Episode 41 - AI in Creative Writing and Translations with Olivia Rigal

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In this week’s episode of Brave New Bookshelf, Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite explore the dynamic world of AI in publishing with Olivia Rigal. Known for her innovative use of AI across various facets of the publishing process, Olivia shares her experiences and insights, offering a fresh perspective on how authors can harness technology to enhance their craft.

Meet Olivia Rigal, Author and AI Pioneer

Olivia Rigal is a seasoned author who has been navigating the publishing landscape since 2013. With a background in law, Olivia transitioned to writing, quickly making a name for herself with her compelling stories. She has embraced AI tools to streamline her workflow and expand her reach, particularly through translations. Despite facing skepticism, especially from the French literary community, Olivia champions AI as a valuable tool rather than a threat.

Navigating the Challenges of AI in France

Olivia sheds light on the cultural resistance to AI in France, where using AI in creative fields is often met with suspicion. She emphasizes that AI is merely a tool, akin to using a car instead of a horse for travel, and advocates for its responsible use. Olivia’s experiences highlight the importance of educating others about AI’s role in enhancing, not replacing, human creativity.

AI as a Creative Partner

For Olivia, AI serves as an indispensable creative partner. She uses AI to brainstorm ideas, generate taglines, and even help with translations. By treating AI as a brainstorming buddy that never tires of offering suggestions, Olivia overcomes creative blocks and enhances her storytelling process. She also utilizes AI to assist with marketing tasks, allowing her to focus more on writing.

Expanding Horizons with AI Translations

Olivia has leveraged AI to translate her works into multiple languages, including French, German, and Portuguese. She shares her strategy of using AI for initial translations, followed by human proofreading to ensure quality. This approach has enabled her to tap into new markets without incurring prohibitive costs. Olivia’s insights into the nuances of translating for different cultures underscores the importance of understanding and adapting to local preferences.

Multifaceted Use of AI Tools

Olivia’s exploration of AI extends beyond writing and translations. She uses AI-generated music from Suno to enhance her book marketing efforts, creating unique audio experiences for her readers. Additionally, she experiments with AI image generation for book covers and promotional materials, further demonstrating AI’s versatility in publishing.

Overcoming Misconceptions About AI

Throughout the episode, Olivia addresses common misconceptions about AI, emphasizing that it requires careful oversight and direction. She dispels the myth of “push-button publishing,” highlighting the significant effort involved in refining AI-generated content to meet her standards.

Key Takeaways from Olivia’s AI Journey

Embrace AI as a tool to enhance creativity, not replace it.
Use AI for translations to reach broader audiences while maintaining quality through human editing.
Explore AI-generated music and visuals to enrich marketing strategies.
Understand the cultural nuances of target markets when translating books.
Continuously learn and adapt to new AI developments to stay ahead in the publishing industry.

Resources Mentioned

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: Hello everyone and welcome back to an episode of the Brave New Bookshelf. I am CTO of Future Fiction Academy, Steph Pajonas. And at the Future Fiction Academy we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their business.

We’re doing a lot of cool stuff at the. Future Vision Academy as usual. And we’re, we just got back from going to New Orleans for the Writer MBA conference, which was a lot of fun and a lot of talking about AI and tools and really just getting into the nitty gritty of things, and that was exciting.

It was super exciting and it was exciting, mostly because I got to see my friends, including my lovely co-host, Danica Favorite. Danica, how are you doing today?

Danica Favorite: [00:01:00] I’m good. Thank you. Yeah, really good. Missing you. Of course. We did get a lot of fun times together. We even sat in the coffee shop and wrote together, which was super fun.

Steph Pajonas: It was nice, wasn’t it? Yeah.

Danica Favorite: Anyway, for those of you who don’t know me, I am Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on all stages of their publishing journey, whether that is formatting the manuscript, coming up with great blurbs and book covers to getting your book distributed out to the largest worldwide market.

And then finally, splitting your royalties. So all that jazz between us and Steph, we have you covered for all kinds of great stuff in publishing. Yeah I love what we do. I love that we get to work together on this stuff. And today I’m really excited to welcome our guest, Olivia Rigal. We’ve known Olivia online, it seems forever.

I know we’ve met in person a few times at conferences [00:02:00] and she is just one of those authors that is out there kicking butt, taking names, and doing all kinds of stuff that’s very cool with AI. I wanna introduce Olivia to you and let Olivia tell you all a little bit about herself and then we’ll dive into asking her all the questions and finding about her AI use.

So Olivia welcome. Say hello to our guests.

