Posted on September 22, 2022
Watch on YouTube.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS | More
Artificial intelligence is progressing quickly, and today we wanted to chat about what this means for indie authors, the creation of books, and for our readers. We talk about everything from evolving business models in publishing, AI audiobooks + foreign translations, and the new formats and immersive experiences AI will enable authors and creators to build.
Free subscription insights delivered to your inbox each week: https://subscriptionsforauthors.com/
And join Ream, the subscription platform by authors for authors: https://www.ream.ink/
Don’t forget to review/rate Subscriptions for Authors on your favorite podcast distributor 🙂
#12 Episode Outline:
0:00 – 4:53 Introduction and 3 AI Takeaways
- Takeaway 1: AI Makes Creation Boundless, for Better or Worse
- Takeaway 2: More Books Than Ever Will Be Released Due to AI
- Takeaway 3: AI Is a Tool that Blurs the Lines Between Human and Machine Creation
4:53 – 11:00 AI Chat Bots that Mimic Your Characters
11:00 – 15:16 AI as the New Fiction Writer on the Block
15:16 – 17:30 AI as Book Translators
17:30 – 20:43 AI for Dubbing Your Content to Market in Multiple Languages
20:43 – 22:27 Monetizing in Foreign Markets: Authors Becoming More Like Tech Companies
22:27 – 24:33 AI Content Generation for Writers
24:33 – 27:01 AI in Video Games and Why It Matters for Authors
27:01 – 30:28 Legal Issues with AI for Writers
30:28 – 32:47 Using AI Images for Facebook Ads for Your Books
32:47 – 36:28 How Big Tech and Retailers Will Use AI In Publishing
36:28 – 40:16 Spotify’s Moves into AI and Audiobooks
40:16 – 44:53 $1 each for creating 1 million books
44:53 – 48:35 The Three Kinds of Authors and Who Will Win in An Age of AI
48:35 – 53:35 The Importance of Fandoms for Authors
53:35 – 58:14 BTS of Ream and the Ethos of the first Author-Powered Subscription Platform
Relevant Links:
- AI for Authors Rules ALLI: https://selfpublishingadvice.org/ai-for-authors-guidelines/
- GooglePlay AI Audiobooks: https://play.google.com/books/publish/autonarrated/
- DALLE-2: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/
#12 Full Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Evans: Hello everyone. And welcome back to a very special episode of the subscriptions for authors podcast. This is all about artificial intelligence and how this technology is impacting the publishing industry today and how it may impact the publishing industry tomorrow, including how has authors we can help shape not only what this technology looks like, but also how it impacts the lives of our fellow writer, friends and our readers.
[00:00:25] Michael Evans: There’s three main takeaways.
[00:00:27] Michael Evans: That we really have for y’all in this artificial intelligent episode. And instead of having you listen to the podcast and get those takeaways, I wanted to give you to them right up front, because this is a complex episode. We dive into a lot of things and we think it’s a really important episode. It’s in fact, one that if you haven’t shared this podcast with your friends, this is one that you’ll wanna share around.
[00:00:48] Michael Evans: We really want this to spark a. but the first big takeaway in all of this is that artificial intelligence is automating creative work. If the internet made distribution limitless, [00:01:00] artificial intelligence makes creation boundless, and this necessarily makes the relationship that we have as authors to what we create into our business.
[00:01:08] Michael Evans: A lot different, no longer will it be books being the primary, maybe revenue driver, or the end all be all for us as authors. And that’s kind of scary, but that’s why we think. a business and building a platform like we are around community and fandom really is the future. So building your own fandom and being able to have a closer connection to your readership, both from like an actual emotional perspective, but also from a data perspective, the actual data you have in your customers is key because artificial intelligence is powered by two things.
[00:01:39] Michael Evans: The data that we feed it and the human input that we give it. We as creative people can utilize artificial intelligence today to do lots of things that we talk about, like making images, producing audio books, producing foreign translations, and even helping it to write your books itself, but how the AI actually utilizes our human input, which does take [00:02:00] creativity is underlying all these massive, massive data sets.
[00:02:04] Michael Evans: And who owns these data sets are big tech platforms, which means that essentially Amazon. Cobo any of these retailers can utilize your readership data to use artificial intelligence, almost how they please, they typically use these things to recommend content, right, recommend books to readers. And we like that as authors, that’s the Amazon algorithm, but with the perforation of this next age of artificial intelligence technologies, We’re now gonna start being able to use that readership data to create books, and that can sound a bit more dystopian.
[00:02:33] Michael Evans: And that’s why we think it’s really important to build a community of your super fans, have a home for your fandom and reimagine your business in a different way. And getting onto that. We also want to talk about the fact that there will be more books than ever there’s tools that are gonna be able to help authors write much, much faster, like unbelievably faster, and we’ll get into just how fast that might look like.
[00:02:53] Michael Evans: And with these things, if there’s more content than ever it becomes even more important to develop a real relationship with our readers, [00:03:00] but also there’s gonna be a world in which people who want to utilize these tools can really be successful and pump out a ton of books. but the third big takeaway is. This is a tool that’s gonna blur the lines between everything. Just like, it’s hard to say, like the Internet’s this really incredible technology tool that we’re all using to a certain extent.
[00:03:17] Michael Evans: Like we get to look up things on Wikipedia or other sites to be able to get inspiration, but also research for our stories. And AI is gonna be the kind of tool that we all might be using in certain ways, whether it’s to repurpose our content in different formats, whether it’s to market our books, like we’ll talk about being able to make your tos and YouTube videos and other languages to go to forward market.
[00:03:37] Michael Evans: This crazy stuff you could do. But also we might be using these things in a way that helps us to write portions of our book that gives us inspiration in certain sections as a specific software that we talk about. Does it helps you break writer’s block? So. , it’s not gonna be a future where like it’s just AI and then human creators.
[00:03:56] Michael Evans: There won’t be like a bifurcation like that. There’s gonna be many, many gray areas in [00:04:00] between and limitless possibilities to be able to expand into so many different business models. And obviously one we’re passionate about is subscriptions. It’s one that we help you execute and deliver to your readers here on this podcast.
[00:04:11] Michael Evans: But we wanted to talk about, again, this underlying trend, because this is going to impact the way that we do everything . and it’s a change that isn’t really coming, but is already here. And it’s scary for me in many ways, but also hopeful because I think that we have an opportunity to create more value for authors that more authors can be full time than ever and create more incredible experiences for readers than ever.
[00:04:33] Michael Evans: And that’s what this podcast is ultimately about. So I hope you enjoy it. Definitely listen to the whole thing as always like different sections or timestamp below. So that might be useful as you navigate through this. Yeah, thank you so much for being here. Give us your feedback. Enough of me let’s get into
[00:04:48] Michael Evans: we are here today talking about artificial intelligence for authors especially with so much developments happening over the last couple months.
