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This week on Brave New Bookshelf, Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite welcomed back a returning guest, Cameron Sutter, the brilliant mind behind Plottr. As an author and software developer, Cameron has been revolutionizing the way writers plan their stories. This time, he introduced us to his newest innovation — Story Snap, a groundbreaking tool designed to create detailed book bibles in minutes using AI.
Meet Cameron Sutter, Creator of Plottr and Innovator in AI-Assisted Writing Tools
Cameron Sutter is no stranger to developing tools that make writers’ lives easier. His flagship product, Plottr, has become a go-to software for authors looking to visualize their storylines and organize their series bibles. However, until now, Plottr hasn’t incorporated AI into its features.
In this episode, Cameron shared his philosophy of using AI as a “tool” rather than a “toy.” While many AI applications feel like novelties that quickly lose their utility for authors, Story Snap was built with purpose: to empower writers by automating time-consuming tasks like creating book bibles.
As Cameron explained it, “We’re building things with AI and looking to see where it’s helpful for writers — making sure it’s a tool, not just something fun to play with.”
Introducing Story Snap: The Ultimate Book Bible Generator
So what exactly is Story Snap? According to Cameron, it’s more than just an import feature for Plottr — it’s a standalone application designed to create the most detailed book bibles you’ve ever seen.
Here’s how it works:
- Upload Your Manuscript: Simply upload your book file into Story Snap.
- Let AI Work Its Magic: In about five minutes (depending on file size), Story Snap processes your manuscript using advanced AI models.
- Get Comprehensive Results: The output includes both a Word document and a Plottr file with every detail organized into an easy-to-navigate format.
What sets Story Snap apart from other tools like Sudowrite or Realm Chef? Its level of detail. Each project goes through hundreds of prompts and up to 10 million tokens to extract every nuance from your manuscript. For example:
- It identifies main characters and tracks their development across chapters.
- It generates intricate descriptions of settings (even seemingly minor ones) and highlights their emotional significance.
- It catalogs worldbuilding elements like magic systems, organizations, cultures, and technologies.
For those who already use Plottr, Story Snap seamlessly integrates by visualizing your story’s timeline with character arcs and chapter breakdowns.
Why Writers & Editors Will Love Story Snap
One group especially excited about Story Snap is developmental editors. Traditionally, creating book bibles requires hours of manual labor — reading manuscripts multiple times and compiling details by hand. With Story Snap, this process takes minutes instead of days.
“We’ve calculated metrics on this,” said Cameron. “For the average book, we’re saving people at least 10 hours of work — even when they’re already using AI-assisted workflows.” One user reported saving over 82 hours on a particularly complex project!
Even pantsers (writers who don’t outline) can benefit from Story Snap by retroactively organizing their drafts into cohesive timelines and character profiles.
Features That Stand Out
Story Snap’s standout features include:
- Detailed Output: Beyond just characters and plotlines, the tool captures locations’ emotional weight or minor characters’ contributions.
- Add-On Marketplace: Users can customize their output by selecting add-ons like marketing metadata generators or book club questions.
- Flexibility Across Tools: Whether you prefer working in Word or within Plottr’s visual interface, Story Snap adapts to your workflow.
Real-Life Use Cases: From Series Continuity to Author Empowerment
One key area where authors will find immense value is series continuity. For example:
- Imagine you’re writing Book Two in a series but need reminders about minor characters or subtle plot threads from Book One.
- With Story Snap-generated bibles for each installment in your series, you could upload them into tools like Google Notebook LM for seamless querying across books.
Cameron also shared how his 14-year-old daughter is self-publishing her first novel using AI for cover design and marketing support — proof that these tools can empower writers at any stage in their journey.
Behind the Scenes: How Does It Work?
The backend technology powering Story Snap relies on OpenAI models (ChatGPT). According to Cameron:
- The team uses chunking techniques specifically tailored for fiction manuscripts to ensure accuracy.
- Prompts are carefully crafted to minimize hallucinations (a common issue with generative AI).
- By limiting unnecessary chatty responses from the model during processing, they’ve optimized efficiency without sacrificing quality.
While currently reliant on OpenAI’s LLMs (Large Language Models), future iterations may explore integrating other models for even greater flexibility.
What’s Next for Story Snap?
Although currently geared toward business-to-business users like developmental editors or high-output authors managing large backlists, Story Snap is accessible to anyone who wants it. While the tool has been in private beta testing since late 2024 with select users refining its capabilities behind closed doors, public release is expected in March 2025.
Authors interested in trying out this game-changing tool can visit StorySnap.ai for more information.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- Save Time with Automation: Whether you’re an author or editor, tools like Story Snap eliminate tedious tasks so you can focus on creativity.
