Posted February 24, 2023.
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Today we chat with author Steph Pajonas about AI technologies and their impact on publishing. We learn how authors can make use of these tools today to improve our stories, writing, and lives. And most of all, we learn why subscriptions are more important than ever in a world where AI is giving storytellers superpowers.
Check out Steph’s Website: https://aifictioncoach.com/
Join AI Writing for Authors on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiwritingforauthors
Join Ream, the subscription platform by fiction authors for fiction authors: https://reamstories.com/
#25 Episode Outline:
0:00:00 Introduction and Context
0:04:17 An Overview of AI Writing for Authors
0:14:37 Helping Writers with AI
0:20:55 AI As A Tool For Productivity
0:31:33 Why Are Subscriptions The Way of The Future
0:44:45 First Step to Incorporating AI into Your Creative Process
051:46 Closing Remarks & Advice
#25 Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Michael Evans: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Subscriptions for Authors podcast. Today we’re gonna be talking all about how authors can use AI to help supercharge and benefit their subscriptions. Now, I know the word AI and authors, it’s frightening, and honestly, it’s a huge change that scares me in some moments, but it also excites me.
[00:00:22] Michael Evans: And today I just wanna focus. Not a distant far off future, three or five years from now, and what’s gonna happen to authors, but instead, the opportunity that lies in front of us in the next few months to think differently about our businesses, to think differently about what we can provide to our readers and how maybe just maybe having a subscription model, being one of the foundations of our business, and having a subscription be one of the ways that we provide stories and amazing experiences to our readers, gives us a huge advantage as we move into a world.
[00:00:51] Michael Evans: Maybe or maybe not, has greater proliferation or usage of AI by authors and other creative people. Who’s gonna be our [00:01:00] guest today? Because me and Emilia, although we know a few things about ai, we wanna bring on someone else who really knows about ai, and that person is Steph pe Jons, she is leading the AI writing for authors Facebook group, and she’s an incredible person, is so friendly, and really has created this amazing community. That is helping authors write better, write faster, and create really interesting experiences. The readers powered by new technologies and these new generative AI tools.
[00:01:28] Michael Evans: We’ll go into more detail about all of that. In the podcast. We cover things like how you can utilize. AI writing to help you brainstorm and almost work with it as like a co-author. We talk about AI image generation, and we talk about just in general how you can use this in your subscription, whether it’s for bonus content and inclusive content, or for helping you provide more early access to your readers or.
[00:01:51] Michael Evans: Just making your world more immersive and more interesting. Cheerleaders, all these tools can help us in that. But also know that if you’re listening to this and [00:02:00] you’re already like about to click off, you don’t wanna listen me as you hear the word AI and you’re like, I’m out. I understand that, but I actually think everyone has responsibility to try and just learn about what the possibilities are now because whether you want to utilize these technologies in your business, , and trust me, it’s not essential to use AI to write as an author or to create anything.
[00:02:19] Michael Evans: You can have an amazing business and create amazing stories to readers. Without this, to be frank, we’ve already done this for decades without hundreds of years without needing artificial intelligence to help us create stories. But given that there is this new technology, I want us to think not only about the opportunities that are presented now, but also the idea that as authors, we can create the change we want to see in the.
[00:02:41] Michael Evans: Our motto here is storytellers of the world. We’re some of the most powerful people in the world because we create stories and give people really worlds that bring communities together. That’s what a subscription’s about. That’s what really storytelling and being an author is about. And that’s one thing to see, if you ever see a change in the world that you wanna make happen as storytellers, we [00:03:00] can do that.
[00:03:00] Michael Evans: And instead of thinking about AI as this wave of either really good or really bad things, I would like to think about it as this real. Opportunity that we can take to change and morph the future the way we want to see it. It’s very empowering, let me look at it that way. And ultimately, a future that puts humans at the center, all humans, artists, humans, storyteller, humans, and our reader humans.
[00:03:20] Michael Evans: And obviously knowing that many of us wear tons of different human hats and have tons of different passions that fall into these camps. Anyways, that’s my prelude to this podcast. I wanna just say there’s a lot of really exciting things that are covered inside of. I think because of the sensitivity of this topic, it warranted a longer introduction than normal.
[00:03:37] Michael Evans: But I promise you this one will be really fun. Steph is amazing and I thank you for coming on our podcast, and I thank you all for listening. Let’s get into this one. We’ll have laps, insights.
[00:03:54] Michael Evans:
[00:03:54] Michael Evans: Awesome. Okay, so I am really excited to be talking with you, Steph. So [00:04:00] you lead the AI Writing for Authors Facebook group, which has been a wonderful place for me to learn a lot about what’s going on. But we brought you here to of talk about what’s going on and how all of us as subscription authors can actually benefit and hopefully build a better subscription for our readers.
[00:04:17] Michael Evans: So we’re gonna talk all about that today, but I just wanna start with what is AI writing? What even is.
[00:04:24] Steph Pajonas: they’re, they are built upon open AI’s, G P T three. So they’re they’ve had many instances of G P T over the couple of years. G P T two is now open source, I believe.
[00:04:35] Steph Pajonas: And then G P T three is the one that most people most companies are using right now. It affords open AI has an API that other companies can use to access the G P T three framework and then generate text by prompting the ai, so telling it what you want, and then it gives you text back, which is fun and whatnot.
[00:04:55] Steph Pajonas: But a lot of people have been introduced to this whole concept through chat, G [00:05:00] P T. Which is hitting the news all over the place right now. Lots of people are prompting it and doing fun things with it, and also doing crazy things with it. And that is also built upon the same framework, although it’s like a 3.5, right?
[00:05:11] Steph Pajonas: It’s a little bit more advanced because they put another chat layer on top of G P T three, so it’s a little bit more advanced. But the basic is the basics are, is that you prompt the system with a string of text, and then it gives you back results based upon predictability of what you’ve put in, right?
[00:05:29] Steph Pajonas: So a lot of us on our phones, when we text a friend or we’re in a Facebook comment or whatever, and you’re, you have the keyboard up on your phone, you get the predictive text above it. Unless you’ve turned it off. I have turned it off in the past. , I understand it sometimes gets in the way but it predicts what you are going to say next based upon what you’ve put into the system previously, right?
[00:05:53] Steph Pajonas: So if you write in happy, sometimes it’s gonna come up with birthday or it’s gonna say New Year, because these are [00:06:00] things that you’ve prompted before in the past. And this is the exact same kind of model that G P T uses. It’s a predictive format. So it has ingested a ton, like billions of words, right?
[00:06:12] Steph Pajonas: From all over the internet. Just you could scrape blog posts, it can scrape, websites. It has been fed, like Gutenberg project. Yeah. Books, things that are out of outta copy copyright now. So it has been fed a huge amount of text. So it then takes all of that and it’s able to predict what you want by what you’ve prompted from it.
