Introduction
Thomas: Skype dies, Romantasy surges, and Mr. Beast starts writing the bestest, best-selling book ever. Or does he? Find out in this episode of Author Update. I’m Thomas Umstead, Jr. with Jonathan Sugar, and we have a lot of really surprisingly good news today. I know you’re not supposed to have good news, that people want to hear bad news, but we have a lot of good news today.
Our first piece of news today is actually about us. Author Update now has its own YouTube channel. We’re going to be moving the show away from the Novel Marketing channel and to the Author Update channel. Do click the link in the description down below to follow the new channel so you can find our new home. We’ll also be posting clips from our live episodes there as well.
Books Now Easier to Buy on iPhones and iPads (00:55)
Jonathan: First bit of news we’re going to talk about today is books are now easier to buy on iPhones and iPads. According to The Verge, Kindle users and other app users can pay for books using Apple devices. There’s now a big Get Book button that wasn’t there before in the iOS Kindle app. I used this. It sent me to a third-party browser instead of allowing me to just buy it inside of the app, so I don’t know if that functionality will come later or not.
The fact that the button is there at all is amazing because now I don’t actually have to navigate using something else to get to it. Before it kind of acted more like you could get this book if you went somewhere else.
Thomas: It sent you on a long scavenger hunt where you had to find the book all over again. And the problem with that is that process of finding a new book presented you with dozens or maybe even hundreds of other books that you might buy instead. This is really good news for authors. It’s not just the Amazon app, the Patreon app is also affected. They were about to do a big price rise for a lot of creators on Apple devices and that’s been paused. It may be the Kickstarter app too. So if you’re an author making money, selling books to readers, Apple is going to drink from your milkshake less, which is really good news and more money for everybody but Apple.
Skype Is Dead (02:32)
Jonathan: Following on to that, this is kind of good news, I think. Skype is dead. Long live Microsoft Teams. After 22 years, they finally put Skype down. It was overly featured, the bloat was incredible on the program. It was good in the early years, it was fantastic for what it did, pioneering those things. Lately I haven’t used Skype at all. I hate Microsoft Teams with every fiber of my being. I don’t know why anyone would choose to use it.
Thomas: I used Skype to write my book because I did all of my interviews using it back in 2014, 2015. It was a key tool. But the problem with Skype, like you said, too many features and when Microsoft bought it, they used it as a tool to try to get people to create Microsoft accounts. The reason why Zoom won, even though every major tech company has a competitor to Zoom, is because it was the only tool that didn’t require you to create an account. You just click the link and you’re on the call. That small reduction in friction was all it needed to become the number one player. And now it’s really the only player. So goodbye, Skype. We knew you well, but Zoom is better.
Education Funds Directed by Parents (04:20)
Jonathan: One billion dollars of education funds will be directed by parents in private schools instead of by public schools. We already have something like this in Arizona and I love it. We call it ESA and I’m getting about eight thousand dollars a year per kid for curriculum, for classes, for whatever it is that they need and I think this is fantastic.
Thomas: We haven’t had it in Texas. In fact, it’s very controversial in Texas. A lot of homeschoolers are refusing to take the money. We’re very independent down here, and very suspicious of handouts from the government. I did the math on this. I’m not going to be getting back the same amount of money that I’m paying in taxes, because our property taxes here are really high, but it is going to help. And it’s not instead of money going to public schools. My understanding is this is just new money for education, which means it’s effectively a billion dollars flowing to authors because either authors of textbooks or authors of regular books. If you’re writing for homeschoolers, if you’re writing for private school classrooms, there’s a lot of potential dollars that you could get as an author, particularly if you make your book classroom friendly.
Speaking of making your book classroom friendly, I created a new patron tool inspired by this new law that’s passed in Texas called the lesson planner. You upload your manuscript of your book, pick what grade the lesson plan is for, and set the goal for the lesson. That’s all you have to do, and it will generate this massive lesson plan for a presentation by the teacher, interactive elements based off of your book for the classroom. It’s included in the Patreon toolbox, so if you’re a patron of the Novel Marketing podcast at the $10 level or higher, it’s free.
Jonathan: Well, a lot of this has to do also with justifying your book as part of a curriculum. For instance, if I wanted to put a sign on my table at a homeschool convention in Arizona, I could say ESA friendly. And then if I had devotional material or learning material to go along with it, when the government runs a checkup to see if this qualifies for reimbursement or for direct funds, they would see that there is a curriculum associated with it and that will make the case for using ESA funds much better. For us, it’s actually a change. We’re actually just getting the allocation that would have gone to the school for the child. So now they just have this money they need to spend on books and all you have to do is convince them that they should send that money to you.
Thomas: Fran asks, what do we do about people who equate book banning, which has sent people to the executioner’s block, with not allowing in or selecting for schools? There’s a big difference between the government buying your book and making it available to people for free, and the government making it illegal for people to buy your book in the first place. If a book is illegal, that’s an actual book ban. And we don’t have those in America. They’re super duper illegal. The constitution’s really clear about that. But no one has a constitutional right to have the government buy their book and put it in a library.
