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This week on the podcast, we are exploring a side of AI that many authors haven’t considered: the physical world. In episode 70, we sat down with fantasy author Amy Campbell to discuss how she uses AI to master live events, from spatial planning to cost-benefit analysis. Whether you’re an introvert looking for a confidence boost or a seasoned pro wanting to optimize your table layout, Amy’s insights prove that AI is just as useful in a convention hall as it is on a computer screen.
Meet Amy Campbell, Fantasy Author and AI Innovator
Amy Campbell is a prolific fantasy writer known for her unique subgenres, including Western fantasy, steampunk dragon fantasy, and MM dragon romantasy. A veteran of the Kickstarter scene, Amy has built a brand around high-quality, “blingy” special editions and AI-forward cover art.
Beyond her writing, Amy has become an expert at leveraging AI to handle the logistical and technical hurdles of being an indie author. From diagnosing hardware issues to designing physical booth layouts, she treats AI as a versatile consultant for every branch of her business.
AI as a Spatial Designer for Live Events
One of the most practical applications Amy shared was using ChatGPT’s vision capabilities to design her table setup for a recent convention. Faced with a six-foot table—much smaller than her usual sprawl—she used her phone to get real-time feedback.
Her process included:
- Layout Optimization: Amy took photos of her books and merchandise on her living room floor. ChatGPT analyzed the photos and suggested moves to improve the “flow” and visual appeal for readers.
- Assembly Help: When faced with a complex banner stand and confusing instructions, Amy used ChatGPT to walk her through the mechanical assembly step-by-step via photos.
- On-the-Fly Adjustments: Once at the event, she realized the foot traffic was coming from a different direction than expected. She took a photo of the booth, and the AI suggested flipping the orientation of her “hero” items to catch the eyes of approaching attendees.
Data-Driven Decision Making and ROI
Amy doesn’t just use AI for aesthetics; she uses it to crunch numbers that would otherwise be overwhelming. Before attending a convention, she used ChatGPT to research historical attendance data from Reddit, Facebook, and local news archives. The AI estimated a weekend attendance of 800 people—a figure that turned out to be remarkably accurate.
After the event, Amy performed a Cost-Benefit Analysis with the AI. By inputting her sales data, travel costs, hotel fees, and even the “cost” of her time away from writing, the AI helped her determine if the event was worth a return trip. It successfully argued that the long-term brand growth and immediate profit made the convention a “must-attend” for the following year.
Technical Troubleshooting and Hardware
The hosts and Amy also discussed how AI serves as a 24/7 tech support desk.
- Diagnosing Lag: When Amy’s MacBook began to crawl, ChatGPT helped her identify that new desktop widgets were draining her RAM.
- Hardware Identification: Danica shared how she used Google Lens to identify a specific laptop battery for an old machine, saving hours of manual searching.
- Foil File Creation: Amy shared a brilliant tip for authors making special editions: she uses AI to pull specific elements (like dragons or text) out of her book covers and convert them into black-and-white SVG files for gold foil printing.
Don’t Put All Your AI Eggs in One Basket
A major theme of the episode, highlighted by Danica, was the importance of model diversification. Just as authors are encouraged to “publish wide” to avoid over-reliance on Amazon, Danica and Steph emphasized “using AI wide.”
If one model (like ChatGPT) changes its terms or experiences a service outage, having a backup (like Claude or Gemini) ensures your business doesn’t skip a beat. Steph noted that she uses Claude Opus for her fiction writing but keeps Gemini as a reliable backup for brainstorming.
The Human Element in an AI World
Despite her heavy use of AI, Amy’s biggest takeaway for live events is to “double down on being human.” She found that readers at conventions were often fascinated by her AI-integrated process. Instead of hiding the use of AI, she uses it as a conversation starter about her design process, proving that the tools are an extension of her creativity, not a replacement for it.
Favorite Tools & Recommendations
The group discussed several tools that help them manage their podcasts and publishing businesses:
- ChatGPT (Vision & Research): Amy’s go-to for spatial planning and convention market research.
- Notion AI: Used by Steph to instantly organize podcast episodes into YouTube playlists.
- Google Lens: Essential for identifying physical objects and hardware parts.
- Typing Mind: Steph’s preferred interface for switching between different AI models (LLMs) easily.
- Book Vault: Amy’s recommendation for high-quality print-on-demand books with special features like sprayed edges.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- Use AI for Physical Logistics: Take photos of your booth or table and ask the AI to optimize the “flow” for customers.
- Challenge the Data: When AI gives you business advice or numbers, ask it to “show its work” or explain its reasoning to ensure it isn’t hallucinating.
- Diversify Your Tools: Always have a backup AI model so your workflow isn’t dependent on a single company.
- Tier Your Pricing: Follow Amy’s strategy of having “High Bling” (expensive) and “No Bling” (affordable) options to capture different segments of the market.
- AI is Tech Support: Before calling a technician, try showing the AI your activity monitor or hardware to diagnose issues.
Resources Mentioned
Here are the key links and resources referenced in this episode:
Transcript
Speaker 2: [00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.
Steph Pajonas: Hello everyone. Welcome back to Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts Steph Pajonas CTO of 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. And if you guys have been listening to us for a long time, you know that when I open up the show with some chitchat, I always like to find out what’s going on with your world and my world and whatnot. I’ve talked about the weather a couple of times in the last few weeks, because it has been snowy and it’s very much winter here. The thing I wanted to mention today was that I’m finally like really writing again.
