A stranger asked to buy my book. Only problem? It doesn’t exist (yet)
But “This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started” sounds like a book I would write. Or SHOULD write?
A few weeks ago, a woman I didn’t know slid into my Instagram DMs. Her name was Jenn, and she was trying to find a book that would speak to the peculiar rupture she was standing inside: 41 years old, recently divorced, two toddlers at her feet, trying to remember who she was (vocationally, emotionally, metaphysically) after life had ripped through every structure she’d used to define herself.
She asked where she could purchase a workbook I’d written, one that she couldn’t seem to locate anywhere online. Its title was This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started.
But I didn’t write that book! But man, that title was oddly perfect. It sounded exactly like a book I would have written, if I had somehow distilled everything I’d learned through my career as an author and reluctant spiritual midwife for people on the brink of transformation.
It wasn’t just that the tone and title of the book were aligned with my voice. It was that Jenn was already convinced I’d written it. She was actively trying to give me money for something I hadn’t made!
Turns out maybe Jenn wasn’t wrong… She was just early.
After some back and forth, Jenn explained that This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started had been recommended to her by ChatGPT. In a gently probing back-and-forth with the chatbot, she’d described her situation, her needs, and her pain points. She told it what kind of support she was looking for.
In response, ChatGPT offered up a few titles that fit. Some were real (including a book I actually DID write) but at least one of the books was a complete hallucination that the AI claimed had been written by me.
The convo didn’t stop there. Jenn sent me a screenshot, showing that the chatbot had written a whole description of This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started, describing it as “quirky, warm, and honest,” “a healing workbook for uncertain times,” “perfect for people in transition.”
It even compared this imaginary book to From Shitshow To Afterglow, my actual 2020 release about rebuilding your life after loss, chaos, and personal collapse. The hallucination was coherent, compelling, and weirdly on-target: This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started absolutely sounded like a book I would write, and Jenn was exactly my target reader.
It felt like watching a later-me pitch me a project from the future.
BTW, this hallucination wasn’t an isolated incident.
Just a few weeks ago, NPR ran a story about newspapers publishing AI-generated summer reading lists that included books by real authors that didn’t actually exist. Fake titles from real authors, with made-up summaries. One of the most fascinating parts was that the fake books sounded perfect: Emotionally targeted and dead-on in tone. A librarian friend of mine told me that this is happening all the time in her library.
So Jenn’s experience wasn’t just a fluke, but part of a bigger pattern. We’re entering a moment where AI doesn’t just regurgitate or remix what authors have written… It actually invents what we haven’t written yet.
And sometimes it seems terrifyingly accurate about what needs to exist next, and who should be creating it.
This who situation could’ve easily been a glitch to laugh about… a funny moment to screenshot and share. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
If you’re someone like me who’s been writing for almost thirty years, and the market starts dreaming up books for you, and those books feel like something you WISH you’d written… at what point do you stop treating it like a mistake and start treating it like a signal?!
We are living in a time where the boundaries between demand and authorship are increasingly porous. As a former product Medium manager, and as a writer who’s spent the decades navigating the awkward friction between what I want to write and what my audience wants to read, I just couldn’t let this one go!
There was something deliciously strange about it… like being reverse-engineered by my own resonance.
This wasn’t a book pitch from a literary agent trying to make money off of me. It wasn’t a business plan. It wasn’t something I’d brainstormed or sketched out in a notebook. Let’s call it an emergent artifact, co-created by a reader, a machine, and the ripples of everything I’ve ever written all over the internet.
After sitting with it for a few weeks, I realized the hallucination wasn’t just cute… it was alive.
I’ve worked on digital products long enough to know that most launches are guesses dressed up as certainty. You push something into the world and hope it finds its people. But what if a product (especially a deeply personal, emotionally relevant one) could tell you it was needed before you made it?
What if the hallucination was the market test?
I decided to run an experiment. I set up a Gumroad page. I wrote up the story. I created a pay-what-you-want presale with a very simple premise: if 100 people preorder this nonexistent workbook, I’ll write it. If not, I’ll refund everyone. The book disappears back into the ether, and I go back to my lovely little life as an independent publisher and small business consultant.
I’m sharing this here on Medium not just because it’s funny or novel or slightly eerie (although, yes, sure: it’s all of those things too!), but because I think it’s instructive. Writers (especially those of us on Medium) are obsessed with voice, with ownership, with originality.
But we’re also swimming in an environment where search, synthesis, and machine-generated patterns are shaping how readers find us … sometimes going so far as to invent what they think we’ve made.
It would be easy to frame this as an existential threat, but what if it’s also a mirror? What if your next project isn’t on your to-do list, but already circulating in your readers’ unspoken needs? What if the hallucination knows something you haven’t dared admit?
When we talk about “listening to your audience,” we usually mean comments, likes, shares. But the next frontier of listening may be stranger than that.
What if it looks like misattributions, confusions, or hallucinations that predict what your market wants before you even know what it is? What happens when you decide to follow those threads instead of correcting them?
I don’t know if I’ll end up writing “This Time Next Year You’ll Be Glad You Started”
As of this moment, 30+ people have preordered it. Maybe it’ll happen. Maybe it won’t.
But the exercise of listening to a hallucinated demand, and letting it move me into action, has already reframed the way I think about authorship, product development, and the deep weirdness of being read online.
As writers, we all know how easy it is to write into the void… and how rare and strange it is when the void writes back.
