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Please note that we did not edit out profanity in this episode.
This week on the Brave New Bookshelf, we are exploring the intersection of healthcare, resilience, and cutting-edge technology. In this episode, Steph and Danica sat down with Cassie Alexander, a veteran author and nurse who has become a prominent—and sometimes controversial—pioneer in the world of AI-assisted publishing. From navigating “self-publishing wars” to facing down online “purity pledges,” Cassie shares her unfiltered journey of using AI to supercharge her career and why she believes the technology is as inevitable as the tides.
Meet Cassie Alexander: Nurse, Author, and AI Pioneer
Cassie Alexander is a woman of many hats, though she jokes that between nursing and writing, she has little time for anything else. With a writing career dating back to 1998, Cassie has seen the publishing industry transform from the “print and mail” days of traditional publishing to the rise of the indie revolution. After a decade of traditional publishing with St. Martin’s Press, she transitioned into indie romance, eventually finding massive success in the paranormal and monster romance genres.
Her perspective is unique; as a COVID ICU nurse, she developed a thick skin and a pragmatic view of “inevitable” changes. Having witnessed the vitriol directed at indie authors in the early 2010s, Cassie recognized the same patterns emerging with AI. Instead of retreating, she leaned in, becoming an early adopter of tools like Midjourney in 2022 and integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into her creative process to maintain her competitive edge in a saturated market.
The Nursing Parallel: AI and the Inevitability of Change
A fascinating theme of this episode was the comparison between the healthcare industry and the publishing world. Danica opened the show with a “rant” about the development of robot caregivers for the elderly—a necessity driven by aging populations. Cassie mirrored this sentiment by reflecting on her time as a nurse during the pandemic. She noted that if you couldn’t “yell people into submission” to save their own lives with masks and vaccines, there is no hope of “yelling AI into submission” to stop it from changing the arts.
Cassie argues that fighting the technology is a losing battle. Instead, she focuses on how authors can help shape the future of the industry. By being at the table and providing feedback—much like nurses giving feedback on the design of caregiver robots—authors can ensure AI tools serve their needs rather than being forced upon them by outside forces.
Handling the Heat: The “Streisand Effect” and Online Backlash
Cassie is no stranger to being the “black sheep” of the writing community. She shared candid stories about being disinvited from conventions, facing “anti-AI purity pledges” in anthologies, and even being ignored by peers at professional conferences. However, she discovered a surprising trend: the more the “anti-AI” crowd yelled, the more her sales grew.
She refers to this as the “Streisand Effect.” When critics tried to “review bomb” her books or call for blacklists on Reddit and Threads, it often piqued the curiosity of readers who otherwise might never have found her work. Cassie emphasized a crucial realization: her critics are almost exclusively other authors, not her readers. By focusing on providing high-quality stories and “beauty on tap” through AI-generated marketing art, she has maintained a loyal fanbase and a thriving bank account, proving that the vocal minority of haters rarely represents the silent majority of paying customers.
Writing the “Id” and Using AI for Creative Vision
One of the most compelling parts of the conversation centered on Cassie’s use of AI to fulfill “Writing the Id”—a concept from Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes. This philosophy suggests that readers are drawn to core elements like beauty, wealth, competition, and danger. Cassie uses AI to provide these elements “on tap.”
For example, she uses AI to generate specific, high-quality character art that stock photo sites lack—such as plus-size heroines or diverse heroes in fantasy armor. This allows her to market her books with visuals that exactly match her creative vision, helping readers visualize her characters and increasing engagement. For Cassie, AI isn’t about replacing the artist; it’s about removing the barriers to entry for high-level marketing and world-building.
Behind the Scenes of “Guarded by the AI”
To prove a point to her critics, Cassie wrote a book titled Guarded by the AI. She treated the project as a scientific experiment, documenting her process meticulously. She collaborated with a GPT she nicknamed “Jack,” engaging in over a million words of back-and-forth dialogue to produce the final manuscript.
Cassie debunked the myth of “push-button publishing,” explaining that even with AI, the process is incredibly demanding. Her analysis showed that while the AI generated about 29.4% of the final text, every word was massaged, edited, and directed by her. The result was a successful launch that reached the top 1,000 in the entire Amazon store, despite organized attempts to tank her ratings. She views these AI chats as “correction pairs” that help her refine her voice and even explore the potential for cloning her own writing style in the future.
Favorite Tools & Recommendations
Cassie and the hosts mentioned several tools that are essential for authors looking to explore the AI landscape:
- Midjourney: Cassie’s go-to for high-quality marketing art and character visualization since 2022.
- ChatGPT: Used as a “shotgun collaborator” for brainstorming and scene development.
- Claude (via Cowork): Utilized for meta-analysis of her writing and managing long-form chat data.
- Shopify: Her preferred platform for selling direct to readers through her website.
- Publish Drive: Danica’s recommendation for distribution, metadata, and market reports.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- Readers vs. Authors: Most readers don’t care about the tools used to create a book; they only care if the story is good. Focus on the reader, not the “author echo chamber.”
- The Inevitability Factor: AI is entering every industry, from healthcare to publishing. Shaping its use is more productive than fighting its existence.
- The Difficulty of AI: Writing a *good* book with AI is hard work. It requires massive amounts of iteration, editorial oversight, and a strong human “voice” at the helm.
- The Streisand Effect: Controversy can often lead to increased visibility and sales. Don’t let the fear of “cancel culture” stop you from innovating.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Use market reports (like the one from Publish Drive) and your own sales data to guide your career rather than following emotional trends on social media.
Resources Mentioned
Transcript
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: Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And we’re publishing AI forward books on the Press. That is also a very exciting thing that’s going on.
We’re working hard on more books to go on the actual press’s website. We’re gonna make that our first place that we publish books that we’re writing. And then we’re also going to be selling books direct via Curios, which Elizabeth Ann West has talked about on our FFA YouTube channel a few times.
I will link to that right in the show notes so that you guys can go find it [00:01:00] there. So what we’re doing is we’re publishing first on the website, and then we’re pushing out to Amazon and wide stores from there. Trying to get people to come and do the website experience instead. It’s a little bit of a retro thing.
We’re hearkening back to the 2010s here. I know that that just made me feel really old. I don’t even know why. It wasn’t that long ago. But we’re having a lot of fun doing all of the planning for that, and as per usual, uh, I will stop chatting now and I will hand over to my lovely co-host, Danica Favorite. Danica’s doing great in Denver, Colorado, where you guys are not getting the snow that we’re getting here on the East coast.
