Reduce Risk, Cover Your Buttx

Why Gen X Writers Need a New Publishing Strategy in the Age of AI

Let's skip the preamble. You grew up with libraries, liner notes, and Napster anxiety. You watched the music industry get "shared" into oblivion, journalism get "aggregated" into irrelevance, and photography get "discovered" right off photographers' hard drives. Now it's happening to your writing, and some twenty-six-year-old founder wants you to "embrace disruption."

No.

Reduce Risk, Cover Your Buttx is a book for writers who still believe words belong to the people who wrote them—and who are practical enough to know that belief alone won't protect a damn thing. It's not anti-technology screeching. It's not legal advice. It's a field manual for staying visible, staying indexed, and staying yours.

"If you're looking for a magical setting that makes AI go away forever, this is not that book. If you're looking to reduce risk, keep receipts, and stay visible—welcome."

The Core Argument: Search Good, Training Bad

Here is the deal that built the internet for writers: put your words out there, and search engines will help people find them. Visibility in exchange for access. Links in, links out. Traffic flowed both ways. You could live with that.

AI training blew up that contract.

Search indexes content to point humans toward it. AI training ingests content to replace the need to visit it. No links. No attribution. No return trip. That's not discovery. That's absorption.

"Blocking Google because you're angry at AI is like boarding up your store because you don't like the mall owner. You disappear. The mall keeps going."

The book's rule is brutally simple: search stays, training gets the side-eye. You don't burn down your visibility because someone else broke the deal. You get specific about who's allowed in and who gets the door.

You Need Leverage, Not Vibes

This is where the Gen X sensibility really earns its keep. The book doesn't promise invincibility. It doesn't sell "AI-proof" fantasies. If someone tells you there's a setting that makes your work untouchable, they are selling something—or soothing themselves.

Instead, the book is built around three practical pillars:

• Clear intent—your terms are stated, not assumed
• Reduced exposure—less surface area for scraping
• Evidence when things go sideways—because they will

"You want leverage, not vibes."

The Practical Playbook

The book walks through the actual tools, one by one, with the energy of someone who has better things to do than mystify the internet.

Robots.txt is a fence, not a force field. It keeps honest crawlers honest. It won't stop bad actors, but it will help you prove bad faith later. That distinction matters more than most people realize.

Meta tags are boring, and that's why they work. They don't argue. They don't moralize. They quietly say: you may index this; you may not train on it. You're not asking for permission. You're setting terms.

"Meta tags are boring. That's why they work."

Partial publishing is not cowardice. Excerpts are fine. Full texts behind email gates or paywalls are fine. Private drafts are not a moral failure. The book puts it plainly: putting everything everywhere is how creators trained the machines that now compete with them. Scarcity is not evil. It's leverage.

DMCA works because it is dull. No speeches. No insults. No explaining your trauma. Just facts, links, dates, and calm inevitability. The book includes a checklist, because that's what you actually need when someone lifts your work.

Owning your audience is the long game. Algorithms are landlords—they raise the rent and change the locks. Email lists are owned property. Websites are owned property. Everything else is a lease.

"Algorithms are landlords. They raise the rent and change the locks."

Proof Beats Outrage

If there's a single line that captures the book's philosophy, it's this: timestamps beat screenshots, archives beat tweets, boring evidence beats righteous anger.

If you want to win disputes, you need receipts, not threads. The book covers how to establish provenance, why publishing first matters, and how to build the kind of paper trail that holds up when you actually need it—not just on social media, but in the places where decisions get made.

"You don't publish because it's safe. You publish because it's yours."

Who Should Read This

If you grew up taping songs off the radio and understand that nothing on the internet is truly free, this book was written in your language. It's for bloggers, essayists, indie authors, newsletter writers, and anyone who creates words for a living and is tired of being told the answer is to "just adapt."

The book includes a practical appendix with sample robots.txt files, copyright language templates, a DMCA checklist, and a platform-by-platform comparison covering WordPress, Substack, and static sites.

It's slightly cranky, completely practical, and mercifully short.