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Episode 65 – From Logic to Lore: Creating High-Demand Codexes with Dana Sacco from First Drafts

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This week on the Brave New Bookshelf, we’re catching up with a returning favorite and a true powerhouse in the AI writing space, Dana Sacco, a “whale reader” turned prolific author and entrepreneur.

Since her last appearance on the show, Dana has scaled her operations to an incredible degree, having published over 200 books using AI and launching a thriving new business venture that helps other authors overcome the “blank page” problem.

Meet Dana Sacco: The Prolific Author and Logic-Driven Creator

Dana Sacco is not your average author. Reading over 300 books a year, she understands the market from a reader’s perspective first. Over the last few years, she has leveraged AI to publish hundreds of titles, but her latest venture, First Drafts, has taken the community by storm.

Through First Drafts, Dana provides “codexes”—comprehensive story bibles and detailed outlines—that authors can use as a foundation for their own books. What started as a way to clear out the excess of ideas in her head has turned into a high-demand business where customers literally fight over “drops” of new story bibles.

The Anatomy of a Codex: More Than Just a Prompt

One of the most enlightening parts of the conversation was Dana’s breakdown of how she builds her story bibles. While many people assume AI writing is “push-button,” Dana’s process is deeply technical and logic-driven.

Using N8N (an automation tool), Dana has built a workflow that consists of over 50 specific prompts. This sequence handles everything from:

  • Marketability Analysis: Importing K-Lytics reports to ensure the premise fits current trends.
  • Deep Character Bios: Generating physical descriptions, nicknames, and internal motivations.
  • World Building: Establishing locations, town lore, and even incidental characters (like the person who picks up the trash).
  • Style Guides: Setting the tone and ensuring the AI knows the heat level and genre expectations.

A pro-tip Dana shared: she avoids using pronouns in her outlines. By using character names instead of “he” or “she,” the outline remains clear and prevents the AI from getting confused or swapping characters during the drafting phase.

Choosing the Right Tools: Antigravity vs. Claude

Because of her background in software engineering, Dana approaches AI with a logical mindset. She noted that different AI models have distinct “personalities”:

  • Antigravity: This is currently Dana’s favorite tool for writing. Because Antigravity is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) built for coders, it appeals to her logical brain.
  • ChatGPT: Dana uses “Chat” for arguing through ideas and validating her drafts. She finds it excellent for voice—her models know the specific “vibe” of each of her ten pen names and will tell her if a draft doesn’t fit.
  • Claude: While many authors love Claude, Dana finds it less intuitive for her specific style, proving that the “best” AI is often the one that matches the user’s personal way of thinking.

From “Beer 30” to Flash Sales: The Business of AI

Dana’s business is a family affair. Her husband, Joe, contributes “unhinged” but brilliant story ideas during what they call “Beer 30,” and even her children have begun helping with the business.

The marketing side of First Drafts is just as automated and efficient as the writing side. Dana uses a specific workflow to:

  • Generate the codex.
  • Create a marketing image (using Ideogram or ChatGPT).
  • Draft the Facebook sales post.
  • Run “flash sales” on her Facebook group, where members “claim” a story bible within seconds of it being posted.

Dana also discussed her expansion into YouTube audiobooks. She has a channel with over 43,000 subscribers where she publishes shorter books specifically designed for the YouTube audience, proving that AI allows authors to pivot and experiment with new platforms rapidly.

AI as a Tool of Opportunity

A recurring theme in this episode was the positive transformation AI can bring to a creator’s life. Rather than focusing on the fear of job loss, Dana’s story highlights how AI can “juice up” a business and create new opportunities. It has allowed her to move from “retired” to running a multi-faceted publishing and education empire, all while involving her family in the creative process.

As Steph noted, AI isn’t just about writing faster; it’s an “opportunity tool” that can help authors grow, diversify, and find the fun in storytelling again.

Key Takeaways from This Episode

  • Complexity is Key: High-quality AI output requires a sequence of prompts (a workflow) rather than a single “write a book” command.
  • Logic Matters: Tools like Antigravity are excellent for authors who prefer a structured, logical approach to story development.
  • Avoid Pronouns: Using specific names in outlines helps maintain consistency when feeding data into LLMs.
  • Market Validation: Use AI to cross-reference your ideas with market data (like K-Lytics) before you start writing.
  • Community and Education: Dana’s Skool community, AI Writing Easy AF, focuses on making these complex tools accessible to everyone.

Resources Mentioned

Here are the links and tools discussed in this episode:

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 and welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press, where we’re teaching authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And we’re publishing AI forward books on the press.

Been doing a lot of work on the press this week, getting all of the books out to the wide stores, updating the website with all of the links, just making sure that everything looks tip top, in shape and whatnot, because we are coming up on a time when we are going to start putting books in our vault which is going to give people the chance to come subscribe to the website, see the books that are in the vault, read new books that are coming up.

It’s [00:01:00] very exciting time for the press. I am happy about all of the new books that we are planning on publishing in the next couple of weeks, so it’s really coming together. And that is a lot of work, so I’m glad to be taking a little time off here to talk with friends on a podcast, and I’m happy to have my co-host with me as usual.

