Thomas: Spotify revolutionizes audiobooks, George R. R. Martin is told to step down and hand his books to somebody else, and are we in an AI bubble? Find out all of this and a lot more in today’s episode of Author Update. I’m Thomas Umstattd Jr.

Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Shuerger Jr. And today I get to talk about something fun. AuthorMedia.social has come under attack! The scammers have found us, the bots are burrowing in through the foundations, and so we have countered their assault with fire and close combat, and we are ready to repulse. Thomas, what are we doing to repulse what’s happening?

Thomas: Tan, tan.

AuthorMedia.social Under Attack and the New Paywall

Thomas: First let me explain what happened. AuthorMedia.social was not hacked. What happened was a bad actor, likely from Nigeria, came in and took advantage of a feature, which is on AuthorMedia.social, which is a social network that I run for authors, you can send direct messages to other authors. The whole point of this feature is to help foster friendships between authors and encourage collaboration. And a lot of people have found their new author friends on AuthorMedia.social.

Thomas: Well, this Nigerian got on and thought it would be a good idea to message hundreds or maybe thousands of authors telling them that he was from Netflix and he wanted to make their book into a movie. So he started doing this first thing in the morning. I wake up and all my phone is is messages from people saying that there’s a bot and I’m frantically trying to figure out what’s going on. The problem with these kinds of bots is that we ban somebody and then they’ll just sign up with a VPN and a different email address and pick up right where they left off. And so what I finally did was something that I was not planning to do, but I have now erected a big, beautiful paywall.

Jonathan: Build a wall! Build a wall!

Thomas: So now, if you want to join AuthorMedia.social, there’s a one-time fee of $10. It doesn’t cover the cost of running AuthorMedia.social. It’s way more expensive than that. And there are still a lot of free ways in. If you’ve already signed up, you don’t have to pay. If you’re a patron, you don’t have to pay. If you’re going through one of my courses, you don’t have to pay. If you’re going to the Novel Marketing Conference, you don’t have to pay. But if you’re some stranger on the internet, you now have to pay $10. The purpose of this is to keep the bots out, because bots don’t have access to money, and it’s going to hopefully keep the scammers out. While the scammers can pay $10, they don’t want to be identified. To get the credit card to go through, they have to actually use a valid credit card. To use a stolen credit card is too much hassle. I really hope that we don’t get there.

Jonathan: That’s a lot of work. It just feels like a lot of work.

Thomas: In general, these scammers are haunting Facebook groups and Facebook pages. One of the nice things about the software that I’m using is that I can erect a paywall. What’s interesting is that since I’ve erected the paywall, I’ve had more new people sign up than we had before, because people actually want to be in a bot-free environment. There’s a real value in interacting with fellow human authors rather than a bunch of bots on Facebook.

Thomas: It costs me a lot of money to run AuthorMedia.social and this is not a revenue making plan. At first I thought no one was gonna sign up. We had our very first sign up. So I’ve made $10 so far on the paywall. But it’s just a one-time fee. It’s a cup of coffee or two cups of coffee depending on where you live.

Thomas: If somebody contacts you, and I will say this kind of attack is becoming more common, the Nigerians who were pretending to be princes and kind of targeting people generically are now targeting authors specifically. There are a bunch of Nigerians who have an AI generated avatar that makes them look like you, however you look. They’ll try different versions to target different people. They’ll run all of their messages through some sort of AI tool to help with the language difference. Normally authors would be protected from these kinds of scammers by the use of the English language. Authors tend to have really high standards for English. If somebody’s claiming to be an editor and they are getting really basic things wrong, it makes it look like maybe they don’t know what they’re talking about. But the reason why these kinds of scams work is because every author wants to get this email. They want somebody from Netflix to say, we’re gonna make you rich and famous.

Jonathan: Yes. So, as somebody who used to maliciously target people, you get people to come to you based on their hungers. What are they hungry for? What is it they really, really want the most? And for authors, that’s ego and exposure. And if Netflix comes to you and says, hey, your book is amazing, we want to make it into a movie, you should be like, are you though?