And that’s exciting, because I have not actually done that for myself [00:01:00] in a long time. Like I have been working in AI, and writing with AI, and images with AI, and doing all that kind of stuff for like four years now. And for a long time I set my own work aside, because it does take a lot of your emotions.
It takes a lot of your head space to get back in with your characters and your worlds and everything. And that was space I just didn’t have, because I was doing a lot of this other work. So I set it aside. I was doing other things for my audience and whatnot, but now I’m actually getting a chance to write again, I’m writing inside of Notion with Claude Opus 4.6. Where, where are we now? I don’t even know. Or I’m using the latest version of Opus is what I’m using inside of Notion and I’m really enjoying it. We’re like pantsing it together. I’m like, let’s write the next 500 words, and it helps me and we guide each other on the path and it’s been a lot of fun.
It is cool and exciting to learn these tools and then go use these tools [00:02:00] and use them for other purposes other than, you know, your writing or your marketing or whatever. So for me, I just made a shift from doing like lots of marketing and nonfiction work, as part of my job, to doing more fiction work, and that has been a lot of fun, and I’m excited about that.
Hopefully you guys are all doing exciting things with your AI as well. I see my lovely co-host smiling on the other side of this video, so that’s good. I’m glad that she’s having a good time listening to me talk about my writing, because I don’t get to do it that often, but Danica Favorite, how are you doing today?
Danica Favorite: I’m good. Thank you. Yes, I’m very excited to hear you talk about your writing. 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 their manuscript formatted, book description, metadata, distributing your books to the widest market possible.
And then once your book is out, we will be able to help you [00:03:00] with your various promotions. And then finally we can do some royalty splitting if you’re splitting royalties with people. Lots of great tools and of course, as I always like to mention, the people at the Future Fiction Academy can also help you write those books.
And I have to give another shout out to Steph and what she’s doing with Notion, because we’re trying to build up some of our views on YouTube, but we’re doing everything low key, ’cause this really is, even though our companies are sponsoring it, we are like, we have to carve little bits of time in our work days to do the podcast, but this is our passion project.
This is something that Steph and I just do for the joy of it. And I met with Dale Roberts, shout out to Dale, the other day and asked him for some tips. And so I just briefly in a conversation, mentioned them to Steph about making playlists on YouTube for Brave New Bookshelf. And Steph messaged me and says, Hey, guess what?
I got the playlist done. I’m like, how’d you get that done so fast? And she’s like, oh, Notion AI. Because [00:04:00] we run the podcast. I don’t think people know this. But we actually run the podcast using Notion. Like the whole podcast is organized through Notion. We have a database, all of the information, everything we do lives in Notion.
And so all Steph had to do was boom, run all of our episodes through Notion’s AI. AI gave her a suggested list of playlists, and now we have a playlist for our podcast on YouTube. So really excited about that. And again, if you’re not checking us out on YouTube, please do. We’re super cute. Steph has her cute little Duolingo guy behind her.
I always love him. Always makes me so happy to see Duo back there. But really, you know, like, subscribe, all that stuff. So we were talking before we started recording about what we were gonna say and Steph was like, oh, I’m not gonna talk about this thing. I’m like, I am. And this will be old news by the time this comes out, but some of you may remember there was a bit of a fury going on [00:05:00] about how Anthropic was asked by the government to sign the deal, and Anthropic said, no way. And so the government’s mad at Anthropic, and then people got mad at OpenAI, because OpenAI signed it. And here’s the funny thing people like this is, you know, this is like, bad, bad. Since that happened, so this happened Friday, we’re recording on Tuesday.
Sam Altman with OpenAI came back and backtracked and said, whoa, we were a little hasty in doing this. Let’s take a step back and re-figure this out. And so by the time this airs, I’m sure the whole saga of the federal government versus the different AIs will have played out even more differently. So the principle that I wanna leave you with is this idea of not having all your AIs in one basket.
If you are solely reliant on ChatGPT, if you’re solely reliant on Claude, just kind of get to know another model, and you can do it on the free plan. You don’t have to spend more money. And this is the [00:06:00] principle I talk about a lot with Publish Drive and publishing wide. This is why publishing wide, even though a lot of KU authors are like, yeah, I make so much money doing KU, blah, blah, blah. Great. But if something happens and Amazon closes your account like that. Boom, your whole publishing is gone. And so what do you have as a backup plan? Maybe KU is wonderful for you and you love it, and you don’t wanna leave.
Great. Don’t. But do you have a backup plan? And that’s what I see happening with AI right now is it’s not so much whether or not you should use a particular tool, or how to use a particular tool. It’s make sure you have a backup. Even. We haven’t talked a lot about the agentic ones Antigravity or Claude Cowork, all those things.
But at some point we do have some people coming on to talk about those, which I’m excited about. But a lot of those, when you use them, some of the guardrails you have to put in place, because it can change your [00:07:00] hard drive, and it can do different things. And so you want to be careful. You want to have your backups, you want to have your backup plan, and in my opinion, this is just responsible computer use.
And responsible tool use. Always make sure that no matter what tool you’re using, how you’re using it, you’ve got another option, and you know how to use another option. So that’s where I wanted to go with that. And yeah, so that, that’s my 2 cents on that.
Steph Pajonas: I agree with this. I am a big fan of Claude, as most people know.