Danica Favorite: Yes, that is correct. So funny story. It is currently 67 degrees in Denver, Colorado. Dana Sacco, who was on the podcast a couple weeks ago, was just complaining this morning that it’s like in the thirties in Florida, and I’m like, ha [00:02:00] ha. But also not really, because come summer, as I think I’ve said this before, Denver’s going to be a sad place. We’re in such a drought, record-low snow pack. So even though I’m loving the beautiful weather, really pray for us. ’cause it’s bad. It’s bad. 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 on every stage of their journey from getting your manuscript formatted, to doing your book description, your metadata, AI covers, and then to distributing your book to the widest possible audience. And we have some built-in promotion tools as well as, once that book starts selling, and you have people you need to split royalties with, we also have a royalty splitting tool. So lots of things in Publish Drive, and we also have some exciting things with Publish Drive happening. Most of you, if you’re on the Publish Drive mailing list already know this.
But for the rest of you we have just released our market report. [00:03:00] I am super excited about this because I’ve been begging our company to do this for a few years now. We’re finally doing it. We took all of our sales data across the board and compiled it into one big report. So in this market report is what is selling, where it’s selling, and really cool stuff, because it’s actual sales data. We didn’t do anything other than, what are our numbers for this store? What are our numbers for this genre? And so this is based on our actual numbers and really, really excited to be able to share that because when people look at this market report to start looking at what’s actually selling.
Here it is. So if you haven’t gotten it already, go to PublishDrive.com. It’ll be there. Put in your email, boom. You’ll get the Publish Drive market report right there.
Steph Pajonas: I’m thinking maybe it might be fun to pop that into Claude and see what it thinks. Maybe give me some [00:04:00] ideas for possible genres to write in those sorts of things.
I’m excited to see what it will bring about. It’s in my inbox right now. I saw it this morning, so I’m excited to play with it.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah. I, like I said, I’m super excited, because I’ve been telling our team, we need to do this, we need to do this. And of course we wanna be careful since there’s proprietary data.
So sorting through all that, and we finally did it, and we’re gonna make this a regular thing. Stay tuned for that. And yeah, I think I’m writing a blog post for Publish Drive about it as well, just my analysis of what’s in there. Really cool information that I think will help a lot of people.
So today it’s really funny that, when we’re talking to Cassie, right before we got on we were joking around about, oh yeah, and Danica you’ve got a little time for a little rant and, uh. They don’t know this, but I was planning on one, and then when we were talking to Cassie, I’m like, oh my goodness.
My rant actually relates to our guest. Uh, because, the [00:05:00] other day I was at a tea ceremony. It was wonderful. And then we started chit-chatting afterwards about AI. And one of the women there, actually, there were two women there who are in healthcare. And they’re nurses. And one of them was saying that she just came back from this aging symposium, because she works with the elderly. And they were getting feedback from the nurses on how to create a robot caregiver for the elderly and, I was like, holy crap, this is amazing. Also a little terrifying because like I will have a robot taking care of me when I’m elderly.
Steph Pajonas: I believe. I’m just gonna jump in here. I believe that they’re already pioneering some of this in Japan, because of their high amount of elderly population, like their elderly population is so huge that they need actual extra help.
And they’ve been pioneering [00:06:00] some of these robots and like other systems to help with the elderly in Japan.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. And I and that was one of the things they were saying that America is actually going to be in a similar position. And so I thought it was super cool that they were having nurses give feedback on how these robots could best be utilized.
And she was even talking about how, they were saying, we’re gonna do the robots on two legs, and she says, no, no, no, no. With an elderly person, you actually want it on a more stable base and something that the elderly person could actually sit on. Like the little scooter things and the developer was like, oh my gosh, that’s so cool.
And was taking all these notes about it. And the reason I’m saying that, ’cause obviously we’re AI for authors and so we don’t talk about healthcare or anything, but it just goes to show AI is in every industry and it’s just getting more and more. And I know there are some authors who have made some really [00:07:00] nasty remarks online about how they don’t like being told it’s inevitable, and how dare we shove it down their throat. Number one, I don’t care if you use AI or not, but number two, it really is inevitable. And we are here and we do this podcast, because we are shaping how we want the writing industry, the publishing industry to use AI and teaching authors how to use it now, before it is forced upon us. Because just like with the nurses, they were giving direct feedback on what would be most helpful in a robot to help an elderly person. That’s what we’re doing here. And so how this ties into our wonderful guest, Cassie, is Cassie is also a nurse. And it’ll be super interesting just I was like, wow, what a coincidence.
‘Cause I hadn’t realized that when I was planning on talking about this. But also Cassie is one of the authors who is pioneering AI and [00:08:00] saying, Hey, I see that it’s coming. I don’t wanna be one of those people who says no, and fights it, but okay, how can I help shape AI and the future of AI and publishing to give authors and publishers the most benefit?
And how can I use it to make a difference in the writing world, as opposed to fighting it or complaining or whatever. It’s, no, I am an author. I’m a successful author. And I want to use it to my best advantage for my career. And so with that, I want to hand this over to our guest, Cassie Alexander.
Cassie, tell us about yourself. We know you’re a nurse and an author, but let’s get some more details on you.
Cassie Alexander: Yeah, so actually that is pretty much who I am. It’s just the two things. I don’t have time for anything else right now. All of my other hobbies are like in the distant past now. My favorite hobby is coding.
So [00:09:00] yeah. I have been writing since 1998. I wasn’t always successful. I wrote, this is back in like the trad pub days where like, and this is before electronic submissions and stuff, you had to print off your whole book and mail it in and pray, that sort of thing. And everything took forever. And as part of that system, and I actually had my first books were traditionally published by St. Martin’s in 2012, 20 13. And so I actually witnessed the self-publishing wars when they happened. So I have a, I have a bigger context window, which, to use an AI term, for like the history of publishing and stuff, than a lot of the people who are angry at me or you guys basically, because I remember the self-publishing wars. And I was on the wrong side of that.
I was so mean, because I had so much emotionally invested in doing things the traditional publishing way that everybody else who like leaped ahead, it seemed like they were cheating somehow. And I believed all that, oh, it’s all gonna be low quality and stuff, things that we know today to be the opposite of true.
