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This week on the podcast, we’re exploring the world of direct sales and author empowerment. In episode 76, we sat down with Greg Keogh, the co-founder of Curios, a platform that is revolutionizing how authors sell their work directly to readers. From handling the headaches of sales tax to offering a “permissionless” space for AI-generated and spicy content, Greg shared how Curios is helping authors take back control of their careers.
Meet Greg Keogh, Co-Founder of Curios
Greg Keogh is on a mission to make direct sales the easiest option for authors. Coming from the music industry, Greg saw firsthand how creators were often beholden to massive platforms that acted as “black boxes,” offering little transparency and even less control.
With Curios, Greg has built a marketplace and storefront system that removes the technical and administrative barriers to selling direct. Whether you are selling ebooks, audiobooks, or physical copies, Greg’s goal is to ensure authors spend less time on administration and more time doing what they love: writing.
The Power of Selling Direct
One of the biggest hurdles to selling direct has historically been the “full-time job” of setting up a store. Greg explained that while platforms like Shopify are powerful, they require the author to be the merchant of record—meaning the author is responsible for collecting and filing sales tax, handling customer support, and managing distribution.
Curios changes the game by acting as the Merchant of Record. This means:
- Tax Compliance: Curios handles nexus issues and VAT, filing taxes so the author doesn’t have to.
- Customer Support: If a reader has trouble downloading a file or buys the wrong format, Curios handles the resolution.
- Ease of Use: An author can go from a file on their computer to a live sales page in about three minutes.
Beyond the logistics, selling direct allows authors to keep a much higher percentage of the sale (often 92% or more) and, most importantly, capture the customer’s email address for future marketing.
A Safe Haven for Spicy and AI Content
A major theme of our discussion was “permissionless” publishing. Greg shared the story of Willow Winters, a flagship author for Curios who was de-platformed from YouTube after her audiobooks were incorrectly flagged as pornographic. This highlight’s a growing problem: authors are often at the mercy of platform algorithms that can pull the rug out from under them at any moment.
Curios takes a different approach:
- No Spice Restrictions: Curios does not limit spice levels in books or audiobooks, providing a secure space for romance and erotica authors.
- Open to AI: Unlike many retailers that are tightening restrictions or using imperfect AI detectors, Curios is wide open to AI-forward authors. Whether a book is human-written, AI-assisted, or “raw” AI, Curios provides the tools to sell it.
Physical Books and the Future Roadmap
While Curios started with digital files, they are moving aggressively into the physical book space. Greg outlined a three-part roadmap for physical sales:
- Self-Fulfilled (Live Now): Authors can sell paperbacks or special editions from their own homes, with Curios generating the shipping labels.
- Print on Demand: A forthcoming integration with Book Vault will allow for hands-free printing and shipping.
- 3PL Integration: Curios is working on a system where authors can send inventory to a warehouse that handles the picking and packing automatically.
Integrating AI into the Author Workflow
Curios isn’t just a storefront; it’s also incorporating AI tools to help authors with the “stuff they don’t want to do,” specifically marketing.
- Marketing Graphics: The platform currently generates AI marketing images for books upon upload.
- Animated Covers: Greg teased an upcoming feature that will allow authors to animate their book covers for better social media engagement.
- Nurture Automations: A new tool is in development to help authors automate “thank you” notes, discounts for sequels, and bundle offers based on when a reader finishes a book in the Curios app.
A Unique Pricing Model
Greg explained that Curios offers a free tier to help authors find their footing without burning capital. As sales grow, authors can move into paid tiers (ranging from $5 to $50 a month).
Unique to Curios is their transaction fee model. Instead of the author “eating” the credit card and delivery fees, these are passed to the buyer at checkout (totaling around 8%). This fee ensures “permanent delivery,” allowing Curios to host the file on decentralized servers so the reader has access to their purchase forever without the author paying a monthly hosting fee for that specific reader.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- Direct Sales is a Safety Net: Don’t wait for a platform like Amazon or YouTube to de-platform you. Have a direct sales channel ready.
- Be the Owner of Your Data: Collecting email addresses through direct sales is the only way to truly “own” your audience.
- Leverage the Merchant of Record: Use tools that handle the “boring” stuff like sales tax so you can focus on creativity.
- AI is an Empowerment Tool: Use AI to handle marketing and “nurture” sequences to keep your readers engaged.
- The Power Structure is Shifting: With direct sales, authors have more leverage when negotiating with traditional publishers or retailers.
Resources Mentioned
Here are the key links and resources mentioned in this episode:
- Curios Studio – Start your direct sales store for free.
- Curios Main Site
- Book Vault – Mentioned for upcoming POD integration.
Contact Greg Keogh: To join the private beta for physical book features, email Greg at greg@curios.com with the subject line “Private Beta Access.”
Transcript
Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.
Steph Pajonas: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I’m one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press, where we’re teaching authors how to use AI in any part of their process, and we’re publishing AI forward books on the press. We’re having a great time doing both of those things.
I think I talk about that pretty much every week that we’re doing those things, but I’m actually just, just this morning I launched three more books on the press, which was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun just to see them up there. It’s very satisfying to see them up there. And we’ll be putting them basically in our membership for free, for people to read through the month of April, and then they go into our vault on May 1st.
And they will also be sold on retailers and direct as [00:01:00] well. And one of the direct partners is actually here with us today, so I will be talking to him about that as well. But before that, I get to introduce my wonderful co-host, Danica Favorite. How are you doing today, Danica?
Danica Favorite: I’m good.
