Explore the rise of AI-generated images and their impact on authors in this Author Update. Learn strategies to adapt and leverage AI tools for your writing success.
Outline
Amazon Ads Expansion
Amazon has recently expanded its sponsored ads, including Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands, to authors in India, Mexico, Netherlands, and Japan. This development allows indie authors to reach a broader international audience, potentially increasing book visibility and sales in these regions. This is particularly beneficial for authors looking to tap into global markets.
Traditional Publishing Starts to Embrace AI – Wiley Announces New AI Guidelines (Press Release)
“At Wiley, we’d rather embrace this shift than fight it. Our recent study shows these technologies will be everywhere within two years, and we want our authors to use them confidently while adhering to the strictest standards of quality and ethics.” (3/13/2025)
Thomas I’ve never heard of Wiley, why are they important?
GPT Can Now Do Book Covers
New Image Engine.
What this means:
- GPT 4o can now do complete book covers including the text. This will make covering Reader Magnets much cheaper and easier.
- GPT4o can now create Amazon ad graphics.
- GPT4o can now create illustrations with character continuity for children’s books and comics.
- Looser guidelines on prompting.
- Really good at matching the style of a previously published book..
Who this will help:
- Indie authors. A lot of what authors used to use Canva and Book Brush for, they can now do in GPT.
- Poor authors.
Who this may hurt:
- Cover Designers maybe
- Template sites.
How it Works: (Thomas)
- Not diffusion. It uses an auto regressive approach.
- GPT creates an outline, then it uses diffusion from there.
- This means it can handle text. It went from being basically illiterate to being just as fluent making images as it is in writing text. This is a sea change for authors.
New Patron Tool: Book Title Brainstormer
Thomas has built a new Book Title Brainstormer for creating search optimized book titles, subtitles and series names.
Gemini 2.5 Just Released
Another week another best model Gemini 2.5 is currently winning all the AI benchmark battles. It excels in large context models. So if you wanted to upload your book and then create an index, a character bible, or a wiki, this may be your best model.
Discussion Question: How Difficult Should Art Be?
Is it good that the ability to make art is democratizing to more people? Is are more valuable when the artists suffers?
Question:
- 1950s Cake Mix
- Diamonds vs Diamonds. What people buy is the story.
- Clothes Washers
Do readers prefer books from authors who suffer?
Procrastination Is Like Swimming in Tar. How Do I Beat That?
Thomas’s latest Novel Marketing episode targets the perennial complaint/problem that authors complain of: not finishing their books. This episode is full of practical solutions that honestly, authors just don’t want to hear. It is very business-like and demands that authors conduct themselves as professionals if they want to achieve professional success. Ten recommendations and habit shifts to achieve success in not just writing, but any endeavor demanding focus and production.
Thomas, some of these recs are brutal in how they can shift an author’s personal life. How many of these do you really expect authors to perform?
Do you have any idea on the potential increase in productivity (in real numbers) an author can see by incorporating just one of these recs? How will it compound if they follow more than one?
Smaller Communities Likely The Future of The Internet
(According to Yoast SEO Update, March 2025)
Big platforms like X, Facebook seem to have lost the trust of their users, who are migrating to smaller, more curated platforms like Bluesky, Discord, etc. This migration affects authors in their attempts to reach national/global audiences through advertising on the large platforms. Content from humans continues to drive engagement, especially as AI drives bot creation and interaction, further widening the chasm of trust.
With this trend in mind, how can authors adapt to take advantage of the hunger for human interaction and personal relationship?
IMLS Cuts to Libraries; How Does This Affect Us?
(Bottom Line)
On Mar. 14, President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate, among others, the Institute of Museum and Library Services “to the fullest extent permissible by law”. Around $2B per year is spent on libraries, mostly from local and state taxes, but IMLS accounts for 10% of that funding. It is unlikely that cuts to IMLS will greatly affect local libraries, as IMLS funding was most likely used to fund special projects, not collections or lending.
Do authors have anything to worry about here? Is President Trump launching a war on books?
The Creative Penn Hits 800 Episodes!