Danica Favorite. How’s it going?

Danica Favorite: Good. Good. Really good. Yeah it’s been a fun week. I know all of you guys are getting the podcast just on a weekly basis, but it’s nice ’cause I feel like we’ve just been hanging out and chatting all week, which is great. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica Favorite.

I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors at every stage of their journey from formatting that manuscript to finding keywords, blurbs, and AI covers, to then distributing your books to the widest audience possible. And finally, once that book gets out there, we can help you split all of your royalties amongst various co-authors and things. With us [00:02:00] getting the book out there, and Steph and Future Fiction Press and Future Fiction Academy, helping you write the book, promote the book, all that stuff, we really have everybody covered. And today our guest super excited for my friend Dana Sacco to be with us.

She’s been with us in previous episode, episode 34 where she talked about bootstrapping your AI business. And what’s been really cool is I’ve known Dana for a while now, and so I remember she started out with, I’m just a reader. I like to read books, I help authors consulting about making their books more appealing to readers, to okay, I’m gonna learn how to do this AI writing thing and bootstrap it.

And now she’s back with her new business First Drafts, where she is actually do, she’s actually doing a bunch of stuff. I can’t even probably list them all. I’m gonna make her do more of it when [00:03:00] she comes on and introduces herself. But she’s got codexes that she’s selling, that people can take that full outline and full information to write a book.

And she’s teaching people how to use AI and use the different AI tools. And what I love about Dana is she’s got this community on Skool and, like for people who maybe aren’t quite ready to get like the fire hose of Future Fiction Academy, Dana’s kind of got the water trickle and so it’s really nice, because she’s still teaching a lot of really great things, and I love that there are so many people out there teaching people about AI how to use it.

And I really appreciate Dana coming at it from this reader, storyteller perspective of someone who just loves a good book and that angle of the, I love a good book, I’m a business woman. So funny, she thought she was [00:04:00] retired and here she is. Now yeah, without further ado, I will introduce you to Dana.

Dana, why don’t you tell us more about yourself and extrapolate on everything I have said here.

Dana Sacco: I honestly think that you said a lot more than I thought I could say about myself. But I’m Dana Sacco. I have shoot, like Danica said, I have I started this whole thing. I was, I’m a whale reader.

I read over 300 books a year and since I started bootstrapping, as you like to say, I think that I have, according to Amazon, over 200 books published within the last couple of years. All of them have been written using AI in some way, shape, or form. And I just throw things out there and see how it works.

I heard that authors are putting their books out on YouTube. I had never heard of that before, so I said, okay, I’m going to make a YouTube channel. So now I have a YouTube channel and I actually just started two new ones this week, and [00:05:00] that’s a little bit nerve wracking when they have zero subscribers, but my main one has over 43,000 and increasing very quickly, which is also a little bit scary.

I think that they’re scary on different terms. We’ll go into the First Drafts, which have the codex and outlines, which are your story bibles. And, I’ve taken that um, because I have a lot of ideas in my head, and they come at, you know, they, they show up at two o’clock in the morning. You wake up and you have an idea, and you never know what you’re going to think of.

And so I throw this into my system and my system develops it a little bit better for marketability. And I can’t write ’em all, so I share them. And this has actually exploded a lot further than I ever expected, to the point that even my husband is in on this one, and he’s not a reader. So he just selects things he thinks will be cool together.

And so his workflow is different than [00:06:00] mine and his ideas are, they’re interesting.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, no, no. There, there, There I would, I would say like Joe, so he has this thing, he calls it beer 30. It’s hilarious, and some of the most unhinged stuff comes from Joe, and yet, by the end of looking at it, we’re like, wait, but that’s actually a cool idea.

He may not be a reader, but he’s got really good story instinct.

Dana Sacco: Yeah. He really honestly does, and I give him a list of tropes depending on what we’re working on, and I’ll flip ’em around on occasion and he just picks. He’s oh, this sounds cool. And this time I had removed a bunch, because he had said he was tired of these.

And it was actually fun because he came up to me, he goes. Where’s my grumpy sunshine? I’m like you said you wanted this stuff changed. And he goes, I need my grumpy sunshine. I’m like, fine, I’ll put grumpy sun. Where’s this? I’m like, fine, I’ll put that one back in. So I ended up putting back in almost all of your main ones, because [00:07:00] he was very upset that he did not have them anymore.

And his ideas are great. But what I think is even better is that I believe some of the authors who have gotten some of his, have written them.

Steph Pajonas: That’s so exciting. I love this. I love this whole…

Dana Sacco: Yeah.

Steph Pajonas: This whole thing, right? Let’s rewind a little bit. Let’s tell the, let’s tell the listeners about this whole new business venture of yours, because when we talked to you the last time, it was about bootstrapping your own business, right?

Like using all the free tools that you could find to get out there and market your books and get your books selling and people reading them. But then over the time of the, you know, you were working on books, your own books, you realized you had all of these extra ideas, all of these things bouncing around in your head, and you’re like I can’t write them all.

