In 2023, I was laid off from Google. In 2025, I was laid off from Marqeta.

The corporate world sent a clear message: You are expendable.

So I took a sabbatical to ask a dangerous question: What happens if I stop building systems for other people and start building worlds of my own?

I dove headfirst into the intersection of AI and storytelling. I wanted to see if I could use my engineering background to make indie publishing more systematic — not to “hack” the market, but to survive in it as a full-time creator.

It worked well enough to become real. I built a portfolio of sci-fi series and found thousands of readers.

The Indie Lab is where I test how this business actually works.

I test Amazon ads, launches, AI tools, direct sales, audiobooks, and whatever else looks like it might move the needle.

Then I publish what happened: what I tried, what it cost, what the numbers said, what failed, and what I’d do differently next time.

I’m not here to sell you a “get rich quick” scheme. I’m here to document what it actually takes to build an independent publishing business when the old career path no longer looks particularly dependable.

What we explore in the Lab:

• The Machine: Amazon, KDP, ads, algorithms, keywords, metadata and the systems that determine whether books get discovered.

• The Data: Real launch numbers, ad results, readthrough, costs, revenue and what I changed because of them.

• The Workshop: AI workflows, publishing tools, automation and the operational systems I build to run the business.

• The Experiments: Things I try because they might work — including the ones that don’t.

Why Subscribe?

• Free: Weekly field notes, experiments, numbers, postmortems and the decisions that follow.

• Paid ($8/mo): The Navigator’s Toolkit plus selected frameworks, prompts, spreadsheets, workflows and deeper breakdowns when I end up with something useful enough to hand over.

The point of The Indie Lab isn’t to pretend I have publishing figured out.

It’s to test things properly, show the evidence, and make the next decision a little less stupid.