Episode 46 - Using AI to Amplify Creativity with Book Coach Jocelyn Lindsay

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In this week’s episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we had the pleasure of speaking with Jocelyn Lindsay, a dynamic book coach and writer whose passion for creativity and technology is truly inspiring. Jocelyn shared her insights on using AI as a tool to enhance the writing and publishing process, emphasizing the transformative power of these technologies in amplifying human creativity.

Meet Jocelyn Lindsay, Book Coach and Creative Enthusiast

Jocelyn Lindsay is a self-described creative tornado, deeply involved in the world of writing and publishing. Having started her journey in the era of self-publishing pioneers like Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking, Jocelyn has always been drawn to the innovative possibilities of technology. Now, with AI tools at her disposal, she finds herself at the forefront of a new era in publishing, using these technologies to help both herself and other writers bring their stories to life.

Embracing AI as an Amplification Tool

Jocelyn views AI not as a replacement for human creativity, but as an amplification of it. She uses AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to brainstorm story ideas, gather developmental feedback, and even craft marketing strategies. This approach allows her to think faster and more expansively, freeing her from the limitations of traditional methods and enabling her to focus on what truly matters: storytelling.

For Jocelyn, AI is about enhancing her capabilities, allowing her to execute tasks more efficiently and effectively. Whether she’s analyzing Facebook ads or designing book trailers, AI serves as a creative partner, offering new perspectives and insights that she might not have considered otherwise.

The Role of AI in Crafting a Successful Writing Career

Jocelyn’s approach to AI in publishing is strategic and data-driven. She uses AI to develop newsletter strategies, analyze audience engagement, and refine her marketing efforts. By uploading her newsletters and their corresponding statistics to AI, she can identify trends and gaps in her approach, allowing her to optimize her communication with readers.

This meticulous attention to detail extends to her understanding of audience behavior, such as identifying the best times to send newsletters based on the habits of her target demographic. By leveraging AI’s analytical capabilities, Jocelyn can make informed decisions that enhance her reach and impact as a writer.

Encouraging New Writers to Embrace AI

Jocelyn is particularly passionate about helping new writers navigate the complexities of the publishing world. She believes that AI offers a unique opportunity for emerging authors to learn and grow at an accelerated pace. By using AI as a supportive tool, new writers can explore different aspects of storytelling, receive constructive feedback, and develop their skills in a nurturing environment.

For Jocelyn, the future of publishing is bright and filled with possibilities. She encourages both new and established authors to remain open to the potential of AI, seeing it not as a threat, but as a means of expanding their creative horizons.

Favorite Tools & Recommendations

When it comes to AI tools, Jocelyn has a few favorites that she relies on:

ChatGPT: Her go-to tool for brainstorming, feedback, and marketing strategy.
Claude: Another essential tool in her creative arsenal, especially for accessing the internet and gathering up-to-date information.
Midjourney: Her preferred image generator for capturing the gritty urban fantasy vibe of her stories.
Ideogram and Free Pik: Used for creating animations and visual content.

Key Takeaways from This Episode

AI is an amplification tool, not a replacement for human creativity.
Strategic use of AI can enhance marketing efforts and audience engagement.
New writers can benefit from AI’s ability to provide feedback and support learning.
Embrace the opportunities AI offers for innovation and growth 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 one of your co-hosts Step Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. I have started a substack and which, I’m really excited about and it’s been a lot of fun. I’ve been talking about AI, I decided to just be out there with it. Talk about AI prompting, writing with AI, just like anything in general that I can give out there as free advice. Of course I do give lots of advice in the Future Fiction Academy for people who are there and their students and their learning. So I generally try to spread the love as much as [00:01:00] possible.

So I’m at spajonas.substack.com. That is not an easy thing to say and hopefully you guys can come check it out. I’ll make sure that I put a link in the show notes for you because I want everybody to have all the free advice as much as possible. As much as possible. Anyway, so I am here with my lovely co-host, as always, Ms. Danica Favorite, how are you doing today?

Danica Favorite: I’m good. We were just talking before we started recording how ready we all are for the weekend and I am totally feeling it. I’m like, okay, is it weekend yet? Is it weekend yet? Almost everyone, almost. And I know you’ll be listening to this episode probably on a Thursday, but just remember you’re really close to the weekend, so you’ll be fine.

You’ll be fine. You’ll get through it.

So yeah, I’m Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on every stage of their writing journey. Whether that is formatting their manuscript, finding the great metadata for their books, and writing [00:02:00] blurbs or creating covers to then distributing your book to the largest worldwide audience.

And then finally, once that book is selling, we can help you split royalties. So lots of cool things that we do and love partnering with the Future Fiction Academy and Steph because, if you need help writing that book, obviously they can help you.

But what’s also exciting is our guest today is Jocelyn Lindsay, and she’s also a book coach.