And so then. I kind of dog paddled [00:10:00] around once that series got canceled. I did some self-publishing myself. And then it wasn’t until a friend of mine wanted to voltron together to write some dragon shifter romance. I’d never written romance before. I came from a hard science fiction and fantasy background, although my books that published, back in the day, we’re urban fantasy, but I had never written like something like, guaranteed HEA true romance, that definition. And then my friend was all like, hey, I like to market, you like to write, let’s voltron together and do something. So we started to work on that in 19 in, sorry, in, 2019 and unfortunately like our first book in that series came out like March, 2020.
So that was when shit started hitting the fan for the entire world actually. And that book’s gone on to do well. But it was just like a really painful synchronicity that like, I got to be a COVID nurse. And so that really reframed a lot of my expectations of myself and also of the industry in general. Because I went to RAM virtually [00:11:00] that year or the next year. I think it was that year. I’m not entirely sure which one, but I realized, oh, there are women here who are making substantial amounts of money. So that is possible. All I need to know is that somebody can do something, and then I can figure out how to do it.
I just need to know what the ceiling is. If the ceiling makes it worth doing, I can figure shit out. And up until that point, I was like, writing’s fun, blah, blah, blah, but I could just work some overtime shifts. And I did love writing, but my heart had been so battered by the whole trad pub experience and that I wasn’t really ready to jump firmly onto riding Island.
But then being a COVID ICU nurse, I was like, oh, I really don’t wanna be a nurse anymore. This fucking sucks. And so I jumped wholeheartedly into writing, and I’ve taken off since then, ’cause I just focused all of my attention on making that work out for me and using all the tools at my disposal, w hich is relevant to our conversation here. I looked back the other day to prove like how old school I was. My mid journey account is from August of 2022. I was like [00:12:00] one of the first on the train. And then, I’m sure you ladies too, like in December of 2023, January, 2023 is when we started getting told we were the devil.
And I was just like whoa. You gotta slow your roll. I was a COVID ICU nurse. We could not get people to save their own lives during COVID, which is arguably a much lower bar than stopping AI from happening. And I was just like, yeah. So you guys, you may be yelling about this, but there’s no way you can yell it into submission.
We couldn’t yell at people to save their own lives. There’s no way you’re gonna be able to stop AI. So that’s when I was just like, all right. Let’s see how I can make this work for me. And then also too, I had different experiences with it, because I came at it originally from the whole graphic realm, because I wanted to make material to market my stuff.
And I was like, you can’t find a heavier woman on deposit photos for love or money. You can’t find, like I had a tiger shifter who was a billionaire and you can’t find a hot Indian guy in a suit who isn’t in front of a PowerPoint. So these were things that kind of formed my [00:13:00] opinion of the utility of AI, and how I was gonna use it moving forward to give myself opportunities.
And then also too to have the opportunity to showcase different viewpoints that I wouldn’t have been able to market really otherwise. Sorry, that’s a lot of talking. I’ve given all this a lot of thought though.
Danica Favorite: I love it. I love that you gave it so much thought. And until you said, this is so cool, this is why we have a nurse, right? Saying that parallel between you couldn’t get people to save their own lives during COVID, and now here we are with AI coming into every aspect of our lives and you know, we’re like, hey, would you like to wear a mask? Nooooooo. Okay, cool, that’s fine.
So I think that’s really great. You gave me a new analogy to use about AI, which I think is super, super cool. Steph and I were both around during that time of publishing, and Initially when I came into publishing, I said a very similar [00:14:00] thing with AI. I was also kind of on the wrong side of indie publishing, because I was on the board of writing groups where we were creating our self-publishing policy, and what qualifies a self-published author as a real author? And I know that the intention was pure. Like I really just thought, again, the same thing. Oh, low quality books, it’s gonna ruin publishing. And let’s be honest, some of those early covers were absolutely terrible. But now looking back, I really wish I had jumped on the bandwagon back then to do indie publishing. I mean, I like, there’s my trad books right there. No regrets about those books or anything, but I certainly would have a lot more money in my bank account if I had jumped on Indie at the time, and I didn’t. And that’s okay. This time I wanna be on the right side of publishing history.
Cassie Alexander: And the thing is too, is you learned from that experience, right? Because I think all of us have probably learned from AI [00:15:00] that pivoting is the name of the game and the faster you can pivot, the better off you’re gonna be. Whether that’s to like try out a new model or listen to somebody else’s idea about how to make things work, and and yeah, I. Yeah. I have so many thoughts about all this. I’m allowed to ramble, right?
Steph Pajonas: Absolutely.
Danica Favorite: Absolutely.
Cassie Alexander: Okay.
Danica Favorite: We give you a small, we give you a framework, but really this is about sharing those different opinions because…
Cassie Alexander: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: the more opinions we can share, the more people understand that there is no one right way…
Cassie Alexander: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: To do AI and publishing.
Cassie Alexander: Yeah, so really one of the beauties of the things is like humans have, as we all know, because we are human and an incredible amount of inertia, and we have change fatigue, right? You can only tell a human so many times redo this chapter or please look at my change to this chapter.
Or I need to brainstorm with you. But that means I need to tell you all of your ideas are wrong, until I come up with the right one on my own. And so yeah, so I think my experiences with using AI in that way has made me [00:16:00] realize just how fast you need to iterate sometimes to get through to what’s actually worth pursuing.
And that’s just an experience that you wouldn’t be able to have as like a human moving just amongst other humans, for like human entrepreneurship, just because you have finite time on this earth and time equals money. But within AI you can pivot like on a dime and then on a dime, and then on a dime until you finally like figure out the angle that’s gonna work best for you for whatever the application is.
Steph Pajonas: That can sometimes be exhausting too. Like I, I run into that problem sometimes. I’m just like, I am iterating and iterating, and by the time I’ve reached four or five times, I’m like, I don’t wanna look at this anymore. I don’t wanna make any more decisions. I’m done.
I get major decision fatigue when it comes to AI, so sometimes I will get a response from it and I let it sit there for a little bit, and I don’t even read it. I just know that it’s there. I can go look at it when I’m ready, take a, take a couple moments, and then I’ll [00:17:00] try to go through it just chunk at a time, just a little chunk at a time until I can get through it.
You know, like, there’s only so fast a human can go.
