Episode 54 - Unlocking Bestseller Potential: Alessandra Torre and JD Lasica on Authors AI & Marlowe

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In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, co-hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite welcome Alessandra Torre and JD Lasica from Authors AI. Together, they delve into the innovative ways AI is transforming the writing and publishing landscape, focusing on their cutting-edge tool, Marlowe. This episode is packed with insights into how AI can elevate your manuscript to bestseller status and help you connect with readers in meaningful ways.

Meet Alessandra Torre and JD Lasica of Authors AI

Alessandra Torre, an accomplished author who writes romance and domestic suspense under different pen names, joins us alongside JD Lasica, a high-tech thriller writer. Together, they co-founded Authors AI, a company committed to harnessing the power of AI to enhance the craft of writing. Their flagship product, Marlowe, is an AI tool designed to analyze manuscripts and provide actionable feedback to authors.

The Genesis of Marlowe

Marlowe was inspired by Dr. Matthew Jockers’ book, The Bestseller Code, which explored the patterns that make a book a bestseller. Alessandra and JD explain how Marlowe was developed to help authors identify these patterns in their own work. Since its launch in 2020, Marlowe has been refined to provide detailed, developmental editor-level feedback to authors, helping them elevate their manuscripts before publication.

How Marlowe Works

Marlowe functions as a developmental editor, offering insights into character development, pacing, plot structure, and more. Authors can upload their manuscripts to receive a comprehensive report that highlights both strengths and areas for improvement. Unlike other AI tools that may be overly positive, Marlowe provides balanced, constructive feedback that authors can use to refine their work.

A Deep Dive into Marlowe’s Features

The tool offers a range of reports, including visual graphs that map out the narrative arc and pacing. Authors can compare their manuscripts to bestsellers in their genre, providing a benchmark for improvement. Marlowe’s analysis is grounded in data and free from human biases, making it a valuable resource for authors looking to hone their craft.

Real-World Applications and Insights

Both Danica and Steph shared their experiences using Marlowe on their own manuscripts. They found the tool’s feedback to be actionable and insightful, offering specific suggestions for character development and plot enhancement. Marlowe’s objective analysis helped them identify areas for improvement that human editors might miss.

AI Tools to Complement Your Writing Process

JD and Alessandra also shared their favorite AI tools that complement Marlowe. JD highlighted the use of AI for transcription and visual imagery, while Alessandra discussed how ChatGPT assists her with research and brainstorming. These tools, combined with Marlowe, create a robust ecosystem for authors looking to streamline their writing process.

Special Offer for Brave New Bookshelf Listeners

For listeners eager to try Marlowe, Alessandra and JD are offering a 25% discount on any purchase with the code BRAVE25. Whether you’re looking for a single report or a subscription, this is an excellent opportunity to experience Marlowe’s capabilities firsthand.

Key Takeaways

Marlowe offers developmental editor-level feedback, helping authors refine their manuscripts.
The tool provides objective analysis, free from human bias, making it a valuable resource for writers.
AI can significantly reduce the time it takes to write and edit a manuscript, allowing authors to focus on creativity.

Resources Mentioned

For more information and to access the special discount, visit Authors AI and use the code BRAVE25 at checkout.

Transcript

Speaker: [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. Welcome back to an episode of the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And Editor in Chief of the Future Fiction Press, now. Where we’re publishing books that are AI forward.

We mentioned AI in the blurb, the copyright page, on the website, pretty much everywhere. So nobody is blindsided by thinking, hey, I didn’t realize this was an AI book. We don’t do that at Future Fiction Press. We’re showing people how the books can be made. And they can go out there, and people can love them and read them and have a great time with them.

So I love doing that. I am [00:01:00] working really hard on getting more stuff onto the website for Future Fiction Press, and that is fun for me. I love coding with Claude. Claude and I are best buds when it comes to Claudeing. When it comes to coding. Yes. So

Danica Favorite: I like that. It’s Claudeing though. I think.

Steph Pajonas: Oh, I think it is Claudeing now.

Danica Favorite: Claudeing. Yeah. I like that.

Steph Pajonas: I think we should leave that in the transcript, because that was a mess up that I think works well. We’re having a good time, Claude and me coding. So we’re Claudeing. All right. So I am doing all the work, as is Danica, my wonderful co-host. How are you doing today?

Danica Favorite: I am doing great.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors at every stage of their journey from getting their book formatted, their book metadata done, and getting their books out to the widest markets possible, and then splitting royalties once that book is published.

So between us and [00:02:00] Steph, we really do have authors covered at every stage of the Author journey and, okay, I’m gonna make an announcement. I’m very excited because I’ve been teasing this for a while, you guys. I keep saying Publish Drive is working on something big. We are launching, we are recording this ahead of time, so for those of you who are recording with me, we haven’t announced it yet, but we will have it announced by the time this episode goes live. So you three get this news exclusively first, and the rest of the listeners are gonna get it somewhere around the same time of the announcement. But Publish Drive is partnering with Eleven Labs distribution.

So you will now be able to distribute your books to Eleven Labs through Publish Drive. So when you upload your book to Publish Drive, Eleven Labs is now a distribution option for your AI audio. You’re welcome.

Steph Pajonas: Wow.

Danica Favorite: Isn’t that great?

Steph Pajonas: That’s awesome. Fantastic.

Danica Favorite: I know I’ve been like dying to give this news. I’m so excited.

