Later this week, I’ll publish Dripping for Him, my first Kindle ebook, as a collection of three high-heat hotwife stories that originally appeared here on Substack.

I’m planning to publish Tropical Permission in September, and I wanted to dip my toe in the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) waters with this ebook – and get a sense of how the whole process with Amazon/KDP works.

So I put ChatGPT and Google Gemini to work.

This post is a follow-up to my earlier piece on AI, where I shared how I use GPT for almost every part of publishing except writing the stories themselves.

With Dripping for Him, I leaned on it fully – and strategically. Here’s exactly how it helped.

Note: Any advice here regarding ChatGPT or Gemini applies to the $20/month paid tiers of each service.

⚖️ Rules & Regulations

I took one look at the “help” website for Kindle Publishing and started to feel the onset of a mild panic attack. Instead of reaching for a xanax I used Gemini’s “Deep Research” mode to produce a comprehensive report on everything I needed to know about publishing - in my genre, erotic fiction - on KDP.

After asking me to confirm its research plan, it spit back a 35ish page report titled, The KDP Erotica Playbook: A Strategic Guide to Publishing and Profit. The link to the full document – and the simple prompt I used to generate it – is below for paid subscribers.

The KDP Erotica Playbook: A Strategic Guide to Publishing and Profit

Prompt: (Using Gemini Pro 2.5, Deep Research mode) Give me a comprehensive guide to self-publishing erotic fiction on amazon's kindle direct platform.

Truly, simple as that. Gemini’s Deep Research function is incredibly powerful and, in my experience, produces useful, thoughtful reports on virtually any topic you throw at it. The “Playbook” has been enormously helpful to me as a reference throughout this process.

📚 Concept & Structure

I started with three stories I’d already released:

• No Condom. No Pulling Out.

• Soirée des Hommes (Guy’s Night)

• The Taste of Tonight

I asked GPT what kind of title would tie them together.

It generated about 40. Some were trash, some were close.

Left on the cutting room floor were gems such as, “Consent, Cum and Cocktails,” “Wives Who Come Home Wetter” and “The Nights She Doesn’t Say No” (huh?).

But when I said, “Try again and make it sound feminine, filthy, and elegant,” it offered as one of the options:

Dripping for Him

Sold. ✅

It also helped me write the subtitle and back cover copy:

Three Hotwife Stories About the Thrill of Being Shared, Watched and Filled.

Which itself was a combination of two or three different subtitle/taglines for the cover - and one that hit some keyword checkmarks for me. (More on that farther down).

✍️ Book Description (aka The Blurb)

Writing a good blurb is a different skill than writing good sex. It’s also something I don’t care for hate doing and don’t have any aptitude for. It is the type of writing task that makes me stare at the screen, both of us equally blank.

Luckily, this is precisely the type of generic, but still punchy, copy that GPT excels at churning out.

I told GPT the final title of the book and asked for a blurb for my Amazon description.

It wrote, literally as fast as I could read the words being typed, a damn near perfect ~150 words that would have taken me 20 minutes, not including the hour (minimum) of procrastinating I would have wasted before typing a word.

It did, in my opinion, a better job than I could have in far less time, and it hit all the important search terms to boot. I barely changed a word

.

Done ✅

🔍 Metadata & Discoverability

This is where GPT really shines. It’s already been helping with keyword and metadata placement along the way – with the title/subtitle, and the blurb – but Kindle Publishing asks you to place your book in at least one, and up to three categories, with subcategories, sub-subcategories, and niches within subcategories.

It also allows you to put up to 7 keywords, which are actually not words but short phrases, up to 50 characters each.

So I asked:

• What backend KDP keywords will attract readers of hotwife/kink-focused erotica without triggering moderation flags?

• What subcategories are underutilized in Erotica on Kindle Unlimited?

• What combination of keywords and categories gives me the best shot at surfacing in KU “Also Boughts”?

GPT gave me a strategy. I tested those keywords in Amazon’s own search bar and confirmed they were viable. Done. ✅

🎨 Cover Design Feedback

I designed my cover using images I generated with Google’s Whisk* text-to-image generator and then put it all together myself Canva.

*Generating images for works of erotic fiction within the bounds of all major platforms’ strict content moderation policies will be its own future post!

