I'll keep the intro honest because that's the only way this is worth posting.
I work a standard office job. Nothing miserable, nothing glamorous. But somewhere around month 8 of staring at the same ceiling tiles, I decided I needed to start building something that was actually mine. Not a side hustle in the gig economy sense, more like a real income stream I had creative control over.
I'd always been a reader. Small-town romance is genuinely one of my favorite genres, and the audience for it, mostly women 35+, is loyal, consistent, and underserved by the traditional publishing world. That felt like an opening.
So I started writing. Or more accurately, I started figuring out how to write faster than I naturally could.
I looked at a handful of AI writing tools because there was no way I was going to produce anything at a pace that made sense without some kind of assist. Tried a few. Landed on StealthGPT after comparing what was out there. It wasn't a dramatic decision, it just held up better than the alternatives when I actually used it on real material.
Three novels later, here's what my little operation looks like:
Sold physical copies at local craft fairs and art shows (this works better than you'd think, people love buying a book from the person who wrote it) Print-on-demand through Amazon KDP so there's no inventory headache Running Google and Meta ads, still learning, but I've found a few angles that convert
A note if you're going to ask about the AI piece: I'm not hiding it but I'm also not leading with it because I think it's actually the least interesting part of this. The interesting parts are the market research, the distribution strategy, and the fact that I'm doing this while employed full-time. The tool is just a tool.
Income is modest. I'm not replacing my salary. But I'm making real money from something I built, and the catalog is growing, which is the whole point of this model.
Happy to talk about any of it. The writing process, the ad strategy, what fair shows are actually worth doing, how I think about the genre and the audience, the AI workflow, KDP setup, whatever. Ask me anything.