[00:06:34] Steph Pajonas: So that’s the basics of G P T and g P T stands for it’s a transformer, right? So it’s a, it’s like its own neural network application. And it runs on lots of really, it runs on lots of cool backend stuff that you, that I don’t really understand all that well, but I’m sure it’s really cool. ,
[00:06:50] Michael Evans: I don’t know if the engineers even understand it.
[00:06:52] Michael Evans: It has something like 200 billion parameters and no one knows what the parameters are. So that’s a whole other Yeah. Conversation. We won’t talk about [00:07:00] parameters today though. , we wanna talk about. . I just wanna preface this all by saying that I know people are immediately thinking like copyright issues, legal issues.
[00:07:08] Michael Evans: , none of us are lawyers. We’re not giving legal advice today. No. We don’t know where the law’s gonna go, and we don’t even know where the future’s gonna go. I wanna talk about today, what’s possible today and what we can do with this today. So I wanna throw it to Emilia first and ask you, Emilia, I know you are in ai, you like experiment, new tools, you’re always innovative on the edge.
[00:07:25] Michael Evans: Have you tried any AI writing tool, any sort of AI tool for your author business? Yeah. So
[00:07:31] Emilia Rose: I used Depot deep for translating. . I translated one of my series into German and I obviously you have to have a, an editor after that and a proofreader. But it was a lot less expensive and the translation wasn’t like, Super bad.
[00:07:48] Emilia Rose: Like it was decent. And then I’ve also tried, I haven’t published anything with AI writing, but I tried out pseudo write a while ago and I was
[00:07:58] Emilia Rose: very impressed [00:08:00] by
[00:08:00] Emilia Rose: how well it, like after I gave it a prompt, it came out with some really good paragraphs that followed the prompts and I was like, oh my God, maybe I could use this.
[00:08:11] Emilia Rose: But I haven’t yet. And then one last tool I’ve tried I forgot the name of it, but it was like a character AI in
[00:08:19] Emilia Rose: words.
[00:08:20] Emilia Rose: Was it Inworld?
[00:08:21] Emilia Rose: If
[00:08:21] Michael Evans: it’s the one I sent you, it’s Inworld.
[00:08:23] Michael Evans: It
[00:08:23] Emilia Rose: might have been Inworld. It was basically where I, you filled out like this character sheet and you gave it like what the character, how the character would respond, certain things, like his characteristics.
[00:08:37] Emilia Rose: And then you can have a conversation with it, in chat, like a chat format and you can teach it to say certain or to respond a certain way. And it turned out really cool. It like responded the way my character responded, like almost exactly in my book. And that was like, wow, this is really awesome.
[00:08:55] Emilia Rose: So those are the three tools I’ve used so far. I think those are the only three, [00:09:00] but I’m
[00:09:00] Emilia Rose: excited. How about you, Steph? What tools have you used? Because I know you used it personally. And then I wanna ask about all the writers you talked to. Cause I know you talked to a lot of writers, right?
[00:09:09] Steph Pajonas: I use a lot , I’ve used a lot of tools and I’m always looking for new tools as well.
[00:09:13] Steph Pajonas: So I have subscribed to a couple of AI newsletters and some of them were given to me by you, Michael. And so every day when I get a new newsletter, I open it up , and I scan through and I look for things that are new and on the market. Anything that looks interesting. But in general I use pseudo write, which is something Emilia brought up in order to keep myself moving in.
[00:09:37] Steph Pajonas: My work in progress, right? So I have this bad habit where I’ll be writing along, do writing some great dialogue, and I’m loving it. And then I have to like, describe somebody’s food on their plate. And I’m always just oh, I hate doing description. Sometimes it’s it’s just a suck me too, and potatoes.
[00:09:57] Steph Pajonas: It’s nothing extraordinary. So [00:10:00] this is the point where I will use pseudo right to I will prompt the system to give me some descriptions of food. I will say like they’re they’re on vacation in Mexico and what are they eating? Just tell me, give me some examples. And sometimes I’ll, it’ll prompt.
[00:10:15] Steph Pajonas: I will prompt it and it will give me back some examples that I’m just like, oh yeah, that sounds great. And that’ll get my mind moving. It’ll maybe a little put a margarita on the table and I’ll think, oh, that’s great. They can get drunk and something bad can happen, or whatever it may be, right? I’ve been using it mostly for that.
[00:10:30] Steph Pajonas: It has a lot of tools that allow you to do rewrites on things. So you you can give it a paragraph that maybe you think is, eh, only and it needs more emotions or it needs more description, and it can do rewrites of that and give that back to you, and you can add that to your work if you like.
[00:10:46] Steph Pajonas: It has an expand feature where you can give it a very brief paragraph and be like, give me more. You can expand it and it will give you a lot more either actions or dialogue, and you can tell it if you want more or less of [00:11:00] one or the other, which is cool. It has lots of brainstorming features.
[00:11:02] Steph Pajonas: It’s basically, it is a tool written and made for fiction writers by fiction writers. The guys who, who who have developed this tool they’re also fiction writers, so they know what fiction writers want. Which is great because a lot of AI writing tools that you may see on the market like Jasper novel AI is new.
[00:11:24] Steph Pajonas: But so it hasn’t been around for very long. I’m trying to think of copy ai. I think it a lot of these tools are built basically for like non-fiction or bloggers, and they’re great tools for those purposes, but not necessarily for fiction writers. Pseudo right has a whole layer between you.
[00:11:41] Steph Pajonas: So it’s like you are prompting the system. So pseudo right? Pseudo right then sends that data, that prompt massaged to open ai, gets back information from open ai, and then they massage it a little bit more, and then they give it to you. So they have a whole layer in there that is mainly for fiction, right?
[00:11:59] Steph Pajonas: So [00:12:00] you’re gonna get stuff that you want from that. So that’s the main tool I use when coming. When writing fiction I use open ai. Just their playground, which is like a, it’s basically just a big text box, on their website, and you just type into it and you see what it comes back with. I’ve used that to help me write blurbs for my books.
[00:12:20] Steph Pajonas: Everybody. we all hate writing blurbs for our books, right? . And that only does it have to be a little synopsis of your book. It has to like, capture people and have a hook and really sell the story. And that’s hard to do if you don’t do them like all the time. But guess what? Open ai. They crawled the web, they’ve seen thousands, maybe millions, I don’t know, of book blurbs, who knows, millions they’ve seen, right?
[00:12:48] Steph Pajonas: So they, it understood the predictability of, a hook and like asking questions in the blurb, but totally understood all that kind of stuff. So I’ve been able to prompt the system by giving it a [00:13:00] slight synopsis of my story, just like a little paragraph of this happened and then this happened, and then this happened, and then I’m able to get back some basic book blurbs from the system and then I, that gives me a foundation to do rewrites and add
[00:13:15] Michael Evans: right
[00:13:16] Michael Evans: little
[00:13:16] Steph Pajonas: stuff and whatnot.