She does a lot of other cool stuff and we’re gonna talk to her about all the other cool stuff we’re doing, but. I know her contact details will be in the show notes as well. Yeah. We are here for helping authors and wanting to make sure that whatever you choose to do in your author career is part of your author journey, that a large variety of options are available to you, and that’s what we’re all about.

And do read Steph’s Substack. I have been loving it. She and I have been riffing off of each other a little bit in Substack because, that’s what we do and love it. [00:03:00] Love getting to work with this really cool human being. And love that we are getting ready to interview another really cool human being.

So with that, I’m gonna hand it over to Jocelyn. And Jocelyn is going to tell us all about herself or at least the parts she wants the public to know. So Jocelyn, welcome.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Hi, thank you. I am so excited to be here with cool human beings talking about technology and AI and all the exciting things that are happening in the world these days, especially with writing and publishing.

So I’m a book coach. I’m a writer. I’m a gardener. I’m an everything. I am highly creative. If it’s something that has to do with creativity, I somehow find myself right in the middle of it. I started publishing last year, but I started writing years ago and I always knew I was gonna self-publish.

I’ve been watching it since Hugh Howie, Amanda Hawking way back in the cave [00:04:00] days of self-publishing. And I knew I was gonna be here. Life got involved. Things happened and I really needed the technology to catch up and for what I was envisioning of how I wanted to create books and put stories out into the world.

And we’re here. I’ve been waiting 35 years for this, right? Right. My little 15-year-old heart is so happy. It’s yeah, I I am just like beside myself. I wanna be in everything. I want my fingers in all of the different pies out there right now. So if it’s technology and it’s AI and it, if it helps me get my stories in the world, if it helps me help other writers get their stories in the world.

I’m here for it because like you were saying, I am passionate about helping writers get their stories out. It’s my calling to help people get stories into the world yeah.

Danica Favorite: [00:05:00] Yeah. I love that. I love that. And I think that seems to be the kind of person we attract to our show is really those people who want to help other writers and believe that the AI is an assistive tool.

There’s no moral designation of what AI is. It’s just a tool just as a hammer or a pen or whatever has no moral value.

Jocelyn Lindsay: No. And. when I start, I’m a child of the eighties and I played d and DI read comic books and a number two pencil was how I brought my characters to life.

That’s really where I started getting into art was teaching myself how to paint, how to draw, because I wanted to see those worlds. My poor parents. I even went out into the backyard and dug my worlds. I made my worlds like in the garden. My fantasy world, my little elf houses, I really wanted to bring these things I was seeing into the world.

And, AI [00:06:00] is another medium. It’s another tool for us to be using. And these days it’s a binary conversation you’re either pro or against. And that’s saying I am pro Photoshop and anti number two pencil. I just don’t, I don’t see it as that kind of a conversation.

It’s not that reductive. It’s both. I think as an artist we use the mediums, we can use AI and still use paintbrushes. And so I think the two work very well together.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, you use all of the tools at your disposal, right? I also I’m a big fan of all Photoshop and Midjourney and maybe drawing some stick figures to give some reference material or whatever it may be.

Just like I’m also a big fan of AI audio. I tell people that just because you choose to do an AI audiobook does not mean that you can never do a human one. You could do a full cast one someday. It is open to you. You can use all of these tools. You don’t have to just choose one.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Yeah. [00:07:00] Either one is not a replacement. It’s not to the erasure of the other.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, for sure. And I think that’s really a great. Way to introduce what is our first question is how are you approaching AI in publishing, which I think you’ve already answered that. It’s just a tool but I’m curious, like what kinds of AI tools are you using and how are you using them?

Jocelyn Lindsay: I’m using it for everything. I can use it for. I’m using it really as an amplification of my brain so that I can think faster, think more, I have 12 Chat GPT windows open with 12 different conversa. I’m gonna sound like totally. Like creatively, like a tornado. But I constantly am trying to use it to support and amplify the creativity that I have to bring it to the stories that I wanna tell.

And I’m not using, it’s not a shortcut because there are times when using Chat or using Claude [00:08:00] can take three times as long as just writing it out. And you’ve talked about this before, it’s not plug and play. It’s still very much like you have to pay attention to it and, so I’m using it for brainstorming.

For story brainstorming. I’m using it for feedback, structural, developmental edit feedback on things that I need to have looked at. I’m using it for marketing. I’m using it to help me identify audiences, help me create blurbs, ad copy, develop hooks for social media.

I’m using it to analyze Facebook ads. I’m using it to analyze Amazon ads. I’m designing art for Instagram. I am creating book trailers. I’m using it really as that amplification. That’s really how I see it is amplified intelligence. It’s not artificial, it’s just, it’s me amplified. And just like me, I have my [00:09:00] moments where I’m hallucinating.

So it’s like sometimes I don’t trust everything that comes outta my own head. It’s not a replacement. I’m not replacing myself, and in fact it’s really highlighting my creativity in a way that I couldn’t before. That I couldn’t six months ago. That I couldn’t three weeks ago, or like with Veo three that I couldn’t a week ago.