[00:04:56] Michael Evans: And we also wanted to bring on a very special guest Sean pat note, [00:05:00] who happens to be the engineer behind ream, which is the subscriptions for authors platform that we are building. And he also has been involved in software for maybe like what, 15 or 16 years you’ve been building things. You’ve certainly been deep in it for well over a decade.
[00:05:17] Michael Evans: And he has used artificial intelligence, very extensively, a lot of the things he does and. Kind of can give us a look under the hood as to where computer science is heading and how this may live with our industry might sound scary. Some of it is kind of far out there, but a lot of it is really present in the world today and is something that authors can make use of for better or worse.
[00:05:41] Michael Evans: So lots of exciting stuff to dive into, but Sean, first, I know you’ve worked in banking before the technology side of banking.
[00:05:48] Michael Evans: What is artificial intelligence already used for? Most
[00:05:51] Sean Patnode: extensively it’s chat bots. Everyone sees ’em, they’re super annoying. Nobody likes them but that’s, I think they could be useful in some places. I hate them.
[00:05:59] Sean Patnode: well, [00:06:00] yeah, they’re terrible. But every company uses chat bots. I’ve actually built one myself. While I was working at PNC, they had like a hackathon thing and that was my project that I built to try and win that particular hackathon. I didn’t win. But I did build a chat bot.
[00:06:15] Sean Patnode: They’re pretty simple. It’s just a bunch of, if blocks, I say like, you know, if the user gives this type of string, then we’re gonna do this action or respond to them in this way.
[00:06:25] Michael Evans: That is something that I know a lot of authors too have utilized like Facebook messenger bots. I know something people have used and actually you Emilia have used a discord bot to emulate your characters.
[00:06:37] Emilia Rose: It’s very hard to do if you don’t know any coding. But there’s certain bots that have already been pre-made that you can sort of figure out how to use them, but yeah.
[00:06:49] Emilia Rose: They have them, there’s a lot of like pre-made bots that I’ve noticed coming up where you can like pay that are, that are pretty much do what you need them to do.
[00:06:59] Michael Evans: What could [00:07:00] a pre-made bot do? Like I’m someone who knows nothing about bots, these, these foreign bots you speak of, what will they do?
[00:07:07] Michael Evans: Will they like steal my reader’s identity
[00:07:11] Emilia Rose: so discord there’s a bot. It’s called me too or something. And a user can input their birthdays. And on that birthday, in the discord group, the bot will be like, Hey, it’s this user’s birthday happy birthday.
[00:07:25] Emilia Rose: I also have, the bot, that’s able to, if a user says, like talk to Jace, which is one of my characters, the bot will spit back to them a line from the book, one of my books that has the character Jace in it, and on the back end, I had to input a bunch of lines that he had said.
[00:07:48] Emilia Rose: So that’s sort of what at least I’ve used them for.
[00:07:52] Michael Evans: I think there’s obviously a very interesting implications there for authors. You know, a lot of times [00:08:00] I’ve seen like very commonly used in Facebook, like very simple, basic chat bot. Like if you were to DM a page, you’ll get a response that says, You know, what do you need? What are you contacting for?
[00:08:11] Michael Evans: And it’ll kind of like prompt you some things, and you can kind of start to whittle down and maybe answer some common questions about like, okay, my reader’s DME 30 times a day about my next book release. So I’m just gonna have this question that they can automatically click on and it’ll automatically give ’em an answer.
[00:08:28] Michael Evans: If they’re curious, when the actual lease date is, and there, there’s not a ton of coding involved and stuff like that, because there’s software that you have to pay for that can help, but there there’s already some interesting solutions and things that people can do to utilize artificial intelligence.
[00:08:42] Michael Evans: But of course there’s a lot more than, than just that that people can do. And I’m curious, what you’ve seen, Sean is like things that you think are on the horizon and maybe already coming in terms of artificial intelligence, that kind of impact the way that we create things.
[00:08:58] Sean Patnode: I’m really excited for [00:09:00] are chatbots that can emulate a person who’s talking to you.
[00:09:03] Sean Patnode: And can pass a touring test almost every time. So for example, Google’s Lamda AI chat bot, which they haven’t released yet. It’s really good. It’s very good at what it does. It can pass as an actual person. You won’t be able to tell the difference. And one of the things that I really liked about it is that you can tell it to try and pretend to be an object, like a paper plan.
[00:09:26] Sean Patnode: And it will talk as if it were, you know, an inanimate object and kind of explain, you know, some of the things that it can do, like, oh, I can fly 300 feet or whatever. Wow. It’s, it’s a very, it’s very interesting and it’s better than most out there because it takes, A lot more information, other chat bots that I’ve seen into account.
[00:09:48] Sean Patnode: And also it has like limited memory. At least, I don’t know if it’s limited or more, more than a normal limited AI, but it takes context into account. So if you’re having a conversation with it, it remembers [00:10:00] what you said in the past and then responds accordingly.
[00:10:03] Emilia Rose: I think that’s really cool, but could be really scary too.
[00:10:06] Michael Evans: Right now, anyone listening can take anything. They’ve written a book, a book that you’ve written and put it on Google play store.
[00:10:14] Michael Evans: And once you do that, you can then use their artificial intelligence that is text to speech to create an audiobook, basically in minute for free. And you could sell it on Google play and a few other audiobook retailers at the moment. Google’s the only major audiobook retailer that’s allowed some like other niche, smaller ones have, and you can also sell it to rec on your website, to your readers, which is wild.
[00:10:40] Michael Evans: Like that’s a recent development and there’s already artificial intelligence, narrating books. And I’m just curious to, to gather both your thoughts on that. What do we think about that as this. Is this something that for authors we should be thinking about utilizing,
[00:10:55] Sean Patnode: I think that based on the stuff that I’ve seen, we’re pretty close [00:11:00] to AI.
[00:11:00] Sean Patnode: Being able to write books and not just bad books, like good books right now, the AI that I’ve seen, the, the books aren’t that great that they kind of generate. But it’s getting close. And when it gets there, people will be able to just generate a book on the fly that is better than or equal to some of the books that they would’ve normally paid for on Amazon.
[00:11:24] Emilia Rose: and going back to it being audio. I think it’s very, very useful. And eventually, I think I would start to do AI audio books. I feel like right now, it’s not the best quality. It can be like, it’s really good, but it’s not the best, like I’d rather still pay for like narrators and voice actors, because they can do things with their voices that an audiobook narrated by an AI can’t do at the moment.
[00:11:51] Emilia Rose: And I think I’ll always have a human narrator or voice actor, voice my audio books as like the final version. But I’m [00:12:00] thinking about doing first versions or first drafts of audiobooks through AI and seeing how they do, and maybe putting them up on YouTube for free or up on lap pad for free and see how it does and see if it can.
[00:12:12] Emilia Rose: Bring more people into my like little world or fandom that I have growing. So yeah, that’s my hot take on it.
