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This week on the podcast, we’re exploring the world of automation, international markets, and series management with a true veteran of the self-publishing world. In episode 78, we sat down with Skye MacKinnon, a prolific author with over 200 titles across multiple pen names and languages.
Skye is well-known in the “Wide for the Win” community and is a native German speaker who has mastered the balance between human creativity and AI efficiency. From building custom author tools to navigating the tricky waters of international translations, Skye shared a wealth of practical advice for authors looking to scale their business without losing their minds (or their budget).
Meet Skye MacKinnon: Prolific Author and Translation Expert
Based in Scotland, Skye MacKinnon is the creative force behind several successful pen names. While she primarily writes romance under her own name, she also writes children’s books as Isla Wynter and “palate-cleansing” erotica as Philomena MacKinnon.
As a native German speaker, Skye has a unique vantage point on the global publishing market. She runs several popular social media groups dedicated to German, French, and Italian translations, helping authors navigate the complexities of reaching non-English speaking audiences. Her current project, a second edition of her guide on German translations, recently launched on Kickstarter, highlighting her expertise in one of the world’s most lucrative book markets.
Automating the “Admin Sludge” with Antigravity
One of the most exciting parts of our conversation focused on how Skye uses Antigravity to automate the tedious parts of being an author. Skye describes herself as “stingy”—she prefers building her own tools over paying for dozens of monthly subscriptions.
She used Antigravity to:
- Build a Custom Website: Tired of bloated WordPress themes, she used AI to code a custom site that handles multi-format retailer links (paperback vs. hardcover) and automatically syncs with WooCommerce.
- Manage Kickstarter Research: For her latest book, she had Antigravity categorize over 50 research emails and folders, allowing her to ask the AI, “What is our research on this specific topic?” to generate chapter outlines.
- Create an AI “Writing Team”: Skye developed a suite of AI personas—including a German linguist, a marketing expert, and a translator—to provide feedback on her drafts from multiple professional angles.
The Reality of AI Translations in the German Market
As a native speaker, Skye offered a “reality check” for authors using AI for translations. While AI tools have improved, she warned that “push-button” translation can lead to scathing reviews if not handled carefully.
She shared a cautionary tale of a “scathing” experience on Lovely Books (the German equivalent of Goodreads), where readers quickly spotted the clunky phrasing of an unedited AI translation. Her takeaway? Quality is a long-term game. While AI is a fantastic tool for a first pass, it requires a human touch to handle cultural nuances, puns, and emotional beats. She recommends always using human editors or, at the very least, native-speaking beta readers to ensure the “whimsy” and “voice” of the author remain intact.
Using NotebookLM as a Series Bible
For authors with massive backlists, keeping track of “canon” is a nightmare. Skye shared how she uses NotebookLM to manage her “universe” of books. After a software glitch deleted her original plotting database, she turned to AI to index her entire series.
Now, she can ask the tool: “Who had the blue hair?” or “What language do they speak on this planet?” NotebookLM even helped her create an infographic map of a fictional Scottish village for her readers. This “safety net” ensures consistency across long series, catching errors like a character’s hair color changing between books.
Building a Custom Author Operating System
Rather than relying on third-party platforms like Make.com, Skye is currently building her own “Author Operating System.” By using APIs to connect her social media scheduler, newsletter, and book database, she is creating a centralized hub to manage her business.
This DIY approach allows her to maintain total control over her data and privacy while ensuring she can work seamlessly across her office PC, her “sofa laptop,” and her Mac. Her goal is to spend less time on “admin sludge” and more time on the creative work that her readers love.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- Prioritize Quality in Translations: If you want long-term “read-through” in international markets, AI translations must be human-edited to respect cultural nuances.
- Automate the Boring Stuff: Use tools like Antigravity to build custom solutions for tasks like website management and research categorization.
- Maintain a Series Bible: Tools like NotebookLM are invaluable for keeping track of character details and world-building in long-running series.
