Welcome back to my Writer’s Tips series, For my April shares, Anne R. Allen has more good tips on how to avoid being Scammed with our Books, Deborah Jay is at the Story Empire sharing How to Pitch your Nonfiction Book, and Hugh Roberts shares a tutorial on How to Add a Blogroll to our blogs. And lastly, I came across two blog posts (sorry I can’t remember from who), directing us over to this interesting page by Grant P. Ferguson at TameYourBook.com on the various uses for A.I., also, a great breakdown from Diana Peach on the Three Act Structure.
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Anne R. Allen on 10 Things to Avoid from getting Scammed with our Books
I recently published my January Writer’s Tips before coming across this important article for authors, from the Kindlepreneur, I felt it was an important share. I don’t know about you peeps, but I don’t relish the idea of Amazon A.I. speaking for me.
Amazon’s A.I. is now describing our books – WITHIN our books! I couldn’t believe this when I came across the article from the Kindlepreneur. Since I recently published my January Writer’s Tips, this article didn’t make the cut, but so important for authors to know. It actually would have been nice had Amazon even bothered to email us and inform us, even though we have ZERO ability to stop it.
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From the Kindlepreneur:
“Amazon just rolled out a new Kindle feature called Ask This Book. It lets readers ask questions about whatever they’re reading and get AI-generated answers on the spot.
Right now, it’s available in the Kindle iOS app for U.S. customers, with plans to expand to Kindle devices and Android later in 2026.
Forget who a character is? Want a reminder of what happened earlier? Confused about a scene? You can now ask, and the system will tell you.
What makes this different from most reading tools is that it doesn’t send you back to the page. It offers its own explanations.
And it does it without the author’s involvement, permission, or ability to intervene.
That’s the problem…”
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My thoughts: Just no! I don’t appreciate Amazon OR A.I. describing what I MEANT in a passage of my book. I don’t appreciate A.I. translating what I intend for my readers.
Welcome to November’s best curated Writer’s Tips. In this edition, the Kindlepreneur shares info about an AI lawsuit case and the importance of copyright, Hugh Roberts shares some free image sourcing sites, Deborah Jay shares how to publish on Draft 2 Digital, Anne R. Allen talks about writing good seconday characters, and author Jacqueline Lambert has an important BEWARE for bloggers using public images on blogs with the new Copyright Trolls.
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The Kindlepreneur talks about AI scraping our content and re-publishing. Read about the lawsuit below, and I’ve provided a link below that where you can check and see if any of your books are part of the lawsuit
I’ve been wanting to update my author picture for ages, but wasn’t looking forward to the price for a new professional headshot. In my surfing travels last week, I came across a site that creates headshots from using our own real pictures!
Of course I tried it! It asks us to download ten pictures of ourself so the generator can work its magic creating professional images with new backgrounds taken from the photos we downloaded. It will show you all new generated photos with different backgrounds for free, and if you wish to pay for them, then we are able to download them. These are great for authors and other professionals, and especially great to use on social media. Just pick your package of pictures, pay, and download. Just know, they choose the attire to add to the pose.
This pic above is one of the fifty pictures I downloaded and chose for my new author pic. I found it interesting that the app puts us in different outfits and scenarios. I also found it interesting that many of the pictures generated had me with my glasses off. I had downloaded five pics with glasses and five without and the app generated most pics with my glasses off, like the one above.
Once the images are generated, we are offered a 10% discount if we choose to download the pics within ten minutes. The original price was $79 CAD, and it charged me $71 and change. So worth it! The last author pic I had professionally done was almost twelve years ago! One photo cost me $140 Canadian!
Below, I’ll share a few of the other pics just to demonstrate the various poses and sceneries the app generated with me:
Name in lights
Nice dream pic
I’m definitely ready for sun and sea!
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Visit the link below and give it try for yourselves!
Welcome to October’s picks for Writing Tips. In this edition, blogging guru, Hugh Roberts shares a tutorial on creating a Contact Page on our blogs and how to build the page, Hugh Roberts on Blog Recommendations, Anne R. Allen talks about the ‘flattering’ email scams authors receive, Diana Peach in her Punctuation Refresher Series talks about Comma uses, and Nathan Bransford on Trusting A.I.
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Hugh Roberts on How to Build a Contact page in our Blogs
Welcome to September’s curated Writer’s Tips. In this edition, Hugh Roberts shares about repurposing old Blog Posts, Deborah Jay in her Self-Publishing series, talks about how to price book accordingly on Amazon, the Kindlepreneur shares how to find best Keywords for our books, and Diana Peach is back with here Punctuation series at the Story Empire, talking about the use of Quotations, and Sue Coletta, Nicholas Rossis shares about A.I. in books and social media, also at the Story Empire talks about cleaning up broken links on our Blogs.
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Hugh Roberts on Repurposing or Deleting older Blog Posts
DGKayewriter.com 