I like Claude, but I also dabble a little bit with Open AI for a little…for some things. And then Gemini is actually my backup AI that I use for any kind of like writing fiction work, that sort of thing. So it is good to have them spread out a little bit and not put all those eggs in one basket, as you said.
Definitely. I agree with that.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Speaking of eggs in one basket, no, actually I didn’t have a good segue there, but I thought that would be funny. We have today a guest, Amy Campbell, [00:08:00] and we’ve had Amy on the show before. I love her dragon stuff. Um, I was showing this off before. She made these cute little cards that came out with her Dragon Latitudes um, Kickstarter.
So, yeah, if you aren’t watching this on YouTube, you didn’t get to see the cute little Dragon card, but it’s super cute. I have it here by my desk. ’cause I think it’s really cute and I love what she’s doing as an artist and just with all the storytelling she does. Again, if you didn’t listen to the previous episode, go back, check it out.
But what she’s doing now, what we’re gonna talk about today is how Amy is using and working in live events. And we were also talking about how the three of us are all actually introverts, and people don’t always guess that about us. And Amy was telling a story about how even the person who does these live events with her was like, this is weird.
And so it just shows that all of the stuff we’re doing now are just [00:09:00] fun opportunities to get outside your comfort zone, try something new, and as always take what you can out of this. And if it resonates, great. If it doesn’t, that’s okay too. But I find that there’s always a little something that you can take away from a lot of our guests.
So I am gonna hand this over to Amy. Amy, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? How are you using AI and what you’re doing now?
Amy Campbell: Hi everyone. I’m Amy Campbell and I am a fantasy writer. Although I write unusual versions of fantasy, I have western fantasy, steampunk dragon fantasy, and my latest big series is an MM Dragon romantasy.
That was my last big Kickstarter. But I use AI for so many things in my business. It’s more like what, what don’t I use it for these days? I’ve used it from a lot of the art in my Kickstarters, as y’all have seen in the past episode I was here. I used it to help with like ad copy on Facebook or even copy on the Kickstarter page.
But [00:10:00] the real interesting news I found for it recently was when I did a live event at the end of January. So I was invited to come do Ag Econ in College Station, Texas, and it was my first time there, and I was going to have a six foot long table, which that sounds like a lot, but when you’re an author, it’s actually not that big. And I usually do a big convention here called Comic Palooza, where I have these two big eight foot tables. I’ve got plenty of room to sprawl. My chaos can find its way there. But so a few days before the Con in January, I pulled out my own six foot table, and I looked at all the books I was taking and I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to make this work.
So I was like, I know who’s really good at figuring out where things should go when I show him things. So I’m like, okay, ChatGPT, let’s go. So I pulled him up on my phone, had it, I had this all in my living room. I pulled him up on my phone, and I took a picture, and I opened up a new chat and I told Chat, pretty much, Hey, I’m going to this [00:11:00] convention at College Station, Texas.
I had the six foot table. That’s the size you see here. These are the books I’m bringing. How can I make this setup appeal to my ideal reader? So we went back and forth. He kept looking at things. I would make little tweaks and every tweak I made, I would take a new picture, add it to the chat, and he would say, move this and that.
So probably 15 or 20 pictures later, I had this really amazing setup that I would never have done myself, because I don’t have that kind of design eye. So I was like, okay this is really good. And then that same day he also helped me figure out how to put up the big banner I was gonna put behind my table. Because I am not mechanically inclined and I will put things together the wrong way if given a chance.
So I had the instruction from Amazon and I’m like, this does not make sense to me. So I’m taking pictures of everything I’m doing. I’m like, how do I do this? How do I do this? Where does this go? And it took two hours, but I got it figured out. And when I had to put it up on Saturday, it did not take two hours thanks to Chat.
But what was also nice, [00:12:00] so when I got to the convention on Saturday, my table was a little different than I thought as far as the flow of where people were going to come. So I took a picture of my setup and I was like, Hey, this is, this is how I’m oriented people are coming this way. Should I change things?
And Chat said yes. Pretty much flip things, because he had his reasons for the flow. And I was like, okay, we’ll do that. And it worked really well. It was not a design I would’ve made, but it was very effective.
Steph Pajonas: I love this idea. Like when I talked to you prior to this, you said, oh, we’re gonna talk about using AI for live events.
I didn’t realize it was gonna be like, placement and those sorts of things. That’s really cool because, I’m also spatially challenged about, about things where I’m like, I’m not really sure to put things, and I often will take a picture of something and give it to an AI and be like, tell me what I need to be doing here.
You can use it to, um, you know, take pictures of things that you don’t like, really, really understand or know and, [00:13:00] and, and it can see and give you direction, and I love that. I feel like, I feel like we’ve finally entered that time where our phones are like actual oracles now. Because in the past that’s what we called it, the just go ask the oracle, which was just, get on your phone and Google.
And now it can actually see and understand things and that is just, that is such a treat. I love that.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I have been loving the fact, like I have, I’ve shown you guys, I have the Google Pixel phone, and I’ve always had the most up to date version of Google Lens, and I had it way before everyone else and always loved it, but the level at which it has gotten so much better.
It’s just amazing. I really am loving that, again, spatially challenged, that anything that I need information on or help with, I can use Google Lens to pull it up and boom, not only do I have that thing pulled up, but right [00:14:00] now true story. I am having struggles with Claude Cowork and Antigravity, mostly because on my laptop they use up so much of the ram and the processing.