Thomas: Shout out to our moderators. We had some moderators who jumped on this right away. If the scammers didn’t attack or didn’t offer you a contract for your book on Netflix, it’s not because the scammers didn’t think your book was any good. It was because we’d kicked them out before they had a chance to get to your account. Some people are like, even the scammers aren’t interested in my book. It’s like, no, the scammers are very interested in your money.

Jonathan: You’ll get, no, that’s actually a good thing. When the scammers start targeting you, you know you’re starting to make it. Just keep doing what you’re doing, you’re doing good, the scammers think you’re worth something.

Thomas: My recommendation instead of paying the $10 is to become a patron for $4 and then you click the link, you’ll get the patron badge, you’ll get lifetime access to AuthorMedia.social and that’s actually the cheapest way in. The $10 paywall is not really meant to actually bring in money, it’s just meant to keep the scammers out.

Are We in an AI Bubble? Arguments For

Thomas: There’s a big question that’s the big buzz right now. I’m hearing it in the political news, I’m hearing it in the AI news, even Ben Shapiro was talking about this. Are we in an AI bubble? The entire stock market right now is being propped up by AI. The biggest growth in the S and P 500 is Nvidia, and the big reason that Nvidia is growing is because of AI. This has a big impact on authors, because the economy overall impacts us and AI is a tool that many authors use, and even if you’re not using it, your competitors are using it.

Thomas: All of the AI companies are losing money. OpenAI, XAI, Anthropic, even otherwise profitable companies like Google and Microsoft, their AI divisions are money losers for them. When you’re using OpenAI or Grok, that interaction that you’re having with AI is being subsidized by venture capitalists. It costs them more to give you the answer than you’re paying, sometimes even for paid users. The thinking was, we are losing money now, but we’ll make it up in volume. As we have more customers, we’ll get bigger and more efficient data centers, the cost per token will go down, and we’ll get profitable. Whoever gets the most market share now will win in the long run.

Thomas: The problem is the tokens aren’t getting cheaper. The models, especially now that they all have reasoning, are generating far more tokens than they ever were before. Nobody uses the cheap models. You could still use older, cheaper models, but nobody wants to do that. They want to use the cutting edge models, and the cutting edge models are getting more expensive on a per token basis, and they are generating more tokens.

Thomas: This explains OpenAI’s big pivot into GPT-5, which was only kind of an improvement around the edges, but really it was an improvement to try to reduce the number of tokens that OpenAI is having to generate because it’s not a money bandwidth, it’s a bandwidth bandwidth. They are hitting up against a hard technical limit. The demand for AI tools is growing faster than their ability to plug in new computers and buy new computers from Nvidia. Some of these companies are trading at over a hundred times their PE ratio, which is a big red flashing light. If their profits don’t go way up, no company can survive a 100x PE ratio. Lots of hype, lots of fear of missing out. Those are telltale signs of a bubble.

Thomas: Some people are like, Meta has freezed their hiring. They were spending $100 million to hire new people. Now they’re not hiring anybody new. This argument I don’t think is very valid because Meta kind of approached it like they’re building out their new team. Now that they have their new team, they’re not going to keep adding people, which is actually smart. But it does sound scary. The argument in general is this is 1999 all over again, it’s another dot com bubble.

Are We in an AI Bubble? Arguments Against

Thomas: The biggest argument against the bubble is that people are spending money on AI. It’s not like the dot com bubble where companies with no plan hoped to make money someday. The VC money is like, you have to make money. OpenAI just had its first billion dollar month. They may be losing money, but they brought in a billion dollars and that was mostly subscription revenue, which means next month they’re gonna make another billion and they’re growing. They had 20 percent growth from June to July. That’s massive growth.

Thomas: People really are using AI more and more. Part of it is because they’re getting AI really cheap. This may be the golden age of AI when you can get a subscription for only 20 bucks. Next year, an OpenAI subscription may be 200 bucks a month. It may create haves and have-nots once companies switch from growth to profitability. Right now, you can get the frontier models for very cheap. That may not last forever.

Thomas: The revenue is climbing, the growth is growing, and it’s growing exponentially. XAI had like a thousand times growth, or their numbers kind of broke charts. Grok went from basically nothing last year to massively profitable over, I think, 500 million users I heard. AI really does make people more productive. An author using AI for marketing is going to be more productive and spend less time marketing and more time writing. The technical limitations on compute are what’s holding the industry back, not money. Some people would argue that the technical limitations are actually preventing the bubble from getting worse.