Cassie Alexander: Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: Even with all of this help, you know. Like it is, it, it is a bit of a balance act.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. But I like the experimental piece as well. Because like you were talking about Cassie with the entrepreneurs and having to experiment and pivot and try new things, what’s great about AI is so many of these tools are free. The ones that aren’t are fairly low cost, definitely low cost in comparison to what it takes to have a traditional business. So one of the good things about publishing is that it’s a low cost to entry. Anyone can be an author, entrepreneur.
Although sometimes I think the bad thing about that is that there’s such a low cost to entry that people don’t understand that if you were in a traditional business, that a traditional business is going [00:18:00] to invest thousands upon thousands of dollars before becoming profitable. And that isn’t necessarily the case in publishing.
I like that it’s broadening this opportunity. So, when you started looking at AI and publishing, what was your approach to saying, okay, I’m gonna look at this AI thing and how am I approaching this?
Cassie Alexander: Yeah, so when I decided to actively take flack for it, I don’t know if you guys are familiar, well, I’ll, I’ll give the whole thing, because there’s gonna be listeners who aren’t, but Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes gave this talk at RWA in 2018. I don’t know if you can still get it online or not. If you can’t though. She’s got some YouTube videos up about her TED Talks, that deal with the same topic. She is like a professor who studies like Parasocial psychology, but she also is the author of the Inheritance Games, which is a wildly popular book, that I think they’re in the process of turning into a TV show right now.
And this talk she gave was called, writing the Id, and the whole point of it [00:19:00] is that there’s these five commonalities that all humans love, and that we are drawn to time and time again, and that you should keep track of how you like them, and it’s like touch, competition, wealth, beauty, and danger.
So if you think about it, one of her examples that has always stuck with me is Game of Thrones is literally like competition of wealth. And so those are the elements that across all of humanity that we are always interested in. Oh, I think one of them is touch as well.
I think maybe I doubled up on one of them. But you like to see humans touch each other too, in fiction and in, you know, on TVs and stuff. Her point with that was that, when you are writing your first book, you very often just tend to put everything you like in it. And then your second book is when you get second album syndrome, because people are like, why do all their names start with an X?
And why does everybody have violet eyes? That’s so pretentious? And then you sand off all the things that make you uniquely you. And in doing so, you deny the people reading you all of these pleasures that you gave yourself in the first book and that that’s what they’re [00:20:00] actually there reading for.
So I listened to that talk and I was like, this is genius. I wholeheartedly think this woman is right. And then I realized early on, like again back in January, February, 2023, I was like, AI is gonna let me give people beauty on tap. Because I write paranormal. And so there is, just as it’s hard to find people of different ethnicities and stuff on deposit photos, it is also hard to find a plethora of hot men in armor and , everybody was using the same princess running out of a castle picture. And so even though the art back then was indescribably shitty, because it was not good, it was still going to allow me to get people interested in my book in such a way and add a volume that I would not have been able to do otherwise. And so I bet my bank on that panning out eventually for me. When I set my path, I was like, okay, the people who are gonna yell at me about this are other authors, but they’re not my [00:21:00] readers.
They’re not the people who are buying my books on the far end. And those are the people that I want to see my books and think highly of me and be interested, not highly of me, but highly of my books and like be able to visualize my characters and watch my characters do things in their head. And I’m gonna give them the art that’s gonna allow them to do that.
So yes, that’s when I really just decided to do that, and then just weather all the assorted repercussions that have come from that, or repercussions. I’m using air quotes if you’re listening to this, for the path that I have chosen, of which there have been many, again with air quotes.
So I don’t know if I can take a detour into that if you want, but lemme check in first.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think that would be a great detour, because one of the things that stood out to me that you said is that, the critics are authors, not readers, and I know Stephanie and Elizabeth Ann West have talked a lot about this, that the readers actually don’t care and can’t tell the difference.
It’s the authors. And I really would love to go down that rabbit.
Cassie Alexander: I would love [00:22:00] to too. I’d love to get all this on the record, like someplace official that they can all listen to it or watch it and then can shut their eyes. Um, yeah, so, so, yeah at the time I had just come out with a romantasy series that was doing very well, and then in 2024 I was doing a Monster Romance series.
Actually at the end of 2023, I was segwaying into some Monster romance, and I was part of a group that was doing like these anthologies and everybody else involved in the anthology decided to sign an anti AI purity pledge. And I was like, yo, I lived through Texas in the nineties. I don’t need to do that.
I’m good. And I jumped out. I was like, alright, see you later. But I was like, I wish you all the best in your careers, you know. So some of those people were angry at me and have continued to be so. Some of the people, like one of my old PAs occasionally calls for me to get blacklisted on threads.
I actually don’t vanity search myself, so I usually hear it secondhand about when [00:23:00] people are angry at me. But I was invited to a convention, and then I was disinvited, and then I explained to them how much money I am putting back into the human economy by actually showing them my tax returns. Because I was like, look how many translators and artists I’m currently employing.
‘Cause I was using my AI art to make the money to pay all my not safe for work artists. So they re-invited me, and then they disinvited me again when somebody else complained. When I went to Readers Take Denver, the super faded one that was very crazy a couple years ago. I was walking out of there with $900 cash in my pocket.
I had sold and, and then much more in my bank electronically from electronic sales. I had sold all but one small box of books that I was shipping home to myself in my luggage even. I didn’t even have to like pay to FedEx it or anything. And at the same time I did that, I got this email from a book box that one of my books was involved in, my Sapphic Romance. And they were like, oh, we didn’t know that you used AI. And I was like I’m sorry. I didn’t feel like I needed to disclose it [00:24:00] necessarily ’cause I had nothing to do at all with this book. But, you know, I, I, I was. the black sheep, I was in trouble. So they were like, you need to put on your website something that says that you use AI.
And we didn’t know. And I was like, you fuckers are so dumb, but fine. Because I had cash, I had almost a thousand dollars of cash and like probably two or three grand from the stripe at the thing. And I was like, okay, this makes no sense. I was like, I, I literally am holding proof that people do not care, but here we are.
