New Release + Limited Free Days: Navigating an AI-Driven World—A Cultural Creative’s Guide to Thriving Beyond the Algorithm
- Joseph Crown
- Oct 8
- 9 min read
We’re happy to announce the publication of Navigating an AI-Driven World: A Cultural Creative’s Guide to Thriving Beyond the Algorithm—and to give it back to the community with a limited free Kindle window over the next few days. To be exact.
Availability note: The book is free for a short window and then rolls off. To catch it while it’s free (and see what’s next), follow the author profile and check daily.
📘 Kindle (limited-time free): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTYD9F49
🎧 Audible (audiobook): https://www.audible.com/pd/Audiobook/B0FTFTPSBP
🖊️ Author profile (follow for promo windows): https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B006MEH3X0
“How many authors do you know who give their work away as they publish?”
Not as a marketing gimmick, but as a practice of community care. In New Orleans, we know that stories aren’t just entertainment—they’re infrastructure. They carry memory, teach skills, and move resources. When an author makes fresh work free—right at release—it signals something bigger than generosity: it says the knowledge belongs with the people it’s meant to serve. It keeps value, credit, and opportunity with the community, not above it.
For cultural creatives, giving work away (even for a rotating free window) can feel risky. But it’s also powerful. Free access widens the circle—teachers download chapters for class tomorrow; a young artist skims a checklist before a grant deadline; a clinic prints a one-pager for a waiting room. The result isn’t “less value”—it’s more use. Use builds trust, and trust builds audiences who show up later for workshops, commissions, subscriptions, or paid editions. In a noisy algorithmic world, utility is the most persuasive marketing there is.
For the average person in NOLA and beyond, free-at-release means the right ideas arrive when they’re needed—not months later when the moment has passed. That might be a parent finding plain-language guidance, a neighborhood organizer borrowing a page for a meeting, or a student discovering a voice that sounds like home. Cost shouldn’t be the gate to competence, dignity, or cultural pride. When access is easy, literacy grows, and so does the confidence to participate—on stages, in councils, at work, and around kitchen tables.
This practice also teaches the platforms—yes, the algorithms—who we are and how to describe our work accurately. When creators pair open access with good metadata, captions, and credits, they make their work easier to find and harder to erase. The payoff is collective: our city’s music, language, foodways, and stories stay visible online and legible to the next generation.
Make Your Work Easier to Find—and Harder to Erase
So what is this book, exactly? Navigating an AI-Driven World: A Cultural Creative’s Guide to Thriving Beyond the Algorithm is a plain-language field guide for anyone making culture, delivering services, or organizing community work in a world where recommendation engines shape what gets seen. It shows you how to keep your work findable, credited, and community-led—without turning yourself into a full-time tech person.
Instead of hype or jargon, the book offers small, durable habits that travel across disciplines. You’ll learn how to attach credit that sticks to your files; how to write clear “about” text that platforms can actually reuse; and how to publish with accessibility in mind—captions, transcripts, alt text, summaries—so more people can use what you make. It also shows how to set boundaries (what stays private), choose what you preview (to invite help), and mark the official version of your work (so drafts don’t get treated as final).
For cultural creatives, this matters because algorithms don’t understand context or community on their own. If you don’t teach systems who you are, they guess—and guesses can erase authors, flatten histories, or mislabel cultural practices. The book offers checklists and examples—musicians, poets, visual artists, librarians, youth programs—so you can build a simple workflow that protects provenance while still welcoming collaboration.
For teams and small orgs, the guide translates these ideas into everyday practice: a clinic posting accurate, human-centered FAQs; a nonprofit packaging program outcomes so funders and neighbors alike can understand them; a school arts program tagging student work so credit follows the artist; a neighborhood historian organizing photos so search actually retrieves the right story. These moves don’t require new budgets—just better habits and five extra minutes at the end of a project.