Thomas: The argument here is that this is like the social media bubble. There was a famous song that came out in 2005 or 2006, Here Comes Another Bubble, making fun of Facebook for having a $20 billion valuation. Facebook makes like $20 billion a month now. It wasn’t a bubble. There was real money. The biggest problem with the social networks is that they were so popular and so profitable it gave them political power in addition to market power.

If a Market Correction Hits

Thomas: What would a market correction look like if we are in a bubble? When the bubble pops, expect prices for AI tools to get way more expensive and more limitations and restrictions. The very best tools, the ones that give you the best edge, will be quite a bit more expensive. A crash in AI will bring down the entire United States economy with it. The whole stock market is going to go down because AI is touching all of these different industries. Every industry is hoping that AI is going to be their path to growth. If it’s not, it’s going to be country-wide, global layoffs, definitely no more signing bonuses for a billion dollars. A lot of consolidation, look for companies to get merged, look for somebody to buy Anthropic. It will be an overall economic recession. I’m not giving financial advice because never listen to economists predict the future because they’re really bad at it.

Tactical Outlook on AI Costs and Constraints

Jonathan: There’s a tactical outlook on this. In the military you get really leery when your LT comes in and says, guys, we got new guns. Why do we have new guns? What’s wrong with our old guns? Why don’t the new guns work? Who made a ton of money selling them to you? We get really leery about new stuff. AI right now is behaving like an invasion. Invasions are extremely expensive. They take territory and try to hold their ground. At a certain point they have to convert to becoming profitable. The prices will go up and it will price out all the little people. Everyone who is now getting value out of AI is going to rely on it and that’s when markets can jack up their prices.

Thomas: Using it for work is probably always going to be profitable. Using it to make funny memes may not be always profitable.

Jonathan: If it’s costing them $100 billion a year to make memes for people, what are you going to cut? You’re going to put in a paywall to reduce your cost so that people are still going to be getting value but you can stay profitable. We’re talking power generation, compute problems, cooling issues. You can’t put too many servers together in a room otherwise it overheats the room and melts all the servers which Helldivers is about to experience on the 26th.

Thomas: There is a whole school of engineering on dealing with microclimate, which is all about how do you cool a server farm because you have hotspots and cool spots. It ends up being a matter of electricity and power. Northern regions actually have an economic advantage. If it’s 30 degrees outside, it’s a lot cheaper to cool something than if it’s in Arizona and it’s already 100 degrees outside without even turning on the computers.

Jonathan: In Toronto, you can just open the door. In Arizona, don’t you ever open that door. We bury it 800 feet underground.

Spotify Launches Six New Audiobook Features

Jonathan: Spotify is launching six new audiobook features, which is kind of exciting for authors, especially those of us that are working on our audio catalogs. First, they are doing author pages. This will do an author’s bio, a full catalog, and new releases. If a fan likes what they’re listening to, they can now search your name, click on your name from the audiobook, go to your author page and see what else you have to offer. Before that, it was actually harder to do.

Thomas: If you’re traditionally published, you should be on Spotify already. Make sure that your author page looks good, that it has your photo updated, your bio, and that it lists all of your books. This is one of those metadata issues that’s really easy to overlook. If you’re exclusive to Audible, none of these cool things Spotify’s rolling out are gonna help you. If you’re indie and wide as an audiobook, check your author page, because you should be able to control it yourself. That’s just the first of the features.

Jonathan: Hubs are fantastic. You always want to look at generating hubs so that when somebody hits one of the branches of the hub and goes back to the hub, you’re just going to statistically make more money from hubs. Another thing they did is a sleep timer for audiobooks. If you tend to go to sleep while listening to audiobooks, this is great.

Thomas: For parents, this is a surprisingly nice feature.

Jonathan: They added the sleep timer for audiobooks. Another one is video clips for exploring audiobooks. You can now do short videos to give a teaser before you commit to an audiobook. This was announced in 2024. There hasn’t been a major rollout since then. It appears limited to titles and creators, but if it rolls out wider, that tool could be fantastic.