[00:13:17] Steph Pajonas: So I’ve been using that, the open AI playground, which also you could use it to outline. I’m a panther and I’ve never really outlined and I used it to outline, which was fun for me. I’ve used it for a lot of things. So including writing. Blog content for my blog, helping me come up with titles for books, helping me
[00:13:36] Steph Pajonas: It’s infinite, it’s an infinite possibility of things. And then when it comes to other AI tools, I’ve used for writing basically those are the main two ones. And then I have subscriptions to a few others that I just I put my hands in and I dabble with here and there just to see what what the strengths are with like one tool versus another.
[00:13:58] Michael Evans: Oh, wow. Okay. . That’s super interesting. [00:14:00] I, me personally, I kind of wanna ask you about the strength and different tools, but I also know that we’re gonna be going into a lot of different nuances and things, and I know you do that in the Facebook group. , ai writing for authors, which brings me to how we met you’ve been in the subscriptions for authors group for quite a while, but. I really was like, whoa, what is Steph doing when she started this, a AI group? And I’m like, that’s interesting. And I think me and Emilia were both one of the first a hundred members in the group. And I’m just curious what inspired you to start it and how has it gone and what are the conversations of writers trying to help writers with this new artificial ish world?
[00:14:37] Michael Evans: Okay. So main desire for starting the group was to help authors who are stuck. A lot of authors have come to me about the AI tools because they’ve been like, I haven’t been writing for the past couple of months. I’m stuck on this book. I’m stuck on this plot.
[00:14:53] Michael Evans: I’m stuck on these characters. I don’t know what to do. There’s nobody to brainstorm with. Maybe because [00:15:00] they, live remotely or they don’t have any, Buddy that they trust to bounce ideas off of. And I found that the AI tools had filled that gap in my life, right? So if I if I wanted to brainstorm something, it was just me, maybe sometimes my husband will let me bounce some ideas off of him, but he’s not really a fiction writer.
[00:15:19] Michael Evans: So I found that by asking, by doing queries of the AI and just asking simple questions, like I would give it a character bio, like this character that I have in my book, he and I like to use astrology to, to get my character started. So I’ll say this character in my book, he’s an Aquarius and his moon is in Gemini.
[00:15:40] Michael Evans: And he likes to box and he likes to go running, and he’s a really successful lawyer. . So I told the AI that this is my character and I gave him a name. I said, now tell me some more things about him. Let’s start brainstorming ideas about this character. I would ask I asked great questions like, what are his Clifton’s [00:16:00] strengths?
[00:16:00] Michael Evans: And it told me what his Clifton’s strengths were. I said, what is his Enneagram type? And these are all tools that we use as authors. Like some of us use Enneagram and some of us use Clifton strengths and some of us may use, something, right? And then I started asking questions like, what’s his favorite meal?
[00:16:15] Michael Evans: And it told me it was pasta . It was like, okay, that’s a nice simple dish. Like he can make that for, a romantic interest. , and then that got my wheels turning, I was thinking about, what new and other questions I could ask. And then those answers made me think about more about the character and dive deeper into.
[00:16:35] Michael Evans: What I was looking for the story, right? So I found that the AI tools really actually inspired me. It made me more creative instead of taking away creativity, which is a thing that I hear a lot from other authors. They worry about AI coming in and stealing their creativeness, taking away the magic of writing, when really it has done the opposite for me, has made it more magical [00:17:00] because I’m able to see different things that are outside of my viewpoint, right?
[00:17:04] Michael Evans: Yeah. I started seeing the benefits of AI for me as an author, and I wanted to give those to other people, When I started the group, it was mainly to show people that like, look, this could actually be really helpful for you if you’re stuck or maybe you’re a really slow writer, and prompting the AI can give you like an extra 200 words that you can get you rolling and writing even more.
[00:17:27] Michael Evans: I just, I felt this need to help people and that’s why I started the group. And it’s been great because over the last, couple of weeks, we’ve had a very diverse amount of people joining the group, so we’ve had people who already write a million words a year. For them, it’s, they’re there to check out and see what they could use AI for in their process that maybe.
[00:17:49] Michael Evans: Needs just a little bit of finessing. And then we’ve got people in the group who haven’t written for months and they’re desperate to try something that will get them going. And so there’s something really [00:18:00] there in AI for everyone on this spectrum. And that’s why I wanted to start the group and be positive about it so that people could see that, there is something there for them.
[00:18:11] Michael Evans: And if it turns out that they don’t need ai, then that’s totally fine too. , totally fine too. It is a tool and hopefully it can help people. Yeah,
[00:18:20] Emilia Rose: it sounds like as you were talking and I think me and Michael talked to the CEO or of Psdo Wright at one point too. We did, yeah.
[00:18:26] Emilia Rose: And he was saying how
[00:18:29] Emilia Rose: a lot of authors use Pseudo Wright as a co-author.
[00:18:32] Emilia Rose: And it got me thinking. I was like, yeah, I love co-authoring with other people, but they, for me, there’s not a lot of time to do it cuz our schedules have to line up and we have to want to write the same exact idea. And when you find a really good co-writer it’s just like fire. You talk, you have some ideas, and then the co-writer has some ideas and it just like builds upon each other.
[00:18:53] Emilia Rose: And then when I was doing, when I was on suit, I just like putting prompts in. I was like, wow, this is the same kind of [00:19:00] feeling. And it’s the same thing as well, except it’s like artificial intelligence doing it instead of another
[00:19:06] Steph Pajonas: person. Yeah. I love working with other authors.
[00:19:09] Steph Pajonas: It’s totally so much fun. Especially when you gel and it gets right. But we’re all busy people and that’s something we’ll talk about here is that we all need more time in the day. We can’t always be interacting, but the AI is always there, . It’s always there. It’s always, unless open AI has an outage, but it does happen.
[00:19:29] Steph Pajonas: It’s there. It doesn’t get sick. Doesn’t get tired. . It’s always there and ready to give you back some information, which is just a total I, something I love about it. Like I’m having this one of those moments where I’m just like, ah, I can’t remember what I need.
[00:19:42] Steph Pajonas: I can just go to the AI and ask it for it. Just fun. . .
[00:19:45] Michael Evans: It’s super interesting cuz we, throughout. All of our history as creative people have had to constantly try and find the energy and the time to make things work and try and hire [00:20:00] help and to try and just make our imaginations.
[00:20:03] Michael Evans: The stories we love come to life. And there’s definitely two sides to the story here. One is that if the AI is always working and you don’t need to work with people, we’ve talked about how it could generate images before on this podcast it can do things like translations. So I understand that, when people, we love and care about people, when people used to be doing that work and AI’s doing that work, it can be challenging.