Danica Favorite: I really love like what you’re saying about it’s not a replacement, it’s amplification. And I like that the idea of changing that A in the AI to amplified intelligence, because I think you’re right. There’s no one who’s ever gonna be able to replace you as a person.

But with bringing in those tools, that amplification, I’m like, yeah.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Really, it’s amplifying the human. We’re so afraid of the human being erased, but it’s giving us the opportunity to amplify what we’re doing in a way we couldn’t do. That makes the human even more important.

I think [00:10:00] it’s still keeping this very centered on the human side of technology. Things in publishing that still matter, the storytelling, the craft. There’s things that we’re always gonna come back to those foundational elements of craft, what is telling a good story. And as humans, we’ve been doing that for thousands of years.

So I really feel like that’s not going away. It’s just how do we amplify our skillset with it?

Danica Favorite: I think that’s a really good point. I was thinking about what you were saying and how that ties to ethics and how people get really concerned about can we make the AI do unethical things or is the AI being ethical?

Yeah. If you are unethical, but if you’re going to be ethical in how you do that, then we’re gonna get more of that. And yeah, I’m like, yeah. All of those fears that we have over AI and AI ethics and AI taking over it all comes down to the human, behind the AI.

Jocelyn Lindsay: We’ve been [00:11:00] having this conversation with every major technology shift.

Typewriters replaced the written word. Typing pools were replaced by computers. I was telling you before the show, I remember back in the, late eighties, early nineties, being accused of, I was learning Photoshop and Corel at the time and learning how to do digital art and I was told I was killing artists.

I was taking jobs from artists. I had been an artist. My whole goal, I went to art school. I was gonna be a traditional artist. I was gonna paint covers for D&D books. But I saw the writing on the wall and I thought I better learn this other tool.

This is just what happens with technology. It’s part of progress and I don’t think the fear is we fight about it being binary, is it bad? But it’s really more of a conversation of how are we changing? And I think it’s a fear of what’s my purpose now if I’m a traditional [00:12:00] artist and technology is progressing and the world is changing, do I still matter?

I think that’s where a lot of the fear comes from. How do I exist in this world now that’s changing so fast? How do I not get left behind? I understand that fear very well.

Danica Favorite: I think that is such a great question. Do I still matter?

Jocelyn Lindsay: Yeah. How do I matter? I don’t think there’s necessarily easy answers, and I think they’re very individual answers.

Steph Pajonas: I think a lot of people are trying to figure out where they fit into this new paradigm that we have, right? Because the paradigm is continually shifting currently. Like almost every week there’s something new, something crazy, something incredible.

And so the basic instinct is just to push back. Just to be like no. Just say no. I see a lot of people saying we can’t just lay down and let them do this. We have to fight. We have to fight.

And I wanna be like, what happened to the people that fought against [00:13:00] the automobiles? What about the people who fought against the printing press? What about the people who fought against the internet? Where are they now? Is that where you wanna be? Five years from now? I don’t think so because this war that they want us to wage it, it’s over. It already happened.

There is no going back and redoing things or like trying to turn the clock back. So we have to accept what we have in front of us. And it’s okay to not use it if you don’t want to, but it is going to be there. So if you want to level up your skills and you wanna stay relevant in this time, it’s probably best to at least try to figure it out a little bit.

Jocelyn Lindsay: And I think it’s really interesting, the war. It’s really doesn’t have to be a war. It never needed to be a war. I’m really interested in the question of what can I build now? What can I create now that I couldn’t before? Not how do I hold [00:14:00] onto what I was before? Or what was there before, but how do I keep moving forward?

How do I help the people around me move forward? How do I help writers move forward? And to me it’s not a battle that needs the energy or the time to be put into it. Anybody who’s posting AI or talking about AI, and you know this very well, both of you, is the, you’re killing artists. You’re killing writers. You’re leading to our demise. And I look around and at my house and I’m like, I have so much art on my walls. I have so many books behind me. It’s not a battle that is I’m trying to make somebody extinct. This is not going away.

If an artist came to me saying, I have some really cool ideas for your story. I’d love to talk to you. I would be far more receptive than you are leading to the demise of art. I’m gonna shame you and bully [00:15:00] you into stopping what you’re doing. That’s really bad business practice.

And like I said, I really understand the fear of where these artists are coming from. I’ve done this art I’ve been there. I understand the, being afraid of where am I gonna be? What, what is left for me?

Danica Favorite: And yet I, I don’t know about you guys, but have any of you been to an art gallery recently?

Because they’re still there. You can still go to art galleries and you can still see art and you can still buy paintings and all of the different art things. It just, it isn’t that it’s gone away. It’s just changed shape and form. And isn’t it great that somebody who. Perhaps didn’t have the ability to create that masterpiece they wanted. Now can do.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Absolutely.

Danica Favorite: And to me, sure. Are there writers who are going to be out of work? Yes. But why? Because they’re choosing not to learn and [00:16:00] adapt. Meanwhile, all of these other writers who haven’t been able to write a book or haven’t been able to get their stories out, suddenly have a new way to do it.

