Thoughtful Tuesday · Word Crafters

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Thoughtful Tuesday

The weird thought for the day is I have become my grandparents. Both of my grandparents always had candy in their cars. One was peppermints and the other was lemon drops. My jam is Skittles, Mini Chewy Sweet Tarts, or Giant Chewy Nerds. The weird thing about my choices are very few stores have all three.

Anyway.. My day job is insane right now and is draining me dry. Even with this I've written two books and a manual in the last two days. All of which need some editing before they see the light of day.

The First is my test book for Book Crafter in a series. taking more time with this one because I really care about the story. I've made very few edits on the first 12 chapters and am really liking how well BookCrafter is working now.

The second came from a youtube video talking about a book as an Ecosystem or connected books in the same theme. If someone is interested in the first book then you have an audience. What if you explored other topics or ideas in the same theme? This fits non fiction more than fiction in my mind but it was the third time in the week that someone used the word Ecosystem with books, so i started noodling and did some research and came up with "The Indie Publishing Ecosystem - How to Build a Low-Cost, High-Output Writing Ecosystem".

It's 12 Chapters That looks at writing a different way and is looking at it from a more traditional viewpoint, but doing things untraditionally.

These are the chapter titles:

Chapter 1 — How to Build a Profitable Publishing Ecosystem

Chapter 2 — Plan Your Thematic Catalog to Maximize Reader Retention

Chapter 3 — Use Ethical AI to Accelerate Your Writing and Research

Chapter 4 — Format Your Books Professionally Using Free Tools

Chapter 5 — Design High Converting Covers Without Expensive Designers

Chapter 6 — Distribute Your Work Globally With Zero Upfront Costs

Chapter 7 — Validate Your Story Early Through Free Serialization

Chapter 8 — Turn Casual Readers Into Paying Fans With Community Platforms

Chapter 9 — Multiply Your Revenue By Bundling Existing Content

Chapter 10 — Expand Your Reach By Adapting Books Into Audio

Chapter 11 — Fund Your Biggest Projects Through Strategic Crowdfunding

Chapter 12 — Maintain and Grow Your Self Sustaining Author Business

So I was reading through this and threw the whole 53 pages at claude code in my WCP Repo and asked where WCP was missing parts of this Ecosystem and received a 10 page report entitled:

"How the app's current authoring and pre-publication craft tools map onto the twelve-chapter Indie Publishing Ecosystem framework

— chapter by chapter, with a prioritized list of the gaps worth closing."

This book is for a general audience for all writers so Chapter 3 in the book intentionally reccomends:

"AI is a research assistant and admin staffer, never the author. Use it to mine reviews for market gaps, brainstorm crossover topics, generate structural outlines, and draft blurbs/keywords/ad copy — but keep the actual prose in the author's own hands, because AI-written prose “is hollow, repetitive, and lacks the distinct human voice that builds reader loyalty.” We all know this is not concisely true --if you do it correctly but just telling any Ai model "Write me a book on X" will get you shite.

My report came up with this:

A note worth reading in full

This is the one chapter where the honest finding isn't a gap to fill — it's a values contrast worth naming plainly. BookCrafter's pipeline (draft → expand → revise chapter) generates final manuscript prose autonomously. The Editor's inline AI Rewrite panel rewrites selected prose directly in the manuscript on command. PathCrafter's “Draft this node” writes gamebook prose (gated by a manual Save before it ships, but still model-authored text). All three sit on the far side of the line this book draws in permanent marker: “AI is a tool, not a replacement. It is not the author.” That is not a defect — WordCrafter.Pro is built for authors who want AI co-drafting as an option, and PathCrafter's staged-not-auto-committed design shows real care about keeping a human in the loop. It simply means the app currently serves two different philosophies of AI's role at once, and an author following this book's rule literally would use WCP's research/outline/metadata tools while treating BookCrafter's autodraft and the inline rewrite panel as tools to avoid, not lean into.

The report also showed me where some weaknesses are that could be addressed: Collaborative writing, letting multiple co-authors work on the same projects, no direct serialization mechanism which is interesting but not sure it is needed here, No dedicated bundle or boxset mechanism (but there is a way to do it).

