Do 45% of Authors *Already* Use AI?! | Author Update

Thomas: Welcome to Author Update. I’m Thomas Umstead, Jr. And sometimes on this show, we don’t talk about AI even a little bit. And today is not one of those days. What’s our first story, Jonathan?

Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Scherger. This is not one of those shows.

How Many Authors Are Using AI? (00:12.84)

Jonathan: The first story that we have is how many authors are actually using generative AI. Bookbub did a survey of over 1200 authors and trying to figure out what the numbers are of authors who actually use AI and trying to separate it from the noise and the yelling that’s going on on social media right now. And it has found that about 45% of authors who were surveyed are actually using some form of generative AI, whether it’s in their writing, whether it’s in their marketing, whether it’s in their illustrations or what have you. About just under 50% are saying, hard no, don’t plan to, it’s the devil, know, burn the witch. And then just about six or 7% is like, no, but I might in the future. I just don’t really know enough about it yet, I don’t know what to say. So this is Bookbub’s findings on who’s using AI. There’s a lot of common objections to them. Thomas, what are some of the objections?

Thomas: Well, first, this reminds me of an old joke that you probably heard many times as a good Baptist. But you know how Lutherans famously don’t recognize the Pope and Catholics don’t recognize Martin Luther? Well, Baptists don’t recognize each other at the liquor store.

Jonathan: I’m a Baptist, it’s funny. We don’t talk about liquor stores, Thomas.

Thomas: So, apparently you haven’t heard that one before. This was a common joke. I went to a Baptist university. Yeah. So you see somebody else from your Baptist church, the liquor store, and you just don’t recognize each other. Well, for authors, same way with AI. They’ll talk a big game at church, at author church, about how much they dislike AI, but secretly they are using it. Many, many, many of them are using it.

AI Usage Stats (01:59.18)

Thomas: I want to go through some of the stats of this because there’s also a lot who don’t and there’s a lot who are open to using it if they could figure it out. And so the most common thing that authors are using AI for is research. And this is where in some ways it’s not even really an AI story. It’s a Google got awful story. Like using Google now feels like how Alta Vista felt in 2002. And using Grok’s deep search feels like how Google felt in 2002. Like Google search has become a really terrible way of doing any kind of knowledge finding. Google’s gotten really bad. And meanwhile, a lot of these AI tools have gotten really good. And Google knows this. They’re just this week announced a whole new search engine powered by AI that they’ll be rolling out over the next few months. And this is, I think, a very safe use of AI for research.

You do want to check, but that’s all like to make sure that the research is valid, but that’s always been the case. I remember my speech and debate coach back in 2002 being like, just cause you found something on the internet doesn’t mean that it’s true. A lot of people forgotten that now, but it’s still the case.

The number two most common use of AI as copy and art for marketing purposes. So a lot of people are using AI to help them for marketing. So patron toolbox type stuff is a very high use case. And it’s interesting because I have personally not gotten much pushback for the toolbox tools. The feedback has been either super positive or like people having trouble because they forgot their password. It’s the number one source of…

Jonathan: No one’s admitting that they used them, Thomas.

Thomas: It’s possibly true a lot of people won’t talk about it publicly because they’re afraid of the butlery and jihad against AI.

Jonathan: That shall not make a machine a legless CV of nine.

Thomas: But, yeah. If you all don’t know what the Butlerian Jihad is, it’s from the Dune novel universe where there was this huge holy war against machines made in the likenesses of the human mind. But I think using it for AI, sorry, for marketing is really popular. And then the next use case was outlining and plotting, which I was surprised. Then editing and proofreading. Now, this is the one where people are wrong because most authors are using either ProWritingAid or Grammarly, and both of those are powered by large language models trained on copyrighted materials. So for people who are all high and mighty about the original sin of AI, just realize if you’re using Grammarly, you’re a hypocrite.

Jonathan: Hahahaha

Thomas: So if you want to take that moral stance and be consistent about it, you have to be consistent about it and uninstall Grammarly. Grammarly has gone full in on the LLM stuff, and it secretly has been from the very beginning. Then real quickly, then jacket copy, so back cover copy, then writing, then cover art. There’s a big other category here I’m curious about. Then audio book narration and then translation. They didn’t ask about dictation. I think using AI for dictation is a really good use of it and one I don’t think most people would have an objection to. And dictating books is a very old practice. It goes back 2000 years plus. We know some of the books of the Bible were dictated, because the guy who took the dictation literally wrote his name at the end. I, Tercius, greet you in the name of Christ is right there at the end of Romans, who wrote down these words. And occasionally Paul would pull the quill out of his hand and be like, see, I, Paul, am writing this in my own large handwriting. So dictation’s a really common way. Obviously having an amanuensis and paying somebody to do it’s very expensive. And the art of writing in shorthand has been lost, most humans don’t even know what shorthand is, much less how to write in it. AI can do this quite well.

Objections to AI (05:52.01)

Thomas: So real quickly, one of the things in the survey that came up was objections to AI. And I want to go through these. I’ve ranked them from what I think are good objections to bad objections.

Jonathan: Part of the joy of writing novels is doing it myself. Where’s the fun in getting AI to do it?

Thomas: So this is actually Larry Caria’s criticism. And his argument is writing books is the fun part, editing books is the work. And by having AI write your book, where you then edit it, you’re taking away all the fun out of the process. And I think this is actually very valid. Most people write because writing is fun, because they enjoy the journey. And if you take the joy out of the journey, they won’t do the work. This is why if you’ll notice the Pitch and Toolbox tools, none of them actually write your book for you. I don’t have any moral objection to using it for helping you to write your book, but just realize that is the fun part. For most authors, they enjoy writing far more than they enjoy editing or marketing, which are the other two big tasks for authors.

Jonathan: But let me push back a little bit on it. Letting it write for you, I agree, takes all the fun out of it. Letting it write with you is something else entirely. It’s like if you were sitting in a group and coming up with ideas for the way the book should go, which is part of the big draw of Dungeons & Dragons, right? You’re writing a story together and you’re all contributing to it, and it’s really fun. You can do that with AI. It’d be like, hey, chat GPT, you know, Skynet, whatever. What do you think I ought to do here? And then you look away, that was good. That was a really interesting idea. And you’re kind of working with it like that to create your initial draft, then I’m all for that. Getting it to write for you, I agree with Larry. That does take all the fun out of it.

Thomas: And I’ve actually thought about one of the tools I’ve thought about building, you can let me know in the chat if you think this would be helpful, is a name brainstormer. So if you want somebody who was born in 1954, having a brainstormer that will give you names that were common for babies born in 1954, and also their meanings and other things that kind of does that research for you. You as the author are still picking one of those names, or maybe you don’t pick any of the names, but it’s kind of informed by data. Cause some people really know this. My wife, like Christmas for her is not actually Christmas morning. It’s when the social security administration releases their name, data, spreadsheet, download. She goes and with all the other name nerds, they download this fee and they dig through the names and it’s like split down by state and the name of our youngest daughter. She’s one of only like two or three other girls in all of Texas that have that name this year. So we had a very unusual name for our youngest. And so for her, that’s really fun. And she’ll know if you name a character incorrectly. It’s like, that name would not have been the name of somebody that age. That will take her out of your story if you pick a name that’s of the wrong decade.

Jonathan: I was at college when everyone was named either Sarah or Rachel.

Thomas: Yep, yep. Jessica, in our age, Sarah, Rachel, and Jessica were the big ones.

More Objections to AI (09:16.67)

Jonathan: Alright, second objection. AI is theft. Period. There are no ethical uses of a program built on stolen IP.

Thomas: Okay, so, I would put more weight in this argument if people applied it even-handedly. But there are many copies, many thefts of your intellectual property that you don’t object to. So for instance, Google has a cache of all books and all web pages on the internet that it uses to inform its search. Entirely separate of AI, and it’s been doing this for a very long time, as does archive.org. And if you object to it in one instance, if you really think that it’s theft, then you would also object to it in these other instances. But in my experience, it’s kind of a red herring. People don’t really mind what Google’s doing, they don’t really mind what archive.org’s doing, they may not even know because they haven’t been inflamed about it, enraged about it. So they’re just kind of parroting talking points that they’ve heard because AI makes them uncomfortable because it’s new and scary.

Thomas: I’m gonna get so much hate comments. We got our first one-star review on our podcast over AI. And over politics. I’m not sure what made them more angry.

Jonathan: Well, here’s one I think is really interesting. Gotta figure out a good voice for this. AI is better than humans. AI is eventually going to put writers, graphic artists, and narrators out of business. I don’t want to help Skynet do this. Terminators are gonna take art away from us.