- Leverage AI Strategically: Use it as a supportive assistant rather than relying on it entirely for content creation.
- Adaptability Matters: Flexible outputs (Word docs vs. Plottr files) make integration into existing workflows seamless.
- Series Continuity Made Easy: Generate individual book bibles that can later be combined into comprehensive series guides.
- Customization Is King: Add-ons allow users to tailor outputs based on specific needs — from marketing materials to metadata generation.
Resources Mentioned
- StorySnap.ai: Explore the new tool!
- Plottr: Visualize your stories with ease.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.
Steph Pajonas: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process.
It’s been a very exciting couple of months for the Future Fiction Academy. After we went to Author Nation in November, we partnered up with our buddies at Realm Chef to bring new software into the universe. It feels like we’re always making new software and launching something cool, but we have Plotdrive, which will be out there and everybody will be using it. Hopefully by the time this podcast goes live. It’s a lot of fun for writing and writing with AI.
So I’m excited because [00:01:00] 2025 has already been off to quite a start. Lots of things going on. I’m so excited to have another guest with us here today that has been with us before. So I’m going to hand off to my lovely partner, Danica, who’s going to tell us what she’s been up to, and then introduce this lovely guest.
Danica Favorite: So well, thank you, Steph. I am excited about all of the cool stuff happening in the AI world as well. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica Favorite. I’m the community manager at Publish Drive. We have an entire ecosystem to help authors get their books out into the world. Whether that’s using our AI metadata tool, our AI cover designer tool distribution, or royalty splitting, we’ve got something out there to help authors at every stage of their journey.
Lot of cool AI stuff. I’m having fun playing with our AI tools as well and tinkering around with all the cool stuff that FFA is doing. So as always, this is a fantastic partnership.
And [00:02:00] our guest today, we’ve had him before, Cameron Sutter with Plottr. So do go back and listen to that episode to learn all about Plottr.
But we have asked Cameron to give us a little bit of a recap of what they do, but Cameron is also here today to tell us about something new Plottr is doing, because I think that is the only thing that you can count on with AI is that it’s ever changing, ever growing, and there are all kinds of new tools.
And so we’re really excited to introduce you to Cameron and the new tool that they’re coming out with . So Cameron, tell us about yourself. Tell us about Plottr, and then let’s talk about your new tool.
Cameron Sutter: Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here with you guys again. Yeah, Plottr is a software speaking of making lots of software for writers.
We’re a software that helps you to visualize your story and to keep the series Bible and all the notes and everything in one place. And to be able to visualize the threads of your story weaving together. And right now it has no [00:03:00] AI in it. But we’re not against AI and we’re building things with AI and looking to see where it’s helpful for writers and what it can do to help their process and make sure it’s a tool, not a toy.
That’s one of the things I’m really excited to tell you about. Something new that Plottrs gonna do with AI for writers.
Danica Favorite: I have to say I’m a little annoyed at the, it’s a tool, not a toy. Huh?
Cameron Sutter: No, just some software out there for that use. AI is more of a toy or it’s like, oh, that was fun. And a lot of writers after using it a few times don’t really get a lot of value out of it and we’re trying to make sure ours is not that.
That’s all I need. Absolutely.
Danica Favorite: Absolutely. I just had to give you a hard time ’cause I think both Stef and I get. A lot of delight in playing with all of the AI tools, and I don’t care what tool it is, it does become a toy to both of us.
Steph Pajonas: We too.
Danica Favorite: Which actually
Cameron Sutter: toys are fun too.
Steph Pajonas: We do, we have so much fun. I was just having fun the other day talking to Claude about a story idea, just laughing at the kinds of things that it comes up with.
I have fun with Midjourney [00:04:00] making the weirdest images I’ve ever seen. It can be both fun and a tool and a toy. It is a pretty flexible thing.
Cameron Sutter: Do you find that your process changes almost monthly because of the new things that come out with AI?
Steph Pajonas: Sometimes it does. And then other times I can tell that the new thing that has come out is not going to rock my world. I’ll see something and I’ll be like, oh, that’s different. That’s real different. When OpenAI came out with O one and it has this thinking on the backend where it’s doing some reasoning.
I was like, oh, that could really be used for certain things when it comes to an author’s work, like figuring out your outline reasoning through the conflicts like this leads to this, it leads to this. All that reasoning can happen on the back end. I figured that was very interesting. But then there’s sometimes where you just get a new model and it’s a slightly better model than the last one, and it’s not really amazing.