Thank you. Yeah I’m super happy to be here. As always we always have the most fun and interesting guests and super excited today. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, and we help authors at every stage of their journey from getting the perfect book metadata, book descriptions, AI covers, and then distributing your books to the widest audience possible.
We don’t do direct yet, but hopefully, fingers crossed. And, uh, until then you have our good friends with Curios. And then finally, once your book starts selling, we can help with some promos, and then if you have people to split royalties with we can help you with that as well. So between us and Future Fiction Academy, [00:02:00] Future Fiction Press. We have a lot of the bases here covered and really happy about that. Really excited for today’s guest because more and more authors are moving into direct sales, so really happy to see that there’s just one more option out there for authors and, yeah. So I think without further ado, we’re just gonna go ahead and dive in.
Greg, why don’t you tell us about yourself, tell us about Curios and how you all got into this crazy book business.
Greg Keogh: For sure. Thank you guys so much for having me. Love being here. So Curios is a direct platform and marketplace. So basically what we’ve created is the easiest way to sell direct that we possibly can, and we’re always working on making it easier.
So historically speaking, if you want to set up a direct sales channel, you’ve gotta build your own website. Usually you can use a Shopify to help with that. You’ve gotta figure out distribution. You’re the merchant of record, you’ve gotta collect your taxes. You [00:03:00] basically have to do so, I, I call it a full-time job just in setup.
And then there’s another full-time job behind that, just in administration and running that website, right? You’re gonna be handling customer support requests on a daily basis, and you’re the person in charge of that, and I do, for what it’s worth, think that it’s totally worth it to do that job, right?
That amount of work is extremely worth it. When you sell direct, you usually get either 100% of your sale or very close. We’re talking like 92% and above of your sale, which is very useful if you’re doing promotion and marketing, et cetera. You have more return on your investment to then reinvest into marketing and promotion.
The other part of direct sales that makes all that work worth it is you collect the email address, so any promotional work you do, which is usually very costly in time, costly on both time and money. You then can capture the email and you can use that to retarget, sell them, have them read through the series, get them to buy your next book without having to spend so much time and money on the upfront side of [00:04:00] recruiting them.
So despite how much work it’s been historically, I still think it’s the best option. However, we as Curios have tried to upend that whole system. Just make it extremely easy, and I think we’ve done it. Um, you guys can be the ones to let me know how well we are on that process. It’s, it’s always a work in progress.
But with Curios, an author can go from their book being a file on their computer to being live, available for sale in any format, ebook, audiobook, paperback, hardcover, the works, in about three minutes per book, I would say that’s about the average. So you can get your own dedicated webpage for your work, where you can then start routing your fans and start making those direct sales where you get, 100% of the sale and you get the contact information of who’s buying, in so much less time. And then in addition to that, what we’ve built in Curios is we’ve built a system to where you don’t need to do that full-time [00:05:00] administrative job post publish, right? So when you’re running your own Shopify store, again, you’re gonna be administering the site, like I mentioned. And on Curios, one of the benefits we have are that Curios is the administrator of that website.
So we technically are the merchant of record. We handle the transaction, so that means that we’re the ones who have to file the sales tax. So if it’s a physical book, we have a nexus in every single state. We’re the ones who make sure that organization gets paid correctly for the sale. We also collect, obviously sales tax, if it’s something like a VAT if you’re in Europe, you know, that kind of works.
We handle customer support. If somebody’s oh, I bought an epub. I thought this was a physical book. We handle that. They reach out to us. We try to make that solution right. And then in addition to that, we also administer the website, of course, right? So we keep the website up, we keep your book available at all times.
And that’s largely how we run. So that’s what we’ve built. Our goal is to open the doors as wide as possible so that direct [00:06:00] can be an easy option for authors and that has a lot of ramifications, especially in the day, in the age that we’re in now, where AI is empowering creatives in a way that’s never really been done before.
So we’ve got a permissionless and open door to anybody to get their work live, which, you know, that’s what we do. It’s what we like to do.
Danica Favorite: I love that so much, especially the merchant of record thing. Um, for those of you who don’t know, I live in Colorado. Sales Tax in Colorado is one, it’s not the most, but it’s one of the most difficult states in the United States to do sales tax.
I, back in the day, I actually wanted to do more live events and things like that. I took a two-day class to learn how to do sales tax in Colorado.
Greg Keogh: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: And it was so difficult that I finally said, I’m just never gonna do this. I’m just not gonna do live events. And so everyone’s doing, oh, I’m direct.
I’m direct. I’m like, I don’t wanna do that. I don’t want the sales tax burden. And when [00:07:00] you guys came onto the scene, I’m like, oh my goodness. I think that this is finally doable for me. And I love that you are making this as easy as possible for authors and I’m Curiosus ’cause I actually don’t know, how do you guys handle physical copies of books?
Greg Keogh: So that’s it’s brand new, right? So as Steph knows, Steph was the one uploading at the time that this change went live, but it is brand new. So, um, right now we’ve got a roadmap. So the first part of the roadmap that just went live is self-fulfilled physical books. So either you or if you’ve got a warehouse and somebody who handles your books, you basically would be, um, sorry. When you get a sale for a physical book. We then collect shipping from the buyer. We then generate a shipping label. And then we just give that label to you. And so then you then can print the label, place it in your book, and then deliver it to the carrier. So that’s how we handle it, for this first roadmap item that we just launched.
The second and third, they’re gonna be released simultaneously [00:08:00] in the next couple weeks. There’ll be a print on demand option with book vault. So you can just connect your book vault account and set up print on demand. And then if an order comes in, we would send that information to Book Vault and they would then print the book and ship it to the appropriate person.
