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In this week’s episode of the Brave New Bookshelf podcast, we explore the dynamic world of AI in authorship with special guest Jamie Davis. Jamie is not only a seasoned author but also the conference director of Author Nation. His journey with AI is both inspiring and informative, providing valuable insights for authors at all stages of their careers.
Meet Jamie Davis, Author and Conference Director
Jamie Davis brings a wealth of experience to the table. With a background in journalism, sound engineering, and healthcare, Jamie has been writing fiction since 2014 and has been a full-time author for over six years. His role as the conference director for Author Nation involves ensuring seamless operations behind the scenes, allowing attendees to focus on learning and networking.
Embracing AI in the Publishing Industry
Jamie’s journey with AI began about a year ago when he decided to educate himself on the tools available. Initially skeptical, he was blown away by the potential of AI to streamline workflows and enhance the writing process. Jamie emphasizes that while AI can assist with tasks like pacing analysis, it doesn’t replace the creative aspect of writing. Instead, it serves as a tool to refine and improve his work.
The Transformative Power of AI
Jamie uses AI primarily for analyzing the pacing of his chapters, helping him produce cleaner drafts that require less revision from his human editors. This not only saves time but also reduces editing costs. Additionally, AI assists Jamie in marketing efforts, crafting newsletter content, and managing social media posts.
Exploring AI in Visual Media
Beyond writing, Jamie is excited about the possibilities AI offers in visual media. He uses AI-generated images for inspiration and is exploring AI video tools to create book trailers and visual content for his series. This approach allows him to bring his stories to life in new and engaging ways, expanding the reach of his work.
The Future of Storytelling with AI
As AI technology continues to evolve, Jamie sees a future where stories can be told in multiple formats, reaching audiences worldwide. He envisions a time when authors can create multimedia experiences that complement their written work, offering readers new ways to engage with their stories.
Favorite Tools & Recommendations
Jamie highlights two AI tools as his favorites:
- ChatGPT: Utilized for writing assistance, pacing analysis, and marketing content.
- Freepik: An aggregator of visual tools for creating images and videos that enhance storytelling.
Key Takeaways
- AI can enhance the writing process without replacing the creative aspect.
- Authors can use AI to streamline workflows, saving time and money.
- AI offers exciting possibilities for expanding storytelling into visual and multimedia formats.
- Education is key to overcoming fear and embracing the potential of AI.
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 another episode of 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. We’re having a lot of fun at the Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press. And.
Many other businesses that we seem to be starting. It just, whenever I get together with Elizabeth and our other people on the team, Stacey and Joe we have another brilliant idea of another business to start and they just keep multiplying. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m definitely gonna be busy for the next three to five years, at the very least. That’s what was determined in today’s meeting when we [00:01:00] came up with another business idea.
So you guys are gonna be seeing a lot of me, that’s for sure, over the next few years, I’m definitely not going anywhere. And it’s been a lot of fun.
There’s a lot of stuff going on in AI right now. Open AI is doing lots of cool things. Everybody’s competing between Gemini and Claude. Who’s the best, who’s the fastest, who’s got the biggest models, et cetera. So it’s just not stopping anytime soon.
And that’s why we’re here. That’s why I’m here with my lovely co-host, as always.
Danica Favorite. Danica, how are you doing?
Danica Favorite: I’m good. I’m good.
Yeah, it is a busy season. Unlike you guys Publish Drive is not launching anything new yet. We do have a cool thing that someday soon I’ll be able to announce. I always tease Steph with this, and I know at some point she’s gonna be like, ah!
But other than that, like we really are just working on doing everything we can to continue making Publish Drive as best as possible. Because like Future Fiction Academy, our plan is to stay around for many years to come. I think we [00:02:00] both have that same mission of serving the author community and, at Publish Drive, we are there for authors on every stage of the journey, whether that’s formatting your manuscript to finding the best keywords, metadata, and book descriptions with AI to some AI cover generation, to getting your book out there and distributed to the world. And then finally, once you start raking in those sales to bringing the royalties and spliting the royalties out with your authors and your co-authors and all of those fun things.
So yeah, we’re doing a lot really looking for how do we best serve the author community?
And like Steph said, what Steph and I are trying to do here with the podcast is serving the authors as best as we can in making sure you’ve got all of the best updates with the LLMs, with what AI is doing, how that’s impacting you as authors and writers.