I’ll use it, but I don’t have to change anything. Sometimes it’s great [00:05:00] and other times it’s just like, okay, yeah, not that great.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think I have a very similar experience or something will come out with, Ooh, this update’s finally out, or, Ooh, look at this new tool that we’ve created for this program.
And I’m like, ah, yeah, okay. And then sometimes I’m like, oh no, this is really super cool. And then I geek out on it for a while and even with, my writing, I dictate a lot. We’ve talked about that a lot in the show that I use dictation and it’s been really interesting because, especially as the models changed, particularly because I dictate using the Google recorder. So it’s using Google stuff to do the transcription and everything. I’ve noticed different updates and things will change how that transcription happens, and so then I have to go back and change my prompts to edit it, and so those little tweaks I think are pretty common.
I’m having to make a lot of tweaks that I wasn’t expecting before. Every model needs different instructions. And so like some of those workflows get [00:06:00] tweaked, but ultimately, I think that it’s the same too. Like I think that the basic framework is the same. It’s just little tweaks here and there. It’s the processes is what I’m finding.
Cameron Sutter: That’s good.
It’s not like your process wildly shifts from model to model or something like that, and you’re like, oh no, I should do it this whole other way.
Danica Favorite: No, I think it’s really become this thing where you know how to tweak it and, different things are gonna need different tweaks. How about you, are you finding anything vastly changing in your processes?
Cameron Sutter: Just finding more and more ways to use it. I’m even starting to use it to program some I’m experimenting with that. I’ve seen some people have more and more success with that and so that’s been interesting, being able to do things a little bit quicker there. There still needs a lot of human intervention with the code that it makes.
It’s not like just something I can push up to the cloud and, oh good. Now here’s a new tool that’s out there, but
Danica Favorite: that’s like writings. Yeah,
Steph Pajonas: it is. It’s,
I just used chat, GPT to help me build a website for our Future Fiction Press. I was struggling with a lot of the backend on it.
I [00:07:00] have WordPress on the backend with bunch of custom fields and the tools I was using, like a page builder, Elementor, it just was not pulling the data like I was supposed to. And so I was just like, okay, fine. We’ll just go over and do it all in PHP. I still know how to do that, but there were plenty of times where it was just like, I’m not really sure how to run this loop.
I would put it into ChatGPT, it would give it to me. I would take it over, maybe change a few variable names, those sorts of things. Yes, it still does need human intervention, but man, I tell you, I was able to get through that website pretty darn quickly because I had all that help and I really love that now.
Love that. It can help us.
Danica Favorite: It’s a really great assistant and it definitely, I think for all of us, reduces our workload so significantly that things that I think I’m being asked to do, even in, like in my job and stuff, Oh, a year ago I would’ve said they were crazy. And now I’m like, oh yeah, I guess I could do that. Oh, okay, cool.
Cameron Sutter: Our marketing guy is not a [00:08:00] designer and we’re having to build a website for this new thing that I’m gonna tell you about. And he’s struggling with CSS and styling.
And he’s like, I just asked ChatGPT, and boom, there, I’ve got it. So it’s helping him to not only learn, but also build it. So it’s cool.
Danica Favorite: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Okay. I feel like you’ve teased us enough. Cameron, you like, ah, you, I’m trying to
Cameron Sutter: got, like,
Danica Favorite: I know you like, got in there with your questions and started grilling us, but you wanna hear about your new tool?
Tell us.
Cameron Sutter: Trying to see how long I can tease this out before I start talking about it now.
Yeah. So originally it started out we were talking to a lot of people with large backlogs of books that already have written books or that are pantsers and like, how can they get that into Plottr very easily?
We could already import a Word document, but it’s very basic what we can pull outta that without the use of an LLM or AI. So then we started exploring like, okay, what if this were superpowered with an AI tool? So that’s what we built. For like two or three months, I just went heads down and [00:09:00] started building that between NNC and Author Nation actually, I just started building that . As we were building it, we’re like, okay, this is way more than just an import feature from a manuscript to Plottr.
We’re calling it Story Snap. The idea is that in a snap you can get your book put into Plottr, but so you take a manuscript that’s already made and it’ll build a book Bible from your story. Sudowrite does that already, and Realm Chef, but this is like the most detailed, most comprehensive book Bible that you’re ever gonna see. We’re doing hundreds of prompts and it goes through almost 10 million tokens every book to really get every detail we can outta there.
It’s surprising the level of detail that I get on some of these things. It’s just a really, really detailed book Bible, and it will spit out either a Word document so that even if you’re not using Plottr, you don’t wanna use Plottr.
You can just have a Word document that’s easily searchable, and you’ll have this really organized book bible, or it’ll put it on a Plottr file and it’ll have all the [00:10:00] visualization of your main characters, and you can see them changing throughout the story and stuff like that.