So my old laptop has more RAM and more processing. But the reason I don’t use it is the battery’s dead and I just like. I don’t remember what kind of laptop or anything it is, but I like Google lensed parts of the battery, and now I know what to get. And I’m like, this is just amazing. And I think about that and it’s so useful.
So to me, hearing practical steps like that from Amy is powerful, because a lot of times, I don’t know about you guys, but I have spent just hours spinning my wheels, like what you were saying in setting up that display. Going to a conference and trying to set up the display, I spent so much time trying to figure it out, and if I have that picture, and that this is what you do, [00:15:00] that makes it a thousand times easier, so go you.
Amy Campbell: Danica, so here’s another approach tip for you with your laptop. So in early in January, I added all these like desktop widgets to my MacBook thinking, oh, this is going to make me more productive. I didn’t realize that it was actually slowing down my MacBook. And ChatGPT told me why after the fact, then I was like, oh duh.
‘Cause it’s always updating everything, but my, my MacBook was getting slow, and I used to be able to have like Claude, Chat, Eleven Labs, like, you know, 45 tabs open in Chrome. Like my poor little MacBook was probably stressed out, but it could still work. And then suddenly, like it started just like being super slow and not working.
So I’m asking Chat what’s going on? So he had me like pull up the activity monitor, and I showed him the processes. And he was like, whoa, there’s too much of all these things going on. So we finally figured out it was those widgets I added that was slowing things down. When I took them off. It worked perfect after that.
So don’t sleep on Chat helping you in like technical ways too, like that.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. [00:16:00] Yeah. I’ve done that as well. Because when I was setting up Antigravity for some reason, every how to video for setting up Antigravity is missing a step. And it’s always like this one little step.
And so what I finally did is I did the same thing, is I just took screenshots of everything I was doing. I was like, okay, what am I missing? And then it’s like, boom, here you go. And so I, I don’t think that people realize just how handy it is that if you are like me and not a computer genius. You can sit there and you can ask it questions, and what’s really great is you’re not gonna get the eye roll of, oh, I can’t believe you couldn’t figure that out.
Like it’s just so nice of, oh, here’s the screenshots, this is what I’ve done of each step. Oh, cool, here’s what you, here’s what you missed. And usually it’s just like a little teeny, tiny thing. And really just having that extra help, it’s so valuable. So yes. I love that tip, [00:17:00] Amy, because I think, again, as I said in the beginning, maybe you are listening to this, you’re like, oh, live events aren’t for me.
But you just, no matter who you are, you just got a bunch of practical tips on how to use the AI. So I love that. So tell us what else you’re working on.
Amy Campbell: Yeah, I still have some more live event tips with AI too. ‘Cause I literally used it like in every way I possibly could for this. So like I mentioned, this was my first time going to this convention, so I didn’t know how many people attended.
I didn’t know what the setup was going to be. So I went to ChatGPT, and I went into research mode and I was like, okay, this is the convention I’m going to, and this was like the 55th year for it. Which is also ironic, because I went to Texas A&M, and I’d never heard of this Con, but that was because it was before the internet.
If you didn’t know people, you didn’t know things back, back in the day. But anyway, I digress. So Chat did his diligent research. He came back and he was like I couldn’t find a lot. But he looked at Reddit, he looked at Facebook, he looked at, like little [00:18:00] newspapers and things like that.
So he was able to give a very rough estimate of attendance over various years. And then of course, you know, that the pandemic came and probably wrecked all of the numbers. So he was like, yeah, it could be this, it could be…it’s really hard to say, but this is what I estimate. Um. What was really interesting was he had estimated about 800 people would come over the weekend based on what he saw.
And I spoke to someone there who was the dad of the girl running the vendor area, and that’s how many he said came. And I was like, what, like Chat, you were like on it. That’s amazing. I think he got lucky, but it was really interesting based on all of his data that he could figure that out. And another thing I did with him was I’ve talked about the pricing of my books, because, and here are the, the people on YouTube get to see the pretty books I have.
So I have these special edition books I sell at the events and you know, these are nice at like Comic Cons and things like that, but this was a college, with college students and we all know college students, they’re buying those $200 [00:19:00] textbooks, so they probably want the pretty fantasy book to not have to worry about, you know, biology or chemistry or whatever they’re studying, but you know, this is, this is pricey.
So I talked to Chat about, you know, a price point that would work and which books to take because I have, you know, no bling books. I have medium bling books, like paperback versions of that. And then I have the hardcovers and the book boxes. So we made a strategy based on that. So I had all kinds of different price points and like even the hardcover, I dropped the price by about $5 thinking that might tempt people, and it did.
So we kind of did this heavy analysis, based on who we thought would come, and then what they might actually buy. And that was actually very spot on as well too. I was right next to my friend Rose Garcia, who did really good selling books as well. And then there were some other authors, a few tables down, and of course Rose and I brought up all of our pretty books.
So we did pretty decently, but I know for a fact, because of just all the vendors there and like the shopping fatigue, that part of what sold my books was like, number one, the [00:20:00] beautiful AI covers and then like the setup of the table that chat had done just to kind of lure people there. So I was very happy with those things too.
Danica Favorite: This is what I love that you specifically said, the AI covers is what drew people in. Because I keep hearing over and over, oh, nobody’s gonna buy books with an AI cover. No one wants an AI cover. Here you are, live events, and it was the AI covers that was drawing people in.