For the average person in NOLA and beyond, the promise is practical: clearer information, fewer dead ends, and cultural work that still feels like people. When our city’s songs, recipes, murals, and oral histories are tagged with care—and shared with the right context—we make it harder for systems to strip credit and easier for neighbors, teachers, and kids to find what they need. That’s how visibility becomes belonging.
The bottom line: algorithms may open doors, but people decide what matters. This book helps people—artists, educators, clinicians, organizers—shape how their work is learned, described, and recommended so it remains visible, verifiable, and valuable. And because access matters, we’re releasing it with rotating free windows on Kindle so anyone can use it the moment it can help. Follow the author profile to catch the current promo, read it, share it, and put it to work in your corner of the world.
What this book isn’t
This isn’t a “let AI write it for you” manual, a prompt-pack of shortcuts, or a growth-hack playbook that replaces your voice with a bot. It won’t tell you the best place to offload your writing, so you’re disengaged from it—the author is against that. It also isn’t an “AI is good” or “AI is bad” manifesto. We recognize that some people love AI and others hate it—often because of the hype. Instead of fanning that hype, this book stays practical and human: it’s about protecting provenance, widening access, and shaping how systems describe your work—without outsourcing the work of being an artist, organizer, educator, or clinician. No vendor worship, no one-click SEO magic, no instructions for automating away your craft. Your judgment, your context, and your community come first.
What this book is designed to do
This book trains communities to use AI as today’s reference shelf—a set of tools to look up, verify, summarize, and organize—not to replace your voice. You’ll learn practical, low-lift ways to pair AI with real work: organizing community archives; translating notes into clear outlines; drafting inclusive alt text and captions; mapping keywords so search actually finds your projects; and structuring metadata and credits so recognition sticks. It shows how to teach the web and AI who you are—using canonical links, version notes, and contributor roles—while deciding what to keep private, what to preview, and what to release as the official version so your ideas circulate with context and credit.
This book also features forewords from Morris A. Singletary, Casey Giraud Davis, Ren, James Butler, and Dr. Scott A. Phillips—voices spanning arts, community, and culture.
The goal isn’t automation for its own sake; it’s discoverability with integrity. The book helps artists, organizers, educators, and clinics make their work legible to people and platforms—visible, verifiable, and valuable—without diluting authorship or community ownership. It also clarifies who a cultural creative is today—from muralists and musicians to librarians, product leads, clinic teams, and neighborhood historians—and why purpose-led storytelling matters. When your “why” leads the message, your work engages people beyond the moment and invites them to stay.
How to Get It Free (Kindle)
Click the Kindle link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTYD9F49
If today is within the promo window, it will show up as $0.00—grab it.
If not, follow the author profile and check back; promotions rotate throughout the month.
A Gift that Advances Literacy & Local Culture
Part of the Crown Legacy Program’s mission is to ensure that our work—and the value, credit, and opportunities it creates—stays with the communities we serve and create with. Offering free access to knowledge is one way we ignite a love of reading, expand access, and reduce barriers—because books change lives.
This release also supports our broader commitment to literacy, cultural preservation, and creative opportunity—from neighborhood storytellers to care-team educators.
About the Author
Joseph Santiago is a data-informed author and cultural innovator who helps communities tell their stories with clarity, credit, and care. He leads the Crown Legacy Program, partnering with artists, nonprofits, and care teams to design community-first, context-rich storytelling at the seam where tradition meets new tools.
Thank you for reading, sharing, and showing up for community-rooted work. Together, we can keep knowledge free, culture visible, and credit with the people who create it.
Storytellers and Poets: Building a Legacy in NOLA
This giveaway isn’t just about statistics and books—it’s also about people and stories, especially in our beloved city of New Orleans. As the Crown Legacy team likes to say, “In New Orleans, storytelling is more than art—it’s legacy.”Our stories, poems, and voices carry the memory and identity of our community. That’s why we’re launching the NOLA Storyteller and Poet Fellowships – to invest in the voices who will carry that legacy forward.