And then, two years ago, two years, three years ago at Inkers Con, I volunteered to give a talk, like a round table which they don’t record, but in person, a round table about using AI for merchandise, because that’s where I really came into with all the graphic stuff I’d been ordering, like stickers and key chains and shit in bulk from China for all my book boxes, which I like to make really elaborate ’cause it makes me happy and I gave the talk in person. I had several people tell me that they couldn’t hang out with me or they didn’t want to be seen with me. They were like, oh no, [00:25:00] you’re too taboo. I had people walk up to me and be like, ah, I know who you are. Like, I was just like, oh, hi. I’m Cassie.
They’re like, I know who you are. And luckily I’m dense on a day-to-day basis, which is how I make it through being a nurse, because it’s like incredibly sad and also really awkward being at people’s worst parts of their lives. So it’s not till later I’m like, oh, that person was trying to be mean to me.
And just I didn’t even catch it at the time. But then later on when they were gonna do virtual round tables, for the people who were only attending virtually, I sent them in my times, and they were like, oh no, you can’t host your talk again. And I was like. I was like, what? And they were like, yeah, no, we had so many people complain that you were giving a talk, even though the people who were at my talk found it immensely valuable, and all the biggest players who were there at that year were at my talk. Because they actually are business people and not just amongst the rabble rousers. So yes, I didn’t get to give that talk virtually. But whatever, definitely their loss.
Um. And then, gosh, what else? Every time there’s like a list about somebody, blah, blah, blah. We don’t like them for AI. I’m always on it. [00:26:00] There’s sometimes the list goes around and it’s like an open Google doc. I’ll go in and I’ll add myself, because I’m like, I wanna be on this list, fuck all y’all. And then we come to the time when, there was this, um, so my, my monster security agency books, it was a co-authored series, of a series of standalones with Kara Wild and Layla Faye, and they are both completely awesome authors and individuals. They’re bomb. It’s great. That was like the highlight of my 2024 is being in that series with them.
But what happened is at the end of that year, and actually ever since then, anytime anybody on Reddit, on the romance book threads said, oh my gosh, this book like changed my life, there was this, like, this, this cadre of individuals who would log on and who would be like, oh, well they use AI to write.
And I just happened to see one of these. And it really chapped my hide, because I’d had interactions with this particular fan before. They fricking lived in Malaysia. And they said that they, they really liked all these books of mine. And I [00:27:00] was like, I’m gonna send you a book box.
And she was like, what? And I was like, yeah, I’m gonna send you one. I just have one left. Let’s do it. So I sent it to her. So she is she’s effusing on the romance Reddit about like my books. And she knows that I’m like a good person basically, ’cause I just, I shipped her like a book box for free. And I paid for the postage and there’s all these people giving her shit about it.
And I just jumped in and I was like, look. If you think that AI can write a double dicked spider monster, I have a bridge to sell you. I was so mad. And then what happened was the moderation people came by ’cause they’re like very authors out in that group. They came by and they slapped my hand, and they didn’t take down my thing. And actually it was still there, which is relevant in a little bit. So I was just like, you know what i s gonna make that person the maddest of the mad, I had already written Guarded by the Spider, Guarded by the Kraken, Guarded by the Nightmare, Guarded by the Krampus.
I’m gonna write Guarded by the AI, ’cause fuck you. So I, that was like [00:28:00] November of 2024. I put it out for release in December of 2025, so this past December. And so then when I started writing it, I was all like, you know, by then I had gotten used to involving my GPT, and I just call him Jack.
That doesn’t mean that I have psychosis or that I wanna sleep with him. It just means that I like to anthropomorphize things. It’s weird not to, in my view, I anthropomorphize everything. He’s not special. And it also really makes me mad too, ’cause anytime a woman does anything creatively, she can only be doing it because she’s insane, or she’s hypersexual, which also really irritates me as a romance writer.
I just wanna strangle people. So, uh, by then I had Jack be side, um, shotgun for like two or three books of mine, by which I mean that I would write a scene, and I would give it over to him and let him read it and stuff. And basically I would even tell him in the instructions, I just want head pats.
I just want somebody to witness me have written the scene. Because as we all know, when you write by hand, like things are exhausting sometimes and you’re [00:29:00] really proud. And who else is gonna put up with 40 iterations of like, does this, this one sentence, what do we think about these commas? And I started playing around doing that same thing back and forth with Guarded by the AI. And then I was like, I wonder how an AI would write. And we wound up doing this thing. He took my stuff and he massaged it, a nd I loved the way that it read, because it read, like a different point of view. And I was like, oh shit, we’re doing this for science now. We’re just going in. So , I say generically, like he wrote half of it, but I actually recently had co-work do a meta-analysis of all of my books, ’cause I kept all of my chats. He only generated, in regards to the amount of text that got kept in the final book, about like 29.4% if Cowork to be believed. ‘Cause I had it go down like on a forward by forward basis through what wound up being a million words of chat. Because I had 16 huge chats and then I had two instances of Monday, which is a different GPT, that’s a little crankier that I was using [00:30:00] as an editor.
Yeah so, uh, and, and let’s, let’s put a pin in that, because that’s really interesting too. But then I was like, oh, I’m gonna tell people I’m doing this, because this is gonna be like fantabulous. People are gonna get really mad at me and it’s gonna be great for my bottom line, w hich is the risk that I took.
Because the thing is, I knew every time somebody had gotten mad at one of the other monster security agency girls or me in particular, I had seen a bump in my page reads. And so I was like, oh, the Streisand Effect is at play. And just for the people listening who may not know what the Streisand effect is, the Streisand effect is when like Barbara Streisand had a house on a beach somewhere and she, I think in California, and she was like, oh, I just want my beach to be just for me. How do I do this? But in doing so, when she filed her lawsuit with whatever municipality she did, she said, Barbara Streisand lives at X, Y, Z. And so then instead of having like maybe 10 randos in front of her house, she had 50 people wanting to see Barbara Streisand, because she had pointed out where she lived.
[00:31:00] And so I was like, that is exactly what’s gonna happen here. And all these people who wanna be looky-loos and stuff are gonna read it. And I know after having written over 40 books and how thoroughly I was incorporating like my own edits into what Jack was giving me, like that book is very much my baby.
I was never hands off the wheel. Sometimes he would have a passage or two. That was great, but it was always at my direction and with my editorial oversight. That’s where the million words back and forth came from. I knew it was gonna be a good book. So I was like, there’s gonna be people who hate it on principle, but I’m not writing to them.