Amy Campbell: Like this one again, YouTube people get to see the pretty, pretty gold foil dragon on this.
Here’s another tip, unrelated to the live events, but just related to this in general. So when you’re doing like a foil cover for book vault or the overseas printers, you have to have a separate file that is just the art as like a SVG file. And it has to be like black and white. If you have Chat or a Midjourney or Ideogram, whoever makes this cover like this, it doesn’t have this as a separate thing. Currently, I dunno if it’ll still do it in [00:21:00] two months or whatever, but you can give this cover to Chat and you can say, Hey, I’m going to make this dragon and these words gold foil.
Can you pull them out and put me, you know, make them black on a white background so that I can make a foil cover with this? And he will do that. I learned that tip from a friend of mine.
Steph Pajonas: I bet…
Amy Campbell: So that’s also very helpful.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I bet Nano Banana from Gemini could probably do that too. It’s so good at either pulling stuff out of images, or mimicking images, or putting your image into other images.
I, I use it as well for putting my book cover into flat lay images for my website and that sort of thing.
Amy Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Steph Pajonas: So also, so Nano Banana would probably be good for that as well. I love the covers. I love the gold foil. And your printed edges there, are they forced edges on those books?
Amy Campbell: No. They’re printed through book vault.
Steph Pajonas: They’re very pretty.
Amy Campbell: So, again, for the YouTube people, you get to see all the pretty stuff.
Steph Pajonas: They are very pretty.
Amy Campbell: So if you’re doing pod, I usually do the podcast. But if you’re doing the podcast, come to YouTube right now.
Steph Pajonas: Exactly. And I think [00:22:00] that um, by did, what was the layout of your table?
Did it show off those right away so that it would draw people in? Is that the way that, um, is that the way that OpenAI, the GPT gave you to do that so that it would bring people in?
Amy Campbell: Yeah, and so I was able to tell him, based on Comic Palooza that I did last year, I could tell him like my book boxes and then My Dragon Latitude, the Dragon Meridians cover, which is my other Dragon series, those brought people in like bees to honey.
So based on that, he said let’s feature the book boxes and the, the shiny, special edition books. But then below them, on a tier below, but laying flat have your paperback so that, people would come to the pretty books, and then they’d say, oh, I can’t afford $65, because I’m a college student, but maybe I can afford this $25 book that has a full color interior also with AI art.
And I have this beautiful book to take home with me now. I usually kind of have, try to have it based on attraction, which is what [00:23:00] Chat was deciding too, so, so we attracted them there with the pretty things. They saw, maybe they couldn’t afford the prettiest thing, but I tried to have an alternative that they could take home with them.
Danica Favorite: I really love that, because I go to stuff like that too, and I look at the books, I’m like, eh, I can’t do the $65 book. But having right there, the lower cost option available, that, that’s so smart. And. It’s great that Chat’s able to pull out all this business advice and use numbers and give you appropriate price points and data and stats.
It wasn’t so long ago that Steph and I were on here saying, please do not believe them when they give you numbers. Ignore any numbers that Chat gives you. AI is bad at numbers, and now it’s pretty darn good. And so it’s super cool to hear just how good all of your numbers and calculations came out.
Steph Pajonas: Numbers are getting better, because they can now [00:24:00] access tools.
Uh, so that’s something that people don’t realize is that now on the backend, the LLM can interface with with MCP servers and other tools on the backend. So sometimes I’ll be working on something, and I use Typing Mind for my interface with LLMs, and I can see Claude pull up data, then go to a calculator and calculate it all and then come back and give me exact numbers, which is great.
So sometimes there’s some hallucinations in there, obviously, but it is getting a lot better. I agree.
Amy Campbell: And something else I did too was with some of the numbers I would push back and I would say, how did you get this? Where did you find this? I would push back to also, because I was curious.
I’m like, Hey where did you actually get this information from? I wanna go look at that site too. So I would push back sometimes, but I am also, in addition to not being mechanically inclined, I am not. Inclined at all with math. And so for me calculators when I was a kid were like oh, this is amazing technology for me.
I really love that [00:25:00] AI’s gotten better with math, because that’s another one of my pain points. And one of the, one of the things I did when I actually came back from the convention was I was trying to figure out if it was worth going back to next year because I had to travel, get a hotel for two nights um, you know, be away from my family.
And I’m like, okay, is it worth it? I can gain new readers, but it, but again, we’re talking poor college students who were busy reading other things. Will they, will they, be able to come back to my books finally. So when I came back that Monday I pretty much went back to my same chat that I had with Chat and I said, okay, let’s do a cost benefit analysis to know if I should go back to this Con next year.
So I was like, what do you need to know? And then of course he gave me homework of all the stuff I needed to get him. And I was like, oh, I hate you, but I, I will get you this information. I will get it for you, ’cause I need to know. Um, so he wanted to know how much of each book sold, like what the format was, um, what my return on investment was, how much the hotel was, how much the banner was, how much the table was.[00:26:00]
So I got all this data and fed it to him, and then he looked at it, and then he came back and he was like. I do think it’s worth it to go back and he listed all of his reasons that he thought I should go back. But then I pushed back more then because I was like but are you sure?
Because, I lost the weekend of writing and being with my family and cleaning my house. I lost a few days before figuring out the table, figuring out the setup, this and that. But he was able to successfully convince me that these are the reasons of why you should Consider because it will help you over time.