So it’s not that we’re killing writers. It’s that writers who are choosing not to adapt are choosing to die.

Jocelyn Lindsay: And like we said, it’s like vinyl. The first medium of music that I had growing up was the eight track. Come on.

The big giant cassette that got plugged into the car, that went away. There’s that meme about us Gen Xers that we’ve had to give up so many different types of music, but they’re still vinyl. The artisans still very much has a place in all the various industries and they’re not gonna go away.

A lot of it comes down to, frankly, the quality of what they’re offering.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you say that because I was just in Target the other day. This still blows me away because I have a love-hate relationship with Target. But one of my hate things about [00:17:00] Target is they’ve significantly scaled back their book section.

However, they had a giant vinyl section and I’m like what Target? Good for them, good for the people who love vinyl. But I think that is really the point is whatever we can do to make things beautiful and to celebrate our art and to allow as many people as possible access to that, I think that’s a good thing.

Jocelyn Lindsay: One of the things that AI art really allows for is representation. It’s allowing people to create art that is not the culturally, socially defined norm of what somebody should be or look like. There’s some amazing art that’s out there that the artists wouldn’t have been able to make before, that never would’ve had the opportunity to reach an audience before.

We’re humans. It’s all about the sky falling. [00:18:00] It’s that scarcity thought that it’s all gonna be gone and it’s all gonna disappear. And we’re always waiting for the end of the world, but I choose to see it as a great opportunity to do so much more than we could have.

Danica Favorite: I totally agree.

Jocelyn Lindsay: And back to like how I’m using it in my business. If I don’t understand something these days, I take a screenshot of it and I give it to chat and I say, tell me what this is because I don’t get it. I, it’s if I don’t understand something, Chat gets a screenshot, and gets the opportunity to explain it to me.

And for giggles, one day I took those terms and services that were always clicking accept on that, you’re like agreeing to when the man shows up at the door, you’re gonna give him your kidney and you’re gonna be like, what? And you’re gonna be like, you signed this when you signed up for this app.

I had chat look and tell me like, what are all these terms? Explain this to me. What am I actually signing? So I [00:19:00] have found, even just in basic business practices, if I don’t get something, give it to Chat. I’m not gonna spend 20 minutes trying to figure that out.

Chat has two seconds to do it.

Steph Pajonas: That’s right. I asked chat the other day to help me. I had a very long document that for some reason had, in order to make the paragraphs, there was like a return at the end of every line. I was like, what is happening here? This is annoying. Right? So I wanted to keep all of the double returns between paragraphs, but not within the paragraph.

I’m like, get rid of these and I could not figure out how to do it. I uploaded a screenshot to Chat. I said, write me an expression in the find and replace so that it can do what I want it to do. It wrote it. It took care of it. I was done. I probably in the past would’ve spent a good half an hour Googling and trying to figure that out, but now I can just do it in a flash of a pan.

It’s great. I love it.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Oh yeah. Or I remember sitting there hitting, in word [00:20:00] like, okay, show me what the code is. Pressing the button to see the code and then going, oh my God, I have to delete how many returns? And then it became, oh, and now I can find it. Now I can find and replace it.

And now it can be done somewhere else that I don’t have to look at it. I don’t even have to press find and replace anymore. Right.

Danica Favorite: I think that it gives us so much more bandwidth to do the things we really want to do. And I know Steph and I talk about this a lot where it isn’t even that you have to use AI for everything, but for the stuff where you’re spending hours on a task that isn’t what you love or isn’t bringing you joy or is just something you have to do, suddenly there’s this other way to get that done so you can spend more of your time on things you actually want to do, which is really great.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Right. Like this morning I chat and I worked out the next 90 days of strategy for my marketing.

Great. Nice. June, July and August are like front loaded [00:21:00] now. And yeah, we sat down and figured out what am I doing and my Chat knows my audience. I’ve trained Chat, so it has my audience. It knows I’ve up, I uploaded every newsletter I’ve ever written. I upload all my social media so it has access to everything and when I need to figure out like okay, this Instagram didn’t work. Why? And put the stats in and figure out what’s going on. Or okay, we’re going into the third quarter. I need the next three months. What am I doing for the next three months?

Danica Favorite: Yeah, and I think that’s a great way to look at where our second question is what does your workflow look like?

Because you do all of these different things. Are there a few workflows that you could pull out and share with our audience that might be helpful to them that, like I love this idea of uploading your Instagram posts and saying why didn’t this work or whatever. So what kind of workflows do you use in your business that would be helpful to some of [00:22:00] our listeners?

Jocelyn Lindsay: One of the things that I found extremely helpful was creating strategies for my newsletter. How many newsletter classes do all authors take? Every author is looking for the silver bullet on what’s gonna get ’em 10,000 subscribers in two days with a hundred percent engagement.