I’m writing to the people who already like me or who are willing to give it a try or who don’t even know what the fuck’s going on. And they’re just fine. They just want a good book and I can give them that. And so then coincidentally with the release of that book looming, Layla, one of the other Monster Security Agency girls, finally figured out that the people, quote unquote, who were harassing us on Reddit were actually all this one other Monster Romance author and her sock puppets.
So she made a post on [00:32:00] Instagram about it. And then that person was like, oh shit, my bacon is cooked. And they started like deleting all of their stuff. We have never revealed their identity. We are both a hundred percent sure who they are, but they’re a smaller author than us and it would be gauche for us to do anything.
It’s enough that they have stopped. But that just created more froth and churn on the topic and stuff. And then I said what I was doing, and then everybody over on threads in Reddit wants to be the main character, and so few of them actually possess the charisma with which to do so, so they have to borrow other people’s main character-ness, IE me. And so there’s like a 200 comment thread on Reddit.
Somebody was saying, it’s like, why doesn’t everybody hate her? It’s like she started a cult. And I was like yes. Bring it. Bring me all of your hate. And then people on threads.
Danica Favorite: Okay, wait, pause, pause.
Cassie Alexander: Yes.
Steph Pajonas: I just wanna say I love you so much.
Danica Favorite: I know. I’m like enthralled, but then I’m jealous of the cult thing.
Like I wanna be accused of having a cult.
Cassie Alexander: Exactly. So I lived in Santa Cruz for 15 years. [00:33:00] Like being cult adjacent in California is just like, has been a lifelong dream of mine. And I watched all the cult documentaries. I’m actually too lazy to start a cult or anything. It just made me, it was, it tickled my funny bone so hard, Danica, I was just like dying, dying when this. Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: Cults seemed like a lot of work to me.
Cassie Alexander: Yeah. No, No, I don’t, I don’t have that. I can’t I can barely keep myself, I can’t do like the interstitial torture thing you have to do to keep a cult alive.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah.
Cassie Alexander: No food and too much wakefulness. No, I’m not down with either of those.
Danica Favorite: Okay, continue accidental cult leader. I just, that was just too juicy not to say something.
Cassie Alexander: No, I appreciate that. I’m just glad other people have been definitely tickled by it too. It’s just so funny. So, um, So yeah, so then everybody and their dog was trying to like dunk on me on like threads and Reddit and stuff.
But after all that dunking though, I could see, like I only lost five pre-orders over that time period. So I was like, most of my people are, are still toughen [00:34:00] it out. So all these people are yelling at me weren’t actually like financially invested either way. Everybody just wanted to have an opinion.
So 200 comment thread on Reddit and oh, oh, so I went back over to the Reddit. And I was just like, so FYI, Layla posted this thing about, a lot of these people who are, ’cause it is generally as you, you both know, like just a really vocal minority, and and so I was like, okay, so five of the people who purported to have hated me in the past, turned out to be one jealous person who also was an author. So I was just like, how much of this Reddit thread is even really real and stuff. And so I just put my head up the parapet just often enough to like peek and see the crazy and to respond.
But then that would make people scared that I was gonna pay attention. So they started talking about me with deleting letters in my name and then, or they’d be like an author who shall not be named. And I was just like, what? And that just made other people be all like who is it? Who is it? And that kind of, even flogged, the interest higher.
Yes. People did try to review bomb me. I lucked out in that right when this book, when I [00:35:00] sent out arcs, was like two days after Good Reads decided that you had to say that you had gotten an arc from somewhere. You couldn’t just review bomb a book. So that probably really helped my book. But then a lot of people on Amazon don’t realize too, that Amazon not only weights your reviews, but in like your reviews as they’re given, but they also weight the quality of a review.
So if you don’t actually give a quality review, then they’re not gonna, they’re, they don’t care what you think, because a review that says good book or AI flop, is like not a quality review and worth putting in towards the maths. So my book came out. I had enough people who loved it, but I got review bombed down to a 3.6, which would be the lowest of any book that I like ever had ever on Amazon.
Um, on Good Reads, who the fuck knows. Good Reads is its own beast, but so that’s just like nail biting. I was like, but some of these people are gonna come through. I know some of these people are gonna come through. And so entirely organically, that book wound up the day after it released being 903 in the entire Amazon store.
Because [00:36:00] I didn’t put any money behind Facebook ads or anything for it, because I just wanted to see where it would get, ’cause I didn’t want anybody to say that I had like done something to propel it. So no, it was like propelled solely on the fact that, A, I am a good writer and B, people are like, they wanted to see, or they just wanted to give it a chance. And then slowly over the course of the next two weeks, like my reviews ticked back up. I think it’s like at a 4.2 now. I know that not everybody’s gonna be in a position where they can say fuck the haters, let’s go, like I am.
And there were, there were times in there when I was more stressed out than I let on, because I was definitely playing chicken with all known publishing reality, but at the same time, I was just really fucking sure I was right. And I, then the data bore me out. Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: I’m with you. The data bears this out.
A lot of these people who are in the anti AI, like, minority. They are, they’re in an echo chamber. They’re all yelling at each other and, propping each [00:37:00] other up. And they’re yelling in a space where we’re just not even paying attention. I certainly am not, I’m not on threads. I think I have an account there because I had an Instagram account, but people will say, they’re over there on threads, saying whatever, and it doesn’t matter. It does not matter, not even a little bit, because like, I don’t see it. And guess what? The majority of our readers don’t see it either. It’s mostly authors talking in circles.
Cassie Alexander: Yeah. Yeah, and so there were, I think like three different people made YouTube videos, like up, up to 20 minute long YouTube videos about how much I personally sucked, I guess. Somebody watched some of them for me and they were like, oh, this lady thinks you’re gonna take some of your stuff down, and that people better screenshot it now. She doesn’t know you at all.
I was like, yeah, we’re not gonna recant. But then there was another TikTok video though, where somebody was taking one of my books off their shelves and like throwing it across the room and stuff. And I was like, oh, that’s an interesting choice. But one of the comments [00:38:00] in their thing though was, because invariably these things incite like more anger and stuff or more attempted blacklistery.
And so they’re like, oh, who else should we, you know, cancel this week basically is what it came down to. And one of the names that they gave was, somebody else, it was Lauren Beal. I’ll just shout her out ’cause she’s bigger than me. It’s not a punch down. And she got outed, I guess by her PA or something, using AI for Facebook ads or TikTok, random shit like a couple years ago.