So this is what I’ve been so excited about. We’ve been really working hard to get everything connected [00:03:00] and oh my goodness. Just one more way for authors to get their books in the hands of readers using AI. Really excited for that.

Steph Pajonas: I love it. I love exciting news. And Eleven Labs is fantastic. I love them. They do great work. We’ve had them on the podcast, and they’re doing even more now with authors. You can publish your ebook on there and have it read. If you want to, you can sell it like a la carte. You can just put a price on it or you can have it for free. And then you get like a, you get a little stipend.

So I think this is fantastic news. I love it. Love it.

Danica Favorite: Yes. Yes. Like I said, one more option for authors. So excited to be able to provide this to authors. And also excited because, as you guys know, Steph and I love to have people on here who are out there helping authors and doing great things with authors. Very excited about today’s guests, because they also are helping authors on a different stage of the journey, and that is people who are getting their [00:04:00] manuscripts ready to publish.

And so today we have Alessandra and JD with Authors AI. And they have this amazing product called Marlowe that helps you find the weaknesses and strengths in your books before you publish it, so you can have the best book possible. And both Steph and I got to try it out. We will talk about that during the podcast.

But for now we want you to meet Alessandra and JD. So please take it away. I’ll let you guys decide who wants to say hello first.

Alessandra Torre: Sure I’ll jump in. My name is Alessandra Torre. I also write under A.R. Tory. And I write romance as Alessandra and domestic suspense as A.R. Tory. In addition to writing, I’m also the CEO and one of the co-founders of Authors AI.

I’m joined today by my fabulous fellow co-founder, J.D. Lasika. I’ll let him introduce himself in a moment. And just a quick summary of Authors AI. In our [00:05:00] company, as Dana mentioned, Marlowe is our AI, which is trained on bestselling novels and really has a deep understanding of the tweaks and and changes that you can make in a book, to take it from a poor book or an average book and bring it towards that bestseller i deal. So that, that is Marlowe’s focus. And what we’ve been working on Marlowe for over five years. We have a team of data scientists. And Authors AI was founded by authors, and we have over a hundred founding authors, that really is our foundation and what we grew from.

I’ll let J.D. introduce himself.

J.D. Lasica: Yeah. Hi, I’m J.D. Lasica. I am a high-tech fiction, high tech thriller author, right? So I’ve got four of those high-tech thrillers out there. Co-founder of Authors AI. We actually started on, officially on January 1st, 2020 back when nobody even heard of AI, in terms of fiction or writing, right?

We’re one of the OGs in the space. I’m [00:06:00] coming to you from the southern headquarters of Authors AI, here in Dorado, Puerto Rico. This is not a fake background, for those who are seeing the video. I hear from a lot of people, what is the dream? And the dream is like writing your book at beachside.

So that’s what I’m doing here. Just living the dream. And it’s a pleasure to be with you both today.

Steph Pajonas: Oh, I wanna be living the dream on the beach as well. So I’m getting on the plane and come join you. But I was really excited to hear that you guys, you guys were really at the forefront of this in January, 2020.

What was it was it a technology that you saw that really made you think that this was what the market needed? Tell me a little bit about how you guys came about this.

Alessandra Torre: Do you want me to take this J.D.?

Okay.

J.D. Lasica: Yeah, go ahead.

Alessandra Torre: Our third co-founder is Dr. Matthew Jockers, and he’s the author of a book called Bestseller Code, which for any like book geeks, it’s a fantastic read. It’s really interesting. And he’s been working in the space of [00:07:00] machine learning and long form fiction for decades. He’s one of the pioneers in the space, so he’s been analyzing the data of novels for, again, decades.

And he published, co-wrote, and published a book called, The Bestseller Code, which really dove into what are the patterns that we see in bestselling novels. And what is that thing that differentiates. Why is one book beloved by readers? You can’t stop reading it, and you inhale the whole thing. And another book you decide to set down, or you just don’t really remember it after you finish it.

Back then, when that technology was created and those tests were run, he could predict the bestseller with 83% certainty. So you could feed a book into The Bestseller Code, and it would know nothing about it and it would say, yes, this book was a bestseller, or no, it wasn’t.

And it defined and trained on bestsellers that had hit the New York Times list for more than 10 weeks. So it wasn’t just like a sudden bestseller. And it was all fiction. It was a book that had standing power. And so now, if we were to create a similar [00:08:00] bestseller-ometer, we believe it’d be more 95, 96% certainty.

Dr. Matthew Dockers was our co-founder, so he created the original Marlowe back in 2020. This was before we had ChatGPT, this was before AI was a hot topic and and very divided in terms of opinion. And and that was the initial Marlo that we released.

And it was focused on saying, okay, we know that these patterns exist. And he had a lot of authors say, I wanna know how my book stacks up, knowing that these patterns lead to a bestselling novel, how does my book compare? And that was what the original Marlowe was built for and has now grown, in leaps and bounds.

But that’s the goal now to take a manuscript and to say, how close is this to the bestseller standard? And in what ways could I improve my book to make it more appealing to readers or more similar in DNA to a bestseller.

Danica Favorite: I do have that book, and I devoured it. I read it actually a [00:09:00] couple of times. And so I’m like, oh my goodness, this is so cool. So I was sitting here book geeking out over the idea that this is based off of the principles from The Bestseller Code. ‘Cause I thought it was a great book.

Hopefully we’ll get that in the show notes as well, because I do think it was a really good, helpful book. But how great is it that you can put your book into a system, and get that data as opposed to having to manually tear apart what’s happening in the book and all of that.