[00:12:21] Michael Evans: That can be a great way to utilize it. You know, AI audio being the sort of like freemium tier that you get to use as a piece of your IP to leverage from a marketing perspective.
[00:12:33] Michael Evans: Another thing that could be interesting as well is we talked to Michael Chatfield like probably two months ago now. And it’s a great podcast episode. If you guys haven’t listened to, he’s a great litera PPG author. Who’s been doing subscriptions and making a living from it for five years now, which is wild.
[00:12:47] Michael Evans: And he’s recently integrated audio into his subscription process where he will serialize audio for his subscribers. And that’s a separate tier that you can pay more for, but [00:13:00] he does it kind of in an interesting way where he has ebook is serializing one cat title, and then. He’s doing audio for another title, which is the title he yeah.
[00:13:12] Michael Evans: Was writing before the ebook, which makes sense, cuz he’s having a human narrator, but if you had AI narrating and basically for free or very low cost, there’s a lot of speech attack software out right now. I don’t wanna like really pub any specific startups cuz there’s like so many that have just sprouted up using specific open language models to do this.
[00:13:33] Michael Evans: And if you use them, they’re not amazing, but they’re low cost. And you could like literally take the first draft to your book. And in a few minutes, have a serialized audio that you could release to your subscribers as an extra benefit. And it’s not like perfect. It’s not gonna be amazing, but it would definitely be for someone who loves your work and just wants to listen to it on the go.
[00:13:57] Michael Evans: It could be an extra benefit. That’s something a lot of
[00:13:59] Sean Patnode: news [00:14:00] websites are doing right now where they have an AI auto generate the article as You know, an audio file that you can listen to. I actually like it. It’s pretty nice. And they’re getting really good with like it voice sounding like a person.
[00:14:11] Emilia Rose: It’s getting close. Like I think , the next iteration of it, it will be almost comparable to a human voice and which is really cool. And you could do so much with it. Like Sean was talking about he’s making a video game and he wants to do an open type world
[00:14:29] Emilia Rose: but he wants the players in the game to be able to interact with NPCs and have the NPCs actually have responses
[00:14:36] Sean Patnode: the code would generate the text the AI would generate the actual, like voices.
[00:14:41] Sean Patnode: You couldn’t do that with a voice actor because how are you gonna have a voice actor just sit around and voice every single line that the code could possibly generate? Like in an instant it’s dynamic. Yeah. You have to have something that does something like that. Yeah.
[00:14:54] Emilia Rose: So, so it makes, there’s like so many possibilities, like, like AI [00:15:00] can open up, like you can start doing like audio dramas and releasing them as podcasts on Spotify, if you want to with AI, because it’s, it’s a lot cheaper.
[00:15:11] Emilia Rose: It’s not going to be as high quality as actual voice actors. But it’s a lot cheaper and it can get done a lot quicker. Same with like translations, like AI translations. I had recently just translated one of my novels and the translation happened in what? Like five minutes or less.
[00:15:29] Emilia Rose: Yeah, it was crazy.
[00:15:31] Michael Evans: When you think about that cost because like some authors might be thinking like, yeah, but if I’m doing well and I could save up for my audio book and publish it, it makes sense. And for authors who are really crushing it, like the top 0.1% spending an extra $3,000 on production might not be a massive difference if you’re making, a hundred thousand or hundreds of thousands of dollars per title, but that is not true for [00:16:00] 99.9% of authors.
[00:16:00] Michael Evans: And. For all of us, we can greatly increase our margins, but also increase our revenue because the different product lines. I mean, you’re saying that you’re now being able to translate into other languages using AI. Normally it would cost like seven or $8,000 per title to get something translated, which is very expensive.
[00:16:18] Michael Evans: If you wanted to get a five book series translated, you know, you’re talking about spending like a healthy salary for a year after taxes to do that, and that is something inaccessible. But now if you can do it for I’m imagining you would need probably a pretty good copy editor, right?
[00:16:36] Michael Evans: You wouldn’t just want proofread. You would want pretty intensive. But let’s say you can decrease the cost by like 70 to 80%.
[00:16:42] Emilia Rose: When I was originally doing research on translators, it was like almost $10,000 for one of my books.
[00:16:48] Emilia Rose: And then like on top of that, I would get an editor and a proof reader because that’s what I do in English. I get it under approved reader just to make sure it’s high quality. But with this,, I’m only paying like [00:17:00] $2,000 for an editor and a proof reader and not like 12,000 or more.
[00:17:06] Emilia Rose: But you do have to, you have to have a really good editor, a really good proof reader and definitely some beta readers in there just to make sure that the translation is one readable. And two, it’s a good translation. It might not be like the best because you don’t have a translator, but it’s good.
[00:17:25] Michael Evans: Yeah. The worst thing you can do is release a bad translation because then you’re just gonna make no money off of it. And it’s like, well, okay, why did I, why did I do that? I just pissed off readers and ruined my brand. I think it’s really fascinating. You see digital creators like video creators doing this in droves.
[00:17:41] Michael Evans: Now a really prominent example is Mr. Be who he uses, famous actors in other countries to dub his videos. He also has a hundred million subscribers, so he can kind of invest in things in different ways, but he now has 20 million plus subscribers on his Spanish channel, 4 million plus subscribers in his Portuguese channel.
[00:17:59] Michael Evans: Wow. [00:18:00] And he’s growing very quickly like globally. So he is now building a global brand with the same exact content that he’s created in English. And, we’re gonna continue to see this become more and more accessible with artificial intelligence author who, who are creating TikTok can then create, let’s say a Spanish or German.
[00:18:17] Michael Evans: TikTok account that is their brand name, but just in German. And then you can dub all those tos using artificial intelligence and no one’s gonna know the difference, and this is gonna continue happening more and more. There’s already software that exists to do this. That’s very cheap, like 20 or $30 a month.
[00:18:37] Michael Evans: And I’ve personally done this with YouTube videos before I actually haven’t gone around to posting ’em because I’m like, I need to ask a Spanish person to just listen to this, make sure. And I haven’t like wanted to put someone through that yet. But, I’ve used the software and it’s quite easy to use and it’s fascinating cuz I used it actually for free, I should say.
[00:18:55] Michael Evans: And actually how we edit this podcast uses artificial [00:19:00] intelligence to do it. So we use an artificial intelligence that takes the video and inscribes it into text. And then we edit this podcast, like a word document. And then I literally just read through it and go, okay, let’s take out this word. You know, they said, I, two times I control F to get rid of words that we don’t want.
[00:19:16] Michael Evans: If someone says, I, I, all the little stutters and you can also control F and take out all the gaps in between words that there’s no spaces and it saved me like powers in editing this podcast. And if $5 a
[00:19:31] Emilia Rose: month. Yeah. And you know what I find really interesting, like I would say like a year ago I was working with this company I’m not working with them anymore because other reasons, but they wanted to take some of my books and translate them into other languages and then create audio books in that language.