Really powerful, really organized and really detailed.
Danica Favorite: Wait, did you say 10 million tokens?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah, that’s about average. Some or less. Some or more.
Steph Pajonas: I wondered if you could see the drool going down my face as you were talking about this, because I’m like, Ooh, I would love something like that for series that I am currently, in the process of writing more books in, right, because I’ve been using AI now for a couple of years, do run some of my older books through a series of prompts just to get information out of it. Just give me like a basic outline. Tell me about these characters, tell me about these settings, just to refresh my memory, but I don’t have the time to do that, to every single book.
Right. So I try to like just get like a overview, but I would love to have something more detailed like that. If you need a beta tester, you gotta sign me up. Sign me up.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me too. Although, I will say, in all fairness, right before Christmas, Cameron did email me and [00:11:00] say, Hey, ’cause he and I had been talking about my need for something like this and he said, here, I’ll give you a deal on this and just send me your stuff. And I haven’t yet ’cause, Christmas, but now I’m like, okay, Cameron’s about to get some emails.
Cameron Sutter: Excellent, excellent. Yeah, and like what you were saying, Steph you could do that yourself, right? Especially if you’re versed in an AI tool, you know how to do it.
You could upload the book and do it yourself. We’re calculating metrics on this thing to how much time we’re saving for people. And for the average book, it’s like 10 hours worth of work and it’s not 10 hours of, okay. I read through the book and now I’m typing out details.
This is AI assisted hours where you’re asking it prompts tweaking the prompt a little bit, asking it copy and pasting the result to somewhere organized. All that work to do hundreds of prompts, it would take you at least 10 hours. Our biggest one so far was 87 million tokens, [00:12:00] and we think we saved the person 82 hours.
82 and a half hours worth of work. And I don’t remember the size of the book, but just 82 million tokens. I was like, that’s a lot of tokens.
Danica Favorite: What you were saying about saving time. I’m gonna tell on Steph in a good way, but she has a really cool process of using notion for her book Bibles and I’ve been using that it’s been mostly good, but there are still times that Notion hallucinates. And I don’t know, I think you’ve probably experienced that as well, Steph. So then I have to go back and say, no Notion this isn’t, what is the story? I have to keep going back and correcting Notion and Notion isn’t really a great interactive interface where you can do that. Where I can go back and say, no, this prompt is not correct. This is not the correct result for the prompt. You actually just have to manually do it. There’s just no way to go back and get Notion to behave like you can with some of the other AI chat interfaces, which, okay. That’s fair.
And so [00:13:00] as I was telling you, Cameron, and I’ve talked about this before on the show, that I’ve got the series I’m trying to rework. And trying to do the book Bible piece of that has been really difficult. I’ve used the Notebook LM from Google.
I’ve used all these different things and I have used Realm Chef. Realm Cheff is great. It just doesn’t always give me the detail that I want, so I am really going. Okay, Cameron, let’s see what you can do with my book.
Cameron Sutter: Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: Let’s hear about how you made the application work so that it could give you the level of detail that you want and not hallucinate.
’cause I’d be interested to hear about that.
Cameron Sutter: Yeah. So part of it is just making sure we take small bites. For some things that we ask it, we do give it the whole book . But for some parts of it we just take smaller chunks. So it was part that, it was part telling it don’t hallucinate, don’t make up things, only pull things just directly from the story And partly checking that. And just making sure it’s all, it all pieces together, and I think I lost track of your [00:14:00] question, but.
Steph Pajonas: You hit most of it there. You basically put together a RAG of the book right. In smaller chunks. We found that all of these places that use RAG don’t know how to do it for fiction books because the way that they chunk things up, they’re getting like the bottom of a chapter in the beginning of a chapter, and that’s not really helpful when you’re trying to get information.
So I’m going to guess that you and your engineers figured out how to chunk it up into smaller pieces that actually makes sense in fiction.
Cameron Sutter: We’re attempting to, yeah, it’s, it’s, mm-hmm. A moving target. But yeah, we think we got a good way of doing RAG essentially for a novel.
Novels are very different than like a Twitter feed or a an essay at school or something like that. So yeah, it’s very different thing.
Danica Favorite: What is the process for someone using this tool? Do we stick it in and we hit the button?
For example Publish Drive has a really great metadata generator. You upload the book, it spits out the metadata, it spits out the book description. Boom. That’s pretty much what it is. I don’t have to do any prompting or anything like that. But then [00:15:00] if you go into our cover generator, you can go in and switch around some of the prompting if you want. So I’m just curious, like where on that scale is this new tool for you?