Thomas: In this, yeah, so this goes hand in hand and people who believe that AI is going to put everyone out of work also often believe the next objection, which is.

Jonathan: AI is worse than humans. It has so many glitches that when it- WHEN it gets things wrong, it only creates more work for me.

Thomas: So you gotta pick one of these. Can’t use both. Either it’s creating a bunch of slop that’s just awful, or it’s better than humans and we’re all gonna be put out of work. In reality, we have will, AI doesn’t have will. It’s a tool like a drill. Drills don’t build houses, people build houses. Tractors don’t till fields, humans till fields using the tractors.

Jonathan: I’m gonna do both.

Thomas: And both of these arguments take the agency out of humans.

Jonathan: There is only one use case that I think would be even mildly concerning, and it’s only if you’re like a really bad author, which is readers having a chance to just throw in a bunch of tropes into an AI generation engine and it writes them a novel for them to read. I only see that as a problem if you have not improved your voice and you have not improved your craft. People are gonna want to come to read you. They want to read an authentic human voice. I mean, we’ve already seen that in cooking, right? I mean, we had this big push of chain restaurants in the 90s and 2000s, but then cooking shows came out and we just see a huge return to people preparing their own food, you know, putting love into the meal, putting standards into it. YouTube is now chock full and saturated of all that kinds of stuff. I think we’re gonna see the same thing. We might see a whole bunch of TV dinners for a while, but that’s not what people are gonna want to eat all the time.

Thomas: And the technology that makes something cheap and easy often eventually kills it. So the spreadsheet made creating a Yellow Pages really cheap and easy. So for decades, the only company that could afford to make a Yellow Pages was the phone company. And you got the official Yellow Pages from the official phone company because it was this big operation, thousands and thousands of salespeople calling up businesses, getting their information, compiling in paper, text, all of this information. Then the spreadsheet came along and suddenly you had two or three yellow pages that you could choose from. And printing a yellow pages became very inexpensive and a huge moneymaker.

Jonathan: Yeah, it was a weapon. Yeah. We were always trying to rip him in half.

Thomas: Do you remember that era when there was like three yellow pages and they were like buying TV ads, trying to convince you to get their yellow pages? But that same technology that made making a yellow pages cheaper and easier eventually got rid of the yellow pages altogether. And so the kind of reader who just wants to throw some tropes in a machine and have the AI write their book, they’re very quickly gonna want to just have an interactive story, where suddenly they’re playing more of a video game than a book. Because the whole point of reading a book is that you’re kind of surrendering yourself to the narrative that’s being created by somebody else. And so if you’re creating the narrative, that’s a very different act for a very different mood and a very different kind of person. So I don’t think we’re gonna see competition from that angle. I do think readers, some readers, will choose to go that way, but… You know, some readers choose to play video games. In fact, there’s a lot of, we have a lot of video game stories coming up later.

Jonathan: I was just gonna say that I think this is more gonna go into the video game like a phone video game market where you’re gonna play a JRPG and you’ll put in your response to it and it’ll generate a new scenario for you based off of your response. I think that’s more likely where this is gonna go than novels. There’s more money in the phone game market. So I think that’s where it’s gonna go. Real quick before we get to our next story I do want to remind all of you if you are watching this live go ahead and click the subscribe button. There’s no reason not to click it. It’ll let you know when the your next show is coming up. It will register us in Amazon’s algorithm. It’ll allow us to monetize and do all the wonderful things that make YouTube shows successful. So please go ahead and click the subscribe button.

Thomas: And that’s right, and subscribe to the actual Author Update channel, because this show will be moving at some point to, right now we’re still piggybacking on novel marketing, but Author Update has its own channel now and we actually linked to it successfully this time. So do go and like that channel. We also take clips from the episodes. So if you want to share a specific segment with your writer friends, you can find those clips on the Author Update channel and there may or may not be an evil laugh from Jonathan that got uploaded recently to the Author Update channel.

AI in Journalism (15:36.44)

Thomas: So now with 45% of authors using AI to some degree or another, let’s talk about other people who are using AI, including journalists. Jonathan, what’s going on with this?

Jonathan: Here’s the bad use case of AI. So, according to World, the Chicago Sun Times and the Philadelphia Enquirer recently published a book list of mostly fake titles generated by AI. The 15 book summer reading list published by the paper on Sunday and the Philadelphia paper on Thursday only had 5 real titles in it. Turns out the faulty list was part of an insert syndicated by King Features, and the Chicago-based writer Marco Buscaglia, who used AI to write the piece and didn’t fact check it. He didn’t know it was gonna be used as part of this piece. They just threw it in. They’re like, this is interesting. We need to have something interesting thrown into this. So they put it in and didn’t check it at all. And it’s not real books!

Thomas: What a freelance writer not being told all of the information he needed to do his assignment. I’m shocked, Jonathan, shocked.

Jonathan: That never happens. Never happens.

Thomas: This is very interesting that everyone is acting so surprised about this story because I guess it wasn’t common knowledge that newspapers have been using AI to write articles, not for a few years, but for over a decade. So for five plus years, 10 plus years before ChatGPT came out, newspapers were using AI to generate stories, particularly financial stories. So the early AIs, the pre-ChatGPT 3.5, were actually pretty good at taking a financial statement from a publicly traded company and taking that data and narrativizing it. In another really early use case of AI, we’re talking like 2009, 2010, 2011 was taking a general story and localizing it. So you’d take some general story and then you’d localize the data. So you’d have some big release of data that has like county by county breakdown of the data. And the newspaper would then share that data, but the AI would customize the story. So the Austin version of that story would have examples from counties around Austin, whereas the Phoenix Sun version of that story would have examples from around Phoenix. And so this has been going on for a really long time. And I hate to break to you, but a lot of the news is fake news. It’s like the AIs can’t be trusted and the humans also can’t be trusted. Like I know some people still think that if the New York Times says that or the Chicago Sun Tribune says that it’s the truth, but it’s not necessarily the truth. People are liars.

Jonathan: What?

Thomas: Computers make mistakes. And part of what drove this was the newspaper business got really hammered. They lost their classified business. Then they started moving to the left and started losing their subscriber base. When half of the residents of a town get made angry with your reporting and they stop becoming subscribers, it really shrinks your subscriber base. I remember being a kid and always wanting to get the newspaper so I could read the funny pages. And our local paper was so left-leaning that it made my parents so angry they didn’t want to pay to support what my dad called the Austin Un-American Spaceman.

Jonathan: Hahahaha

Thomas: So the newspapers didn’t realize that. Most newspaper people really think of themselves as centrists because they just don’t interact with folks on the right. You know, there came out that like nobody at NPR is a Republican, like at the editorial level and above, there’s like not a single one. And so it’s like, if none of your friends are Republicans, if you’ve never even talked to a Republican, other than shouting at them at a protest, it’s like, how do you even know how they think, right? It’s like, you get very disconnected. And so they kept cutting, they kept losing money, they kept cutting costs, and they started making cuts in their editorial department. And so this is why they were so early to adopt AI, really early on. And you’ll notice in the apology from the Chicago Times, they didn’t apologize for using AI, because they use that all over the paper. They apologize for the inaccuracies because they got caught. And this is the thing, everyone’s like, we’re going to catch you using AI. The only reason they got caught was because they didn’t fact check it. And the guy who wrote this didn’t even check to see if these books were real, which means he had to been using a pretty obscure prompt, or he was using an AI that wasn’t very fluent in books. My guess is he was specifically prompting the AI for like, undiscovered books or like, you know, hidden gems, some kind of trigger like that and kept asking for more and more obscure books until the AI is like, obscure books? I’ll give you obscure books. These books haven’t even been written yet. He’s like, perfect, copy paste. My work here is done.

Fantasy Author Leaves His Prompt In His Book

Jonathan: Hahaha. Another fantastic use case, and I find this one delightful, is this guy put out a book and he left his prompt in the text of the book. Okay? First of all, the first sin this guy committed is that it’s written in present tense, and I can’t stand that, personally.

Thomas: Come on. Hunger Games is in present tense. It’s fun.

Jonathan: Ash’s scales darken as his fire magic heats the air around us. I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with Jay Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements. We need to tell Kai. Okay, if you’re going to do this, take out the prompt!

Thomas: Remember, 45% of authors using AI in some degree, very small percentage are not hiring human editors to check things over. You need some beta readers, you need some human editors. I don’t want to beat up on this guy too much, but… Yeah.

Jonathan: No, no, no, but it’s hilarious.