Olivia Rigal: Hello. Hello. I’m really excited to be here and I was telling some French friends that I was coming over and they said, you’re gonna tell in public that you’re writing with AI. And I say, yes. And they say, are you crazy? Because in France there’s still a witch hunt about anybody who publishes with AI.

If you have your covers made with AI, you’re stealing the jobs of the illustrators. If you are making music with Suno AI, you’re stealing the jobs of the musicians. And I’m trying to say no because the AI will never replace [00:03:00] us. It’s like having a tool. When you go to the south of France, you don’t ride the horse and change horse at the end of every day, no. You take a car, you’ve gone with the tools that you have.

And there was a conference last year, I think it was in November, and some girl said, I will never use AI, and the person at the conference said, you text. Do you have an iPhone? And she said yes. And said I’m very sorry to tell you’ve been using AI.

Anyway, I also have a YouTube channel, which is called AuteurPreneur, where I talk about using AI and all the various things. And I’ve made videos about Raptor Write, so that we would have a French guide on how to use it. I’ve made videos about it, so if you hear that I’ve been burned, it’s because they connected the dots.

Steph Pajonas: Oh, [00:04:00] no, we don’t want that. We don’t want that.

Danica Favorite: I’m glad that you were sharing that experience about, even people in France have this anti AI attitude, because we talk about that a lot here and just how it’s wrong. And so I love that you’re out there fighting the good fight. if people wanna burn you, we will be there to protect you.

Or at least

Olivia Rigal: thank you.

Danica Favorite: Stand in the flame with you because I think at this point we just have to acknowledge that AI is here. It’s not gonna go away, going away. As everyone says, you’re not gonna put the genie back in the bottle. So let’s figure out how to use it and be the ones who are controlling this technology rather than allowing the corporations and everyone else to take over and force us to use it in ways we don’t want to.

Like we have the reins. You’re talking about the horses. We’ve got the reins right now, so let’s guide that horse wherever we’re going.

Olivia Rigal: Yeah. And another thing, I think readers want to have books, and they want to have good books and good stories, and they don’t [00:05:00] care if we still write it with ink and a quill, or if we type it on a machine, or if we do it with AI, as long as they have good books. Our manufacturing process, it’s you don’t wanna know how the sausage is done. Same thing with the book. You, sometimes you have beta readers that will go with you, with the through the process. They will read the chapter and give you feedback. most of the readers don’t want to know how it’s done, and they don’t care.

Steph Pajonas: They only really care about that final output, right? Like that final story that wowed them or touched them or whatever it may be. That is where the proof is that you’ve done your job, whether you used an AI tool or not.

I agree. I definitely don’t want to go back in time and try to do things like with a typewriter or with a pen and ink. I wanna be using the tools that I have right now that are at my disposal right in front of me.

Danica Favorite: And if you do wanna use pen and [00:06:00] ink, it was great we had Kevin McLaughlin on here and he was talking about some of this, and actually he and I in, in New Orleans were sitting there and there he was in his notebook with his pen and ink writing and taking pictures of it and using AI.

To take that text and move it into the written word in terms of like typewritten words. So yeah, if you wanna use pen and ink, you can still do that. You can still do whatever process you want. And as Kevin showed us, it’s something that we still can use and make work for us.

So I wanted to go back to what you said, Olivia, about the readers. So obviously you’re using AI and you’re like, the readers don’t care. Is that, has that been your experience where your reader’s like, Nope, just give us the books?

Olivia Rigal: I haven’t really had that conversation. It’s my opinion that they don’t care. And that the noise about, oh, it’s not fair. They’re using AI come from a fear of those who don’t use it, and [00:07:00] unless you start using it and then you decide if it’s for you and it’s not for you, and what part of it is for you.

I’m gonna backtrack. I started publishing in 2013. I don’t know if anybody remembers Elle Casey. She used to write a book a month and she was like me.

She was a lawyer who decided she was tired of telling the fiction of other people and she wanted to tell her own fiction and, everybody was suspicious because she was writing so fast, but that was her full-time job and they were saying she’s got ghost writer. So every time you do something that is out of the beaten path, people will suspect you of doing very weird things.

Steph Pajonas: That’s true. I was also one who published in 2013. My first book came out in September of 2013, and I remember Elle Casey and just I feel like it comes [00:08:00] from a place of jealousy. Where people are just like, wow, she’s pumping out a book a month.

I wish I could do that. Why can’t I do that? There must be something wrong with me or the person who is succeeding, they must be cheating. That’s like the cycle of thought that people have when it comes to this business, right? It’s like they’re they must be cheating or there’s something wrong with me and we don’t want to look inward about that. Something that, yes, exactly.

