Chet Day & CasaDay Press

On a good day, my typical Facebook post gets a few hundred views and a handful of thumbs.

I gave away 991 copies of my book in two days, made zero sales, and got exactly one review for my trouble.

TL;DR: The White Whale is a 105,000-word modern thriller adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, written by 78-year-old horror novelist Chet Day in transparent collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude AI.

In my first two posts of this three-part series, I showed you how to spot scams and explained why indie authors are such attractive targets for fraud.

In my last post on indie author scams, I dissected a sophisticated email that fooled me for several seconds—a fake Macmillan representative offering to help the memoir I wrote about my late wife reach more readers.

I recently received a fake book marketing email that made my 77-year-old heart skip a beat for about five seconds.

Five years writing a grief memoir… That’s how long I spent writing about my life with Ellen, my wife of 47 years who died on Thanksgiving Day 2019.

Buy on Amazon Now Last week I wrote about why memoir is having a moment in 2025 and why your story matters.

I’ve been watching something interesting happen in the publishing world regarding memoir writing in 20205, and I’ll be honest: it surprised the tar out of me.

Buy Kindle version In my first two posts, I talked about what documentary fiction is and how structure shapes meaning.