Canadian Booksellers Fighting Tariffs
The CEOs of two major Canadian booksellers joined forced to request from Canadian prime minister Mark Carney that books be exempted from Canada’s upcoming tariffs on April 2. Books by Canadian authors printed in the US or distributed through US warehouses would be subject to this 25% tariff. Most books sold in Canada come from Canadian divisions of US publishing houses. While paper production is big in Canada, printing and warehousing of books is not, and there is concern that Canadian business lacks the capacity to replace these products, as opposed to other products such as alcohol.
With a potential 25% hike on book imports, how can authors reach their Canadian readers creatively and on a budget?
Beta Test for Amazon Sponsored Ads on Retailer Websites
On iherb.com (vitamins and supplements), sayweee.com (groceries) and orientaltrading.com, it is now possible to see ads from Amazon’s marketplace. Amazon is beta testing Sponsored Display for a few selected sellers, but if this beta test works, could see new advertising opportunities spread for new markets and new retail websites.
Should the beta open up to other retailer websites, what is your prediction on how authors can take advantage of this potential new capability?
FirstEmailChallenge.com Starts in 10 days.
At the Novel Marketing conference, I survey all of the attendees before they come. We use this survey to place attendees in writers groups with similar authors. One of the questions we ask is the size of their email lists. And the results are shocking. 33% of attendees had last year had zero subscribers on their email lists.
The Novel Marketing conference attracts a more advanced author than the typical writers conference. Many of the attendees have thousands of subscribers. And yet one third of the folks flying to Austin had not taken the very first step toward marketing their books.
They needed help and this was the inspiration behind the Send Your First Email Challenge. The goal is to get authors from zero subscribers to over a dozen subscribers in one week. And, more importantly, start the process of email list growth. The best time to start an email newsletter was ten years ago. The second best time is right now. And we will all be doing the challenge together, at the same time as a community. At the end of the week I will host a celebratory Q&A for everyone who completed the challenge.
An easy way to start fighting procrastination is to join the Send Your First Email Challenge. You can sign up for free at FirstEmailChallenge.com.
AI Transcript
Introduction [00:00:00]
Thomas: Hello and welcome to Author Update. I’m Thomas Amstat Jr. And joining with me is Jonathan Sugar. This is the show where we talk about the news and we also answer your questions. And we have a new and improved system where we should be able to put your questions and comments right up on the screen. If you have commentary on that particular news story that we’re talking about, chime in and you may just become a part of the show.
Amazon Ads Expansion News [00:01:00]
Jonathan: First thing we’re gonna talk about today is Amazon ads news expansion. They have recently expanded to include their sponsored ads in the countries of India, Mexico, Netherlands, and Japan. This is of course a big development for authors in opening up new markets that have not yet been saturated by Amazon Ads advertising.
Thomas: The biggest one here is India. There’s more English speakers in India than there are English speakers in the United States. So it’s a very big potential market, but if you want to be price competitive, you’re going to have to price your book very inexpensively. But I think it’s definitely worth experimenting.
Sometimes authors will find that they are almost randomly super popular in one country or another. So famously, Larry Korea is huge in the Czech Republic, and it’s changing the name to Chea. He was so popular that they ended up doing a whole book in Czech, in his story world, because his books had really taken off there. So having more access to more countries is more better.
Technology Section: AI Updates [00:02:00]
Jonathan: We’re gonna move on into our technology section. This week, AI is all over the news. First, we’re gonna talk about how traditional publishing is starting to embrace AI. Wiley publishers announced new AI guidelines. They’re looking at being able to embrace the shift rather than fight it. They had tons of researchers asking for permission or guidelines on how to ethically embrace AI as they’re using it for research.
Thomas: Wiley is the first domino of all of the dominoes of all of traditional publishing eventually embracing AI. You actually have heard of Wiley. Everybody has, they’re one of the few publishing companies that’s really good at branding. They’re the company behind the Dummies books. They’re the company, I believe, behind the O’Reilly technical books, and they tend to be out in front of the rest of publishing from a technological perspective.