So that to me is fantastic. So let’s go into this idea of AI in publishing. So what was your approach to bringing AI into the process, and where you feel like that has had a great role in, in publishing?

Alessandra Torre: Yeah, so our answer to that has changed in the last five or six years as technology has evolved, right?

But our focus has always been on two things, on, on how can we look at a manuscript and understand its current potential, its expected [00:10:00] potential if you improved it, and how would that help both publishers and authors? Because you also have this problem with publishing where, you know, you have huge slush piles and great manuscripts that go undiscovered.

It’s also a problem with retailers, in terms of they have millions of books in their catalog, and how do we surface great books so readers can find them? How do great books not get lost? So it’s a combination problem of recognizing the potential and how to improve an unpublished manuscript, and then once a book is published, how can we connect it with readers who will like that? And it’s not just surfacing great books, it’s also understanding the unique DNA of every book and a reader’s DNA profile for reading, and how can we connect that? So that’s something that Marlowe… We don’t have it available as a publicly available technology, but that is an ability that Marlowe has. So we’re really looking at how can the abilities that our AI have, how can that improve, first of all, the [00:11:00] eternal problem in publishing, which is, I am a reader and I want to read a great book. How do I find that? You know what I mean?

And what is it that I love about a book? The other benefit of Marlowe’s technology is Marlo can read a million books and recognize the commonalities between those books. So if you, as a reader gave Marlowe, these are my hundred favorite books, Marlowe could recognize the commonalities in those a hundred books, versus these other million and say, okay, I understand what this reader likes about books. And here is a book that fits all of those things. So those are the amazing technology, that the amazing possibilities that are available with AI that humans just can’t do. It’s just not possible.

Steph Pajonas: It’s just not possible. And I think that one of the things that readers really do want is to find similar books to what they already love, right? There’s a whole industry surrounding this, between goodreads, where you [00:12:00] can go and you can see the books that you like, you can catalog them, rate them, talk about them with your friends, and then there’s also, things like BookTok, right? You’ve got BookTok, you’ve got people on TikTok talking about the books that they love, the books that they’re excited about, the books that they’re interested in reading, the books that they hate on. Even sometimes when a user hates on a book, it’s showing some sort of love to it, right?

But these are all in these different places, right? And you have to, if you’re not a TikTok person, then you’re not finding those things on TikTok. If you’re not a goodreads person, you’re not finding them there. Sometimes you are only seeing what’s given to you on an Amazon product page or whatever it may be.

So I’m hoping that when AI really starts to roll out, as it’s now coming out of the early adopter phase and into the early majority phase, that it will start helping us find those books we want to read. And I feel like you’ve [00:13:00] already kind of got that with Marlowe, and you can possibly roll it out and make it a little bit bigger for more people to come and check out.

I’m excited about that.

J.D. Lasica: Let me add a couple things here. One is, I totally agree. I think Amazon’s becoming less and less useful for useful spot on book recommendations. So we decided as a company to focus on just one, one or two quick things because, we can do a million different things with AI, right?

We have our author audience. They’re our main customers right now, people who are using Marlowe to improve their manuscripts and write better books. We have Marlowe recommends, which we’re rolling out, over time, which is more of a reader and publisher facing model where publishers can use it for a variety of different things that Alessandra can explain.

But readers can also find like their next great read, right? So Marlowe is able to do all this, and it is probably worth mentioning that, we get a lot of blowback from people who don’t really understand how [00:14:00] AI works or how we work as a company. We do everything by the book. So we’re a hundred percent legal.

Everything in our corpus is is purchased or acquired from uh, uh, licensed by the publishing houses. And we don’t train on any manuscripts that are submitted over the transom when Marlowe does this analysis. So all the kind of concerns people have about privacy and about rights and undercutting the existing book industry model, and cutting authors outta the equation, we wanna make sure authors that are at the center of the equation for all of this. We actually decided as a company not to just write a tool like Sudowrite, where the platform and the software writes the book for you.

We don’t have any judgment about people who do that. And authors come in all flavors and everybody uses AI in different ways. So we’re mostly focused on giving you feedback that’s actionable, that you can decide what bits and pieces from the author dashboard [00:15:00] that you wanna act on, and then how to integrate that into your novel.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I love that. And I definitely wanna hear how that all works because , like I mentioned in the intro, Steph and I both got to try it out, and I’m really excited, because I will say I’ve put this book through a lot of the analysis tools. I hate to like, play favorites here, but this has been my favorite set of results.

I’ll be interested to see where Steph falls on this, but, before we got on the recording, Steph was like, ooh, would you use it on? And so, you all have heard me talk about this series of novellas that I’ve written, that I want to expand and turn into an actual series and connect them as opposed to these group of standalone novellas, and I haven’t figured out how to do it, and I know I need to lengthen the books and yada yada yada. You’ve all heard this. But what I realized when I did this is first of all, when it went through the Marlowe thing, I was in the writer self-doubt phase of oh my gosh, is this really good book?

And first of all, Marlowe said it was a good book. [00:16:00] Um, I always like that affirmation, but also I really felt like the critique of my book was actually actionable. It was interesting, because in some of the pieces where it talks about where you got your information, you talked about things like James Scott Bell, which I know Steph and I both are a huge fan of James Scott Bell and his work and his writing, and how he teaches author about structure.

And so I liked that you were using as a resource known structure systems and known author teachers. And so actually, after doing this analysis with Marlowe of this novella, I feel really confident in, okay, I know actually what’s wrong and it’s actionable. Not like, some of the other reports I’ve run on it from other companies….