[00:19:48] Emilia Rose: And I was like, I’m sure, like, maybe I’ll think about giving you the rights to do that because I can. Foresee myself ever getting to that level where I’m transla, like I have a [00:20:00] translated book and now I’m creating an audio book of that translation. Like that is, seemed so like far, but right now, with the emergence of both being able to translate a novel and then have that translation spoken through AI, I think Google has, you could translate a novel in spa or not translate it, but have it spoken in Spanish, using their audiobook thing, , it’s like so much more accessible and it’s really interesting and it’s something I never thought I would be able to do, but now I’m like, oh, so like I could do this probably in the next two years.
[00:20:36] Emilia Rose: It’s it’s closer.
[00:20:38] Michael Evans: So I think a really interesting stat. When we’re recording this Figma, which is a design software got acquired by Adobe for 20 billion, which is huge, it’s wild. But something else in that, that I found most interesting is that 80% of their customer bases international that’s international to the United States.
[00:20:57] Michael Evans: But most authors, especially [00:21:00] authors of the United States are maybe at like a 70, 30 split at best. 70% of their audience is the United States, 30% international, but tech companies really do make a lot of their revenue from an international audience. The us is still the biggest market. The most expendable income is still here, but that’s quickly shifting.
[00:21:20] Michael Evans: And there’s a lot of opportunity that a typical software company would be able to capitalize on, but authors couldn’t. And one thing I think that artificial intelligence is doing is making authors be able to make their IP. More composable, just like software companies can do with their products and that enables authors to hopefully reach and, and monetize more.
[00:21:42] Michael Evans: That’s that’s the hope. And I think we just highlighted, like translations are some interesting things. Being able to convert your IP from one kind of medium into another also very interesting. And the great part is that there’s limited legal issues in the sense of you’re taking your text, [00:22:00] your intellectual property and you’re converting it to another language.
[00:22:03] Michael Evans: So that makes it quite doable. When you sign contracts with the editors who will edit that, there’s some pretty standard contracts that you’d have in which it kind of delineates. You’re the original IP older and the English language and this translation that they’re editing, they don’t own. And those have been around the publishing industry for quite some time.
[00:22:22] Michael Evans: But what I’m really curious about. Our AI gen we’ll say content generation tools. So not just converting from one thing to another, but they’re actually generating new content. And I first wanna talk about what’s possible. And then we can kind of maybe talk about some of the legal issues and gray areas around that, because I know a lot of authors are interested in that, but Sean, what do you think about artificial intelligence?
[00:22:48] Michael Evans: Being able to generate new co content like covers and writing books, like right now, are there things that authors can use to do this? So I know
[00:22:57] Sean Patnode: there’s some different software and [00:23:00] websites you can use to generate art. You could probably use that for cover art. It’s pretty good. Actually. I like it.
[00:23:06] Sean Patnode: There’s some very interesting stuff you can generate. I
[00:23:09] Emilia Rose: have a different experience. I , some stuff and it came out very weird, but maybe I wasn’t looking for the right thing.
[00:23:15] Michael Evans: well, actually, if you’re looking for senior romance romance author, and ju maybe hypothesis, if you were looking up something that was like anything though, AI perceives to be sexual in nature, open AI, which you can have a whole podcast just about open AI. They are like the API company power, a lot of this new artificial intelligence economy.
[00:23:36] Michael Evans: Always great when you have monopolies . But anyways, they don’t allow any sorts of what they deem to be sexual content generated by their AI. Wasn’t trained on any sort of images and. I don’t know where the line is for that. I think the line is obviously blurry, but their idea was to not have people creating porn.
[00:23:56] Michael Evans: They obviously were not thinking about romance authors who are [00:24:00] creating art in a very different way than maybe what they were trying to prevent. But that may be a reason why you’ve maybe
[00:24:07] Emilia Rose: I think I was probably looking up like shirtless guy or
[00:24:09] Sean Patnode: something.
[00:24:10] Michael Evans: yeah, that, that makes sense. To be honest, we’re gonna have to, you know, Rylan is a beautiful cover model. I met at Susie’s conference. So we also had on this podcast and I think that he will be a hot commodity for a while. AI won’t be putting him out of business because yeah. Of those reasons, which is interesting.
[00:24:28] Michael Evans: One thing, that’s a theme across technology that we’ve seen is these companies. Aren’t very open to certain communities and are also oddly accepting of other communities, which we don’t need to dive into that I would hold this moment. I wanna dive into the bigger picture of technology and the power that authors have in this, but so image generation, that’s a thing.
[00:24:49] Michael Evans: How about what you do with your video game, Sean, because I know that sounds like maybe unconnected to authors, but especially when talking about building communities, I think video games do that [00:25:00] better than most mediums and storytelling is inherent in every video game. It’s something that the IP in worlds that we’re recruiting as authors.
[00:25:08] Michael Evans: There could be more and more convergence between video game creators and authors. We just become storytellers in a possible future. So I’m curious how you see artificial intelligence being used in inside of video games
[00:25:21] Sean Patnode: AI reactive, so you give it data and then it reacts to that data and video games are no different.
[00:25:27] Sean Patnode: So to make an a, to make a like an example, chat bot is reactive to the chats that you send it, but in a video game you have a character and it gets data every tick. So like every millisecond or so you’ll send this actor some data. And that doctor, that, that data is like sensory data. Like you’re sending.
[00:25:46] Sean Patnode: Some of the objects around them, maybe there’s sounds happening and then there’s, and then the code will kind of look through that data and, and say, what can I react to this? And that will go into something like a behavior tree and a [00:26:00] behavior tree is just something like a bunch of like, you know, like based on this data, I’m gonna go down this branch or that, or go down this branch, if I’m a guard and I’m supposed to patrol a particular area, then that guard will patrol that area until he gets some kind of data that says,, oh, there’s there’s a thief over here.
[00:26:17] Sean Patnode: I’m gonna go check that out. But until he gets that data, he’s not gonna react. He’s not going to go into that behavior, trees, branch, so to speak. Maybe here’s a sound, but it’s very reactive. Same with any other kind of AI?
[00:26:31] Michael Evans: It brings up a lot in my mind because I start thinking about when you’re reacting to something who is holding that data that ultimately you’re able to react to as our artificial intelligence trends. I don’t want to humanize them too much, but just pretending that , they can make behavioral changes in the world around us.
[00:26:51] Michael Evans: They are actors of sorts that are kind of coming into ecosystem. That’s really interesting. I want to now like call attention to like two things that I know authors are thinking [00:27:00] about, which are the legal side of things. And probably hearing us talk about AI writing books earlier. Like what the heck the heck is that?
[00:27:08] Michael Evans: So I first wanna mention there’s a software that I am wary to call out by name. Not because it’s good or bad, but because it’s, it’s early, but. They were featured on the Joanna Penn podcast, one of the founders, and I’ll I’ll link to the podcast description. So it’d be very easy to figure out what I’m talking about.