And he was like, like financially you made enough to more than cover you, you know, your traveling your weekend. He had so many good reasons. I was like, okay, darn it, you convinced me.
Danica Favorite: I really love this because you know, as I was saying back in our previous episode about critical thinking, like it’s so great that you’re pushing back on the AI and saying, okay, really, how did you come up with this?
Where did you come up with this? And this is why, even though, everyone’s so [00:27:00] afraid of AI, I think it goes back to this idea of how do you use it and how are you being responsible in using it? And validating your data. Because yes, sometimes it still hallucinates. Again it’s getting so much better at that.
It’s been a while since I’ve had something I would say is an actual hallucination, um, which is super cool, but it’s so good to always be challenging that. And I like what Steph was saying too about, I love it now that it shows you the little steps where it’s like, and I’m checking this and I’m doing this thing, and I’m doing this thing.
Because you really are seeing, okay, this is the work that it’s putting into. It’s like I was the kid in math class when I was younger where they would say, show your work. Some of the problems showing your work was good, but I always had a weird way of doing things. Still came up with the right answer.
Learning that this is a neurodivergent thing. But I would hate that, because the way I showed my work never was what the teacher wanted, but I still got the right answer. And it’s still the same [00:28:00] thing here where they’re showing the work. And so at least you see that they’re going through a thinking process.
It’s not just, okay, here’s an answer. You know that they’ve researched it, and you can sometimes even see in some of the models where it’ll say, oh, I thought through this. So I think this is really cool. And I love that you asked it to give you that ROI and to actually help you decide if you’re gonna go back again.
So it sounds like it was really worthwhile for you to go.
Amy Campbell: Yeah it is, and it was worth it just seeing on what, what, what the AI could do to help me ease my way getting there, because I feel like a lot of what helped my success was using the AI, leveraging it this way, because, you know, I would’ve had a nice table regardless, because I’ve got the pretty books, but it was just, it really brought it up another level with having this display that was just spot on, luring people to me. And it just really helped me feel like you know, brought me up another level. Because there [00:29:00] were some other vendors there. Not just authors, a wide variety of vendors who, some of them had nice displays.
Some of them I really wanted to be like, I wanted to go try to convert them to AI and be like. Hey, have you Considered ChatGPT? Let’s take a picture of your table and see what he could do to make it prettier. But, you know, I, I didn’t do that because, some artists are really touchy about AI, so I didn’t wanna, you know, have anybody chase me outta there with a pitch for or anything.
But I really wanted to be like oh, the AI could really help you with this thing. So may, maybe someday we’ll be in a world where we can do that.
Steph Pajonas: What were some other things that you thought of that you might wanna use AI for next time when you go do a show? I mean, I’m sure that after using it for a little while, you probably got some good ideas in the back of your mind.
Anything stand out?
Amy Campbell: Not overall, although it was funny, because when I was there I was next to my author friend Rose Garcia. And so between talking to readers we would just kind of chat back and forth. [00:30:00] So she had mentioned that she was thinking of maybe changing her author name to possibly being an initial and a last name, because she had a friend who did it, and I was oh like, why did they do that?
So she talked about why. And so then I was like you have an established brand. So I don’t know what that would do with that, but I thought about something like that too. So I said, well, you know, I’ve got time. Let’s see what Chat thinks about this. So I asked Chat Hey my, I’m thinking of, changing my author name, and so was my friend.
What do you think about, this is our, these are our current names. These were our current brands. And so first he analyzed me, because he knows me, of course, and he knows what I write. And he was like. No you should not change it because people are gonna get confused about, you know, what you’re writing.
Otherwise, people know that Amy Campbell writes these very different fantasies. This is your brand. Do not touch it. And I was like, but I, I, I have problems on Goodreads, because there’s another Amy Campbell, so I kind of wanted him to be like, yes, change it so you can make life easier there. But he is like, no, don’t touch it.
So I’m like, Aw man. [00:31:00] So then I had him analyze my author friend. And so he went through it and he was like, no, tell her not to touch it either, because she needs to stay as she is. She’s gonna sell more books with her current name. And so I showed her, I’m like this is what Chat says. And she read it.
She’s like, okay, yeah. That’s okay, that’s really good reasoning. But another funny thing we did was I took a picture of one on my book covers, ’cause I’m, I’m sitting there bored between, uh, readers and I said, okay take this cover, make it say A. D. Campbell instead of Amy Campbell.
So, you know, thought made the picture and then it had my new potential author name on there AD Campbell, and I was like, yeah, I don’t like how that looks. I’ll stick with Amy Campbell. So that was just just a funny off the wall…we, we, we were bored so how can I play with AI thing that we did there too.
Steph Pajonas: It’s keeping you on your toes.
Amy Campbell: Yes. Yes, exactly.
Steph Pajonas: I love that. I’ve been sitting here thinking while you’ve been talking about different ways you could probably use AI at a live event, and I’m thinking like [00:32:00] maybe if you’re, if you’re brainstorming ideas for swag, it might be able to help you out there.
It might be able to help you out with, um, cold, cold talking, cold selling to people, you know, like…
Amy Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Steph Pajonas: how do you, uh, how do you approach people about your work? What are the things that you might wanna talk about first? Whether it’s tropes or asking the other person questions about what they like to read or anything like that.
And I was also thinking that, it would probably be good to like have, so that you can, um, as your stock dwindles, like on, on the table, how to rearrange things later to make it still look like, you’ve got plenty there to offer for people. These all just came to my head. It came into my head just now.