I’m like, okay, cool, but what do I do? But I really felt like there were some [00:17:00] really great suggestions on particularly my hero. ‘Cause I have heard that people didn’t really connect with him, but no one would tell me why. And Marlowe actually explained what was wrong with him. Not that there’s anything wrong with him ’cause he’s obviously the hero.

But it was good, because I felt like what I was getting was actionable enough that I know now what to do with this book. At least for the book itself. I still have to figure out how to put it in the series, but I really appreciated that. So I’ll let Steph like talk about her experience, but then I would love for you guys to walk us through what Marlowe actually does, and what that workflow is, ’cause I thought it was great. I really enjoyed my experience.

Alessandra Torre: For anyone listening just a one minute summary so that y’all know what they’re discussing. So Marlowe is like a developmental editor. So they have uploaded their manuscript, and in about 15 minutes they have gotten this big report that has a lot of different tabs and it talks about characters and point of views, but it [00:18:00] very much is it’s not a line editor.

It’s very much kind of developmental edit editor level feedback.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, that is a great, that is a great thing to point out. It wasn’t like, it wasn’t like this line, fix this line. It really was like this overview of each little piece, like a developmental editor would give. And I think that is I really loved that.

Steph Pajonas: I put mine through today as well. I wanted to give it a book that I already had written and published, and I know all of its shortcomings already, right? Because I wanted to see like how accurate it is and how well it did. And it did, it nailed all the things that are wrong with that book. It’s a….

It’s a great book, and I do love it and it’s one of my favorites. But I know that there are some issues with the muddy middle in the middle. But I pointed out all of the different things that that I could find and improve. I loved, like there were character analysis, there were analysis of like my setting and my world building, which was great.

It had, it had [00:19:00] positives and negatives as well, so that’s always very helpful. ‘Cause sometimes, when you’re using some of these large language models, you can say, give me a critique of the book. But AI tends to be a yes man. Like a very positive, almost always you have a lot of trouble like coaxing it to actually give you negatives.

And we also run into the problem sometimes where we ask it very vociferously to give us the negatives to things, and it will invent them instead of actually, you know, really drilling down into them. So there are issues with using AI as a developmental editor in some cases, but from what I saw from Marlowe, it actually did a pretty good job with my book.

It found positives, it found negatives. It did a good job of parsing out everything into little reports, which was great too. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the first couple of pages, you could easily go and check out something else if you needed to [00:20:00] and work your way through it. So I wasn’t, I was pleased and impressed, so thank you very much for letting me do that.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. And just to go off of what Steph said, particularly when I was talking about my hero, that has been my problem, is that I knew something wasn’t working in the story, and I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. And again, like AI, oh yeah, no, your characters are great, you had these great characters, blah, blah, blah.

But people, like some people who had read it, there were pieces that didn’t…that they said they didn’t connect with the hero, but that wasn’t helpful. And even, like I’ve had editors and developmental editors read things and say, oh yeah, I don’t connect with this character. Okay, great. Why?

And Marlowe actually said why. Marlowe said, he goes back and forth too much on, on this one idea. And I was like oh yeah, I see that. And it was so clear that I was like, okay, I know how to fix this. And that’s where I was really impressed.

I would love it if you guys could give us a rundown of what that [00:21:00] looks like. Tell us about the workflow and like you upload your manuscript, what happens there, and then what kinds of things are we getting from those results with Marlowe?

J.D. Lasica: We trained Marlo to be critical, but not cruel and mean. So you’re right, AI is overly positive in a lot of cases. And that’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do you any good when you’re trying to improve your manuscript, right? So, Marlowe’s very nonjudgmental. You could upload any kind of manuscript about any subject, and it won’t say oh, forget it, I’m not gonna bother reviewing this. What’s fun is authors can actually compare their manuscripts to some of the best, you know, thousands of different bestselling novels. So if you look at my like dashboard. I actually have done this. We’ve legally purchased all these books.

I’m always looking at how does Marlowe review Lord of the Flies and Pet Cemetery and Project Hail Mary and The Firm and For Whom The Bell Tolls. So those are all books that we’ve run [00:22:00] through Marlowe. And it’s fun to see, even the most successful novels in the world, Marlowe is gonna find some faults with it, right?

You wonder what Hemingway would’ve thought about Marlowe, if he’d used it today. He’d probably go back and make a few changes, right? But it doesn’t mean your book’s no good or it can’t be a bestseller without these kinds of things. But we’re always focused on improving the craft and taking it one step at a time.

Alessandra, why don’t you explain how that works step by step.

Alessandra Torre: Sure. And and just to second, what J.D. said, but also what you guys said. Early on I heard a lot of, a lot of feedback prior to them running the report saying I already know AIs are always too kind. Like it’s not that. And I was like, just run it and see, before you judge it, like just run it.

I had one especially opinionated author, but then he responded and said, you’re right, it was good. It was it’s interesting. I think a lot of authors are afraid of critical feedback, and a lot of authors are really wanting it. And what [00:23:00] we’ve noticed from Marlowe for the past five years is that Marlowe is uh, it’s very nice getting feedback from an AI, because you don’t have to take its advice, it’s not gonna get its feelings hurt, no one else knows it or has read it.

Versus an editor where there’s a little bit of that, a human editor, where there’s a little bit of ego involved, but also like a relationship that you’re going to have with this person. So moving on, how Marlowe works. Yes, so when you upload your manuscript to Marlowe and Marlowe takes doc files or epub files you don’t have to do any special formatting.

