Why I Use AI for Every Part of Publishing — Except the Writing
The Hidden Ways AI Levels the Playing Field for Indie Authors
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.
I’ve known three things for a long time:
I can write.
I can write erotic stories that people want to read.
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. 💋
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!