So please, people go out and take that and maybe it helps you when you go do some live events. Danica, did you think of anything?
Danica Favorite: I was just just blown away by some of this, because even like the idea of how many books would I [00:33:00] even bring?
Amy Campbell: Mm-hmm.
Danica Favorite: Um, like now. Obviously, Amy, you’ve got the data, you see what sold and what to do.
But for somebody who’s never done it before, really to be able to have that resource, because the other thing that I was thinking about, even with you guys talking to Chat about your author names, um, I get really frustrated with author groups sometimes, because there’s always people who have very strong opinions, who always answer every single question that people have, and they’re incredibly opinionated about it, and a lot of the time they are wrong.
And part of that is, is they don’t know your business. They have no idea what your brand is. They have no idea what your market is. They don’t even know your genre ’cause they write in a completely different genre. But because they’ve had success as their name in their genre, they think that they know everything there is to know about publishing.[00:34:00]
And I, get really frustrated with that, because like I said, a lot of times it’s just wrong. And so when I look at what you’re doing and what you did to be able to say, okay, Chat, here’s what we’re thinking, here’s why, and it gives you really good reasoning behind it. Suddenly it’s not just the opinion of somebody who knows nothing about your business, who thinks they know everything.
But now it’s actually somebody who has looked at your business, and is doing it from a very neutral point of view.
Yeah, that’s, that’s where I was going with thinking about that, because honestly, that’s what I do anymore is instead of going to the groups and asking their opinion, I’ll talk to Chat and say, Hey, Chat, what do you think of this? And also, go down some of those rabbit holes that I don’t longer feel comfortable doing in a group because, um, especially now that I am obviously, [00:35:00] hi, I co-host a podcast with my friend Steph about using AI for authors. It’s just, I don’t even wanna expose myself to some of these people and their nonsense.
Steph Pajonas: I, I hear this. I definitely use Chat or Gemini or whoever to help me with business decisions. Um, where to go with certain series, what to do with my business.
I recently published all of my books on my website for free. That was a big step for me to take, to put all of my stuff out there for free. But it was it’s a calculated risk on my part. It’s all about bringing people in. Bringing people in, showing them my work and letting them know that I write for me, and everybody else is secondary.
Here, come enjoy the work that I’ve made. I’m not doing this for money. I’m actually just doing it to put my stories out into the world um, and that that’s my business. But if I, honestly, if I went into a [00:36:00] Facebook group and told people that they would all call me crazy. They’d be like, what are you talking about?
You don’t wanna make money? What’s wrong with you? And I would hear it and I would internalize it, and then I would doubt myself and whatnot. And so now, I just go to my chat buddies or my really close friends about these things. And I don’t go to the wider world about it anymore. I agree.
But I wanna get back to the live events, because I feel like this is something that a lot of people don’t think about enough. I certainly have, um, I’ve done some signings in the past and whatnot, and it wasn’t really my thing. But I’ve seen other people go to Cons. They have these books. They have the pretty books.
They have the kind of properties, I would say, properties that are gonna draw in fans, ’cause it’s the whole fandom thing. The whole fandom thing is really, I feel [00:37:00] like it’s like the next step up when you’re an author, right? You get readers and they love you and whatnot, but once they like become fans, and I’ve seen these readers, they’re like the ones that are going out and getting tattoos of your characters.
They’re like, they’re making fan art, they’re doing all this kind of stuff. And being at live events is how you reach those people. And AI can definitely help here, because we’re not all extroverts. We’re, we come from both sides of that spectrum from introverted to extroverted. And if you just need that little bit of extra help, AI is gonna be there for you for these things for planning. Maybe you wanna start with smaller Cons first. So go talk to AI about all the smaller Cons you might wanna go visit first. Also talk to it about the kinds of things that you need for your table, your booth. Whether that’s a big printed sign or you start with something smaller and you work your way up.
All of that thing is [00:38:00] upfront costs that you can take from one Con to the next. Because like when Amy did her cost benefit analysis with Chat, it’s able to look at it and say, she spent money on these things, but she’s not gonna have to necessarily spend money on the next time she goes to a Con, because she can just take those with her.
And those are a lot of things that we don’t necessarily think about. So go to Chat for these things, because I think that we can all benefit from having like a neutral third party look at these for us, and help us make those decisions.
Amy Campbell: I will say one more thing about live events and to borrow from Joanna Penn, double down on being human. That’s another reason I like live events because, you know, I obviously integrate a lot of AI into my process and my business. But by doing the Kickstarters, by going out to these live events, that shows people like, Hey, this is a real human who is obsessed with these characters, making these pretty books.
Like she’s not just pressing a single [00:39:00] button, ha ha ha. And, producing these beautiful books. It really puts me out there with the readers and people will, sometimes it, it does get awkward when people say, who, who did your art? Everything is so pretty. And then I’ll say, honestly, well, I did. And they’re like, you’re so talented. You drew all these? And I’m like, well, you know, I’ll, if, if they really are interested and ask, sometimes I will say I generate things through different art LL, you know, generators and put them together an affinity photo to kind of make a hole from them.
So I. If they’re curious, I will tell them the design process. I won’t just say, oh, I just go to ChatGPT and put, you know, really cool dragon and really cool dragon comes out that I put on my book. Like, it’s a whole process. And some people, they’re just happy to hear, oh, you made the art.
