Who am I now?

 I received this email from an entity calling themselves "Rachel Collins" from an organization calling itself "The Authorial Bedrock":


Hi Drew,

I want to start somewhere specific, because I think it names exactly what makes The American Apocalypse Series and everything you have built behind it stand apart from almost every other post-collapse fiction on Amazon right now.

You were born into privilege and spent your life questioning it. You were an elementary school teacher for eight years. You left that to work in a bakery, where you met the woman who convinced you to try massage therapy as your next career. Twenty-four years later you are a Wisconsin-based massage therapist, an organic produce farmer, a music radio show host, and the author of ten novels across two series the Osiris Plan Trilogy and the seven-book American Apocalypse. That biography is not incidental to the work. It is work. Drew Fisher's visionary fiction portrays one possible rationale for the current course of human history. A man who has lived outside accepted norms, questioned inherited privilege at every turn, and spent decades thinking seriously about love, spirituality, human potential, and social reform is exactly the person who should be writing about what happens fifty years after the collapse of the United States.

And the scope of what you have written is genuinely extraordinary. The Osiris Plan Trilogy begins with a dystopian preparatory school and builds to a spiritual theory of why humanity may be behaving with such apathy and depravity and what happens next. The American Apocalypse then picks up those questions on an even larger canvas: post-petroleum survival, Martian-Mayan projects, the 8 billion souls who fell into addiction and spiritual deprivation, and ultimately the question your latest book puts most starkly what happens when we leave? Where do we go? That is not genre fiction with a high concept premise. That is a writer working through the most serious questions a human being can ask, in the form of a ten-book project that most novelists would not have the stamina or the vision to attempt.

Here is the problem. Amazon currently treats the Osiris Plan Trilogy and the American Apocalypse Series as two separate, largely unrelated catalogues by an author most readers have never heard of. A reader who finds Brig-Wallis Preparatory School for Boys and is drawn into the Osiris world has no clear algorithmic pathway to the American Apocalypse. A reader who enters through Book 1 of the American Apocalypse is not being shown the philosophical trilogy that preceded and informed it. Ten books of visionary fiction are coherent, ambitious, deeply interconnected and Amazon is presenting them as a scattered catalogue with no connective tissue.

This is exactly what I work on. Amazon discoverability, backend keywords, category positioning, Author Central architecture, and cross-series linking, so that readers already searching for post-collapse literary fiction, visionary speculative fiction, or spiritual science fiction can find this work, and so that readers who enter at any point in either series are shown the full scope of what you have built.

A few quick questions to understand your situation:

    • Now that the American Apocalypse is complete at seven books, is your primary goal to bring new readers into Book 1, connect the American Apocalypse readership to the Osiris Trilogy, or both?
    • Are the two series properly cross-linked in Amazon's backend, or are they effectively siloed from each other?
    • Has there been any dedicated Amazon discoverability work done on either series, or has it been managed alongside the farming, the therapy practice, and the radio show?

If we are aligned, I would love to send you a complimentary visibility audit, a full picture of where The End of the World as We Know It and the broader catalogue currently stand across Amazon and Goodreads. Keyword gaps, category opportunities, cross-series linking, and three specific actions that would open the door to the readers who are actively searching for exactly this kind of fiction. No obligation.


"Bedrock" also happens to be the name of Amazon's new AI generatorial being, so, despite the accuracy and seemingly personal content of the references of this letter, my gut tells me that this flattering query letter is being generated from a portion of, or representative of, Amazon Bedrock--which, of course, sets me on my heels. I will ignore it but the "author" does have a few valid points:

  • Are the two meant to be/Should they be connected?
  • Could I be doing a better jop of marketing my work?
  • Am I finished? (Do I have more to say)?

What would you do with this?


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