- Think “Wide” for Stability: Skye noted that her wide sales remained stable even when she took a two-year break for health reasons, whereas her Amazon-exclusive sales “fell off a cliff.”
- Experiment Freely: Use AI to run “experiments” that would otherwise be too expensive or time-consuming, such as building custom apps or testing new genres.
Resources Mentioned
- Skye MacKinnon’s Author Resource Hub
- Antigravity (Referenced tool for automation)
- NotebookLM
- Lovely Books (German book community)
Transcript
[00:00:00]
Speaker: 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 Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press, where we are teaching authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And we’re publishing AI forward books on the press. Word. Cruising through into, into spring now, I’m so happy that it’s spring, but I’m also suffering from a lot of allergies. So please excuse me if you hear me cough or sniffle because I will be muting my mic as much as possible, but something might make it through. This is the suffering we do in order to have lovely weather, and I love having lovely weather.
I’m a big outdoors walking fan. I like to listen to audio books while I’m out there. Been listening to lots of great audio books and just [00:01:00] enjoying, enjoying being outside, which is one of my favorite things to do. And that really has nothing to do with publishing except for just, a mindset being present and like thinking about stories, thinking about what I’m working on while I’m out walking and then coming home and getting right to work. And I think that’s a good balance for me. I know that it’s a good balance for other people too. And it’s possible that you listen to us while you are out walking, ’cause I definitely listen to other podcasts when I’m out walking as well.
I’m always listening to the Creative Penn podcast and she says, you know, send, send me a photo of where you are. And it’s always just, you know, my neighborhood. It’s nothing interesting or cool, but maybe one of these days I will be out walking, listening to Jo and send her a, uh, picture of where I am.
You guys can do that too if you want to, feel free, drop by bravenewbookshelf.com and leave a comment and tell us about where you’re going and what you’re doing while you’re listening to our podcast. All right. Okay, so that’s enough for me [00:02:00] from all my chatter, chitter chatter. I’m going to hand off to my lovely co-host Danica.
How are you doing today?
Danica Favorite: I’m doing good. I’m doing really good. Yeah, spring is nice. For those of you who follow me on my substack, you might have seen that yesterday. I posted a picture, the little seeds that I started growing when I was getting spring itchy. I’ve gotta grow something, even though I know technically in Colorado you shouldn’t plant before Mother’s Day.
I can start seeds now, and then when it gets cold, bring ’em into the house. So my little seedlings are starting to come up and it’s making me super happy. So hopefully by the time you all listen to this my seedlings will actually be plants and it will be so cool. And just, yeah all these things that make us happy and, um, we’re so grateful that we get to be part of your happy place when you are listening to us on the podcast.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors at every stage of the [00:03:00] journey from getting your book manuscript formatted to getting your metadata, keywords, book description, some AI covers. Or AI cover ideas to then distributing your books to the largest audience possible.
And finally, once your book sells, we can do some promotions for you as well as help you split royalties if you have co-authors. And I’m super excited for today’s guest Skye MacKinnon. Because earlier this year we put out our annual sales report of what, where Publish Drive is seeing sales. And obviously this is just where people who use Publish Drive are selling.
So this isn’t necessarily reflective of KU or people, who use other services, but it was really amazing to me and surprising some of the things that I’ve talked about have been surprising. But one of the markets that’s really still doing well and selling gangbusters is the German market. And Skye has a Kickstarter [00:04:00] going on right now for how to sell more books in German. So I’m really excited about that. And she’s doing a lot of other cool things with AI. And it’s funny, I had reached out to her before her Kickstarter because she was talking about how she’s using Antigravity to automate a lot of her author tasks. And I am super excited about automation.
Trying to get some of these pieces off of our plate. And we’ve talked about other automation methods and skills and things like that with some other guests, but we haven’t dove deep into Antigravity yet. And so very excited to have Skye with us today because she can talk a bit about her experience with her German Kickstarter, as well as automations and who else knows where this conversation will go. As you guys know, it’s always a fun surprise. So without further ado, here is Skye MacKinnon.
