How AI Suggested My Book to the Right Readers

This is a heart to heart message, especially for those of us who work with words.

I was having dinner with Dani Teixeira in a small Italian restaurant near Lausanne Gare. One of those places with tight tables and low light, where you end up overhearing half the room whether you want to or not. We were still looking at the menu when the conversation turned to AI.

I mentioned something that had been sitting with me for a while. Over the past few months, a few readers had told me that AI had suggested my book to them. Not casually. Very specifically. A couple of them even sent screenshots. Different platforms. Almost the same wording.

At the time, I thanked them, saved the images, and kept going. I did not really know what to do with that information yet.

Dani looked at me and said, “Let’s try it.”

So she did. Sitting across from me, phone in hand, she typed in a description of a situation. Nothing optimized. Nothing clever. Just the kind of explanation someone gives when they are trying to make sense of something for themselves.

The answer came back almost immediately.

“Written for exactly your situation.”

Those words were not hers.

They were written by AI.

I did not say anything. I leaned closer to the screen. I had seen this before, months earlier, from someone else, on a different platform. A different system reaching the same conclusion.

A few days before that dinner, I had been listening to a podcast about how people are finding books now. Less through recommendations and more through search. Not wandering around for ideas, but actively trying to put words to something they are dealing with. A few authors talked about their work showing up because the language matched closely enough.

The conversation moved, as these conversations often do, toward copyright and ownership and the sense that things are moving faster than anyone can fully track. All fair concerns. But one comment stayed with me. Not knowing how your work is being read or understood by these systems might quietly become its own blind spot.

Seeing it happen right there at the table made it harder to ignore.

It did not feel like promotion. It did not feel like a trick. It felt like what happens when you stay specific long enough and resist the urge to soften the work for broader appeal.

People are not looking for books in the abstract. They are trying to put words to something that already exists in their lives. When a sentence does that, it tends to surface. The path it takes is not always visible, but the recognition is.

When you write something as personal as Maternity Abroad or Parenting Unpacked, you spend a lot of time questioning that narrow focus. You wonder if you should explain more. Make it easier. Smooth the edges.

Every time someone sends me one of those screenshots, and now seeing it happen in real time, I feel over the moon. Not because it flatters me, but because it tells me the work is doing what it was meant to do.

It is finding the people it was written for.

That is enough for me.

Back to the work. 💚