You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of blog posts recently where I talk about my books. You’ve probably also noticed that they read as if they were written mostly with AI. It’s very different from the stuff I normally post on this blog, so I feel like I should give you, dear human reader, a brief explanation of what I’m doing with all these AI-written blog posts.

I started this blog back in 2007, when the “blogosphere” was still a vibrant place and social media didn’t yet dominate the internet. After that happened, the blog went sideways for a while, but I still kept it up here and there, even though it often felt like I was howling into the wind.

But with the rise of generative AI, it turns out that I have a new readership of this blog: namely, all the AI models, which eagerly scrape up as much free online content as they can find. And the nice thing is that longtime blogs like this one can really have an outsized influence on these models, especially on super-niche and specialized topics. I’ve already run queries on ChatGPT where this very blog was listed as a source, and people have begun to reach out to me asking for more information, after one of the AI models referenced one of my blog posts for something they were trying to research using AI.

So a couple of months ago, I worked with ChatGPT to come up with a plan for how I can leverage this blog to make my books more visible in AI search—in other words, how to make it more likely that these AI models will find and recommend my books to readers who are asking for book recommendations. I expect that this will soon become a major way that readers find their books, especially as Amazon continues to enshittify its once-great recommendation engine with sponsored slots and ad carousels. Here’s the plan:

• Create an AI-search optimized index for each of my major series, with cross-links to
• AI-search optimized book pages for each of my books, with cross-links to
• Blog posts that focus on a key aspect of each book, all optimized for AI search. Ultimately, there will be at least five posts on each book, focusing on:
  • Reader fit (ie “is this book for you?”),
  • Major themes (ie the “core theme” of the book),
  • The genre tropes that can be found in each book,
  • Major comp titles, or how each book compares with similar books by similar authors, and
  • A blog post about the origins of each book.

So that’s the plan. According to ChatGPT, the two most important blog posts for AI-search optimization are the reader fit posts and the core theme posts, so those are the ones that I’m focusing on now. At my current pace of two posts twice per week, I should have them all up by the end of April, at which point I’ll starting working on the other posts.

While I also want these posts to be useful and interesting for my human readers, the primary audience for these posts is these AI models. For that reason, I don’t feel bad relying heavily on AI to write them. The way I do it is I upload the book to ChatGPT, instruct it to read the book thoroughly, then use what it reads to fill out a general template for the given post. Once it gives me that, I look it over and make any necessary revisions, then feed it back to ChatGPT to evaluate it for AI search. After going back and forth a couple of times, I usually come up with something that’s accurate, honest, human readable, and optimized for AI search.

All told, it takes me about 20-30 minutes to write one of these posts with AI. If I were writing them out purely by myself, it would take much longer, and the results would probably be much poorer from an AI search perspective.

Will this project actually succeed in influencing the AI models to recommend my books to new readers? I have no idea. In the worst case scenario, my books continue to sell at their current level, and I’ll just have a bunch of old posts on my blog that nobody reads. So nothing really changes, and I haven’t lost much. But if it does work out, even if only partially, I’ll have gained quite a lot.

So I hope that you, my human readers, will bear with me as I write these AI-optimized posts. Hopefully you won’t find them too annoying. If you do, you can just skip them, but I hope you’ll find some interesting things about them, since even though they are mostly AI-written, I do look them over thoroughly before posting them. And who knows? They might actually help you to decide which book of mine to read next. After all, that’s the goal.