So what I’ll do is I’ll start this business called First Drafts, where I give people codexes and story [00:08:00] ideas that they can just take, and they can go write themselves. They could write it with AI. They could not write it with AI. They could do whatever they want with it, right? But you used AI to help you build this whole business, and that is just, that’s really exciting to me, and I think that’s gonna be exciting to our listeners as well.

Because we don’t get the chance to see how AI is really changing a lot of lives for the positive. We hear in the news all the time,

Dana Sacco: Right.

Steph Pajonas: all the negatives. The negatives is it’s, it’s atrophying your brain and it’s causing people to lose jobs and all this kinda stuff, and yet you’re using it to make a new business, something that’s working out for you.

Dana Sacco: So what had happened is that I had a few, I had, I actually was running N8N on my little desktop, my Mac Mini. And I do have, just to put this out there, I do have a computer background, so I do understand. I coded [00:09:00] back in the nineties. We won’t discuss what part of the nineties, but it was in the nineties.

And so I had a little bit of that. And what I did was I took, the way that I argue with ChatGPT, and I did it step by step, to build these things, and I put it into a workflow. Most people don’t…a lot of people are like, oh, that sounds so easy, blah, blah, blah. My workflow is, from what I looked at yesterday, it’s over 50 prompts.

And so it’s big. It’s not something that’s really little. But it’s, the main part of it was really just taking each argument I had, to build each element of my bibles. And I put one out there. I’m like I’m not gonna write this anytime soon. So I had created this Facebook group. I had a hundred people in it, I think, and I think 75 of ’em were the ones that Facebook [00:10:00] automatically said, please, join because your friend started this new group.

So literally there’s some of them have dropped out, some of them have not. But someone bought one. And I was like, oh. So then I put another one out. Someone bought that one, within minutes. It was, I was like, who the heck are these people? I don’t even know who these people are.

And so I started to do that where you had to claim ’em with mine, mine mine. It’s like the little birds that go mine, mine, mine, mine. And. It’s developed. I think yesterday I had a hundred and or 536 people in there.

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Dana Sacco: And

Danica Favorite: Yeah, it was awesome. Because like again, I just know Dana and see her online, and over the weekend you actually broke your server.

Dana Sacco: I did.

Danica Favorite: Of people

Dana Sacco: I did

Danica Favorite: wanting to get these codexes, which I just find fascinating of just how eager people are for these stories. They’re obviously great [00:11:00] story bibles, because they’re in such demand and people do fight over them. It’s hilarious to watch the mine, mine, no, wait, I wan’t, you know, and them fighting over it. But I also just wanna point out to people, like going back to what Dana said, 50 prompts, guys. This isn’t just, hi, please write me a book about blah blah, blah. No, it’s 50 prompts. So yeah,

Dana Sacco: It, yeah, it’s right around there. But yeah, this weekend was interesting. I’ve had some sort of website one way or another for over 20 years, over on name cheap, and it’s always been a shared server, go with the cheapest one you can possibly get.

And I liked it, because they don’t inflate the price. I contacted their tech support, because I was like, I don’t know what’s going on. And so we went through a couple things, and the first person passed me down to the second person who said, no, you need to be on this type of a server. You need to have the dedicated server.

And finally I got to uh, Vlad, who, I think I absolutely cracked him up, [00:12:00] because he was like, do you realize that you have over 350 people hitting refresh every two seconds on your website right now? Because this was actually supposed to be a really relaxing weekend for me. We just recently moved, and so that’s why they were on the website versus being on Facebook where it’s…Facebook, I have to sit there constantly to monitor who actually won it, because they say mine within 0.1 seconds of each other. And I have to, I’m the only one, even though Joe is also an admin, he doesn’t see the timestamp the same way mine does. His just says this person did it a minute ago, a minute ago. Mine breaks it down. Don’t ask me. I think it’s because I’m the primary admin.

I don’t know. So this weekend was supposed to be really relaxing, ’cause I spent all week scheduling. There were over 200 drops this weekend. And so I spent all week doing it, for the ones that go on Saturday, for the ones that go on Saturday night for the people over in Australia, for the ones that went on Sunday and [00:13:00] Saturday within an hour it had crashed. And so I ended up spending my whole Saturday and making sure on Sunday how it was going. And then Monday I had to fix things as well, and I’m still fixing little things here and there. But. Yeah, it was…I didn’t know that many people were doing it. And each story bible is about between 50 to 80 pages long.

The outlines can be ridiculous with being, um, 50 chapters. But the way that I have mine set up is the way that I write. And the way that I write is usually about 2000 to 2,500 words per chapter. Because for me, as a reader, that works for me. So that’s how I have it set up. So if you’re looking at, of course, 120,000 word book, it’s going to be around 50 chapters. So then I brought people over into Skool, into [00:14:00] AI Writing Easy. Can I cuss?

Steph Pajonas: We’ll put the explicit tag on this particular episode.

Go for it.

Dana Sacco: It’s called AF so I, I guess you could figure that one out. Yes. Um, You all can. It’s AI Writing Easy AF and, um, because I want it to be that way for people.