Spotify and Findaway Voices (22:19.91)

Jonathan: All right. So moving off of AI for a little bit. There is an interesting story where Find a Way Voices, by Spotify has now split its distribution. And this is really interesting. It is now possible to upload directly to Spotify through Spotify for authors. Okay. So if you just want Spotify metrics, you can just upload directly to Spotify.

Thomas: So this is Audiobook News for those of you don’t know what these companies are.

Jonathan: And sometimes that’s better because if you go through Find a Way, there might be a delay in reporting coming from Spotify. I know I find that with audible when I did it that way. But if you want to do wide distribution through other distributors, say you’re going to libraries or something else like that, audio books are now going to go through a company called in audio. If your books are already in Find a Way Voices, they’re still going to be available and distributed through in audio. It might necessitate a login change or something like that, but it’s still going to be the same basic system. But they’re just now splitting that you can put it up through Spotify directly, and then if you’re going through everyone else, it’s in audio.

Thomas: Yeah, I think this is a big branding blunder to the level of HBO Max taking away HBO from the name and then realizing, wait, Max is not a valuable word, we should add it back. So they recently put the HBO back. Findaway Voices is throwing away one of their biggest assets, which is their name, Findaway Voices, because neither of these two subsidiary companies is using the name Findaway Voices, which I think is going to really hurt them.

Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.

Thomas: And for example, I have old episodes where we talk about finding way voices and talk about when it’s a useful tool. And now when people hear finding way voice or in the future, let’s say a year from now, people hear that episode, they’re not going to know what we’re talking about because in audio, all one word is a terrible company name. It hurts me. And it’s, it makes me sad what Spotify has done. They’ve kind of taken finding way voices, which served a really useful niche and they’ve broken it into smaller pieces, each of which is less useful for authors. And in doing so, they’ve helped kind of encapsulate Audible’s dominance in the market in some ways. That said, being on…

Jonathan: Yeah, I do like the other thing that’s happening that they’re doing though. So Spotify changed kind of the format. So when you do Audible, you want an audiobook on Audible, what do you gotta do? You gotta spend a credit, right? And your subscription only gives you one credit. I have the one that gives you two credits. And so that credit is important because it’s worth 15 bucks or whatever the subscription is that you’re paying. So you’re really careful about how you’re spending that credit.

Thomas: And it’s psychologically difficult to ask for refund. Because Audible’s defense would be, well, if you don’t like it, if you’ve listened to less than two hours of the book, you can get your money back. But that still, it biases Audible users towards big authors, authors they’ve read before, sure bets. So how is Spotify different?

Jonathan: So Spotify, they’re including with their premium subscription 15 hours of audiobook listening for their premium audiobooks. And I know readers who go on to Spotify and they just listen to the free audiobooks, you know, because they’re budget conscious or whatever. But for people who are paying for the premium subscription to Spotify, who are now able to just listen to 15 hours of any audiobook they want, it has created a psychological tolerance for new authors and Spotify is seeing that people are now experimenting with new authors more because of the way their system is constructed and this is really important for us indie authors. You need someone to take a chance on you. You need someone to take that risk or at least lower the barrier for the risk that they’re taking and man if they make a bad choice on their audible credit dude that’s their month. But if they listen to 20 minutes of your book and decide they don’t like it they still got 14 hours, 14 and a half hours left. And that’s such a huge deal that people are now listening to indie books as long as they’re on Spotify. So this is huge for us. Thomas, what do you think?

Thomas: Yeah, the medium is the message and it is interesting how Spotify is really shifting consumer behavior. And it’s really growing the overall pie of listeners. Because I don’t really know anybody who was on Audible, a hardcore Audible user. And then they’re like, wow, I don’t use Audible anymore. I switched over to Spotify. But I have talked to people who weren’t audiobook consumers before. They’re like, well, I already have a Spotify subscription. I’ll try this book. Hey, this is kind of good. Listening to audiobooks is kind of fun. Fiction can be good. It’s suddenly you just created a reader out of a music listener It’s like that’s really good for our industry And so in this in this regard, I am thankful Spotify is doing good things.

Jonathan: Yes.

Thomas: As podcasters, we have a very fraught relationship with Spotify. They tried to take over podcasting the way YouTube took over online video and so the podcast industry kind of all we all gathered together like Roman Legionnaires and locked our shields and held our ground and Spotify finally wandered off to go bother somebody else.

Jonathan: Give them nothing! Take from them everything!

Thomas: It was very scary there for a few years. So and they spent a lot of money trying to buy their way into podcasting and it didn’t work and now they’re trying to compete they’re not gonna be able to buy their way into audiobooks because audible is Amazon and Amazon has all of the money but they’re one of the few companies that actually can give Amazon some legitimate competition, which we desperately need because Amazon doesn’t treat Indies well, it doesn’t treat publishers well because it knows it has such dominant market position. It’s the same way that Apple treated the music industry back in the 90s when they first created iTunes. They’re like, we know you’re desperate, so this is the best you can get, take it or leave it.

Jonathan: And it’s even worse with Amazon because Amazon completely dominates the market, but they don’t care about it. It’s such a minuscule part of their profits that they don’t need to care about it. And the conjunction of those two things is just terrible for us.

Thomas: Yeah, Ted is asking, is 15 hours enough for a single book? And it is for some books, but remember, that resets every month. And not everybody is willing to commit to 15 hours of audiobook listening a month. So if somebody listens to an hour of audiobooks a week, 15 hours is plenty of time to have basically unlimited audiobook listening, because at the end of the month, you’ve listened to four hours, and so the next month you listen to four hours, you kind of slowly work your way through audiobooks. It wouldn’t work for me. I’m a audible platinum plus member. I calculate I bought over a thousand audio books on audible I used to get there like annual platinum package like two or three times a year I’m not quite as voracious now that I’m married, but yeah, I listened to a lot of auto audio audible audiobooks back in the day.

Jonathan: But also if you are that level of audio consumer, it is a big deal to you to not blow credits. If you’re gonna waste time, I’d rather only waste half an hour and still have my time left, and then could just buy more time. Which is what you were doing on Audible, you were just buying more credits. It’s a much better budget and also less waste involved.

Thomas: Where it breaks down is if you want to listen to a 60-hour Brandon Sanderson book, I think on Spotify you’re still paying full price for it, which is like 40 or 50 bucks. And so at that point they’ve priced themselves entirely out of the market because you can get that same Sanderson book for a single credit on Audible. So again, it’s favoring authors with shorter books, whereas Audible favors authors with longer books. So it’s very much a zig where the other guy zags strategy.

Jonathan: But again, that’s exactly which is good. That’s good. Let’s create two different stores where you go and get different things. It’s either Trader Joe’s or you’re going to what do you have in Texas? H-E-B? Sorry. I just brought up the cult didn’t I? Let’s try it again, What-a-burger.

Thomas: H-E-B is the best grocery store. We’re very nationalistic with our restaurants and stores. HEB is the official grocery store for the nation of Texas. They don’t exist outside of Texas.

Google and AI Models (30:29.34)

Jonathan: Yes, yes. So Google has released the best ever AI model. At their AI event they announced updates to Gemini 2.5 Pro, which show it to be the most powerful AI in the world. 48 hours later, Anthropic released Claude IV, which shows it to be the most powerful AI in the world.

Thomas: Normally we have to wait 10 days between best AI models. This time we got it in 48 hours. It’s almost like everybody in the industry waits for Google to release and have some big announcement and then they jump on top of it. I’ve started playing with Gemini and where Gemini is really useful is when you’re wanting to do things with your entire book. So the chapterizer, a patron tool, now runs on Gemini and it’s way better than the old one that ran on I think it was OpenAI’s 03mini, either that or DeepSeek. That’s a tricky task for an AI because they all do fine on a 200 page book, but nobody in Indie World writes 200 page books. Everybody writes 300 page books. And for whatever reason, that length just causes the AIs to choke because they don’t have a bigger enough context window.

Gemini currently has a million token context window. They’re going to be upgrading it soon to a two million token context window, which is plenty of tokens to ingest your entire book without having to vectorize any of it. So it can have your entire book in its context so that you can do cool things with it. And I’m going to be building a lot of tools using Gemini where it creates a character Bible, so it lists all of your characters from your book, writes a little bio about each character based off of the writings that you wrote in your book about that character, doing the same thing for locations and other things like that. There’s magical things happen once you can pull an entire book into an AI’s context window. GPT stills kind of struggles with this. If it’s a shorter book, it can handle it. They just recently opened AI, increased their context window, and so it does better, but you have to start a new project. Gemini though is the current leader in this. And it’s one of the advantages of using a patron toolbox tool is that I play with the different models and I pick the model that’s best for that particular task. And I’m really excited about the opportunities that Gemini is opening up. Anthropics, Claude is the best at writing. So a lot of the like back cover copy patron tools run on Claude. And I do use GPT-SUM. But if you’re a GPT maximalist, Jonathan, you’re missing out on some of the best tools for certain kinds of tasks.