Thomas: They do have a countdown page, which is a really unfortunate name for a page, which would have been called pre-order. It functions like a pre-order page, but since they’re not buying your book, they just get to subscribe to it. If you’re doing a pre-order window, make sure you have a countdown page. During your launch and especially during your pre-launch, you can drive traffic to this countdown page, which will lead you to the final tip we’re gonna get to, which is the most important for boosting your audiobook sales, especially if you’re trying to pivot away from Audible and their crushingly awful royalty arrangements.

Jonathan: The playlist. Now there are audiobook playlists that you can get on, kind of like Goodreads with their lists. You can create and curate a to-listen list or be discovered via editorial picks, which will categorize everything from favorites to new gems. This is available right now. If you get your audiobook onto one of these lists, you have people who just want to be told what to listen to. Your statistical likelihood of being selected from that list goes way up, especially given that Spotify is on a minute basis. You’re not stuck on the credit thing here. Now you’re just competing for minutes.

Thomas: If we take a note from Spotify marketing tips for musicians, there is a lot to learn. Eighty percent of Spotify marketing tactics are all about getting featured on the right playlists. If you’re at the top spot on a popular playlist, you get a lot of guaranteed downloads and the controllers of the top playlists end up being the hit makers. There is a real opportunity here in the book world to start controlling the top playlists of the micro genres. Consider creating a playlist for your micro genre and curating it yourself. For the playlist to be popular you have to do a good job curating books, which means you have to actually be well read in your genre. It will help you develop good taste and it will help you with things like this where you can curate playlists, and maybe you can team up with some other authors. This is the first you’re hearing about it most likely because nobody’s talking about this. This is so critical and now’s the time. Six months from now everyone is going to be talking about it and by then it’s too late.

Jonathan: This mirrors the giveaway strategy where you get together with another author and you give away your books and share the results of the email list that you got. If you can get together with another group of authors who write the same thing and you all promote the same playlist on Spotify, to your email lists or even social media, or on a podcast, you can probably see some pretty good mileage. A lot of people have Spotify Premium. They can listen to audiobooks there. Even if they’re not used to doing that. If they have Spotify Premium, then the audiobook is free. Like you just say that, you know, it’s free on Spotify Premium. That’s what I say, it’s free to read on KU.

Thomas: The final really cool feature that they’re rolling out is something called follow along, which allows for visuals to appear on the screen at various points in the story. Epic fantasy authors, come in close. Your map, the one that you have beautifully laid out in your print book and it looks great on your ebook, use this here. You can have more than one map, you can have a map for every chapter of your book. You have a battle, have a map for that battle. Are your people exploring a city? Have a map for the city.

Jonathan: It’s almost like, is there a tool in the Patreon toolbox that does something like this?

Thomas: I have a map making tool. It’s the map maker. It costs me money every time you run this because the image tools are some of the most expensive. Whether you use my tool or not, you probably already have a map. Use it here. It could be fun to use AI to create character images. When a character is talking, you see an image that you, the author, generated of that character. You could play around with this. There is innovation and experimentation here. It is still an auditory experience primarily, but you can augment it with images that change. This gives you an advantage over Audible. You are trying to get your Audible readers to switch to Spotify because you’re making more money off of them on Spotify. You have to give them a reason to switch. This kind of more multimedia experience could be that reason to switch.

Jonathan: This is a combined arms strategy where you’re negging Audible, diminishing the perception of them while enticing people to another platform that could potentially give you more benefit like higher royalties or more exposure. If people are locked into Audible, they are going to stay there unless you can figure out a way. This is a good time if you want to try to move people to Spotify or to your selling direct. A lot of people are selling direct now. Say this is the shady, slimy stuff that Audible’s doing in the background. Even if it’s not shady or slimy, it’s being portrayed that way and you can take advantage of it.

Thomas: Great time to compete with Audible.

11 Labs Previews 11 Reader AI Audiobook Marketplace

Thomas: I just had a conversation with someone from 11 Labs, the leading AI text-to-speech company. This is the company that did the Melania Trump audiobook. They made a voice clone of her and turned it into the audiobook. Eleven Labs is rolling out soon a new marketplace called 11 Reader where you can just upload the text of your book and it turns it into an AI audiobook and allows you to sell it to your readers and you keep 60 percent of the money, and they don’t let anybody else have a bite at the apple.

