26 Authors. 14 Countries. Zero Budget
A community, a published book, and a blueprint for what's actually possible when people stop waiting to be included.
If you’ve ever felt like you needed permission, funding, or a platform to do something big in tech, this story is going to challenge that.
Because 26 women just proved you don’t.
In March, a book called AI Everywhere, Volume 1: How Women Are Changing the World with Artificial Intelligence hit #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in its category.
It has 26 authors, spans 14 countries and five continents, and covers 24 topics in AI.
The cover was designed by a volunteer. The interior layout was done by a volunteer.
The website was built by a small team of community members.
The peer reviews were done by the authors themselves, and editing was done by two volunteers.
No publisher. No advance. No marketing budget.
The book came out of SheWritesAI — a community that didn’t exist two years ago.
It began in December 2024 when Karen Smiley, frustrated by yet another list of “top AI writers” with no women on it, built a directory.
That directory grew to 600+ women and nonbinary writers across 60+ countries. Then the community decided to write a book together.
Karen wrote for us last September about how SheWritesAI started.
This piece is about what the community did next, and what it suggests about what’s actually possible when people stop waiting for institutions to include them and start building the infrastructure themselves.
Here is my interview with Karen.
Dinah
A lot of communities talk about doing big things together. Very few actually ship them. What made this one different? What was the thing that turned SheWritesAI from a directory into a community that could produce a book?
Karen Smiley
I have to credit our shared desires for connection and long-term commitments to supporting each other. People joke about how sometimes 1+1=3. In our case, adding 26 1’s gave us 1000.
Our She Writes AI Community started reaching critical mass last summer, as more 1+1 collaborations started happening naturally as people discovered each other and common interests.
The AI Everywhere book was a natural outgrowth of that energy.
The idea of a collaborative book arose after noticing that not many of the writers in our directory had published a book yet.
The community reaction when I pitched the idea was immediate and enthusiastic. I talked a bit about this when Farida Khalaf and I interviewed each other about the book on March 7.
Dinah
Almost every production role on this book was filled by volunteers — cover design, layout, peer reviews, editing, and the website. Nobody was paid. Why do you think people showed up to do that work?
Karen Smiley
One concern that many chapter authors raised early on was cost. We talked about it openly as a group from the beginning.
About half of our authors had either published or contributed to a book before, including me, so we knew that publishing a quality book can be expensive, even as a chapter contributor or self-publisher. And we didn’t want to cut corners and deliver a low-quality product. We wanted the book to be something we could all be proud of.
I knew my own artistic skills were not up to creating a cover design that I would consider good enough; I paid a cover design company to create my cover image for Everyday Ethical AI.
However, not everyone is in a position to contribute towards outlays like cover design, especially people who might be between jobs, or launching a new career phase on a shoestring, or in a location where US$1000 would be burdensome even in good times.
We talked to a couple of hybrid publishers with experience in collaborative books. But it was still out of reach for some authors, and a few dropped out at that point.
We kept going, exploring options like a Kickstarter to raise the funds for outlays, and we built a pitch deck to approach potential sponsors. Efforts to find a big sponsor in the current climate weren’t fruitful, though.
We considered pitching the book to a traditional publisher, but in the end, we decided that we didn’t want to wait years to get our book out. The world of AI moves too fast and people need to know now about the lessons our writers have learned about how & when to use AI — and how & when not to use it.
So we shared with the group what skill sets we needed. And so many people stepped up in a big way. As one volunteer put it,
“I’ve been deeply committed to supporting other women for my whole life. So why wouldn’t I do this?”
We found all of the skill sets we needed within our chapter author group. Plus, I was lucky to find a volunteer with professional editing experience. And we even ended up getting a donation from one kind sponsor to help offset some of the unavoidable outlays, such as for proof copies of the print books.
Dinah
What came closest to derailing the whole thing?
Karen Smiley
I think the pivotal point was when the volunteers came through, so that we didn’t need to wait for sponsorship or a publisher. Until then, I was seriously concerned that our book initiative might fizzle due to a lack of funds.
Working through the funding options also put the book a bit behind schedule.
I got worried in early January that we were not going to make our target of releasing on International Women’s Day. But we made it work, in part thanks to Dr. Hollie C. White volunteering just in time to help me handle the time crunch on editing the chapters.
