There comes a time when fear doesn’t just paralyze, but acts as its own form of superiority. How dare we grace the world with our brilliance? Someone might come and take what is ours. How dare we venture to use our words to save a soul? Isn’t healing ourselves enough? Why, then, must we risk pouring poetry onto the concrete for the world to see? Wouldn’t someone come and take it? Won’t it get soaked into the soil? Won’t the birds eat it? What will happen to our brilliance once it’s exposed? Will it wither up and die like Langston’s dream deferred? We are much too wise to let these words go out into the world.
This is not enlightenment. We shrink to keep from shining, so we avoid the light. We avoid the truth: Fear is not growth, and hiding behind the superiority of the pen is not salvation.
It’s been a minute since I’ve talked about publishing on this blog. Mostly, I was just tired of giving advice. Still am.
Most of the work is doing the thing. Failing at it. Succeeding at it, and failing again until you find your groove.
Buttttt… our latest viral sensations have brought me out of hiding.
Enter AI and Dr. Cheyenne Bryant
These seem like unrelated, separate topics, but stay with me.
Lately, I’ve been noticing tons of creators with social media captions that use the same “It’s not x, it’s y” ChatGPT cadence, including authors.
Why are people who write books using AI to write their social captions? Isn’t being creative like, our literal job?
The “it’s not x, it’s y” cadence sounds like: “It’s not just a meal, it’s an experience.”
The words are also structured a certain way, and it is noticeable for those who know what to look for.
For me, it’s mostly noticeable when someone drastically changes how they write. Since I’m a poet, I compare it to suddenly sounding like a poetic professor. You’ve once been an emperor of typos, and now the words flow neatly on top of one another.
The phrases are very well-written, too well-written for a person who has never written in such a way.
It seems to mimic how professional writers write, except now everyone is doing it.
Suddenly, everyone’s Insta captions and Facebook posts are grammatically correct, inspirational, and profoundly poetic.
It is also profoundly fake.
While it might read pretty, it waters down the writer’s authentic voice.
I’d be remiss not to mention that this is not everyone. There are some fantastic, extraordinary writers out there, and for the record, AI is mimicking the genius of the real brain.
The most tell-tale sign is whether I can sense your personality in your writing, or if instead you just sound like an English teacher when you are not one.
The twist in all of this is that typos will become the new normal. They will signal that the person who wrote the piece is a human who makes mistakes and uses their own mind.
You Sound Just Like Everybody Else
What should be most disturbing is that using chat to write will have you sounding like everyone else in the same way that all those AI flyers look the same.
These flyers are always way too cluttered. There is too much information on them, and they end up drawing attention away from the core message, which is drowned out by so many colors and images.
This leads me to question if people are even trying to make changes to the prompts, templates, or whatever they are using.
As a reminder, Canva still exists and has some great free and paid templates from real graphic artists. For my poetry contest, I hired someone on Fiverr to handle the initial design, then paid for the source file. The source file allows me to go in and edit it into as many versions as I want without paying for them. So far, I have turned two graphics into seven to promote my sponsors and judges. It was the best $20 I’d ever spent.
Ya’ll are watering down your voice and image.
I’ve also been seeing a ton of new self-published books with AI/ChatGPT-generated book covers. I cannot emphasize how strongly I recommend not doing this.
You are likely damaging your author brand and marketing strategy before they even begin.
And this isn’t just my opinion. It’s what readers are saying.
Additionally, I have been monitoring the bookish community on Threads, and many readers say they don’t trust books with AI-generated covers.
If your book cover is AI-generated, it’s hard not to wonder if your book was written by ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other artificial intelligence software.
It’s hard not to wonder if you’ve put the hard work in to write or if the computer has done the writing for you.
Consequently, even if you did write the book, it’s challenging for readers to see you as an authentic voice.
The book cover is your first impression. Lose readers there, and they are not reading your book.
Speaking of authenticity, enter Dr. Cheyenne Bryant, the woman currently under fire for the legitimacy of her doctorate and the location of her dissertation.
Dr. Bryant also just published a book that people are saying sounds like it was written by AI.
With twelve 1-2-star Amazon reviews, it is littered with claims of fraud stemming from her latest allegations that she is not a real therapist or psychologist.
People knew his father and what he had contributed to the movement. They still spoke Joseph’s name with a kind of reverence, as though saying it might conjure the courage of another time. His photograph—creased at the corners, and yellowed with time, hung in barbershops and church foyers, beside posters for fish fries and gospel concerts.
Every February, Joseph’s face reappeared on classroom walls, a reminder of marches and megaphones, of a generation that refused to bow. For the community, Joseph was history come to life.
For Michael, he was just Dad.
Michael and his friends walked past the bulletin board in the school hallway. There it was again: his father’s face, eyes sharp, mouth set like a promise. Michael paused, thinking about his first days at Lindbloom.
“Ey, Mike! Mike!” a classmate had called. “Yo man, so how is it being famous? What was it like?”
Today, he would tell the person to go to hell, but back then, he just shook his head, a small, polite refusal that spoke louder than words.