What are these fellowships? What are these fellowships? Beginning now, the Crown Legacy Program will select two creatives—one Storyteller and one Poet—for a six-month sponsored fellowship. As funding is secured, fellows will receive mentorship (editorial coaching and publishing support), a platform to share their work, and stipends. We are working to raise at least $14,000 by 2026 to fully launch our project. To begin this journey now, our inaugural Storyteller Fellows—Adrian Flowers and Andre J. McDonald, C.Ht.—are contributing monthly posts to the Crown Legacy blog, bridging technology, tradition, and cultural memory starting in September.
By downloading the free book, you’re directly contributing to this vision. We’re using the increased visibility and readership from the giveaway to raise funds and awareness for the fellowship program. Every new reader who joins our cause is a potential supporter of a local artist. The funds generated (through optional donations and sponsorships) during this campaign will help ensure we can pay and mentor those first two fellows. Imagine a young storyteller from New Orleans writing the next great chapter of our city’s story because of supporters like you—that possibility is real, and you can help make it happen.
Illiteracy has profound personal and social costs. Parents who struggle to read often can’t share stories with their children. By supporting literacy and local storytellers, we aim to help break this cycle for the next generation (source: National Literacy Institute).
Our hope is that these fellows will not only hone their craft but also engage the community—through readings, workshops in schools, storytelling events, and more. They will become ambassadors of literacy and creativity, inspiring others to read, write, and find their voice. In a city as vibrant and storied as New Orleans, there is no shortage of tales to tell or poems to pen. With your support, we can lift up those voices that too often go unheard.
Want to be a Crown Legacy Storyteller or Poetry Fellow?
We’re building the 2026 cohort (and future cycles) now. Writers, poets, culture bearers, and creative technologists with NOLA roots—email joe@crownlegacyprogram.org with your bio, links, and a brief project idea.
Subject: Fellow Interest — [Storyteller/Poet] — [Your Name]
Let’s make work that stays with the community.
Your Support Matters
This September book giveaway is more than a one-time event – it’s the start of something bigger. Every download, every read, and every shared story matters. Here’s how you can help build a legacy of literacy and creativity:
Read and Enjoy: Download the free book, dive into the topics that intrigue you, and enjoy the journey. Knowledge truly is power, and by empowering yourself, you empower your community.
Spread the Word: Tell your friends, family, colleagues, and social networks about the free book giveaway. Share the alarming literacy facts you’ve learned. Encourage others to read the books and discuss the ideas. The more people who join this effort, the greater our collective impact.
Contribute to the Cause: If you believe in our mission, consider going a step further. We are actively seeking supporters and sponsors to help fund our literacy programs and creative fellowships. Your donation or sponsorship can directly fund an adult literacy class or sponsor one of our Storyteller/Poet Fellows. Even a small contribution can make a huge difference in someone’s life. (Below can be found a QR Code and a donation link)
If you can do nothing else, remember, by simply reading and sharing a free book, you are already helping. You’re proving that there is a demand for knowledge and that people care about these issues. Each download enhances our visibility, demonstrating to authors and platforms that topics such as cultural competency, conflict resolution, and poetry are relevant and have an audience. This, in turn, helps attract more resources and partners to our cause.
Lastly, we invite you to stay connected. Visit the Crown Legacy Program website regularly to stay informed about our ongoing community work, including educational initiatives and our new Lagniappe Logic podcast. Follow our updates, join our mailing list, or reach out if you’d like to collaborate. And be sure to check out my Amazon Author Profile for details on these titles and future releases.
Together, let’s build a legacy of literacy, creativity, and transformation. Thank you for being a part of this journey. Go download your free books today – read them, enjoy them, and help us share the gift of reading with others. By turning pages, you’re helping turn the tide on illiteracy and igniting change that will resonate far beyond this month.
Joseph Santiago, Executive Director, Crown Legacy Program joe@crownlegacyprogram.org
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