We’re constantly going back and forth, aren’t we, Steph? We’re constantly like, for a while Claude was the big boyfriend. And then for a while I had a crush on Gemini, and then I was like, no, Gemini [00:03:00] sucks. And back and forth and back and forth.
And so it’s fun. It’s a fun adventure and just when you think you know it all, something new pops in.
That’s why I think it’s really great to have such a variety of guests because today we have author, Jamie Davis. Who is also the conference director of Author Nation. Jamie and I were sitting in a group talking about AI and automations, and he was talking just about how far he’s come with, changing his mind and seeing things differently with AI and what his AI use looks like.
I thought he’d be such a great guest to have because as we all have really focused on with this podcast is making sure it’s a variety of perspectives. And Jamie’s coming in from, Hey, I just started using these cool tools and this is what I’m doing. And I think for some of you who are maybe like, okay, you guys keep bringing on ninjas, Jamie’s not a ninja, but he’s awesome.
That’s why we wanna [00:04:00] hear from Jamie today. I’m not gonna keep waxing on about Jamie, ’cause you are gonna get to know him really well in this podcast. So I’m gonna hand it over to Jamie. Jamie, tell us about yourself.
Jamie Davis: Wow. Okay. First of all, I am not a ninja because I don’t want my friends over at Ask a Ninja to come find me and tackle me.
And that’s an old podcast reference for those that have been around it for a long time and you’ve actually resurfaced recently. So I thought that was cool. I have been an author, I was a journalist for a while. I was a sound engineer, which is why my virtual background is a booth, because I still feel at home in that kind of setting.
Otherwise, you’d see the corner of my bedroom and no one wants to see that. I have been writing fiction since about 2014, so just over 10 years. And I’ve been a full-time author for about six years now. And just delving into things a little bit at a time and learning along the way.
I had been a podcaster for a long time and a medical journalist, and so technology [00:05:00] has never scared me. I’ve always taught myself what I needed to know along the way, and that’s why I am excited to delve into some of the tools out there that help me speed my workflow, and that’s what it’s all about in my estimation.
Danica Favorite: I really love that because as authors we’re always looking for ways to make the whole author business, author life just run a little bit more smoothly. Let’s just jump into my first question about AI and publishing. How are you approaching AI and publishing? What has been that approach?
What are your thoughts around all of that?
Jamie Davis: I think I’ll start by saying that until probably a year ago this time, I was aware of AI. I was listening to all the arguments for and against it and was like on the fence. I’m a big believer that, you can try to stand in the way of advancing technologies and that’s a good way to get run over.
I think there’s a lot of people out there who swore that they would never stop going to the village blacksmith until there were no more village [00:06:00] blacksmiths. That’s how I look at things about new technologies. I used to work in the TV business and was there when cable really exploded onto the scene.
We went from four channels to a hundred channels, then suddenly a hundred channels with podcasting and the advent of online video and audio. Went to a thousand, 10,000 channels. AI is expanding that even further, and I think there’s no sense getting upset about it. Just find a way to make it work for your workflow and move forward.
So what I’ve done is learned to educate myself. And one of the ways I did that I am the conference director for Author Nation. Basically that means that I’m there to make sure that the logistics behind the scenes all happen. That the rooms are set up right every day and everything’s ready.
So if there aren’t problems when you go to a conference, thank the conference director because they’re the person you never see. Or maybe you see them scurrying, hither and yon. But they’re just troubleshooting and fixing things behind the scenes. And that’s what I do there.
Danica Favorite: [00:07:00] As one of the sponsors of Author Nation and last year we sponsored as well. I did see you do much scurrying and you were very helpful to me a couple of times. So yes, I can definitely attest to Jamie scurrying scurrying abilities and that he does a fantastic job.
I wanted to put that plug out there for
Jamie Davis: all. I appreciate that. Yeah and one of the challenges, I don’t get to see a lot of the sessions, but I do get to access to all the virtual sessions and I really wanted to learn about what was going on. Chelle Honiker had been talking about the AI sessions that she had lined up for last year.
And so I went and watched all of them. Like every single one of them just to see what was out there. And it blew my mind, honestly. It was way more than I thought it was. It was way different than I thought it was. Sure there are people out there doing unethical things, but there are people doing unethical things with all kinds of technologies.
But there are also some amazing tools that I was [00:08:00] not utilizing. That would have greatly improved my workflows, and that’s what I immediately latched onto. I love writing, I love the process of writing. I love what my brain does when I’m writing. I love how the stories come out of me. I’m about a 75% discovery writer, and I would never give that up.