It does a really good job, unless you have really funky encoding, it normally has no problem accepting your manuscript. Now, Marlowe does need a certain length of manuscript to work, and that is over 300 sentences. So you can run novellas. I’ve run a short story through Marlowe, and that was fine. As long as it has that 300 sentences, which is typically 5,000, 6,000 words unless you’re really verbose with your [00:24:00] sentences.

But then it goes to a series of different technologies. We have homegrown AI that powers the majority of Marlowe. We use Large Language Models. So it goes to a variety of different technologies. We have commercial agreements with all of those. Nothing is ever trained on your manuscript.

And everything is run through our secure API. It does take anywhere from 6 minutes to 15 minutes typically, and then everything displays in our dashboard. And again, we have a variety of different reports. Some of them are visual, and if you have been a Marlowe customer in the past, you’ll see like that we plot out your arc, and your pacing.

Those graphs are much more interactive than they used to be. And you can pick a bestselling book to compare your book against, so you can see how your pacing is. But the new Marlowe also shows how dark or light your book is. And there’s a lot of accompanying text which you can choose to read or not read, but you definitely wanna read the sections that have the red pinpoint, because those are specific [00:25:00] feedback about your book.

But there’s a lot there. We worked with dozens of editors. We had a team of editors that worked hand in hand with J.D. for almost six months, I feel. It was several months, and they helped both with the feedback that Marlowe gave, but also how can we explain to authors, why pacing is important, or how to improve your pacing, or what plot structure is, because a lot of newer authors c ome in without a creative writing background. I certainly was self-taught. And so there’s a lot, there’s a lot of information there also that can just help you grow.

J.D. Lasica: The other thing that’s really cool, Alessandra, I think you would agree, is the visual elements, right? The graphs, nobody else does this.

So we have really cool graphs for your story’s narrative arc and the plot turns, and the story elements, the story beats, and the pacing. And, you can explain it in a million words what’s wrong with your pacing, but to actually see how fast your pacing is at different points of your novel, and then to compare it to other [00:26:00] bestsellers in your sub-genre against that to see how you’re doing. You know, I, I was surprised with some of my pacing results. It’s very fast paced, as a thriller should be. But boy it gives you a sort of comfort level because, we actually, you know, our data scientists are really, amazing people who applied all of their academic learnings and put it into this software tool.

And you can actually visually see step by step the different kinds of elements in the pacing or the narrative arc at different points. You could mouse over any point in the novel in the graph to see what’s actually happening in that scene. So there are just a lot of things that some of the other tools out there can’t come close to replicating right now.

Alessandra Torre: And because the way Marlowe was built from the ground in terms of like…. In Marlowe’s brain, there’s like a book universe where there’s all of the books, and it can at any point in time compare a book to another. So you can see the roller coaster of up and down that your book is.

[00:27:00] But it’s interesting, like J D’s roller coaster, his lowest point will still be faster paced than Eat, Pray, Love’s highest point, you know, not, maybe not exactly, but he could be able to tell. He could put in Eat, Pray, Love, and he’d be able to see not only his own undulations, I don’t know if that’s the right word, up and down, but also then where that is and compared to another.

So it’s sometimes interesting to see two books and how much kind of they interact with each other.

Steph Pajonas: I, love the fact that I opened it up, and I started going through the report, right? And there does come a point when you’re working with data like this where you have to remember that you’re the human in charge, right?

You’re still always gonna be the human in charge. It’s gonna give you lots of great advice and lots of good feedback, but then you still have to make those decisions. I like the fact that you give direction and you [00:28:00] point things out, but it’s never a prescriptive where you must do anything. So like for example, I ran my book and it pointed out that one of the characters is a brother who was totally like a bit outta control, gambling, doing stupid stuff, and still the parents gave him access to the business’ finances, and he blew it all. And the AI was just like, that doesn’t make sense. Why would anybody do that? And I was like, have you met human beings? They make the worst decisions about things, especially about family. You’re still giving people opportunities that you wanna see them grow, and they’ll still let you down because that is human nature, right?

So I was like, even though the AI told me you should probably change that. I was like, no, I’m not going to change that, because that is a human thing, right? We’re not going to change that. That is actually a part of the story is understanding [00:29:00] when to keep your faith in people and when to cut them off, right?

So it was like, that’s part of the theme of the story. But I, as the human, I saw that and I said, nope, I’m not going to make that change. Because I know that is something that the AI is not necessarily understanding, because it’s not a human being. But it can see that, in the story, it might have made sense to not give the brother access to all the financial records, but that is not what happened.

So I love the fact that there’s plenty of room in there to see the things that maybe an outsider or an outside AI would see and know that yeah, that might have been a problem, but I’m banking on human nature here, and I’m not going to change that. So I’m sure Danica got something probably fairly similar in her report about hers.

Danica Favorite: I did. I did. And it’s interesting that you say that, because I had two interesting experiences with that. One of them is, so there was a [00:30:00] scene where these boys came in and did some vandalizing and that was like part of the situation in the book, and the AI rightfully pointed out, hey, the boys thing seems random.

Like you should add a scene somewhere else to foreshadow it or make it more plausible that these boys came and vandalized this thing. And I was like, oh, yeah, that actually makes sense. But then another one where it said, hey, to increase the conflict in the story, what you should actually do is, and I forgot what the, oh, it was like you should bring in the ex to stir up trouble.

