In our premiere episode of "AI Publishing Formula," Jamie Culican, a seven-figure fantasy author and seasoned mentor, and Melle Melkumian, an MIT-certified AI expert and technology marketing director, dive into the transformative impact of AI in the publishing world.
(Are you curious about how AI is reshaping the publishing business? Then this episode is for you!)
Despite common perceptions, integrating AI into the publishing process isn't just for tech enthusiasts. Together, we break down the stereotypes and demonstrate how AI tools are becoming indispensable for authors of all genres. We'll explore how these technologies can streamline workflows, identify readers and even open up new marketing avenues, making life as a publisher and author much more manageable and successful.
Whether you're an AI skeptic or a tech aficionado, tune in as we uncover the exciting potentials of AI in publishing, complete with practical insights and beginner-friendly explanations. By the end of this episode, you'll understand not only what AI publishing entails but also how it can revolutionize your approach to writing and selling books. Join us to discover how to embrace AI and make it a powerful ally in your publishing journey.
Got questions you'd like answered in the podcast? Email: [email protected]
TRANSCRIPT
Hello everybody and welcome to the inaugural session of AI publishing formula. My name is Melle Melkumian, and I am here with Jamie Culican. We are the owners of AI4CES. Our business has been serving authors and helping them to understand AI since early 2023. We are excited to offer a deep dive into the use of AI for publishing in this podcast: AI Publishing Formula. Our goal is to support authors in how they can use AI in their publishing business.
We're going to talk a little bit about our experience both before AI and after AI, but I first wanted to make something really clear from the start of our podcast is that AI in publishing doesn't have to be a bad word and it doesn't have to be a problem in terms of copyright and original work. You don't have to use AI for writing. And if you don't use AI in your business, you're going to be missing a great opportunity and probably one of the biggest that we're going to see in the marketplace since the advent of the internet, which completely changed the way that businesses work.
We really feel passionately about this. Jamie and I both work in areas that have seen the use of AI really serve the business side of companies in areas like marketing, product delivery, and organization. We really want to bring those capabilities and knowledge to authors who are often working alone or with some contractors and who are really working hard to make a living at publishing. We're going to see so many changes in publishing over the coming years. I think we've already seen a lot in the last 12 months. And so, I just want to kick this off by letting you know that we're really starting this podcast to help you get a grasp not just on AI and writing, but it's really about AI and the business world.
Now, before we continue talking about AI and publishing, I want to introduce Jamie Culican. She is my amazing business partner. She has a great acumen both for education and for publishing and writing. Jamie, I'm going to let you introduce yourself. Can you give a little bit about your background and let's talk about pre-AI. Tell us a little bit about what you did with publishing?
Hi everyone! I'm Jamie Culican and I've been published now for eight years, since 2016. Two years into my publishing I started a publishing company called Dragon Realm Press. This was all pre-AI. I didn't use any AI of any sort. And then AI really came into my publishing about a year and a half ago.
Can you tell us a little bit about the success you had in publishing because, in my world, you're a rock star and I think people really need to know things like you're a 7-figure author which is what a lot of us aspire to be in publishing.
So, my first series I released was in 2016 and that was the Keeper of Dragons. And that series just sort of exploded out of nowhere. I couldn't even tell you what I did right and what I did wrong to have that series explode, but then I just mimicked it with the rest of the series I released since then.
I think what's really interesting, Jamie, is that you say things like, “I didn't know what I did right.” but you knew enough that you were able to mimic it and I think not only did you mimic it, but you shifted as the market shifted.
For those of you who don't know, Jamie and I met in 2016. Although we had both been writing for quite a bit, we were novice publishers. We came out with our first novels. They were both YA fantasy. Hers was on target for the market with dragons. Mine were whatever I wanted to write, which at the time was bird shifters, which, you know, like weren’t exactly evergreen. So, my series didn't do as well as Jamie's.