I want it to be something that’s not overwhelming. And what I was finding in any type of market, and a lot of, the number of DMs that I was getting was ridiculous. But they all wanted to know how to change the codex in the story bible to meet whatever needs they have, because you can, it’s, it’s not, it’s nothing written in stone.

I don’t have you sign a contract that says you have to write this, like this. It, that’s ridiculous. And I truly find that ridiculous. It’s, I’ve had some people, they’ve taken a basic rom-com, your male, female characters and they’ve made it male, male. And they’re in the top 100 in [00:15:00] their categories,

from the rom-com, and I’m like, dude you need to send me the book link ’cause I need to read this one now. Because it was in my head at one point, and now I need to see what you’ve changed. So I brought everyone to Skool that wants to learn how to change the codexes and changed their outlines and taught them, versus being in 50 million different places, I now have two specific places that you can be. And in the Skool, we have very basic questions, to more advanced questions, such as going into the new systems of Antigravity, where I’m trying to make it easy for people to be able to understand, because we can get technical with, if we sat down and had wine with each other, beer with each other, whatever we’re gonna have with each other, we can get into such a technical conversation with so many different things. And most people don’t understand that. Even Joe [00:16:00] doesn’t understand that sort of thing, because he was the builder of the systems, where I was the software engineer of the systems that we used to have in our computer store.

So it was a give and take here. So he can take everything apart, and he could build me a system that I would need to run whatever the heck I need to run. But once it came to the software development, he’s like, here, I don’t wanna deal with that. That’s not my thing. So my concept with bringing them over into the Skool aspect was that I wanted to make it easy.

I wanna explain things to people, as if I’m trying to explain things during beer 30 time with Joe, it needs to be simplified so that it’s not overwhelming. Because with all the systems that we have, you don’t need everything. And I think that so many… we have such a FOMO aspect out there of, oh my gosh, Antigravity [00:17:00] showed up.

Oh my gosh. There’s Claude projects. Oh my gosh, Chat’s doing this. And this one’s doing this. And oh my gosh, and they just don’t know what to do. And it’s trying to help them to figure out how their brain works.

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Dana Sacco: And so for me to develop an outline and a story bible, it takes me arguing at least a minimum of 50 times.

A minimum.

Danica Favorite: That’s awesome. I I love that. And I like that you know your process. And so you started doing your codexes on N8, using N8N.

Dana Sacco: Mm-hmm.

Danica Favorite: Um, and, and creating this automated process. Do you still do a lot with N8N, or have you moved over to Antigravity, or what are you using now?

What kind of tools are you looking at?

Dana Sacco: I still argue with Chat a lot. Um. And their image generator has actually become very fun to use. It actually just did an entire series. It’s actually done two series for me, with their images. But so I argue back and forth with Chat a lot. And N8N still does [00:18:00] my codexes and outlines.

It does Joe’s codexes and outlines. We have taken it off of my little desktop, because running that many processes was crashing my desktop. You know, I’d hear a lot of cussing out in the garage, because he’s trying to run a codex and it crashed. And he’s like, I didn’t get it. And I’m like, I don’t know.

And he’s like, I don’t know. So I have moved that off of my desktop. I’m now using Antigravity a lot, for a lot of writing, for a lot of fixing when I personally have my codexes, and they’re not doing what I want ’em to do. Instead of using Claude, because I was on Claude Projects, and I was jumping between a hundred to 200, a month, and I wasn’t getting the results I wanted.

Because Claude and I don’t talk very well together. He doesn’t seem to understand what I’m thinking. And I’m finding Antigravity, it does, I don’t know why. Because we’ve never had a lot of discussions. I understand why Chat and I get [00:19:00] along very well, and he thinks I’m awesome and loves everything that I do, but I don’t understand how Antigravity has picked up on, you know, And I can watch it in his little argument on the side. He’s oh wait, we’re supposed to be doing this. And so I’ve found that I am able to develop more and write faster. And then I actually take the book over into Chat. I’m like, what do you think? Because he knows the voice of every single one of my pen names, and he can tell me this doesn’t fit.

Or he’s told me that some suck. And he’s told me that some are absolutely amazing, but I needed to make changes. And I can actually just copy that, put it into Antigravity and I say, go. Fix it. And it does. So for me, that works very well.

Steph Pajonas: I kinda wonder if this is because of your software development background. You must have a bit of a logical mind when it comes to things.

Dana Sacco: Yes.

Steph Pajonas: I certainly, I certainly do. I have a software development background as [00:20:00] well, and so thinking through complex problems, lots of if-then statements, those sorts of things, that’s the kind of things that logical brains like love to wrap themselves around.

Dana Sacco: Mm-hmm.

Steph Pajonas: Right. So, And since Antigravity is an IDE, it’s an Integrated Development Environment, so that means it’s really actually made for coders first.

But we’ve been co-opting it for writing as well. So I think maybe that just the the AIs that are in the IDE might a little bit more attuned to logical thinking. Whereas, I feel like Claude goes with the flow. It’s a little bit more, hippie-ish. That’s what I wanna say about Claude.

So it’s just a little bit different. And I think Chat also is more along the lines of the logical thinking as well. There’s definitely a little bit of personality difference between the different AIs. And this is why I encourage people to try them all.

