How to use AI to make special edition books quickly--
Yeah? Yeah.
Okay so — check this video — this is one of my next special edition books coming in from China, I got the production video for it last night:
First off, let’s all be jelly of my book-rep’s super watch there, LOL — BUT — more importantly, let’s take a gander at my special edition of my sapphic demon romance AITA? which is now FREAKING GLORIOUS — it’s gonna have holographic silver edges that match and a book mark — and that cover?
I did that cover.
My dang self.
Plus, all the art inside.
I sent in the artwork for this book THE LITERAL DAY that Chat GPT came up with character consistency. I sat there and played with it FOR HOURS until I got it right, lol.
I’ve got some feels about this book in particular, because of two things: I wrote it for monster-fuckers, pre-AI, in 2021, and they loved it, but then all of my friends from then turned on me almost entirely when I went down the AI-using route. And also, it came out in a Rainbow Crate box in 2023, and they created a really beautiful special edition of it — but then someone told them I used AI art, and they msg’d me, while I was *at* that fated Readers Take Denver, the one that went down in flames, being aghast that I used AI art, and asking me to please put a disclaimer on my website about their innocence in everything.
I’m telling you this because I need you to know that if you follow me down this path — you will get bullies and haters. Some of them will be your peers, some of them will be people you look up to, and some of them will be people you have never freakin’ met, who just enjoy stalking you for some reason.
(As a nurse, I say to those people: this is your one wild and precious life, and you could die pretty much any moment of any day, and this is what you do with it? Honestly, being a nurse is half the reason I’m pro-AI—it’s given me perspective like whoa— because there’s no easier grass to go touch to recenter myself than going into my floor.)
But I digress!
So — there I was, coming out of RTD, with this chat thread on discord, giving me a queasy feeling — but — I also had $900 in my pocket, that I’d made that very day, from people who’d bought books from me.
So, like, I knew — viscerally — that other people’s opinions of who I was didn’t matter.
And I’d just come out of a whole conference hanging out with people I *did* care about.
My readers.
And no, your readers are not on Threads, busily yelling at each other, in their seemingly infinite freetime.
Your readers are so myriad and vast and there’s an ocean of them out there that you can’t even comphrend the size of and all they want is to get a really good story in a really good package.
They’re too busy to be involved in silly-kerfluffles online.
They’ve got lives. They’ve got kids. They’ve got paychecks to earn.
They just want to get something that promises them what’s on the inside of the package and on the outside of the package match.
And that book there, my friends — I’ve set it up to match through and through.
(We’ll talk about branding thoroughly, some other time!)
So — here’s a tiktok where I go over all the art choices I made to create this book for THEM (the only people that matter.)
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Now, for the haters who are gonna hate-read this — please fucking learn something?
It took me HOURS of my life to get art that was good enough for this SE. I spent days working with things.
I feel like a lot of the fear around AI is this dual-edged sword thing — it’s like simultaneously ‘too easy!’, and thus somehow cheating — but it’s also ‘changing too fast and is too hard to keep up with so fuck it!’ — annnnd yeah.
Whatever excuse you need to tell yourself so that you can sleep at night.
Am I personally frustrated that I have to re-learn new tech like about every month nowadays?
YES. YES I AM.
But I don’t let that goddamned stop me. C’mon now. Grow the eff up. Whoever promised you an easy life? Would you even enjoy that? (I wouldn’t. Which is why I’m here. Preaching to you, lol.)
If you want to be relevant in the future you need to acknowledge it exists and also realize that it’s changing. All the time. Fast and scary.
Get used to the fear and grow beyond that.
When I looked down at my phone and saw that Rainbow Crate didn’t want to be associated with me — of course I felt bad. Yeah. I’m a person.
But I’ve learned since then, that every time I get scared nowadays, to think, “Oh shit, here comes some personal growth” because I’ve trained myself to be like that—and I’m almost ALWAYS right.
So just get there already, k? Stop being scared.
Be who you are. Loud and brash and fearless.
Come play with me on the other side.
Here’s a link to Ideogram — it’s the bomb for text (obvs, see above) — and Midjourney
I work tomorrow, but I’ll bb this weekend!
xo!
Cassie