So you’re get be more hands free. And then we’re working with a 3PL system, trying to set that up where essentially it’d be the same thing, right? So you would send your inventory to a warehouse. That warehouse would then store it for you, and then when an order comes in via Curios, we send the shipping label to that warehouse.
They pick, they place the label on and they send it out. So right now, self-fulfilled is the option. We did that first, ’cause everybody’s got some books in their house that they can, sell. And it also covers the whole gambit, right? It allows you to be okay, paperback, hardcover, special editions kind of lets you cover the whole works.
Even if you’re a large operation and you have your own warehouse, it still works, but we’re working towards those hands-free solutions and you can tell with how we set the company up. Our [00:09:00] goal is to alleviate the burdens of authors. I have a very selfish interest in that, in that I want authors to write more.
So it’s like the authors that I love, they’ll spend quite a bit of time in between books and I get it, ’cause they’re relatively famous. They have to run the administrative side of all of that. And it’s like, well, I want that to just be offloaded. And authors can be writing more books and they can be making plenty of money from their work so that they’re, not working day jobs or doing other things.
I want them basically writing. And again, it’s, that’s the selfish part of me. It’s like I want to just empower creatives again thing.
Steph Pajonas: You’re doing a great job of making sure that it’s easy on authors for up uploading. So I’ve been doing this with Future Fiction Press for a while.
We had a, an account with you guys like last year or maybe the year before that. I don’t know. It’s been a while. I feel like I’ve known you for at least two years now, so it’s been a while. But I started uploading books for Future Fiction Press and it literally is like a three minutes, like title, blurb, maybe ISPN, files, boom you go. It’s so easy.
Greg Keogh: Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: [00:10:00] Very easy. And then, we also have to talk about the different levels of the accounts at Curios as well. Cause
Greg Keogh: Yes.
Steph Pajonas: A lot of authors I’ve heard from that they, they don’t necessarily wanna spend money on a direct store, but I remind them that, hey, you know, if you sign up with Shopify, you have to pay Shopify fees, you have to do the same with Pay Hip and a bunch of other places.
So Curios is not different in that matter. But you guys have a free tier to get started, correct.
Greg Keogh: Yes, that’s correct. And yeah, thank you for bringing that up. We run into it as well. So essentially the way we’ve designed our payment is we have a free tier and we want authors to be able to find their success on that free tier.
And then you bump up to a paid tier and the paid tiers are very low, right? So we’re going from free, I think it goes to $5 a month, which also honestly goes on sale all the time. You can usually get that for like $2 a month. And then it goes up to, I believe it’s $20 a month, and then it goes up to $50 a month is the max.
So the idea [00:11:00] though is you’ll be able to afford it when the timing is right. So it’s like you’ll be on the free tier and then once you hit, you know, 10 sales a month in direct sales and you get all of the royalties. It becomes very easy to pay $5 to then run that site, if that makes sense. So that’s the way we’ve designed it.
We design in a way where like it will make sense for you to upgrade as you have funds. And it’s not something where we’re gonna be like, you must pay upfront. And we just really are trying to milk the whole industry until, you know, promising them the world is gonna be amazing when they go direct because, honestly it’s still is a long journey.
So it’s like you’ve gotta do a lot of work on the promotion side and the funneling side. So while you’re setting that up, you’re not burning capital on your direct store pages. So that’s largely how it works, how it’s set up. We charge monthly. Again, we have the free plan, and we encourage everybody just to start with the free unless you’re pretty confident, you’re gonna have a high volume of monthly and you want to get some of the special tools, start with the free.
And then we do charge a very small percentage [00:12:00] on the sale to the buyer. So what we have to do is we have to charge for credit card fees, right? So that’s usually around 3% and I think 35 cents, we tack that onto the buyer. And then we also tack on a small fee. It’s usually about 3 or 4%. The goal is to make it be within that 8% window in total.
So that’s, you know, usually a sales tax and at least in the US everybody’s accustomed to 8% being added on, and we really don’t see any issues in checkout where people are dropping carts. Because there’s 8% added on. So that’s the two ways that we make money. And the reason we charge the buyer at checkout is we enable permanent delivery of content.
So we’re basically taking a few cents and then we use that to like keep the content on a server so that person has permanent access to the book or the audio book or whatever it is. So that’s kind of how we afford that, if that makes sense.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. I think that’s really interesting and I was glad that you brought that up because it really is an interesting [00:13:00] way of making sure you guys get paid, the authors get paid and where those costs are because again, people are like, oh, this is so expensive, this, you know, this cost, that cost, and what you’re doing is that cost of the transaction rather than the author having to eat it. You actually are passing that cost onto the buyer, which I think is very unusual.
Greg Keogh: It is. Yeah. And in the book world, we’ve gotten, we’ve gotten feedback on that and we’re working on figuring out what we wanna do there. Some of the feedback we’ve gotten is authors would like to bake that in or have the choice to, and so we’re working towards a solution where, an author can select if they wanna absorb those fees or give them to the buyer, but the root of where it comes from is we want the creators of the content to be free. And I know it sounds dramatic when I say be free, but it’s like if you deliver a digital, if someone buys a digital file directly from you and you use a service to then deliver [00:14:00] that file to them, you have to technically speaking, pay for that service for the rest of your life because you’ve told this reader, you can buy the ebook or audiobook from me and then in order to read it, you’re gonna use a service to receive that.
And it’s one of those things where like technically speaking, you’re kind of beholden to the deliver it to them, and those services usually charge monthly. So it’s one of those things where we’re like, how can we collect upfront that amount so that we can put it on a decentralized server that allows it to be delivered forever.