If I’m gonna go in and use the tool, do I upload the manuscript and then have to go through prompts of what I want and ask it to do things?
Or does it just boom, spit out results for me?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah. Great question. So this is a separate thing from Plottr, so you don’t have to be a Plottr user to use it and we made the output both a Word document and a Plottr document so that ’cause we’re not trying to like rope people into using Plottr.
I think there’s a lot of value in just getting a word document out. All you do is you upload your manuscript, push a button, and it spits out a Word document and a Plottr document. And that’s it. And it just takes like five minutes, depends on how many people are in the queue, and how big it is.
But, I think the best part of this is we’re also making it flexible with what we’re calling the add-on marketplace. So add-ons are gonna be something that anybody can build. So Future Fiction Academy, we’ve already talked to you [00:16:00] guys and hopefully you’re gonna build some add-ons for us, but they’re basically just prompts or a list of prompts that we’ll ask on top of what we’re already asking.
And it’ll just add that to your book Bible. So if you wanted to do marketing, metadata, book club questions. You’re gonna be able to add multiple of these add-ons in and just say, okay, I want this one, this one, this one, and hit go.
And five minutes later you got your book Bible.
Steph Pajonas: Authors wanna get into their book and get their hands dirty with the actual prose and building their characters in their plot and all that kind of stuff.
That’s where they live and breathe and love it. But when it comes to building a story Bible, it’s like, oh, no, just, just take the document and I wanna hit a button. And like, that’s it. Honestly.
Cameron Sutter: Don’t make me learn prompts, don’t make me configure things. Exactly.
Steph Pajonas: Right, right. And like you said, if you love the process of prompting and putting your whole book in there, of course you can do it yourself. But this is where authors need the most help, definitely on the stuff that exists outside of your book. The marketing and the [00:17:00] cataloging and the advertising and all that kind of stuff. We wanna concentrate on the content and the story, and we want the other stuff to be rather easy.
I’m also curious to know what the kind of output will be for people who love Plottr too. So tell me a little bit about what that’s gonna look like for the people who, when they open it up in Plottr, what are they gonna see?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah, so I think it’s magical to be able to see the output in Plottr because if you’re familiar with Plottr and you know the timeline and there’s a line for each of your characters. So this will take all the main characters. We don’t do it for every single character ’cause that would just exponentially increase the number of tokens we’re doing.
But for all the main characters, it creates a new line for them and for each chapter that they show up in, it’ll add a scene card to that spot and say what they do in that chapter. And it is a little finicky. ’cause sometimes it’ll say this person’s presence was felt in the way that the other characters talked about, this or that.
And so we’re trying to figure out if that’s valuable or not. But then [00:18:00] it also takes all your characters. And so for each character, it’ll put it in Plottr and list out, physical description, emotional psychological, I guess description and a summary of the character and how they’ve changed and what significance they play in the story.
It’ll also go through, and this is what kind of blew my mind, but, it pulls out all the places in your story and writes so much about your places. That to me it was surprising because, so in, in one of my stories, Pizza Planet, there’s this clearing in the forest, there’s this clearing, and I would never spend the time to write two sentences about this clearing. It wasn’t in my mind important, but the AI saw this as a place, it put one in Plottr and it wrote five paragraphs about this clearing, the emotional significance of the clearing, what happened in the clearing, what characters were in the clearing, and it was like 40 or so different places in my novella. So detailed. I was really surprised.
So it does places, it also does magic systems [00:19:00] organizations, cultures, religions just world information if it takes place at a different time or if there’s something different about your world, technologies and things like that.
Tries to get all those details and pull ’em out and put ’em in the notes area of Plottr for you.
Danica Favorite: Okay, so that is very cool. I have a question about that in a moment, but first, can we just discuss this book, Pizza Planet? Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: A Pizza Planet.
Danica Favorite: That sounds awesome.
Steph Pajonas: Is it, is it, does it look like pizza or does pizza live there?
I’m curious. I’m curious.
Cameron Sutter: Yeah, so it’s a world where pizza’s their only food source. It falls from the sky once a day like manna. And their town, not all the towns in the world, but the main town where the story takes place is in a circle and they cut it into eight slices and like, there’s the merchant slice and the homes slice and the, those kind of things.
So yes.
Steph Pajonas: Oh my God, I love it.
Cameron Sutter: One of the characters is named Chovy. She’s the aunt of the main character. So Anchovy.
Steph Pajonas: Anchovy.
Cameron Sutter: [00:20:00] Yeah,
Steph Pajonas: I get it. It’s hilarious.