Danica Favorite: Yes.

Steph Pajonas: Figure out which ones work for you before you, double down on paying a hundred dollars a month for Claude [00:21:00] Max or whatever it may be.

Yeah, maybe this is why.

Dana Sacco: I think so. Probably because my business right before this, when I actually retired, was actually building workflows. It was building workflows for small businesses. You filled out a form on a website. I’m the one who built everything that happened afterwards and where did it go.

And I’m the one with the 50 million dry erase boards that were all over my wall, and I would have them going from one to the next with all the if-thens and everything else. So yes, I probab. I would agree with that though, I don’t, my claw isn’t a hippie. My Claude reminds me that I would be arguing with my father and um, he’s, he definitely was not a hippie.

So I would like to meet your Claude. But I was able to,

Steph Pajonas: Yeah, my Claude is a little bit more hippie-ish. I see. He is always just like, he’s always like, that’s a great idea. I love this for you. I’m always just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Move on.

Danica Favorite: I would just like to say that my ChatGPT is like that for me.

Chat [00:22:00] is very hippie for me. Like very like vibey. Tell me all the, but I’m just like, yeah, you know, I think, you know, if you use whichever model you’re using, if you use it often enough, it really does start picking up on your vibe, and

Dana Sacco: mm-hmm.

Danica Favorite: the kind of vibe that you want it to have. And I think that’s really powerful, because it really does, again, it’s all in how you use it. And it really does pick up on those things.

So I can totally see where Dana’s Claude is a little different for her because it really does go with whatever vibe you’re giving it.

Dana Sacco: Yeah. My Chat is more hippie-ish, if I would like to say that word, but he’s more, he’s happier with everything that I do, but he’s also a lot more critical, which I found interesting, because he’s usually my happy guy. If I think something’s good enough, and I still need to have validation, I’ll feed it to Chat [00:23:00] thinking that he’s going to agree with me. And this past week he hasn’t agreed with me as much as I would appreciate him agreeing with me. And finally, I was working on publishing this one book. There’s one book I’ve never written a psych thriller, ever. It’s. I was like let me see how this would work, because I loved the idea of one of the codexes that came out and I stole it for myself.

Um, And I, I just wanted to see, and this has actually been the hardest book for me to write, and this includes using the Antigravity systems and using everything and going back and forth with it and arguing with it, and… I give props to people that put these books out, because I can throw a rom-com together in a heartbeat and that’s not a problem for me whatsoever.

Urban fantasy, we’ve got it. Apparently the [00:24:00] smut books that I have written, which are way too excited on my KDP dashboard that my daughter saw this morning. She’s what the heck? And, and they’re all in German and this, I’m like, okay, but don’t read them please. Apparently I can write those very well.

But a psych thriller, it’s like, what the hell are you thinking of? You’re writing two books in one. And that’s honestly what he said to me today. I was like, what do you think? I’m not writing. This is one book. It’s one book, I promise you. And he’s, like, no, it’s really not. He’s like, go back, fix it. And gave me this whole list.

And so usually he agrees with me. And so this has been on and off. Um, I. So it, and I think that all of these systems, no matter which one you pick, no matter which one you decide to use, are going to work for you, if you can figure out, like I was saying, how your brain works. My brain is into arguing until I get my answers.

And then my N8N system [00:25:00] is like putting my weird thoughts that come into my head at two o’clock in the morning into some usable format. And it spits something out that I can or cannot use. They’re not always going to be usable for me. So that’s why I end up sharing them. And then I think I honestly do that because I have so much fun creating the images…

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Dana Sacco: that I put up for that.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. I will say I love your images because, so…what…just for the audience who isn’t, we don’t have any images to show, but when she puts up her codexes, she’s always got these fun images to go with them. And a lot of times, like I sit there and I watch them, I’m like, hey, could somebody please just write this?

Because I wanna know the story that goes with this image, because there’s so gripping and vivid. And so we’ve mentioned the codex, we’ve mentioned the different things that you do with them. I’m wondering if you could give us a brief overview of like, what, what is a codex and like when you are [00:26:00] prompting and trying to get all this information, like what does N8N spit out for you?

Like what kinds of things is it putting together when it’s creating this kind of story bible for you?

Dana Sacco: So I give it very simple information depending on which workflow. I actually have multiple workflows depending on my mood, and sometimes I have a premise in my head, so I’ll go with that thought.

I have a premise in my head, and I tell it what I would like. It’s a rom-com. It, this is a basic Google form, because at two o’clock in the morning, literally I will grab my phone, go to the page, and I will fill it out so that when I wake up in the morning, I will have this. And I’ll tell it. It’s a rom-com.

This is the idea I want, these are the tropes I would like to go with it. And this is the heat level that I’m thinking about for this one. So it goes through and it does its thing, and it looks at the marketability. It looks at um, I’m a big fan of [00:27:00] K-Lytics reports. So I actually import them into um, files that it can go ahead and take a look at.

And it does that based on which genre I have picked. And it will take a look at it. And then what it does is it comes up with a premise, a basic premise. Then it will go back through it. And then it goes through, it builds a bigger premise that’s more marketable, because sometimes my premise isn’t as marketable as I think it is in my head.