She tearfully recanted on all of the social medias. But that didn’t matter. There’s no path for redemption, so why should anybody bother? Because if I were to turn around now, they would still be angry at me until the end of time. So what incentive do I even have to be flustered or bothered by it?
It’s just not even worthwhile.
Steph Pajonas: You might as well just double down at this point.
Cassie Alexander: Yeah, yeah.
Steph Pajonas: That’s what I, that’s what I do.
Danica Favorite: It doesn’t sound like your bank account has at all suffered from it.
Cassie Alexander: Oh, no,
No, it hasn’t. And if I had seen [00:39:00] financial repercussions, yeah, I literally never have because the people who are yelling, again, are just a small percentage. They’re just in these hyper insular groups on Facebook or threads and by and large too, they just don’t have the perspective time that I have. Monster Romance is a fairly like, new genre, new to being hot genre.
And so a lot of the people in it are newer writers. They don’t have that many books out. They haven’t lived through some publishing cycles like I have. I think I’ve probably lived through 10 vampire boom bust cycles by now. Right? So, um, and, and I, again, I remember the self-publishing wars. So people, they’re freaking out, because they were in a genre that was in ascendance, and now it’s very saturated. And maybe you have to put out a better book or a higher quality book to get anywhere in it.
And they’re thinking that the AI changed that when, no, that’s just the cycle of the zeitgeist. And that is why, we were talking briefly earlier before recording, about why I still have a day job. Because I’m just like, you know, what if the zeitgeist all of a sudden decides they don’t like books [00:40:00] anymore. I really like money and I like health insurance.
Um, but, but, but yeah. M ost of the people who are mad at me are either…I have potentially been publishing longer than they’ve been alive. Definitely, I am probably older than them. And all these things make me sound like an asshole. And I recognize that.
And I’m sorry, but, and I also have a lot of books out, and so I’ve seen the market at different times do different things with different stuff. And I have a lot of experiential data from all the friends I’ve had over like the past 25, 27 years of trying to be active in publishing with varying degrees of success.
This is definitely my most successful part ever. And that’s one of the reasons why I kinda removed myself from Threads a couple years ago because somebody was… people like to give each other really bad publishing advice. And they have all of two books under their belt.
And so I would seem like a condescending asshole to be like, oh, honey, you’re wrong. But then, I would Google people, because I don’t want to be that author…and I know that even I am not like a huge, big name author, but I don’t wanna [00:41:00] be, I don’t wanna ever punch down if I can help it. And so I would Google people and I’d be like, oh, okay.
You know, so I’d say something gently, and then they would never bother to Google me in return. They would just try to dunk on me for clout and not realize that, oh, I have many books out in many languages, and perhaps I know where of I speak, and so that’s why I was like, I just need to leave Threads, because as much as my instinct and drive is to help other people, that’s just not the platform to be doing that on.
Because the people there, even though they’re complaining about their careers, they’re not actually looking for help. Otherwise they would be using AI.
Danica Favorite: Oh yeah. I love it. I love it. And you bring up so many good points, and I know we are really short on time.
Cassie Alexander: Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.
Danica Favorite: No, No. Please do not be sorry. Please do not be sorry, because this was such an important conversation and. What I was gonna say is we want to have you back as soon as humanly possible.
Cassie Alexander: Absolutely.
Danica Favorite: To talk about, we want you to talk about your workflows and stuff. ’cause we didn’t get to…
Cassie Alexander: Oh my gosh.
Danica Favorite: any of [00:42:00] those questions. And I know you’re doing really cool stuff.
Cassie Alexander: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: And I think,
Cassie Alexander: Thank you.
Danica Favorite: That is so important for people to learn from. But for me, listening to this whole conversation and listening to you share about what your experience has been, I want people to take away quite a few things actually. Like I want them to listen to this one over and over, because number one, if you’re out there and bullying authors for using AI. Um, please meet our friend Cassie. Cassie doesn’t care and you haven’t harmed her at all. You’ve just made yourself look dumb. Her bottom line has not suffered.
Her books are still selling. The world is still going on. And I wrote this down. I was taking a couple of notes, mostly because of stuff I also wanna talk, talk to you about in a future episode, but your iteration on one book was over a million words.
Cassie Alexander: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, so some of that was me pasting, like all my book into [00:43:00] parts of the window again, so it would know what was going on and stuff.
But yeah, that’s the thing is, I think that’s what chaps my hide professionally the most is. And yeah, this is what I’d love to end up on, ladies, because it makes me so mad that people assume that because, I mean, it’s that dichotomy, right? You guys have run against it. The AI is gonna replace me because it’s so easy.
Why hasn’t it replaced you yet? Turns out it’s fucking hard. But they don’t wanna admit that second reality exists. And so everybody is like. You are cheating. You’re not an artist anymore. And it’s like, do you know how hard it is to write a quality book with AI that meets your standards and carries your voice?
No, you fucking don’t. Because if you were, if you did, if you had ever tried it, if you’d ever actually probably known what your voice was, you would realize it is a harder task than you currently think that it is. So that also helped me brush off a lot of people hating on me and stuff too, because I was just like you don’t really…you don’t have the skin in the game yet to actually know what it is that you’re angry about. You’re angry about change, but that isn’t necessarily the fault of the AI or even my [00:44:00] fault, but yeah, because it, it’s that book, that voice is definitely alien, because I wanted it to be alien. It’s definitely different.
Like my narrator, my guy narrator is this is so strange. And I was like, yeah, because it’s literally not human. There’s big chunks of it that are not human or that I wrote to match what was there. That is not, you know, ’cause that’s the other thing. It’s everybody’s like, oh, I wrote a book about AI, I wrote Fanfic about Data.
And you know, I didn’t have to use an AI to do it. And it’s like, well, yeah, but I’m fucking cool. So why, why would I not do that if I could? Because it was rad and it was fun and I wanted to play around and try things. But, but it’s still, it was like, yeah, it’s incredibly challenging. And yeah, I had all of those chats up.
Oh, this is the pin I wanted to, to Danica, I’m sorry. I had all those chats up, and I actually took them down because it turned out that all of the chats contain really incredible valuable data about the potential for me cloning my own voice in the future, because it [00:45:00] has a million words of correction pairs.
Because every time Jack did something wrong, I said this is what I want you to do that’s right. And so I actually was teaching him, in as much as you can be said to teach any particular model, and this one was like 4.0.