And I’m like, yeah, dude, that is so cliche. Not gonna happen, but thank you for that suggestion. And so, I think as Steph and I always talk about, it is always one of those things that you as the author always are in the driver’s seat, and you get to use your judgment and discretion.

Because like for [00:31:00] me, I absolutely agree, yes, I need to do a better job of at least making these boys come in and do this thing not as random and have a little foreshadowing there. However, there’s no way I am going to have the ex come, because it is really this cliche. I know it works in some people’s stories, but like for me, that just was completely, to throw that in my story would’ve been like just forcing a conflict that didn’t need to be there.

I think it really is cool that it gives options. And there was another place where it gave me like four or five different options of scenes and ideas I could include. Which again, for me, since I’m taking this novella and turning it into a full length novel, that was really useful.

‘Cause I’m like, oh, it could use some scenes here. Oh, you’re right. These are things I can use. And as always, we point this out all the time, and I can never underscore this enough, that you are in the [00:32:00] driver’s seat. And honestly, even if you’re using a human editor, you’re in the driver’s seat.

I have novella coming out. Actually by the time this comes out, it will be out and part of a collection. But, the editor sent back to me with the edits, and she took out a bunch of my em dashes. You know what I said? Bite me. No. I didn’t say that, but I did take out half of them.

I took out half of them, but I left some of them in because, I wrote it. I’m putting the em dash in. Leave me alone. Those are mine.

Steph Pajonas: Those are your m dashes and you’re keeping them forever.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, like I really, like I said, I was really impressed with the fact that the AI, this was probably one of the better developmental edits that I’ve had, even comparing to like some of the humans that I’ve had do some developmental edits. So again, if you’re a developmental editor, you don’t have to like fear for your job, because some people will still want it to be done by human and that’s great, but for those people who want that developmental edit, I thought it did a really nice job. [00:33:00] And I also thought it was very reasonably priced. So I…

J.D. Lasica: We just brought down the price by a third a couple weeks ago, right? So it’s only $19.95 a month now for Marlowe Pro. We wanted to make this accessible to as many authors as possible around the globe.

And with Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT around the same price point we thought, let’s just move into that, that, that pricing space. And I use both, I’m, in fact I use all three. We’ll talk about that later. But we think there are so many things you can get out of a Marlowe report that you really can’t get out of ChatGPT.

And believe me, I’ve tried over the months to do an entire developmental edited edit with a with one of the large language models. And it does a fairly good job with some things, and it does a terrible job with other things. So we’re we’ve done everything from the ground up of trying to understand what it is that an author needs feedback on, in, in what areas, from conflict, to pacing, to character, to story [00:34:00] elements, to plot, and everything else.

And then just went out there and got like all the best kind of authoritative sources that we could find to bake into the product, you know, the, the major takeaways, and trained Marlowe on that as well. And I think, like you said, it doesn’t always come up with the right recommendations and we don’t want all, we don’t want AI to be writing our next book that we’re gonna read anyway, but it’s got a lot of really great useful feedback that most people, I think once they run one report, they’re gonna mostly be blown away, if, if they’re novels any good, let’s put it that way.

Alessandra Torre: And I also some common questions we get. Marlowe only works in English, at least right now.

Marlowe is trained on fiction. Doesn’t mean that we don’t have a lot of authors running nonfiction books through it, because authors will try anything. But the really, the sections, the pacing, everything is really set. You’re doing a disservice if you’re not using a fiction book. The other thing that we have a lot of authors that have a partially completed manuscript, and I will [00:35:00] say as someone with unfettered access to Marlowe and who has, tested it I, I get too anxious.

Like I need to have feedback as I’m writing. So I upload partially completed manuscripts to Marlowe all the time. And it’s still really helpful feedback. It’ll be critical, but, and it’ll say oh, you should explain that. Things that I’m going to do in the second half of the book anyways. There’s a section of like unresolved plot threads or plot holes and it, that section’s really full because, my book is half complete, but but if you’re listening, you absolutely can run a partially completed manuscript.

There are certain things like where it shows like. Your book’s journey and the highs and lows in your plot arc shape, that isn’t gonna be accurate because it thinks that you gave it an entire manuscript. But as long as you take that sort of thing with a grain of salt, it can still be really helpful for you.

And like we said, it’s a great way, whether you’re working with a human editor or not, to polish up your book and really knock out some of the major problems before it gets to that [00:36:00] stage.

J.D. Lasica: And we have two different modes by the way, debut author and experience author modes and the experience one we try not to go over sort of the things people have learned over the years.

I wish I had Marlowe when I was starting out writing novels, in like 2018, I think it was. Instead of having to read 20 different books on how to write a novel, it’d be so cool to just have this tool in your hands that actually explains and guides you along the journey, explains all the, you know, I never knew what the hell an inciting incident was or a midpoint shift or all the things that are now part and parcel of what do you have to know to write a successful page turner.

But we baked all that into the product and people could take away whatever they want from it.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. What I think is really good about this, that I was thinking about as you guys were all talking and using all of these different models and all the different books and how to writing and, and this is where I think it is useful, even if you are using a human developmental editor, is going back to this [00:37:00] character… I’ve had developmental editors tell me I don’t connect with this character, but I don’t know why. And I get that feedback a lot, particularly about my men, and go figure. But it’s really interesting because I’ve written like at least 30 books now by this point.