I would never want somebody else to take over that creative part of my brain. That said, if I could have somebody look at a chapter and tell me how the pacing is compared to other chapters, wow I don’t need it to write for me, but I would love it to tell me if things slow down or maybe miss a beat in a couple of places and I can go back and fix that.
That’s easy.
Steph Pajonas: You’re interested in the more analytical side of the AI. Mm-hmm. Right. Having it do some analysis of your writing, give you some feedback. That’s what I love it for too as well.
Jamie Davis: And I also like how the AI is nice to me. I used Chat GPT to do the analyzing of my chapters for [00:09:00] pacing primarily, and I love how it tells me, wow, that was a lot of fun.
Or, it gives me compliments so it, it uses that compliment sandwich to tell me when there’s a problem and I appreciate that. So somebody’s writing these AI algorithms are doing a good job and making them seem friendly. I know it’s just a machine, but if a machine can compliment me, I’m the guy that says, thank you to Alexa when I’m talking in my room.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think that’s funny because we were just talking with another guest and the other guest was like, I don’t like when AI is telling me all these good things. And I’m like, no, give me those compliments. I love it. AI tells me I’m brilliant all the time. No one else tells me I’m brilliant.
Steph might sometimes ’cause, but yeah I think it is funny that, we tend to think of the AI as, wow. It’s giving all these human-like qualities, but you’re right, it’s not human. it sure does give you some of those blows of Yeah. Maybe went off track here a little bit. It’s gonna tell you in a much nicer way.
I’ll never forget this almost [00:10:00] stopped me from writing when I was a very beginning writer where an author friend wrote this critique of one of my characters and said, I hate her. She’s such a terrible person, and blah, blah, blah, blah. We just went off on how much she hated this character.
And of course all those things that she hated were like so much of me that I had put into the book. And I just was devastated by that. It’s so nice that the AI can read that stuff, and it’s going to tell me in the nicest way possible that maybe this character just didn’t connect.
Jamie Davis: I really love that.
And the other thing and this is relatively new I think for Chat GPT at least, is that it’s got a memory now, and so it knows my chapter. So when I went and started thinking about marketing this new book, I got the Kickstarter running right now for it. And so as part of that process I started saying what would you say to my newsletter about this book?
And it went, oh, I can do that and spit out three different newsletter options for me to talk about this new book and talk about the Kickstarter [00:11:00] campaign. And it talked about the characters and it talked about the interesting scenes that had seen and it could only have done that because I was brave enough to put my chapters in there and let it analyze them. And it just, now it knows when I say Uncle Chip, it knows who Uncle Chip is.
That kind of thing really fascinates me. It’s able to help me with marketing. It’s able to streamline my workflow for posts on social media. I use it for so many different things in the sidelines, the business aspects of what I do. That gives me so much more time to write the next book and get ready for doing that. and I didn’t know these things were even available to me really until I actually watched some people who do these things, talk about them, and specifically people from the Future Fiction Academy. It was just kind of mind blowing and I couldn’t wait to watch the next video and I only let myself watch one a day because I really was taking notes and doing all that stuff. So.
Steph Pajonas: Well, We certainly learned a lot from that conference because there was all the people [00:12:00] who had already been using the tool, right?
They had been in there and they’re already familiar with it and watching them have light bulb moments and be like oh, I didn’t realize it could do that as well. And then that levels them up. And then there were the people who had never used it at all, but were curious and they got a chance to see things from the ground up.
So it was one of the things that I really liked about being at Author Nation last year was just to see the different levels of people in their career and where they were gonna go with that. And now, especially with these sorts of tools on the market that help us get back this time that we need to do the creative things. So that’s one of the reasons why I really enjoyed being at Author Nation last year
Jamie Davis: Thank you. And Joe Solari, who is the vision behind that conference now really takes the stance on AI that, we’re not gonna take a stance one way or the other. We are going to provide the education for the people that want to use tools the same way we provide education about tools that manage your accounting [00:13:00] or do any other thing, any other aspect of your business. And I think that’s the right approach to take is to be agnostic and let people make their own minds up about how they wanna do it.
Look, when I made the comment earlier about blacksmiths, there’s still blacksmiths out there. There’s still people doing that job and making amazing artisan things in an old school way, and I would never take that away from them. And I don’t call them archaic or anything else because I have some stuff of theirs hanging on my wall.
