Distributed story structure

I think the main innovation I’ve made with my AI lore books is not the use of AI at all, but the structure & arrangement of the narrative, spread across many volumes in a non-linear web of cross-references. (a.k.a., a networked narrative)

In plain terms, I scatter links to other books throughout the text, so that the story is networked across many volumes. As a result, the buyer behavior that I’ve seen repeated with some frequency is that people click through these links to other parts of the story that interest them, and they end up buying multiple volumes. If it goes really well, they come back again later and buy another batch, and sometimes even another.

AI didn’t help me do that at all. You could do that same distributed narrative structure without using AI at all. And you could do it in any genre. The thing AI has helped me to do though is produce a larger quantity of text in a shorter amount of time. So that enables me to put out many more individual volumes, all of which cross-link out to others.