Thomas: From a cost to create an audiobook perspective, basically free, especially compared to working with a human. Eleven Labs allows you to put emotional cues. You can say whisper and the AI will whisper. You can say laugh, sorrowfully, sardonically. It takes surprisingly good stage direction and you can tweak it. There is somebody on AuthorMedia.social who needed like 20 changes to her audiobook and her narrator is just not doing them. I’ll be testing 11 Labs myself. This isn’t a recommendation, but it is something to keep an eye on. More competition for Audible is 100 percent better for the market.

Jonathan: You don’t have to like AI audiobooks, but.

Thomas: This is a record. Jonathan has not used the word marine in 30 minutes, ladies and gentlemen.

Jonathan: I’m trying really hard.

Novel Marketing Conference Tickets

Jonathan: We’re going to have a Q and A at the Novel Marketing Conference that probably a lot of this is going to be covering. About how many tickets do we have left? Is it still possible to get into the conference?

Thomas: Early bird ticket sales are still open, but if you’re thinking about getting a super ticket, which extends the two day conference to a three day conference, there are only seven super tickets left. If you want to grab a super ticket, do not wait. The early bird window ends in about four weeks. You can find out more at novelmarketingconference.com. This is a conference focused on helping you sell more books. It is not about how to get published, but it will make you more appealing to a publisher or give you more confidence as you market and promote your own books. This is our third year doing it. We had rave reviews in the previous years and we would love to see you there.

Do Listeners Prefer AI or Human Narrators?

Jonathan: Jaina, that’s a great question. Do we have any numbers on whether audiobook listeners prefer AI or human narrators? We do. Readers do prefer human narrators, but they prefer AI narrators over nothing.

Thomas: A voice clone of your voice, which you can do with 11 Labs, is a big step up. When people think AI narrators, they are thinking Siri. Eleven Labs is a huge step up from Siri, and it can be your voice reading your book with your emotional coaching. You can have every character have his own voice or her own voice. Suddenly it becomes something more and kind of different, like a fully cast audio film. The more work you put into an 11 Lab style audiobook, the less it is cheaper. It could be quite a bit of work to do that.

Jonathan: Daniel Green showed some statistics as to how readers actually don’t know if they’re listening to AI or real voice actors anymore. They had some audiobooks rated and the AI audiobook won.

Thomas: There are a lot of young people on TikTok and a lot of the audio on TikTok is AI generated. People are being desensitized. There is also talk that YouTube is using AI upscaling on regular videos in the shorts, to customize people to seeing AI images of people that they know to desensitize them. I wouldn’t be surprised if TikTok and Instagram got on that game as well.

Jonathan: Again, the end result is the same thing I’ve been saying for months. Just be a storyteller. Use the gift of storytelling and tell your story. If you are putting out a bunch of books and you can’t afford human narrators, make use of the tools that are available to you. There’s no moral stance to be had here.

Thomas: It will never be as good as working with a celebrity narrator who has their own fan base, from a straight up quality and marketing angle. But that is also expensive.

Jonathan: Are you a bad person because you can’t get Morgan Freeman to narrate your audiobook? It doesn’t make any sense. It is just a matter of the resources that are available to you.

Do Audio Files Require an ISBN?

Jonathan: There was another quick question from Ronald. Do audio files require an ISBN? Yes, they do. If it’s another edition of your book, you need a new ISBN for your book.

Thomas: I encourage you, if you’re asking that question, to listen to my episode on metadata. This isn’t a burden, it’s an opportunity, and it can be really useful for marketing purposes. Speaking of metadata, Reputation Thieves strike again. Jonathan, what’s the story?

Reputation Theft: Impostor Books on Amazon

Jonathan: On August 14th in 2025, Eric Topol, a prominent physician slash scientist, publicly alerted X and LinkedIn about fraudulent books on Amazon using his identity. These included fake memoirs and cookbooks themed around longevity, which would echo his legitimate work in his book Superagers. Despite these infringement reports, the listings persist, showing an issue with content moderation. This confuses buyers and dilutes trust in a guy’s brand. This has happened with a bunch of other people too, especially celebrities. They are shooting a bunch of chaff to confuse the air. This is a great unethical, but great tactic to use against a competitor.