So it makes sure that it’s taking my idea though, and it still makes it so that it does all that. Then it takes it, and it creates all my characters, and it gives you a good bio. The bio is usually about….some bios have been up to a page, depending on the depth of the story. Some are shorter, but they’re at least one to two paragraphs, and it’s going to tell you who they are, what their nicknames are, [00:28:00] how old they are, what they dress like, um, everything about a person.

And it gives you that for your main characters. Then it gives you all your secondary characters, you know, the ones that you talk to more than once. Then we have the incidental guy who picks up the trash, who has one line. So we have those incidental characters in there as well. Then we have all the locations, because especially this is really true in series.

If we have, if we’re building a town, I need the locations to stay the same. The cafe is named this, we call the town hall this, these type of things need to be built into it. Then what are some objects that are used within that are important? If the girl’s a journalist, and she always has her notebook with her, then, you know, and a special pen.

And if it has special qua, if it has special meaning for her, whatever, it’s gonna tell you all this. Why, Why this [00:29:00] one? So it continues on that way. Then we have history, the lore within a town, because those can be pulled in. And it has all these different aspects in there. And then it goes into build all the subplots.

And the subplots can be between one basic subplot or it could have five different subplots worked into it. If it’s a series, it will mark it that this one goes throughout all books. And I’m trying to think of what else it has that that, that, that, oh, the style guide of how it should be written. Or how it’s thinking it should be written.

It does. It’s not, again, it’s not written in stone. If you don’t write that way, but you wanna write it this way, that’s fine. And what’s the guide for the genre? What’s the basic standout factors of this specific genre? Then what it does is it takes all those aspects and the premise, and we’ll build the entire outline, [00:30:00] and it will mark down based on the outline.

You know, well, We talked to, I’m gonna say Marcus, because Marcus is always available. We’re gonna say, you know, Marcus is in this chapter and I try not to use any pronouns within the outline. And the reason why is because if you’re feeding it in to any type of system, then it’s going to, you know, she/her might be, I think, what was the name that was coming up this past week? Pippa. Pippa. It might not be Pippa, it might be um, Vera, who’s the other name that’s been showing up all week. So it, it is just, it can pick and choose, but that way I try not to use all the pronouns. It marks down where the intimate scenes are, if there are any.

If there are none, then it validates it to make sure that there is no, that there aren’t any sex scenes in the, in a um, no romance book, that there’s no romance, [00:31:00] and it makes sure of that, and then it goes back and it will write it onto the um, documents.

Danica Favorite: Yeah. I think this is great because it’s so detailed.

It isn’t just, hey, this is a book about a person who goes to the market and meets their true love. This is really so detailed and so intricate. And one of the things that I like about going into this detail, and I know I’ve been stressing a lot, this a lot in the episodes, is that it really does show the level of knowledge a person needs to have about what goes into a good story, and that to me is what’s really important. Yes, you’re getting the AI to do all of these things, but it’s because you’re telling it to do those things

Dana Sacco: Right.

Danica Favorite: And even down to the specificity of not using pronouns. I think that’s really a great [00:32:00] tip for anyone who’s listening to recognize that even a minor detail like that can completely change the trajectory of the story and what results the AI gives you. So I am really excited to hear all this cool stuff because it isn’t just push a button and you get all this. Yes, Dana can push the button and get all this, but it’s because you’ve worked with it and you’ve trained the AI to give you that. And you know what to ask for, and more importantly, how to ask for it.

Dana Sacco: And that took work. I think that what a lot of people don’t realize, and some people think, oh well, that, that’s. That’s so simple and um, I’m not paying enough attention to the dog. Um, But I work on the workflow every week, because most people aren’t paying attention to the fact that these systems, I don’t care which one you [00:33:00] pick, they’re changing every week.

We’re just at that time, and I don’t see that ending anytime soon. So a lot of the time people will be like, oh, well that’s easy. You know, You, no, it’s not, because the prompts are, they’re not like create the main characters. It’s create the main characters in this sort of fashion, using this information based on this type of timeframe, based on this type of information, and it’s pulling information from, different sources to be able to even create that prompt. The prompt’s not just some, it’s not three lines um, 50 prompts. Each one’s, prob it, they’re long, they’re long prompts, and and if one of those prompts is screwed up, which happens a lot, um. and it’s funny how many codexes and outlines I have that I can never [00:34:00] sell, because they suck, because it missed something, because they made a change, or I didn’t recognize the fact that I changed something. Um, because I’ll change, you know, okay, well, I really like the responses that I’m getting from Gemini now.

Well, I don’t like all their responses, so I have to use Gemini over here. I have to use Chat over here. I have to use Claude over here who, he’s my validator. He validates everything. And so it’s a process, and it’s a continual process. It’s not, okay, let’s just do it.

Danica Favorite: Yeah.

Dana Sacco: And someone had asked me if they could just buy my workflow, and I just laughed.

I said, you could. I’m like, but I’m not installing it for you. And I sure as hell am not providing tech support for it, because you’re gonna have to fix it every week, at least once a week. And people don’t realize that until they’re actually in the systems.