[00:20:23] Michael Evans: But then again, a lot of us listen. Or Andy authors, a lot of us will never be able to afford any of these people that we talk about potentially needing, like it sounds right to have a translator, but who here makes $7,000 off their books to be able to afford one? I know I don’t, and I don’t know if I ever will.
[00:20:40] Michael Evans: We’ll see. That would be really cool. But for all the people who want to use this to help save them more time, help them be more productive, what are the options? How has AI maybe helped you be more productive just as a writer and then we can talk about subscriptions.
[00:20:55] Steph Pajonas: Okay, AI definitely has made me more productive and the fact that [00:21:00] it’s keeping me in the chair and writing, right?
[00:21:02] Steph Pajonas: There were times when I would get stuck, like I was saying earlier, I go for the description of the Mexican food on the table. In the past, what would I do? I would open up Google maybe and start asking it like, what are some famous Mexican dishes? And then, I click on the link and then I go read the post.
[00:21:21] Steph Pajonas: And then all of a sudden, five hours later, I’m reading something about Mexicans dancing on the beach. I don’t know, it’s a time suck, right? Doing the research rabbit hole is fun. And it’s definitely cool when you come across something that relates to something else and you’re like, oh, this is a great idea.
[00:21:37] Steph Pajonas: I never would’ve gotten this idea if I hadn’t gone down the research hole. But there does come with a point where it is sucking away a little bit too much of your time. And you should probably step back a little bit from the. This is where these tools come in handy for me, so I can ask it, give me the description of the Mexican food or give me gimme some descriptions of how a character [00:22:00] may look or what they’re wearing to a party or jewelry.
[00:22:04] Steph Pajonas: I’m just thinking of all the things I’ve recently asked the system to describe. For me, jewelry was one that was just like, oh no, it’s sparkly and ba metallic. Tell me more , so it’s saving me time because I’m not going and doing, opening a ton of tabs on my browser and doing a lot of research.
[00:22:21] Steph Pajonas: I’m in the system. It’s one of those things where, you know how you’re writing and you wanna. Get rid of all distractions, right? There’s like these des distraction free modes on Scrivener and whatever other tool you may be using. Maybe Word has it, I don’t know, it’s been a long time since I’ve used Word, but either way you wanna go distraction free.
[00:22:39] Steph Pajonas: So this keeps me in the app, right? I’m in the app, I’m just me and my words. I can query the system and I’m stuck there, right? Days when I was only getting 500 words, now I’m getting 2000, 3000. It’s definitely doubling, tripling my output for. The day. So it is making me more [00:23:00] productive and it is I found it to be less taxing.
[00:23:03] Steph Pajonas: Sometimes you sit down at the keyboard and you’re writing like this really amazing scene that’s three, 4,000 words and you’re like, exhausted when you’re done. Like absolutely exhausted. I don’t get that exhausted anymore. I don’t interest, I found that like playing with the system, getting some words, editing them, keeping the story rolling.
[00:23:22] Steph Pajonas: At the end of two, 3000 words, I’m like, oh, it felt like nothing, which is super cool, right? So now I suddenly have more energy to do other things, which is nice. It would be like if I were writing a big chapter in a book sometimes that would be the only thing I could do that day, and then I would just have to like stare under space or watch TV for the rest of the day.
[00:23:43] Steph Pajonas: But now I can get in my word count every day, and I still have time left over to do other things. Maybe it’s admin, maybe I’m writing a book blurb. Maybe I’m writing a blog post to bring people to my site and to bring people into my world. Maybe [00:24:00] I’m writing ad copy for my books. All of those things can be done with the AI tools as well.
[00:24:04] Steph Pajonas: And then that also cuts down on time and leaves more time for the things that we love. I’m a knitter. I love to knit and watch tv. Now I actually have time to do that , whereas in the past I didn’t. So I’m finding that it’s keeping me productive. It’s keeping me in the flow, which is a nice thing too.
[00:24:23] Steph Pajonas: Yeah. And then it’s saving me time so that I have more time for other things, which is something that I find. Would be really helpful for subscription authors. Which is one of the reasons why I came to your group in the first place. I’m interested in subscriptions. I think that they’re the way of the future, like one-on-one with your readers, talking to your readers, giving them the content that they’re interested in.
[00:24:49] Steph Pajonas: I’ve been writing for over 10 years now and I have a blog, which I love. And this is how I talk to my readers and I’m hoping at some point I can offer a subscription model [00:25:00] to them where I give them more content that is more focused on my books. Right now I write a little bit more content that’s that’s a bit more broad and wide for my blog because I’m trying to bring in lots of different kind of readers.
[00:25:13] Steph Pajonas: So once. Once I get a subscription going, or if other authors have a subscription, I think that they can use these kinds of tools to create more content or to make it so that their writing is faster. Because we all wanna write books, right? That is our main product. If you are writing the books, if the tools help you write them faster or cleaner or whatever it may be, and that gives you more time to do things for your subscription, maybe you are an artist and you are like doing graphic design and you don’t have enough time to make things for your subscription.
[00:25:53] Steph Pajonas: If you save time with the writing, maybe you’ll have more time to do the cool enough fun stuff for your [00:26:00] subscription as well.
[00:26:00] Michael Evans: I think No, it’s very interesting. I’m curious, as Emilia’s listening to this, what are you thinking about in terms of what do you wish could be better productivity-wise about your subscription?
[00:26:12] Michael Evans: What do you wish you could be doing more of? Just in general? And I’m wondering, how you’re thinking AI may or may not fit into it. This is, we’re all learning, exploring here. Me and Emilia are not, and even you Steph, we’re all beginning this journey. But I think it’s an interesting, open conversation to have.
[00:26:27] Steph Pajonas: Yeah. I
[00:26:27] Emilia Rose: don’t know. Cause I do some books that I write multiple books on my subscription at one time.
[00:26:33] Emilia Rose: The characters might not do what you want them to do, or you don’t know what’s gonna happen next. Because I don’t plot either I completely just let it all out and I just sometimes don’t know what’s gonna happen. And so I think if I were to use it more, I would probably do something like that.
[00:26:52] Emilia Rose: But something I really like, at least in my subscription is making my stories as immersive as possible. And [00:27:00] how do you do that with ai? I’ve been doing that character like character, I don’t even know what you would call it. Creating a character who can chat with people. Like a chat bot?
[00:27:08] Emilia Rose: Sort of, yeah. Yeah. So something like that. But I also saw in a Facebook group, I don’t know who mentioned it, it might have been you actually, that you can like, give the a chapter from your book and have it turned into like the other character’s point, like another character’s
[00:27:25] Steph Pajonas: point of view.
[00:27:26] Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, thought that was so cool. Yeah. You can definitely use a lot of the AI tools to rewrite. On pseudo write, I think is what you can do. You can highlight, like a chunk of your chapter. I think you can only do about 300 words at a time or so highlight a couple of paragraphs and use the rewrite function and tell it to rewrite as the other character, right?
