Using AI to Pop My Self-Publishing Cherry
Using GPT to figure out KDP
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. 💋
How about some smut now?