However, since then several things have changed in the marketplace and Jamie, you were able to take your career in publishing and shift with the genres in the marketplace. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
So, I started out in middle grade fantasy and as my audience got older, I just shifted my books to accommodate them as they grew up. I went from middle grade to young adult fantasy. And I kept with the same genre. I stayed with mostly dragons and fantasy, which was what my readers were asking for. I also was very engaged with my readers. I send out a newsletter every week to them…for years. I also had a reader group that we talked in daily. They were very engaged especially back in 2016 and 2017 when I started.
Then, as the years went on and everybody had a reader group and everybody had a newsletter, I did have to shift gears a little more and just connect with them in new ways, with more engaging material. So, I couldn't just say, “Hey, I got a new book coming out next week.” I had to say, “Hey, what do you want to see in my next book? What do you want? Who wants to have a character named after them in my next book?” The engagement had to change.
And I think what's interesting about that, Jamie, is it's something we really talk about a lot in our courses: you must know your readership. If you're just starting out or you don't have the popularity that you had with your first series, then it becomes a little harder for authors to know exactly who their reader is. It’s one of those areas AI is really helping new businesses with or people who want to upscale their business because it allows us to create something in marketing.
We haven't really talked about my background much, but I've been a marketing director in technology for about 25 years and we always create these things called user profiles or avatars or, as authors, reader profiles. What these all mean is “Who's my ideal audience?” What I hear you saying, Jamie, is that you were getting that direct feedback from engaged readers. We show a technique using AI and a chat tool like ChatGPT 4.0 to create the avatar to understand our audience. We dig deep into analysis about what your avatar’s age group is, what they like, where they read… and, by doing that, we can use AI to gain greater insight into where we should be providing our material and what we should be providing as our engagement material.
I agree. And it took me 2 to 3 years to truly understand my audience with me just engaging with them, but now being able to create those reader profiles using AI, we can take that 2 to 3 years and compress it to get that data almost instantly.
So, you pivoted your writing, which I think is key, and you didn't pivot to a different genre, you pivoted in the same genre to the same readers but to a different age as your readers aged up and I think that's a nugget of gold for any author who's trying to make a living at writing. The other thing I think is key, and I know this happened in our careers as authors, is platforms. What do you see as the biggest shift in the marketing platforms?
There's so many. One of the big ones for me because time management is huge for me is social media and being able to interact on every social media platform out there. Having the time to come up with the ad copy for all of that. So, I would say programs like Buffer to schedule all of my social media. And now with AI, I can fill Buffer for the next 3 months in 2 or 3 hours and then I don't have to focus so much on social media. Which is a huge part of how I market my books. I just go in and in a short time, it's just done. And I think that's one of the keys.
For our listeners, what you're going to find is that Jamie and I use some different techniques from each other, and we use some different tools. I've mentioned I work in technology. I was working in technology in Silicon Valley during the dot com era. Fortunately, I worked for a company that wasn't a dot com. They were a software developer that was working in engineering, but I saw firsthand the rise of a bunch of different dot coms and then the collapse. We are going to see the same thing with AI. You will see a ton of new AI tools come out. They're getting multi-millions in venture capitalist funding because everyone's making bets on what AI tool is going to reign supreme.
I’m looking at a couple of social media management platforms and one we'll talk about it in a different episode, but the one that I'm currently investigating is using AI. And one thing you're going to see in this podcast, we're not trying to tell you exactly what tool to use. We're going to tell you what we use, what we've investigated. We're never going to be able to try every AI tool on the market for every aspect of publishing because there are a ton, there's not one tool to rule them all. But we will tell you what we've tried out, what we like, what we don't like and why we like it and why we don't like it.
Also, what you're going to see is tried and true tools such as Canva, Word and Excel are going to implement AI in the same way Facebook and Amazon are implementing AI. But I wanted to go back to the tool you're using, Jamie, Buffer. What have you seen happen in Buffer with AI?