Cameron Sutter: But that’s very subtle. I don’t think it calls her anchovy anywhere in the book. Maybe once. Maybe once. But usually it just says Chovy and so it’s like you gotta have to understand it.
A lot of pizza puns though.
Danica Favorite: Awesome.
Steph Pajonas: That’s great.
Danica Favorite: That is so fun. So yeah, I just had to, I just had to ask.
Cameron Sutter: Thank you for asking,
Danica Favorite: But we’re all writers and I think we all take delight in fun little things like this. Back to my question, ’cause you’re talking about the different characters and the locations and things. To me, obviously this is my personal interest in it, but I think a lot of authors as well is the ability to use this say for a series, because then you can look at the different pieces that it pulls for like a series continuity. So let’s just say, we’re doing Pizza Planet as a series and Aunt Chovy is a minor character in Book One, but we want book two to be about Aunt Chovy.
Is that book Bible of Book One , can we ask it to pull out things about Aunt Chovy knowing that in Book Two it’s gonna be about [00:21:00] her?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah. So right now we’re only doing it book by book. I guess the main reason for that I guess there’s two reasons. One is just LLMs they can barely handle some books, so making it do a whole series that would probably take an hour of compute time. And the second reason is what exactly would be valuable in a series Bible pulling out all that from AI.
So for right now, each book, we’ll give you a separate Word document or a separate Plottr file. And with Plottr you can combine them all into one. So just like normal Plottr, you can have all your books in your series. And then I guess the next step for us eventually is like, how do we do this for a whole series?
Somebody told me what they want and it was like, when does this character show up? And or what book does this character show up in? And like, very, very basic details for their series Bible.
Danica Favorite: That’s really more what I was thinking. If I put in book one, is it gonna tell me, even though Aunt Chovy is like a very minor character, is it going to tell me when she appears and where she appears and that sort of thing?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah. Right now for book one, it would. [00:22:00] If you’re trying to do it in a whole series, it won’t. We don’t do anything with a series yet. Just book by book.
Steph Pajonas: Once you’ve got all of the books, packaged up into their book Bibles, then you could actually bring those into an LLM and start questioning it about like the entire series altogether.
Danica Favorite: Oh yeah.
Steph Pajonas: That might be where people could use it to look at their series once they’re done.
That’s what I would think.
Danica Favorite: Like Notebook LM would be perfect for that.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Yeah. Actually it would Google Notebook LM, I would upload all of those Bibles in there and then start asking the questions.
Danica Favorite: Because it does a terrible job with all of the books.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: Like those summaries. I bet it would do a great job. So yeah, that would be super cool. I was just mainly curious. Like I said, if I was going to say write book two with this character in it, since it was like a minor character in book one, how much of that is gonna be pulled in?
So that is super cool because…
Cameron Sutter: yeah, it’ll tell you if it’s a minor character or a major character.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Because I do think a lot of authors are writing series and they like that whole [00:23:00] series concept. So how can we make that continuity between the series, easier. Cause sometimes we forget.
Steph Pajonas: What do you mean sometimes? That’s like the story of my life lately. I’m like, I’ve forgotten all of this information. I’ve gotta go reread it all.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah. That is true. That is true.
Cameron Sutter: I’ve talked to so many authors that they’re on book like seven or 10 and they don’t remember those little details. And somebody was telling me they have over a hundred main characters in their series, and like, how many hundreds of minor characters would that mean, just like there’s no way you can keep all that straight.
Steph Pajonas: That sounds like Mal Cooper to me.
Danica Favorite: I was, I was about to say, are you talking about,
Steph Pajonas: Are you talking about Mal?
Mal who has like hundreds of books and hundreds of characters and probably thousands of little bit characters in her series? Yeah. Like there are definitely people who have a lot of books who need something like this, need this kind of tool.
I like the fact that you decided to [00:24:00] make a entirely different app for it. Especially since since we know that there are still a lot of people out there that are fairly Anti AI, about the whole thing and it makes it so that Plottr can just be its thing.
It’s doing its thing when it comes to plotting the book and following your characters and your setting and all that information, but then you can use this other tool, which is optional, obviously, and get all the information that you need. I feel like that was a good strategic move on your part, so good job.
Cameron Sutter: Thank you. I hate there’s still that divide and we didn’t do it just because of that, but it does make it easier for those people that really don’t want it, that just like, Nope, it’s totally separate.
Danica Favorite: I know we’ve asked this before but we know your approach to AI and publishing at this point, but let’s go to the second question, which is, what does your workflow with AI look like?