So I, I think that there’s a place for everybody in this ecosystem and I don’t think, at least at the current time, that anyone’s gonna take my job as a writer away. I just really think that’s fear talking to people rather than really thoughtful process.
Danica Favorite: That’s something we talk about a lot is that no one’s coming for your job. Because in order to be able to use AI effectively, you have to know how to write and how to use AI.
And if you don’t know those two things, [00:14:00] then you’re not gonna get anywhere. I was just in a thing this morning, I really had to bite my tongue ’cause I was probably not in the right head space to actually be nice about it. These authors were talking about how poorly written AI written stuff is and oh, I can always tell and this and that, and.
I was like, yeah, maybe on some people, I challenge you on that because the truth is that a good writer using AI, you really can’t tell. And to their point, if you don’t know how to write a book and you’re gonna try to use AI to write a book, then yeah.
It’s gonna sound funny. As you were introducing yourself, you used the word delve a couple of times. Which everyone says, oh, that’s an AI tell. Okay, cool. So Jamie Davis sitting here, he is an AI!
Jamie Davis: I did not know that was an AI tell. I use the word delve all the time, and I do not use it to refer to AI at all.
So that’s really funny that people think that’s a tell on Yeah, I, because I don’t. I wouldn’t even associate those two things.
Danica Favorite: They’ve put [00:15:00] together these lists of words that automatically make it an AI tell and delve is supposedly one of them. But it’s so funny ’cause now every time I use that word or I see someone using that word, I’m like oh no, I’m an AI.
Jamie Davis: That’s funny. I don’t, I didn’t even know that. So that’s weird that people would do that, but I guess, I really think that a lot of this stuff comes out of fear and the way to defeat fear. I’m a journalist at Heart Healthcare journalist and a nurse behind the scenes.
And I am a scientist. And the way to deal with fear is to educate people. When I was working in the healthcare field, I was helping people understand a scary disease so that they could better deal with it. And once they were educated, it wasn’t so scary anymore. And I think that’s really the way that people need to understand that maybe that they could just learn something.
And maybe they won’t change their mind, but at least be open to see what’s going on and be open to learning what other [00:16:00] people are doing.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I agree. And that’s the thing, like last year when I spoke at Author Nation about AI and I was really just talking basic stuff, not writing, just using it for marketing and all of that other stuff.
And it was amazing to me how many people were like, wait, you can do that? Oh wait, AI does that. And it was just, to me, I’m like, wait, you didn’t know that? And which is good, it’s good to be reminded and it’s good to have people like you on, and other people who maybe are just learning because I think what, like things like Steph and I take for granted, it’s really funny because sometimes we’re like, wait.
Oh yeah. People don’t know that. And so I love having the dialogues and the space for educating people because it’s really important that sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know. And sometimes, okay, I admit Steph is encouraging me to give a little less grace on this one. But sometimes I do give people a little more grace because they just don’t know. But now I’m kind to the point where I think [00:17:00] Steph is, where there’s there’s so many ways of learning. At least explore the idea before you go after it.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah. at the Future Fiction Academy, that is our main goal is to educate people about this subject, about this topic.
Get them going from the ground up if they need to, and so if I find people who are just they’re spouting the rhetoric. They don’t understand how far the technology has gone because they are intentionally putting their heads in the sand then that somewhat angers me. If not, I’m just mostly disappointed. I hate that meme that goes around, he wasn’t mad at you. He was just disappointed.
And that’s how I feel sometimes. Like I’m disappointed that you are not willing to educate yourself on this, and I feel like that is really an important part of this whole thing is just getting to know things, understanding them so that they’re not scary anymore.
Just like you said with the diseases that you were helping your patients with.
Jamie Davis: I think that, we just need, [00:18:00] like you said, you used the word grace earlier, Danica, and I think we just need to give each other the grace to be who we are and to do the things we do without assuming or assigning ulterior motives to things.
And I think that we have enough sadness and problems in the world without creating new ones.
Danica Favorite: I love that and I’m glad you said that and put that out there. ’cause I’m like, yeah, I needed to hear that today. So look at that inspirational moment from Jamie Davis. I am not gonna use AI the way either of the two of you use it. And not that I hold anything on myself about that, but that is really okay because we all find our own processes and we find what works for us. And, that’s the goal of this podcast is to help people find things that may or may not work for them.
