Friday Fixes | DragonWorks Publishing One fix. One Friday. This week: the bio nobody reads twice. The Problem Your author bio shows up more places than almost anything else you write. Amazon. Goodreads. Your website. The footer of every newsletter. The back matter of every book. A reader can encounter it five different times without ever reading a full chapter of your work. Most authors write it once, early, and never touch it again. That would be fine if the bio were doing its job. It usually isn't. There are two failure modes, and almost every weak bio falls into one of them. The first is the resume bio. A list of credentials, awards, associations, and career facts stacked in a row. "Jane Smith is a member of RWA and has published twelve novels across three genres. Her work has appeared in..." This bio is trying to prove the author is legitimate. It reads like a LinkedIn summary, and it does nothing to make a reader feel anything about the person who wrote the book they're deciding whether to buy. The second is the apology bio. Self-deprecating, hedging, minimizing. "I just write for fun and I'm still figuring this whole author thing out, but I hope you enjoy it!" This bio is trying to seem humble and relatable. Instead it quietly tells the reader not to expect much, right before asking them to spend money finding out. Neither bio is doing what a bio is actually supposed to do. What a Bio Is Actually For A bio has exactly three jobs, and none of them is "list your accomplishments." Build trust. The reader is deciding whether to hand you hours of their time and the price of a book. They want a reason to believe you can deliver the experience the cover and blurb promised. Signal genre fit. A reader in your genre wants a fast, unconscious confirmation that you're one of them, someone who understands the genre from the inside, not an outsider dabbling in it. Create warmth. Readers who like an author's bio are more likely to follow that author, join their newsletter, and buy the next book. A bio that feels like a real person is doing marketing work a spec sheet never will.

Enoch Fortune has been banned even though he did follow most of the rules. I warned him about trying to DM folks and he did not listen. I had high hopes as he did follow the other rules and played like a good citizen. Oh well Happy Monday!!

So said Sir terry Pratchett. The article is posted below. It apparently got lost along with my short forward here. It was after 3AM. Whoops. This is why I do not code that late. I was watching the MOvie version of "Going Postal" and really between what I know and what my buddy Claude can find I could write an entire book on the Discworld So i concentrated on His genre bending, breaking, satire , and the books topics. There are huge arguments on reading order for those who haven't gotten into them (and are interested) starting with "The Colour of Magic" book or double movie is never a bad idea. Death has the greatest line in the book: "I think I just had a near RinceWind Experience". I've included three different reading order guides that explain this better than I ever could. I've never made it completely through all of them. I think i' short 6 or 7 as I can only read so much British Humor in a row without a palate cleanser or two.

I just thought I would share my experiences using local models with WordCrafter Pro. First a bit of my setup I run a Mac Studio M4 with 128GB RAM. So overkill for most things but large enough to run some larger size LLMs. With WordCrafter Pro I originally tried Ollama. I was able to see my local models without a problem however if I tried to connect with any of them, even setting context length, I kept getting 504 errors (if I remember correctly). So I moved over to LM Studio and tried with Gemma 4 31B with 128K context window. Again I could see my models but in case I could actually connect. I started with BrainStorm and threw it a silly throw away idea. Working through the BrainStorm process it was able to take this more or less random prompt and help craft it into something actual workable. I was able to take this and go through Story Dev then Character Creator. It seemed to more or less keep the conversation coherent and not drift too much from what we worked out. I did cause some direction changes, but much less than I normally would when working through a project, and it seemed to handle these changes fine. In this case I simply wanted evidence that it could work with the model then a finished project I would work on. Finally, I had it create the first chapter. The prose was more or less the standard AI generated I would expect but it generally kept to the story I wanted to create. In the process I did have a few cases where the prompt would process up to 100% on my side within LM Studio (i.e. finished) but then get disconnected and nothing showed up within WordCrafter Pro. Some of these might be some of the errors @Michael Culp was mentioning about in his post. Not sure who was at fault. However, asking it to 'continue' within the application seemed to work and allow it to finish the process as expected. Though I was starting to get the impression that the more context included within a prompt to the local model, the more likely it would run into problems and/or not be able to process at all.

TL;dr: Thinking of changing the Tiers in Skool to match the tiers in WorCrafter.Pro that will go in effect next month and tie the two together for extra value and better algorithm visibility on Skool. Payments to be made through Skool instead of WCP. This is not a done deal. ****** Skool just added Reviews, but only paying users can leave reviews under the About button, And Discovery is based on an algorithm that includes income from the skool (which a primarily free skool doesn't make). The recommendation from several other Skool owners that do make good money from their channels is to change at least a minimal rate for everyone to have access. $2-$5 a month. This does a couple good things and a couple bad in my mind. The Good: Adds value to the site, makes us higher in the algorithm and Discovery will give us more free advertising. And we lose lurkers that have forgotten they are even here 8) The Bad: This is intended as free support for the software. And we lose our lurkers that are getting some value. And wil be a gateway for some new folks and I'll lose some folks here that just don't want another monthly fee And I truly want to help folks. So no. The free tier remains and will remain. But the upper two tiers.... So my Idea. At the end of the month I intend to tier the price of Wordcrafter.pro so different plugins will be available to users at the different levels. At the basic level you will get everything you need to write a book with a few extras. The PWS Skillroooms, custom prompting, basic graphics The pro level will give access to advanced graphics, the layout tools and the basic marketing reports. The Studio level is everything else, Audiobooks, path crafter, Merchandising, advancedmarketing and everything as it gets released. Founders will all be at the studio level. Everyone using it at the time will be set to the Studio level and have all access to all of the plugins and the new ones as they get released, as long as they stay members. I'll start sending out warning emails in advance, so if you have been thinking of giving it a try now is the time. First two weeks are free to check everything out. the advanced imaging and hopefully marketing tools will be released within the next week.