I started using buffer way back in the beginning of my publishing career, so pre-AI. It was just to schedule your social media for you. But now I can put in my ad copy for any social media platform, and they have an AI button where it will rewrite your social media posts and it will give you different options for different platforms, so you can take one that you have and create 10 different social media posts right there in the program. You can also have it post to all of your social media. It's a huge game changer with time management.
Yeah, and what I know about authors in general is that we're all juggling. So, I have 2 children. They are both teenagers, young teenagers. I work full-time at my business and then I also write books and I also run an AI business. And Jamie, for those of you who don't know, has 4 children, coaches softball, is a full-time educator, runs a publishing company, mentors other authors and writes and publishes books as well. Time management is a huge part of our story. We're both also still married. So, there's an added, you know, challenge on that. Don't tell Dan I said that.
Okay. Getting back to this AI button inside Buffer, do you ever feel, and this is something that I think there's a great concern over and I even hear kids talking about it, when you press that AI button is there any fear that the content it produces will be stale or repetitive.
Yep. Absolutely, I mean you must reread what the AI comes up with, but a lot of times I’m impressed and think it’s really good.
Right, and I think this goes back to what we were talking about before. If you train your AI to know who your avatar is, to understand your reader profile, it'll probably think of things you haven't even thought of. For example, I was working with one of our authors who does Victorian nurse romance, that's how specific we like to get with our writing in terms of genre. So, when your AI understands who you're selling to, it can help guide you. One of this author’s comments was that she didn't realize how conservative her audience was. But AI probably does because she's selling to older American conservative women with the Victorian medical romance. Because she's a middle-aged New Zealander living in a liberal city, she's going to have a different perspective and not quite realize that. You know, for that audience, there's some taboos that you can't write into the book.
It also comes down to engagement too, because once you understand who your reader is. You're able to engage with them.
I was really surprised by that because I entered the market as a YA writer. Then I started getting emails and I found that my audience. I got a lot of emails from older Europeans. And that surprised me. I don't know if it was because I was writing bird shifters, but YA and middle grade isn't really about the age of the character. Those books are coming of age stories. They're about new discoveries. They're about, growing up and transforming. What I realized is that these people who were what we call whale readers because they read 200 books in a year.
And that's the type of audience you want because they will read all your books as you come out with them if you keep publishing in that vein. But those readers were idealizing about some fantasy transformation that could uplift them and change the world. So, I think that's what really attracted them to the type of book I was writing.
I wanted to get back to this change in social media. Jamie, you were talking about how the platforms have come out and they've shifted to give you a tool that not only manages all your social media (and I remember the days when we used to write all our social media posts in an Excel on my computer and we'd copy and paste into the various platforms and schedule in the various platforms…)
No, that's you. You were so consistent. And for those of you listening, I'm just going tell you, Jamie is one of the most consistent marketers I've ever met in my life. She's brilliant at it. The huge change that I've seen, and it's been a challenge for me even though I do have a Master of Fine Arts in filmmaking, we have cell phones that can shoot videos. This has meant that social media has shifted. Instead of posting photographs, which I was very happy and comfortable with, we’ve now moved to reels and TikTok and short form video format. Jamie, how did you shift for that?
Again, that is a time management issue that every author and any creative who works in the field must deal with because taking videos and creating TikTok's and reels take a lot of time. But again, now with AI. You can create a single video. And throw on 50 different ad copies and have 50 videos very quickly. It's shifting with what tools are out there and what's available instead of making individual TikTok's and Reels and Instagram stories and YouTube videos. You can now create one and just shift your ad copy. And AI can do that for you. You can use an AI tool like ChatGPT to create the copy for you for different platforms. It doesn't have to be a completely new system that you have to go out and learn.
I think there are a couple of nuggets there and this is probably where we're going to wind down today's podcast because we've got a whole month of podcasts planned that focus on social media. To get the consistency that Jamie is talking about. It doesn't start with “Oh, I'm going to use AI to pump out a whole bunch of things, stick it in this platform and send it out to the world.”