And uh, I’ll often get the feedback from humans, I don’t know why I don’t connect with the character, but I don’t. And what I liked about Marlowe is because it’s not a human and it doesn’t connect to those human emotions. And like we as humans say, I feel this, but I don’t know why. The AI has actual, these are the qualities of a good character, blah, blah, blah.

And it can go and give you actually objective, actionable items that as a human, we just have the feeling. But the LLM is no, here are actually the standards. And I thought that was really useful. And that’s something for people to keep in mind if I know something’s off, but I don’t know what it [00:38:00] is.

I think this is where AI can really shine, because AI doesn’t have a feeling something’s off. They know exactly what’s off.

Steph Pajonas: I love that because sometimes you just need that data, and it needs to be not passionate. It needs to not have feelings to it. It just needs to present data. And this is what I love AI for really.

Because I just, sometimes I just want an answer. I don’t want feelings.

Feelings are…

Alessandra Torre: And you don’t want

Steph Pajonas: tough.

Alessandra Torre: Yeah. We all come into a book with biases,

Steph Pajonas: Yes.

Alessandra Torre: I like certain types of books. Everyone likes certain types of books and doesn’t like certain types of books. And even like, me and J.D. could both like, you know, I don’t know uh, action thrillers, but we’re gonna be drawn to different types of main characters and situations.

And there are so many readers that don’t like to read about certain things, or that have had events happen in the past that caused them to be biased in some way. So it’s why you don’t want your early beta readers, when we all have no money, we don’t have anyone to hire, and it’s your like, great Aunt [00:39:00] Susie and she’s like, this book has way too much sex.

Versus, another reader who’s gimme more. That’s what is nice about… Marlowe doesn’t have a favorite genre. Marlowe knows all genres and what works for that genre specifically, which is really nice.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, it’s a data comparison, not a feeling comparison. So I think that’s really important.

J.D. Lasica: And by the way, it took us like 14 months to develop this. We have developers in Sri Lanka and Bozeman, Montana, believe it or not, working together on, on all.

Alessandra Torre: Yeah. We have a lot of Bozeman actually.

J.D. Lasica: It took, yeah, it took a long time to put this together, but also give us time to figure out like the right wording here and there.

If instead of having a section on screw-ups right, it’s points of concern things like that. We’re trying to be as diplomatic as possible and encouraging and holding the hand of beginning authors as much as possible.

Danica Favorite: I think that’s really useful and it’s a great tool. So let’s talk about, I know J.D. you said you’ve got a couple of favorite AI tools out there. So what are some of the other AI tools you guys [00:40:00] like? I, like I said, I think I’m definitely a fan of Marlowe. I have a few more books I’m definitely gonna be running through it. I appreciate that.

And I would love to hear are there other AI tools that you guys use or recommend or really enjoy with your process? I know J.D. you said you do a couple of things besides Marlowe with some of those developmental edits for your own work.

J.D. Lasica: I’ll mention a couple quick things. They’re probably familiar to some of them, maybe not all of your listeners.

One is certainly, I’ve used Gemini. I’ve used ChatGPT. I’ve used Claude. I still like Claude best for writing and for editing and for pointing out things, outlining, scene prompts, ideas like that. And so that’s part and parcel. It took me like a year and a half to write my first novel.

My last novel using AI took me 80 days. And I know people who write much, much faster that than that, in your authors group, I see authors all the time, like whipping out a book or two a week, right? I’m not gonna be doing that. But it’s nice that you can get that kind of progress now with using [00:41:00] AI. In addition to the craft of improving your novel running.

I also use Eleven Labs. So I’ve got three of my books up on there already, and I’m looking forward to the new Publish Drive integration. We’ll get that going. I use Otter whenever I go out. A few years ago, actually, I used to live in Silicon Valley, before I moved to Puerto Rico. And I actually visited the offices of Otter in Silicon Valley and got to meet the founders.

And it’s really cool. It’s still one of these best transcription apps on your phone that you can just walk around on the beach with scene ideas, or the next scene in your novel, and start transcribing. I know you do the same thing Danica. And the last thing is visual imagery.

I’m using AI all the time now. Freepik and Ideogram of my two favorite tools for that to create images for marketing for social media. I haven’t done it yet for book covers. I know people who do that as well. But we’re gonna be seeing more and more of that kind of, [00:42:00] end-to-end kind of thing, using AI to help you get that book out there into the hands of readers.

Alessandra Torre: And for me, I’m not nearly, as diverse as J.D. in terms of the usage. I use ChatGPT for almost all of, I use it pretty consistently when I’m writing because I don’t, if I open the internet browser, like my productivity’s shot, like I’m gonna be looking at cat videos and sending them to my next door neighbor and, and nothing else is gonna happen for the rest of the day.

But ChatGPT I can stay in that window, and I’m not, I don’t have any distractions. I don’t have any popups. And a lot of times it’s just oh, like character names. Like I, I’ll just sit there forever trying to think of a character name. So I’ll ask it for 10 character names, that are X, Y, Z, or I need, five outfits that, you know, a busy mom in California in February would wear or that sort of thing. Just things that like cause a mental stutter in my head that throws me off my game. [00:43:00] Or, what would the landscaping be? I write a lot of books in California, and I don’t live in California. I live in the Florida Keys.

So a lot of times I’ll be like, what’s blooming in April in Pasadena, and that sort of thing. Or what would like a walk through x, y, z forest smell like in February? W hat’s the average rainfall? That sort of thing. So I use it a lot for that. And then I will typically upload my outline and get taglines, blurbs, that sort of thing, hooks. I also have used Author Scale a little bit. It’s not great for thriller books. I think it’s better for romances, but it still allows me to look at my book in a different way and come up with potential hooks for social media.