And we talked about this a little bit, about how these have changed. So I’m just curious, are you finding that you’ve got some different AI workflows going on. I know we talked about the programming. Is there anything else, AI wise, that you’ve been doing?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah, so as far as my [00:25:00] writing, it changed a little bit. I still like the actual writing part, so the brainstorming and like outlining stuff like that I’ll do with AI. But the actual writing I do, and I don’t write that much and I’m really hoping to write more.
And so when I write more, I think that will change. But, as I’m just like trying to learn it still. I don’t know that that’s how I do it.
But as far as like marketing efforts, I, I’m not really marketing my books too much, but for book blurbs and back cover copy… The main example I have with this actually is my daughter.
She’s self-publishing her first book. And her cover is AI. The marketing is AI and stuff like that. We’re trying to use that for the supporting the content. And that’s the way I’m thinking of it now. There’s the creating the content and there’s the supporting the content. And for supporting the content, the AI is like super fantastic ’cause that’s the stuff I don’t care about. But for creating the content that’s for now. At least that’s the stuff I I care about doing. That’s the part that I like. That was maybe a long-winded answer, but
Danica Favorite: [00:26:00] Oh, I think it was a great answer. And I love the story about your daughter.
So how old is your daughter?
Cameron Sutter: She’s 14.
Danica Favorite: Okay. So how awesome is that, that we’ve got AI enabling a 14-year-old to be a published author, because I’ll tell you, when I was 14, I definitely wanted to be a published author. I actually did write my first novel at that age. It’s terrible by the way.
But I do think like, wow, what if I’d had the tools back then and how cool would that have? And I love that your daughter gets to do that, so congratulations to her and.
Cameron Sutter: Thank you.
Danica Favorite: Congratulations to you for being able to help her and enable that journey for her, because how powerful is that for a 14-year-old to be told by her dad, I believe in you.
I believe in your dreams. I’m helping you become a published author. Like that’s…
Cameron Sutter: yeah.
Danica Favorite: Amazing.
Cameron Sutter: Thank you. Really excited for her. She did all the hard work. I’m just there like cheering around. So
Danica Favorite: Yeah. But that support is so valuable and I think that that is what we all [00:27:00] need as authors.
The third traditional question is what is your favorite AI tool? Do you have like a favorite that’s jumping out at you? Besides, of course, your cool new book bible tool.
Cameron Sutter: I still just use Chat GPT and Claude. Leonardo AI is the one that I use a lot for images and stuff like that. So that’s definitely, that’s the one I have the most fun with ’cause we were actually trying to figure out a logo for this Story Snap, this new tool, and so we were just playing around with different AI things and so yeah, I’d say that’s my best tool to have fun with, with AI but I still just use ChatGPT and Claude.
Steph Pajonas: When you were working on the backend of your tool, did you find that the best LLM to use was a particular one or are you using an amalgam of a couple of different ones to pull all the information, collate it, and figure it out?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah, for right now we’re just using ChatGPT but I wanna expand into others. We just wanted to get something simply made and then we’re gonna make it more complicated and like, which is the best model? And things like that eventually. [00:28:00] But for right now, it’s just the open AI model.
Steph Pajonas: I find that it’s the easiest one to program with, especially if you’re gonna be doing API calls and you don’t have a human involved,
Cameron Sutter: right?
Steph Pajonas: ’cause if you do it with Claude, Claude tends to do a lot of preamble and a lot of chatting. I think I can do this for you. Let me see if I can get to it. It’s like, no, no, just leave all of that off. Just get to the task. Right? Yeah, I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised that you went with Open AI because it is a little bit less chatty despite the name ChatGPT, so
Cameron Sutter: even so we still had to say it.
We still had to tell it like, don’t say anything after this. Like, just stop right after you end this. Always trying to say extra little bits, like Good job or whatever.
Steph Pajonas: Right. It’s very supportive. Right? It’s very supportive.
Danica Favorite: No, this is why we’re nice to the LLMs because we want those supportive answers.
Like the day we start getting the mean answers is when we need to like start to worry and be like, okay, okay, we’re sorry. We’re sorry. Computer overlord.
Cameron Sutter: That’s so true though.
Steph Pajonas: I never wanna piss them off. [00:29:00] Never, never, never, never. No. Try to be as nice as possible all the time.
So tell me about the tool. When is it coming out?
Cameron Sutter: So it’s actually been out for a little while, but just secretly we’ve been letting some people use it, and I didn’t even talk about this, but some of the biggest users for this we think are gonna be developmental editors because right now they’re building a book Bible manually.
So they read through the book and some of ’em read through a second time and build the book Bible themselves. And this will enable ’em to do that in five minutes. And they can literally do twice as many, three times as many clients, and actually do the human creative task of making the book better instead of that manual labor.