Jonathan: I just don’t care anymore. Look, we’re in a nuclear arms race right now, where everyone is trying to come out with the newest, best, most powerful, fastest AI tool to grab as much of the market share as they can. I think it’s best, it’s in my best interest to just wait and see who’s coming out ahead, let the, let things settle down. And when we see who’s doing the best, as far as I’ve seen, Claude has just the best writing when it comes to AI generation. It has the most, you know, simulated emotion in it. It seems to have the best idea of context and creating something that a human would enjoy. I’m still never gonna take it on its own. I’m always gonna adapt it, which is what I would do with anyone else. I don’t take what an editor gives me and just use it. I always adapt it and tweak it and whatever, because it’s gotta be me. It’s gotta be my voice. So I’m waiting for the dust to settle, everyone’s racing right now, and if you’re just jumping on every horse that’s pulling ahead, I mean, you’re jumping on a lot of horses here.

Thomas: There’s this adoption curve. You’ve got the early adopters and you have the early majority and the late majority and then you have the laggards. You all can guess where Jonathan is on that adoption curve.

Jonathan: I buy games on Steam for 10 bucks. Okay?

Google vs. Anthropic: The AI Race Heats Up (30:29)

Thomas: Ha ha. No. Normally we have to wait 10 days between best AI models. This time we got it in 48 hours. It’s almost like everybody in the industry waits for Google to release and have some big announcement and then they jump on top of it.

Gemini’s Advantages for Authors

Thomas: I’ve started playing with Gemini and where Gemini is really useful is when you’re wanting to do things with your entire book. So the chapterizer, a patron tool, now runs on Gemini and it’s way better than the old one that ran on I think it was OpenAI’s 03mini, either that or DeepSeek. That’s a tricky task for an AI because they all do fine on a 200 page book, but nobody in Indie World writes 200 page books. Everybody writes 300 page books. And for whatever reason, that length just causes the AIs to choke because they don’t have a bigger enough context window.

There’s magical things happen once you can pull an entire book into an AI’s context window. GPT still kind of struggles with this. If it’s a shorter book, it can handle it. They just recently opened AI, increased their context window, and so it does better, but you have to start a new project. Gemini though is the current leader in this. And it’s one of the advantages of using a patron toolbox tool is that I play with the different models and I pick the model that’s best for that particular task. And I’m really excited about the opportunities that Gemini is opening up. Anthropics, Claude is the best at writing. So a lot of the like back cover copy patron tools run on Claude. And I do use GPT-SUM.

But if you’re a GPT maximalist, Jonathan, you’re missing out on some of the best tools for certain kinds of tasks.

Different Approaches to AI Adoption

Jonathan: I just don’t care anymore. Look, we’re in a nuclear arms race right now, where everyone is trying to come out with the newest, best, most powerful, fastest AI tool to grab as much of the market share as they can. I think it’s best, it’s in my best interest to just wait and see who’s coming out ahead, let the things settle down. And when we see who’s doing the best, as far as I’ve seen, Claude has just the best writing when it comes to AI generation. It has the most simulated emotion in it. It seems to have the best idea of context and creating something that a human would enjoy. I’m still never gonna take it on its own. I’m always gonna adapt it, which is what I would do with anyone else. I don’t take what an editor gives me and just use it. I always adapt it and tweak it and whatever, because it’s gotta be me. It’s gotta be my voice. So I’m waiting for the dust to settle, everyone’s racing right now, and if you’re just jumping on every horse that’s pulling ahead, I mean, you’re jumping on a lot of horses here.

Jonathan: I buy games on Steam for 10 bucks. Okay?

Paid vs. Free AI Models

Thomas: So Kat says, I paid TWA manuscript analysis and it was a waste of money. Gemini did more for me and I was really surprised. It was probably cheaper too. I will say paying for Gemini gives you the good models. You can get Gemini for free by doing a Google search, but it’s not real Gemini, this is where it gets complicated. There’s all these different versions. So you’ll have like Gemini 2.0 and then Gemini 2.5, but then you’ll have versions off of that. So there’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is the best with really good reasoning. Then there’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, and then there might be a Mini or like a Super Flash. It gets a little complicated in terms of the breakdown. So just realize, and this is true with all of the AM models, if you’re paying for it or paying for a third party that gives you access, you’re often getting better models than you would if you’re using it for free.

Jonathan: So what we actually see is happening here is a brand new pantheon of gods. Okay, we have Claude, the god of writing. And we have ChadGBT, the god of image generation. And—hahahaha! Yes, yes, so—hahahaha! So we’re creating a new mythology, okay? And this is not gonna work out for humans. Hahahaha!

Thomas: False gods. The aggrock, god of research.

AI Optimization for Authors

Thomas: So speaking of these gods favoring you, having these AIs recommending your book is really important. So if you haven’t yet listened to my episode on AI optimization for authors, I thought this was the first ever piece on this, on optimizing your book to be recommended by AI. But then Joanna Penn emailed me, it turns out she’d covered this like a year and a half ago because of course she did.

Jonathan: Of course.

Thomas: I emailed her back, like, my life goal now is to cover a tech topic before you do. She gets in so fast. So she’s an even earlier adopter than I am on technology, but I’m looking forward to having a conversation with her soon. And we may be able to share that with y’all where you can hear us talking about AI.

Jonathan: Thomas, take a look at this question real quick. Do you use a tool like OpenRouter to access many different AI models and tools?

Thomas: Yes. So, in fact, this is what I recommend right now while the AIs are all taking turns being the best, is potentially instead of signing up with just one, sign up with a service like Strayco or T3Chat or one of the others. There’s a lot of services that will give you access to many, most, or even all of the tools. And you can play with them and get a sense for them. And a lot of those tools use OpenRouter in the background. I don’t want to get too much into the API chain, because it’s already too technical. But there’s a lot of ways to do it on the back end. Some connect directly, sometimes they go through OpenRouter. But those sorts of tools are really helpful if you want to get a feel for it.

One nice thing about using the Patreon toolbox is that you’re not just getting the tool that I’ve tested to perform best, but you’re also getting it with my tuning and my prompting. So for some of the tools, I’ll actually train the tool on my episode on that particular topic. So it doesn’t just do it, it does it the Thomas Umstead way. Because sometimes the AI is going to follow the general knowledge, general wisdom, the prevailing wisdom, and I don’t always agree with prevailing wisdom. So I have to sometimes hit it with a hammer until it does it my way.

Blog Post Brainstormer Tool

Jonathan: All right, well tell us about your new Patreon tool, the Blog Post Brainstormer.

Thomas: Yes, this goes along. One of the things I talked about in the episode is writing blog posts that are a list of books where you can train the AIs to associate your book with other books. And this does exactly that. You put in your book and your title and your genre and it will then brainstorm blog post titles for you to write that can then help optimize your book to be recommended by AI. Because the number one tool for you to talk to large language models is your website, actually, because website and large language models are constantly harvesting the internet for knowledge and for language reinforcement. This is the one thing you have full control over that the AIs have full access to.

They don’t ingest every website, so your website does have to be of sufficient notoriety. But again, a lot of the things I talk about for search engine optimization and boosting your website’s notoriety help. And one of the things I talked about in the episode, that I wanna reinforce is one of the best ways you can boost the notoriety of your website is links from other websites. And one of the best ways to get links from other websites is to be a guest on podcasts, believe it or not, because every guest gets a link. That’s part of how podcasters say thank you for being on my podcast. They link back to your website. And so if you do a lot of guesting, you’ll find the notoriety of your website rising, which then helps with your AI optimization. So all of these things work together to help boost your sales, not just directly, but also through AI recommendations.

Patreon Tools Value

Jonathan: And I am, I’m going to jump on this. Guys, I’ve been trying to tell Thomas to increase his prices for becoming a patron for a while now because of all the tools that he’s making. If you are not yet a patron at the level that is taking advantage of this stuff, he is literally in his mad scientist lab churning out another one of these things like every three days or updating the ones that are there. It’s kind of concerning.

Thomas: My goal was one every week. I haven’t seen my family in days. I four new Patreon tools.

Jonathan: Like do you see how pale in Juan his skin is? Like he’s not going outside. I forgot the taste of bread. So if you are not a patron yet, you really need to go and take advantage of these things. It’s going to take a lot of the work, I guess the grunt work, I guess is what I’m saying here and leaves you available for the creative work. You need to become a patron and start taking advantage of these tools, tell your friends who aren’t doing it. We want to leave everyone else in the dust who has decided that they’re purists, and this is a really good time to get the competitive edge and get ahead of them, and this is a fantastic suite of tools that you should be taking advantage of, and eventually Thomas is going to listen to me and raise his prices. So… how long do you think it will take Thomas to listen to me?