So that’s why we designed it that way. But again, we’re trying to work with, we listened to feedback very closely and actually Steph is one of the people who spoke to us at the earliest stage. Like we met, I think when we were like one month into books and we had sat down at a bar and I pretty much listened to you and Elizabeth for it might have been several hours, and I, I kept a lot of those notes and was just basically like hammering through, hammering through and re-updating, re-updating, re-updating. ‘Cause ultimately we’re building this for [00:15:00] authors, right? We have other creators on the platform as well, but we, if authors want a tool, we usually comply.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, I remember that conversation. That was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun because you guys were just starting out and I was like, oh, the world’s your oyster. Let’s talk about all the possibilities that could happen right now. And I remember one of the things was your, your app that you had for the phone, iPad, et cetera wasn’t working yet.
Greg Keogh: Oh yeah.
Steph Pajonas: You were like, oh, we’re still working on it. And I was thinking if you can get that going, then you’ll really pull out a head because if, if an author can deliver their ebook or their audiobook straight to an app that somebody can just download and listen to or read right on that, that right there is golden.
And.
Greg Keogh: Yes.
Steph Pajonas: And then you guys, you guys got it working.
Greg Keogh: We did. Exactly. Yeah. That was a very fortuitous conversation. It was really nice. Both you and Elizabeth, that was like super helpful for us, so yeah it was an interesting time. We had almost, it wasn’t that we stumbled into books.
We [00:16:00] very deliberately went into books, but we were so new and it was one of those things where it was like. Yeah, we, yeah, we were sponges ready to just absorb whatever it was, to make this thing work well. So yeah.
Steph Pajonas: You guys had a you guys had like a flagship author who really helped you along at the beginning, didn’t you?
Greg Keogh: Yes, we did. And that was another extremely, so I’ve, I’ve even now realized how lucky we were with this. Pretty much I think every so often, like, yeah. My theory on this is you get this lucky once in your life, and this was it for us. And the flagship author was Willow Winters, and where we got lucky was so many timing pieces came into play. So she happens to be very generous. She’s very tech forward. She’s always willing to try new things. And we were speaking to her about our platform, just picking her brain on what authors need and things like that. And she was like of course I’ll give you guys an audio book you guys can put on the platform.
Use that to test. Just be a beta, you know, sort of thing. We’re like, great, we’ll do it. And [00:17:00] within that very first week, so we ended up getting the book from her. We were uploading, we were playing around with it, seeing how it worked for delivery and things like that. It was an audio book. And then within that week YouTube decided that her content was pornographic and which is, it wasn’t right, so she had her her back catalog of audio books were available on YouTube and she was giving them out for free.
And it was, there was no visual pornography. She had the age designations appropriate with YouTube’s policies of 18 and up and contains mature language and things like that. And again, it was just her audio book, on YouTube, no visual, no nothing. Which I mean, you know, is hilarious because if YouTube thinks that’s pornographic, like I can show them like hundreds of videos where there’s like actual pornography, but you know, whatever.
Steph Pajonas: I’m sure, I’m sure.
Greg Keogh: That’s a full conversation.
Steph Pajonas: That’s a whole other conversation.
Greg Keogh: But they had de platformed her, so she had over a hundred thousand subscribers. There were several readers of hers that were in the middle of a book, right in the middle of an audiobook and now boom, gone. And then there’s no [00:18:00] rectification for that either when YouTube or other, like these large social media companies when they remove your access to your account.
Meta is notorious for this as well. It’s just cold turkey. There’s no way for you to, rectify, there’s no way for you to even like ask them if you can fix it. It’s just gone, done forever permanent. So she was obviously very upset by this. And we had fortunately already been speaking to her about what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, how we’re trying to make things permissionless, and access and all that.
And she was like, I’m bringing all those books over. And we’re like, oh, great. Wonderful. So she brought over that whole back catalog. And then, um, this is where we, the lucky part is look, we didn’t really understand how in tune she is with her audience and her readers and how much her readers support her.
So she told the story, you know, on Instagram to her reader base and they all came in droves. So we went from having one trial book that we’re just like playing around with to having something like, I think she brought over, at first it was like 15 books and then a hundred [00:19:00] thousand readers just like boom.
And it was like, it was well over a hundred thousand, I think it was like, in the 120 thousands or so, but that many readers just came on within that first month and we were just like, oh my goodness, there is something humongous here. Because I kind of was under, I knew there was a problem in books, specifically audiobooks, ’cause I had remembered Brandon Sanderson’s epic Post about Audible and their rates, and all that. But I didn’t really know how systematically bad it was. I assumed, okay, I buy books. People buy books. Authors are gonna make money because people are buying it. We had come from the music business where nobody buys music.
So the musicians that have trouble with like, nobody’s even paying for music. And then you go to the author space where I was like at least people are paying for stuff. But then you come to find out, it actually, in my opinion, it stings a little worse. Knowing somebody pays like 12.99 for a book and then when you get like a dollar or less for it, it’s like, you’re like, well that kind of [00:20:00] stings. So in some ways I feel like it stings worse on the author side, but regardless, we didn’t really understand how much the space needed direct solutions. And then we were very fortunate in that too. So we were fortunate to have Willow come on, fortunate for her to really test our platform with trial by fire.
And then I feel like I was very fortunate to meet you guys, the FFA group at Author Nation. That was wonderful as well. ‘Cause that then also like when you’re developing something you’re walking with a blindfold on for the most part. And you guys were like, let me show you what everybody wants, like right away.