Yes, I’m gonna buy the book. And some people love to hear, oh how did you do the art? And then I’ll tell them, and they’re like. I have told people that some of it is AI and at first I was like, they’re going to stone me. They’re gonna throw me out of here. But more people have been like, oh really?
This is [00:40:00] really cool. So that has been really interesting too.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think the general public honestly doesn’t even understand what AI art is, and so I think it’s nice that you’re able to just talk to them about it and again, have that human conversation and understanding that it’s just humans interacting with each other. Because I think that is the point that sometimes we miss in the online spaces, like it’s so easy to leave a nasty comment on somebody’s post and, oh, AI, I hate AI. Okay, but do you wanna have a conversation about it instead? And online, people don’t. They don’t wanna sit and just talk and get to know a person and their process. And I think that is really important, because yes, AI does all that heavy lifting for you, but ultimately you get to be the person out there having conversations with them, and that [00:41:00] sounds really cool and fun to be able to get to know people and like you said, build that fandom.
Amy Campbell: To go back to the introverts that we talked about earlier, like we said, I’m a very big introvert. I did used to work at the public library where we would do, you know, have to do outreach events to go out in public, which I’m like, oh gosh, I have to go out in public. I just wanna sit in the library and be the stereotypical librarian who sits and reads my book, which, we don’t get to do either. So I would take one of my former staff members to, um, these live events with me. And so she would just be so surprised when I would leave the table and, you know, tell people like, Hey, do you like to read fantasy books?
Do you like dragons? Do you like this? And that, and just be very outgoing. And she’s like, like, who? Who are you? Like you turn into a totally different person at these events. And I’m like, well, you know, number one, I wanna sell these books. But number two, I’m also very invested and excited about my books and my world that I create too.
So I think that can also, for people who are really passionate about their work, the live events are great for [00:42:00] that, because you get to help make your potential new readers excited about it too.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, I think that’s also a good point. It is just that passion of your books being able to come through in ways that a Facebook post can never convey. You,
I mean, you can say, oh, I’m so excited about this book in a post, during your newsletter, or whatever. But to actually see that excitement and to interact with the human being behind it is really powerful. And that’s why we’re always gonna need humans. We’re always gonna need that interaction and to be able to see that spark of excitement and joy.
And I love that you’re bringing that joy to others through the live events. So I know we’re running out of time. I can see Steph doing her little, getting ready to say, we gotta wrap it up, look. And are there any other final things you wanted to share about live events and all the great things [00:43:00] that you’re doing that we haven’t covered yet?
Amy Campbell: For the live events, just to reiterate what Steph said, they seem scary, they are what you make of them. They’re a lot of fun. Definitely start small like Steph suggested, but also try to find ones that are appropriate for your genre. Like I do Comic Cons, because fantasy is vary adjacent to Comic Cons.
If you write romance, there’s lots of different romance conventions. I know some authors who do like, farmer’s markets and sell really well. So you can start very small, so don’t be afraid of that. And also, Kickstarter and live events go very well hand in hand. Because number one, you’re producing pretty books that will then sell well at live events.
That Kickstarter also gives you lots of talking points and additional swag and things that you can have at these live events too. They very much feed each other that way as well, which is a nice ecosystem to have.
Steph Pajonas: That’s perfect. I think that’s a great way to end this conversation on live events.
I would love, though, to be able to send people [00:44:00] to a URL or website or whatever you’re working on now. So please let us know what your URLs are.
Amy Campbell: Yes. Y’all can find me at amycampbellbooks.com. That’s where you can see my whole catalog and like Steph, all of my books have AI images done by ChatGPT to make them look really pretty.
So you can see those there. And you can also see my latest Kickstarter there too.
Steph Pajonas: Perfect. Perfect. I love that we had a chance to talk about this. ‘Cause this is something that I never really thought about for AI, and now this is a great use case, and I’m sure that somebody’s gonna go out there and really kick some butt doing live events with AI’s help.
So I’m glad we got a chance to talk about it today. Thank you so much for being here. Um, Danica, do we wanna talk about anything else before we wrap up?
Danica Favorite: Yeah, just, to reiterate what Steph was saying about this idea of having not really thought about it. Because as an introvert, I’ve always just been like yeah, not for me, have a nice day. ‘Cause I’ve done book [00:45:00] signings and things, and they were never my thing. It never moved the needle for me. And I love seeing people like Amy who are super successful at it and understanding she’s an introvert. This isn’t a natural, Ooh, let’s do this thing. But we now have tools that can help us.
So really excited about that. As always, I want to remind you to like and follow Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press, Publish Drive, Brave New Bookshelf, all of those things on all the different socials. Make sure you’re liking and subscribing to the YouTube channel. I know we hit that one hard today.
Um, but you know, always a good reminder that we do have so many resources out there, and I want to make sure that people are getting connected in all the ways possible, because this is really great information. And also, as always, if you have a recommended guest or a recommended [00:46:00] topic, just let us know. Because we always want to make sure that we’re providing things that are gonna be beneficial to the author community.
Steph Pajonas: Absolutely. We are here for you with all the good AI in publishing stuff. So come by bravenewbookshelf.com, check out the show notes for this particular episode. We’ll be sure to get them in there and get all of our links and whatnot so you can go find Amy and all of her books and all of this great advice about doing live events.
So everybody, thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you guys in the next episode. Okay, bye.
Danica Favorite: 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.