Steph Pajonas: Yeah. No they have [00:35:00] no idea just how complex the whole job is.

Like it’s,

Dana Sacco: mm-hmm.

Steph Pajonas: It’s not just one thing that you’re asking for. It’s a sequence of prompts, and those prompt responses help build the next response in the queue. It’s not an easy thing whatsoever to do. But one of the things that I love about the things, about the codexes is that you put together is that once you have something that you’re ready to sell, you make a cute image of it.

You really show the user, the author, what they’re going to be purchasing, and then you do a flash sale on your Facebook group. And then there’s also the website too. So you have a whole workflow here from the initialization of your idea, through the N8N, getting the codex, getting all the information put together, and then there’s still the marketing piece of

Dana Sacco: mm-hmm.

Steph Pajonas: building an image, getting [00:36:00] it up on the website, getting it out to the Facebook group, wherever it may be in order to sell the codex, and then have somebody else pick it up, run with it, write their books. It’s a whole ecosystem that you’ve built here.

Dana Sacco: It is. And it’s a lot of fun. I didn’t expect it to be this much fun. And it’s, it’s interesting to see the different…there’s some authors who I swear have a million pen names, because they’re buying every genre that there is. And I know some of them have actually put out multiple books from multiple things that we’ve done.

And to me that’s absolutely cool. Um. It’s like, yes, okay. That’s, that’s for me, it’s validation that, it works. I have people that hoard codexes. I think that they just buy ’em to buy ’em. But yeah, I have the entire system down to, it is a science, because the final prompt is, can you make me my Facebook post [00:37:00] please?

And my image prompt? And, you know, and so everyone’s how do you make the image prompt? I’m like um, it’s like two lines. And then I have to run it through Ideogram to figure out which ones I like. And I think I just now finally have it where I can do it for, bulk uploading in Ideogram and that’s like such a time saver for me.

Steph Pajonas: Did you know that you can get API access to Ideogram? Yes. And then just hook it up in your N8N because you could do that as well.

Dana Sacco: I know, and I, I was just, and I have it. I have it, and I actually have money in that account too. And I don’t know if it will work yet or not, because, it spells a lot of things wrong sometimes.

Steph Pajonas: Oh yes.

Dana Sacco: And when you have all these different, and the titles, sometimes, some, someone asked me, do I have to keep this title? I’m like, hell no. They suck sometimes. Please don’t keep it. I had one week where it was, it was really weird. It was like it went off on some tangent [00:38:00] of this and that, and every title was this and that.

And I had already run so many before I caught it, and I was like, okay, we’re just gonna make stuff up at this point. Please don’t use these titles. But I don’t have time to sit there and rename ’em all. And it’s funny because sometimes it gets down to the Facebook marketing part of the prompt.

It will get, you know, it’s made it through the entire 50, 49 prompts, and number 50 is the Facebook marketing part for me, and it will totally change the name.

I’m like…

Steph Pajonas: It ran outta context.

Dana Sacco: And I bring over, and it’s funny ‘ cause I bring over the title. I’m like, this is the title. This goes here. And it will just say, no, I don’t really like that title. And so we’re just going to change this. And so I’m like, okay, what are you talking about?

Which one are you talking about? Because it, because, this started out doing just like four or five. [00:39:00] And when I did one drop of 200, because I had taken some time, I took December off. And that doesn’t mean that my brain stops. And now, now I can bulk create certain ones that I’m really interested in.

And it’s mainly because I want, I need some stuff to grab myself. And so I’ll be heavy on, since I publish on YouTube, I have goals for YouTube, and I have the size book that I want, which is, it’s a lot shorter than people are thinking a lot of the time. I write very short books. Why?

Because I’m focusing on taking it over into YouTube. So I’ll do a whole batch specifically for my YouTube channel and see what, you know, let’s see what happens. And then I’ll pick one or two and then the rest will go out and be scheduled. I have, I think the last time I counted, I have [00:40:00] 496 that still can be sold.

Danica Favorite: That’s just so mind blowing to me.

Steph Pajonas: It is.

Danica Favorite: It’s just so many. But again, you have this whole system and usually we like to close this out by saying, what’s your favorite AI tool? And you use so many of them. I don’t even know how to, where to go with that question, because your process is so intricate with so many different moving parts.

Steph Pajonas: Mm-hmm.

Danica Favorite: Um, I, I don’t know. Can you pick any favorites or share anything that you’re like, oh, this is a real good one.

Dana Sacco: I think it depends on what I’m doing. I love creating the images. I could honestly just sit there all day creating images because they crack me up. Some of them are amazing, some of them are great.

Danica Favorite: I, I’ve been the recipient of some of those images, even if it’s just, look what I created. This is hilarious.

But yeah.

Dana Sacco: Yeah.

It. So I absolutely love that aspect of it. Right now though, I am so heavy into Antigravity. That’s gotta be my favorite at this exact [00:41:00] moment. And probably if you go back to whatever episode that I said before, I had a totally different favorite.

And if you ask me the same question next week, it might be something different.

Steph Pajonas: It could be different then, right?