And that was really nice. So yeah. Thank you guys for that.
Steph Pajonas: You’re welcome. You’re welcome. We opened the door and we said, here are all the possibilities of things you can do. And that was…
Greg Keogh: Exactly.
Steph Pajonas: It was a really cool. It was a really cool conversation because we got to see you guys at the infancy and now I’ve been able to watch you grow and actually add in all of these tools that we’ve asked for.
One of the ones that I thought was really cool was that when I’m just gonna go off on a little bit of a [00:21:00] tangent was that when we upload the books, you get a little marketing graphic that you guys generate.
Greg Keogh: Yes.
Steph Pajonas: Like an AI marketing graphic and they’re always fun.
Greg Keogh: Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: I’m always like, what’s it gonna look like?
So I wait, wait, wait at that page to see what it generates for me. So it’s really cool that you are adding in some AI tools as well. Is that one of many that you’re planning? What are you planning with that?
Greg Keogh: Yes, for sure. Yeah. So we’re planning like. We’re thinking about AI. I think the same way that, I think authors are as well, or at least should be thinking about it, in that it’s a tool for empowerment.
So there are things that, there are things that we don’t want to do, if you’re doing the job of your dreams, there’s like probably 40 to 50% of it. It’s just stuff you don’t want to do, and I think for authors, a lot of that’s marketing. So it’s like, if we can kickstart how marketing could work, like, uh, one of the other tools we have is animated covers.
And that one I’m actually trying to, I’m, I need to switch out. So we generate the marketing images now at Publish. I wanna switch out and animate the cover at Publish [00:22:00] because it’s just really fun and there’s all kinds of advantages to video over image for promotion. But that’s a little bit more in the weeds.
But yeah, so on the marketing side, we want to help automate those pieces. We’re also working on on the nurture side. So basically we have a whole tool that’s not released yet, but it’s called automations, and it’s okay, setting up any kind of automation that you can around your work. So simple ones are things like somebody finishes book A of yours.
What do you want to show them in that moment? You could show them a thank you letter. You could show them a discount for book B. You could show them a discount for a bundle, you know, so like letting you set up what happens at different places on the platform. Similarly, of course, we’re gonna offer that for the standard sort of upsells like post cart or pre cart if you wanna do some stuff there.
But I, I get particularly interested in the consumption portions. So because we have the app, fortunately, [00:23:00] we get to be the whole picture, right? So we know when somebody purchases, we know when somebody opens the book. We know when somebody finishes the book. And there’s all kinds of cool things you can do as an author in that, right?
Like again, even just thanking them. It’s kind of nice, you know, so we have a whole automation category that we’re working on, and that’s kind of, I think, the next step that we’re, we’re building AI tools for it. So of course you can write your own thank yous, you can write your own pieces, but also like you could upload 10 examples and let AI just handle it, or start handling some of the nurture process.
So that’s the next one coming down the pipeline. And then we’re always ideating or open to suggestions of course, as like things come up.
Danica Favorite: I think this is so cool. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is so exciting. I’ve got one book that I technically have all the rights to, and I’m like, okay, I’m just gonna go put my one book up.
Greg Keogh: Oh, you should totally do it.
Danica Favorite: Just one book.
Greg Keogh: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: But
Greg Keogh: You could
do it while we’re talking.
Danica Favorite: I, I could, but this is so fascinating that I’m like, no, I want all the details.
Greg Keogh: Yes, for sure.
Danica Favorite: But one of the things I, I wanna go back to one of the things you said [00:24:00] and bring up a second one, because I think these two are really important points for our listeners. Um, you know, ’cause it’s like, okay, why are we talking about direct sales as an AI forward podcast? And so the first one is when you’re talking about Willow Winters and that idea that her stuff was taken down for being pornographic for YouTube, which it isn’t.
Greg Keogh: Right. It’s a joke, but yeah.
Danica Favorite: I know the answer to this, but you know, like what are your limitations on spice levels and even AI usage on Curios?
Greg Keogh: It’s a great question because yeah, even though I know you know the answer, it’s one of those things that it’s worth mentioning every time. So we have actually no limits on spice levels and we have no limits on AI usage.
And the limit we have right now is a limit on the visual pornography side, because there are laws in the US about potential access of minors and things like that. So in the current iteration, [00:25:00] we’re basically just being like, okay, on the visual side, no. But when it’s a book or an audio book or anything along those sides we’re wide open.
The other piece that’s interesting is we have two sides of the site. There is the public side where you’re able to see content, you can see books, you can browse books, you can purchase them, all that. And then we have the back end of the site where we’re actually delivering the files. And so those are actually separate.
And the delivery of the files is, um, it’s not, it’s not public, right? It’s private only to the person who purchased the content. So that’s where we’re exploring, like even opening those doors even wider and being like, well, okay, like if we can ensure age verification, then we can ensure, okay, then even more sensitive content in theory could be delivered on the backside of it.
But yeah, that’s kind of it. And then on the AI side, we are just wide open and part of it again goes to the structure of the site. So the way the site’s organized is it’s a marketplace. So [00:26:00] we show content, we show tons of different content. We’re working on this a lot. We’re working on improving our genre pages, improving our recommendation algorithms and all that so that content can be surfaced and people can browse and find something great.
But the majority of transactions still come from the author leading a reader directly to their specific pages. So in that, if you write a whole, an entire book using only AI, and you don’t even edit it yourself, you let AI edit the works, it’s just like truly, deeply raw AI and you’re bringing readers to it, and the readers are enjoying it and reading it and buying it.