Sadly, I can’t even get chat to do that for me yet. I’m not that amplified. But so I started going through and having the conversation of I need a newsletter strategy, and I did this last fall and I talked to it about how many times do I wanna post?

And so I just went through the questions of what do I wanna post? How many times do I wanna post? Here’s what I’m writing. Here’s what I’m thinking. I downloaded my brain into those first few sessions with Chat, and we just put together Chat, and I put together, I really should name Chat. We put together a strategy on if I’m [00:23:00] posting, once a week, what are the themes in my book, what am I posting on, what is other strategy that’s out there?

And now I have. Six months worth of weekly newsletters, and I take those newsletters and I upload the stats. What’s the open rate, what’s the unsubscribe? And now, part of my workflow is uploading all that information as soon as a newsletter goes out, I upload the newsletter, and then a few days later, I’ll upload the stats.

I have Excel spreadsheets for everything. And then I can go back. Part of that workflow is now going back and saying, okay, what trends am I noticing? What am I missing? Let’s hypothesize, why did this newsletter get six unsubscribes when the ones before it didn’t? Is that because I suddenly sold something?

That’s become extremely helpful because I love the data. I don’t love getting there. I like having the data. And so based on that, now [00:24:00] I’ve gone into ConvertKit and have started segmenting my email list and I have Book Funnel subscribers come into a different area into, before they even get into my main list onboarding.

So getting that information part of that workflow has now just been seeing, what am I missing? Where am I missing it? How can I close those gaps? And then, is closing those gaps, part of social media, newsletter, where so I would say really with the workflow, it’s what can I do better?

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think that’s awesome and I am really glad that’s the tip that you shared with us, because I look at that and I think a lot of us, we do, we spin our wheels trying to have that perfect newsletter or how to do it.

And sometimes we’re so close, and I say this a lot of times when I’m teaching people about writing blurbs and [00:25:00] all of that kind of stuff is you’re so close to your work and to your newsletter and to what. Your thoughts are and what? Oh, I really loved this paragraph in my newsletter. This was my favorite part of the newsletter.

Oh. But I love putting pictures of my cat in my newsletter and the AI has zero emotional attachment to any of that. And so it can look at the stuff you did and say, yeah, I know you love putting all your cat pictures, but only 2% of your readers like cats.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Right. And oh my God, I was trying to close some of these gaps to get better open rates and it said your audience is Gen X. Gen X typically does not open emails till Friday afternoons or Saturdays. And I was like, oh, maybe I don’t wanna send it Thursday morning then.

And so I’m trying now to shift into a different day and time that I send my email because I’ve noticed this trend on Thursdays for the first 24 hours. I don’t [00:26:00] get in any opens. And then all of a sudden Friday hits and my open rate is going straight up and I’m like, oh.

So it’s just even something so little that for me would take me hours to go and try and find the data, to put the data together myself with spreadsheets. And I used to do that, and now it’s like I can just say, why isn’t this working?

Danica Favorite: Interpreting the data and the trends in the data, like that takes a lot of brain power that, I’ll be honest, I don’t have that anymore.

It takes gone. I was gonna

Steph Pajonas: say, I love the data. I hate the data analysis. Like I don’t wanna do any of that data analysis, and I’m gonna say that is. The perfect thing to say about Gen X, because that’s totally true. I saved most of my email opening for like Friday and Saturday, sometimes Sunday morning because you gotta get it done then.

Otherwise, it’s sitting in my inbox. I’m not touching it.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Exactly. And then, and I was [00:27:00] like floored when chat suggested that. And I’m like when do millennials open their email? When do you know Gen Z opens their email? And I went down a rabbit hole of this conversation of email opening and I’m like if I was writing for Gen X, that’s gonna change my newsletter strategy.

I am, and if I was writing for like the Alpha or the Zs, I would change that as well. ’cause I had just arbitrarily picked Thursday it you’re just like, ah, I think I’ll put my newsletter out Thursday. I, isn’t that what most of us do?

Steph Pajonas: I actually send mine out every, oh, on Fridays. If I send it out at all, it’s a Friday.

Unless it’s like some big new release I have to participate in. Yeah. Fridays it is. ’cause I’m a Gen Xer and I love Fridays.

Jocelyn Lindsay: And I, since I’m also a book coach and I keep these, my audiences on the Venn diagram cross. But I have [00:28:00] two separate businesses. The streams do not cross.

And so I do two newsletters a week, and so I have to be keeping track of different metrics for each different newsletter. And I couldn’t keep track of the analytics. I wouldn’t want to. I’m tickled pink when it spits out the numbers. I find it highly entertaining. Something that I hated doing is now entertainment.

Danica Favorite: it’s really interesting to go those rabbit holes and you don’t have to do the work. You literally are just sitting there with ChatGPT. So what about this? Okay, cool. What about this? What about this? Like you just ask them their questions. I feel like almost you get to be like that 2-year-old. Why?

Jocelyn Lindsay: Why?

Danica Favorite: Why?