Thomas: It’s not worth it for that purpose, even if you have no ethics. We’re not recommending that.

Jonathan: It’s immoral and when people find out, you’re done.

Thomas: We have a whole episode on this. I coined a term for this kind of fraud, because we didn’t have a term for it yet. Reputation theft. It is not actually illegal. Creating a pen name that’s Janna Bass and writing a book on editing books that seems like her is an effort to steal her reputation or to steal Eric’s reputation. My advice for him would be to get a trademark on the phrase Superagers. He can’t trademark his own name. You can trademark phrases. Be careful. If the phrase is overly broad or if other people are also using that phrase, the whole world will turn on you. It is safer in non-fiction. Trademarks are expensive. You do have to defend them. I’m not a lawyer, but in my episode on reputation theft, I interview a lawyer and we talk about other ways that you can fight this. The fastest, cheapest way is to do exactly what Eric is doing, which is whine about it publicly and hope that the outcry causes Amazon to take these books down, which does work in some instances.

Word of the Day: Doom Prompting

Jonathan: Word of the day, doom prompting. Doom prompting, which is kind of the idea of doom scrolling, is the idea of mindlessly or addictively conversing with a chat bot. You’re sitting on the couch and you’re like, ChatGPT, do you like me? I actually have a question and Thomas disagrees with me on this. Is being anti-social a defense against this kind of behavior? When I use ChatGPT, I ask it a question. I might type please. I don’t see this as a person. I don’t anthropomorphize it. I don’t say thank you, I don’t say goodbye. I’m not affected by this doom prompting thing. I don’t want a relationship with AI. I don’t want a relationship with anyone.

Thomas: I disagree. I think that you’re just a jerk and that’s why you’re not nice, which is different than being antisocial. Being very social, having very positive, healthy relationships in your life, the more satisfied you are with real human interaction, the less desperate you are for an artificial alternative. If you’ve just eaten a good meal, you’re not tempted by McDonald’s. If you’re starving, suddenly you’re tempted by McDonald’s.

Thomas: You may be a jerk, but you’re a happily married jerk, and you have a good community with your church and with your family. You’re not vulnerable for the AI to slot into some empty friendship slot in your life. Somebody who has no friends, doesn’t get out, doesn’t go to church, isn’t married, and they can chat with an AI that promises to fulfill all of their dreams, that’s very dangerous. It can create a spiral that’s mentally unhealthy.

Thomas: Part of the reason why I’m building the toolbox is because I think that a chat interface is not a good interface for using these powerful tools. I don’t want AI Thomas to be your friend, partly because it would bankrupt me. I see how people use AI Thomas and it’s exactly how we want them to use it. They have a marketing question, they ask AI Thomas, it gives them the answer. If they don’t understand, they ask for clarification, they go back and forth a few times, then they’re done. I don’t want them going around and around getting affirmations. Being very social is a protection against doom prompting. I am starting to see this as a problem more and more as people opt for AI companions.

New Tool: Not A Copy Editor

Thomas: I have a new AI tool that I’ve built called Not A Copy Editor. This is a companion to my AI tool called Not A Developmental Editor. Not A Developmental Editor will give you developmental feedback on your book. Not A Copy Editor lets you select what English you speak, British or Canadian or American. Then you pick your style book that you want it to follow, Chicago Manual of Style or the Oxford Manual of Style. Then it will give you a copy edit of a chapter of your book following that style guide. Everything is presented as a suggestion that you can either incorporate or not, which is a much better interface for protecting your voice than Grammarly or ProWritingAid’s little red squigglies. It is a little bit more friction, but that friction forces you to make a judgment call on each edit. If you’re already a patron, give it a shot and let me know what you think.