We could care less. You’re the one driving the traffic. You’re the one getting the results. It’s like. It, it’s, um, it’s not a zero sum game in that way, so the way we have the site set up, we’re completely open and permissionless in that way. It’s like, and, and that’s, that goes to the point of Willow, right?
So Willow’s readers loved her content, right? And Willow wanted to give that content to her readers. She’s giving it to them for free. So the two [00:27:00] parties that matter were getting what they wanted and nobody else is like stumbling across these audio books and like listening to them on YouTube, like YouTube’s not actually protecting anybody.
You know what I mean? It’s not like people were like, oh my gosh, YouTube just served me this book up. And I couldn’t believe what I heard. That’s what I think was so ridiculous about it. So it’s if you have readers that want the content and you have an author who wants to give that content to the reader.
Like who is the platform to step in and not allow that is kind of where we stand. So you can tell I’m pretty passionate about that topic.
Steph Pajonas: That’s okay.
Greg Keogh: It’s one of those things is just open access.
Steph Pajonas: You should be. Yeah. But this is a good topic to be passionate about because I that, uh, I feel so bad for all the authors who get de platformed from YouTube, and they’re actually, they, they spend time putting the books up there.
They spend time getting more people to their, to their page subscribing, listening, and then they get monetized finally and they’re finally making money, because there is a long stretch before they get monetized to [00:28:00] where they’re not making anything.
And then they get de platformed over a sex scene in the book and you’re like, Ugh.
And I do caution authors now like, if you have some spice in your audio books, maybe redact it or censor it or whatever for YouTube. But then nobody necessarily wants to do that that if it’s a romance book, like those scenes are pivotal to the story where the hero and heroine, or whoever it may be, are finally connecting and boom, it’s a emotional period.
And then just to have that cut off. It’s ugh. Where were we going with that?
Greg Keogh: Yeah, exactly. Or like to have characters start out at one emotional connection level and then all of a sudden just appear at a different one without the context of how they got, it’s, you know, it does, yeah.
Doesn’t make sense.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Yeah. It’s disappointing, right?
Greg Keogh: Yes.
Steph Pajonas: So it’s good because we want to be able to serve our audience. That is the goal of most authors. It’s like we, we write the book because this is something we wanna write. We’re excited about it, but ultimately we want to [00:29:00] publish it and serve readers, and we love to see them read the books and be excited about them.
We need platforms like this who are willing to be. Be in the middle and get those files from one place to another without giving us any kind of crazy roadblocks. So yeah.
Greg Keogh: For sure.
Yeah, for sure.
Danica Favorite: I really appreciate that too, because, one of the things that we’re really proud of at Publish Drive is, a lot of authors who have been de platformed, particularly on Amazon, because Amazon’s another one, they can pull the rug out from you and, it’s just gone. And so we work really hard to give those authors a place to publish their books, but ultimately, because we’re connected to the stores, we’re still beholden to what the stores say. So even though we would love to have AI content, which we do allow AI content, but, ultimately, if it’s raw AI stuff, we have to send it back to the author because we know the store will penalize us and potentially cancel our accounts.
And the same with spicy stuff, [00:30:00] like certain stores don’t want high spice levels. And so then we have to kind of balance, okay, what are authors writing and producing versus what do the actual retailers want? And so…
Greg Keogh: Yes
Danica Favorite: to have something like Curios where you’re like, Hey. We’re not here to decide what is good content and what is not, because I don’t wanna make that decision.
And I, we have these meetings and decisions and discussions all the time at Publish Drive. How do we balance that? Because we don’t care what you publish, but the stores do and you are the storefront. And so you can say, no, you can publish here. And so that’s, I think, so important for authors to understand that there still is a place for their voice. There still is a place for what they have to say. And I don’t wanna fully get into this ’cause Steph and I already irate about this, but the AI detectors are wrong.
Greg Keogh: Correct.
Danica Favorite: So like even us who’s trying to say, okay, is this AI, is this not AI? Will the store get [00:31:00] mad at us?
Like we’re trying to rely on an imperfect tool to determine that. The stores are relying on an imperfect tool to determine that. And you guys are saying, we don’t care.
Greg Keogh: Exactly.
Danica Favorite: I love this. So for everyone who’s out there producing their AI books, here’s a solution for you where you’re not worrying about having to jump through those hoops.
Greg Keogh: That’s exactly right. And that’s like, uh, that is like the root of what we aim to build in the very beginning. It was one of those things where, ’cause we came in the music business and it was one of those things where these musicians are completely beholden to a platform and the platform rules makes their rules.
And in the author world, it’s no different. Exactly what you mentioned on the retailers is that you have, if you wanna sell on the retailer, you still have to abide by their rules. And the rules can get crazy. So we were like, okay, at the very base, there needs to be an alternate way to get your content out there.
So that was one of the things we just want here’s a door, you can always use this [00:32:00] door. And then the other component of it is like, even if in a platform is accepting of your content, they still change their stuff up all the time. Kindle Unlimited could decide, oh, we’re gonna give you less per page read, right?
Or, um, Audible, right. Audible just made their change where your books are included in the All You Can Listen program and now authors, they say you’re gonna make more money, but probably not, you know, they don’t make these changes to then all of a sudden give up some of their revenue. So it’s one of those things where you can be into a platform and then the platform changes and that affects you heavily monetarily from your business side and how things work.
