Rolling Up My Sleeves ? Part 2

The Unfiltered Journey of Building an AI Consulting & Edu?Focused Business for Creatives (Debt-Free & Figuring It Out as I Go)

In my Part 1 of this series, I spoke of my reading the article about the Edmond de Belamy GAN portrait painting, and how seeing it got seated in my brain as the next evolution in design. From there - diving into Disco Diffusion, then Dall-E, then every beta I could get access to…

I will pick up from there - the first weekend of September of 2022 on a camping trip with a handful of my kids. It was my birthday weekend and we stayed near Carver’s Gap - where we hiked (in this crazy fog) several miles on the Appalachian Trail.

Right when got to the summit of our climb, the fog opened up, the sun began to shine and the view was spectacular!

Don’t worry - this is not a slide-show of the Life of Brian - but the fog fading feels a bit symbolic of the events of that weekend. The day before leaving home (for the camping trip) I managed to post a few images that I did on Midjourney. I though little of it, because I had been posting daily for months. Most posts of mine at that time got the typical 15-20 likes… In fact, while settling in to sleep on the air mattress under sleeping bags that night - I noticed that something different had happened when the waning mobile allowed an update to my LinkedIn post to reveal fresh insight.

September 1st (just days before the trip) I had released a video called “Midjourney the First Steps” - hoping to help people understand how to get started with Discord, tie into Midjourney, produce their first prompts and see results. Barely was noticed on LinkedIn… at first, at least by engagement count.

My posts for some time under the banner of AI Explorations (soon to be called AI Explore), had in their copy -

My purpose with these posts is to share with the community-at-large some of the cool things created with AI ( inspiration ), offer insights around things discovered along the way ( education ), and share some impressive results from AI platforms ( entertainment ).

But this one post of Knights Armor I posted just before we hit the road, got LIKES. Like - a lot of LIKES! It was a lot more LIKES than any other post I had done before then. It felt like my efforts had somehow managed to be seen and appreciated - by more than 20 people for once!

Suddenly, my posts began to get traction. I had been sharing for months - but this post gained eyeballs and engagement.

Over the days that followed when I was back home, an idea arose…

What if I were to take the abbreviated posts I created on LinkedIn - and expand them to craft a book on prompting? I could expand each of the topics and share how to engage with the tools - but use my daily posting as a means of building the renders and content to talk about.

So - that is exactly what I did. To organize the entire process, I already had a folder on my external hard drive called AI_Art_Gen to which I added FunStuff_1. Because I was creating new content on the daily - I created folders by the date with a short description of the work, to simplify my efforts later. Like the Knight Armor images above - it was inside the 9_2_KnightArmorRender folder. This made the edits and compilation later for the book - so much easier to manage (and find).

These are the mockup images of the first book - shared in a post on September 28, 2022 when Book 1, “A.I. Explore: Prompt Fundamentals” was released!

My first book…

So let me back up a second. In order to sell the book, I had to:

1. produce the assets and structure for the book
2. layout and design the book
3. find a way to sell & distribute the book (& get paid)
4. promote the book

The first 2 points were the easiest for me. I knew what I wanted to cover and how I wanted to put it together. My background was design - so I used Adobe InDesign for laying out the book. I purchased a copy of Topaz to upscale all of my images (without modifying the original images - just increasing the resolution.) But the 3rd point was a challenge. As I spent several weeks while producing the book - trying to figure this out. One day with headphones in - listening to a podcast while washing my car - I heard a fellow describing a platform he used for his passive income product sales…. Gumroad.

With Gumroad, there was no startup cost. You can use their platform to list your product - with images and description - set your price, link PayPal and Stripe… and share out the URL to your product page. Gumroad (at the time) would charge 10% of your total sales (plus there were fees from your payment processing), but after a set number of sales points, the total amount of charge would diminish in percentage. I signed up to sell on Gumroad, and experienced enough sales that my rate had dropped to around 2% by the end of 2022!

There were a lot of requests for the book to be in physical form. Many people wanted a hard copy - so I set out to figure out the most cost-effective way to produce this. I checked out Amazon with Kindle Direct Publishing. I explored multiple POD (print on demand) book printers that I had used for small personal projects - but everything I found would (in my mind) price out those who might want a copy. I did not want a physical copy to be more than double the price charged for the digital copy. This would allow me to make the same profit whether it were print or digital, and still be reasonable for the consumer. I found Lulu.com, and ended up getting the book set to print on demand through them. By the time I had the book ready for print - Midjourney released an update - and I did a total book refresh. Everyone who already had the book - got the update for free (with a copy of the original included in the download). The physical POD updated version could be acquired from Lulu.

HOW did I promote the book? We will talk about that in the next post…

Before I go... have you ever dreamed of writing your first book?

If the answer is YES, I’m thinking about launching a cohort where a group of creatives (like you!) will work side by side to bring their first book to life.

This isn’t just about writing—it’s about having accountability, guidance, and a community to support you along the way.

If this sounds like something you’d love to be part of, drop a comment below with “Book” or “I want to write”, and I’ll keep you posted!

Let’s turn that someday... into today.

I have produced 6 books over the past 3 years - with my first selling over 1000 copies. Ready for help to self-publish your own?