[00:27:26] Michael Evans: I don’t wanna hide it, but I just wanna say that the founder of the software, one on the podcast, and it’s a software designed to help writers, crush, writing block, prominent writers, such as hug, how we have invested in them, Hugh, how he’s a legend in the, in the ecosystem. People don’t know him and he is very prominent author.
[00:27:46] Michael Evans: So there’s people backing this company. There’s authors who believe in it. There’s like the co-founder of Twitter and medium invested in it. So there’s a lot of things there that there’s this company that’s trying to help [00:28:00] authors crush, writing block, which sounds great. And maybe it is how they do it is they generate text.
[00:28:07] Michael Evans: When you enter in text that essentially can help you write your story. And it can come up with new adjectives. It can come up with characters, it can come up with entire paragraphs and soon this thing could probably end up writing entire books. And right now, as it stands, legally, the co-founder said on the creative pen podcast, that they don’t own the copyright, the company to what you’re creating in there, but he would not recommend using what is created by this, in your actual book, at least word for word, but would recommend using it as inspiration and why he says this is because it’s super unclear right now from a copyright perspective who owns work that is generated by artificial intelligence.
[00:28:53] Michael Evans: And the same thing is actually true for covers. So if an author’s looking to make an artificial intelligence, its [00:29:00] cover, you may not own the copyrights, that image. It depends on what API you’re using. It depends on what the company’s terms of services are. Some explicitly say they own the image. Some say that they don’t own the image and that you have the rights to use it.
[00:29:16] Michael Evans: However you’d like, but copyright law right now in the United States requires the human create something in order for it to be copyrighted. So we haven’t actually updated our laws for artificial intelligence. So I personally am a bit wary right now of recommending authors to create things with artificial intelligence only because the laws haven’t caught up in a sense.
[00:29:39] Michael Evans: But I also wanna say that that might not be the right way to think about it because we don’t have to have laws that allow artificial intelligence to do anything. I think we more have the ability to now re. What future we do want what role we do want artificial intelligence to play in our society. And I think as authors, it’s really good to be aware of these things, cuz we can all like advocate for [00:30:00] certain things to happen or not.
[00:30:01] Michael Evans: The retailers can enact certain policies or not. If all of us authors didn’t want something, they’d have to listen like truly they would. Now that would be very difficult to do, to get all authors on the same page saying something, but that is something I’m putting out there. So I personally am not gonna be using AI to generate covers or AI to write my books at the moment.
[00:30:23] Michael Evans: That’s not something I’d utilize personally, but I am using already AI for generating ad images because ad images I’m just using and business purposes, that’s not like my IP or part of my business, but it could be really interesting to. generate really cool unique images using Facebook ads. I know one of my biggest problems was a lot of the images that I would find that I knew my readers liked.
[00:30:46] Michael Evans: I would then be scrolling through Facebook and find, oh, another author is now using that image. Cuz we went to like shutter stock or PAB a, the same sites that everyone goes to. But if you can create unique images using artificial intelligence, you can then possibly kind of create your own [00:31:00] brand feel from the ads that you’re creating, which is cool.
[00:31:04] Michael Evans: I would say that’s a valid use case at the moment.
[00:31:06] Emilia Rose: I haven’t thought about that. Using AI for ads. I haven’t really personally, I haven’t Del too much into the, the AI images after the weird findings I had. So maybe I’ll take a look into it.
[00:31:20] Michael Evans: One thing people wanna read really careful about too, when using an artificial intelligence generated image is that some of these kind of programs generate copyrighted images themselves. What I mean by that is that if you say like SpongeBob, you know, in the grocery store or something like that, and although that image itself was artificially created, if it looks like SpongeBob in the image, yeah.
[00:31:45] Michael Evans: You don’t own the right SpongeBob. That is someone else’s IP. So you don’t wanna magically be let’s display Disney. And my image that I’m promoting my fantasy book in you will, you will get in trouble. Disney will find you and they [00:32:00] won’t be happy. And of course this kind of conversation around playing around with the copy.
[00:32:06] Michael Evans: That other people own as part of a larger conversation around fan fiction fandom and how people can interact with IP, which is just a lot to get into right now. We don’t need to go totally down the rails of everything in publishing, but it’s worth noting that I think at least, because I myself have on generated like things that I thought were cool that I’m like, wait, this is another brand in here.
[00:32:29] Michael Evans: I can’t use that. So it’s tough. And I think in time, natural language generation is going to be opening up more and more possibilities. It is shocking kind of how fast this moved. And I kind of wanna look to the future a bit, cuz we’ve talked a lot about what’s happening today. And I think looking out five or six years from now is challenging, but also really worthwhile because.
[00:32:53] Michael Evans: G P T three is a lot of what’s powering these gen language generation models that are able to [00:33:00] come up with new texts that are able to create books. G P T four is coming online soon. We don’t quite know the details. My guess is to be better than GT three. And at the rate that we’re going five or six years from now will be on like GPT seven, which is created by open AI.
[00:33:14] Michael Evans: They are a nonprofit that also can make money. They change their rules. So they’re kind of like a corporation with investors. They like to make money. There’s something wrong with that, but there is something to talk about with that. So I’m curious in an AI future. But we think about our relationship as little old authors here to these big tech giants.
[00:33:39] Michael Evans: How do we think a company like Amazon will end up using artificial intelligence in relation to authors? How do we think a company like Spotify will? How do we think a company like apple will? I know we’re speculating now, but I think it could be useful to share some of our thoughts on this, because it’s really important for us to figure out where this is going.
[00:33:58] Emilia Rose: That’s like, [00:34:00] obviously this, this might not happen. It could definitely not happen. But if AI has the ability to start, like actually like writing books and producing audio books to high quality standards, like companies that are big, like Amazon who are creating content for the public, at that point, why do they need authors on their platform?
[00:34:22] Emilia Rose: They can just create that content themselves. And it’s something that we need to be really careful of as authors. We don’t want that to happen obviously, but we need to be aware that it, it could happen. And Amazon can just be like, okay, so we’re all the content that we are going to produce ourselves through AI.
[00:34:41] Emilia Rose: We’re going to push that out through all the advertising that we can. And so advertising costs might go up. And just, yeah, it, it could be really, really bad. Which is one of the reasons why I think like creating a community around your stories and around your world is super important because [00:35:00] yeah, we have people who can just like it once this happens, cuz it’s going to happen in the future.
[00:35:06] Emilia Rose: We don’t know when, but people are just going to publish a book a day and it might not be a great book, but it’s gonna be a lot of content. And if you don’t have your super fans, or if you’re not growing a community, it’s going to be really hard to get your book seen.
[00:35:22] Michael Evans: What do you think, Sean? I’m, I’m really curious in your take as someone who I like to think about these things from a science fiction author. It, but you have not only an imagination behind this, but also unbelievable practical experience. So what do you see as someone who’s worked behind the hood of many tech companies and can kind of see a bit more behind their business, what do you think is possible?