There’s more books published every day than would fit in most libraries. So libraries have to make decisions and they use a lot of criteria for making a decision. Your book not getting selected doesn’t mean it’s being banned. That said, librarians use political motivations as one of those big decisions. We covered that story last week. So now we’re democratizing the decision-making so that it’s not just librarians and public school teachers making the choices. It’s now also parents of homeschoolers and private school librarians and private school teachers. Having more people have more say, I think is a good solution.
Will Mr. Beast Be Next Year’s Bestselling Author? (09:05)
Jonathan: Will Mr. Beast be next year’s bestselling author? Publisher Weekly reports Harper Collins acquired rights to an untitled thriller co-written by YouTuber Mr. Beast and James Patterson. This is going to be a powerhouse because Mr. Beast knows how to tell a good story and James Patterson knows how to format the story into a novel. I’m actually probably going to read this.
Thomas: I am really excited about this for several reasons. Number one, this book is probably going to be the bestselling book of 2026 because James Patterson is already a really big time author. He’s really good at working with celebrities. He worked with Bill Clinton to write some books and I think he’s written books with two different former presidents. They’re smash hits.
What folks who are over 30 may not know is that Mr. Beast may be the most famous person on the planet. He is incredibly famous for folks under 30. And if he covers his book just one time in just one episode, the equivalent funding of advertising for that will probably be bigger than any other book gets all year. Because to get a spot on a Mr. Beast video costs millions of dollars as he often gets tens of millions of views, sometimes hundreds of millions of views. He’s so big, he got an Amazon Prime deal for his own show on Prime.
Part of the reason why I’m so excited about this is that his core audience isn’t just young people under 30, which aren’t a big reading demographic, but young men under 30, teenage boys, many of whom have never been required to read a book in school ever. And the books they have been required to read are not the kinds of books that cause them to love reading because often the people selecting those books are not selecting them with young men in mind. They’re not reading Monster Hunter International, they’re reading Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby. Nobody fell in love with reading because they’ve read The Great Gatsby. But they might fall in love with reading a Mr. Beast book. And they can maybe then acquire taste for better, higher brow fiction, but you can’t start somebody out with that.
Jonathan: Right. Well, James Patterson is known for his thrillers, but Mr. Beast is known for breaking human beings. If you watch any of his videos, watch the series on Amazon Prime. Ladies, you’re going to hate it. If you’re a nice person, you’re going to hate it. There are two guys on there who work in cyber warfare in the army, they’re contestants, and they broke this woman psychologically that they were stuck with in one of the games to the point that she was crying and she actually eliminated herself from the game. Mr. Beast is a master of psychological warfare. I’m so excited to read this book.
Thomas: Ram’s asking, but how many people are going to read his book though? His audience is very loyal. And we’re starting to brainstorm some titles here. PJ is saying, tentative title, Beauty and the Mr. Beast.
Jonathan: You have to understand that this guy in a different context is a cult leader. He has actual disciples, people who want to be like him. Anyone who wants to be big on YouTube studies his videos to figure out how to be big on YouTube, because his storytelling is unmatched. And the things he dives into make people angry or fascinated. It’s like what preachers like to say about Paul in the Bible. It either starts a riot or a revival. And that is MrBeast on YouTube. So this is going to be a big hit. I think we’re going to see a huge content shift as people realize what can be done. And I think that this matchup is a powerhouse.
Thomas: If you’re a publishing executive, it’s a no-brainer team up. And it could lead to, if it is successful, a whole swarm of these, because there are other famous YouTubers and authors that could team up to match that platform. The key is going to come down to the writing, but I have confidence that Patterson is going to be able to create something that will resonate with MrBeast’s audience, and MrBeast does understand storytelling.
Romanticie Surges (14:03)
Jonathan: All right, we have several pieces of Zeitgeist we’re going to cover. Right now, Klytics by Alex Newton has released a new report on Romanticie. And also one on women’s paranormal fiction. The numbers are significant. It seems that Romanticie has poached most of women’s paranormal fiction pretty much just by renaming it.
Women’s paranormal fiction used to be the biggest deal in women’s fiction for a long time and then Romanticie surged out. I just see it as a rebranding. It’s all the same thing. You’re falling in love with a dragon or a werewolf or whatever it is. And sometimes there’s crime thrillers and stuff like that. But according to new data, four of the five top selling Kindle books of 2025 fall under Romanticie now. Rebecca Yaros just released another book, Onyx Storm, I think. And it’s crushing it. I think it’s over a million copies sold right now.
If you take a look at this Klytics report by Alex Newton, which we should have linked in the show notes, what you’ll see is that there’s this sudden spike, but if you compare it with the paranormal women’s fiction, there’s a sudden drop and that’s just a recategorization. It’s a movement of the market and renaming it as something else because you’re still looking for the same thing. You’re looking for a fantastical setting, a romance, something that’s exciting, something that’s different or arousing depending on what you’re looking for in that market. Another thing that Alex said is that indie authors are the heart of this revolution. They’re the ones that pushed this and Tradpub is just trying to catch up and they’re trying to scale it appropriately. Thomas, what are your thoughts on that?
Thomas: It’s hard for TradPub to catch up because the TradPub process takes one to two years to make a book, which puts them one to two years behind any sort of exploding trend like this. One important thing when you see a genre blowing up is to try to tease out how much is this a genre blowing up or being created and how much of this is one author who just happens to have books that are really popular.