Steph Pajonas: These are all great uses of AI. You found your pain points, which is what I always talk about on this podcast.

Found your pain points, found the things that are causing you, pain in your process, and then you used AI to help alleviate that. And that is something that I always advocate for. So I love that. I’ve also used Author Scale as well, so I do [00:44:00] agree that I think it’s much better at romance than it is at some of the other genres.

I agree. Yeah.

Alessandra Torre: And I have to say, J.D. mentioned Otter, and recently I was listening to another author speak on productivity, and she was saying that she dictates like into a voice memo app or something, uses Otter to transcribe it, and then she uses ChatGPT to clean up the dictation or to add like the capitalization, to remove the, the ums, the whatever.

And I was like, oh. duh.

Why haven’t I done that? Always capitalize any proper nouns, that sort of thing. So…

Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely my process as well because I just, I’m like, yeah, I’ve been dictating for years, and that manual process really took out a lot of my writing time.

So now that ChatGPT can clean it up for me, it’s perfect. And I learned something new. I got a new cool idea that I thought was great, because what you were saying Alessandra about asking what people would wear. I am terrible at that. I [00:45:00] am like you guys can’t really see I’m basically like in t-shirt and sweats right now, because that’s the Danica uniform.

I never know what to wear, and I don’t care what people wear, but I know that charact like characters, my readers care. So now that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna put stuff in ChatGPT and be like, okay, what should they wear? So that is a new, cool thing I’m really excited to try now. So thank you for that tip.

Alessandra Torre: Yeah, I did I do like a paragraph. Like this characters personality, they like this sort of thing. This is their job, this is their style. Or I say they don’t care anything about what they wear, but they’re trying to like, look cool in the kids’ pickup line or whatever. And then I’m like, can you give me looking at all of the typical occasions that a stay-at-home mom would go to, please list the occasions and, three outfit choices for each, and how what the socioeconomic level of this person is.

And then it’ll be like, PTO meeting, like grocery shopping, whatever. I don’t know, but it’ll list it all out there for me, and that’s great.

Steph Pajonas: That’s an [00:46:00] amazing time saver. I love that tip. We’re definitely put that one in the notes for sure.

Danica Favorite: Yes, yes.

J.D. Lasica: I know we’re wrapping up soon, and we’ve been on for a while. Alessandra, do you want, we have a little surprise for your listeners. For those who’ve stuck around till the end.

Alessandra Torre: Yeah, we just wanted to, yeah, we wanna extend a discount code for Marlowe to your to your listeners. It’ll be 25% off any purchase. So if you just wanna get a single report, you can, if you wanna sign up for a monthly, which you can cancel at any time, you can, or you can do the annual plan so that that code will be in the show notes.

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. Thank you so much. I am looking forward to putting that out there and hopefully you can get some more people in who can try out the tool. I am excited about that. Yay. Thank you so much.

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: Yes. So we are wrapping up. I wanna make sure that we send everybody to the proper places, right?

So let’s have either Alessandra or J.D. tell us about your URLs and where to send people.

Alessandra Torre: Absolutely. You can check out Marlowe Pro, you’ll see [00:47:00] Marlowe Basic, which is free, and you can run a free report on your manuscript. But Marlowe Pro has all of the bells and whistles that we talked about today at Authors.ai.

And the coupon code if you wanna save 25%, is BRAVE25. I don’t believe it’s case sensitive, but you might wanna put it in all caps just to be safe. So BRAVE25, and again, that’ll be in the show notes and you can again, visit Authors.ai to begin.

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. Thank you so much. I appreciate the links and the coupon code, ’cause I’m sure people who are listening will just wanna open up their phone and get to it right away, right?

J.D. Lasica: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: Alright, so good. Danica, do you have anything you wanna tell us before we wrap up here?

Danica Favorite: Yeah, like I said, thank you guys for coming. I’m very excited about this tool. Very excited about the coupon code, because guess who has a bunch of stuff she wants to run through Marlowe now.

But please do check out all of the links and everything mentioned in the show notes. Lot of great information and tips [00:48:00] there. Remember to like and follow us on all the social media Brave New Bookshelf, Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press, and of course Publish Drive. All those fun things.

Make sure you are subscribing to the newsletter. I know Steph has that running up again. And also remember for those of you who wanna listen to it on your favorite podcast channel, you can subscribe there. And finally you can watch us on YouTube. So if you wanna see how cute everyone looks today and be very jealous of J.D. and his amazing tropical landscape, it’s not AI, it’s real, and y ou wanna go watch us on YouTube.

J.D. Lasica: That’s right. The other, the last thing to mention is we’re also authors. So you can find us on our author sites, right? So jdlasica.com to see all of my hightech thrillers and Alessandra?

Alessandra Torre: And artorrebooks.com is my domestic suspense or alessandratorre.com for romance.[00:49:00]

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. Thank you so much, both of you for coming and talking to us about Marlowe and all the cool stuff you’re doing. For everybody who’s listening, as Danika said like and subscribe. Find us at bravenewbookshelf.com. Come check out the show notes for this episode. We’ll be sure to put all the links and the coupon code in there for you all.

And so until next time, we are gonna say goodbye, and we’ll see you in the next episode. Okay, bye.

Danica Favorite: Bye.

Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.

Episode 54 – Unlocking Bestseller Potential: Alessandra Torre and JD Lasica on Authors AI & Marlowe