But before I started smashing the return button on a Whisk prompt, I asked GPT for five cover design options – and I picked the one closest to what I already had in mind (the sexy silhouette).

Once I settled 4-5 Whisk images to use, I fed them back into GPT and it gave me pros and cons on each.

As I selected an image and added text, I fed drafts back to the chatbot for critical design notes I could actually use:

• “The subtitle is too small to read at thumbnail.”

• “The right-aligned text is competing with the model’s gaze—try centering.”

• “This serif font is elegant, but the kerning makes it look unpolished.”

I didn’t always agree with it. But it has repeatedly suggested small tweaks that have made big differences (see above, re: kerning).

📦 Back Matter & Branding

OMG there is more marketing copy that needs to be written?? I used GPT to help me write:

• A clean, 100-word About the Author;

• A teaser for Tropical Permission (coming 9/15/25);

• A short introduction to Dripping for Him designed for KU readers who binge filth.

It even helped me draft this post – based on the conversation logs leading up to me hitting submit on Dripping for Her.

GPT was a lot less useful for this post than it was for churning out marketing copy. It gave me a very GPT-like post that was all bullets and em dashes and not a ton of substance.

But it did give me a nice structure – complete with accompanying emoji – that I mostly kept in place.

🧠 Final Thoughts

Using GPT (and Gemini) didn’t save me from doing all of the pain in the ass things one has to do to get their book up on Kindle.

It saved me from stalling. And it saved me a lot of time by taking some of the most annoying parts of the self-publishing process and in some cases, nearly automating them; in others, just making them much more manageable.

Every step between “I think this could be a book” and “Available for Pre-Order on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited” came faster and smoother with GPT in the room.

It is a damn good publishing assistant. (I think? I’ve never had a publishing assistant before.)

If you’re self-publishing – especially in indie or adult genres – don’t be afraid to use the tools. You still have to have taste. You still have to decide what feels right.

But when you do? You can move faster, smarter, hotter.

— L.H. 💋

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How about some smut now?

I write about dirty secrets, but this feels like the biggest taboo of all:

I don’t think I would’ve done any of it without AI.

I am no great literary success story, by any objective measure. Let me start with that caveat. I haven’t sold any books. Yet. I just hit 150 subscribers here — less than a month in — and I’ve got a handful of paid subscribers.

But by my own measure, I’m farther down the road than I’ve ever been in my life — a life that has always included the dream of writing fiction. I’ve got a (short) book of short stories going up on Kindle Unlimited next week, I’m more than halfway through the manuscript for Tropical Permission, and I’ve published tens of thousands of words of original erotic fiction on Substack in the last 20ish days.

To be clear: I have not used AI to write or even directly edit a word of my creative writing.

But I have used AI tools — primarily chatbots and text-to-image generators like ChatGPT, Gemini, MidJourney, and Whisk — for every other part of my recent journey toward self-publishing.

Literally everything except writing the stories.

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I’ve known three things for a long time:

1. I can write.

2. I can write erotic stories that people want to read.

3. There’s a real path to commercial viability for self-published romance and erotica authors.

I’ve also had a lifelong desire to be a writer—and while writing is a big part of my day job, that writing is mostly soul-draining drudgery that I hate* (and am so happy to now run through ChatGPT, freeing up my time to write sexy stories instead).

*Seriously, have you ever spent all day dreading a memo that—once you finally stop scrolling Substack and/or porn and sit down to write—takes maybe an hour and a half, including edits and formatting? And then, when you send it out, people are amazed at your speed and polish? With ChatGPT, you can cut that hour and a half down to well under 45 minutes—and your colleagues still won’t read them.

I’ve known all of this about myself for years. But I didn’t act on it. Years ago, I had a smutty Reddit account with 10,000+ karma that I could have monetized into a Patreon or an OF or something. But back then, I saw that smutty life as a fun escape — and I knew the kind of work it would take to make money from it would probably suck all the fun out of the venture.

It wasn’t until I started talking to ChatGPT (if you can call it “talking”) earlier this year that I finally saw a roadmap to those old literary ambitions—one that felt personal, manageable, and achievable. GPT helped me build a customized plan, step by step, tailored to the kind of writer I am and the kinds of stories I want to tell.