While they’re not as big as Random House or Scholastic in terms of total unit sales, in terms of dollars, they actually do really well because a Dummies book is like 30 bucks, 35 bucks. They also do a lot of textbooks, I believe. Once one publisher starts accepting AI, all the others will follow.
Jonathan: Moving on from them, we have to talk about the big dog in the room. A couple of days ago Chat GPT dropped the image generator. If you haven’t tried this thing, it’s available on the free plan. It can do book covers, ads. It doesn’t mess up fingers. It can do text. It is doing a fantastic job and it’s easier to use than Midjourney, which requires a very specific set of prompting. You can just do long form text-based stuff, which is all authors love to do.
Thomas: You can highlight parts of an image and make changes. This isn’t just an improvement, it’s a completely new approach to generating images. Midjourney uses a technique called diffusion, which is also what Stable Diffusion uses and DALL-E. All of the big AI systems have used some version of diffusion where it creates random pixels, then fixes it to be slightly more like what you described, and after a thousand fixes, it looks like what you asked for.
The new engine runs on a language model that draws the picture one pixel at a time, kind of from top to bottom. A better way to think of it is if you watch a painter paint, the painter will often start with a sketch with pencil and then fill in the details from there. What GPT’s model is doing is using English language to pencil in the image and then fill it in.
This is key for authors because it can now handle text. If you’ve ever played with AI images, you had to add the text yourself because DALL-E and Midjourney were not fluent in English. This new system is just as good at writing on an image as it was writing plain text, which means you can create a book cover for your reader magnet with one prompt and you’re done.
Jonathan: I tried several use cases from my perspective as an author. I had to make ads. I threw in my book description, asked it to make me some Meta ads, and it gave me text, the copy, the audience, and the image. Then you can feed it an image and say, “Give me stuff based on this,” and it makes you stuff in a hierarchical ranked structure that’s been shown to work the best, which is exactly what you want in marketing.
Thomas: An author friend of mine was testing this out yesterday. She has two books in a series that are very tightly branded to each other, and for the third book she’s always wanted to add to the series, she asked GPT to do a cover in the style of the first two. And it nailed it. It’s shockingly good and it’s going to change a lot.
I’ll soon have a Patron toolbox tool for creating covers for reader magnets. The API for this new engine isn’t available yet, but as soon as it is, I’m gonna add a tool to the toolbox. You do need to have the paid version of GPT. The free version doesn’t unlock this new image engine.
Jonathan: I’m going to throw some devil’s advocate stuff at you. Are we taking jobs away from people? We’re talking about a machine which does not have a human soul, which is now going to be taking jobs and food out of the mouths of already starving artists.
Thomas: That has not been what’s happened with technology over time. If you look at the history of technological revolutions, 200 years ago, 90% of us were working in the fields, and now only 5% of us are working in the fields. And yet we all still have jobs.
A good comparison is the spreadsheet. Before VisiCalc came out, you would have an accountant manually make you a spreadsheet. So making a spreadsheet was a very intensive human task. Then VisiCalc could do that whole summing of a column of numbers instantly. You would think the number of accounting jobs would go down, but just the opposite happened. The demand for accountants went up. In fact, it’s higher now than it’s ever been.
What’s really happening is that we’re democratizing art. It used to be the creation of art was reserved for the elites. And even if you were talented, getting your art sold wasn’t really based off of how good it was. It was based off of your personal network. Now the tools of art making are being pushed down to people who couldn’t afford to go to art school for four years.
Jonathan: My contention is that when automation hit factories in the United States, it took care of a lot of jobs, opened up other opportunities. Now with AI automating things, it’s just gonna eliminate the mediocre. If your writing has no voice, it can easily be done by a robot. It’s really gonna drive us to become more competitive.
I think the real currency in the future is going to be authenticity. Prove your humanity, show your relationship, your ability to speak to the human soul. That’s where creativity needs to go next, because that’s what people are gonna be looking for. Right now people are starving for human interaction.