Thomas: I will say this, I never raise prices on existing customers. So when I raise the price on a course or whatever, or I make upgrades to a course, I always give all of the upgrades to previous people. My goal is for no one to ever feel bad that they got in early.

Best AI Models for Marketing

Thomas: Cami has a good question that I want to address. She asks, for SEO and marketing, which AM model seems the best? So for different kinds of marketing tasks, different models are the best. The “recommend a book for me” task – I tested several different ones. I tested at least two. I think I tested three. And the best performing one was Chat GPT. That’s why I featured it in the episode. Gemini made a big noise about multimodal search. Grok is, it’s fine. It’s not great. I’m hoping Grok 3.5 will be better, but GPT was incredible.

I tested it. I went to my bookshelf and had some of Jonathan’s books and some of CJ Malacy’s books right next to each other. So I took a snapshot just of the spines and GPT was like, have you considered Nadie Brandes? And then it started listing all of these like enclave authors that were very similar. In fact, not only similar, but actually real life friends with CJ and Jonathan. I was like, dang, this is really good. Like this is a really good recommendation engine. Cause those were really solid recommendations if you’d liked those books already.

Jonathan: Hahaha!

Thomas: Whereas when I did that same test with Grok, Grok was recommending like super best sellers. So it went up and started recommending like Divergent and Hunger Games. Yeah, and it’s like, okay, slow clap. You’re recommending Hunger Games for somebody who likes dystopia. It’s like, you really put a lot of thought into that one, Grok. But Grok is like a year and a half behind. It’s catching up quick.

Jonathan: So it’s not granulating far enough. Yeah. Yeah, weird. You went and looked at the categories. Good for you.

Thomas: So I’m very excited about the 3.5 model. It’s gonna have first principles reasoning, which I’m very, very… Every morning I check, I open up my Grok app and check to see if I’m on 3.0 or 3.5 and every morning it’s on 3.0 and I’m just sad. Like, come on, Elon Musk, I want it now.

Amazon’s AI Categorization

Jonathan: Get with it! He’s sad now, leave him alone. Alright, so I wanted to share a story from one of my books that is out. I saw Amazon’s AI switch its tactics on a live book, which I thought was really interesting.

So I released my Marines vs. Zombies novel Semper Die on May 4th. And it was kind of in the wrong categories. I didn’t want it to show in military thrillers, but Amazon decided that’s what it was. And based on the cover and based on the description and stuff like that, I’m like, man, I really don’t like this. That’s a really hard category to compete in. But you know, I had it in a post-apocalyptic dystopia and I had it in teen and young adult, the post-apocalyptic. And I was like, man, I really want it to show there. Cause then I’ll get the best seller tag. I’ll get the number one new release tag. And those are all the things I was looking for.

Well, about 16 days later, after the release, which I’ve never seen this take this long to do, it got the number one new release tag in teen and young adult post-apocalyptic thrillers. I was like, that is very strange for it to happen 16 days later. And what I think happened, this is speculation, you know, not doctrine, is that there’s no swearing in the book. That’s something that I put out there, which you think is weird with Marines versus Zombies. And it wound up being commented on in the reviews because there were several readers who said, I was really concerned about reading this book after it said in the beginning, yeah, we got the Amish Marines going, you know, that’s not what people are looking for.

Thomas: It’s a squad of Puritan Marines.

Jonathan: So you will not lose control while you are in the squad and one of those is using profanity. And then it was a first-person POV, so the guy pretty much says, I’m just editing it all out because we honor and respect this guy. Well, that reader wound up going on, he really enjoyed the book, but he’s like, this concerned me at first, but I kept reading and I’m glad I did. Well, a couple other people commented on that as well. Well, when you have a clean book and these protagonists are about 18, 22 years old, I think Amazon’s AI looked at that content and switched it to show what categories it was actually promoting it in, what categories it was actually putting it in, and that’s how Semper Die got the number one release in teen and young adult post-apocalyptic. Actually, it wasn’t even post-apocalyptic, it was science fiction. It was a larger category. Thomas, what are your thoughts on that?

Thomas: Yeah, Amazon has been doing this for a long time, switching books around and moving them from category to category. In fact, there’s some categories I think you can only get into by Amazon manually putting you there. Like you can ask for it you’re not gonna get there without them putting you there. This would be a really good question for Alex Newton, because nobody knows Amazon categories quite like he does.

Jonathan: We’re getting him.

Sports Romance Trends

Thomas: Great source of news. Also, I want to give a shout out to Meg McDonald who gave us a Super Chat. That’s actually another way to support this show. We don’t mention it, but this is not a free show for us to produce. And so we really appreciate those of you who financially support the show, either on Patreon or through Super Chat. So Super Chat’s a feature here in YouTube where you can donate money. So thank you, Meg McDonald for that.

Amazon does look at the content of the book, but it also looks at the content of the reviews. So it’s AI and it’s great wisdom puts you in a category you can perform well in. So congratulations.

Jonathan: Which is what I said in the first place. Alright, moving on to Alex Newton. K-Ledix released a sports romance report in the past week. And it showed a lot of very interesting trends. This is a report I recommend romance readers pick up. You’ll see that sports romance is actually performing very well and has stayed there for some time. There was a big spike in hockey romance for a while, which I don’t get what’s so great about, you know, strapping knives to your feet and playing with other boys on the ice. Then, you know, then romance is involved in that, you know. I live a Tucson, man.

Thomas: Says the Arizonan who has never seen ice in his life.

Jonathan: So, but sports romance is becoming big because there’s a lot of stuff involved in sports. You do have more of the masculine men that are involved in sports. There’s a lot more loss involved. You have a little more tragedy. So no, he’s vulnerable. Now I can pounce and get the romance going, you know, I can comfort him and these are a lot of trigger scenarios for a lot of romance books. So sports romance does do the setup very well.

Romance Book Marketing Insights

Thomas: Well, so this is an interesting thing with romance. In fact, I had a conversation with a listener about this just this week. She was objecting to the fact that in the Patreon toolbox, we have a romance pitch generator and we ask questions about the man first and then we ask questions about the woman and then the pitch that it puts together features the man. And she’s like, you know, this isn’t men’s literary fiction. Why doesn’t it feature the woman first? And so I was like, oh, she’d probably write. And so I changed it.

But then I started doing some research and I started remembering some research I’ve done in the past on covers, which the pitch and the cover often have the same focus. And this ties in with sports romance. Cause if you look at sports romance covers or firefighter romance covers, what you see is the man. In fact, if you read the blurb for firefighter fiction, not only is the cover just the man alone, but the blurb is from the man’s point of view in first person.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Always the female.

Thomas: And so, and I’ve talked with bestselling romance authors who say what readers are really buying in romance is they’re buying the man. You’re selling them this man. But that’s not always the case. If you look at historical romance, you’ll often see just a woman in a beautiful dress and the blurb focuses from the woman’s point of view. It’s from her perspective, it’s through her eyes. And then of course there are romances where there’s a couple.

Fabio’s Impact on Romance Sales (50:01)

Thomas: So back in the day when Fabio was on all the covers, when he was on a cover holding a woman, he would boost sales by 33%. But if he was on a cover all by himself, he would boost sales by 45%. Because what women in the 90s were buying, they weren’t buying a romance story by so-and-so author. They were buying Fabio. They were wanting to buy Fabio. And he would do these shoots where he’d do like a dozen covers in a day. They’d have all these costumes for him and they’re like, okay, now you’re a cowboy, now you’re a firefighter.

Jonathan: Hahaha

Thomas: Now you’re a whatever. Just shoot cover after cover with him. Yeah, and so I was thinking, how do I build a tool that accommodates these different approaches? And really, the Romance Pitch Generator is specifically designed for that couple on the cover kind of pitch. Because if you’re wanting one of the other kinds of pitches, the other pitch generators already do that. The Fiction Pitch Generator…

Jonathan: This is way too close to another industry.

Thomas: already focuses on the protagonist. So if the protagonist of your romance is the man, then you focus on the man, and if it’s the woman, you focus on the woman, or the setting, or what have you. So with that said, kind of in terms of like how you sell a romance and the different approaches to selling a romance, what is new in the sports romance, I wanna date a football player genre?

