I’m going to give people an option that does both #1 and #2 and it’s completely old school. Ready?
Start a blog. I know I know. You’re shaking your head. Hear me out. It fulfills #1 because as long as you let the OpenAI bot crawl your website, your data will be picked up and added to the training data. I have 14 years of blog posts on my blog and OpenAI and Claude (probably Gemini too since they all seem to share the base set) are trained on it all. I know because I’ve tested it. And as long as you keep it up to date and let the bot crawl it, you’re good. Deep Research will also go to your site and grab data if you ask it to. My books have been recommended to people by Claude (they sent me screengrabs).
#2, blogging about what you’re doing, your characters, your world, etc. makes you real to your readers and fulfills that “human” quality that they want.
I like all of your ideas too! I think they could be really helpful and valuable as well. Great post, Michael!
First of all, thank you for upgrading to Sidekick Plus... that means a ton! I SO AGREE WITH THIS. Dang, I wish I included this in the article, brilliant, and I'm fully on board with this advice. Grateful for you sharing this advice in a comment so everyone can see it :). Hive mind!
Agreed. I've got almost twenty years of posts, and Gemini recently returned me as an author in some research I was doing to find authors like me I could collaborate with! I still get traffic from posts I wrote years ago... And some of that traffic is now coming from AI engines like Perplexity.
This is truly a “slow and steady wins the race” business. I think it’s important to build reader relationships one interaction at a time. Be present with that reader for time you’re “with” them, be it online or in person.
I started adding charcaterAI chatbot for the MC of my mystery series and put about 5 novels worth of content in there. Now, if I'm not sure what my MC should do, I ask her. It's been a lot of fun to do it, and it would be really cool to have a character like that out there you could interact with. I need to read up some more on this and see how far I can take it. I like the glimpse ahead of what some forms of writing my be next.
I'm thinking about putting my shop on Fourthwall. I've already started an account and been looking around. It does integrate with BookFunnel so I like that. What's your thoughts on it?
I’m going to give people an option that does both #1 and #2 and it’s completely old school. Ready?
Start a blog. I know I know. You’re shaking your head. Hear me out. It fulfills #1 because as long as you let the OpenAI bot crawl your website, your data will be picked up and added to the training data. I have 14 years of blog posts on my blog and OpenAI and Claude (probably Gemini too since they all seem to share the base set) are trained on it all. I know because I’ve tested it. And as long as you keep it up to date and let the bot crawl it, you’re good. Deep Research will also go to your site and grab data if you ask it to. My books have been recommended to people by Claude (they sent me screengrabs).
#2, blogging about what you’re doing, your characters, your world, etc. makes you real to your readers and fulfills that “human” quality that they want.
I like all of your ideas too! I think they could be really helpful and valuable as well. Great post, Michael!
First of all, thank you for upgrading to Sidekick Plus... that means a ton! I SO AGREE WITH THIS. Dang, I wish I included this in the article, brilliant, and I'm fully on board with this advice. Grateful for you sharing this advice in a comment so everyone can see it :). Hive mind!
Agreed. I've got almost twenty years of posts, and Gemini recently returned me as an author in some research I was doing to find authors like me I could collaborate with! I still get traffic from posts I wrote years ago... And some of that traffic is now coming from AI engines like Perplexity.
so cool you are seeing traffic come from perplexity! I love that
This is truly a “slow and steady wins the race” business. I think it’s important to build reader relationships one interaction at a time. Be present with that reader for time you’re “with” them, be it online or in person.
100%. Slow build is often the best
So much good information! Encouraging and upbeat!
Very grateful for you reading! You are awesome :)
I started adding charcaterAI chatbot for the MC of my mystery series and put about 5 novels worth of content in there. Now, if I'm not sure what my MC should do, I ask her. It's been a lot of fun to do it, and it would be really cool to have a character like that out there you could interact with. I need to read up some more on this and see how far I can take it. I like the glimpse ahead of what some forms of writing my be next.
I'm thinking about putting my shop on Fourthwall. I've already started an account and been looking around. It does integrate with BookFunnel so I like that. What's your thoughts on it?
Fourthwall is great! Good place to start selling direct since they have their free plan. I support!
Awesome! Thanks for your thoughts!