We can’t intuitively understand the Pareto distribution. We understand the standard distribution, that kind of bell curve where most people are near the middle. The Pareto distribution is where Rebecca Yaros lives. It’s where Mr. Beast lives. He’ll get more views in 10 minutes than I’ve ever gotten in my entire lifetime on all of my YouTube videos combined. That’s how the Pareto distribution works. Where there’s a tiny group of haves and a big group of have-nots. It’s sometimes called the 80-20 principle, but it’s not always 80 and it’s not always 20. In publishing, it’s more like the 1-90, I would say. So 1% of people get 90% of the money.
It’s easy to think that a genre is being created when in reality it’s just one book. But often that is how genres get created. Let’s say somebody reads all of Rebecca Yaros’s books and they love them and they binge them. They’re reading one book every two weeks. Well, after two months, that person has now read all of the Rebecca Yaros books there are, assuming she’s got four books. And so now she wants to read the next book and that’s where the genre gets created. Lord of the Rings was so popular. People wanted more Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was dead. And so other authors were like, hey, this is like Lord of the Rings, but a little bit different. And suddenly the epic fantasy genre is born.
So we’re seeing the birth of a genre. I don’t think Romanticie will always be as hot as it is right now, but right now is the white hot moment of Romanticie. It’s also benefiting from a really cool name. Paranormal Women’s Fiction is an awful genre name. No one’s going to Google search that unless they’re a real nerd in the genre, but Romanticie is catchy. You hear it one time, you immediately know what it is. It’s like brunch. It’s just a word that was going to happen.
The one thing that I find a little bit unfortunate is because it’s so hot right now, I was at a bookstore and there wasn’t a single regular fantasy book in the fantasy section. It was entirely Romanticie.
Jonathan: Which is producing a search. I’ve been tracking it on X. Readers are actually now searching for something that’s not Romanticie. It’s in their search query, which is “epic fantasy, dragons, no romance.” So if you’re writing, like me, I don’t write Romantic fantasy. If you’re doing that, make sure that you’re using your targeting keywords to include “no romance,” and you’ll actually hit the people you want to hit at that point.
Horror Boom (19:14)
Thomas: I’m happy to see indie publishing winning. I’m happy to see this genre doing well. It’s not my favorite genre, but there’s a genre I like even less. It’s also on the rise. Speaking of zeitgeist.
Jonathan: The horror. The Bottom Line reports that horror is experiencing a boom like it hasn’t seen since the 1980s. In 2023, Serkana BookScan reported a 24.2% increase in US sales of horror titles. In the UK, Nielsen reports a 54% increase. The biggest year for the genre since accurate records began.
Thomas: And not just that, but the box office too. I follow the box office really closely. It’s rarely that horror movies will be number one in the box office, but they’re often like the spots three to 10, there’s often 50% horror movies in that lower half. And horror movies often have budgets of a million, two million, sometimes $10 million, which means if a horror movie makes $20 million in the box office, they are laughing all the way to the bank. Whereas if a Marvel movie makes $20 million, they are bankrupt. So it’s a very cheap genre. It’s very popular. It’s very resonant with certain audiences right now.
Jonathan: For those who don’t understand why horror is a big deal, you probably do want to include some element of horror in your storytelling. Horror is about connecting to something transcendent. And in horror’s case, it’s bad for you. It’s the flip version of religious faith. Because in horror, particularly cosmic horror, you’re looking at something that you can’t defeat. I see a lot of horror movies that are done badly and I’m like, the second amendment would solve all the problems in this movie. Like just stop running away and falling down, turn and blow the guy away. That’s not a horror movie.
Thomas: I think it’s also for somebody who’s got depression if they’re wanting to feel something, like they just feel very numb, it makes them feel something even if what it’s making them feel is afraid.
Jonathan: And it’s an adrenaline shot. The good horror movies that I’ve seen do their jobs by connecting to something in real life, but it reaches in from somewhere spiritual. That’s why the exorcist is so big. I think that’s why the Smile movies have done so well, besides their fantastic marketing campaign. But it touches something in you that’s already in you. We have the capacity for horror. That’s why it’s a genre. So you should probably include some kind of element in your storytelling. I write epic fantasy, grimdark fantasy kind of a thing. Elements of horror need to be in that. If you’re writing cozy mystery, you should probably back off of it a little bit.
Thomas: I talked about this in one of my episodes about genre and the psychology of why people read, but there is something very elemental to predator and prey relationships. And we play that at very young ages. The game tag, which most children play quite a bit when they’re little, you take turns being the predator and being the prey. And so when you’re it, you’re the predator and you’re experiencing an action adventure story. And when you’re not it, you’re the prey and you’re experiencing a horror story where you’re trying to get away from the person who’s it.
That kind of primal longing, that psychological itch, is something that horror can scratch or horror elements can scratch. You can work in horror elements where there’s a moment where they have to hide without it becoming a horror story. Like Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, at one point they’re hiding and there’s monsters and there’s horror elements, but the story overall is not a horror story. It’s still an action adventure because the protagonists still have a great deal of agency.
Jonathan: A movie that’s perfect for this that you would not think of as horror but absolutely is, is A Quiet Place. If you watched the first A Quiet Place, they have to remain absolutely silent because that’s how the monsters find you is if you make a sound. And it’s perfect because you have to follow the rules. And if you don’t follow the rules, we’re all going to die. And it was a great movie.