Olivia Rigal: And I can attest that as far as Elle is concerned, one day she called me up and she said, can I move in with you for one month? I’m gonna lock myself in one of the bedrooms and write a novel. And I, okay. And she would come out at mealtime and to shower, and then she did nothing but write for a month. And at the end of the month, she had a novel, and then she rinsed and repeat.

Yeah, in 2013, I wrote a few novellas. It didn’t really go well. I think I sold 700 copies in one [00:09:00] year, which you never look at those who do worse than you. You always look at the Lucy Score or the Janet Ivanovich, or the big names. And I thought maybe I’m not good at that at all.

And then just for the heck of it, because Kindle Unlimited had started to happen. The Kindle Publishing had started to happen in France. I translated one of my books and for I got number one in the Amazon France store. And I said to myself, okay, I don’t suck. I have a visibility problem because in the US if I have a penny for every time I’ve heard the market is flooded, we can’t really do anything about it anymore. I could retire.

I decided to learn marketing. And I also jumped in with bundles, so that was 2014. With Blair Babylon, we create [00:10:00] something called the Red Hot Authors. And we published eight bundles in a year and a half. Stayed on the USA today bestseller list for four weeks with one of them. It was fun time.

Anyway, so that’s ancient history. I started looking at AI and my first touch with AI for writing, because I was still practicing law at the time, was when Sudowrite came. Then I had met Elizabeth a few times, but I really didn’t know her. And then I saw her teaching on Sudowrite. And it’s like everybody feels like Elizabeth is their best friend because they have spent hours with her except that she doesn’t know us because we’re on the other side of the screen.

So anyway, the first thing was Sudowrite and I was not happy with it. There’s one thing that I hate. Absolutely. It’s [00:11:00] editing. I write very clean. When I write something, it’s almost good to go, and then the next day before I start writing again, I read the previous chapter and then I go on. So this is my editing process. Going in and editing something that the AI has written that I’m not happy with was pure torture. So there was no interest for me to do that.

Also. I had problem, but I guess that’s not with AI, that’s with people because they don’t understand that AI hallucinates. That when you ask a question and AI doesn’t know, AI will invent. It will make up a pretty story. There’s people who got disbarred for that because instead of doing their research in the classical way, what they did is give me a case law that says this, and that. And I’m guessing the AI went looking for case law like that, but there was no case law like that, so it just invented a case law, [00:12:00] gave it like a nice little citation. The guy put it in his brief with the citation, didn’t bother to check if it was real or not, and then put it to the judge who say, oh, this is interesting. I like this decision. I wanna know more about it. And went looking for it and found that it didn’t exist.

So I would not say stupidity because it was smart to ask the AI. I would say it’s the laziness of not checking afterwards or the absolute truth. It doesn’t really matter because we’re writing fiction. So if we write something that is false, it’s not like we’re saving lives. It’s not important.

So my first feeling about AI was not a good one because it put people in trouble. They put themselves in trouble. AI didn’t do that, but still. And second, it was more work than it was worth it. And then I went to NINC in, Two years ago. [00:13:00] So not 24, but 23. And you had just started the FFA. Elizabeth got me in the boat and I started using AI in a smarter way. And I started using AI so much that I didn’t do anything else but use AI and learn about AI.

My number one is woo. My number two is learner. I wanna know all the things. I wanna try everything. it’s like a kid in a toy store. I wanna play with a truck, and then I wanna be Barbie doctor, and then I wanna be. The little chemist and there was just so much of it. I realized that my production had gone down and I hadn’t published anything in months.

So I left the FFA for a while to get myself back into track, and now I’m back I’m in love with Raptor Write. I think it’s the most fantastic thing. And what I understand, because like I said, my number one is Woo. So I [00:14:00] talk to everybody and I, I, even the introvert, I will go and fish them out and torture them.

Everybody has their own process and whatever your process was before AI should stay your process. It’s just that you’re gonna get the assistance with the AI. For instance. I’m a pantser. I just have a starting point. And since it’s romantic suspense, we know they’re gonna end up together.

But what happens between my starting point and the end when they live happily ever after? I have no clue. I discover it as I go along, and sometimes you get yourself stuck into a corner and you have no idea where you’re going. So you pick up your phone and you call your best friend and you say. Give me an idea and your friend gives you an idea and you say, I don’t like it. Give me another idea. And by the fifth time you’ve said to your best friend, I don’t like your idea. Your best friend will [00:15:00] politely tell you, get lost. AI is my best friend who never gets upset with me. And actually I said, no, I don’t like this idea. Oh, you’re right. It wasn’t that great. Let me think about something else.