Thomas: I think that authenticity is gonna move more and more into the real world. It used to be storytelling was a live experience. Your dad would tell you a story as you were going to bed. The elder of the village would tell a story at the fire. A minstrel would sing a poem of a great war. It was a performance.
Same with music. Music was a performance and people were paid to perform music. Then these infernal machines came along, where now you don’t get paid to perform music. A small aristocratic class gets paid to record music. Instead of there being a thousand bards in a thousand villages, there’s one super bard that sings for everyone. And I think that trend is being reversed now, where the voices of the people are being restored.
Jonathan: Because you can trust it more, because you can see it being created more.
Thomas: A few more quick AI news. We have to mention Gemini 2.5 because there’s actually a conspiracy that OpenAI has been sitting on this new image engine for over a year, and they finally got beat. There’s an AI model that’s better, faster, and cheaper than Chat GPT that Google released – Gemini 2.5.
Gemini’s model is crazy good. You can upload your whole book to it, and it can have your whole book as a context window for the entirety of your interaction. And it’s like a tenth of the price of the other tools from a token perspective. I’d encourage you to check it out.
Jonathan: That brings up a question then – how much does a human being need the software for something to be art? What amount of human pain or experience do I need to put into a work for it to be human enough to be considered art?
Thomas: There’s an interesting analog to this. In the 1940s, we invented foods for soldiers to make it easier to feed them abroad. One was cake mix, where you just add water and put it in the oven. The product failed. The big marketing innovation was realizing that women, particularly mothers, wanted to put effort into making the cake. If it was too easy, it wasn’t emotionally satisfying.
So they took out the powdered oils and eggs from the recipe, and changed it to require adding two eggs and one cup of oil. That was just enough work where suddenly 1950s mothers were willing to buy the cake mix. That’s where you get the Betty Crocker cake mix, basically unchanged to this day.
The same thing happened with clothes washers. Everyone thought that would cause moms to spend less time washing clothes. It didn’t actually save people very much time – they just wash their clothes more often. The results of this time-saving machine was not actually time saving, it was cleaner clothes.
So my recommendation for you, if you’re gonna use AI tools to write better books or deliver books to your readers faster, it would behoove you in your marketing to really play up how miserable you are, because readers want authors to be miserable. They want you to talk about how much you suffered to write this book, and that’s what adds value.
Library Funding News [00:39:00]
Jonathan: On March 14th, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate, among others, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to the fullest extent permissible by law. Around $2 billion per year is spent on libraries, mostly from local and state taxes, but IMLS accounts for about 10% of that funding. It’s believed that cuts to IMLS will unlikely greatly affect the funding used for collections or lending, as most of that funding is used for special projects. Do you think authors have anything to worry about here? Is President Trump launching a war on books?
Thomas: Your local library gets money to buy books from your local community. It’s the local taxes that fund that. The IMLS is more about connecting different libraries to each other, interlibrary loans, that sort of thing.
There’s a bigger, more fundamental view here, a Marxist view that more people is more better. What if you are familiar with business? You often find that you can do more with less. Gideon’s 300 is actually a more effective fighting force than Gideon’s 20,000. By doing layoffs and cutting unnecessary programs, regulations, steps, and people, you actually can get a lot more done.
This is what we saw at Twitter. 80% of the employees got laid off, and now it’s as profitable as it’s ever been, with twice as many users, running better than it’s ever been. All those additional people pulled the productive people into meetings, and eventually you’re just in meetings all day long and not actually getting anything done.
Jonathan: The Marine Corps is predicated on this very idea. When I was over in Iraq, we had a four-man team to do the job of the Army battalion next door. That Army battalion got their authorizations revoked because they had so many people touching stuff, their products got polluted. So yes, fewer, more productive, highly qualitative people is a much better way to operate.
Canadian Tariffs on Books [00:44:00]
Jonathan: Canadian booksellers are now moving to start fighting to prevent tariffs from affecting books moving from the US into Canada. The two CEOs of major Canadian booksellers have joined forces to request from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that books be exempted from Canada’s upcoming tariffs on April 2nd. Books by Canadian authors printed in the US or distributed through US warehouses would be subject to a 25% tariff.
