Hi everyone, GOOD NEWS I got my first review on pubby..... Thank you, you know who you are... Please take credit for the suggestion.. Even tho it does cost like 25 a month, or 200 a year.... Reviews make or break your book. Again, this is my FIRST 👇 review link at bottom. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPFB1JJH

I finally finished a first draft of my upcoming cosmic horror novel, The Last Delgado. 38 chapters and 132k words took me a little over six months writing 2-4 hours every single day. Although I had an outline already completed, I didn't start writing intensely until I came across Jason's channel on Youtube. I used AI heavily (you can see my tools used below) but also had to HEAVILY edit it. AI is only as good as the instructions you give it, and I had to keep it on a very short leash to achieve what I wanted. For those curious, my tool usage and process is listed below. Tools: Novelcrafter Claude 3.5 Sonnet via Openrouter Google docs Pro Writing Aid Process: 1) Build outline - this was done months prior to learning about AI tools. It will be interesting to see how I change my approach to outlining for my next novel. 2) Populate Novelcrafter Codex - since I had an outline already, and knew all the characters who would be in the story ahead of time, this wasn't too bad. I used AI to help me better flush out the character details and add subtle traits to make the characters have more depth. I also put in locations, lore and objects into the Codex as well. This definitely helped with consistency in the AI generated prose. 3) Write the scenes in Novelcrafter. This was basically a two step process. First I would quickly get prose generated by using Novelcrafter's chat function (scene beats really didn’t work well for me) telling what was supposed to happen in the next several hundred words. If this was the start of a new scene, I would include the previous scene in the context, explicitly telling the AI in the prompt that I wanted to create a new scene after the current one. Otherwise I would just include the current scene in the context. Then, once the full scene was generated, I would go line by line and edit the prose. This was where the majority of my time went. In some cases I would just edit the prose directly. However, I would ask the AI what it thought of the change, and this would often lead to a back and forth conversation which usually produced a hybrid result. I found it was very important to tell the AI why I was making the change, as this would often spark the AI to propose additional changes to achieve the result I was going for.

My first book of the year, and since a lot of it was inspired by this little community I thought I'd share it here first. Soon I'll come to my senses and put the eBook price back up to normal, but for now... have at it!! From the back cover of the paperback version.... Step into the untamed world of independent publishing, where creativity meets resilience, and every hat worn tells a story of triumph and transformation. In Indie Authors: Heroes in a Thousand Hats, Duane P. Flowers, PhD, unravels the multifaceted journey of indie authorship. From the lonely spark of writing to the meticulous grind of editing, from the alchemy of collaboration to the intricate web of publishing, this guide illuminates every step of the indie author's path. With practical insights, real-world examples, and inspiring anecdotes, this book is a compass for creators navigating the wilderness of modern publishing. Whether you're a seasoned storyteller or just starting your literary adventure, Indie Authors offers the tools, wisdom, and encouragement to conquer challenges and craft a legacy. Discover the beauty in the struggle and the enduring hope that every story deserves to be told. Dare to create. Refuse to quit. Your story awaits. https://mybook.to/indie-authors

Just came here to share that thanks to the great info provided by Jason, I was finally able to get over my burnout and finish my first full-fledged novel. This is just the first step, I know, but I’m really excited to continue exploring the process of working with AI all the way through publishing. For anyone interested, here’s a breakdown of the tools and the models that I used (and also how much I spent): - RaptorWrite: I decided to use a completely free tool as I didn’t want to pay for NovelCrafter or Sudowrite (I know, free trials are a thing, but I didn’t want the time constraint) → Pros: it’s free, it lets you change LLM easily, also has a solid editing feature; Cons: API with Openrouter (so you pay as you write), sometimes I had to generate the answer multiple times before getting something barely decent (but maybe that’s because I write in Italian). - Favorites LLMs: ChatGPT4-latest and Claude Sonnet 3.5 were basically the only ones I used. I experimented a bit with open-source models, but their Italian was quite atrocious, so I just stuck to what worked best for me. - Future Fiction Academy: Raptorwrite providers also offer several courses on their page. I enrolled in the free ones and I recommend them for learning both the tool and the basics of AI. - Scrivener and Notion for backups: Raptorwrite has no cloud memory, it simply stores your writing on your browser, so if you happen to change it, update it, or delete the caches you could potentially lose all of your progress. For this reason, after each session, I made sure to save both to the browser and then onto Scrivener and Notion. - The data: I ended up with a total of 43k words added to my previous 30k already written. Still, I think I probably generated around 70k words total from November 26th to December 12th and that cost me a grand total of 15 euros (so a pizza+supplì+cola). Something interesting I noticed is that for Italian the token count was different compared to English. It was close to 1:2. I really can’t figure out why, but maybe you do and if you do tell me lol, it drove me insane.

I finished the final chapter of my first novel last night! The book is called Quantum Soul, and it's Book 1 of at least a three-part Science Fiction series that I have in mind. I uploaded my manuscript and ran the summary report, comparing it to the Sci-Fi genre and got an overall score of 89.6, which is not at all what I was expecting, lol. The Summary Report recommendation is to start with the Strong Writing, since that was my lowest score. One stat that kind of concerned me was that I only have 7 slow paced paragraphs (in 173k words and 45 chapters), where the average for Sci-Fi is 295! So... maybe I need to slow it down a bit, or a lot. 🏃‍♂️‍➡️ I'm curious if anyone who uses AutoCrit could share their workflow (or at least a summary of it). I've watched the AutoCrit 101 videos on YouTube and the workflow that they seem to recommend is... - Developmental Editing - Line Editing - Copy Editing I tried to take notes of which reports belong to each of these steps, but I'm interested to hear what others do who use this tool. Thanks!! 🙏