No, it starts with a strategy. It starts with knowing your reader, building your strategy, then planning out what platforms you're going to focus on and then delivering the message to your audience. These are the foundations of marketing, and it starts with knowing your reader. Once you know your reader you can craft your message and then you deliver your message. So, you pick the platforms you're comfortable with. I currently do not do TikTok and it's up for debate whether I will do that or not.
I think in the future AI won't just deliver scripts. We will see in the next 6 months AI delivering reels. That's why our social media month is going to be in October because I want to wait a little bit. AI can produce reels now, but I've been testing out a few tools and I don't like the level of professionalism it delivers yet. We're going to show you how to deliver TikTok's using AI completely. Like Jamie said, you'll be able to press a button and get the entire TikTok reel.
There will be ways to use your own videos so you can take one video of your book, put it into this tool, and then produce 50 different TikToks, transform them into Instagram reels and then post them all as stories on Facebook as well. So, I think that social media shift is going to be huge and I'm excited to deliver those podcasts, but the technology needs to grow a little bit more.
On that note, before we finish, I want to talk about the 4 steps of marketing. I'll repeat them again because they're so crucial. Know your audience. Craft your message. Deliver your message. Review and revise. The review and revise. Step can be as simple as looking at your bank balance and being like, did that marketing campaign make money? Or it can be something a little more intricate and I think AI is going to help us with this in the future. It helps us now to a certain extent in tools like Buffer to understand your engagement level and the best times to post. In the business world, they are using AI to crush data and strategically plan the future of business.
So, Jamie’s career shows us that all these marketing activities lead to something when you are consistent, and you hit those 4 steps and you're producing the same quality books. These tasks build brand. We’ll be talking a lot about brand is this podcast. It's the hallmark of what I've done in my entire career. Branding is not your logo or the way you write your name. It's not even your book cover. Branding is what people think about when they come into contact with anything to do with your business.
If your audience goes to your Facebook group, makes a post and no one responds to them for 3 weeks. That is telling them something about your brand. If they go to your website and the link is broken, that is telling them something about your brand. If they read your book and there are a lot of typos in it. And I'm kind of showing you the negative sides of brands, but I'm going to hand it over to Jamie in a second and she's going to tell you what she's done right in brand. But the reason why brand is so important, especially right now, is that brand is the way that authors will survive. In the changing publishing world as a lot more books will be written with AI. You will see a lot of marketing campaigns delivered with AI, but your brand is based on the quality and consistency of your work. So not just the books, but the websites, the social media, and that brand is what's going to make you stand out in the marketplace. If you build your brand strongly, you will rise above a lot of what we're going to see come out in the marketplace over the coming years. So, I really emphasize that everyone needs to be focusing on their brand. And Jamie, let's close out with you telling us a little bit about how you feel you did well in branding yourself as a fantasy author.
The huge part about brand is how your readers see you. Readers see me as very engaged. I try to find them everywhere. Daily. But I also think it's what they expect from me. They expect a certain book from me. They usually expect dragons, young adult, fantasy books from me. But they also expect so many books from me a year. They expect I'm going to send out a newsletter every week to them. They expect I'm going to be in my reader group every week. It's not just about the book covers, the logo or anything like that. It's what my readers expect for me. That's my brand.
That's awesome. So, let's end on that note because I think what you're saying is so crucial. We as authors and business owners, we have to meet the reader expectations.
And when you do that consistently, you build trust. And when you build trust, you build mind share and the readers not only come back to you, but they do this thing that is the hallmark of every successful author. They recommend your book to their friends.
Yep, and word of mouth is something that AI will not replace.
On that note, we're going to close out this inaugural episode of the AI Publishing Formula podcast. We'd love to hear your comments or questions. We will be engaged and active. If you've got questions, we're happy to answer them. We will put an email link on the page below so you can send them to us and then we'll work to respond to those in the next episode.
These are going to come out weekly every Wednesday. Looking forward to chatting with you.