And so we’ve had some developmental editors using it for a couple months now. And that’s our plan for now, just secretly or as people hear about it and as they ask ask about it, we’ll be onboarding people and letting them use it. Probably by the time that this podcast episode airs, we’re going to publicly announce that it’s available and anybody can use it.
So we’re thinking [00:30:00] around March is when that will happen. Now people are just emailing us and we’ll return the results in an email. It’s just way simpler. We don’t have to have a UI. And this is a business to business tool the way we’re thinking of it.
Like, you are a business, just send, that kind of a thing. So there will be a interface where you can just click that one button and get the result by March. So that’s what we’re hoping for.
Steph Pajonas: And you have a URL for it? Is it Story snap. AI maybe, or how
Cameron Sutter: Yes, exactly. You got it right? Yep. Story snap ai.
Yep. That’s what it is.
Steph Pajonas: Excellent. I tell you, the country of Anguilla is getting plenty of money off of all of us doing AI stuff.
Cameron Sutter: Is that where that domain is from?
Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, they’ve managed to fund their, like entire government and educational system and everything off of people buying the.ai domain.
I heard about it on, I think it was the New York Times podcast, like a year ago or so.
Cameron Sutter: That’s awesome.
Steph Pajonas: Interesting.
Cameron Sutter: That’s so cool.
Steph Pajonas: Great. I’ll make sure that I put that in the notes so that when this podcast goes live and people wanna go check it out, they can go [00:31:00] straight over to story snap.ai. Perfect.
Danica Favorite: I love that. I just wanted to ask Cameron if he had anything else he wanted to add or anything else to share before I hand it back over to Steph to close out.
Cameron Sutter: One thing I mentioned a minute ago was that it is a very, we’re thinking of it as a very business to business kind of thing.
A lot of writers don’t think of it as their business, but you are in business and especially the writers that write more tend to start thinking of it as their business. We’re gearing it more towards developmental editors and writers that do write a lot.
Cameron Sutter: So for the first time author you’ll still find value in this. And if you’re a pantser, you can upload your manuscript and you’ll get it in Plottr very easily and things like that. But I think it’ll be more geared towards those more experienced writers.
And because of that, we are thinking of it like how can we make this work in your process? And so if there’s any special tweak that you need to make it work in your process, or if you’re a developmental editor agency and you need it to work in your intranet or something like that, I don’t know.
We’re trying to make it fit [00:32:00] wherever people want to use it and make it very accessible and easy for those kind of workflows. If you have anything custom like that or any needs, we’re willing to work with you on that kind of thing.
Steph Pajonas: That’s good to know. I know from developing lots of software over the last couple of years, sometimes you get really great ideas from other people who come to you and then you’re sort of like, oh, I didn’t think about that. And then it ends up being like a core part of your business out of nowhere, right?
Cameron Sutter: Yeah. Happens all the time. Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: Happens all the time. Excellent. Okay. So we’ll be sure to, include the links to Plottr and to Story Snap in the final notes for today.
Thank you so much for coming. You are our first repeat customer here on Brave New Bookshelf. Yay. I’m so glad to be
Cameron Sutter: here second time. You guys are awesome.
Steph Pajonas: Thank you. Alright guys, so everybody who’s listening, be sure to drop by the website brave new bookshelf.com and read the show notes from today.
We’ll have all the links, all of that kind of stuff, and the full transcript from today’s [00:33:00] podcast. And don’t forget to drop by Facebook and like our page and like us and subscribe to us on YouTube. All of that stuff really does help. It helps us find more audience and get to all the places we need to go.
So do you have any closing thoughts, Danica?
Danica Favorite: Seriously, please do share where you can about the podcast because I was just talking to someone earlier today about it and authors still don’t know what they don’t know about AI.
We bring all kinds of guests onto the show so that you can learn about all the areas of AI in publishing and what may or may not be useful to you. The best way to spread the word, if you want more people to know about a certain part of AI in publishing, this is a great resource.
And the other thing I’m gonna just say is please, if there is something that you feel we haven’t covered or you’re like, oh, hey, this would be a great topic for a future show, please do drop us a line leave a comment for us on Facebook or on the blog because we really [00:34:00] do want that feedback.
Again, this is a passion project that Steph and I have to educate authors and it really is something that we wanna make sure you’re getting as much value out of it as possible.
Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. This is exactly what we want. We wanna educate people and we wanna make sure that they’re getting all the information that they need. And that’s what we’re here for and that’s what we’ll continue to do through this year and onward. From everybody here, we’re gonna sign off and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.
Bye bye.
Cameron Sutter: Thanks for having me!
Steph Pajonas: Bye!
Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us@bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.