The Golden Age of Weird is here

Weirdness isn’t a liability anymore. It’s a career path. The more the average gets automated, the more the extraordinary stands out.

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Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

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Hi,

Melissa Storm is one of my favorite humans, along with being one of the most talented author support humans on the planet.

Not to mention she’s a multi-six-figure author across different pen names, a genius, and hilarious. She is literally a force of nature.

Working as both an author of weird books and somebody who helps authors get visibility for their work, she has a unique perspective on AI and the place we are that contradicts the doom and gloom we normally hear in the author space.

So, I wanted to bring her in to talk about “The Golden Age of Weird”. She currently has two Kickstarter campaigns live. The first is for her very weird cozy fantasy series.

The second is for a Kickstarter ads course, where she uses the above campaign as a case study.

As somebody who launched a Kickstarter campaign to promote a book about Kickstarter, this is very aligned to my interests. I hope it’s aligned for you, too.

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I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment. I just didn’t know it would look like this. When people talk about the AI revolution, they tend to focus on what might disappear. Jobs. Skills. Stability. Maybe even the idea of what it means to be a creator. The headlines make the world feel like it’s cracking open, and not always in a good way.

But if you sit where I sit, if you watch what I watch every single day across thousands of ad sets, publishing tools, reader behaviors, algorithm shifts, and creative breakthroughs, you start to see a different story. A better one. A hopeful one.

Something extraordinary is happening, and I want you to feel it, too.

Weirdness isn’t a liability anymore. It’s a career path.

And the reason is simple. The rise of AI has made people hungry for one thing above all else. True, unmistakable humanity. Not the polished, curated kind. Not the safe kind. The weird kind. The kind that opens a door and says, here’s my odd little corner of the universe. Come on in if you’re feeling the vibes.

Readers are craving something only real humans can make. Something a little strange, a little specific, a little unapologetically itself.

Something like an autistic gnome who makes divine wishes with her talking cheese sidekick.

Something like me.

Something like you.

This is the first time in human history where deeply quirky, niche, highly individual work has an easier path to the right audience than the broad, generic, please-like-me work that used to dominate publishing.

It feels like a gift. Fuck it, it feels like justice.

It feels like the world finally figured out that being different isn’t a glitch. In fact, it’s the whole effing point.

The algorithms finally caught up to us

For so long, every creative had to play a guessing game. Throw work into the void. Hope someone might see it. Pray the right readers would stumble upon it before the wrong ones shouted it down. It was like trying to whisper your truth into a crowded stadium.

That era is finished.

The Amazon and Meta algorithms have grown sharp in ways we once only dreamed about. They understand micro-niches. They understand reader psychology. They understand that someone who wants a gnome with social anxiety will also love a sentient cheese wheel with too many opinions.

They can place my incredibly odd book into the exact hands that will laugh, gasp, or cry at the exact moments I wanted them to. I no longer have to spray and pray. I no longer speak to the masses.

I speak directly to the reader who was basically born to love my work (and probably for other reasons too, but hey!).

It still astonishes me. Every week I track how the delivery shifts, who the ads find, how the responses change, how the communities grow. Watching it feels like watching a destiny machine click into place. A weird one. A beautiful one.

Mine.

People say algorithms are cold. But they haven’t met these new ones. This new generation is something else. Something almost intuitive. Something that knows where your creative fingerprint belongs.

I’ve always believed that niche is power, but now we have proof.

Meeting the patron saint of weird

This summer I found myself in Alaska at a VIP meet and greet with Weird Al Yankovic. It felt like the universe whispered, it’s time. Face the truth of who you’ve always been.

I brought a copy of my book Bard to the Bone, handed it to him, and said thank you for making weird a viable career path. Thank you for saying, through your entire career, that oddities matter. Thank you for showing that the strange kids don’t have to hide in the back row forever.

He smiled. He accepted the book. My heart did a small somersault. And the camera went click.

I don’t know if he’ll ever read it. That’s not the point. The point was claiming my heritage as one of the Weird Kids Who Made It.

And realizing that this is the best possible moment in history to be weird.

I built a seven-figure agency to serve this moment

Running a seven-figure ads agency (Hi, I’m also CEO of Novel Publicity) didn’t fall out of the sky. I built it brick by brick over more than a decade. And yet it still surprises me how much the landscape continues to shift under our feet.

You’d think I’d be exhausted by it. Some days I am. But most days I feel a joy that’s almost childlike. I see the arc of the industry bending in real time, and it bends toward opportunity.

I don’t fear automation. I don’t fear AI. I don’t fear disruption.

The more the average gets automated, the more the extraordinary stands out.

The world doesn’t need more sameness. It needs more specificity. It needs more people willing to show up with their full strange humanity and say, here I am.

It needs your fingerprints all over your work.

The algorithms that once made everyone feel invisible can now find your people with precision I could barely imagine ten years ago.

And my cheese book prove it.

What is my cheese book? Let me tell you how strange my current Kickstarter is.

The book is about a wish-granting autistic gnome, her overly confident cosmically divine cheese wheel, a swarmless kobold slowly becoming intelligent, and a town that runs on divine bureaucracy. It’s cozy fantasy that leans into neurodivergent truth instead of neurotypical aspiration. It’s heartfelt, ridiculous, tender, and chaotic.

And readers love it.

Not because it’s normal. Not because it’s market tested. Not because it fits neatly into a mold.

Readers love it because it’s weird with intention.

Guess what? The ads work. The ads work like they were designed for this exact book. Because they were.

I’ve been training a suite of new methods that match the changing behavior of Meta’s Andromeda algorithm. This is the first time I’ve ever seen an algorithm naturally prefer the most human option in the batch. It rewards specificity. It rewards heart. It rewards originality.