If it doesn’t work for them, that’s great, but if we’ve taught somebody something that might work for them and might change their workflow or change their process, or buy time back for their writing, buy time back for their families, buy time back for [00:19:00] their social lives, whatever it is they need to buy time back for, let’s find a way to help you do that.
So what I wanna do is move into my next question was, what does your workflow with AI look like? Because I know you’ve said you’ve bought some of that time back for you, and so I’d love to hear about some of your AI workflows and some of the ways you’re using the AI.
Jamie Davis: My AI workflow is really, I do some basic plotting.
Like I said, I’m mostly a discovery writer, but I do try to have a little bit of a roadmap so I don’t get completely lost. Now I write a chapter so usually a couple of chapters because I get into a flow. And then when I’m done with those chapters, I take them over to Chat GPT.
And I upload them one at a time and ask it to analyze and make pacing suggestions and there’s more of a prompt than that. But that’s basically what I say to it. And then I save all of those suggestions and stuff for that chapter [00:20:00] and put it into another document. That I save for when I’m actually editing.
But I do this as I go. I do read the suggestions and I keep them in mind as I keep writing forward. So it’s refining my writing as I go, but also when I come back to do my editing pass, giving me concrete places to make adjustments in addition to the things I do ordinarily in an editing pass.
And that has helped me overcome and see some things about my writing that I maybe wasn’t as aware of until an editor comes back to me a month later and says I’ve finished editing the book and it’s good and this next time you might wanna work on this and this. And those kind of things.
Now I’m getting more immediate feedback. It enables me to first of all make better first drafts and then also refine the way I edit. That saves me a lot of time, saves me a ton of time to do it that way. And so I’m turning in cleaner drafts manuscripts to my editors [00:21:00] because of this that are less needful of story changes and more needful of just the standard punctuation stuff that everybody needs help with.
I’m not an editor and that’s what I hire an editor for. I tell stories, I don’t punctuate. I do punctuate, but
Danica Favorite: I think we need like bumper stickers or t-shirts or buttons. I tell stories I don’t punctuate.
Jamie Davis: Yeah. Right.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah. But I love that because even though you’re using AI for editing, you’re still hiring a real human editor. Yeah. And I want people to hear that and recognize that Yes. Some people can replace editing with AI, but you don’t have to, and what you’ve just done is actually made your editor’s job a lot easier.
It’s a win-win for everybody.
Jamie Davis: I have a relationship with my editor that, sometimes when my manuscript’s a little cleaner they say, oh, I’ve got through it faster than I expected. So it’s a little, here’s the rest of the payment and it’s a little less than you expected to pay.
And that’s nice. That’s not just saving me time, it’s saving me [00:22:00] money. So I think there’s opportunities to really use these tools to improve our process and improve the opportunities for us to work with other humans on things that humans are good at.
I’ve been using AI for some image generation and things like that, but not in a way that would take away from any human that I would get. I use a lot of the images that I draw up for my own inspiration. I’m the guy that gets my cover designer to make a cover for me before I’ve even written the book yet. Like I give them a blurb and an idea for a cover and they send me the cover. And invariably something on that cover ends up in the book because it was their vision that inspired me to add something that I didn’t already know was gonna be there.
And so I use a lot of these AI images that I generate to inspire me to write the characters. I have one right now on my other screen that is part of a scene from my book that only Midjourney [00:23:00] could have created for me. I could have paid hundreds of dollars for somebody to put something that’s gonna end up and being on a screen and nowhere else in my private use.
But I would never have paid somebody for that. So nobody’s losing a job from me creating images for my own self.
Now there’s some other things I’m doing. I’m starting to really delve into some of the AI video stuff. We can talk about that maybe separately or not, because I know this is primarily a writing podcast, so I don’t wanna usurp that, but I’m excited about some of the opportunities there.
Danica Favorite: Go ahead. We actually we do talk about AI video. We do talk I think our last guest we just talked about Yeah. AI video stuff. So really anything that an author might use AI for is fair game. Fair game. Yeah.
Jamie Davis: Like a, like I’m really interested in making a book trailer for my series. And so if I can create a series of five to ten second video clips that I can pull pieces out of and piece together a thirty second book trailer for [00:24:00] my series, how cool would that be?
And the technology is really there to do that now. I’m really dabbling in that area.
