Put me in a room full of novelists and I am the marketer. The one who asks what the book is going to sell for before he asks what it is about.
Put me in a room full of copywriters and I am the guy who wandered off and wrote cozy fantasy. Three books about a woman, a cat and a garden that argues back.
Put me in a room full of AI people and I am the one who keeps banging on about prose. Rhythm. Voice. Whether a sentence earns its place.
Wrong guy. Every room.
That is not a complaint. It is the reason this blog exists.
Where it comes from
I did not start at a keyboard. I ran restaurants. Then I was an army officer. Then, 22 years ago, I found direct response copywriting and never really left.
I co-founded IM Wealth Builders. We shipped the Covert suite, CB Pirate, and more launches than I can list without checking. I have written for names you would recognise and a few you would not, and I have spent two decades in the one discipline that has a scoreboard. Copy either converts or it does not. Nobody cares how it felt to write.
Twenty-two years of that teaches you exactly one thing, and it is the only thing that matters here.
How to make words do a job.
The trick is that it all crosses over
Here is what the people in each of those rooms miss. The skills are the same skill wearing different clothes.
A fiction hook is a headline. The first line of Whiskers & Wildwood is a woman who has been arguing with her rosemary for eleven years. That is not a literary flourish. That is a Carlton opener. Specific. Odd. Impossible not to read the next line. A novel gets about a page to earn the reader’s evening. A sales letter gets about a sentence. Same job, different clock.
A sales letter is a story with a buy button. Pacing. Open loops. The reveal you hold back until the reader is leaning in. I write letters that way on purpose, because a reader who is inside a story does not notice they are being sold to. They notice they want the thing.
A book launches like a product. Book 1 goes free for three days. That is a lead magnet. Book 1 at full price is the front end. Books 2 and 3 are the funnel. Kindle Unlimited pages are the recurring revenue. I ran a 30-minute free promo on a trilogy nobody had heard of and it landed at #34 paid in Cozy Fantasy, above Legends & Lattes. Not because the books were magic. Because I promoted them like I have promoted everything else for 22 years.
None of that is luck. It is a method, and I have been running it long enough to know which parts break.
Then everything changed
About two years ago the ground moved.
AI got good enough to write a novel. Not on its own. Left alone it writes slop, and you have probably seen it… eyes like black holes, brutal kisses, one-word paragraphs pretending to be drama. If you publish that, readers smell it in chapter two and the one-star reviews never leave.
But something else turned out to be true. The thing I had spent 20 years on, knowing what good looks like and being able to specify it in writing, was exactly the thing AI was missing.
So I built the specification. A framework that holds the voice. A style pack that strips out the tells. A setup conversation that turns a single idea into a plan the AI can execute chapter by chapter without drifting.
Six novels. Two pen names. Two genres. Thirteen days each.
Real covers, real reviews, real royalties landing every month. And a Google AI, asked to read the manuscript blind and be brutal, concluded it was “highly unlikely” a machine wrote it.
That is what I do now.
What I am actually becoming
I am not a novelist. I am not a prompt guy either.
I am the person who makes AI write what you want, the way you want it.
That is the whole job, and it is a job almost nobody is doing properly.
It comes in three flavours, and you will see all three on this blog.
- You want it done for you. You make the creative calls, the system does the heavy lifting, you get a finished book without writing a word.
- You want a partner. The system gives you a strong draft, you shape it, and the result is yours in every way that counts.
- You just want to write better and faster. The planning documents alone… story bible, character profiles, chapter outline… are architecture most working authors never build.
Different outcomes. Same skill underneath. Know what you want. Build the system that gets it. Then check the output like a copywriter checks conversion, because you either got the thing or you did not.
What you will find here
Three lanes.
- Writing and publishing with AI. The main one. What is working on Kindle right now. Where the frameworks break and how I fix them. Which model wrote the better chapter this week and why.
- Copy and marketing. Twenty-two years of it. Headlines, launches, funnels, the stuff that pays for everything else. Applied to books, products, and whatever you are selling.
- What we are building. Tools, courses, free stuff, and the three humans plus one Viking doing the work. When something ships, you hear about it here.
This is the longhouse
Wrong guy in every room. Right guy in this house.
Pull up a bench. The next post will be something useful, and the one after that too. That is the only editorial policy I have.