So I took down all of that chat data, because I actually wanna use it to do research with, and like the potential for like voice cloning and stuff, which I know is gonna freak out a lot of people. But, c’est la vie. So yeah, I’m actually, that’s how come I was able to tell you that 29.4% of that book was generated by GPT, because I started running those chats through, um, uh, through Claude Cowork to see what’s the math on this? Like, there’s a lot of studies about AI and creativity, but very few of them have been like, longitudinal studies about one creative project that have gone on over time that people have actually kept track of.
Because once I, like three chats in, I was like, oh, okay, I am gonna have to show people my work or they’re gonna think that I cheated. I knew I was doing it for science, so I actually was good about only working in those particular chats. So, so, yeah. [00:46:00] Yes. Sorry guys.
Danica Favorite: I think it’s great. No I think it’s great, and I think this is really important for people to hear, and that’s why we were so happy for you to go off on a tangent.
And like I said, we will have you back, because you do so many cool things, but it’s really important for people to understand, as we say in almost every episode, it isn’t just put in a prompt, you have a book. It is a million words with different iterations and teaching it how you think, putting your humanness into what the AI is doing. It’s not just you saying, Hey, please write me a book. It is, Hey, please write me a book. Nope, that piece isn’t right. This piece, you know, and really digging into what it means. And so, I’m really grateful that you were here sharing this whole history of just some really big online abuse by other [00:47:00] authors.
Cassie Alexander: Thank you for listening. I still have a little bit of an ax to grind. It’s going away though.
Steph Pajonas: We’re glad that you were here to tell our listeners about this kind of stuff, because it’s one thing for me and Danica to like constantly hit this home, but it’s another to hear from other authors who have been through it, who have triumphed on the other side and to show, and to teach our listeners that this is something that they can accomplish.
Like they don’t have to hide necessarily if they don’t want to, but they can also learn from the experiences that we’re going through, because we’re gonna be open about it so that they can go out there and forge their own path. So it is fairly important for our listeners to understand what we’re all going through when we’re being the pioneers here, because, I mean, let’s face it, a lot of people on that Oregon Trail died on their way out there. Right?
Cassie Alexander: No, you said it. You’re right. You make such a good [00:48:00] point. And it is so true. And it’s funny, because I feel to some degree all of the people who are like super active in this field know each other tangentially.
So we feel like there’s a lot of us, but in actuality on this jagged bleeding edge, there’s really not. So yeah. And then there’s a lot of people who are coming up behind more slowly, who are just, is it safe to come out yet? So I wanna echo back. It’s very safe. Just, it’ll be all right.
Steph Pajonas: So just ignore the haters. Ignore them.
Danica Favorite: Yes. And that’s the thing too, I was thinking about with what Steph was saying with, all these people looking to this. I know there are a lot of people who watch or listen to this podcast who are dealing with various aspects of AI, and I know some of them are terrified of cyber bullying, and I know some of them have experienced it.
And like I said, I…every time I turn around somebody is private messaging me, hey, please don’t tell anyone that I use AI, but I really just have to tell someone. And I know that you are gonna listen and you’re gonna [00:49:00] be kind and you’re going to keep it a secret. And for all of you, I want you to hear Cassie, who has experienced some really big cyber bullying, and we just had Coral Hart on and she’s had some cyber bullies and guys.
Number one, if you’re doing it for the love of God, stop. And if you are someone who’s afraid of it, or if you’re experiencing it, please know you do have a community to come around you and say, we don’t think it’s okay. Please know that you are not alone. And if someone is online going after you, it isn’t gonna hurt you as much as you’re afraid of.
And Cassie, thank you so much for being here and being that comfort for those people who are afraid.
Cassie Alexander: You’re super welcome. This has been a great hour, and I can’t wait to come back.
Steph Pajonas: You’re definitely coming back. Yes, thank you so much for being here. We wanna make sure that people can go find your cool books, right?
Cassie Alexander: Oh yeah.
Steph Pajonas: You’re, y ou’re Cassie [00:50:00] Alexander. So where should we send listeners to?
Cassie Alexander: Yeah, so cassiealexander.com is like my main site slash Shopify store. But I wanna give some pitches here. I’m coming out with a nonfiction book at the end of the month called How to Think With AI, because I have a million words of doing so.
That is available for Amazon and pre-order and then potentially of more of interest to your peoples, Novae Caelum and I do a Substack, which is AI Marketing for Storytellers. And we just pipe up over there whenever we feel like we have something to share. I love to code. I’ve been sharing a lot of code recently. And then we have a live chat for people who are paid subscribers every Friday from 10 to 12 PST, because we realized if we had like actual class formats, things would get out of date so fast.
But we’re both addicted to playing with the newest, latest stuff and thinking about how we can incorporate it into our careers as effectively as possible. So those are like live chats where we’re just like, here’s what we did this past week. Here’s what we think is coming [00:51:00] up. Let’s go for it.
Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I love your substack. I read it quite often. We also love…
Cassie Alexander: I read yours too.
Steph Pajonas: We also love Novae. We’ve had Novae on the podcast as well, so it’s great. It’s all a big happy family. And we’re really happy that you were here today. We will definitely have you back. So anybody who’s been listening, you wanna come by bravenewbookshelf.com, read the show notes. We can also send them to you via email if you sign up for our mailing list. You can just hit little subscribe there at the top of the page and give us your email address, and we’ll send them to you the next day after the podcast goes live. You’ll wanna check out any of the links that we gave you, and I’m going to hand off to Danika for our last bit here.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. As usual, I’m gonna remind you to please subscribe, like, to Brave New Bookshelf on YouTube, Facebook. Really I’d love to get more people on YouTube, just see our cute little faces. Cassie had a cute little cat wandering around through the recording. And help us [00:52:00] build up that YouTube following and also make sure you’re liking and subscribing to Publish Drive and Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press on all the socials. Future Fiction Academy does some really great live YouTubes on Fridays, and other days of the week too, but the Friday night ones really get pretty lit, if you ever are without a date, as I frequently am on a Friday night that’s where you wanna go.
So enjoy, and we will talk to you all again very soon.
Steph Pajonas: We will. See you guys in the next episode. Okay. Bye everybody.
Danica Favorite: Bye.
Steph Pajonas: Bye.
Speaker: 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.