👋 Welcome back to AI for SME Success, your weekly dose of practical AI insights for small businesses.
Today we cover:
- Writing with AI: a playbook behind $1 million in sales
- New Gemini landing page for small businesses
- New Canva’s Craft, Gemini Text-to-Speech and Meta Terms
Let’s dive in! 👇
💰 Writing with AI: Playbook Behind $1 Million in Sales
Hated online and paid anyway. Here’s her playbook.
South African author Coral Hart (a pen name) has earned more than US$1 million so far this year from fiction written with AI, she told AFP. By her own estimate, she has sold over one million copies across ebook, print and audio, from more than 370 titles published since February 2025. Coral discloses AI use only when a sales platform requires it. The backlash is fierce. She has received tens of thousands of hate messages, but they couldn’t stop her from successfully monetizing writing with AI.
Here are the four core principles that helped Coral monetize AI writing:
- Built on expertise. Coral spent 14 years in publishing and wrote several dozen books before touching AI. She knows her craft. AI just helps her work faster.
- Framework first. Before AI writes a word, Coral sets the concept, style, characters and chapter outlines. Skip that step, she warns, and you get a “flaming dumpster fire of trash.”
- A tested toolset. Like most successful AI users, she tested several tools and gave each a role: ChatGPT for dialogue, Claude for story structure and Grok for the steamy scenes.
- Layered review. An AI developmental edit comes first, followed by a continuity pass for sagging middles, unfinished character arcs, forgotten subplots and eye colours that change mid-book. A human proofreader then strips out any leftover AI tells.
Takeaway: Even the publisher of Harry Potter admits it is hard to tell when authors use AI. Coral’s reply to her critics is simple: the books are selling. Small business owners can apply the same four principles to anything they write with AI, from proposals to marketing emails.
🏪 New Gemini Landing Page for Small Businesses
Gemini now brings your brand, books and apps together in one place.
On October 20, 2026, Google launched a business landing page in the Gemini app, one hub where small business owners can build their brand, analyze finances and understand customer insights. It builds on a June update, when Google connected Gemini to your Business Profile so it could read reviews, track performance and draft replies. Now Gemini also links to Google Ads and Workspace, plus Adobe, Canva, Dropbox, Shopify, Wix, Zoho and Xero.
The biggest benefit: instead of re-explaining your business in every chat, you start from your real reviews, brand and numbers. Gemini remembers your brand. You can upload your website, brand kit, fonts or colour palette once, and its image model, Nano Banana 2.1, keeps new visuals on brand. It also reads your numbers, turning spreadsheets, receipts and purchase records into charts and interactive models.
How does it compare to other AI tools for small businesses? Gemini is strongest where customers find you on Google: reviews, Search and Maps. Claude goes deeper on back-office work like payroll and month-end close, Microsoft’s Copilot has stronger data controls, and Meta’s Muse suits sellers whose customers arrive through Instagram and Facebook.
How to set it up:
- Go to gemini.google.com. Sign in using the exact account linked to your Business Profile.
- Type @Google Business Profile and ask a relevant setup question, like “Summarize my business details,” or “Help me set up my business notebook.”
- Follow the prompt to connect.
🤖 New Canva’s Craft, Gemini Text-to-Speech and Meta Terms
🎨 Canva’s first image model ranks next to OpenAI
On October 22, Canva launched Craft, its first in-house image model, trained mostly on millions of Canva templates rather than photos. That’s why it plans the layout and text before drawing, then gives you four versions per prompt. You can ask for one change at a time without starting over, then finish the design in Canva.
One reviewer tested it on three real briefs, and every requested headline, date and menu price came back correct. You can try it in Dream Lab.
🎙️ Gemini now reads text aloud in 2,000+ voices, including yours
On September 23, Google released new Gemini text-to-speech models that can clone your voice from a 30-second recording, with your recorded consent. You can also pick from more than 2,000 ready-made voices, create a brand-new voice just by describing it, or script a two-person, podcast-style conversation with laughs and pauses built in.
Sign in at aistudio.google.com/generate-speech. It’s free to try, but on the free tier Google can use what you upload to improve its products, so don’t feed it anything confidential. The paid tier costs about $0.81 USD per hour of audio until January 1, 2027, when the price doubles.
⚠️ Your Facebook Page is about to let Meta crawl your website
This Meta update is more worrisome than exciting. Meta already crawls public websites, but on October 30 its new business terms turn that into permission. Any business using Facebook or Instagram, even with just a free Page, agrees to let Meta collect content from its website, and test logins get it past free sign-up forms.
If you publish guides, checklists or courses, even free ones behind an email sign-up, ask whoever manages your website to block meta-externalagent, Meta’s AI crawler, in robots.txt before October 30.
Thank you for reading today’s edition.
If this issue was valuable, pass it along to a fellow business owner. I’d love to hear your feedback at natalia@nataliabrattan.com.
See you next week!
Natalia