Jocelyn Lindsay: Yeah. I think I would say the other thing, the other tip I would give that is now becoming really useful as we get more research, I ask it like, what’s the latest strategy with TikTok?

What are the experts saying about Instagram? What are they [00:29:00] saying about posting on Facebook? And then I’ll have that conversation what are the experts on newsletters saying about newsletters? How does that compare to what I’m doing?

And it’s really interesting to see again. Checking my own work, being able to look and find these gaps and where I can start improving what I’m doing.

Steph Pajonas: Claude will go out and actually do the web searches. Yeah. And it brings in data and analyzes it, and then it’ll look at your stuff and compare it and contrast it.

And that’s one of the beautiful things about AI now, is that it doesn’t have to rely solely on training data anymore. It can access the internet and figure things out. You could even tell it to go look at the top books in your genre on Amazon. It will go out. It’ll find them. It’ll bring them in. It’s fantastic.

I love it.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Yeah that’s another thing I’ve done is looked at when I start putting together marketing material, what are [00:30:00] the Amazon reviews to my genre? What is being said? What’s being loved? What’s being not loved? And using that to find, even if it’s finding keywords, finding direct audience language.

Danica Favorite: I’m gonna point out one of my really big pet peeves about the writing industry. Is that we do this, get advice about our career by committee. We go into these groups and we’re like, here, this is what’s going on. What is your advice on pen names? What is your advice on this?

And you have these random people who know nothing about your writing business, who know nothing about your genre, who know nothing about you, and they are spouting out all of these expert pieces of wisdom and then they take it to heart and I’m like, dude, this isn’t right for you.

But with AI you can actually go in and say, Hey, I’m looking at launching a pen name. Should I do a pen name, number one? This is what I write. This is [00:31:00] what I want to write. Should I do a pen name or not? What does this genre have? What are the key underpinnings here? What do I need to know about this?

And here’s what my actual career looks like right now. This is what my numbers look like. Is it smart for me to do this? Is it smart for me to do that?

I was talking about some of the sales analytics of Publish Drive where you can dial down to the countries you’re selling and things like that, and that’s data about you and your business. And yet you go into these writing groups and people are like, Hey, what language should I start to translate first? How about you look at data number one, where are your book selling? What are the themes in the different languages?

For example, my books do terrible in foreign markets because they’re so American, and that will be different as I am shifting. Actually, that’s not true. Australia loves my books as well. But but as [00:32:00] I’m shifting into writing different things now, that’s where I’m taking my research. I’m not going into these random Facebook groups where everybody has an opinion and none of it is based on data except their own personal experience or things they heard.

Jocelyn Lindsay: It’s one of the things I tell writers I work with, please don’t join a critique group. Please. Go make it a margarita group. Make it a community admiration group, but getting advice from people who don’t know you or don’t know what your goals are.

It’s so dangerous. I have seen so many writing and publishing careers derailed by this. And I think about starting as a new writer with no experience whatsoever. Going on to Chat and saying, I’m a new writer. I have this idea. And just starting from ground zero, because I see a lot of new writers [00:33:00] also get caught in the, strategies and tactics that worked in 2012 and 13. We’re not in the same world.

Or getting caught in, he told me I should spend $10,000 a month on Facebook ads, but he has 300 books published, it’s apples and oranges.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. And seriously, there is one author in these groups.

I sometimes wanna just punch this author because I’m like, dude, you are giving a beginner author advice that should only be given. To people who are at a certain level. Yeah. And you’re expecting this beginner author to do these things that they can’t do yet and like Exactly. Give them the tools they want.

And I’m actually gonna steal your margarita group idea because when I first started writing, I did have a local critique group. We all wrote very different genres and frankly, we all gave each other really bad advice. I really wish one of the critique group members has since passed and I wish I could have gone [00:34:00] back to this woman and just be like, dude, you had a good book for your genre, but none of us in the critique group understood that. And you gave up writing too soon.

And here’s the thing, woman is dead now, guys. Her dream got killed because of a well-meaning group of writers who wanted to help and didn’t know how to help because they didn’t know her genre. I look at that now and if she were writing now and she could put that in there and have all of that.

She might have gotten to get that book published. But also what I really liked about getting together with those writers is just sitting and talking about writing and drinking. Probably a lot of the drinking, but not so much now. ’cause I’m a woman of a certain age and too much alcohol’s not good for me.

Like why not just have a writer’s get together and drink wine? ’cause that sounds pretty awesome to me.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Yeah. Get together and talk about the things that are hard, the thing, the successes, and just enjoy each other with where you are on the journey. I’ve worked with writers [00:35:00] who are probably like the writer you’re talking about who try and come back to writing after just being destroyed in some of these groups.

And it’s hard. It’s really hard. Yeah,

Danica Favorite: it’s hard. Yeah. Yeah. And I was one of those who almost quit. There was a point where this woman totally trashed my book and trashed this heroine about how desperately she hated this woman. And I’m like, oh my God, I based that character entirely off of me and you hate her.