And the worst, the worst feeling is when you have no other option. If you’re like, okay, that just leaves me with nothing else. Or if it leaves you with spending four months setting up, up a Shopify store, like that’s also difficult. It’s a huge shift. So we were like, okay, we need to make an open door that works well, like meets authors [00:33:00] financially where they want to be met, so they have another option, right? So, okay, Audible raises their rates and you don’t like it. Then you can move. We want to create a system where you can actually boycott a service instead of having to like begrudgingly accept, so there’s those two sides of that we want to fight.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah, because again, like I know the authors right now are up in arms because KU admitted to one of the authors that their reporting is messed up. And they are not correctly reporting their books.
Greg Keogh: Oh my goodness.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Authors are really upset right now because so many authors who are in KU are seeing really significant nose dives in their income. And they have no control over that. They have no…
Greg Keogh: Exactly.
Danica Favorite: recourse for that like, it isn’t like they can go to Kindle and say, Hey, could you please fix this? They’re trying and Kindle’s like, we don’t care.
Because we all know that really books are the loss leader for Amazon at this point.
Greg Keogh: Yes, exactly. Have grown out of it.
Danica Favorite: So we’ve got you who is saying, Hey, you get the whole pile of money.
Greg Keogh: Yep.
Danica Favorite: And [00:34:00] however you want to price it is up to you. And so.
Greg Keogh: Exactly right.
Danica Favorite: That to me is really powerful for an author because suddenly you’re not beholden to the whims of somebody else telling you what your book should be priced, what’s a fair price. You know, Amazon’s another one where if you’ve got a really expensive book, Amazon says no.
Greg Keogh: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. Or a very inexpensive book.
You’re sacrificing enormous percentages because if it, if it’s under what, I think it’s 2 99, right? And it’s like, well, there are some novellas where it’s like this, I can’t charge more than 2 99 for this. And yeah. So yeah, that, that bothers me. And to what you’re mentioning, in the music business, this was, it’s theoretically been corrected, but obviously nobody knows.
But it’s all this black box, right? Where it’s like the record label is supposedly available, able to know how many plays there are, how many purchases there are, and the money comes to them. And then they’re supposed to then pay you per your contract. [00:35:00] But again, it’s this black box where it’s like not auditable, very hard to figure out exactly what came where.
And that’s why there were, you know, so many lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit of famous musicians suing their record labels, suing their management companies, because they were like, there’s no, there’s no way this can be correct, there’s no way that my one, you know that this is accurately reporting how much my music has sold or how much my music’s been listened to.
And you have those same problems on the author side where it’s you’re reliant on KU to tell you your page reads, and if they’ve got a mistake. That’s that. And yeah, it’s, yeah, I don’t wanna sow the seeds of conspiracy, but it’s one of those things where it’s when it’s a black box, you’re always wondering like, how accurate is it?
And that’s what’s annoying. Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: We’re dealing with that all the time. Even when it comes to sales. Even when it comes to sales. There were plenty of times where I was just like I know I got a sale because somebody showed me that they bought the book. Yes. And yet I don’t see it on the dashboard.
And where did it go?
Greg Keogh: Yeah, exactly. And [00:36:00] you’re immediately suspicious. And then it’s that’s not good.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. And even again, like what I’ll see at Publish Drive, same thing where authors will come to me and say I know I made the sale and I’m, and they’re like, it’s not in the dashboard.
And I’m like, but this is what the store told us. And so.
Greg Keogh: Exactly.
Danica Favorite: All of us are beholden to what those big stores tell us. And sometimes it’s right and sometimes it’s not. And then people are like, but this doesn’t seem fair. And it’s not. But you have these stores that are run by big corporations, like Amazon, and they don’t have to be transparent.
Greg Keogh: No, they really don’t. And it’s what it is again, that begrudging acceptance. It’s like, well, we can change the rates and watch what’ll happen. Everybody will stay because there’s not really another option. So it’s like one of those things where it’s we have to build the option.
And then also, you know, uh, this is the soapbox time for me, but part of building the option is on the author side, actually using those options. So it’s like on the Curios side, it’s like, [00:37:00] the more authors that use it, the more that direct sales can become normal and the more readership can come through.
And then hopefully, you know, our, our goal is obviously to change the whole industry. So we push on our side, authors push on their side, and I think that’s how you can change an industry in a super peaceful way. You don’t have to hit the street or protest and march, you can just opt out.
You know, it’s your work just opt out. So that’s where we like to be.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, and that’s what Indie did, like Indie change the industry because I remember back in the dinosaur age, back when eBooks first came out and everyone said, no one’s gonna read an ebook.
Greg Keogh: Right.
Danica Favorite: No one cares. These, what does, what are we gonna do with this?
And then suddenly eBooks became popular. And then it was, oh, well, Indie authors, their book is garbage, so no one’s gonna read it. And now you have big publishers picking up Indie books and it’s wait a second, like the whole business model keeps changing, [00:38:00] so why not change this way as well?
Greg Keogh: Oh to I totally agree with that.
I think especially in that early time of publishers deciding, being the tastemaker, like deciding who is good and who is not good, I think is ridiculous. And that’s what I love about the Indie movement is it’s oh no, people like this book or they’re going to like this book. I wrote a very good book and watch people like it and they have the empowerment to then get there, which I think is really awesome.
And then, uh, Danica, as you mentioned, the reversal of the big traditional publishers is very interesting to see now, right? They’re waiting for Indies to have success and then they’re coming in and picking them up, at that success point, which I think is great. ’cause I think that’s a moment where the Indie has leverage and they can then say, yes, no, I don’t like those terms.
I make more money on my own. They have power to leave. Whereas in the previous kind of model, which they still do, when they offer you a deal in the beginning, everybody has a little bit of, um, you know, you’re a little insecure about your [00:39:00] work, so you’re kind of like, well, maybe it’s not that good. Maybe I should take this check.