The ads for this Kickstarter are performing beautifully. They’re driving the book into the hands of people who laugh out loud at the socially anxious stumbles and cry at a moment of deep and hard-won self-acceptance. They’re connecting with autistic readers, quirky readers, cozy readers, neurodivergent parents, and anyone who’s ever felt like they take up too much space or not enough.

The ads are doing exactly what the book needs. Not by accident, but by design.

The most meta project of my life

I’m running a Kickstarter right now that teaches creators how to run ads to Kickstarters. It’s the most awkwardly brilliant thing I’ve ever done…

…but it’s also completely on brand for the weirdness era.

I’m teaching best practices through a live example that’s actively hitting stretch goals as the lessons drop. I’m using the exact system I teach to run the campaign. I’m letting people watch the real time data so they can see how each decision plays out.

I built the course. I built the ads. I built the system that supports it.

The best part is that it works for every niche. Not just books. I’ve done it for games, nonfiction, service offers, digital products, and art. The mechanics are universal. The examples happen to be bookish because that’s where my heart lives, but the method itself doesn’t care what your niche is.

Weird. Serious. Experimental. Traditional. Spiritual. Scientific. Cozy. Macabre. Minimalist. Maximalist.

If your work has a beating heart, the system will find the readers who feel that heartbeat too.

You can join the Kickstarter for just fifty dollars. You get the entire course. All the bonuses. All the live lessons. And a front row seat to the new era of ads in publishing.

I also built an AI system that writes marketing copy the way authors actually need it

A while back I realized something. If AI is going to exist no matter what, I want it to serve the author community instead of swallowing it.

So I spent hundreds of hours training an AI workflow called Manuscript-to-Marketing.

It takes your book. It reads it. It analyzes tropes, vibe, emotional tone, audience alignment, competitive edges, and marketing angles. Then it writes your ad copy, blurb upgrades, meta descriptions, social media strategy, and launch assets without stripping out your voice.

It soft-launched a few weeks ago, and already the feedback has blown me away. Authors are saying the tool helps them understand their own book better. They say the ads finally sound like them. They say the process feels human, not mechanical. One person even said it gave her hope back and helped her fall in love with writing again instead of quitting. I mean WOW.

That was always the goal.

To keep the soul of creativity at the center of everything.

If you want to try Manuscript to Marketing, use discount code WEIRDWAVE for fifty percent off (the offer’s only good for 2 weeks, so don’t wait). I want it to be accessible. I want creators to feel empowered. I want you to have tools that make your life easier and your marketing better.

A new hope

I know it sounds dramatic, but something in the air feels familiar.

Hope is rising again.

This moment reminds me of the energy that kicked off the original renaissance of indie publishing. Except now we’re wiser. More skilled. Better supported. Better connected. And far less afraid of being ourselves.

It’s a beginning, but it also feels like… I don’t know, Episode Four. Wink.

A new hope. A strange hope. A wild hope.

The old systems are crumbling. The old rules are fading. The new era belongs to the weird, the tender, the curious, the neurodivergent, the joyful misfits, the artists who don’t fit inside neat little boxes, and the creators who once thought they were too much or too little.

This is your moment.

The world wants your voice. Your quirks. Your heart. Your fingerprints. The more automated the world becomes, the more precious the human parts will be.

So, write the strange book. Build the bold brand. Start the small business. Run the odd little campaign. Say the thing that scares you. Make the work that only you can make.

Then let the new algorithms do what they do best. Let them find your people and prove what I already know is true.

We’re entering the golden age of weird.

And we’re building it together.

To your blinding and brilliant success, friends!

Melissa Storm / Luna Ryder / A Million Other Things

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

There are over 600 exclusive posts available behind the paywall, including tons of interviews, courses, books, and more to help you on your author growth journey.

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P.S. because I love getting “meta” where I can, here’s what I wrote to prompt my robot assistant (in this case ChatGPT 5.1, although I’m typically a Gemini simp) to prep this post:

I want to write a blog post about the new opportunities to be weird and make a living at it, not despite the AI revolution but because of it.

I want to talk about the rise of AI leading people to crave more authentic, quirky, uniquely human work like my autistic gnome and her talking cheese sidekick.

I want to talk about how the new super-powered algorithms on Amazon and Meta can now find the exact right reader for that weird book.

You’re not speaking to the masses anymore and hoping blindly that your message will land with somebody. You are talking to the EXACT right reader for your unique book and brand.

I’ve been tracking all these changes with amazement and just pure giddiness.

This summer I got to meet Weird Al at a VIP event in Alaska. I gave him my book, Bard to the Bone, and thanked him for making weird a viable career path. (Picture included)

Now I’m running a 7-figure ads agency (to be fair I’ve been doing that for quite a while now) and seeing the rapid shifts in the industry not as something to bemoan, but something to celebrate.

I’m running a successful Kickstarter to my strange cheese book using ads methods I created to match the shifting algo and copy I also created through an AI tool that I spent hundreds of hours programming to write great book marketing copy.

So I just wanted to let you know that hope is not lost, hope is on the rise. Some might even say there is a new hope and even though it feels like episode 4, it’s also the beginning.

Then show off some of my ads for the cheese Kickstarter, plug my Kickstarter about running ads to Kickstarter (and address the awkward brilliance in that). Share about Manuscript to Marketing, and then offer a discount code for 50% off to try it out. Invite them to back the campaign for just $50.

Aim for like 2,000 words using things we’ve talked about throughout our chats. Remember to use contractions so that you sound like a real human. Keep my warm Melissa CEO voice. Go.