And I almost quit and I didn’t. I’m glad I didn’t because, I have many published books now she’s got a couple and hasn’t been writing in like 10 years.

Can you imagine if I let that woman’s voice make me quit? Yeah. And that’s why I really do love sometimes the AI tools because they can be really more, much more objective.

And if you give them all the information, if you tell them, Hey, this is all the information. What am I missing? Because that’s often really [00:36:00] important. ’cause you can’t see the forest for the trees and you don’t know what you’re missing until you’re told what you’re missing. And then you can come up with a plan and suddenly you’ve got this opportunity to be way more successful.

Jocelyn Lindsay: I’m working with a writer now who is a brand new writer. Never written. She’s midlife another Gen Xer, and I’m helping her learn how to prompt in Chat. She’s very AI leaning and the great thing about Chat is she can ask it 47 times what an inciting incident is and have it explain it to her in 300 different ways and ask it over and over again, and then I can look at the work. I can help her practice. She comes to me. I look at what she’s writing. We talk about what she wants to do. We talk about how she can prompt. She’s learning how to write, but she’s getting there so much faster through AI because she [00:37:00] just doesn’t even know the basics. And she knows if she lets Chat or Claude spit something out at her, she’s not gonna know whether it’s good or not.

And so I’m helping her provide that sounding board for what’s good. How do you train it to become your companion in writing? How do you become a better writer so you can go on? And it’s really fascinating because she is learning what takes most writers 20 years. She is picking things up so fast and she’s turning in pages now and it’s just like I am watching her at light speed become a good writer because she can spend all this time doing this tactical learning with her AI buddy.

Steph Pajonas: And the AI buddy is not gonna be like, why am I telling you this again? Are you stupid? No, it doesn’t. That’s one of the things I love about it. I love that. Like I, [00:38:00] it it would’ve smothered me with a pillow, like 10 questions back by this point.

Jocelyn Lindsay: And even when I tell clients, ask me anything, ask me as many times as you want. They don’t want to because and I know this thought, you’re gonna think I’m an idiot. I’ve already asked you this 10 times. So it’s not just that there’s not a place that’s available or somebody to ask, it’s that they don’t wanna do that and seem dumb. And so she can, yeah, she can ask it all she wants to ask it, and then you don’t have to look at my conversations and see how many times I ask.

Danica Favorite: yeah. Chat has never called me dumb. Usually chat calls me. Brilliant. Yes. Yes. Brilliant. What brilliant insight you have. It’s, I’m sure you could train, chat to call you dumb, but I don’t know.

I don’t think you could. But yeah, chat has never said, that’s a really dumb idea. It will say, that’s a really dumb idea in a very PC way, that doesn’t make me feel [00:39:00] stupid.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Yes, it has a lot of constructive criticism.

Danica Favorite: Yes, it has. The sandwich technique perfected

Jocelyn Lindsay: Exactly.

Danica Favorite: So like we’ve talked about the different tools and we’ve talked about chat a lot.

Is Chat your favorite tool? Do you have any other favorite tools that you like?

Jocelyn Lindsay: Right now, Chat’s my favorite because I have used it for so long. It’s so tuned into me now. And with the two businesses, I have a GPT for book coaching and then I have a GPT for writing. I have a GPT for advertising.

But occasionally I will jump over into Claude. I either have subscriptions to everything simultaneously, or I go back and forth. You exactly know how that is. But, part of it is just like I, I try and stay focused on Chat for now and then somebody will say, oh, Claude is doing such and such.

And I’ll be like, oh, I gotta go back to Claude. It’s kinda I’m sorry, Claude, it wasn’t you, it was [00:40:00] me. Let’s get back together again.

Can I take you to dinner, Claude?

Danica Favorite: Steph and I talk about that a lot. And actually it’s really funny because by the time the episode airs, it’ll be interesting to see what the consensus is because right now. People are hating on Claude because Claude is misbehaving like you would not believe. Claude is being a very naughty child. As soon as they do some tweaks on the backend, everyone’s gonna be in love with Claude again.

It really is like, how do you feel about the AI today?

Jocelyn Lindsay: Yeah, exactly. My AI boyfriends. I found like chat last week. Something in his attitude changed and he was really obnoxious and I was just like having these circular arguments and I was like I guess I just have to wait for them to change another line of code and turn the dial a little bit and there’ll go.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah I go back and forth between them for different tasks. I like GPT for the more logical tasks, the marketing tasks, those sorts of things. It’s great [00:41:00] at summarization, et cetera. I go to Claude now if I wanna brainstorm ideas ’cause it has access to the internet and it loves to be creative with me and all that kinda stuff.

And then Gemini. Gemini is also my boo. I love Gemini. It just, it’s. Fun and it writes very contemporary, fun prose. So I go to it if I’m drafting or… they all have some sort of place in my life. Yeah. I don’t know how, I wouldn’t know how to like, get rid of any of them. I really.

Jocelyn Lindsay: It’s the modern tagline.