[00:27:50] Steph Pajonas: And then once you have that, you could you could also query the AI and be like, let’s do more emotions. Or you can say, this character is [00:28:00] frustrated. Let’s write more about like their feelings of inner frustration. That was one of the ideas that I thought would be really cool for.
[00:28:07] Steph Pajonas: For subscription, like for your patrons, so it’s like to take scenes or even whole chapters or books, even and rewrite them from the opposite person’s point of view. AI could definitely help that and make that faster, make that a, because I’ve done that before. I have a whole, I have a whole book in one of my series written from the, a different protagonist point of view.
[00:28:33] Steph Pajonas: You take , the chapter written the first way, and then you have to go through it and, strip out the dialogue because you want the dialogue to bring, remain the same. But then there’s the inner feelings and the actions of the other character. And you’ve gotta rewrite all of those.
[00:28:49] Steph Pajonas: And AI could definitely make that whole process smoother, faster. It’s not going to write it for you, obviously, , you’re gonna have to direct it and say, what you want from your characters, what they’re [00:29:00] feeling, what they’re thinking. And then it will start producing words that you can.
[00:29:05] Steph Pajonas: in that kind of case, you, you could use it for scenes from a different character’s point of view where, maybe they’ve just left a scene in your book so you can have it start out with a conversation that they’re having that was.
[00:29:18] Steph Pajonas: the previous person’s point of view, and then you flip it over and then they go on to do something else, which is fun. And you could actually query the AI at that point and be like, tell me what happens next. Because it can get an idea from what you’ve already written, good, like 3000 to 1000 words previously.
[00:29:35] Steph Pajonas: It can look at that in, and it can make some creative decisions about what may happen next if you don’t know what’s going to happen next. It could be fun, , you could maybe even do two or three of those. The AI says this person walks across the street and goes to the deli, or they actually go down into the subway and they go someplace else.
[00:29:52] Steph Pajonas: And you could actually write all of those, which could be a lot of fun. The possibilities are pretty infinite at this point. .
[00:29:59] Michael Evans: [00:30:00] Yeah, that sounds like the possibilities of AI go perfectly with the possibilities of subscriptions, because we always tell authors, and it can be frustrating people, like there’s no one set path, there’s best practices and we try and share the best practices on the podcast, but no, you don’t have to price your subscription between $2 99 cents and $9 99 cents.
[00:30:16] Michael Evans: You don’t get paid half a page per page read automatically. Audible isn’t here setting you and telling you, you have to price your book this much and it has to be this long and it has to have these sorts of tropes to fit into this category, or else the algorithm will dox you in that category and you’ll go somewhere else, right?
[00:30:31] Michael Evans: That’s like what we’re used to as authors, but subscription’s no. You can really run your business how you want. And there’s definitely ways to run that business that can be beneficial and that are best practices. And there’s best practices in AI that you teach in your Facebook group, but then at the same time, , there’s room for experimentation.
[00:30:48] Michael Evans: There’s room to learn, there’s room to break the boundaries of what we thought was possible with this new age. And this kind of brings me to a question I wanna ask both of you, which is, we now had you, Steph and [00:31:00] Lindsay unprompted, Lindsay Sparks in a prior podcast. Come on and share.
[00:31:03] Michael Evans: Subscriptions are the way of the future, which ya mean. And Emilia are happy to hear. We both run a platform that is just there’s AI that’s for fiction writers. We are the subscription platform for fiction authors called Ream. So obviously we’re a bit biased. That sounds cool to us. We believe that, but that’s us.
[00:31:19] Michael Evans: Why did you say subscriptions are the way of the future? I know you were talking about like relationships to your audience, but how do you think AI plays into this? There’s this wave of subscription, is there this wave of ai? I know it’s a question that no one has an answer to, but what do you think when I ask that?
[00:31:33] Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I don’t really know the answer to that. I feel like AI is a helper tool at this point that is going to help authors to, be more productive or to produce more content for our readers. And that could be, that could totally be just in the form of more books, right?
[00:31:51] Steph Pajonas: That you put up for sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and whatnot. And maybe that’s totally fine for some authors. Maybe they don’t wanna run a [00:32:00] subscription. I completely understand it. It’s definitely more work to part of subscription, but I think that some of us really enjoy, the one-on-one.
[00:32:08] Steph Pajonas: Interaction with our readers, right? I have a couple of really great readers. I just love talking to them. We mostly talk on my Facebook page right now. Some of them are loyal blog readers, and they will come and they’ll leave comments and we talk back and forth there. And I really just, I really love that interaction.
[00:32:25] Steph Pajonas: And I can see how by producing more content that isn’t necessarily books, it, maybe it’s bonus scenes, maybe it’s extra chapters, maybe it’s character profiles, maybe it’s, and then if you branch out from writing, it could be AI art, it could be AI audio books. It could be a lot of things, right?
[00:32:42] Steph Pajonas: But these are these are elements and products that don’t necessarily translate well to an ebook that you put up on Amazon, right? So I wanna be able to offer those things to people who are interested. And I feel as you. Get further along in this path as an author, you [00:33:00] start to gather up the really fantastic readers that believe in you and believe in your work and want more of that.
[00:33:06] Steph Pajonas: So that’s why I feel like it’s the future for authors especially if you are interested in being, doing the one-on-one with readers. I understand that not everybody wants to it. Maybe you have to be a little bit more extroverted instead of introverted to want to do that, and so it might not be your.
[00:33:26] Steph Pajonas: Cup of tea, right? But it can be and I feel like if you’re into making all the little extras, like you’re, you love writing the bonus scenes and you love doing all these kinds of things that it’s a perfect marriage for you. So I I also love the fact that it’s it takes out that whole layer of, is Amazon gonna show my book to people?
[00:33:51] Steph Pajonas: am I going to sell these books? Like how do I do this? It takes a, it takes out that layer between you and the readers where all they have to [00:34:00] do is find you on your subscription platform, whatever that is, whether it’s Patreon or Ream or whatever. And then you have that, that just that one place where you can easily go to and they can find you, and find your work.
[00:34:12] Steph Pajonas: And then there’s the financial component. We all wanna earn money so that we can pay for our editors and buy our book covers and whatnot. And knowing that you have a monthly subscription with a certain amount of subscribers, gives you some stability. And you can look forward to having that money in order to do the things that you wanna do for yourself and your readers.
[00:34:34] Steph Pajonas: So it’s one of the reasons why I like subscriptions. I like selling direct too. It’s like this is all a part of it. It’s taking away the anonymous big box store layer between you and the reader. So I don’t know how AI is just blown up in the last six months guys? It’s been huge.