Most books sold in Canada come from Canadian divisions of US publishing houses. While paper production is big in Canada, printing and warehousing of books is not, and there is concern that Canadian business lacks the capacity to replace these products. With a potential 25% hike on book imports, how can authors reach their Canadian readers creatively and still stay on budget?
Thomas: I have a controversial opinion here, but I actually think Canada should ignore this and hit us with that 25% because I actually think it would be good for Canadian literature. One of the challenges that Canada has culturally is that every major city in Canada is closer to a major American city than it is to the nearest Canadian city.
Canada looks very big on a map, but most of that is almost entirely empty. Texas has in some ways done a better job of being able to keep our culture separate from American imperialism because our major cities are closer to other Texas cities than they are to the nearest major American city.
If you look at things like cuisine, Texas has two cuisines, whereas Canada has a few dishes that are unique to Canada. This is a big frustration for Canadians and there’s been a lot of efforts over the years to try to encourage Canadian arts, literature, conferences for authors, filmmaking, and they keep getting bought up by the Americans.
American companies will come in and buy Canadian companies. Simon & Schuster will buy some successful Canadian publisher and then make it an imprint. Canada hitting the United States with a tariff throws sand in the gears of these global, multinational companies.
Tariffs are not a tool against other countries. They’re a tool against companies because there’s a handful of mega corporations that are basically running the world. I think it’d actually be good for Canadian literary culture to slap this tariff. It’ll be painful in the short term, but it might actually help flourish Canadian literature long term.
Jonathan: This is an opportunity for Canadian authors because now with American books having to be at least 25% higher in cost, Canadian independent authors, if they’re able to print in Canada or find a local printer, can actually undercut in price their competitors that before they would never have been able to compete with.
Thomas: It’s actually really good for indie authors across the board because indie books are printed in the country in which they’re mailed to. Typically indie books are print on demand and there’s print on demand in Canada and the United States. This tariff is only gonna hit the big mega corps hard. If you’re Joe Indie author who’s writing military science fiction, suddenly your paper books are 25% more price competitive than they were otherwise.
Amazon Ads on Retailer Websites [00:51:00]
Jonathan: Amazon is running a beta test to see if spreading Amazon ads and allowing them to distribute to other retailer websites will actually produce a surge in orders from amazon.com. Right now on iherb.com, saywe.com, and orientaltrading.com, it’s possible to see ads from Amazon’s marketplace.
Amazon is beta testing it for a few selected sellers, but if this test works, we could be seeing advertising opportunities for new markets on other retail websites. Should this open up to those other websites? What’s your prediction on how authors can and should take advantage of this potential new capability?
Thomas: Amazon has tried this two or three times over the last 15 years. They keep trying this and it keeps not working because Acme Shopify store doesn’t want to give their biggest nemesis money.
Jonathan: Well, it would require relationships with all those different retailer websites, and those are individual relationships. It’s not like it’s as easy as saying all retailer websites can have Amazon advertising. You have to incentivize each one differently, and that level of negotiation is hard to do.
Thomas: What I could see working is Amazon advertising on content creator websites where the Babylon Bee now has Amazon ads, or Wall Street Journal has Amazon ads. The Babylon Bee doesn’t have that same level of competition with Amazon and is very happy to get more ad revenue. Now Amazon’s competing with Google AdSense. I could see that working, but competing on Acme Shopify store – I wouldn’t wanna be that salesperson.
Q&A Section [00:54:00]
Jonathan: Sue Fink asks: Do you have a podcast explaining the best way for starving authors to buy ads that work?
Thomas: I do have an episode literally called “The Starving Author” or “The Starving Artist.” If you go to authormedia.com and search for the word “starving,” there is an episode exactly for you about what to do when you’re on a really tight budget.
Jonathan: It’s really your targeting, your productivity, knowing who exactly you want to reach and the pathway to get to those people so you’re not wasting money. I saw a publisher chat telling authors to use Meta’s Advantage Plus placement and take advantage of their AI to make ads better. But Advantage Plus wasn’t designed for author-level budgets. It was designed for business-level budgets where you can drop $500-1000 a week on ads. Authors don’t have that.