[00:35:44] Sean Patnode: Anything is possible and if there’s a need for something, for a technology like this, it will be built eventually. However, I will say taking, I mean, like building AI takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time and I [00:36:00] have not seen anything that is close to what would be needed to To make a really good story.
[00:36:06] Sean Patnode: Like most of the stuff that I’ve seen is pretty bad actually. I think it would probably be like five to 10 years before we start seeing stuff. That’s as good as what a human can make story wise. So there’s quite a bit of time before that happens, but I think eventually it’s going to happen and there’s nothing that you can do to stop it.
[00:36:23] Michael Evans: That it’s very insightful. It really is because that’s sharing with everyone that it’s not tomorrow, but this kind of wave of sorts is coming. And there’s a lot of thoughts. I have, we had someone in our Facebook group post because for those who aren’t part of our Facebook group, really great place to join.
[00:36:41] Michael Evans: It’s called subscriptions for authors. I’ll link it down the description and we just, our community trying to help authors. Build their fandoms, everyone’s sharing their ideas, their strategies, and what’s going on. And we posted about this podcast where we recorded it. And we had an author who was actually coming from quite a nervous kind of perspective [00:37:00] about where this is all headed and said, what do we think about Spotify’s recent acquisition of an artificial intelligence startup, which to give everyone some context on what this author’s talking about.
[00:37:12] Michael Evans: Spotify in June, acquired this company called Soo. It’s an AI voice startup that specializes in creating hyper realistic artificial voices. It’s not clear how much they paid for it, given how much they raised and where things seemed to be at. I would guess they paid roughly like eight figures for it.
[00:37:31] Michael Evans: So it wasn’t a small acquisition, but for a company of Spotify size, they they’ve got some cash in the bank to make investments like this. But what’s more interesting to me. Is that when you put this in tandem with their recent acquisitions, for those who don’t know, they acquired anchor. Anchor is a podcast distributor, and it was really gained a lot of ground as like the freemium solution for a lot of beginner and even advanced podcasts.
[00:37:55] Michael Evans: And then they also acquired find a way which was the largest audiobook distributor. So they’ve made a ton [00:38:00] of moves in the audiobook space and it’s something that is authors. We can kind of imagine our translators gonna, our narrator’s gonna start to license their voices soon with AI. Are they going to look to generate their own content with AI?
[00:38:15] Michael Evans: I don’t know if we have thoughts on that. I know it’s wild
[00:38:17] Emilia Rose: If we get to the point where like AI is taking over audiobooks and it becomes as good as actual narrators, I think it would be, there, obviously, everyone has their own thoughts on this.
[00:38:29] Emilia Rose: But it’s like another source of like revenue for a narrator to be able to license their voice, to an AI and get royalties every time it’s used. I don’t know if that’s how it’s set up. That’s how it should be set up. But I think it’s really cool. And I, I’m just reading like that article now about somatic, if that’s how you say it.
[00:38:53] Emilia Rose: And it says that you can, did it say that you can create your, a custom voice model. But so that’s, I think [00:39:00] that’s pretty cool. Like you can have a voice as close to your character’s voice as possible, which is really interesting. Like if Spotify builds the framework for authors to be able to use it, like that,
[00:39:13] Michael Evans: and this is something that I saw on a podcast recently, that one of the guys was talking about how he invested in a company that is helping podcasters and writers basically take their own voice and be able to narrate what they’re writing without actually narrating it.
[00:39:30] Michael Evans: So you may, let’s say you’ve like talked for an hour on the internet. You upload all that content that you’ve talked in, and then I’ll use that as the data that trains this basically algorithm that’s gonna. Read the text that you’re you’ve written and then spit something back out in a pretty lifelike voice to you.
[00:39:47] Michael Evans: And the demos of it are pretty wild. They sound just like the actual person’s talking like with a, maybe 95%. Wow. Accuracy will say, which is really interesting. So I definitely think [00:40:00] audiobooks are the area that we’ll see in the next couple years, that’s gonna really change. And as Sean was saying in the long run, we might see the actual creation of books really shift with the proliferation of AI.
[00:40:11] Michael Evans: This is an anecdote I know I’ve mentioned to Emilia and Sean, this an anecdote I wanna share on this podcast, because I think it’s important in 20 books, there was a very prominent author who also runs a publishing company who was on stage. Well, actually it wasn’t a stage, but he was up the front of her and he was talking and I asked him, where do you see the future publishing going?
[00:40:31] Michael Evans: I got picked ask. I got, but I asked him that. And he said that he envisions a future where publishers, instead of paying $1 million for one book, all the books that the do OG or the DOJ is fighting with paying good random house, about as they’re trying to acquire Simon Schuster, these huge titles that they’ve paid millions of dollars for, instead of doing that, publishers will pay $1 each for a million books.
[00:40:56] Michael Evans: And that was his vision that he put forward. And it was a [00:41:00] vision that rubbed me the wrong way. Like the idea of having endless content, flood readers, and no money in it for authors basically, because where is the money if $1 for a million books. But then I thought about it a bit more and I thought about what’s already happening today.
[00:41:16] Michael Evans: And I realized that possible future is already here for some creators. And it’s something I think is especially important for us all to hear in the author community. It’s like, I really wanna get your thoughts on, especially Emilia, but TikTok. I really don’t like tick TikTok as like a platform, like as ethos of it.
[00:41:35] Michael Evans: Something rubs me the wrong way about it yet. I see authors making money on it. I see readers happy there. The book talk hashtag has, I don’t know, probably almost a hundred billion views now, and that’s not an exaggeration. So that’s wild. That’s a good thing. El Griffin posted an article where it was claimed that 20 million print books were sold as a result of TikTok and 2021.
[00:41:55] Michael Evans: All that seems great. But then I thought about my TikTok creator, friends, some that I [00:42:00] know have lots and lots of power, some have millions and what they’re like. And nothing wrong with them, but like what their business is like. And some of them are completely broken, making no money. Despite the fact that they have an audience of millions, of people, they every day show up to reach their audience.
[00:42:15] Michael Evans: They struggle to build connections and TikTok basically pays their creators nothing because they have a really bad ad system and a bad revenue share program. And that could seem like core platform design, oh, short form content just doesn’t work. But then I thought about it a bit more and it feels like TikTok almost is an artificial intelligence company.
[00:42:37] Michael Evans: Like they’ve figured out better than any other platform, how to make everything you do, basically be designed to enhance the recommendations that will feed you next. And they’ve convinced Allegion of hundreds of millions people to be able to fulfill those recommendations, hop on trends, just with the promise of getting views.
[00:42:56] Michael Evans: And that to me, almost felt. Like the [00:43:00] dystopian future, at least for video content is like kind of here. And then I was talking to a friend, I won’t mention his name because he’s on NDA. He works for a company called jelly smack, and they are a big company that takes craters content and tries to license it, convert it across platforms.