And just money in the hands better than, potential money sort of thing. So it can be a difficult time in the beginning to make that decision. But once you’ve got direct sales under your belt, or even not even direct sales, but once you’ve got your own sales under your belt, you’re able to, to leverage in a different way.
It would be like, that’s a bad deal for me. I made that last month. Or I’m confident I’ll make that sort of thing. So.
Steph Pajonas: The power structure has changed now, significantly I think. I think that, um, now traditional publishers are a little bit on the back foot as they try to figure out what’s hot in the market, but still be able to produce the books that they want to or need to. I mean, it takes them a long time to get a book out to market, whereas Indies it’s like, we can, even without AI, write a book in a week and publish it.
Greg Keogh: That’s right. Yeah.
Steph Pajonas: It is totally possible. So the power structure has changed pretty significantly, and I think that just giving the Indies more power, more [00:40:00] freedom to make the choices about their books and how they’re sold is really helping the whole entire market for everything.
Greg Keogh: I think so too. Yeah, I think so too. It’s one of my, you know, we’re, we’re seeing the signs of it, but it’s not, fully adopted, but it’s like the thousand true fans idea, and it’s like, well, when you make all of the money, you actually don’t need as big of a fan base, and you can write in super niche worlds that are specific to your group.
And they can support you that way. So that’s what we kind of like that, that theory as well, and I think the world of content’s gonna get way more interesting as a result. I just think it’s gonna be so much more fun.
Danica Favorite: I, I agree. I think that’s, where everyone’s so afraid of AI and what AI is doing. To me, it just expands so much more possibilities.
And I think, again, the content, like you were saying, the content’s gonna get more interesting.
Because at some point, yeah, right now people complain that the AI voices are all the same. And I know Steph and I were just in the AI for Authors [00:41:00] group where they said, yeah, like each AI tool has its own voice.
It does. And eventually though the people who are really good at working with this content are going to create these things that are just so indistinguishable and…
Greg Keogh: Right.
Danica Favorite: And Steph was saying her mom can’t tell when the AI has written stuff for her, which I think is yes, that’s, yes. That’s the goal.
Greg Keogh: Exactly. I also think, yeah, I think that there’s, the AI voice sounds the same if you are prompting it kind of in a generic prompt. Like it does have a voice, but you can have that voice change quickly.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, absolutely. I know we are running low on time. Is there anything else you wanna share with us and with our audience before we close out for this podcast? .
Steph Pajonas: Yeah. Maybe anything that you’ve got coming up, new things that are happening at Curios, et cetera, whatever.
Greg Keogh: Yes, for sure. So, um, new things happening on Curios. Obviously we’re, our foray into print, we’re like full bore with it. So right now it is [00:42:00] technically in private beta, so if anybody wants access to it, all you do is email greg@curios.com.
It’s helpful if you put in the subject something about private beta access or something like that. Um, ’cause that helps me like quickly hit those. But we’ll open that up for anybody that wants it. And, my, yeah, basically it’s just my encouragement is just try it out, right? It’s free. You can go to Studio.Curios.com, upload a book, see how it works, see what the pages are like, and then it’s yours to do what you want with, it’s not something like, you have to make a critical decision or a permanent decision. Just check it out, and most importantly, I just want people to know that it exists, so that when you do find yourself in that inevitable place of being upset at a platform, or you wanted to trad deal and you didn’t get it, go prove the trad wrong.
Prove them wrong, that your work is better than they thought, and go get your own sales.
Steph Pajonas: I love that. Perfect. Because I wanna encourage people to make sure that they have their options open at all times. We do that with AI, we do that with [00:43:00] our business, and now we can do that with how we’re selling our product as well.
And it’s really important to keep those options open. So thank you so much for being here today. I love talking about your business. I think it’s a lot of fun. You guys are doing great work and you’re, I love the fact that you are listening. You are listening to authors. You’re listening to the people on your platform, so you know anybody who is listening to this podcast, you’re already on Curios or you’re gonna go try it out.
Be sure to let them know how you feel about the platform. Let them, give them your feedback because this is how we make changes, right? This is how we’re making a change in AI with this podcast alone by talking about it, talking about the pros and the cons, and the more that we’re in the conversation on any one of these things, the better the outcome is for authors and for people who are going to be using these platforms.
So please definitely let Greg know
Greg Keogh: Oh yeah, yeah.
Steph Pajonas: How you feel about it [00:44:00] when you get in there. Great. All right, perfect. So thank you again for being here today. Is there anything else that you wanna say before we, we head out?
Greg Keogh: No, just but thank you everyone listening, and thank you both for having me.
It’s always wonderful to talk to you guys, so I appreciate it a lot.
Steph Pajonas: Thank you. Okay. Everybody who’s listening, come by bravenewbookshelf.com. Check out the show notes. We put them together for you every week with all of the information and the URLs and the links and all the tools that we talk about. So come by and check those out.
And you can also subscribe to the newsletter. We’ll send you the notes to the next day after the podcast goes live. In case you know you’re not on your phone and you just wanna have it, you know, show up in your inbox. That’s fine with us too. No problem. Danica, anything else you wanna say before we leave?
Danica Favorite: Yeah, just a reminder as always. Please go and like, and subscribe to Brave New Bookshelf on YouTube and Facebook and also Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press, Publish Drive. Make sure you’re out there liking and [00:45:00] subscribing to all the things and spreading the word.
Steph Pajonas: Perfect. All right guys, it was great talking and we will see everybody else in the next episode.
Okay.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us@bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.