Trends in Sports Romance (51:22)

Jonathan: So honestly, it’s just like a trend upward in sales and kind of pulling ahead of other categories. The main data points that seem to like in terms of keywords and categorization was enemies to lovers, which is really easy to do in sports romance. There was a lot that combined together because you could also do rich athletes. So you had the billionaire romance or the millionaire romance kind of thing but it was all coming together in this one subgenre and actually the one really interesting point of this report was that it took over the actual category for hockey. You can’t look for a book on hockey without getting a bunch of these romance books in your search results.

Thomas: Well, there’s probably a lot of statistics books, like bloody ball type books. I blame Taylor Swift for the rise of this genre. And when she inevitably breaks up with Travis Kelce and writes her breakup song, that’s the end of this genre. So wait for that song if you’re working on a sports romance or you’re thinking about writing one. After she’s written her, I’m breaking up with Travis Kelce because Taylor Swift is dating a Kansas City chief.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Thomas: And like she does with all of her boyfriends, she breaks up with him and then writes a breakup song. That’ll be the end of this whole genre. She’ll single-handedly have nuked the sports romance genre. But until she does, there’s also the like, yeah, I want to feel like Taylor Swift reading this book makes me feel like Taylor Swift.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm. It’s a good thing to jump on.

Champion-Based Combat in Marketing (52:57)

Jonathan: Right. And that’s an important psychological point you want to keep in mind is champion-based combat, which is where you follow someone you want to be like. In martial arts, this is huge. Everybody wants to be like Bruce Lee. Everyone wants to be like Chuck Norris. Everyone wants to be like Ip Man. Ip Man was huge for a while. He got a ton of movies out of it. The idea here is that Taylor Swift is the champion of romance right now for a lot of women, not even just young women anymore, it’s like women in their 30s. And so they want to be like Taylor Swift and live her life. And the best way you can do that is through these kinds of romances. So if you’re a romance writer, be looking for the champion of romance. Who is it at this point? You know, is it for some reason Kim Kardashian? Is it Taylor Swift? You know, it doesn’t matter if you like it, you just have to see who it is. And then if you want to make sales, you tailor your stuff in that way.

Evolution of Romance Book Covers (53:55)

Thomas: Yeah. And we’re seeing a shift in romance covers. So there was the 90s Fabio all the time, which was really quite remarkable because it wasn’t just a single style of romance cover. It was a single guy. It was on all of the covers. And then you had a 50 Shades of Grey, which ushered in the simple book cover, which was often lots of typography, maybe a single symbol, no faces, no people at all.

Jonathan: He was one guy. Well was Twilight before that, because Fifty Shades of Grey is the fanfic of Twilight.

Thomas: Yeah, what was the Twilight cover? I’m trying to remember. That’s right. Okay. You’re right. So Twilight actually was one started that trend or it was one of the first mega hits. Cause the Twilight series is one of the best selling series is period. I think it’s in the top 10 of all time. But now if you look on the bestseller list for romance, you’re going to see a lot of illustrated covers. Many of which I suspect are done by AI, AI illustrations.

Jonathan: Twilight is an apple on a black and white divided. Mm-hmm.

Jonathan: No

Thomas: Where AI is kind of rough still at photos you can often spot the problem if it’s illustrated. It’s difficult to spot some of you may not know but the album art for this show all it’s all AI. Hey, it made you happy today.

Jonathan: They’re cartoonish, and it can do it really well. And it’s decided I’m angry.

Jim Butcher’s Mental Health Struggle (55:12)

Jonathan: Probably the laugh, it’s what it was. He’s a happy guy. All right, so moving on from the covers discussion there, one thing I would like to bring up is there was a really interesting story on Substack from Fandom Pulse about Jim Butcher. He opened up to a journalist about his mental health struggle and he actually, he went in pretty deep on some issues that he had. Actually, he wound up killing his main character at the end of one of his books, and he actually attributes it to his mental health at the time. And I just thought it was a neat story to bring up. Even big-name authors are struggling with the same kind of burnout and depression that the rest of us are. And I used to deal with this with my Marines all the time. You know, we’re under a lot of stress. We’re doing Marine things with the worst people in the world and the worst places in the world and our orders come from the other worst people in the world.

The Importance of Recovery Mechanisms (56:17)

Jonathan: And so what you really need is a good recovery mechanism. You know, all this stuff is great. Learn about the AI, learn about what the market is doing, learn about, keep on top of it, keep doing it, but you need to have a recovery mechanism that will allow you to keep going. And actually in the writing group that I was in earlier today, we were talking about what is your why? Why are you doing this? Because when you get into the hard times where it doesn’t seem like anybody’s reading your book and no one is reviewing your book and you’re not getting your dopamine, why am I still writing this? Why am I still doing this? I’m on book three of this series and book two hasn’t been selling at all. What is the… Why am I doing this? You need to have your vision. You need to have your hope that you’re looking forward to because otherwise you’re going to burn and flame out. And I’m seeing that on social media all the time. Authors get to the hard part of authoring and they’re burning out.

You can see, I mean, this big name author who has 20 book series and millions of people read it and love it, and he still falls into the same trap. So make sure that you have your recovery mechanism in place. Love your family, go to your church, be around people, touch grass, leave the marketing to the side every now and then. Have a Memorial Day barbecue. You know, if you’re a veteran, make sure you chew out people for having a Memorial Day barbecue.

Thomas: Don’t say happy Memorial Day.

Jonathan: Exactly, exactly. Make sure you yell at people about it. There you know it, I bought that freedom. But make sure that you are healthy. You are eating right, you are sleeping, you are continuing to write, and you’re not getting sucked down into this rabbit hole of constantly trying to do all the things, and I gotta do this thing over here, and I gotta do this thing over here, and I gotta do this thing over here. And eventually you’re like, why am I doing any of this? So my advice on this is make sure that you are completing your mission, but that you are also recovering enough to be able to do the mission the next day. Thomas, you want to say anything?

When to Quit Writing (58:11)

Thomas: I have an episode on this that I feel like is one of the most important episodes I ever recorded. And it’s not a particularly popular episode, but I do recommend that everybody listen to it twice. Once right away, and once when they’re thinking about quitting. And the title is “When to Quit Writing.” And in this episode, I share a lot of kind of hard truths about writing. Like the fact that writing is hard work, and that most writers don’t make money.

Jonathan: It sucks.

Thomas: I also give five questions if you’re thinking about quitting to help you decide. And then I talk about when to quit because we all quit eventually, right? We’re all gonna die and most of us quit writing before we die. But sometimes we take a break and sometimes we prune around to make writing a priority. And so I’ll post a link to this in the chat. If I remember, I’ll post a link in the show notes to this episode, but everything Jonathan is saying is very true, where you have to have your foundation under you. I’m actually thinking about doing an episode, I’ve been wanting to do an episode for a long time on the Pareto distribution, and I think I finally got a title for it that will get people to listen. And I’m not gonna share that title because it’s gonna make people angry.

Jonathan: Hahaha!

The Reality of Writing Economics (59:38)

Thomas: Writing is not like being a plumber or an attorney where most people make pretty good money. It’s more like being an athlete or a musician where most people lose money and a handful of people are millionaires. And if you don’t internalize that, that Pareto distribution, that 80-20 or 190 rule, you can get very frustrated. You can lose a lot of money. You can get really taken advantage of by people who are like, oh, if you just buy my secret formula, you can be in the bestselling author. And it’s like, there’s only one bestselling author. So if two people bought that course, then one of you, it’s like the Highlander, there can be only one. And so you need to know why you’re doing it. And you need to have a solid financial footing underneath you. If you’re hungry and you’re trying to write to put food on the table, you don’t need to write another book, you need a job. Because jobs are in the standard distribution.

Jonathan: Yeah, best.

Thomas: Not the Pareto distribution. Most jobs pay real money consistently. And I’ve almost never lived in standard distribution world. I started a business while I was still in college and I’ve worked for businesses that I’ve started almost my entire career. But I did take a break for two years and actually worked for a fancy boutique marketing firm here in Austin. And when I did that, I got a check every two weeks. It was unbelievable, never in my life.

Jonathan: Hahaha

Thomas: Had I been paid like that? Because as a business owner, the big ups and big downs, I learned how to keep money in savings, because just because you’re having a good month doesn’t mean the next month is gonna be good. And that’s the thinking that you need to have to be a successful author, because traditionally published authors get often their whole money for the year in one check, one or two checks. And if you don’t know how to live off of one check for a whole year, which takes an enormous amount of discipline.

Jonathan: This is amazing!

Thomas: When I was a literary agent, there was stories shared in the agency of people who would take their advance check and go to Disney World, and two weeks later the whole thing was gone, and then they’re like, I’m hungry. It’s like, that was your, and it was a big advance check. It’s like, that was your money for months of expenses. Like, you can’t just go and blow that. But if you’re thinking is,

Jonathan: Man.

