Social media marketing for authors can be tricky, but I acquired a cool tool to make design templates for authors earlier this year and promptly never spoke about it again… so here it is, with a coupon code for free lifetime access. So wait, what is this exactly? Graaphics.co is a simple and light tool to make pretty graphics for social media, or for your website. You can change the background image, the logo/featured image (with a book cover or reviewer photo), and pick a font. That’s pretty much it. Here’s some examples of what the templates look like… How does this compare to Canva or oth ..read more

what is a haiku: history details, famous examples A haiku is a type of poem that originated in Japan. It is composed of three lines with a 5-7-5 syllable structure. Haiku often focus on nature or the seasons. The form was developed by Japanese poets in the 17th century. Famous examples of haiku include: “An old silent pond/A frog jumps into the pond,/splash! Silence again” (Matsuo Bashō) “Light of the moon/Moves west, flowers’ shadows/Creep eastward” (Kobayashi Issa) “In the twilight rain/These brilliant-hued hibiscus -/A lovely sunset” (Yosa Buson) 10 beautiful nature haiku A splatter of ..read more

I should probably collect a list of the best romantic poems ever written, and maybe I will. This is not that. I mostly talk about writing books, but I noticed most of the other big writing sites actually get most of the their traffic from this keyword, because everybody is interested in romantic poetry! When you want to tell her how you feel, but don’t have the words to express all that emotion… I’m actually playing around with a love poem generator, so you can write unique poetry in a flash. It should be pretty cool. Today I was just playing around with random prompts and examples, and figure ..read more

There’s always been a ton of demand for children’s book publishing, because it seems easier to “write” a children’s book and then hire and artist. But it’s expensive, and formatting children’s books is a pain. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a case study, now that GPT3 is pretty good and you can write a decent children’s book story quickly…. and then use an AI image generator like midjourney to get high quality art for nearly free. I even have a website for children’s book publishing and have considered putting up an image generation tool and openAI writing tool, so you can add your co ..read more

Short answer: Yes, for now. Content respinners, rewording tools and sentence rephrasers have been around for a long time. It was a way for black-hat SEO gurus to steal content and make it unique enough to still rank in google So why is Quillbot blowing up right now? AI Writing Tools are brand new and amazing They were already becoming good, in the summer of 2022, but not so easy to access. First moves had a big advantage and a handful of tools are making tons of money, basically providing a friendly user interface to access much cheaper AI writing services. And that has some value: the latest ..read more

I’ve been curious about AI for awhile and have dabbled with most of the big “AI content writing” tools this year. But first, a warning: a few friends of mine made a series of sites with GPT-3 writing tools, and they worked great for awhile… until they didn’t. There’s been some discussion about whether Google can even tell whether content is AI generated, but they definitely don’t like it, and that’s unlikely to change. However, it’s also true that the newest form of GPT-3 (davinci) is smooth, natural and accurate. It’s probably better than most people can write. It’s definitely better than the ..read more

I’ve been up for days, anxious and paranoid, because I’m excited about a new tool I found on Reddit and immediately reached out to buy. I’ve been thinking about making a “magic 8-ball” tool to generate writing prompts for years so this one caught my eye. The prompts are fun, clever and creative, and there are over 2 billion potential combinations (yay!) I need to redesign it, but currently it looks like this: Writing Prompt Generator + Story Expander It’s a fun tool on its own already, but after playing with the new GPT3 AI writing tools, it would be amazing if you could just click “write my ..read more

I wrote a post a few months ago when AI writing tools were just starting to get good enough to be exciting. I was impressed with the results using Jasper, especially for improving the blurbs for my novels. But OpenAI just updated to a newer version of GPT3 (davinci3) and I wanted to test it out so here goes… PS. “AI generated” = the new openai davinci3; but I tried some of the same prompts in jasper for comparison. Writing poetry with AI Write a rhyming poem about a spooky pineapple in the style of edgar allen poe: I saw a spooky pineapple one day So strange and eerie in its sway It seemed so ..read more

Recently I’ve been playing around with author portraits. These are notoriously hard to get (professional, studio quality headshots) because most writers are awkward and maybe not super-photogenic (hey we’re writers, not models). BUT midjourney version four allows you to combine pics now, so I can generate any mythical creature and “blend” it with any profile picture, and customize with text prompts until I have something pretty great – it usually works incredibly well. Fun, but not amazing (well, pretty amazing too actually). Inspired by a friend, I was trying to make some kind of paper-doll ..read more

I was updated my Amazon page and noticed this new banner: Which took me to the following popup: If my math is right, basically if you spend $60 on bucks, you get $3 back to buy more books. Not a great deal, but it’s something, like a loyalty program. If I’m speculating, here are some reasons they might be doing this: #booktok exploded so much, big publishing companies are talking about going straight through tiktok with a new book marketing program, which will probably be rough on Amazon ironically (I think), #booktok also caused a storm when tiktokers taught each other to buy and refund bo ..read more