[00:43:19] Michael Evans: They do some great stuff, but they’re running some internal experiments inside of the company that basically involve automating the creation from the ground up of video content with artificial intelligence. And he says, he feels a little bit odd about these experiments. He had his company acquired by them.
[00:43:36] Michael Evans: So he’s kind of just there. And I love him. I think the company’s great. I think they’re just exploring this, but more and more companies are starting to explore. How can we pay creators? Nothing. But get our products in front of people by creating unlimited ads and getting random users to serve them up on the internet.
[00:43:55] Michael Evans: That’s like not a thing that is science fiction, like that’s [00:44:00] happening right now. And to me, that feels very much like the future. You are talking about Sean, where AI is just creating things and tailoring it to everyone’s interests is something that we’re already all instantly
[00:44:10] Sean Patnode: involved
[00:44:10] Emilia Rose: in. Yeah. That’s very scary.
[00:44:12] Emilia Rose: that’s so scary. But I think that that’s what a lot of companies are like trying to do. And yeah, I don’t know if I have much of an opinion on it. I just, it’s very scary. Because that can soon be the future for authors as well. And I don’t think that will happen like within the next five years, but maybe in the next 15.
[00:44:34] Emilia Rose: It’s just something that we have to understand is definitely possible. And if it, if it can happen it, if people are gonna try it. So,
[00:44:42] Michael Evans: yeah, and I think we’re, we’re already seeing those experiments occur today. And this reminded me of a post I saw from Samir from Colin and Samir, he’s a podcast post and he talks about the creator economy and he is [00:45:00] broadly focused on video creators and YouTubers, probably more specifically, but has such great insights for all creators.
[00:45:05] Michael Evans: And he says in his recent post, this was published two hours ago. The future lies. With community based creators. Let me explain. There are three categories of creators. Each type of creator offers a different reason to watch relationship based creators. The creator’s personalities, the draw you would watch them do almost anything.
[00:45:25] Michael Evans: Examples, Emma Chamberlain, KC ISTEP, which for those who don’t know these creators, they’re really interesting. They have some great YouTube videos. I recommend checking ’em out. Number two is idea based creators. The video concept is the draw. The idea would be interesting to watch no matter who the creator is, he offers creators like Mr.
[00:45:40] Michael Evans: Beast, Matthew beam. Again, these names probably sound foreign to a lot of us here. Maybe they ring a bell to some of us, but number three, he says our community based creators. The community is the draw audiences. Watch these creators to be part of a CUNY larger than themselves. There are three types of engagements here, creator to audience, audience, to creator and audience to [00:46:00] audience.
[00:46:00] Michael Evans: The future is not a lean back experience for audiences. It’s a lean inexperience. That’s multiplayer allowing the audience, not only watch content, but impact the content and build relationships with each other, even when the creator isn’t uploading. I really like that.
[00:46:14] Sean Patnode: So that’s his vision. Yeah, that’s really interesting.
[00:46:17] Michael Evans: It makes me think about the analogies in the author world. And I feel like idea based creators are very much the creators. Because there’s no, I I’d say there’s not like a clear delineation. You can be all three of these creators. Right? But I’d say an idea based creators are typically those who in the author world are writing to trope, writing to a very specific market that is probably redefined.
[00:46:42] Michael Evans: And there’s nothing wrong with that. That could be great. Like Mr. Be is the biggest YouTuber in the world and plenty of authors who write to market, I’ve done this by myself. Like it’s a great way to get readers. It’s a great way to engage people with your ideas with, oh, like I love enemies to love and that I need to read this book, but ultimately[00:47:00] the bad part about an idea is that if they’re just coming to you for that one specific joke or that one specific viral idea, it can be replicated.
[00:47:08] Michael Evans: It can be replicated even by artificial intelligence. The first one that he talks about relationship based creators, I think is quite interesting. I think that like an author in this kind of seat, Would would do pretty well. Someone who likes their very specific voice, my mind goes to an author like Stephen King.
[00:47:25] Michael Evans: I don’t care what Stephen King writes. I know his voice. And if an AI could emulate it, it would be Stephen King. AI would have to be trained on his books. And I would hope he’d get a Realty share of that, which don’t put it over the publishers. They might have dead authors release books for 50 years after they’re gone because they can use a attitude.
[00:47:43] Michael Evans: It, I see that as possibility, but I think that’s interesting. I think it’s great. And for authors who can have a unique voice, it can be a big moat around what you’re doing, but I, I really do see community based creators as potentially the antidote to a lot of these fears [00:48:00] because how can AI be able to artificially create a relationship from you to your audience, your readers, back to you, and then your readers between each other.
[00:48:11] Michael Evans: Maybe AI can be involved in that chat. Bots. Authors can utilize these tools, but I don’t see a world where an author who’s really good at that. Who’s really good at building a fandom
[00:48:23] Emilia Rose: doesn’t . Exist. I agree. And I think a lot of authors, I think video games does this really, really, really well.
[00:48:30] Emilia Rose: Like when you play a video game, you feel like you’re, at least when I play video games, I feel like I’m in that community. I’m in the video game myself and I’m playing it. It’s not me watching somebody play it it’s me actually in that game, experiencing all the things.
[00:48:45] Emilia Rose: I think like authors can take a lot from other, other markets, like video games or movies and just look at the fandoms behind it. And why is it so popular and why are the communities so big?
[00:48:59] Michael Evans: [00:49:00] I think you’re spot on. And there’s something really interesting to mention here that I think is something a lot others aren’t talking about, but is really important for us, which is that Twitch made a really big move. They are now allowing creators on Twitch to stream cross platform, which means that I can stream on Twitch.
[00:49:19] Michael Evans: I can stream on YouTube. I can stream on TikTok and Facebook all at the same time so that you are a multi-platform creator. Twitch, I think is doing this, due to competition reasons. They’re seeing that creators are like, Hey, why do I ever need to be on Twitch? Because I can get discovery elsewhere. And they’re realizing that they haven’t built a great discovery.
[00:49:37] Michael Evans: But what this is really gonna lead to. I think it’s an interesting opportunity for a company to step in and help creators do. This is creators ultimately using all these platforms and just bringing people into their own site, into their own community, right. That they own, they have access to people’s emails who are there, they have like their own little spot on the internet, their own little Phantom.
[00:49:58] Michael Evans: And I think we’re already seeing this [00:50:00] actually video game creators, Twitch, streamers, live streamers, which that is a massive, massive market. And I also see them as being very defensible against AI because. How can artificial intelligence in real time automate a live experience? Like that feels like a conversation between friends.
[00:50:20] Michael Evans: Like I see that as so far off, like it’s just not even worth talking about, like, that’s not any sort of demo that I’ve seen could lead to that. And I think authors in ourselves, a lot of what we’re doing is very similar to live streaming. We’re creating these really intimate experiences and friendships between us and our readers and our characters.