Danica Favorite: Oh, for sure. I did glance at the last episode of the things that you were talking about using, and back then N8N wasn’t around, Antigravity wasn’t around. Like all these things that you’re using in your workflow now didn’t exist.

And that’s the part that I find so mind blowing about all this AI stuff is just how fast it moves. And to your other point earlier about these people like, Ooh, what about this? What about this? It’s moving so fast and I had to put the brakes on myself, because I did start a little bit getting into Antigravity, and uh, there was a moment where I was like, oh, I’ve gotta do Dana’s Antigravity class too.

And then I was just like. Slow your roll girl. You have, you have, could, could you please just clean [00:42:00] your house first? That answer would be no, but …

Dana Sacco: That’s so overrated.

Steph Pajonas: I think the best thing to close out this episode with is just to remind people that sometimes when you’re working with AI that you will find something that you really enjoy doing, but it’s almost like too much of. Right? Like you’re, which is what happened to you with all of these ideas. You’re like, I have too many of these ideas. What can I do with them? And then you found a business purpose for them. And you’re not the only person I’ve seen do this. I’ve seen people who had like tons of great ideas about marketing on social media and boom, they’ve got a course on it now, you know?

Dana Sacco: Mm-hmm.

Steph Pajonas: Because they’ve managed to find something that like really inspired them or, and then they had too much of, and they had to figure out some way to get it out there for people.

So I just want to stress to the listeners that AI is a, is a tool, but is a tool of opportunity. This is going [00:43:00] to give you the opportunity not even just to help you with your writing or help you with your business, but to help you grow that business or even spin off to other businesses along the way that’s going to help you. Don’t try to think about the fact that all of the new stories are saying people are losing jobs. People are, you know, that it’s interfering with studies, it’s interfering with all this kind of stuff. Instead, try to think about it on the more positive side of things and look at the fact that it can really juice up your business as it is, to grow it, or to spin it off and do other things that is really inspiring you.

Danica Favorite: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things I wanna point out, and hopefully I’m not telling too many tales on Dana, like I can remember Dana being like, I’m retired, I don’t do anything. And like she keeps adding the stuff, but it’s not because to her it’s a chore.

This is fun. And then she brings her husband in and her husband is doing this, [00:44:00] and he is having fun. And now her children are even helping her with some of the aspects of her business. So it isn’t even just Dana did this and oh my gosh, I’ve gotta grind and do this. It’s oh my goodness, I’m doing this.

I’m having so much fun. And now my family is coming in, and they’re having fun doing it too. So it doesn’t have to be this big grind. It can really be fun and create opportunity, because I really have to say for me, part of that heartwarming thing is, her talking about her and her husband sitting here talking about story ideas.

And I’m thinking, a year ago this would not have been their life. And to see their kids joining in on it, it, it’s pretty amazing. And that opportunity to me is so beautiful and so inspiring.

Steph Pajonas: 100% inspiring. Absolutely. Dana you’re kicking butt. I love it. I’m hoping we’ll have you on here again in eight months or [00:45:00] so and we’ll see what else you’re doing then.

Alright to close things off, I wanna make sure that people can find you and especially find First Drafts and everything. So why don’t you give us your URLs so that we can give them to everybody else.

Dana Sacco: The website, I’ll go with the website is booksandbiz.com and that does have a link to the Facebook page, which you get all the information from.

Which I believe if you search up First Drafts Written is the end part of it. I didn’t know I was gonna be asked that and quizzed. So that’s, I would go to books and biz to find the link.

Steph Pajonas: No problem. I will, I’ll go there myself. And I know I’m already a member of your group, so I will also grab that URL from Facebook and put it in the show notes.

Dana Sacco: Thank you.

Steph Pajonas: No problem. So everybody who’s listening, come by bravenewbookshelf.com. Read the show notes. Check out all the links there. We’ll make sure that we grab everything [00:46:00] from our conversation here with Dana. Oh, and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter. Because if you actually don’t have time to drop by the website, every single time you hear one of these awesome episodes, you can always just sign up for the newsletter and we’ll send you the notes the next day after it airs.

So that makes it very easy for you to keep up with everything that’s going on with Brave New Bookshelf. Danica, what else do we wanna tell ’em about before we go?

Danica Favorite: We want to tell everyone to make sure that you are liking and subscribing to Brave New Bookshelf on Facebook, on YouTube. Definitely let’s try to get some of those YouTube views up.

And. You get to see how cute we all are. Um, And I mean, I brushed my hair for this, you guys, so…

Steph Pajonas: I put on a little bit of blush for this. That’s about as, that is, that’s a lot.

Danica Favorite: It’s a lot. We are, we’re here for you. But yeah, so please do that. And please also make sure [00:47:00] you are liking and subscribing to Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press on all the various social media channels as well as Publish Drive, and send a little love to the companies that allow us to be on here and have a great time with all of our friends.

So thank you all.

Steph Pajonas: Again. Thank you, Dana, for being here. We really appreciate it.

Dana Sacco: Thank you for having me.

Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. And everybody, we’ll see you all in the next episode. Okay.

Danica Favorite: All right.

Steph Pajonas: 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.

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