Thomas: How much you see of the bad guy tells you a lot, whether it’s horror or action adventure, horror versus thriller. In thriller you see the bad guy quite a bit, but in horror you don’t see the bad guy very much, which is actually why the original Jurassic Park has aged so well, because it’s more of a horror story, because you hardly see the dinosaurs, because they made that movie on Windows 95 computers.
So like the famous T-Rex chase scene is mostly people inside the Jeep and like seeing the water ripple. It’s not actually looking at the T-Rex, partly because it’s scarier that way, Steven Spielberg knew what he was doing, but also because it was really expensive and almost impossible to put a T-Rex on screen. It’s why they did it at night, because that T-Rex would not have looked realistic in the daytime, but with rain and with dark shadows, it covers a lot of CGI sins.
Jonathan: Well, Jay Baker has asked, wouldn’t A Quiet Place be more like Thriller versus Horror? And that’s not true, because in Thriller, you can see the bad guy. Horror is like when Emily Blunt is giving birth and can’t make a sound because the monster’s in the house. That’s not a thrill. That is horror. Or when her baby is in its crib in the water in the basement which is flooded and so is the monster in the water. That’s not thriller, that’s horror.
Christianity on the Rise (26:17)
Thomas: Just because something’s on the rise doesn’t mean that every book has to be horror. There’s a lot of readers who won’t touch a book that has even a hint of it. And so if this is making you uncomfortable, you don’t have to make your book horror. Because it’s not the only thing on the rise. Lots of things are on the rise. Lots of zeitgeist shifts going on. Christianity is on the rise, particularly with young men. The Daily Wire reports that Christianity is on the rise in the US and the UK. It’s surprisingly up in the UK amongst young men, both in evangelical and in Catholic churches.
We’ve seen a significant growth since 2023. So if you’re watching the charts for Christian participation, overall charts were going down, down, down, down, and then bottomed out in 2022. And then starting in 2023, the numbers started going up, but the numbers are going up driven predominantly by young men that are flocking to church so much that they’re making the overall numbers go up, which is a fascinating trend that I’ve been watching really closely.
These are young men who feel like they’ve been left behind by culture, that people don’t like them. They grew up in schools that told them that they were evil because they were men and they were oppressors by their very nature. And they don’t feel very catered to by authors. They don’t feel very catered to by the publishing establishment right now. There’s only one author on the bestseller list for YA books, and it’s a guy, Christopher Paolini, who’s the Eragon guy, it’s like he’s the only one. Other than that, it’s all women across the board.
This is a real market opportunity for authors who are willing to write for young men. I’ve got an episode on how to write for boys on the Christian Publishing Show, and I have an episode on how to write for men on Novel Marketing. If you want to try to adapt your writing for this new growing sector, I would encourage you to check out those episodes. My episode on how to write for men is I think my most popular YouTube episode ever. It’s either number one or number two. It’s very popular, very controversial, lots of comments on that video.
Jonathan: I have my own thought on this. I believe Christianity is on the rise in terms of metrics because when you ask them, they will say, “I am Christian.” When you speak to them, it’s more slogan focused kind of doctrine, which I know exactly what it sounds like. I was in a cult. I was in the Marine Corps. I know what slogan sounds like, when someone actually believes something and when someone is parroting a slogan.
I think there is a brittleness to this movement, and a lot of it is social media performativeness. So when you’re writing to engage with that, I would be aware of that kind of thing. If you’re going to try to grab them, you need the slogan propaganda stuff, the Kool-Aid of the Marine Corps. But once you have that, your substance needs to treat this actual need or this pain point that these young men are experiencing.
If you’re looking at that, you need to look at a lot of what Jordan Peterson was doing 10 years ago, because he was specifically trying to treat that problem, and it contributed to his boom, his success. And if you want to try to imitate that success, you need to be identifying what young men are feeling right now. They’re feeling ostracized, they’re feeling cast out, like they’re unwanted. And the problem is, they’re finding each other. They’re going to form tribes. They’re going to fight back.
Thomas: I think the horror shift and the shift to Christianity are being caused by some of the same sorts of things where people are wanting to feel something, they’re looking for an emotional experience, they’re looking for something that feels real. We live in a world that feels very artificial and very digital, very online, especially young men are very online as are young women. And so things that feel real like fear, like a spiritual experience at an actual physical church. Because it’s not just like survey results, it’s also like church attendance is up with young men. And lots of reports of baptisms.
Whether or not these are genuine or not, it’s not for us to decide necessarily. But I do think that if you want to understand it, you need to look to Jordan Peterson, because he’s the guy who’s chasing these young men into church. He’s not some Christian evangelist. Jordan Peterson isn’t actually Christian, which is fascinating.
Google’s Major Update (31:14)
Thomas: Now we have some hard news to get to, not hard in that it’s psychologically hard, but hard in that this is the news you can use to help sell some more books, particularly regarding search engine optimization. Google’s made a major update. Will your book get lost in the noise? Jonathan, what’s the download?
Jonathan: All right. I have so many things to go over on this. Back in February, Google required that all data scrapers that go through Google are required to execute JavaScript in their data mining activity. And the reason that is important is because executing JavaScript will also activate ads and then activate Google’s metric tracking. What this has resulted in is that a good percentage, at least 34% of Google’s ranking, the way that they rank a topic higher is actually generated by automatic background activity, data scrapers and bots moving through the internet and it’s actually pushing topics and URLs higher in the search instead of actual human interaction. Thomas, what does that mean for us?