Michael kept walking, shoulders tight, mind elsewhere, like the chess match he had lost last night. If he had not been hungover, his opponent would not have stood a chance. He didn’t particularly enjoy the taste of liquor, but it got his mind off thinking about walking in a legend’s shadow.
Tanya carried the legacy easily, quoting speeches and smiling at cameras as if born for the stage. But Michael kept to the edges. He wanted to be noticed for his own quiet triumphs—for the way his mind worked over a chessboard, or how the basketball arced perfectly from his fingertips.
Instead, people only ever asked about “The Movement,” their eyes expectant, as if he held some sacred story he refused to tell.
His father’s name was everywhere, in every conversation, every display, every “remember when” retold by people who seemed to think history lived only in him. Not in Michael. Not in the quiet hours he spent imagining, planning, thinking. They acted like he was Martin Luther King’s son.
So what, his father took part in the Freedom Rides? What did that have to do with him? Michael didn’t care about no Barack Obama either. He wasn’t his Savior. He was just another politician. He swallowed hard, tasting the bitterness of being overlooked for the wrong reasons.
History had chosen him without asking, which is why he couldn’t admit to his friends or himself that he had a crush on a white girl.
Tanya McNair, dressed in her favorite navy-blue blouse, which bore a faint trace of glitter from the campaign rally a month ago, moved from group to group of the crowded apartment. Her living room was alive with chatter, laughter, and the occasional burst of applause from friends and neighbors whenever a commentator announced another state leaning toward Obama. Tanya looked fondly at the old TV set sitting on the floor beneath the big, flat-screen they were all watching.
The floor model television belonged to her grandmother, Sidney McNair—Mama Sidney to everyone who knew her. Uncle Eddy had bought it after great-grandma Judith passed, back when he and his sisters decided to remain in Chicago a while longer. That was also around the time her father, Joseph, disappeared into what he later called a revolution of self-discovery, also known as abandoning the family until he found himself.
The television had been there through it all.
It was the same set where great-grandma Judith—daughter of the great Solomon, son of the first Stella—watched the Black Panthers march down the street in their berets and rifles, demanding the freedom of Huey Newton.
The same screen that flickered quietly in the corner the day Aunt Karen’s boyfriend, Noah, stormed into their lives. Years later, she would name their first and only son after him.
For Tanya, it wasn’t just a piece of furniture but a sacred repository for memories, a portal to her family’s history.
Tanya frowned at the stacks of books on top of it, wondering if she was disrespecting her grandmother by using her TV as a table.
A cheer erupted from the room as the phone rang. Tanya’s heart raced as she ran to answer it without taking her eyes off the flatscreen. So far, Obama was winning.
“Sisss,” sang her little brother.
Tanya raised her eyebrows, “Are you drunk already, Mike?”
“Nah. I’m good. What’s the word?”
Tanya sighed, “Michael, you are not good. I can smell the Hennessy through the phone.”
Mike burst into laughter, and Tanya pulled the phone from her ear. That boy was gonna make her go deaf. “Where are you anyway?”
“I’m handling some business. Why, what’s good?”
“The business you were supposed to be handling is here. What happened to you helping me with the party?”
“The election party? You know I don’t get into alla that,” he said, slurring his words.
“Well, you need to get into it. History is being made. Have you talked with Dad?”
“History? Yea okay. Nah. I ain’t spoke to him today.”
“He was supposed to be coming over.”
“Coming over where?”
“Over here, to the apartment.”
“Not today, he ain’t. He told me he was working on the Malibu.”
“That beat-up old thing?” Tanya sighed. “And I thought you ain’t talk to him?”
“Look, pops don’t wanna hurt yo feelings, but you know the old man don’t vote.”
It didn’t make sense to her. Joseph McNair was born in 1945 and grew up in the ’60s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He had heard Dr. King speak, fought segregation with his friends through protest, and was even beaten for trying to integrate at a bus station during the Freedom Rides.
Finding out he really was a mixed Black man and not the white boy he grew up believing himself to be is a history lesson all its own.
And now, as the country waited with bated breath to see if the United States really would elect its first Black President, her father, the revolutionary of the family, didn’t participate in politics?
Joseph McNair was politics!
“Yo T, you there?”
Michael’s voice startled Tanya back to the present, her heart beating a million miles per minute as her guests sat on their hands, quietly waiting on the biggest announcement of their time, the walls echoing with hope.
A hundred years ago, in 1926, Dr. Carter G. Woodson planted a small but deliberate marker in time—Negro History Week—never knowing it would one day swell into a month, a memory, a reckoning.
February has carried that weight ever since, in what is now known as Black History Month. It is a month crowded with remembrance, with names spoken loudly and moments replayed until they feel familiar.
But February also carries the ongoing debate over whether Black history should be relegated to a single month, primarily since Dr. Woodson himself never intended the week-long celebration to be permanent, let alone to encompass a whole month lasting 100 years.
For Woodson, he wanted Black history integrated into the mainstream curriculum, not restricted to a single week or, in our case, a single month.
For me, two things can be true.
If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I spend 90% of my time reading, researching, documenting, and sharing Black historical facts year-round. Thus, I am for incorporating Black history into the mainstream curriculum and reducing its focus to a footnote or an elective.