[00:50:39] Michael Evans: So I see that as a really interesting, and I think you’re right, there’s a lot authors can learn from the world of video games and lit R PG I think is a kind of a emerging genre. That’s now huge, but I think does no matter what, you write a lot of best practices to be gained from that, there’s a strong community of authors, really [00:51:00] strong communities of readers.
[00:51:01] Michael Evans: There’s blurred lines between the fans and the. And the creator to begin with where most of these, like people who are creating or becoming friends of the authors and they become authors themselves, it’s this just kind of like huge community with a bunch of mini communities in between. I see romance as being the only other genre that feels very similar to this.
[00:51:21] Michael Evans: To me, it’s obviously a bit more disparate than I think LPG just cause it’s so much bigger, but I, I think romance is also
[00:51:29] Emilia Rose: on this too. Yeah. I think that RPG is really good at like, I don’t know a lot about L RPG, but from what I’ve heard in the community and the people we’ve talked to, that’s it pretty much seems like it’s, the community is very close and it’s really cool to see.
[00:51:45] Michael Evans: Yeah. I mean, that’s what it’s about at the end of the day, like building relationships with real people. And it’s kind of sad that like Amazon abstracts all of it from us and just gives us like a single book sale. And I suppose that’s like better than like [00:52:00] what you would get as a traditional published author.
[00:52:02] Michael Evans: In many cases, you wouldn’t even know who’s buying your books unless you’re on a physical signing. Like you wouldn’t know how many books you sold in a given day, but I really see authors of being able to own their own data and being able to leverage these technologies for their purposes as being the future.
[00:52:17] Michael Evans: And you’re only gonna be able to do that if you’re a community or fandom based creator. And to be completely honest, this is the biggest reason that inspired me to work on re with you Emilia. It was kind of seeing. Where this is headed. And then seeing like, wait, you’re already doing this in subscriptions.
[00:52:36] Michael Evans: Like it’s already possible. And like, it’s then possible for us to help other authors do this too. And of course we have a long way to go and, we want to do so many interesting things, allow authors to build a fandom, but it is possible. And you kind of are Testament to that. So that, that’s what inspired me to do this.
[00:52:55] Michael Evans: Cuz I being a science fiction author saw the writing on the wall [00:53:00] and realized if I’m in Amazon and KU for the next 15 years of my career, like I might be in my thirties with zero work experience, zero real life experience. I’ve just written books and that career could go away for me at any moment.
[00:53:12] Michael Evans: I was already feeling that two years ago and I think that feeling’s only growing more and more present in authors and. I’m just so excited to try and give people another opportunity because it sometimes feels,
[00:53:26] Sean Patnode: yeah. Like
[00:53:26] Emilia Rose: we don’t have that. I’m really excited for ring too for that reason.
[00:53:30] Michael Evans: And I’m just curious, because the people listening, we have probably people who ask us every day about updates about ream. And I’m curious, Sean, how has building ream up to this point been for you? Where would we say you’re at
[00:53:43] Sean Patnode: I have a full-time job, so I’ve been working on it, either after work or on my weekends. So I don’t get a lot of time to myself, , I’ve I basically built like the entire front end, the entire front end is done. Recently I finished the authentication.
[00:53:55] Sean Patnode: So you are to create an account and then you’re able to log in with that account. And [00:54:00] then I created the architecture for the authentication with other APIs within the website. And I’m currently working on being able to add a story to the website. So the UI is there.
[00:54:11] Sean Patnode: But the backend that allows you to actually submit a story. That’s what I’m working on.
[00:54:16] Michael Evans: And some of you listening have had calls with us to, of like contacted us and we’ve showed you bit of what’s going on and gotten your feedback, which we’re endlessly grateful for. But if you’re also curious to like, maybe use this when it goes live, because it really is like, So much better than anything that exists for fiction authors.
[00:54:33] Michael Evans: And I’m not just saying that because I’m biased. Although I am, obviously, I, I really believe in ream, I’m working on this company as well, but the features that this thing has, like from the ground up are just designed for indie authors and no one else. And I think it makes the platform really, really special.
[00:54:54] Michael Evans: Like the scheduling features, I don’t know how many hours will that save you
[00:54:59] Emilia Rose: oh my [00:55:00] gosh. So many hours.
[00:55:01] Michael Evans: Sean’s basically sacrificing all of his hours so that all of you can have hours back in your life, which we are very, very grateful for. And that’s not the only thing about it. Other subscription platforms are really just built to say.
[00:55:14] Michael Evans: How do we help people make money from subscriptions? And when I say people, anyone, anyone can make money subscriptions to our platform. That’s cool. I’m glad those places exist, but we really wanted to focus on yeah, like making subscriptions is great. Like making money is great, but how do we help authors build relationships with the readers?
[00:55:31] Michael Evans: How do we turn authors from basically workers of Amazon and readers of customers, of Amazon and retailers into authors as being empowered to create the stories they love with not having any platform take down their stories that are romantic, just because it’s doesn’t fit their investors purposes, but also even more powerfully than that, how do we help them create their stories and build relationship to readers that they become their customers and.[00:56:00]
[00:56:00] Michael Evans: That’s kind of the ethos of this platform, which is quite different from just, hi, we help you get your newsletters or hi. Here’s like a really complicated site where you can post videos, podcasts, anything you want. And your readers probably are confused, but we we’ll take their money. Like no, no. We wanted to actually build a relationship between you and your readers.
[00:56:23] Michael Evans: And we do that by allowing readers to have conversations inside of the stories and what we’re calling a social D reader. We have a lot of different things, so we’re excited for it. And you’re interested in that, check out the link description and sign up because we’ll be sending out more information when we’re ready for alpha and beta testing, and you might be able to be involved in that.
[00:56:40] Michael Evans: And we’re gonna have a public launch that anyone could be involved in. That’s coming up soon, which is exciting. And we’re really, really grateful to be here and do this with all of y’all Part time for now, just like every author in the beginning, but once this first drafts up it’s just gonna keep getting better.
[00:56:57] Emilia Rose: Very exciting. .
[00:56:58] Michael Evans: Any closing messages from you [00:57:00] all? No, not really.
[00:57:00] Emilia Rose: I’m excited for, for AI. That’s all cool. I have to say about that. I’m excited, but it, it can be very scary as an author to, to see what could possibly happen in the future.
[00:57:12] Sean Patnode: I’m sure there’ll, there’ll always be readers who only wanna read things from an actual
[00:57:16] Emilia Rose: person. Yeah, it’s true.
[00:57:18] Michael Evans: It’s just like eBooks. Didn’t take over print books, print books are selling more now than ever. Mm-hmm , which is great. More readers, more books. I love it. And I think an important thing about AI is that if it makes creation, boundless, just think about all the cool things we can create as authors, especially if you have a deep relationship of the community, if you’re not just focused on selling books, but building worlds, think at all the amazing things you can do.
[00:57:45] Michael Evans: We hope you enjoyed this podcast anyways. I’ll see all soon next week.
[00:57:50] Michael Evans: Thank you everyone for listening and happy writing