Jonathan: Cheers!

Thomas: It’s a job, I’m gonna get another one of these two weeks from now. That’s not how advances work. That’s not even how royalties for indie authors work. Sure, you get paid more regularly as an indie author, but not all months are like launch month, right? Most of your sales happen at the beginning and then it trails off unless there’s that’s some kind of black swan event. And so you need to have a solid foundation underneath you financially and you need to have thought through these questions because if you don’t count the cost ahead of time, you can get yourself into trouble.

Video Game News: Green Ember (1:02:30)

Jonathan: Alright, let’s jump into my favorite part of this segment. Video game news! Alright ladies, everyone can check out now. No, seriously, you do need to listen to this because there’s some important principles that we need to discuss here. First of all, Green Ember, which is a series my kids love, is right in their window with my 9 year old right now. They have funded a video game on Kickstarter and…

Thomas: Okay. So they took the book series and turned it into a video game and it’s still on Kickstarter. I’ll throw the link into the chat. But they’ve already raised $200,000, $215,000 for this video game.

Jonathan: Which is amazing, because that’s a huge crossover. That’s not a genre crossover. That’s a big crossover to go from something that you’re reading and enjoying to something you’re interacting with and enjoying. And I think it’s a good idea, honestly. Green Ember already has a lock on the homeschool clean market. It’s safe. People know they can read it and enjoy it, and their kids can read it and enjoy it. And now there’s a video game for their kids that’s clean and they can enjoy it? I see nothing but benefit from this.

AI Reducing Video Game Development Costs (1:03:39)

Thomas: It was controversial. He had to do a whole apologetic defending video games as a category because his core audience was very suspicious of video games as a category. So he had to give a reason for why we needed good video games. I thought he gave a good defense. Video game development, so tying this back to AI, AI is dramatically reducing the cost of making video games. Which means that more authors are going to have video game tie-in potential. Because it used to be you needed a million dollars to 10 million dollars to make a kind of low budget video games. Kind of like making a movie. In fact, the highest budget video games have far bigger budgets than the highest budget movies. So you may think, the, you know Marvel Endgame, right, $300 million budget or $400 million budget. It’s like, yeah, that’s pretty big. But Grand Theft Auto had a $500 million budget and they spent 10 years building it. And Grand Theft Auto made way more money than Endgame did. So the most successful video games make far more money than the most successful films. And this is kind of a secret. A lot of people don’t realize this.

Jonathan: And a 10 year development pipeline.

Thomas: The video games don’t get the kind of press, right? Grand Theft Auto doesn’t get press about how much money it’s making. It’s sold a billion dollars, billions of dollars worth of units. No, gets press that it’s causing people to be violent or whatever. Whereas no one has ever like, Marvel’s causing people to be violent. Right, they get the stories.

Jonathan: Captain America’s literally throwing guys out of a plane.

Thomas: Yeah, and part of it is the company that owns Marvel also owns ABC News. And so when Marvel advertises on ABC News or goes on the ABC News night show, like the actors from the Marvel show go on the Tonight Show. It’s all in the same company, right? Disney owns ABC, Disney owns Marvel. And so Marvel gets good press. It’s amazing when you own the outlets. They also own ESPN, a bunch of other news outlets. Watching video games is important for authors to understand changes in the zeitgeist, but also now possible monetization strategies, because you can now make a video game for $200,000. You can make a video game for even less than that. And soon, you may be able to make a video game for maybe 20 or $30,000, which is suddenly in the realm of like, oh, I could raise that on Kickstarter. My book raised 10,000, I might be able to get 30,000 for a video game.

Video Game Monetization Models (1:06:17)

Jonathan: And there’s an important, important, when we’re talking about monetization for video games, that it’s not just the initial price of the video game. So you have the initial price model, which is it’s like 60, 70 bucks for the game. And then if you want the premium release skin and pay and play two days early, you pay 80 bucks. And then if you want the DLC that they’re going to release with it, it’s another hundred bucks. So they kind of lock you in on that. But then it’s also important to remember that there are also what’s called micro transactions in the game where you can buy skins, weapons, DLCs which are extra content for the game. There’s a tail to these video games so they need to maintain their player base. Players need to keep playing so that they’re still in the game when more iterations of the tail are releasing. So Destiny 2 is huge with this in that they’re always releasing a new episode like every three months and it comes with tons of extra content like skins, emotes, mounts, all these kinds of fun stuff. They’re doing a Star Wars collaboration right now. And they’re making tons of money off of it because suddenly you can go through the game playing as Darth Vader.

Applying Video Game Strategies to Books (1:07:25)

Thomas: And these are ideas that you can steal for your book. If you look above me on the shelf, these are Brandon Sanderson special edition books that cost like $250. And the idea for his super fancy special edition books came from the video game world. Sanderson was looking at when a new video game comes out, you can buy the video game for 60 bucks, but for $100 you can get the special edition and for $250, you can get the super special edition that comes with a figurine or a mask, or a Pip-Boy. And a certain percentage of players want to spend $250 for the same game that their friends are spending $50 for.

Jonathan: How many times have you bought Skyrim? You know, like, yeah, right, exactly. It’s the same game! You know, Oblivion for the second time. Dawn of War is releasing another one remastered and that game has had three iterations that have come out. Follow this kind of idea in monetizing your stuff. If it’s popular enough, people will pay for it again to look prettier.

Thomas: Two or three times and I just bought oblivion for the second time. I’ve bought Narnia three or four times, I I’ve bought two book sets and several… I’d prefer not to disclose this information, Jonathan. I need to leave a legacy, an inheritance to my children, so I need a copy for all of them.

Jonathan: Yeah, how many Lord of the Rings editions do you have? You know? It’s part of my house’s foundation, I’m just saying. But keep that in mind.

Pricing Strategies: The Wrong Way (1:08:53)

Jonathan: But there is a wrong way to do this, and Borderlands 4 is making this mistake right now. They’ve announced an $80 price tag for their new game. And then when a gamer came up and said, why are we paying $80 for essentially the same thing that’s not done yet, you’re just gonna release more stuff to go with it, and I know it’s gonna be buggy on release, why am I paying $80 for this? And the guy who was running the game said back to him, if you were a real fan of Borderlands, then it wouldn’t bother you. And that’s just not the right response. The internet is blowing up about this, all the gamer news outlets are just really against this kind of approach. That’s not the way to increase the price. You know what? You might have cost issues you need to address. You might need to increase the price of your product. This is not the way to do it.

The Diamond-Water Paradox (1:09:42)

Thomas: And actually have an episode on this very thing. It’s called, “How to Use Scarcity and Ubiquity to Make Your Book Irresistible.” And I opened that episode with this ancient paradox. I think Aristotle or Socrates was the first one to bring up this paradox, but it’s one philosophers have pondered for a long time. And it’s the answer to this question, why are diamonds more expensive than water? You don’t need diamonds. So putting to beers and the whole market manipulation in the last century aside, you don’t need diamonds. You can live your whole life without seeing a diamond in it. You can live a perfectly happy life and you can live your life surrounded by diamonds and die of dehydration, right? So you would think that water is more valuable than diamonds. So it becomes an interesting kind of thought experiment.

Jonathan: Because diamond companies told us they were.

Jonathan: And this is a perceived value as well. It’s not an absolute value.

Thomas: The reality is it has to do with supply and demand and rarity and value and wealth. And the fact that water has a lot of value if you’re thirsty, but then when you’re no longer thirsty, it doesn’t have additional value. So the marginal value of water decreases pretty dramatically, because you can only drink so much water. Right. And so you can kind of launder half of economics through this question, which is really fascinating. But from an author’s perspective, what’s interesting is that you can make money both with ubiquity and with obscurity. Because the global market for water is actually more. People spend more money on water than they spend on diamonds. In fact, you in the last year have probably spent more money on water than you spend on diamonds, right? Our purchases of diamonds are kind of punctuated and infrequent, whereas we’re constantly spending money on water here and there.

And so the mistake that Borderlands is making is that they’re getting rid of water and they’re trying to only sell diamonds. And that’s a mistake because you can make money selling the extra special, you know, bells and whistles version of the game and you can sell a cheap digital copy. And you know what? Authors can do the exact same thing, right? Don’t make your ebook expensive. Traditional publishers are making a terrible mistake pricing their ebooks.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Thomas: At the same price of their paper books and they don’t have a good offering in the ubiquity side of the equation, but they’re trying to constantly bring down the price of their paper books, making them cheaper and lamer. So they don’t have a good offering in the diamond side of the equation. They’re in the pit of despair, which is my second princess bride reference today.