Thomas: I don’t entirely know what this means actually. Google’s changing the way that they’re operating. Executing JavaScript means that parts of the page that were previously invisible for Google are now visible. Google’s really struggling as a company and as a search engine. And I don’t know if you’ve done a Google search lately, but the results are really bad right now. And part of the problem is they’re drowning in the amount of new content that’s being generated.
Google’s AI, if you go to Gemini and ask it questions, you get often better results than you get from an actual Google search. Even though the Google search now will often put a Gemini answer, but the Gemini answer is not Gemini’s best models. They’re the really efficient, give it away to everyone free model.
I was tempted to start shorting Google because I don’t know if they’re going to make this transition, but they do have really solid hardware. They are well positioned to have a strong AI play. But I’m wondering if Google search, Bing search, if those are going to go away as a primary way people interact with the internet because I’m finding myself not doing searches much anymore. If I have a question, I now go to an AI and have it do the analysis, have it look up 100 pages and synthesize that data and give me the specific answer and do analysis on it.
AI Users Mating for Life (34:12)
Jonathan: Well speaking of AI, users of AI are now mating for life when it comes to their AI platform of choice. The race seems to be on between AI giants to get the lion’s share of the market now. I don’t want to investigate 12 different AI platforms. I don’t want to look at Claude and Perplexity and ChatGPT and Gemini and Grok. I use ChatGPT, I’m good. It does the thing that I want it to do and it’s getting better.
Thomas: But that’s the worst one, Jonathan. Literally all of them are better than ChatGPT.
Jonathan: I don’t care. They’re all bad. They’re all trying to destroy everything. But the point is, you can see where I’m coming from. I don’t want to go anywhere else. I have my cell phone company and I’m sticking with my cell phone company because I don’t want to research another cell phone company. And this is exactly the trend that users are following on the internet. So now AI companies are racing each other to get those users onto their platform. What that’ll mean is probably lower costs right now and then competition more similar to what we see with cell phone companies in the future. If you switch from your carrier and come over to us and we’ll give you six months free or something like that. Thomas, what do you think?
Thomas: We’ve seen this several times already in my lifetime with new technologies, where when they first come out, it’s a really wonderful experience because the company isn’t trying to make any money. Like social media in the early days was really quite fun. And then it got awful when the company started making money.
Basically, the strategy is you offer a really cheap, really free version, or as cheap as you can, version of your service, and you get as much market share as you can, and you get people addicted, locked in, committed to your product. Uber’s a good example of this. It used to be Uber was cheaper than taking a taxi. They kept the prices crazy low, and gobbled up as much market share from the taxi companies as they could, put as many taxi operators out of business or got them to switch and start taking Uber rides instead. And then once they had dominant market share, the prices started going up. You started seeing surge pricing more often. You started to see the price not quite going down as low as it used to be.
You see the same thing with Facebook where it’s now mostly ads. So right now is the golden age of AI in the sense that you can get an unbelievably great experience that’s free of ads and free of monetization for the most part. Grok is just straight up free. Elon Musk is at war with Sam Altman for personal reasons and the benefits are we don’t have to pay for Grok. Eventually it will be, but right now they’re trying to get you to commit to theirs. Because people, once they start with Claude, they don’t go back to OpenAI because Claude is better at writing than OpenAI is. OpenAI is better at images.
I’m not committed to any of these because I’m trying them all. When I’m building tools for the Patreon toolbox, different tools will use different models based off of which model is the best model for that particular task. Some models are better for some things than others. And so I use them all all the time.
Jonathan: So all of this to say is that Thomas is polyamorous when it comes to AI, and the rest of us are monogamous.
Thomas: It’s a computer Jonathan! I am a happily married man to my own human wife. And I use many AI tools, the right tool for the job.
Jonathan: So all of this to say is that Thomas is polyamorous when it comes to AI, and the rest of us are monogamous.
Thomas: It’s a computer Jonathan! I am happily married man to my own human wife. And I use many AI tools, the right tool for the job.
Multimodal Search and AI Book Recommendations (38:14)
Jonathan: They’re also incorporating something called multimodal search into a lot of these AI programs, which would be like inputting a picture of books that you own. So I would take a picture of my shelf over here, upload it, and then ask the AI, if I liked these books, what could I read that would be similar to these books? And then AI is going to spit out a list of recommendations according to those books. Thomas, real quickly. What are the possible benefits you see of that and what’s the strategy?
Optimizing Your Website for AI (38:46)
Thomas: So AI optimization is still really new. We don’t know how to influence these models, but search engine optimization is really helpful for this. Having good structured content on your website is actually critical. One of the best things you can do to optimize your books for AI is all of the things I’ve been recommending for authors to do for years, which is have a website, have a page for every book, have that page well optimized for search. Good headings, good content, good data, because that web, every webpage on any major website, so if you’re in the top million of US language websites, it’s very likely all of the AI models are training on your website. So if you have a really good page for your book, the AI models are gonna train on that book and you can influence it. So your website is really critical right now. It’s really easy to think, I’m just all in on Amazon. As long as my Amazon page is good, I don’t really care about my website, I’ll abandon it. I’ll update it when I have to. No, your website is critical. Jonathan, you need to work on your website. I have a patron tool that I built called the website scanner. I’m actually working on an episode for next week on the main novel marketing channel where I share all the tools in the toolbox. And I use Jonathan’s website as my example for the website scanner.
