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🪄AI didn’t ruin hooks. Lazy humans did.
Published 13 days ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader,
In April 2022, I posted a thread on Twitter that began:
THREAD: Storytelling is becoming a buzzword.
"Use storytelling." "Inject storytelling."
We need to bring the value behind the word back into focus.
It got 6 likes. Ouch.
Looking back at it now, I can’t even tell you what I was trying to say. The hook gave "zero motivation to keep reading" energy.
Two months later, I rewrote the same thread with this opening:
Two million articles are published every day on the web.
Almost none use story properly.
Storytelling: 5 steps to be more persuasive, interesting, and memorable.”
This version exploded with engagement. 419 likes.
That was the moment I realized: Hooks aren’t just important — they’re everything.
I became obsessed. I started spending as much time crafting my hooks as the rest of my content.
It felt crazy at first, but the results spoke for themselves. My engagement kept going up. Posts that would have previously gone unnoticed were getting hundreds of likes, dozens of comments, and — most importantly — real business opportunities.
But as I dove deeper into hook writing, I noticed the internet was overrun with terrible advice about hooks.
The “hook bros” were everywhere, peddling templates that promised virality but delivered nothing but cringe:
“I made $10k in a day using this ONE trick…”
“99% of people are doing this wrong…”
“This secret strategy made me $30k in 24 hours…”
I turned to satire because that’s my comfort zone:
Who knew collages could be so cathartic
But satire wasn't enough. This was a lazy human problem that needed critical thinking fixing.
So in April 2023, I released a short ebook titled The Book of Hooks to help people write attention-grabbing openings without resorting to bro-marketing tactics.
A few months later, people started asking if they could use ChatGPT to write better hooks. (ChatGPT was everyone's new favorite toy.)
So, I teamed up with my friend and AI wizard Rob Lennon to create "Hooked on Writing Hooks" — combining my hook frameworks from Book of Hooks with Rob's AI-powered tools.
635+ entrepreneurs, marketers, and creators transformed their content using our principles. To this day, it's our most successful course.
But now, in 2025, we're facing a new set of problems:
1. AI-generated hooks are EVERYWHERE and because most people don't have strong principles to guide them, these hooks are mostly...shite.
(They suck because they're trained on lazy human sucky-ness, not because AI sucks.)
2. Audiences have become hook-pattern detectors. Nothing makes someone scroll faster than seeing the same tired formula they've encountered a dozen times that day.
(Humans are gonna human no matter how much we try to tell ourselves not to human.)
From where I'm standing, the hook problem hasn't disappeared — it's evolved.
Anyone who's opened LinkedIn lately can see the problem in plain sight.
(Hmm...time to make another collage?!)
That's why Rob and I have decided to create Hooked on Writing Hooks: 2025
We've completely revamped our course to address these new challenges head-on. It's designed specifically for the 2025 content landscape, where standing out requires more than just a clever template or a meh AI prompt.
This new version answers three critical questions:
1. What makes a scroll-stopping hook in 2025, in the age of AI saturation and pattern-recognition fatigue?
2. How can you use AI strategically — building on strong principles rather than cheap tactics — to write and edit great hooks that feel worthy of an email open or a “read more” click?
3. And most importantly, how can you develop a sensitivity to what works, so that out of all the hooks you write or generate with AI, you select the hook with the most potential?
Whether you’re brand new to hook writing or you’ve been crafting openings for years, these principles, techniques, and powerful AI systems will transform how you capture attention online, both on social and in email.
Stay tuned.
Cheers,
Erica
PS. Anyone who bought the original Hooked on Writing Hooks course will automatically get 50% off this new version. We're pricing it the same as the original at $149.
The old course isn't going away so you'll still have access, but the new one is completely different. New principles, new lessons, new AI tools.
More soon...
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New here? I'm Erica.
Your seltzer-loving solopreneur who helps you earn more money with content that moves people to action (but doesn’t feel salesy).
Learn to edit words like a pro. I've edited 3M+ words and each week, I share a lesson to teach you what to cut, how to add value, and how to finally feel confident when editing. Every subscriber gets access to my Editing Library, a database of 62 edits broken down by the problem, my take on how to improve it, and my edited version.
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