HarperCollins Reverses Outsourcing of Fulfillment

Jonathan: Stepping out of AI news for a second into book industry, HarperCollins has reversed its decision to outsource its book fulfillment. Now they’re going to operate their own large scale warehouse in the United States for the first time in 15 years. They revealed they’ll construct a state-of-the-art 1.6 million square foot logistics facility in Brownsburg, Indiana at a cost of $160 million. The idea here, this is a good thing because now they’re operating within the United States, and that’s going to lower costs for American authors shipping to American readers because it affects the whole industry.

Thomas: They were already operating in the United States, but they were outsourcing their fulfillment to a third party, which was likely Ingram. A lot of the big publishers stopped actually doing the work of a publisher. After a while, what even are you at this point? You have to have something that you do as a company other than just cashing checks. This will give them a good competitive advantage. Fulfillment and distribution is more than just taking the book and putting it in a box. It is also the relationships with the various retail channels. You are in a better position to interface with those retail channels if you have a relationship with them directly, rather than going through an intermediary like Ingram. Potentially this will free up capacity with Ingram to start working more with indies.

Like and Subscribe

Jonathan: Real quick reminder, like and subscribe to the Author Update channel if you’re enjoying the content. Even if you’re not enjoying it, give us a hate like.

Thomas: If you ring the bell, you’ll be notified when we go live. The easiest way to know when we go live is to turn on notifications.

Jonathan: Thomas doesn’t let me answer in the chat anymore.

Thomas: There was that incident that we don’t talk about, Jonathan.

Google Gemini Storybook Mode

Jonathan: Google Gemini launches Storybook mode. They’ve added a Storybook feature inside the Gemini app which turns a prompt and potentially some photos into a 10 page illustrated read-aloud storybook. It’s available wherever Gemini runs, has print and share options and support for 45 plus languages. It’s probably not a good idea to get your children’s book from this. What it is good for is brainstorming.

Thomas: I was playing with this earlier today, because there’s a children’s book I’ve been wanting to write about a car bed. A little boy is moving to a big kid bed, so his dad orders a race car bed. He builds it, and he’s watching his dad build the car bed. Then he gets bigger and he doesn’t fit in the car bed anymore, so it goes to his little brother. His little brother gets too big and they sell it to another family and then another little boy. It’s actually a story of the car bed as it goes from family to family and gets more and more run down as each little boy loves this car bed. I prompted the AI with the pitch and the art style. I was very impressed with the continuity of the images. The little boy on page one was the same little boy on page three, which has historically been a real challenge for AI. The illustrations were still soulless and its writing was not great.

Thomas: Where this is really interesting is you can prompt it with prompts like, create a children’s book for a five-year-old that explains what daddy does. He works as a nuclear researcher for the University of Colorado. That kind of prompt is laser focused. Although this can lead to existential dread as you hear your job explained in really simple language. Gemini is behind GPT in terms of image creation. For rapid brainstorming, this is a really cool tool. It gives you a 10 page children’s book two minutes later. It is still really buggy. This is an indication of where things are headed. One of the places where things are headed are micro targeted books where your children and your grandchildren have more books with their names in the book because you printed a version of the book that had their specific name in it.

Jonathan: I also see some ways where you can use this. For my brand it would work great because I tend to be affectionately abusive to my readers. This would be great for my Marines if I’m doing some promos for Semper Die. This is how you do math for Marines and there’s a 10 page children’s book on how to do it. That would be huge for my audience.

Thomas: I love that. Children’s books for adults that are humorous and tongue in cheek. It doesn’t make sense to publish that as a children’s book for adults, although there have been a few smash hits. As a joke or a reader magnet or a fun reward in an email newsletter, I can see it being really fun.

Jonathan: Probably not a good author marketing technique. I think that’s hysterical.

Worldcon, George R. R. Martin, and Author Responsibilities

Jonathan: Worldcon just happened. George R. R. Martin was in attendance, along with Brandon Sanderson and Matt Deniman, and there was a panel where people got to ask them questions. A fan got up there and asked the weirdest question. He asked George R. R. Martin, you’re getting old and you’re gonna die soon. When are you going to hand off the completion of the Game of Thrones series to another author? Brandon Sanderson, sitting right next to him who finished Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, said, no, I’m not doing it. George got up and left and he went to go sign books. They ended the panel because it was so awkward.

Thomas: It really shouldn’t be him. He would do a terrible job.

