The Lean Publishing Playbook

Or, can I use AI to help create a book without selling my soul?

I have been in full-on hustle mode and I can’t stop. Full-on hustle mode means my brain has no off switch. Night, morning, weekend, it doesn’t matter.

In the past two weeks, while lining up the next thing, waiting for various projects to come into sharp, funded focus, I have been outrageously productive. Get this:

I have written a book, started creating digital art for an online store, puzzled through an outline for a second book, written a business plan – and still found time to worry.

The Minnesota in me says that everything is going to fall apart when Winter comes. Better stock up the pantry.

The book, though. This has been interesting. Paperback now available from Amazon!

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T-shirt design from my forthcoming RedBubble store

I’m old enough to know when I’m beat. But young and stubborn enough to want to keep playing.

I hear the agony and complaints about generative AI taking jobs.

It is.

It reduces so much administrative grunt work, like basic research, data entry, and formatting, for a start, to milliseconds of compute time and real, “agentic” action on someone’s behalf.

Admin assistants, mid level paralegals and other carriers of administrative water are concerned about their jobs, if they still have them.

And then there is the cynical move to actually create full-fledged video and audio entertainment - ART - with AI abandon, and substantially cheaper overhead. And yet, meanwhile, burn the earth alive with a reckless carbon footprint.

But there are things that AI can do, and things that AI cannot.

I wanted to test this, to see what elements of new technologies can empower creatives rather than replace them.

So I decided to put together a book.

Now I’m not saying that AI can do anything well. Other than mimic and deliver what is statistically likely.

So this works well for repetitive, known tasks. This does not work for whimsy or surprise.

This does not work for soul, long form cohesion, taste, curation, or originality.

However, the animal is out of the cage.

I just saw a video of Aldous Huxley talking about technology and man in the mid ‘60s. He says technology must be of service to man, and not man of service to technology.

AI threatens to rip that very notion apart

Technologies go where they will; either at the will of the users or determined by the feasibility of the underlying business model.

I’m sure lots of us who enjoy gaming would prefer our phones not hammer us with microtransactions but someone found a gold mine and the vein hasn’t run fallow.

And yet.

I was reading on Linkedin and found a young CEO offering his take on how he would create a company with modern technology and $100.

I’m never usually short on ideas. It’s focus and execution, as determined by resources – aka is there enough money in the bank to afford to spend the time on spec.

OK, so I have been seeing folks on Facebook - mostly hometown people, who may veer a little to the right - talking about an EMP attack. There’s this constant fear that a terrorist or otherwise attack is around the corner.

Nothing sells like fear, right?

And yet I don’t want to sound craven. I do think that preparedness is a virtue, having lived through several grid-breaking weather events here in Austin TX that proved, without a doubt, how close to the wire society can get in a matter of not even days, but hours.

When you’re boiling snow to flush the toilet, hoping the gas stays on while everything else has shut down - water and electricity - and wishing you’d pulled the trigger on that gas generator, and it’s Tuesday, and the weather outside is bad but it’s barely a snow day level event in, say, my home state of Minnesota — THEN you realize that prepping isn’t such a bad idea.

At least have a case of water in the garage, and a few spare USB chargers, for heaven’s sake.

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And so I started my new iterative hobby of asking questions of ChatGPT 4o. I asked it what would be the major steps I’d need to worry about if the power was out for over a week. I started to formulate an idea.

I spent the weekend slowly asking more intricate prompts and more targeted questions.

A sample prompt: “I am writing a series of books on practical advice in case a worldwide or citywide or statewide event happens, such as an EMP, a nuclear explosion, a terrorist attack or a poison gas incident among other potential events. I plan on advising on what you need to stock up on, how to respond to individual types of incidents, how best to prepare yourself, your family and your community. First, what would be a solid breakdown of books in this series?”

And so on.

A lot of content started to form.

It’s content here, not real writing. Raw material. Raw word salad that needs to be checked and goosed and rewritten and reviewed.

But then, as I worked through the rewrites, and put my own voice into the story, and added context, like the weather events in ATX above, an actual… thing started to emerge.

I am not saying that this is a great piece of literature. It’a barely a book, yet, it has specific advice and ideas on what to do in an emergency situation.

AI served me, as a creative with an idea, in:

• Ideation

• Mimicry

• Wholesale change (eg manuscript updates without destroying precious design)

• Generation of ideas en masse

• Organization

• Prioritization

• Presentation of information

What didn’t it do?

• Creativity

• Originality

• Curation

• Style and Voice

• Aesthetic

I think of this more like the Roger Corman model - have an existing set? Have a couple actors around? Got half a script? Do a quick polish, throw some pillows around, and shoot the SOB in 2 days.

Maybe you’ll get a Little Shop of Horrors.

Or at least A Bucket of Blood.

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Now, this is just generating the material.

You still need a cover, you still need marketing blurbage, you still need a site, you still need a marketing campaign or ideas about how to spread the word, you still need distribution.

And yet there are technological ways to make this process easier, if not less time consuming.

And time is the asset of the most value.

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that I don’t need more than a focus group of one.

Corollary: this is likely why my ideas aren’t always successful.

So this idea needed to be fully fleshed out into an actual thing, to see if it was even worth doing in the first place.

This is the Lean Startup model of writing.

Getting to Minimum Viable Product. And then testing market response.

Cynical? Possibly.

Did it work? I don’t know. The book just came out.

I haven’t even held one in my hands. The entire process was digital.

With some research I settled on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform to get the thing into the world.

This enabled me to create a book, give it a cover, create some marketing language, format the manuscript into place, with illustrations, and then decide on a price point and publish it.

I did not have to sign an exclusive. I can do whatever I wish with the material.

It was too easy.

And yet, quite powerful.

I’m still figuring this out. Next week I’ll go into the tools I used, and how I’m thinking about the next steps.

Do I feel good about this? I don’t know yet. It is too soon to tell. Using a pen name felt safer, so there must be something deeper here.

One copy sold so far. My royalty was $6.60. Poetic license aside, I see the number of the beast.

For now, I’m going to see the hamster wheel spinning in my mind for what it is, open the door, and just go outside.

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This is Are You Experienced and I’m Nick Tangborn and this is one of the things I do on a regular basis.

You can find me at nicholas (at) areyouexperienced.co

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