The ebook came out on time, on March 8, and the print editions should be out by the time this interview is published.
Dinah
You were the one holding all of this together — 26 authors, 14 countries, a production timeline, an editing process. What did that actually require of you that people probably don’t see from the outside?
Karen Smiley
Coordinating globally distributed projects is something I’ve done for years in corporate life.
The only thing that made this project hard was not having a single place for connecting with all of the contributing authors.
Substack only supports 1-1 DMs or subscriber chats, not group chats, and not everyone lives in their DMs there. We started a mailing list, but spam filtering for the new domain and sender diluted its effectiveness.
We also created a Google Workspace and chat group. That chat group ended up being where the most productive conversations took place. But still, a lot of authors don’t live in Google’s ecosystem, and the chat didn’t really work for them.
So whenever a draft or review deadline was coming, or when editing feedback needed to be addressed, I had to go to whichever communication mechanism worked best at that time for reaching each person in a timely way.
I felt like a duck — trying to look calm and steady on the surface, while paddling my feet furiously below the water ;) It was fragmented and not very efficient for me, and probably frustrating for some of the authors as well.
I’m tempted to write up a spec for a collaborative book support tool and see if anyone wants to take a shot at vibe coding it for us to use for coordinating future volumes, and for others :) If anyone’s interested, DM me!
Dinah
The peer review model — authors reviewing each other’s chapters — is interesting structurally. What did having the community review its own work do that bringing in outside editors wouldn’t have?
Karen Smiley
I had two goals for the peer reviews: catching what the authors might be assuming a typical reader would know, and pointing out gaps or complementary views for the author to consider. I wanted most of the book to be accessible to any reader worldwide, along with a few more-technical chapters with a clearly defined audience and stated prerequisites.
AI is so broad that even people who “know AI” might not know terms or concepts that a chapter could assume a reader would know. One of the unique assets of this book series is that we all come from different areas of experience within AI and data.
Some of our author team’s skill sets are T-shaped, with primary strength in one major topic; others are M-shaped or comb-shaped with more than one knowledge area in AI. I saw most of the peer review comments, and the peer reviewers excelled on both of these goals, identifying both gaps and assumptions.
We also wanted the book to be valuable to people worldwide. It’s easy not to be aware of implicit cultural assumptions. Even a single outside editor would not have the breadth of knowledge that our author team did, coming from so many different countries and experiences. So folks volunteered for chapters they wanted to review, then when they finished, and the authors had addressed their feedback, Hollie and I did the more conventional editing. Then I wrote the Introduction, and Hollie & I wrote the Afterword.
I want to especially call out Cassandra, Whitney Whealdon, Emma M. Joseph, and Blessing Okpala, PhD for the number and quality of their peer reviews on Volume 1!
Peer review isn’t a substitute for editing, but it’s a great complement, and we definitely want to continue it for future volumes.
Dinah
The book hit #1 in Hot New Release on Amazon in its category before it officially launched. Pre-orders came in from Mexico, India, Canada, Italy, Germany, and the UK.
When you look at that, what does it tell you about the demand that was already out there for this kind of book, from these kinds of voices?
Karen Smiley
I hope it means that people see the value in books that highlight diverse voices on AI sharing practical experiences, and not based on hype!
I think it also reflects that people worldwide are eager to hear voices from people outside the US too.
With our authors representing 14 countries and five continents, we offer a breadth of views that are frequently underrepresented in the discussions around AI.
Dinah
We track who shows up on Substack’s technology lists, and women are consistently underrepresented.
A community-built book that hits #1 is a different kind of visibility.
How do you think about the relationship between what SheWritesAI is doing and the broader visibility problem?
Karen Smiley
Oh, they’re absolutely connected.
A key motivation for starting She Writes AI was the general lack of visibility of women working in AI and tech, especially women outside the big US tech hubs. Another was seeing exceptional writing by women and nonbinary authors on AI here that wasn’t getting the level of attention it deserved. And that’s not just unfair to the writer, although that’s important. Poor visibility of their writing deprives the readers who could benefit from their insights.