Jonathan: It does bring out a legitimate question. What level of responsibility do authors have to their fans to complete their series? Fans have invested time, money, identity, cosplaying. At what point should the author be called out like this? Most of the fans feel this way. It’s a symptom. George R. R. Martin doesn’t count as just a human being anymore because of the cultural impact that he’s had. I am of the opinion that at a certain point when you have a certain threshold of cultural impact, you have a responsibility to behave well for your audience. Roy Rogers made sure his personal life was good for his audience, which were boys.

Thomas: We should be good examples and role models for impressionable young people. I don’t think George R. R. Martin sees himself as a role model for impressionable young people.

Jonathan: George Lucas had the same issue, not the exact same problem, but similar. People didn’t like the prequels because they took previously created material that he licensed and tossed it out. Boba Fett’s history was totally different in the Extended Universe than the prequels came out and he tossed it out.

Thomas: The prequels are horrendously underrated in my opinion. There is another angle. Many years ago, I visited Salzburg where Sound of Music is filmed. We visited the graveyard in Salzburg that inspired the graveyard in the film. As we’re walking around this graveyard, I was struck by how many skeletons there were on tombstones and in statues and skeletons with their fingers pointing right at you. Often underneath the skeleton would be a Latin phrase, memento mori. Remember that you are mortal. Our ancestors had this desire to be reminded of their mortality to encourage them to live a more virtuous life. The modern view rejects that. If you’re around an old person, you don’t mention that they’re going to die soon. That’s offensive. Their ancestors would have seen that as very important.

Thomas: I disagree that the problem with this was him telling George R. R. Martin that he’s gonna die soon. That could have been like an act of grace, a kindness to somebody who has been in denial. It’s the ultimate statistic that 10 out of 10 people die. Lying to ourselves about this statistic doesn’t do us any favors.

Thomas: Living a virtuous life and thinking in terms of eternity is a good strategy. Also think in terms of your legacy and your readership. If you leave a series incomplete, that series’ longevity is dramatically diminished. Having a succession plan, having an outline, having a successor, explaining to your spouse. The Wheel of Time books were saved by Brandon Sanderson. It ended. That series is too long to just stop.

Jonathan: You’re looking at investment. People aren’t going to invest if it’s not ever going to end, or they’re going to be angry. There are people not starting my fantasy series because George R. R. Martin hasn’t finished his, because Patrick Rothfuss hasn’t finished his. They’ve been burned.

Thomas: Think of your heirs. Say what you will about the Wheel of Time TV show, but Harriet, Robert Jordan’s wife, has been comforted in her widowhood by the Amazon money and by the Brandon Sanderson money. Robert Jordan left his wife in a comfortable way because he had a plan. Otherwise sales would have cratered.

Jonathan: This is just good behavior. You are thinking of your family, your legacy, your children. There’s a toxic thing right now, I’m not leaving my children anything. They can make their own way in the world. That’s wrong. You want to give your children every advantage. You should be unafraid of death and planning for your legacy beyond it. Honestly, this is something that I think George R. R. Martin has failed at. You’ve had an impact and you’re falling down on the fact that you’re not finishing it. I understand, it’s a huge deal. How do you wrap it up? How do you resolve it?

Thomas: It’s scary. If I were George R. R. Martin, there is a way to preserve your legacy while still avoiding the inevitable blowback. He could write the last book and say, it’s in my will, ten days after I die, my publishers have the right. That way he can fulfill his promise to his readers without having to hear all of the pushback. There are ways to solve this problem. I don’t think he has any children. People without children tend to not think in terms of future generations. There is a selfishness that’s particular in his generation. Now that we’ve offended half of our audience and gone over time, if you want to have grandchildren, I will give you a pro tip: sell your house, move into a smaller house, and help your children buy a house. Amazingly effective at encouraging the generation of grandchildren.

Jonathan: Holy oak, don’t you do it man. Don’t you do it.

Closing and Patron Q and A

Thomas: We’ll be back next week. If you’re a patron, we’re moving over to Crowdcast for the Patrons Only exclusive Q and A. Crowdcast is having some technical issues. If it’s working, come see me over there. If not, we’ll see you next week for the next Author Update. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and live long and

Jonathan: Discord!