1 in 4 books sold in America right now is a romance novel (source). Inspired by this fact, we launched summer’s biggest thirst trap (our X-Treme Watermelon Smoothie) by creating the first (and thirstiest) full-length digital novel written by a brand using ChatGPT. Our novel, A Summer Fling to the X-Treme, tells the story of a riveting love triangle between a man, a woman, and an X-Treme Watermelon Smoothie.

We leaned on AI to do the heavy lifting. ChatGPT created the story, outline, chapter summaries, plot points, or wrote all 228 pages filled with 36,920 words. Our human team was involved for oversight, feeding ChatGPT points from an outline it had already created and monitoring its 500-700 word responses.

We know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but we’re human after all … Unlike our AI artist Midjourney. Arming the program with inspiration from 90s heartthrob romances, Midjourney delivered sensual imagery that teased the watermelon smoothie love story inside. There were only a few extra fingers added.

To finish the process, Smoothie King published the novel on Amazon's direct publishing platform, where digital books were available to instantly download and physical copies were automatically printed and shipped on-demand; a process that took all of one afternoon instead of the 18 months at a traditional publishing house (source). ChatGPT finished the process effortlessly with a quick product description. Soon after, the real human purchases and reviews started pouring in.

Even on our paid media budget of $0, the word spread. In a matter of days, over 700 books were claimed. 60 media outlets covered the release, amounting to 646 million earned impressions.