I’ve revised that roadmap dozens of times since. Sometimes refining it with GPT, sometimes bouncing it off Gemini and back again.

Artificial intelligence may well become a species-level competitor with humanity someday. But in its current state, it simply cannot compete with human creativity. Artistic expression can be spoofed — more convincingly every day — but it can’t be replicated.

“AI slop” is largely defined by—besides the em dash, a dubious metric by which to judge authenticity—its fundamental unoriginality. This might come off as condescendingly “writerly,” but it’s true: most adult humans can’t produce compelling, original sentences. Neither can large language models.

Take the Maalvika controversy that exploded on Substack this week. Yes, the real issue was blatant plagiarism of another writer’s work. But much of the conversation revolved around whether the entire account was AI-generated—because the stuff that wasn’t plagiarized still felt derivative, dull, and uninspired.

If something is dreck on its face, what’s the point of arguing over whether it was written by a human or a piece of software? Dreck is dreck.

The defining traits of a fiction writer are originality and output.

But being a published author—whether indie or traditionally signed—requires dozens of tasks that have nothing to do with inspiration or voice:

• Setting up a domain (or five)

• Managing social media—each with its own pixel dimensions, bios, tones, and avatars

• Reformatting a 1,500-word story into a 267-character pithy social post (including emoji, hashtags, and a TikTok soundtrack?)

• Navigating Amazon/KDP’s byzantine publishing rules and content moderation filters

• Creating images, videos, graphics, and marketing copy for Substack, socials, eBooks, and your own .com

These are basic, mostly unavoidable steps for any self-publishing author in 2025. You can do all of them yourself. But LLM tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude make them infinitely more approachable if you’re new — and far less painful if you already know how but hate the work.

For instance: I’ve registered plenty of domains over the years, but I am no DNSexpert (lol, sorry). When I coughed up $50 for Substack’s custom domain feature to link LydiaHaverly.com to my site, I ran into a typical DNS headache. I screenshotted the error, sent it to Gemini, and was walked step-by-step through the fix.

Intoxicated by my burgeoning web-developer powers, I decided to set up Google Analytics. Why? More headaches. More handholding. If and when I ever open that Analytics dashboard again, you’d better believe I’m going to ask a chatbot to interpret the data for me.

Fine, Lydia, you’re clearly internet challenged. Congrats on setting up a domain. But give me something useful.

Here it is:

The real power of AI for authors isn’t just helping with logistics. It’s in leveling the playing field between writers like us and the lucky, hardworking few who get traditional publishing deals—with teams to help them succeed.

Big, bold-name authors often get access to:

• Narrative and character arc feedback

• Market fit analysis from agents and editors

• Subgenre-specific market research

• Focus group feedback

• Copyediting by someone who reads every word and knows their voice

• Keyword and SEO support

• Coordinated release planning and social strategy

ChatGPT can’t fully replicate all of that. But it can give you a pretty damn good approximation — for $20/month.

If you hang out on r/PubTips or lurk author Twitter X, you’ll see that plenty of traditionally published authors don’t get this kind of support — even with a book deal and an agent.

AI may one day be our marketplace competitor — or our species’ overlord — but for now?

It’s just a tool.

A powerful one.

One that’s getting more powerful every day. (In a way that is totally not ominous.)

Everything I’ve done with AI has involved double-checking, handholding, and sometimes yelling at my laptop like it’s a lazy intern — back when interns were unpaid and you could yell at them.

But now AI agents are rolling out across major platforms, promising to automate even more of the annoying stuff — freeing up time for what I actually want to do:

Yell at AI agents. Tell filthy, honest, original stories.

I’ll be posting more on this topic — and other writing-craft and self-publishing subjects — in the coming weeks. My plan is to publish a post like this weekly.

In fact, tomorrow I’ll share a post for paid subscribers with specific examples of how I’ve used AI to prep for publishing my first KU release.

Think: keyword testing, metadata optimization, cover prep, and more.

Thank you for reading. I hope you found this helpful — or at least mildly thought provoking.

— L.H. 💋

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P.S. Fear not, I’ve still got smut on my mind. More chapters of Tropical Permission drop next week, Part II of What Happens on Spring Break… is in the works, and I’m actually working on a short story called CuckGPT. (Really.) And don’t forget: my trio of hotwife stories leaves Substack next week!