Why choose?

Isn’t that all our romance why do we have to choose now?

Steph Pajonas: You don’t. You don’t have to choose anymore.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Just take one out occasionally and,

Steph Pajonas: yeah. Do you have a favorite image generator as well? We’ve talked a, we talked a little bit about art in the very beginning of this conversation, so I was curious.

Jocelyn Lindsay: I start with Midjourney because I love the vibe [00:42:00] of Midjourney. Mm-hmm. It’s, I’m writing over 40 gritty urban fantasy and I can really get the vibe with Midjourney. But I. It’s like with Chat and Claude, why choose? I’m also an Ideogram. I’ve been using a Free Pik because I’m really into animation now, and so I’m over on Free Pik. Veo. Kling.

Danica Favorite: I do wanna jump in here because I will say for those of you who do follow Jocelyn online, the videos she’s been posting of stuff she’s creating with AI. Woo. They’re really good. They’re really good.

Jocelyn Lindsay: Oh, thank you. Yeah it’s taken a while to get the prompts. It’s getting the prompts, it’s getting the things dialed in and I would say like today is like the first day I feel like I’m dialing in the workflow, the process to be able to get animated images out now. So I’m really excited. So there’s gonna be a lot coming out.

Steph Pajonas: Excellent. I love it. I love this conversation because we talked all [00:43:00] about the different tools and how we use them, but also about new authors too, coming into this business because I feel that new authors they get shoved aside a little bit because all of the people who have been doing this for a decade or more, we had these established lives in this business, and then suddenly it’s all been upended by AI.

But now there’s a new crop of people who are coming in who can use the tools and they’re finding their own voices with the tools, and they’re finding their readers, they’re finding their market. And that is just really exciting to me.

I don’t ever wanna be one of those people that shuts the door behind me when I come into a place. I wanna leave it open for them.

Jocelyn Lindsay: And they’re gonna be coming in with out the bias, without the emotional attachment. They’re gonna be excited about things in ways that we can’t even think about.

I think about being Gen X, I’m in my fifties now and there was pre-technology and now, and I think about [00:44:00] when technology first started coming into my life. It was all about the opportunities. It was all about what was possible. And I think about the writers that are coming in now that never didn’t know a world with this possibility. And it’s gonna be a totally different mindset. And I’m so excited to see where it goes for them and what they create and what they build, because the sky is wide open, and I think it’s just amazing seeing what people are creating.

Steph Pajonas: It is. And I’m hoping that when people listen to this episode, they will think about that and encourage other newer writers to be open to these tools to be excited about these tools. For sure. So I wanna thank you for coming and talking to us about this subject today, because this was a lot of fun. Um, I wanna make sure that we send people to you to the right URLs and everything.

So please let our audience know how to [00:45:00] find you.

Jocelyn Lindsay: The easiest thing to do is to Google Jocelyn, J-O-C-E-L-Y-N Lindsay, L-I-N-D-S-A-Y, and you’ll find my author stuff, you’ll find my book coaching things. You’ll find my Instagram. I think that’s just probably one of the easiest ways to go.

And then I will make sure you have my information for your notes. And if you’re a new writer out there that’s starting to play with these tools, please let me know. Contact me. I love talking to new writers about this. I’m always open to a conversation.

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. I will Google you as well and add all of those things to the show notes when we put them together for everybody.

So everybody who’s been listening, definitely come by brave new bookshelf.com, check out the show notes, any of our links and all that kind of stuff. Ms. Danica Favorite, what do you wanna say to bring out the end of this episode?

Danica Favorite: First of all, yeah, thank you, Jocelyn, for being here. I knew this would be a great episode.

You and I have had some [00:46:00] conversations in other areas about AI and I knew this would be good and really just that same encouragement to the newer authors.

But also to the older authors. Like really be careful about how you are encouraging the newer authors because this is a golden opportunity for everybody. The newer authors, but also for you. You have that endless possibility of really cool things you can do if you’re just willing to step outside your comfort zone just a little bit.

That is what I’m excited about and why I’ve been on this journey with Steph, and so happy to have people like Jocelyn along with us.

But for those of you who want to keep up with Brave New Bookshelf and all of the cool things that Future Fiction Academy are doing and Publish Drive is doing, make sure you’re following all three on social. Facebook, YouTube, all that stuff.

Make sure you’re liking and subscribing. We want to make sure that you get all of this information. If you see an episode that you really love, please make sure [00:47:00] you’re sharing that too, because the more we can get the word out, the more people we can help.

Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. Excellent. All right guys, this was a great conversation.

I’m looking forward to talking with everybody in the future about these fantastic topics because I really feel like this is where we need to keep people up to date about everything that’s going on. So it’s very exciting. Okay, so from me and Danica and Jocelyn, I’ll say bye for now and we’ll see you guys next week.

Okay.

Danica Favorite: 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@bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.

Episode 46 – Using AI to Amplify Creativity with Book Coach Jocelyn Lindsay