So for bouncing ideas, it’s absolutely magical. And even if you don’t like the ideas you have that tsunami of ideas that comes out. You, maybe you’ll do a mash between one thing and the other, and you’ll come out with something that will make you bounce.

I was watching Elana Johnson’s interview with you, and she does about the same thing is like she will ask for an idea and another idea, and sometimes just bouncing off somebody else. And this way you don’t have to upset your friends by telling them their idea are stupid and because the AI doesn’t get offended. So that’s the first thing I do with AI is bounce off [00:16:00] idea.

The second thing I do is I use Miragold’s prompt. Mira has created a bunch of GPTs. So when you go on her site, which is mira gold prompts.com, at the bottom of the page you have: write me copy, write me a blurb, write me taglines, write me whatever. So you click on this, it brings you on Chat GPT. Then you can throw your entire manuscript inside of it and it will spit you out a blurb and taglines. And you know what? It does this in Portuguese, it does this in Italian, it does this in French. So if you’re pushing translations and you don’t know the first word of that language, go for it.

If you’re really prudent, because trust, but check and verify, is you take whatever the chat GPT has given you in Portuguese and they [00:17:00] say, what does that mean in English? Or what does that mean in French? And it will translate it for you. You’ll know if the AI has gone over the top or if it’s right on track.

Sometimes I find it must be because Mira writes Dark Romance, it tends to do things in a very dramatic tone. So if you’re doing a blurb for a Christmas romance, then it’s very sweet and cozy. It’s gonna make it sound more dramatic than it is, so you just have to correct course and say, Nope, this is Sweet Romance.

The level of drama is very low. Please rephrase and it will do it.

Danica Favorite: I love how you’re taking like, prompts of other people and things like that and really using them, but making them your own. Which I think is really cool that you’ve found this process for yourself and are using it in a way that works for you.

Steph Pajonas: Your journey was very similar to mine. I started off with Sudowrite and then it just it wasn’t giving me [00:18:00] what I wanted after a while, so learned how to prompt and then, moved on to all these other tools. So it’s interesting that when I talked to people who started at the beginning of this whole process of learning AI when we started back in 20 22, 20 23, that a lot of people have the same pipeline for coming into AI writing.

Which is not really surprising, but it is comforting, I’ll tell you that much.

Olivia Rigal: And a lot of people say to you, oh, but it doesn’t work. But it’s like saying. To start your car, you gotta put the crank to, like they did in the twenties to start the engine. So that was what it was like at the beginning.

Now there’s so much progress, it’s just amazing and if you are a plotter, and sometimes I regret not being a plotter because I say you can do the entire outline and then you write it. But my problem is if I have an outline, I’m bored. I already know where [00:19:00] I’m going. I wanna be surprised and the best experience for being surprised is co-writing, which I’ve done a few times where you have to be with another pantser where you write your chapter and I write at night. So I would write my chapter at night, I would send it to my co-author. My co-author would read it, and sometimes in the day she would send back the chapter. So you are, you’re having the discovery of writing your own stuff, but you’re also like reading somebody else’s book because you get her chapter and you have no idea. And the game was to have a cliffhanger at the end of every single chapter. It’s like the car turned over, you’re on your own girl.

And one thing I was thinking and I haven’t done it, is to try to co-write with the AI. Have the AI write the guy, and I would write the girl and say to the AI, okay, this is the story now. Now figure out what’s coming next.

Steph Pajonas: I love that idea. [00:20:00] We should totally do that idea. Like I’m just saying I’m gonna write chapter one, you write chapter two, then I’ll pick it up and we’ll just go back and forth and see what story we get on the end, and I think that’s a fabulous idea. I’m totally gonna do that.

Danica Favorite: I know, I think it sounds fun.

I love this. That we get to find out all of these new, fun little ideas and tricks that we can learn. So you’ve talked a lot about like your journey with the AI in publishing and how you’ve approached that. But one of the things that I really want to hear from you, because this is something that Steph and I just love that you’re doing, is you are using AI for all kinds of things.

So you’ve got this really multifaceted approach to using AI in your publishing process. So can you tell us about some of the other ways that you’re using AI in publishing?

Olivia Rigal: I speak English, I think fluently French, totally fluently, and a little Spanish. And I’m lazy. I’m extremely [00:21:00] lazy.