[00:34:54] Steph Pajonas: I, every day I open up my email and there’s something. Mind blowing to look at, or [00:35:00] I see somebody in my Facebook group that did something that I was just like, wow, that’s so cool. I hadn’t thought of that. I’m not much of a prognosticator . I’m not good at looking into the future. I do just believe that if we remain open minded about the tools that come out and what they could possibly do, and keep brainstorming with fellow authors who are interested in the same thing, that we can harness this momentum and really put it towards this subscription life that we wanna build for us and our readers.
[00:35:34] Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I really,
[00:35:34] Emilia Rose: Loved what you said it. AI is
[00:35:37] Steph Pajonas: a helper
[00:35:38] Emilia Rose: and it’s not something, and that’s what I, that’s what I believe. A lot of authors should view AI as, it’s not something competing against you. There’s gonna be, there’s gonna be people who use it to compete against you. Sure, there’s gonna be people who make entire books like in one day, one hour, and they’re gonna just like flood everywhere.
[00:35:56] Emilia Rose: That could potentially happen, but if authors use [00:36:00] AI to help them build a bigger and better brand like a brand that readers wanna be part of. It’s not your enemy, like AI is not trying to hurt you. You should use it to help you. and I I really loved when you
[00:36:12] Steph Pajonas: said that.
[00:36:13] Steph Pajonas: So yes, this is a tool like any other thing. If you look back at the last, what, like 10 to 15 years on Amazon and K d P we’re looking at people who they saw an opening in the market to produce content and some of them went extreme, they became content mills where they had one author name and they paid ghost writers.
[00:36:32] Steph Pajonas: They did a lot of things in order to turn out content really quickly and to flood that genre or to flood , that trope that they found that the readers loved and they flooded it so that they. Capitalize on that. And there’s really nothing wrong with that. I don’t see a problem with that.
[00:36:49] Steph Pajonas: It’s just that it’s hard to compete , right? If you’re the one lonely author who’s maybe may writing maybe one book a year, maybe you’re writing a couple more. You [00:37:00] can’t necessarily compete with that. But we say compete because the store, like Amazon, right? It pits us against each other in the algorithms.
[00:37:09] Steph Pajonas: But we don’t need to compete as authors. We can prop each other up and yeah, like I say, like a rising tide lifts boats, right? So if we’re all using these tools to help bring up professionality in our content to bring up the level of the greatness of our content, then it’s good for us all.
[00:37:29] Steph Pajonas: it is good for us all. And I know that, I just know that there’s definitely going to be people that are gonna flood the market with crap, right? , that it was like, what eight years ago somebody said that when self-publishers finally flood Amazon market, it will be a tsunami of crap is what they called it.
[00:37:44] Steph Pajonas: The tsunami of crap. And yet here we are eight years later and yeah, there’s like millions of books on Amazon, but a lot of , the good stuff has gotten the good reviews and the readers love it and then they. Recommend it to their [00:38:00] friends. And it’s still that same engine that’s driving the good content and the bad content is floating to the bottom and people are ignoring it.
[00:38:08] Steph Pajonas: And the same thing will happen with AI books that are not curated, that are not cared for, they’re not edited, right? People will look at them and say, meh, they’ll close it. They won’t recommend it to somebody. It floats to the bottom. This is just, that’s the way the market works. And I think that we will see the same here when it comes to the AI books, when they start flooding the market.
[00:38:32] Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I feel like it’s the same thing. So I’ve seen the pattern in the past and I’m not too worried about it. I’m not too worried. It’s a tool and we’re gonna use it to the best of our abilities. But there will always be bad actors who will use it for something that we don’t approve of, but.
[00:38:48] Steph Pajonas: We’ll do better . We will do better.
[00:38:50] Michael Evans: It’s interesting cuz at the end of the day too, I think there are things that broadly like 99% of people would agree are bad actors. But I also do wanna say, cause I know there might be people listening who think like using AI at [00:39:00] all is bad. And you might think that someone who uses AI is a bad actor.
[00:39:03] Michael Evans: And what I will just say to that is that you have the right to think that. Don’t be negative about it because we all have different ways that we think is living a good life and that is good author to us. And that’s okay because we can operate our career the way we want.
[00:39:15] Michael Evans: And even as someone who decides, I wanna go release a hundred books next month because I don’t know, g p t four came out, and it can generate rumor to be able to hold at least 5,000 words in memory. Some people have said 10 x that. So if that’s possible, then okay, G P T four is coming out in May. That’s gonna be interesting.
[00:39:31] Michael Evans: Maybe people decide to do that. But is that wrong? Is that bad? Is a billion books written worse than 10 million books in Amazon? I don’t know. I don’t wanna be the one who says what’s right or wrong, but what I do know is interesting is that indie authors are not the only people thinking about this anymore at all.
[00:39:45] Michael Evans: Big publishers are getting ready to use AI too. That’s another interesting market entrant. It was just at a conference in New York City a couple days ago called Digital Book World. Oh yeah. And who owns the conference is a conversational AI venture capital firm that [00:40:00] invests in basically like Amazon Alexa type stuff.
[00:40:02] Michael Evans: And they’re basically executives from Spotify to you name the company. Really were pushing AI audio hard, and these publishers were seeing an opportunity to be able to create their content in that. Or even things like serialized podcast audio dramas. When you think about the other layers of editing that go on top of it and what we’ve, the main thing that ended up becoming the end of the conversation was that, There is actually so much demand for content that at least at the given moment, that there’s not enough content still being created that really gives readers and consumers and listeners what they want.
[00:40:38] Michael Evans: Yeah. Which means there’s gonna be an interesting intersection where it might not even be a loan in the author with one book, but Random House deciding to use these tools. And I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, but I do think you’re right in saying that it makes having a direct relationship to your readers more important.
[00:40:54] Michael Evans: Because when there’s a lot of chaos, for better or worse, there’s opportunity. . But in that change, it’s nice to [00:41:00] have your little home. Yeah.
[00:41:01] Steph Pajonas: I agree with that and I also, I definitely see it coming where publishers will be using all of these tools themselves. And it doesn’t mean that they’re gonna cut out the middle man or anything like that, but it will make it so that they can be more profitable.
[00:41:16] Steph Pajonas: Cuz when you think about the amount of work that a publisher puts into , a book, maybe it’s a tent pool book for them for that season. And they’re gonna put a lot of, ads, they’re gonna put a lot of marketing, they’re gonna build websites, they’re gonna do radio spots, they’re gonna do everything right.
[00:41:33] Steph Pajonas: Using AI for them could even be something as small as helping them refine book blurbs or write copy for a press release or any of these things which will allow them. To take on more authors, it will allow them to take on more books because they will actually be able to spend their energy on the things that matter and they can just that.
[00:41:56] Steph Pajonas: So the thing I like to tell people is that AI [00:42:00] is not going to replace humans, but humans using AI will replace humans who don’t because it’s going to make you more efficient. It’s going to give you more time to do the things that matter. That’s my bottom line is that it is giving me back time.