Jonathan: Leave me alone!
Thomas: So, but any one of you can use that website scanner privately. You just paste your homepage in there and it will give you things to work on, things to improve in. It specifically looks at your search engine optimization. It looks at your metadata. It looks at your meta title. And if you get that right, you’re really positioning yourself well for this new future where people are taking a picture of their bookshelf and asking for recommendations. The more your site is accessible to these AIs and where they’ve read it, the more likely you are to be recommended when people do that kind of search, because that’s the future, right? That’s a really easy way to get your next book in a really fun way. Pull out your phone, point at your bookshelf or point at a friend’s bookshelf and be like, recommend a book that’s like these books. This is the future. And if you get it right, it’s a lot of potential new sales, new readers that you could attract.
Making Your Content Discoverable (41:04)
Jonathan: So a way to metaphorize real quickly the way that AI is going to behave is when it gets its search request, it gets sent on the hunt, right? It’s a dog sniffing the ground. And you want to have your website in your metadata and in your content structure, which I’m going talk about in second. You want to leave it enough breadcrumbs or enough of a scent that it will come to you naturally. It will turn towards you.
So I recently released a Zombies vs. Marines book called Semper Die. I’m probably not gonna get anyone searching for Semper Die unless they already know about it. But they might search for zombie books, they might search for marine books, they might search for zombies versus marine books. And you want to leave that scent in the hunting ground that people are going so that when the dog, the AI, the SEO, whatever it is, they can run across it and follow it to you. It has to be clear, it can’t be muddled, don’t run through a river, don’t mix it up with other scents. So don’t mix your metadata with another book’s metadata. Remain clear enough and distinct enough that it’ll be able to find you. And that’s what the great point of all that stuff is.
Using AI to Optimize for AI (42:10)
Thomas: Cami said, I asked AI to help me optimize my webpage for SEO and it was great. Yeah, AI can help you optimize for AI.
Jonathan: Ask the robots what the robots want.
Thomas: Yoast SEO, which is this report that we’ve been going through, these last several news items have all been from this one Yoast webinar. Yoast SEO is a plugin for WordPress. I pay for the premium version of it. You probably don’t have to. It’s got a really good free version. It’s the most popular WordPress SEO plugin and it will position you really well to be well optimized, not just for search, but also for AI as we move into that world.
Content Structure for AI Discoverability (42:47)
Jonathan: And actually from that video, I’m hope we’re going to put a link in the blog version of this, talking about how the content structure of a blog will actually beat metadata structure when it comes to AI searching for data. So when the AI actually scans, your article, because people are going to ask questions, right? What, what say you’re writing nonfiction and you want to talk about, what’s the best way to help a kid who’s gone through an abuse situation or, you know, it gets more granular after that. You need to structure your blog to where it has easy headings, subheadings, lists, and bullet points that’s very clear to read, concisely written. You’re not ranting because AI is not going to read you.
Thomas: AI will. This is actually one difference between writing for humans. So we’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about this. For AI Thomas, do we do shorter blogs or longer blogs? And it seems to be that we get better answers through AI Thomas with longer, more robust blog posts. Because AI is really good at taking big amounts of data and consolidating it down into little amounts of data. And it’s getting better and better at what’s called the needle in the haystack test where it can find the one piece of information and the big piece of information.
But what you’re saying about the hierarchy is critical. And let me walk you through what that is. So you want one H1, that’s the title of your blog post or the title of the page. And then you can have multiple H2s, which is like your subheadings on the blog post and then H3 inside of your H2s. Typically you don’t go beyond H3. And learning how to do that for your blogs will also help you do that for your book, which will make formatting your book way easier down the line. If you’re highlighting things and making them bold, you’re doing it wrong. You’re just making extra work for your future self or requiring you to hire somebody to fix it down the road.
Google’s Personal History Based Search (44:36)
Jonathan: Because when you change a heading, you’re changing the metadata, the structure of the actual document. Going on, this is the fun one for all the paranoid people out there. Do remember that one time when people were like, you know, I said this and then my phone started showing me ads for it? That may actually be a thing now. Google just… I believe.
Thomas: It’s always been a thing, Don’t listen to their gaslighting. Facebook has been listening to you the whole time.
Jonathan: They just filed a patent for personal history based search software. Are now gonna be listening to things. Google is gonna be listening to things in its ecosystem to tailor search results to your past history. So if you said something in an email a lot or even used the voice feature to dictate stuff and it went into Google’s ecosystem, Google is gonna minority report this. They’re actually going to tailor search results for you from stuff that you have in your emails. And the one guy in the video brought up something interesting. He’s like, what, I work in SEO. What if I’m advising a client not to go to these adult websites and I give examples of the adult websites is Gmail, because it’s in Google, now going to start feeding me search results based off of things I told a client not to do.