Thomas: A lot of those machine learning engines require a certain amount of spend for the machine to learn. It can’t make the intuitive jumps that you can make. If you’re not spending very much money, you really can’t use those tools. This is where “to him who has more is given” – those tools are magical when you’re spending $500-1000 a month, but if you’re spending $20 a month, your money will just go poof.
Question: What about using AI to do a developmental edit of a novel?
Thomas: It is getting really good at this. Some of the AIs you’ll need to pay. The new Gemini 2.5 can literally read your whole novel and then give you feedback on it. I’ve seen this done quite well for nonfiction. My expertise is more for using AI for marketing purposes; using it for craft is a little outside my zone.
Jonathan: I’ve tried it. The suggestions are really good if you have a story that has been written before. But it still struggles with prologues, with time jumps. There’s a lot of intuition that the model doesn’t have yet to really interpret what your story is doing that human beings just do instinctively.
Question: Regarding targeting. One of the episodes recommends letting Amazon target for you because they know better. So if you’re trying to find your targets, which method do you use?
Jonathan: You need to know your reader. I would meet several of them and ask them questions. Find out what they like and don’t like. Why do they buy books? When do they buy books? A nursing mother is surfing her phone at two o’clock in the morning. She listens to podcasts and audiobooks while nursing a baby. If you don’t know that, you’re missing a great purchase window.
Buying a book is a terrible financial decision. It’s never necessary. You’re trying to convince people to make a bad financial decision. You need to understand why they are justifying the purchase for your book. So your promise needs to be right on target.
Thomas: This is also how you beat the AI generally – through that human-to-human connection. The two paths to success are either all digital all the time with an army of AIs doing stuff for you, or having coffee with your reader. The middle road is death.
Question: Is it a lack of integrity to not disclose AI content? Are we morally bankrupt to still take credit/ownership for AI content whereas all we contributed was the idea itself?
Thomas: The only people I hear asking questions like this are people who haven’t really made anything with AI themselves. Once you start using AI, you realize that it’s actually a lot harder than just saying “AI, write me a book.”
Does the handyman have to disclose that he’s using a cordless drill instead of screwing in the screws himself? He’s still doing the work. Getting something valuable from AI where it’s not just AI slop requires a lot of work – different work. Some things are easier, but some things are actually harder. It requires more judgment and a skill you weren’t taught in school: learning how to ask good questions.
Jonathan: One thing I would consider is what is the final destination of your product? It’s the reader. When I create, it’s to help them find a way out of darkness or make them smile or enjoy their day a little more. Am I really gonna quibble about whether I typed my manuscript or finger-painted it on a cave wall?
If it helps your reader, if it’s what your reader needs, then you did good. It’s that relationship with your reader that’s gonna make you successful regardless of the tool you’re using.
Thomas: Einstein supposedly said, “I’ve only had one original thought in my entire life.” There’s a way of thinking that everything you know is based off knowledge that other people have given you. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants. I think we all need a little bit of humility. All of our stories are derivative – most of them are the hero’s journey. What matters is blessing your reader, contextualizing that eternal story in a better way for that person for this time.
Jonathan: Remove your ego. It’s not about you, it’s about the reader. For me, my audience, half of them are on the verge of killing themselves. So if I save one, who cares what tool was used? Always keep that final destination in mind.
Closing [01:07:00]
Thomas: If you want help starting an email newsletter, I have a free one-week challenge where you’ll go from nothing to something. By the end of the week, you’ll have a landing page, subscribers, and you’ll have sent your first email newsletter. You can sign up at firstemailchallenge.com.
Jonathan: What I want to do for the Author Update people is on my Substack – if you pay to become a paying subscriber, I’m going to create weekly AdWord recommendations for you based off of your current bestseller in your genre. Every week I’ll take a look at your book and generate a list of 30-50 AdWords suitable according to what the bestseller is in the genre.
Thomas: Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you for participating in the chat. For those of you listening in the future, do let us know what you think in the chat down below. Live long and prosper.