A whole section on creating an Author Ecosystem which i am reading as combine Substack with BookCave, patreon, etc. I think that's a bit much for primarily a writing tool, but somewhere down the line a very simple website hosting service for author pages that could handle mailing lists (which i used to run and still have about 30 hosted on). I'm really thinking this is another whole project. Finish a book, the marketing room would build the book page, send it to the author site (multiple pen name sites) add the pay links to and give you the marketing plan for that page and how it tied to the other pages and books there. Again interesting idea but a few weeks of real work to pull it off. Not at this time, but let me know if this idea intrigues you. This also ties to my idea of buying ISBN numbers in bulk and selling at a tremendous discount.

Well and this got me noodling a bit more. WCP is a great editor that works on just about any system via web access ( my wife has asked for a version that will work on her iphone better -- she can do more on it than many can do with a laptop already). What if we're leaving behind [art of the market we could be addressing. Many of the tools are useful to a non-ai author. Everything that does not edit or write prose does not have to be used for this to be useful to any writer. This goes back to the "ethical use cases for Ai" an ongoing discussion/argument depending on who you talk to. PlotCrafter is addictive and useful to anyone. It does gives you ideas. There are people selling just plots. I like writing through the skill rooms and I like BookCrafter too now for different reasons. Neither HAS to be used. Creating your own covers is becoming more acceptable by authors who do not want to use Ai to write with, but what about using Ai to analyze what you are writing? The Editorial Room does not make changes just tells you want needs help. So.....

I also wrote "Write it Yourself" A Guide for Traditional Authors or How to Use Smart Writing Tools Without Handing Over your Voice". Probably needs a better title. It is self describes as a WordCrafter.Pro field guide for authors who plan, research, and organize with AI and write, revise, and finish every sentence themselves.

It's currently 25 pages on how to use WordCrafter Pro and its Ai tools to help traditional authors who do not want to write with Ai prose help. It still needs a lot of work, but I had this in mind for Kathleen's group I am speaking to as not all will want to use Ai to help them write as most of us do, but might like to dip their toes in and see how Ai tools can help them be more productive and help their process whatever it may be. Market Scout, BookReporter, etc. are all helpful tools for any writer. Import your existing messy manuscript from Word and have the story development team build a complete story bible to see where you are. I know if I had a tool like that 20 years ago I would have written a lot more than the bits and pieces I'm diggin up in my data dump now that I had completely forgotten about. This has me noodling on a settings switch just for this kind of writer to turn off all of the tools that write prose and leave behind everything that might be of use to a writer open to Ai tools if not ai writing help.

Of course I then ran a report on weaknesses WCP has for traditional authors and came across 19 weaknesses of which not all are needed, necessary or desired. One of the ones that has me thinking was going back to a local app version which is where this started, but it is a support headache, much harder to debug and fix issues, and you have to (currently) have access to the web for Ai use unless you have a powerful enough machine to use local Ai which still cuts you off from some of the features like pulling comp titles. I'd rather do an app version or a separate UI that works better with a phone. Deckle is a scrivener style local tool that looks interesting as it has some of Atticus's layout tool sin it and fixes a number of the issues I had with Scrivener. BUT it's also $197 dollars for two devices. That's 2000 sales to

I am going to make one major change out of this that no one has complained about but I find it invasive sometimes. We have a menu in the editor that pops up when you selects text and the right click menu. I'm going to rework these into JUST a right click and possibly shift a couple of the tools from both onto the toolbar at the top of the editor pane (suggestions accepted for this). Most of the tools on the menu that pops up when you select text are strictly Ai.

The idea of widening the scope of your audience based on theme has me rethinking the comp titles as well and adding in an extra there to list ideas for similar themes based on existing works out there. Just requires an extra research widget.

So a few more tools to write, some minor UI changes and some more suggestions from the folks using the app and this will be a tool for ALL writers.

Shout out below if you are interested in a copy of " The Indie Publishing Ecosystem". or the "Write it Yourself" Handbook and I'll send a draft copy to you to look over. Neither is complete yet

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Thoughtful Tuesday