Privacy Concerns and AI (45:57)
Thomas: I don’t think so for several reasons. One, if you’re paying for Gmail, it doesn’t report your data. This is shocking. Almost all the AI models work this way. If it’s free, everything you talk to the AI model with is used for training. But if you pay for it, total privacy. It’s like night and day. And if you pay for Gmail, which if this guy’s a professional, he’s probably using Google Workspace or G Suite for Teams or whatever the name is now. I’m old enough where this particular product from Google’s had like four or five different names and I can never remember the most recent name. It to Google Apps for My Domain. That’s what it was called back in the olden days. Back in my day.
Anyway, I don’t think that’s a problem. Also, large language models are getting much better at processing negatives. So it’s not like the old where it was just looking for keywords. Like my wife and I will be talking about possible plans. We’re like, maybe we could go to the park. And then like my three year old’s like, park, park? It’s like, that’s the only word the three year old heard, didn’t hear any of the other words, right? And that’s kind of how the old search engine bots were, right? They were just looking for keywords and they were ignoring all of the context. It like, yes, this is a park we will go to next week when we’re out with grandma. We’re not going to the park right now, right? Like all of that context is lost. But now AI is good at that kind of context.
Being the Customer, Not the Product (47:24)
Thomas: So be the customer. I probably am going to say this every author update.
Jonathan: Not the product they said it on the video actually they’re like you are not the customer.
Thomas: Mean, yeah. So like for instance, patron tools, you have to pay for them, right? And partly because I have to pay every time you run one of those tools, I have to pay a little bit of money. But I’m a big believer in being with customer and it’s true with AI, it’s true with social media, it’s true with books. Anytime somebody is offering you something for free, they’re making money off of you in some way you don’t know, unless it is a way that you know.
So they’re trying to get you to get the paid version. So like the free version of Yoast is good because they want you to have a good experience with the free version of Yoast so that when you have more advanced needs, you get the paid version of Yoast. That’s a good version of free. Substack is a good version of free. It’s like, hey, we’re free, but if you want to make some money, we’ll make money together and we’ll take a percentage of the money that you make. That’s a good version of free. A bad version of free is free in the way of Facebook because they’re not just selling you to advertisers, they’re also selling your data to advertisers because advertising is always more valuable the more data you have on the people. So you can’t have an ad-supported model and a privacy-first model. Those are incompatible.
AI Answers and Website Traffic (48:38)
Jonathan: So speaking of traffic and how ads are working, another problem that’s coming up is as AI answers people’s questions, so when you type into, say, Google search, what is, what’s the best way to cook a souffle? Okay, do I throw it in the oven, do I do water under it or whatever? It’ll come up with an AI summary, right? Well now, the thing they’re seeing is it’s reducing by a third the number of clicks to the URL that had that information.
So now that site is not benefiting from the traffic because AI answered the question by taking it from the URL. So this is a big deal for non-fiction authors who usually rely on this SEO strategy to generate traffic to their website. And it may be seen initially as a negative, like, holy cow, I’m losing 33% of my traffic because AI is stealing my answers and putting it as its own. Another way to look at this is now all the traffic you’re getting is higher quality. This 33% of people that aren’t visiting, they were just there for an answer anyway and they were gonna leave without making a conversion decision.
Case Study: WordPress Hyperlink Traffic (49:43)
Thomas: I have an example of this. 15 years ago, I was getting a question from a lot of my website clients. This is back when I was writing, building websites for authors. And I wrote a blog post titled, How to Add a Hyperlink to WordPress.
This blog post has gone on to get hundreds of thousands of visits. I have spent, I don’t even know how many, probably hundreds of dollars hosting this page for people. For many months over the last 15 years, it was our number one best performing page because it was a really good answer to that question, how to add a hyperlink to WordPress, because we didn’t just give one way to do it, we gave a whole bunch of ways to do it.
And that page resulted in zero sales for anything ever because people looking to add a hyperlink to WordPress were not our target customer. They weren’t authors. They weren’t in the market for any of the things. None of you listening found me because you first Googled how to add a hyperlink to WordPress. But for over a decade, we ranked in the top set of results and sometimes really high for the top set of results. And so if Google were to take that traffic away from me and redirect it to Gemini. Where if you do a search for how to add a hyperlink to WordPress, now you’ll get a Gemini summary. It will save me hosting money, but it also makes me sad because it was kind of an ego boost to get all of that traffic. It’s like, man, our website’s so popular.
Jonathan: That just saves you money.
Jonathan: It’s one of those false things, like social media interaction doesn’t result in book sales, but it made me feel good, so that’s what I’m going for, so now you’re wasting effort on vanity, you know, like Ecclesiastes talks about. That’s the big draw there. So I’m actually happy that this thing is gonna cut out non-converting traffic. They can get their answer, they can move on with their lives, I’m not paying to host them on my site, and my traffic is now higher quality and my numbers look better in terms of conversions in that case.
When AI Summaries Hurt Your Business (51:43)
Thomas: Yeah, we are still the number one result for the stupid search phrase. At least when I do a search, it comes up number one. But there is a Gemini summary above my, the current results as I do this search myself, there’s the AI overview, and then there’s a sponsored ad for WP Engine, and then there’s the author media post, and then there’s related questions, and it goes on from there.
Jonathan: Well, hopefully that’ll go away now Thomas.