So what I figured out when I started publishing was. You write one book and then you have somebody translated into German and in Italian and French and Portuguese and Spanish, and all of a sudden you have five or six books when you only had to write one. So I painfully translated my own books into French, which was not that painful but it was amusing because I realized some things I would say in French, in English. I wouldn’t say them the same way in French, and I changed entire parts of book because it didn’t sound good in French or it didn’t go with the culture.

20 years ago. I had a friend who wrote for Harlequin, and actually what she did was translate the English Harlequin book into French and she would have to culturally rearrange them.

Like for instance, the American women liked bearded guys. In France in the seventies and eighties, we didn’t like facial [00:22:00] hair, so the hero of the book was shaved. And in the American book, the guy takes you out on a date that the first night he kisses you and he says, we’ll do this again soon. And I have a day in court tomorrow. And he goes home without even trying to seduce you.

The American woman gets it because he’s serious. He’s a lawyer, he’s gonna be a good provider, and he’s reasonable. The French woman is. What the heck if on the first date he doesn’t try to get into my pants, what is this gonna be 10 years from now when we are married, we’re never gonna have sex at all.

So she would have to rearrange the book to match the culture. All this to say that translating is fun, but translating is also rewriting in some cases. Back to translation. So I used to do my translation myself, and then when AI came along I tried [00:23:00] Deep L which was the first free translation tool we had.

And I would throw a chapter in Deep L and then I would rewrite it and I would edit it seriously. But. It was faster than doing it directly myself and sometimes Deep L came up with very good translations of colloquial expressions, and the one I always give is in English. You said it’s not kosher in French, you say se ne pas Catholique. Se ne pas Catholique. It’s not very Catholic.

So you know you need the AI to have enough knowledge to translate the colloquial expression. So I did that, but I didn’t feel, because of my experience of what it had been translating into French, I didn’t feel comfortable putting something into the AI and then throwing out a translation into the world. What I did is I hired translators, but [00:24:00] translators are very expensive. German translators are four or 5 cents a word, and if you write a 50,000 word book. It adds up.

Now we have Steph’s method that she taught into the FFA. And then if you’re lazy, because Steph’s method requires work you have Scribe Shadow.

Scribe Shadow has one advantage is they have the prompts required to format in the destination language, like for instance in English, a dialogue will start with quote. I am very happy to see you, comma, quote, she said, period. In French it would be em dash. I am very happy to see you, comma, said she. So the subject and the verb are inverse.

I know the French one because I speak the language and I’ve read in French, but I’m sure there’s the [00:25:00] same thing in German and there’s the same thing in Hungarian or Polish or whatever. And that’s where Scribe Shadow has cornered the market because they have their own prompt to which we do not have access.

And normally I’m with Elizabeth on this. I want tools where I can prompt myself and I wanna know when I’m asking the AI to do, but sometimes I don’t know what to ask the AI to do and I don’t wanna go and study Spanish formatting or Italian formatting. So I’ll give the money to Scribe Shadow to do it for me.

Steph Pajonas: Scribe Shadow is pretty great. They’ve done a lot of the work on the backend. They recognize that they need to understand the market and they need to understand the target languages, so where you’re going to. Right. And so that’s one of the things I’m still trying to work with the AI, like having a conversation with the AI about the different formatting between the different languages, so [00:26:00] that I can understand what’s different and then therefore make the prompt a little bit better on the backend for those sorts of things. And it’s still a work in progress. I feel like the AI translations class that I did for FFA is 95% there, and there’s this little bit, the very end that is still a little nebulous and people are figuring it out as they go. But I think sometimes getting you there to that 95% really is the bulk of the work.

Olivia Rigal: Yeah. And even when you have a human translators you have human translators, you have errors. I’ll give you a cute one. I had a friend who hired an translator to translate her book in French and I had read the book in English and now I’m reading the book in French and the woman is pouring half the cup, half her cup of coffee in one cup and the other one in another cup, and now she writes very quirky characters.

But I didn’t remember, and I thought that was really weird because she did that a few times. [00:27:00] And so I go back to the book in English and then I get it. The woman is pouring half and half in her coffee, half and half. And if you have never have half and half, if you’ve never been in the States, you don’t know what it is.

So the translator didn’t know, and she just assumed it was half the coffee there, half the coffee there. Even human error happens.

Steph Pajonas: Oh, absolutely. That’s so funny. As you were saying the story, I was like, oh wait, it’s half and half the, I go to other countries plenty, and I realized the last time I traveled abroad that there is no half and half in other countries. I would ask for it and they’d be like, I’m like, how about cream? Cream? Can we do cream? They’re like, oh yeah, sure, we can do that. And then you get something really delicious and you can put your coffee.