Another thing I’m excited about, and it’s not quite there yet, and it may be, in AI years, it may be just a year or so off. I don’t know. It could be here faster than that. But, I’ve had a couple of options on some of my series that have never gone anywhere. I made a little money on it, but it never went anywhere. ’cause most things that go to Hollywood never get made. It suddenly occurred to me that if I wanna ever see any of my stuff created into some kind of video format, I’m gonna have to do it myself.
And I used to work in that industry. I don’t have that kind of money to pay for that. But if I can create a scene or maybe two scenes and do ’em a little at a time. I could create something that would keep my readers really happy and wanting to come back for the next book, and I’ll get to see something in a visual medium that I just am [00:25:00] dying to see.
It’s one of my series, that’s the number one comment I get back from people is this will make a great TV show. Don’t tell me that. I also know that the logistics of it is, it’ll never be made into a TV show. It’d be better to walk around with a golf club and a lightning storm and bet on getting struck by lightning than get that thing made into a TV show.
So you have to know what’s going on, and I think AI offers all of us in the author world, an opportunity to see our books in different formats and forms than they would ever have been made into otherwise.
Now I still hire audio narrators. I’m not gonna take away from them. I think if I ever make a scene, I will hire audio narrators to voiceover and do it that way.
So I think there’s ways to meld the worlds together in a responsible way that achieves the goals we have for our work, our IP, and still allows other creatives to partner with us. [00:26:00] And I think that’s something that I’m excited to do.
Steph Pajonas: That is exciting because we’re moving into a time of multimedia with AI, getting AI images, AI video, AI audio, AI music, any one of these things, and there’s the opportunity to fill in gaps with AI between things that humans do. There are ways for humans to work that are enhanced by AI, just helping them, getting them through that last final step, whatever it may be.
I feel like there’s a lot of opportunities here and we’re gonna see probably a lot of them come about in the next two to three years, especially as the video stuff really takes off.
I have a feeling that’s really where the linchpin is in this whole thing. It’s just, it’s gonna take off after that.
Jamie Davis: I’ve been working with some AI video tools just for I don’t know, four or five weeks. And I was in an app yesterday and it said New at the top and I went, oh, that looks interesting.
I wonder if that works or not. ’cause sometimes it [00:27:00] doesn’t work. But it did exactly what I wanted it to do on the first try. And that’s exciting because so far for images and for video, it’s been very hit or miss. And I know I got lucky. I’m not gonna say that I didn’t get lucky, but it did it on the first try what I wanted it to do.
And that made me very happy because I really want my books to live in all formats and for all people everywhere that wanna consume my books, however they want to get them.
Danica Favorite: I love the opportunity that whatever format now you can imagine your book to be in, it can be there. And your work could do so many great things, and I think that’s really exciting and that’s why I was telling you, yeah any way an author can use AI, we’re here for that because there are things that probably Steph and I have not even thought of. Maybe, ’cause you just [00:28:00] never know. Yeah, anything we can, anything that AI can do, we’re here for.
Steph Pajonas: Story is at the center of all of this, right? It’s not just books. I understand that we’re authors, right? We started out with words on the page, and then it became words in eBooks, and then it was, words being spoken aloud for audiobooks. As technology has come along and evolved all of these different ways to tell the original story are coming around too. So it’s just one of those things where we’re seeing an evolution of story and where it becomes the center of everything. So it doesn’t have to be just an ebook anymore.
And it doesn’t just have to be in English. You can have that center story and it can be told in whatever language that reader or that listener or that watcher wants it in. Just that future alone is incredible, and I don’t think it’s that far off at this point. Buckle up. Yeah, [00:29:00] we’re going,
Danica Favorite: We’re going.
And I, we, I think I make this point almost every episode, so sorry to be redundant, but I feel like we have to keep making this point that it’s happening faster than we think. And so every time we say, oh, it’s not for however long. Boom, there it is. I’m like, wait, what? Okay, we’re here. So yeah, this, the seatbelt is very important.
Jamie Davis: I, I’m sure you’ve made this, but I feel like AI and us are like dog years and people. Tools are developing so quickly and what AI can do or not do today is going to be very different three months from now.
I hope that my workflow will grow. I won’t get stuck in a rut, but my workflow will grow with what’s available and capable in the AI realm and not just be stuck doing, oh, now I can do pacing and some light editing. I wanna be able to be involved enough with the process that I can continue to utilize the tools to [00:30:00] make what I do better, and that’s just tell stories.
Danica Favorite: And that is something that only you can do because no matter how good the AI is, no matter how well you get it to mimic your voice and do all of that stuff, the AI is never gonna be Jamie Davis and it’s never going to have your way of doing things. And ultimately, that’s what the readers are here for.