We started the digests to lower the friction of finding women writers who resonate with anyone’s interests in AI and data, and to help them discover new writers.
I love what you’re doing in Code Like A Girl to use data to highlight progress on the leaderboards and encourage people to support women writers in tech.
Dinah
Volume 2 is already in motion, targeting Ada Lovelace Day this October. What did you learn from building Volume 1 that changes how you’re approaching this one?
Karen Smiley
We are definitely taking lessons from Volume 1 on how we collaborate on Volume 2. I’ve extended the writing guidelines to cover questions that came up during Volume 1. I’ve also written and shared a more detailed schedule up front, and that is helping potential chapter authors know what they’re committing to.
I would have liked to have time in our Volume 1 schedule for ARC reviews, to get feedback from readers outside our author group. But I didn’t want to ask for feedback and then not be able to act on it before publication; that didn’t seem fair to the reviewers. So we are keeping the peer review process and editing process, and an ARC cycle is now built into the Volume 2 schedule.
Another lesson we learned during Volume 1 is that notifications from Google Workspace aren’t reliable enough to let people know when someone else has commented or proposed edits. So we had to adapt to that, and we’re going to use a slightly different workspace setup and communications for Volume 2.
Dinah
If another community wanted to do something like this, not necessarily a book, but some kind of collective output, what’s the thing you’d most want them to know going in?
Karen Smiley
It’s like almost any other human endeavor; the keys are expectations and communications.
There are three things I’m trying to do as early as possible:
Work out and share what you expect from contributors.
Share a detailed schedule with the team, and be prepared to share updates regularly.
Agree on communications and response times.
For instance, our book chapters weren’t “write it and throw it over the wall”; we needed authors to remain involved to address revisions from reviews and editing. And ideally, we wanted authors to help with promoting the book once it’s out, but we understand that everyone has different bandwidth and interest in that.
Our book guidelines now cover these points and more.
Dinah
What do you think SheWritesAI actually is now — is it still a directory, or has it become something else?
Karen Smiley
It’s more. It’s not just a directory. It’s become a community, a source of strength. I see more authors finding each other and collaborating on articles, and we highlight those collaborations in our weekly digests.
I’ve heard from authors that collaborating on this book has changed them, changed how they feel about our community.
And it is our community — not mine.
That part makes me so happy.
Seeing more volunteers step up to contribute leadership in the community is awesome.
Karen Spinner was instrumental in enabling our weekly digests last year.
Celeste Garcia now writes regular Herstory profiles for our newsletter to showcase women influential in AI.
Cristina organized our first networking event in February.
Blessing Okpala, PhD built us a beautiful book website for the She Writes AI Everywhere series.
Farida Khalaf is hosting a new interview and podcast series, starting with our chapter authors.
Shannon Kimberly Edwards has offered to curate a book list to highlight all book authors in our community, not just those who collaborate on She Writes AI books.
And other volunteers have expressed interest in supporting our community in new ways, such as mentorship.
So I’m excited not only for AI Everywhere, Volume 2 and beyond, but also about what more we women and nonbinary folks can do together to help each other survive and thrive as writers, and help to shape the world of AI.
When Frustration turns into Infrastructure
When Karen Smiley sent that first private message to a Substack author in December 2024, the one pointing out that none of his ten recommended writers were women, she wasn't trying to start a movement.
She was just frustrated.
Fifteen months later, there's a directory, a community, a #1 bestseller, and a Volume 2 on the way.
It turns out frustration, properly organized, is infrastructure.
If This Resonated With You
We’re so grateful to Karen Smiley for allowing us to share her story here on Code Like a Girl. If this resonated, don’t just read it. Follow her work. Writers like this deserve readers who show up.
This Is What We Do
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Since 2016, Code Like a Girl has been finding writers like Karen Smiley , women and non-binary technologists doing serious, thoughtful work that deserves a much wider audience.
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The future of technology is being built by women like Karen Smiley.
If you want more voices like hers in your feed, you’re in the right place.
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Love seeing the story behind the movement. And seeing how the community came together to get this book published, how authors helped each other out and peer reviewed each other’s work, it just makes the book that more special.
I am so excited to be part of Volume 2!
If you build it, they will come and play. A thrilling paradigm for building a better world!