Danica Favorite: I didn’t get it until she explained it, because I drink my coffee black.

So I’m like I don’t, I, why is this funny? And then when she said half and half, I’m like, oh, yeah. [00:28:00] But it is like those cultural context things and those clues that we don’t always know. And I like what you were saying in terms of, the translation to pay translator is really expensive and you’re not necessarily going to get good results.

There’s these other cool tools that you can use to get there. So tell us, because I know you’ve done a lot of translations, what languages are you translating into now?

Olivia Rigal: I am so in French where I do it myself in German. I’ve had several translators. Most of them were good. What I do now is I have the AI translated and then I hire a proofer who edits it. That’s what I do in German because the problem is if you go on the market and you throw something that’s unreadable. You have killed your name. People will not trust you. There is one author right now who has an advertising where the tagline [00:29:00] ends with all the steam. It’s a steamy romance and it’s all the steam. In French, AI translated it. It says, and all the vapeur. And it’s steam, but it’s vapor, like when you’re steaming your dumplings. So it’s the same word, but a steamy romance is not a so you look at this and you laugh because you think dumplings or you think you know something steamed in the kitchen.

Vapor.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, sometimes those little misses are enough to really throw things off. Right.

Olivia Rigal: And if it’s bad in your blurb, nobody’s gonna pick up your book. Exactly. Yeah. However I translated, so I did something stupid not stupid, but annoying. Two weeks ago I translated an entire series in Portuguese because I was debating to with myself, should I translate in Brazilian or should I translate in Portuguese?

And I [00:30:00] figured there’s more people in Brazil. But the level of earning. The spending money is higher in Portugal. So I said, okay. And then I’m thinking Brazilian people who are reading, they probably can read Portuguese. So I translate the seven books. I format my seven eBooks, I format my seven paperbacks, and I throw everything on Amazon.

And then I speak to Christina who says, no, the market is in KU Brazil and you can’t put the Portuguese books there.

So I had a fit with myself and then I put myself up. I say, okay, let’s do this again. And I translated the same seven book into Brazilian Portuguese. And what I did. Is I targeted the Brazilian books to.com, dot com, dot br, and then I put a little Brazilian flag on the cover, and [00:31:00] then I targeted the European Portuguese version to the Spanish market, because there’s no Amazon Portugal, I’m assuming they must look in the Amazon Spain. And also interestingly, Amazon Spain lets you do paperback. Amazon Brazil doesn’t. When you do your paperback and you look to put the target country, there’s no .com .br.

Steph Pajonas: I did not know that. That’s crazy.

Danica Favorite: What I love about this is we were curious about AI translations, but I feel like this is really a masterclass in translations period and things that authors need to think about because people say, oh translations.

And. It’s clearly more than just, oh, I’ll get my book translated in another language and put it up in that market. Like you really have to do your homework and understand what’s available and what that market is like. So yes, this is so good, Olivia.

Olivia Rigal: And it was Kate Rudolph who started [00:32:00] translating in Spanish.

And I said, how do you price? Because here again, people have more money in Spain, but there’s more people in all of South America. So how do you target your price? What do you do and who do you target your advertising to? And she says I go and look at the price of a beer in Mexico and a book is gonna occupy them for more time than having a beer with friends.

So, una cerveza y un libro and I thought that was so smart.

Steph Pajonas: I’m a big fan of looking at the target country and figuring out like how much a sandwich costs, how much a bottle of water costs, how much a beer costs, and then that gives you a good idea of what you can target for books. But then of course, looking at comp books in the market and seeing what selling at what price points, and that can help to sort of figure out things a little bit because some of those prices are just automatically changed from US [00:33:00] dollars. Like they’re, yeah, they’re just currency conversion happening there, so you can’t really rely on that too much, but you definitely will look at rankings to figure out if they’re selling or not.

Olivia Rigal: One thing to know if you’re doing paperback in France. Two things to note. You must have the price on the cover. It’s a legal obligation. And second, the spine. Goes the other way. So let me get a book. I’ll show you with a book.

Okay. This is an American book. It’s that way, so you can read it the wrong side of the law, and then the front cover is on the top. If I put the front cover on the top of this one, it’s upside down.

Steph Pajonas: Oh, look at that. And what’s the purpose of it? Going in the opposite direction. Do you know, or no,

Olivia Rigal: it’s just why do [00:34:00] you the English right on the wrong side of the street.

True. No. So there’s no purpose. It’s just a question of what is being done and in the back. So it was a present that was given to me. So the bookstore will put a little tag to hide the price, but the price has to be on the back cover. It’s required by law.