They want whatever that essence of you is. They want that. And however you can use AI to bring that out, that’s awesome. And there’s so many opportunities. I think about your reader saying, oh, this would make a great show, or whatever. And I have this debate all the time with people where they’re like why don’t you have movies? Why don’t you have that? It’s not as simple as that. And what readers think are going to be a great movie, even if Hollywood agrees it’s gonna be a great movie. Like I think of Steph’s sci-fi stuff. Holy cow, that’s such great writing.
And some of it would be a great movie, but guess what? [00:31:00] That would be a fricking expensive movie to make if Hollywood made it
Jamie Davis: right.
Danica Favorite: And with AI there’s that opportunity that you know, oh, I’m getting a lot of feedback that this book would make a great movie. Oh, here are some cool tools.
Boom, here we go. And so I think that’s exciting.
Jamie Davis: One of the things that excites me the most about it is in the same way that indie authors, a mid-list indie author, can be a full-time writer, whereas a traditionally published author maybe still needs a part-time side gig or something to make extra cash or teach or something.
Because they just aren’t making enough as a trad pub author at that level. It takes a lot fewer books for me to stay in the green for things. That’s something to keep in mind when we move into other formats. I dove heavily into audiobooks, a few years back and I’ve been thanking myself that I had that vision that I reinvested in that, and now I wanna reinvest in [00:32:00] visual assets with the goal that yeah, maybe my story isn’t going to be viable for Amazon Prime to buy it.
But maybe there’s a few thousand people that wanna see that story and are willing to pay for it.
Danica Favorite: That’s a great point because what you were saying earlier I keep thinking about is with, the TV stations and then cable and all of that taking over. And I remember when nobody thought that streaming was gonna be a big thing. Nobody thought that cable was ever gonna be threatened by streaming. And now here we are.
I was staying in this hotel a while back and so I’m like, okay, I’m exhausted. I’m gonna put the TV on and just see what’s on TV. And they have cable, right? I had 10 channels and then a bunch of really weird stuff. When I remember the days of cable and going to the hotel like that was always, I don’t know about you guys, but when I was a kid ’cause we did not have cable most of growing up. That was the great thing about going to the hotel is you get [00:33:00] to go to the hotel and see all the channels. And I was like, wait. Where are all the channels? I couldn’t remember my password for my streaming stuff, so I couldn’t watch anything. Okay, I guess cable is dead.
And now we’re living in a model where people are used to going online and doing things. The other day there was this movie I wanted to watch. I don’t have Blockbuster anymore, so I scrolled through my Fandango app on my TV and I went and I found the movie. And for 3 99 I rented it just like I would’ve done at Blockbuster, except I didn’t have to get outta my jammies and go to the store.
I just sat there scrolled through, boom, there it is pay-per-view, anything I wanna watch.
Jamie Davis: It can be argued that the content has gotten even better in some ways. I think that freeing up people to make content in a broader sense has allowed us to have some really, I mean there are stories that did made into TV shows on the [00:34:00] streaming platforms that never would’ve made it onto a network or a cable channel, right? But only because the streaming platforms existed and had more budget to spend, were they able to create some of these programs. And I think that AI is a great equalizer in the sense that there are gonna be more stories being told in that format down the road.
For people that want, oh, I’ll just turn on this app and let’s see what kind of cool shows in this genre are out there. And oh wow, I’ve never seen this. This is from a book I heard about once, but this looks fun. Let’s watch this episode and oh, I’ll think I’ll watch the next episode.
There are so many opportunities out there. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be blockbuster movies being made by Hollywood because I think there will always be blockbuster movies being made by Hollywood. Portrait artists didn’t go outta business because of the camera. There are still people paying portraits out there, that are amazing works of art. We often think it [00:35:00] can only be one or the other. It can’t be both. And that’s just, I think the misconception.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think it’s great that there are so many options because now that people are trained that, hey, oh, there’s this thing I want, let me find it on the internet.
I can pay for it and have it. It’s not a big deal because they have so many ways to consume the media, and so I think that they would be totally open to saying, oh yeah, this movie great. Sure. I will pay, the five bucks for the movie or whatever the author decides to set the price at, and the author is gonna be much more profitable making that movie. Because unlike the movie studios, they’re not having to invest millions of dollars into it. They’ve put maybe hundreds, maybe a couple thousand dollars into it, and boom, you’ve got a really good movie. So yeah, I’m super excited about that future. Not just for my own personal books, but gosh, there really are a lot of author stories that I wanna see as a [00:36:00] movie. So I’m excited.