[00:42:17] Steph Pajonas: It’s giving me back brain space to do the things that I love the most, which includes more writing or crafting, or spending time with my family. Like all of those things are important as a whole person. , they, these tools are helping me achieve that and making my life a lot better. They’re gonna do the same thing for businesses.
[00:42:39] Steph Pajonas: It’s going to replace repetitive tasks that nobody really wants to do anyway. , you don’t really necessarily wanna hire the 20 year old to come and, go through the slush pile when you could probably have an AI do that. You get the books electronically. It could read through them, do a summary, boom, and then instead you could be teaching that [00:43:00] 20 year old concepts on marketing.
[00:43:02] Steph Pajonas: You could be teaching them to do things that are actually going to directly relate to their career. And this is where I see AI taking over and making our lives a lot easier and actually more creative.
[00:43:21] Steph Pajonas: Yeah.
[00:43:22] Michael Evans: That’s, I think a really fascinating takeaway and I think a sign of hope that, maybe we, through all of our history as storytellers, whether it was the capital that publishers had and like the ownership of distribution, and now still publishers have a lot of power, but the power that platforms have specifically even over published at this point because they hold data and now maybe there’s this piece of AI that also can set us free and give us more freedom and control, not only, as you were saying over our personal lives and how we spend our time and what we can create, [00:44:00] but also how we run our businesses.
[00:44:01] Michael Evans: Maybe there is this opportunity to truly have storytellers rule the world. That is my big goal for the next decade in this industry. I don’t know if it’ll happen, but that’s what we’re fighting for and I think it’s why AI is so interesting. And before we actually. Wrap this podcast up because we’ve talked about it a lot and it’s probably, people listen, people listening, you’re like, either you’ve taken like 10 deep breaths and you’re like, wow.
[00:44:21] Michael Evans: Or you’re like, I need to see what I can do next, which is why I’m gonna ask you if I’m someone maybe coming from the subscriptions for Sini, which you have been a member of. What would you recommend doing to maybe explore how you can integrate AI for writing into your publishing process, into your marketing process, into your production process, and into your subscription?
[00:44:43] Michael Evans: Where should I just start to dive into this?
[00:44:45] Steph Pajonas: I’m gonna do a shameless plug and tell people come to my Facebook group. Okay. So it’s facebook.com/groups/ai writing for authors. And that’s all written out. And you can just actually search for us on Facebook and you’ll probably find us.
[00:44:57] Steph Pajonas: But description too. Yes. Like des. Thank you.[00:45:00] , you can come to my Facebook group and you can see you can scroll through the posts and see how people are using the tools already. Maybe something will spark you and make you think, oh, I never thought of using it for that.
[00:45:11] Steph Pajonas: Maybe I’ll try that. It is literally like growing, the amount of tools and the amount of things that can be done, they’re growing Like every single day, every day there’s something new. So it’s hard to just put my finger on like the one thing that you may wanna try. So I’ll break it up into a few little things.
[00:45:28] Steph Pajonas: Go
[00:45:29] Michael Evans: the Facebook group, ,
[00:45:30] Steph Pajonas: just go to Facebook group . But anyway, no, I’ll break it up into a few little things. If you’re interested in trying out an AI writing tool for writing fiction, I recommend pseudo write, and that is S u d O W R I T E, pseudo write. And that’s pseudo for I don’t know if either of you guys are computer people or not, but like Unix, it’s like the pseudo command like helps you, it makes you like the super user in Unix, which is where it comes from.
[00:45:57] Steph Pajonas: Anyway, so I recommend pseudo, right? Eh, [00:46:00] you can, they have like a free tier. Like you can get like free words to get started and you can go in and start playing around with it. That’s something you can do right off the bat. And they have a Slack community that is very active. So you can even jump in there and see what people are doing in there.
[00:46:14] Steph Pajonas: People are asking questions a lot. They’re and they’re giving away tips and tricks, which is of fun too. So I go in there often to see what people are doing. So if you wanna try and fiction writing, I recommend pseudo, right? If you’re interested in brainstorming, I definitely say chat. G P T, while it’s available they, it’s in research phase right now where they’re taking inputs and they’re archiving and we’re looking at them and determining what’s working and what’s not.
[00:46:40] Steph Pajonas: And I think that Chap G P T eventually will be paid, but, so for now it’s free. So jump in there while you can. This is January 20th, 2023. So in case you’re listening to this podcast in the future, it may not be available for free, but you can go in there. It’s. Runs just like a chatbot. You can talk to it like you’re talking to another person, which is fun.
[00:46:59] Steph Pajonas: [00:47:00] I recently used it to to ask about something in one of my books. I had a court case, like a, I’ve got one character suing another character for property. And I was like, I don’t, I’m not a lawyer. , I know plenty of lawyers that I could go to, but that will take time. And they’re all busy people, right?
[00:47:17] Steph Pajonas: They’re like, bill, in every six minutes, they don’t have time for me right now. So I went into chat, j p t and I said, this character is suing this character for property. Is that a civil case in the United States? And it came back, it was like, yes, that’s a civil case in the United States. I’m like, great.
[00:47:32] Steph Pajonas: Tell me what happens next. Because I have no idea what the steps are if you sue somebody. So it came back and it gave me all the steps, like you file a summons complaint and then you have to show up at court and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It gave me all the steps. And then I asked questions of the chatbot about each one of those steps.
[00:47:50] Steph Pajonas: What is the con, what does a summons look like? What happens if you wanna speak to the judge? And it gave me all of this information, right? And at the end, of course it tells me [00:48:00] it is not a lawyer, , and you can’t use this stuff in place of a lawyer. But because I told it, I was writing a fictional story, it gave me this information, and I’m using it in a very fictional, far future universe.
[00:48:13] Steph Pajonas: So it’s only just a basis for me to jump off and write those scenes, which I wouldn’t, where am I gonna find that information? Otherwise, I could Google. and get sent down the route hole again. But instead, I just asked check G p t and it gave me my information and we went about our separate ways, which was fun.
[00:48:31] Steph Pajonas: Lots of people are using it to write song lyrics for the books or write a poem or . You can ask it to write something like a famous a famous author. You can say, write a poem, write a paragraph about trees in Bloom in the style of Hemingway. And it will write something for you. And then you can say, take that and write it in the style of Shakespeare, and it will write it in the [00:49:00] style of Shakespeare.
[00:49:00] Steph Pajonas: And these are all the fun things that you can do with it. Maybe that sparks some creativity in you. Who knows what I’ll come up with, right? Those are the two main tools I suggested people get started with. They’re like the most they’re the ones that are pseudo right?
[00:49:12] Steph Pajonas: As like being mentioned in tons of author communities. People are hearing about it constantly. Chat. G p t is being mentioned, like pretty much everywhere, hearing about it on the New York Times, hearing about it in cnn, hearing about it from Some , random cousin of mine has been using it, like everybody’s been using it, so you might as well before they make it paid.