Steph Pajonas: Okay. Yeah. There are all these little things you have to know about your target country and what you’re gonna do.

So that is a good tip. I like that tip.

Olivia Rigal: Yeah, you can try and throw something out at the market and see how it flies, which is what I’m doing with Portuguese and Brazilian. I will throw a five dollar a day Facebook ad at it, see if it spends, and I think I spent $150.

I have a book, which is my bestseller in France. It’s called Jade. It happens in Southeast Asia. I cannot give it away in English. Nobody wants it. I had it translated [00:35:00] into German. They don’t want it either. So I spent 4,000 euros paying the German translator for something that must have made. 500 euros in German. Thankfully the French version paid for the translation. But look for the market. We all want to be original and to be one of a kind. But no, you don’t wanna be a perfect snowflake. You want to be in the flow.

Danica Favorite: That’s a great point. And I love this whole idea of figuring out a whole process of doing what is gonna work for you, what’s gonna work for your book, the particular market you’re gonna look at. And also genre. I liked that you’re like, this book didn’t do well in this other country.

That’s important too. If people in that country aren’t gonna read that genre. You don’t want to take that time.

So when you’re using AI, because I know you use it for a lot of things, can you walk us through some of [00:36:00] your workflows or maybe like an example of how you would do that?

Olivia Rigal: I struggle with titles. And sometimes I don’t have a title at all. I’m almost finished with a book and it was book three in a trilogy, and the first book is a Bad Boy for Valentine’s Day. The second book is a Survivor for Forever. And the third one, I had no clue. So I threw the book in AI and I had a conversation with the AI who came with a Sinner for Redemption.

And I said, this is not a religious book, so let’s try again. And then I try and try it again. And if I don’t like anything I’m getting, I’ll try again the next day. I’ll ask for taglines. I’ll ask for a summary. I want to do it, but there’s only 24 hours in my day. And I like to [00:37:00] sleep. I’d like to make a Bible of my series because I’m on the second generations of my bikers and I want to not have cousins sleep together.

And.

Danica Favorite: I think right there, that is the best story Bible reason I have heard from an author. I don’t want cousins to have to sleep together. Yeah.

Olivia Rigal: And you don’t want John to become Jim and his green eyes to become blue and… I was thinking to create, but maybe somebody’s done this already. A template of, summarize the chapter. Tell me who’s in that chapter. Describe the character in the chapter if it’s the first time they’re here. And specificities of that character. I’m sure it would be a template that would get changed as we would have the experience with it, but I think there’s a market for that template.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, like a story bible prompt template type thing. I’ve [00:38:00] developed my own over time because I like to run my story bibles in silos where it doesn’t doesn’t know that this chapter is really connected to other chapters or anything like that. So I ask very specific questions in my prompt and just get the information I need from that chapter.

So you basically using the AI for a lot of these extraneous tasks that you have to do, right? All the marketing, all like the bookkeeping things that you have to do, to keep track of all the stuff in your process.

Olivia Rigal: And I’m a Notion fanatic. I have a Notion database with all my books, so I have different views of it. So you only have the info you need. But you have everything about the book except the book, and you have the number of pages, the date that I uploaded for the first time, the date I reloaded it for the last time. What I did when I reloaded it because I’m not getting any younger. And there’s stuff that I forget.

[00:39:00] I really wanna try the fine tune. The fine tune is my greatest hope that, not that I think that I write the best way, but I like the way that I wanna say it. And I really would like to try this and maybe that will reconcile me with writing with the AI.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think everyone has their process and I like that, even though you haven’t necessarily figured out like how to write with it you’ve still figured out processes and things to do with it that make it yours and buy back some of those 24 hours in the day. I think that oh, and

Olivia Rigal: images are magical.

I’m, Midge is my best friend that’s Midjourney. I have unsubscribed to Midge and I’m on a detox from Midge because if you want the one where you own the copyright, it’s $60 a month. If you don’t, then everything, if you pay less, you can make the images, but you don’t own the right. I’m [00:40:00] not sure. You can use them for your own covers. And see, that’s the lawyer coming up again. So I’m on detox, but I really love midjourney. I’ve made fabulous guys. Guys I would take home on Mid Journey.

Danica Favorite: I like that. So that brings us to my last question. What is your favorite AI tool?

So is it Midge or do you have another AI tool that you really love?

Olivia Rigal: I’ve started playing with Suno which makes music and I had things that, had me like you call this music? And I had amazing songs. I have a Christmas song that I’m gonna use for making videos for my Christmas books. I have a very hard rock country-ish.