Jonathan: Exactly, they’re just killing themselves here. Exactly. Alright. Yes.

Thomas: So you don’t wanna be in the middle. You don’t wanna be a little bit ubiquitous and a little bit scarce. You wanna be either scarce or ubiquitous.

Helldivers 2: Creating Excitement for a Series (1:12:32)

Jonathan: So, the last story I want to talk about today, which is one that’s close to me and Thomas’ hearts because we both play this game, is what do you do when your series has been like dead for a while, there hasn’t been enough going on in it, how do you get people excited again? Well, Helldivers 2 just released the Heart of Democracy update where Super Earth itself has come under attack. Okay, this is the homeworld, Earth itself. We’ve been fighting on other planets against bugs, bots, and who knows what else, but now Super Earth itself is under attack. Guys, the player, the number of players in Helldivers 2 held for about 40,000 for the last few months. And it would spike from time to time, particularly when a war bond came out, which I’ll discuss that. It’s at about 250,000 right now. Okay?

It has quintupled the number of players that are active on Helldivers right now because everyone wants to be a part of this story event. The stakes are so high right now. We can’t lose Super Earth. Right? I’m actually fighting in Buenos Aires right now because of the Starship Troopers line, I’m from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all and I have not left Buenos Aires.

Thomas: Where were you when Super Earth was invaded?

Creating Events for Your Readers (1:13:36)

Thomas: So how do you do this as an author? How do you create the kind of event that draws the attention of your readers? You can try to do it in your story, but you have to be careful ramping up attention too much or too artificially in the story. You make kind of promises with your genre and with your series and with your brand. You can fiddle with that a little bit, but I think the real way to do this as an author is through real world events, things like a Kickstarter where we’re all coming together to try to achieve this big, difficult objective, or an in-person event where we’re all traveling to a single location to interact with each other. Because the Helldivers 2 phenomenon is not because they added new content to an old game. Games do that all the time, and they would have gotten a bump from that, and they’ve done that in the past, and they got bumps from it.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Thomas: But no, this had to do with the narrative in the sense of like, we’re doing this together and we’re fighting for Super Earth and they had to earn it by foreshadowing, right? They make you care about Super Earth.

Jonathan: It’s been like four months of this storyline, I think.

Thomas: Yeah. And so having kind of a shared storyline is the big innovation of Helldivers, where there’s a narrative layer to this otherwise somewhat repetitive game.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Effective Foreshadowing in Games (1:15:04)

Jonathan: Right. And their foreshadowing is fantastic because the way they do it is through the propaganda that this socialist utopia keeps putting out. One of them was like, the super earth has decided to start studying mind control to better protect you, the citizens, from the insidious aliens. And the rest of us are like, this is totally not good. This is not going to be a good thing. We’re getting mind controlled.

Thomas: You

Jonathan: But seeing what is happening, they do free content updates. All of this narrative stuff that they put out is free. These are not paid upgrades to the game. But what they are benefiting from is the war bonds. These things you can pay real money for or just farm the currency in game, but you have to play the game to farm the currency in the game. That’s where they’re getting their benefit from and they’re just achieving fantastic loyalty to their franchise and their story. Because everyone wants to be a part of the story, I mean, Thomas keeps trying to ding me for not having the Malevolent Creek cape, and I’m like, I have it, son! I was there at the end, that’s when I came in! You know, but you want to be a part of the events! You know, it’s like, were you there on Super Earth? You know, were you there?

Subscription Models for Authors (1:16:24)

Thomas: And so going back to the war bonds thing, how do you replicate that as an author? And this is something I wanna do an episode on at some point in the future. It’s something, I see a lot of innovation in books for the homeschool market. If you go to a homeschool book fair, it’s like walking into the future, which is kind of, if you’ve never been to one, it’s kind of a strange experience if you’ve only been to one, because people don’t dress like they’re from the future.

Jonathan: Yes. Yeah, yeah, really. Mm-hmm.

Thomas: But in many ways, homeschooling is super cultural. We were with our dating and courtship norms. We got to where the rest of culture got to after us. So the mistakes that we made, the rest of culture made as well. I wrote a whole book on this. But when it comes to books, a lot of the things that authors just in the last few years are discovering like, oh, wow, selling direct is really good. You make a lot more money this way. I’ve been down in the homeschool market for decades in some cases.

Jonathan: Decades. Yeah.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Thomas: And one of the things I noticed at the last year’s homeschool convention I went to was how many booths of authors had subscription plans, where instead of selling you a book, they would sell you a $20 a month subscription where you get a new book every month. And so it’s a 12 book series. And so at the end of the year, you’ve gotten a book a month from this series. And it’s like, that is really savvy. It’s similar to this war bonds thing, although that’s not a subscription.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Thomas: But it’s kind of a subscription in that you opt in every month or every other month with your own money. And I think that finding ways of selling subscriptions to your readers is a really untapped opportunity that’s likely gonna be the big thing in like the 2030s, maybe the late 2020s for authors, especially authors who are prolific. Because if you have a lot of books, you’ve got a backlist that’s not selling particularly well, but you can sell it at a premium potentially if you sell it in a subscription.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Thomas: To new readers who are new to you.

Short Stories as DLC (1:18:24)

Jonathan: Right. And one way to do it is look at short stories connected to your novel as DLC. Okay. Make them like extra content. And that’s a way you can keep a newsletter engaged for your next book launch is if you’re constantly sending them a free short story set in your story world. That’s a free content update. And now they may, you know, sometimes pay war bonds, you know, they may pay for extra stuff, whether it’s a devotional associated with your novel series. That’s big in the kids market.

Some people are doing devotionals, but if you can release a new devotional that goes along with it that’s in your newsletter, you just have these free content upgrades to content they’ve already purchased. You’re keeping them engaged with you and your brand. You’re keeping them engaged with you as a person and they’re excited for your next book because who knows what’s going to come out with that. And there’s so much to learn from the video game world. And I know, you know, everyone looks at it like, it rots your brain. Well, it doesn’t have to. Cause I’m going at it going like this is ingenious. Like they are making so much money. Obscene.

Learning from Video Game Marketing (1:19:30)

Thomas: And even if it does rot your brain, you can still learn marketing tactics and you can sell your good wholesome books instead. So you can learn from your enemies, so to speak. And as authors, video games are a big competitor. It’s why the iPhone never became a huge reading platform. People don’t read books on their phones. Why? Because people would rather play Candy Crush than they would read a book on their phone.

Jonathan: Yes. Mm-hmm. The games are better than the books.

Thomas: Which is unfortunate, right? We’d rather them read books. We’d rather them read our books, but we’re competing with those games. And as you acknowledge that, your fellow authors are no longer your true competition. Your true competition is, yeah, you’re working together to compete with Candy Crush. And that’s why you should keep listening to author updates. We’re gonna keep probing the depths of Hollywood and video games and other industries to find tactics that we can bring to you. Tactics that perhaps,

Jonathan: They’re your allies. Hahaha

Thomas: Don’t warrant a full novel marketing episode, but might just warrant a segment on Author Update. And one other piece of news, and another reason to subscribe to Author Update, is Jonathan is gonna start releasing exclusive content, how-to type content, tips and the like, on the new Author Update channel. So if you’re only subscribed to novel marketing, you’re not going to see the cool new stuff. And the very first piece of content I think drops tomorrow.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Thomas: And so do click the link down here, go like the new channel. Only like 1% of you have liked the new, or followed the new channel. Subscribe today and tune in next week to Author Update. I’m Thomas Umstead, Jr. Live long and prosper.

Jonathan: Subscribe, subscribe.

Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Sugar.

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Do 45% of Authors *Already* Use AI?! | Author Update

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Jim Butcher’s Mental Health Struggle (55:12)

The Importance of Recovery Mechanisms (56:17)

When to Quit Writing (58:11)

The Reality of Writing Economics (59:38)

Video Game News: Green Ember (1:02:30)

AI Reducing Video Game Development Costs (1:03:39)

Video Game Monetization Models (1:06:17)

Applying Video Game Strategies to Books (1:07:25)

Pricing Strategies: The Wrong Way (1:08:53)

The Diamond-Water Paradox (1:09:42)

Helldivers 2: Creating Excitement for a Series (1:12:32)

Creating Events for Your Readers (1:13:36)

Effective Foreshadowing in Games (1:15:04)

Subscription Models for Authors (1:16:24)

Short Stories as DLC (1:18:24)

Learning from Video Game Marketing (1:19:30)

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Do 45% of Authors Already Use AI?! | Author Update