So then our last question is, what’s your favorite AI tool? Do you have a favorite AI tool that you love? I know we’ve talked a little bit about our AI romances. Do you have one? Do you have a favorite?
Jamie Davis: Gee, I’m torn between, I’ve been using chat GPT as my primary writing tool, helper, and that’s been great.
But I am completely swept off my feet lately by Freepik, which is an aggregator of various tools in the visual space. So creating images as well as creating video from those images or from text. And that’s been where I’ve been living lately. I guess my new girlfriend is Freepik for right now, AI wise.
Don’t tell my wife I said that, by the way.
Danica Favorite: I think that’s one of the exceptions. I think spouses have the free pass to have an AI boyfriend or girlfriend in the tool sets.
Jamie Davis: I’m not creating anything unusual, hey. Exactly.
You know when like I write urban fantasy and when [00:37:00] I see my characters pop off the screen visually at me and it just absolutely looks like I envisioned them looking.
And they’ve got that attitude and that snark and all those things that I was thinking I could never see in front of my face that it was always only gonna live in my mind’s eye. That’s just amazing to me.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. I agree. I think it’s really awesome to be able to have those visuals and get that picture.
Steph Pajonas: I love doing that with all of my characters and it’s even more fun for me. I definitely, I’ve been around for a long time, probably as long as you, Jamie, is a little bit longer and I’ve been blogging as my main form of speaking to my audience and so I love to just I’d love to put the pictures up there and add a little excerpt from the book and it makes me happy.
It keeps the creative juices flowing so I completely understand it. Completely.
We should wrap it up here and make sure that everybody can come find you online and Author Nation as well. So fill us in on the URL details and [00:38:00] whatnot.
Jamie Davis: You can find me over at jamiedavisbooks.com and it’s J-A-M-I-E Davis books.com.
And stop by. I’ve got a Kickstarter going on right now as well, which is fun, which will probably be over by the time this releases, but you can still go back and see what I did and hopefully it funded. It started today, so I’m like halfway there, so I, it should be all right.
I also wanna urge everybody in the author world out there to check out Author Nation dot Live. It is a conference that is a community and we are very much involved with helping authors at all levels achieve their next steps and goals no matter what they might be, a nd help you find the tools and connect you with the people that can help you get there. And Author Nation dot Live, it’s coming up in November 3rd through the seventh in this year, 2025.
And if you can’t make it to Las Vegas for the actual conference, there is a virtual ticket. So I urge you to pick that up. You’re gonna get almost all of the [00:39:00] videos from the conference. We can’t by contract record everything. There are some of the people that are in attendance can’t be recorded or aren’t allowed to have their likenesses recorded because of company obligations, but most of the content from the conference is recorded on video and is available in a virtual ticket.
So if you can’t make it to Vegas, I urge you to get the virtual ticket. That’s how I learned about AI.
Danica Favorite: Love it. Love it. So excited. I know Publish Drive is sponsoring and so we’re gonna be there. And I’m really excited to see everything. It’ll be a great experience.
Always good to connect with people. And as always, if you see us at Author Nation, please say hi. Definitely love talking to people and hearing about what your journey is.
Steph Pajonas: Same. I will be there as well as many of the people from Future Fiction Academy. We’re excited to be there and check out what’s going on.
Especially everything about all of the cool AI stuff and all of the writing and craft stuff, which we always talk about as being very [00:40:00] fundamental to actually using AI. So everybody come and get your education on. Yes. Yes. Okay. I’ll make sure that everything that we talked about in today’s podcast is in the show notes. We are gonna be on the website, so drop by bravenewbookshelf.com. Check out the show notes and subscribe to us on YouTube. What else do we want them to do, Danica?
Danica Favorite: We want them to make sure, did we say Facebook? I totally blanked there. So yes, go likes Facebook, share on Facebook as much as you can to get word out.
And of course, make sure you’re finding Future Fiction Academy and Publish Drive online and liking and subscribing to all of our cool stuff. And yeah, just another plug for Author Nation. Make sure you’re checking them out as well. So until next time, we’ll talk to you soon.
Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. We’ll see you guys all soon.
Okay, bye bye.
Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and [00:41:00] 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.