I run tornado song that I’m gonna use on all my advertising. So right now my favorite toy is Suno, but that’s [00:41:00] because it’s the latest toy. But Suno AI is magical.

Steph Pajonas: I agree. I love making music with Suno. It’s been a little few weeks. I need to get back in there and start making some music. It’s so much fun.

So much fun. So that’s your favorite one? Out of all the tools?

Olivia Rigal: And also they have a rapper that’s using it and very vocal about it, who I happen to like a lot. So I felt vindicated that I’m not taking the music away from the music industry. I’m just making fun music.

Danica Favorite: I love that. And I think Steph I don’t know if you used Suno, but if you listen to the intro music on our podcast, that is something that Steph made using AI. Good. Good.

Steph Pajonas: I used Suno to make our intro music. Yeah, it’s fun.

Danica Favorite: I love that. It’s so great. It’s so great. So yeah. Olivia, is there anything else you wanna share with us?

Any pieces about your AI journey or using AI that we didn’t get to share? I feel like we could still keep talking for another couple of hours because, oh yeah. Like

Olivia Rigal: I can talk forever. Yeah, there’s [00:42:00] one thing I do for my sweet pen name, which is something that was inspired by Steph which is flash fiction.

The concept she threw at us was say to the AI I write, let’s say Christmas romance and ask the AI for two or three word prompts so you get, list of prompts like present wrapping or Christmas tree decoration or eggnog preparation or making cookies. And then you take that two word prompt and you throw it into a visual AI. And the visual AI makes an image. And then you look at the image and you write a story. So you can write it yourself or you can write it with AI.

Then you can take the end product and throw it in a vocal AI and then I have it on the YouTube channel. And what I do too is every single week, on every single Monday for the past [00:43:00] 26 weeks I’ve been sending a flash fiction to my readers.

So I’m hoping to get a better opening rate on my newsletter. There’s just so much you can do with it and you’re not stealing anybody else’s job when you’re doing that.

Steph Pajonas: No, I really enjoyed doing flash fiction back in November. I did it during the NaNoWriMo season and I think I’m gonna pick it back up again. I was just thinking about it the other day about how the fact I miss doing it. It was a lot of fun and I like the idea of sending it out every week to your newsletter subscribers, because then that’s material that keeps you at the forefront of their mind. Right. So it’s just another way to keep creating content that we like and we enjoy and that it’s good for our readers as well.

So I love it. I’m glad you, I’m glad you took it up. It’s fun.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. And I love that you’re putting it on YouTube as well. We just had Dana Sacco here and she’s finally got her YouTube channel monetized. Just in the couple [00:44:00] weeks since we last had her on, she’s been able to do that.

And so the flash fiction sounds like another cool way to add to that, to get those followers, get those subscribers, get those views.

Olivia Rigal: You’re gonna get the followers because I think I’m up to 5,000 followers now, but I don’t have enough hours because it’s flash fiction. So I’m not monetized yet.

Steph Pajonas: If you throw a few audio books up there, you might be able to get the hours in. Yeah. That’s one of the advantages of doing that.

All right. We’re almost outta time how do we tell our listeners to come find you? What’s the best place to do that? Do you have a website, socials, that sort of thing?

Olivia Rigal: I have a website. It’s oliviarigal.com. And some authors are very brave and they have the fr, de whatever. I’m lazy. Like I said, the least effort is my favorite thing. So when you go to my site, you’ll have a tab that will say Deutsch, [00:45:00] Italian, or you can recognize your own language if English is not your thing.

But the landing page is the books in English.

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. All right, so for everybody who’s been listening in, we’ll be sure to put together a blog post about this episode so you can find out all the cool stuff that Olivia talked about today, the translations, and all the interesting other side stuff that she’s doing that’s using AI as well.

It will be up on bravenewbookshelf.com along with this episode and the full transcript when the time comes. Danica, do you wanna see a few final words for us?

Danica Favorite: Of course. I, you know me, I love to encourage everyone, make sure you are liking following our YouTube. Olivia did this great cute little visual with the book, so if you wanna see the video of her doing that, it’s very important to do that.

Make sure you like and follow our Facebook page for Brave New Bookshelf. And of course, make sure that you’re finding FFA and Publish Drive on socials as well, following [00:46:00] us in all those places. Keep up with us and let’s spread the good word.

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming, Olivia. We enjoyed talking with you.

I can’t wait to do it again sometime soon. We’ll definitely see you in class, that’s for sure. All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you guys in the next episode. Okay, bye bye. 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 at bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.

Episode 41 – AI in Creative Writing and Translations with Olivia Rigal