[00:49:32] Steph Pajonas: When it comes to other AI tools there’s a lot of them out there for video. There’s the ones out there for images, there’s ones out there for translations. There’s a chatbot I just found recently that you can, if you’re learning a language, which I’m learning, I’m really into languages.
[00:49:48] Steph Pajonas: I know Japanese, I’m learning Portuguese, I’m Italian, and you can, they have chatbots now and other languages that you can chat with if you’re learning a language. It can figure out where you [00:50:00] are in your journey of learning that language, which is, maybe you’re a beginner, maybe you’re intermediate and you can talk to it and.
[00:50:06] Steph Pajonas: It will correct you. That’s so cool. And it’ll tell you what else you can do. There are just so many tools, guys, so many tools, . But if you’re a writer, I definitely suggest if you’re a fiction writer, you start with pseudo write and then Chad, g p t for fun and brainstorming. If you’re a nonfiction writer you may wanna try tools like Jasper copy ai.
[00:50:28] Steph Pajonas: There are these new tools out. There’s one the other day I saw called Boo, like b o, and it’s a little ghost which will help you write blog entries. Magic blog was another one I heard of recently. They’re just they’re coming out like gangbusters. All of these tools.
[00:50:42] Steph Pajonas: So I wanna write more content for my blog, maybe with an SEO bent so that I can get people I write space opera, science fiction, romance, right? So I wanna write a blog post about science fiction, romance, maybe some tropes in it that I really love. I can use a tool in AI tool to [00:51:00] help me with that, just to like some, brainstorm some ideas for that blog post.
[00:51:03] Steph Pajonas: Maybe come up with some text, put my own spin on it, put it in a blog post, hopefully. , if the SEO brings more readers to me when they search for it there’s just, the tools are but I definitely suggest, starting small one or two. Yeah. And then branching out from there, come to my Facebook group and learn what other people are doing.
[00:51:23] Steph Pajonas: My Facebook group I keep it very positive. We’re not there to lament the end of our creative lives because AI has taken over. It is like my one number one rule. So that we’re not allowed to do that. We’re there to discuss how these tools can help us become better or faster, more productive, any one of these things.
[00:51:42] Steph Pajonas: So yeah. I’m welcome to this, welcome to have them there if they’re willing to talk about it.
[00:51:46] Michael Evans: I’m sure our people are, and I always say Just be respectful, anyone who’s coming and going into that Facebook group, because Steph really is a wonderful person and we’re very grateful to have her on the podcast today cuz you really shared so much information.
[00:51:58] Michael Evans: And I definitely wanna [00:52:00] second the advice of starting small cuz it could feel like the world has changed overnight. But we’re at the beginning of this whole change. It’s gonna take three to five years to make a truly sizable impact in most industries as authors we’re seeing and feeling it and having these conversations early, specifically because text, generative text is like further along the most generative AI technologies.
[00:52:25] Michael Evans: But that also doesn’t mean it’s going to change the industry overnight either. That will take some time, it won’t take 20 years, but it’s gonna take some time. But I wanna leave off with some advice, not from me, but from j k. We’ve been talking a lot about artificial intelligence and tools, but I wanna end off with two piece advice that he shared in a Twitter thread called 30 Life Lessons to Learn asap.
[00:52:46] Michael Evans: He’s a creator and he helps creators build their CUNYs. That’s what he does. He shared really two Aus piece advice. The second life lesson is build your network budget time every week to meet and have conversations with someone new. Meet them with [00:53:00] no agenda. Meet them to build a bond and learn about them as a person.
[00:53:03] Michael Evans: The world runs and relationships build. Maybe that exact language wouldn’t be my advice to an author, but how many times do we build relationships with readers, just with the intention to sell, build even relationships with other authors, just the intention to newsletter swap, whatever it is, there’s a magic to what he said, and especially in the last sentence of meet them to build a bond and learn about them as a person.
[00:53:24] Michael Evans: Meet them with no agenda. Then the third lesson is this. The difference between a big outcome and a small outcome is usually relationships. Behind every decision is a person, even if it’s override power over an automated system, which is literally what we’re talking about here, right? In most cases, there are people who can make a big difference.
[00:53:41] Michael Evans: For you, ai, as amazing as it is, will not be the difference between you being a New York Times bestseller and making a million dollars, or starving on the side of the street. None of that will, but who will probably are. Your fans are those relationships you have with the key people, and it’s why, like you already said, Steph, AI is not going to take over humanity.
[00:53:58] Michael Evans: It might just superpower us. [00:54:00] So anyways, this was amazing. I love this podcast and hope everyone has a great time writing.
[00:54:05] Steph Pajonas: Thank you for having you. It’s been great talking about it with you guys.
[00:54:08] Michael Evans: Seriously. Really fun
[00:54:09] Michael Evans: I hope we can all really stick with this last paragraph or this last point we’re creating a podcast in a book. But the last paragraph being that AI is not going to take over humanity and maybe this is something that can help supercharge, you can turn you into almost a creative superhuman cuz we all only have so much time in a day, so much energy and maybe AI can be something that helps us.
[00:54:30] Michael Evans: And I know this podcast has a lot of. I know this podcast is a lot coming on. I just wanna say everyone, thank you for listening. I appreciate your feedback. A lot of times we stick to just talking about subscriptions and some tactics and strategies, but we also like to talk about some technologies and other future, or even now, topics that are important to this industry.
[00:54:50] Michael Evans: And I’d love to hear from y’all what topics you’d love to hear us share with you on the Descriptions for Authors podcast, so you can always reach out. At [00:55:00] contact at ream, r e a m dot i n k. Yes, contact ream dot eight can reach out to us at any time. We will take your feedback into account and we may even create a new episode just because you want to hear it, because we love that kind of stuff.
[00:55:13] Michael Evans: Now, if you aren’t a part of the Subscriptions for Authors Facebook group, it’s another amazing community. In addition to the AI writing for Authors Facebook group and can really help you build your community as an author, focus on how you can. , build your subscription, start it and grow it, which Steph said might be a really important revenue model and where the, a lot of this business, this industry is shifting and me and Emilia certainly believe that too.
[00:55:36] Michael Evans: Now, if you’ve already joined the Facebook group, there are some other resources you might wanna check out. Recently we released the subscriptions for Author Starter Guide, totally free book that can help you supercharge your subscription. And there’s also. The top 500 fiction authors and subscriptions report I’ll link down to both of that in the subscriptions.
[00:55:52] Michael Evans: It’s on our resources page, a new page on the Subscriptions for Author’s website, all free resources to help you grow and [00:56:00] supercharge your subscription. But that’s enough for me today. I love y’all. I’m very thankful for you sticking around for this episode. I hope to see you all very soon. But in the meantime, don’t forget Storytellers Rule the World.