But I do also love the idea of keeping it separate, special, and set apart, as we are.
Therefore, if February is a time when the minds of the people are not as distracted, then let us use it to do some good.
To quote Bob Marley, “The people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking the day off. Why should I?”
So while Black History Month is not the movement itself, I do see it as a mirror history placed in our hands. When we look into it, we do not see the past frozen in black-and-white—we see ourselves.
Our language. Our resistance. Our contradictions.
The mirror does not lie.
It shows us who we’ve been bold enough to become and who we’ve been too afraid to remember.
This is the time of year when many of us are inundated with a call to “finish the year strong.”
A time when we will be pressured by businesses, organizations, and entrepreneurial gurus to race to the finish line. Social media posts will bombard us with how many days of the year are left, year-end discounts, constant promotions, and posts about how much we’ve grown before the year is even over.
But rushing into the new year doesn’t guarantee a fresh start. Sometimes, it just carries our burnout into January.
Yes, we know. January is not the start of a New Year. Anyone who has done the tiniest bit of research knows that a real new year starts in the spring, when everything is reborn, not in the dead of winter. Stay with me tho.
We’ve all experienced or witnessed the last-minute scramble of trying to summarize the year without fully processing it: trying to complete a weight loss program, write a book, or achieve financial goals in just 10 days. Office parties, school events, family gatherings, all crammed together to see who can win the most before January first.
It can feel like we’re running from something. Perhaps a feeling of not having done “enough,” maybe comparison, and maybe the belief that value is measured by productivity.
It’s already happening with Black Friday sales. As you may have noticed, I rarely have one. I have nothing against them, and I am sure I’ll have something special in the future. Maybe even next year. But for now, it just all feels so exhausting.
I’M TIRED YA’LL.
If you are also tired, remember there is nothing wrong with slowing down at a time when everyone is speeding up. If you are a nature person like me, you know nothing blooms all year long. We were born from the Earth, yet we move opposite to it.
While humans rush to prove their year was meaningful to other flawed humans, nature is slowing down for the winter months. Animals are hibernating, finding ways to escape the cold, and trees have shed their leaves, with plants stopping growth to conserve energy. Even the soil rests, with nutrients being regenerated under frost and snow.
Meanwhile, my neighbor blows his leaves every morning. Poor thing. I want so badly to tell him they are just going to fall again. Let them leaves alone. They are doing what they are supposed to do and helping the soil in the process.
On this side of the Earth, humans accelerate and accomplish as much as possible before the final countdown. But for other living things?
For them, this is a period of rest and preparation for spring.
Slowing down isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about doing what matters with intention.
When we slow down, we reclaim time.
We notice the beauty in ordinary moments, and we greet the “new year” with clarity rather than exhaustion.
Instead of rushing to create a version of ourselves that looks good on paper, we can walk grounded, nourished, and whole.
Social media is a necessary tool for connecting in today’s world and it is a must for all businesses to have a social media presence in some capacity.
There are people whose entire livelihoods are built into their social media accounts. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and now Threads have become creator economies where high performing content gets you paid.
But what happens if you are hacked, the app malfunctions, or in the case of TikTok, the app is banned? Now all that work you’ve done and all those people you connected with are gone in an instant.
That’s why I believe authors should focus as much energy into building their own communities.
Community Membership Website
Outside of meeting up with people in person, community membership platforms are the next best thing. I am a member of a few, and I love that the person has their own social app, which they control. There are paid membership sites like Mighty Networks and Skool, and free ones like Discord. The only reason I don’t have one of my own is because I am already managing so many websites, including this blog. Otherwise, I would definitely consider it.
Blogging
This blog has helped me tremendously in my work, and Imma stick beside her.
Email List
By email list, I do not necessarily mean an author newsletter that reads like an ad. These newsletters usually have updates on the author’s latest books and events and usually go out once a month or so. (Pretty much whenever the author has a new book out.)
However, most author newsletters are boring, long, and cluttered with too many images.
The emails I am talking about are where the author speaks to their readers like friends. They might share thoughts on what’s happening in the world lately, how they feel, or offer an inspiring story. They might also throw in an update, but not so many that it becomes a billboard for their books. These emails might come out several times a month, and readers are okay with them because they are fun and inviting.
These emails are usually simple and sent using third-party providers like Mailerlite or Mailchimp. They give people the option to unsubscribe if they want, which is kinda legal. If you are sending out mass spammy marketing emails with no way for people to unsubscribe, you are breaking privacy laws.
Text List
By text list, I mean a professional text line for your business, not your personal number. This can be used to offer short, quick updates, alerts for sales, or an inspiring quote. Personally, I don’t have a text line, nor do I want one, but it is an option. Many businesses use them and do well.
In-Person Meet-Ups
This one is pretty self-explanatory. In person meetings, workshops, and events will always provide a special kind of value you won’t find online and I don’t think we should neglect them. Zoom meetings can also be a great way for meeting up to see people face to face.
As for socials, remember to back up your content, download your data, and save viral moments like videos you might want to repurpose later!
The PBS Blog 