Thomas: Yeah, hopefully this will save me a little bit of money, but I can see this hurting. Let’s say it was a, do I get cockroaches out of my house type question? And I had written a blog post and I sold a product that was a cockroach poison. And people would go to that post, they would read all of my suggestions and I would recommend my cockroach poison. So they would take that and that was a good source of sales for me.
Jonathan: Yeah.
Thomas: And now there’s an AI overview that has a lot of the same content of my blog post, but it recommends the other guys insecticide. That’s where it gets scary. Cause I do know people who have built whole businesses off of being number one for one search term or another. And all that traffic comes to a single blog post and that blog post is integrated in with their core offering. So for me, I’m not selling hyperlinks. I’m not really selling WordPress. So it was not connected to my core offering, but we had another post called 101 Book Marketing Ideas That Will Change Your Life. And for years, that was a core, if you did a search for book marketing, we were one of the number one, number two results for that. We had 87 book marketing ideas that will change your life. I recently updated it and expanded it to 101, which you can find on authormediated.com, it’s a free download now. But that was much more integrated.
Jonathan: Ha
Thomas: Back in the day other people basically ripped it off and made their numbers bigger than ours. There was this big arms race of how many book marketing ideas you could give away in your guide and that did hurt because the kind of person searching for book marketing was the kind of person who might go on to buy a course from author medium.
Jonathan: I love capitalism.
Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. So this is probably going to hurt affiliate revenue, ad revenue, because as fewer people are moving to the URL, those are traffic reliant to determine revenue. So that’ll probably impact those kinds of things.
OpenAI’s Social Network Plans (54:22)
Jonathan: Probably the last one of these we’re going to mention for now is open AI is developing its own social network. You can now talk to more bots on a different social network.
Thomas: So the AI community has been all abuzz about this because this is Sam Altman and Elon Musk really don’t like each other. And so Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI from, or chat GPT from OpenAI. And now Sam Altman’s like, well, I’ll find, you know, I’ll start my own social network. What this really shows is to be competitive with a large language model. You really need a good source of real-time data.
And this is one advantage that Grok has, is that Grok is continually trained on Twitter. And so, let’s say it was yesterday, the Pope had just been announced, let’s say, an hour ago, and nobody knows who the Pope is. But if you ask Grok, who’s the new Pope and what do we know about him, Grok has all of the information from everybody who’s been talking about it for the last hour and has the ability to search the web overall. And that’s just an advantage that it has over GPT, which can only search the web, but the web doesn’t have a lot of context yet, right? So it’s brand new, nobody was expecting this particular Pope. And so OpenAI is seeing that they have a disadvantage moving forward, that they don’t have a social network. And all of the major social networks already have large language models that they’re working on, right? So Llama doesn’t seem to be super connected with Facebook, but it could be in the future.
Jonathan: Right.
Thomas: And so they’re gonna try to create a social network. It’s not going to work. Nerds have been trying to start social networks for the whole of the internet. Google has tried to start like dozens of social networks. And the problem is for social network to work, it’s got to be cool. It’s gotta have the cool kids there, the people you want to hang out with, right? This is why Facebook took off, because it started off at Harvard. Who do college kids see as cool?
Jonathan: It needs socials.
Thomas: Harvard, and then it was only Ivy League, and then was only college students. So who do want to be around with the college students? The high school students. Who do they open it up to next? The high school students. And now you’ve got this thing that all the kids are into, and when all the kids are into it, who wants to be a part of it? The adults, and that’s how they took, and their moms. Yeah, I’m a cool mom. So this is a desperation play. I don’t think it’s going to work, but we will be covering it because they’re gonna, they have billions of dollars to make it a glorious failure.
Jonathan: All the moms that used to be in high school. Exactly, yeah.
Jonathan: They’re gonna try to make it work.
Thomas: And we’re gonna, and there’ll probably some benefits, I’m sure, maybe, I don’t know, of being a part of the social network. I’m not a big fan of it for authors because authors tell themselves social networks will help them sell books and they don’t. And I don’t think that this is gonna help you sell books, but there may be some other uses. I’ll keep an eye on it. As we will all of these breaking stories.
Closing and Contact Information (57:14)
Jonathan: Yeah, don’t fall into the trap of crypto, which is like, you gotta jump on it right now to be the first in the space in order to, they’re ground floor. Don’t do that, okay.
Thomas: Yeah. Jonathan, where can people find out more about you?
Jonathan: All right, couple of things. They can find out about me on Substack is primarily where I’m putting most of my content. Substack.JonathanSugar.com. You can email me at jjsugar at gmail.com. You can find me on social media.
Thomas: And check out his new and improved website that he’ll be working on this weekend, jonathansugar.com. You don’t have your most recent book on your website and you just launched it. You gotta…
Jonathan: You really want to do that.
Jonathan: I’M WORKIN’ IT!
Thomas: All right, you all have a wonderful weekend. We’ll be back at 4 p.m. next week. Remember to like our new channel at some point. These live streams are gonna move over to the Author Update channel. So if you haven’t yet, click the link down below. We need to get at least 100 subscribers so we can start doing thumbnails. So please subscribe to the new channel. Also subscribe to Novel Marketing. It’s not going away, but Novel Marketing is gonna be the evergreen how-to type content that it’s always been. We’re gonna move all these crazy news shows over to their own channel for people who like that sort of thing. I’m Thomas Umstead, Jr. Live long and prosper.
Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Sugar.