Skye MacKinnon: Hi there. Thank you so much for having me here today. [00:05:00] Um, yeah, as you said, I’m Skye MacKinnon. That’s one of my many pen names. Um, but it’s what I’m kind of known as in the writing community, so I mostly stick to that.
I’m Skye like 90% of the time, and then I’m other people, yeah, in the rest. I mostly write romance but I also write children’s books and Isla Wynter, and I do various other projects. You mentioned my Kickstarter. It’s my, the second edition of a book about German translations. And I write that as Skye B MacKinnon just to have that, I didn’t want yet another pen name, so I just added a random initial. It’s not even my initial, it’s just a random letter that sounded better than other letters that I tried. But yeah, basically I’ve been around in the self-publishing world for a while now. You may have seen me in Wide for the Win where I’m one of the admins. um, I run a book, uh, a group on German translations, on French translations, on Italian translations, and I’m just spending way too much time on social media. So you’ve probably seen me [00:06:00] around.
Steph Pajonas: We’ve seen you around for a long time. I feel like we’ve known each other for at least 10 years, right? It’s been a while.
Skye MacKinnon: It feels a very long time, in a good way.
Steph Pajonas: In a good way, in a good way. I just wanna point out that, you have all of these these groups that you’re running about translations, and that’s because you do speak other languages.
Isn’t that correct?
Skye MacKinnon: Yes. I was raised bilingual, which is a great advantage if we want to do translations later on. Um, so I speak German as an native speaker. I also speak more or less passible French. I’m learning Gaelic at the moment. I’ve got a bit of other languages. I do love languages because it tells you so much about the culture too.
Not just communicating to a person, but also learning about them and their background.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. I love that. And I think that’s, you know, one of the things we all have in common, because I know Steph is really into languages and geeks out on languages and things like that. And I’m a language geek as well, so it’s fun to [00:07:00] recognize what I think you were just saying about the culture.
Skye MacKinnon: Yes.
Danica Favorite: Because it really is interesting to me like how much their language reflects a country’s worldview and a person’s worldview. And I see, this is why I love our guests. We always get like just these little nuggets of things that just make, I think it makes you more personable in terms of Ooh, this is who Skye is as a person.
Because, like Steph said we we’ve all known each other online forever, it seems. And even when we first came on, before we started recording, it was like, oh my gosh, this is like a reunion of friends. And so I, I really love that. So tell me about how you started getting involved with AI and publishing and what your approach has been to that.
Skye MacKinnon: Oh, it was ages ago. It was basically when things, the first tool started to appear specifically for authors. Um. And I just, I’ve always been curious [00:08:00] about technology. I used to be a journalist, so I’m very much into trying out everything and researching everything. And I love a good new toy I remember one of the tools, I think it’s no longer around, but it was a very basic writing AI, pretty awful output, like definitely not publishable in any shape, but, um, I have, even though I write a lot of spicy romance. Sex scenes have always been my weak point, or at least the ones where I feel least confident. My readers seem to like them, so I, apparently I do things right, but I’ve never enjoyed writing them as much.
Give me a fight scene any day and I will go into, I have, will have so much fun with that. I will draw little stick figures and everything. I also draw stick figures for sex scenes um, especially if it’s like reverse harem where you have lots of them and lots of body parts, and you need to keep track of which hand is where and which other body part is where. Um, But so actually I started with AI, I think for sex scenes, which is now it’s all censored much harder [00:09:00] to find an AI to write that in a good way, unless you know how to prompt it. But in the beginning that was very easy. And so that was my first start with it. I don’t think I ever actually used any of the material that it generated to like, as published, but I used it as inspiration or as inspiration of what not to do. Um, so yeah, that was way in the beginning and I’ve just basically been trying to keep up to date with it ever since. Um, there was a bit of a break because my health was really bad and I couldn’t really work much, but that, that then actually made me use AI more because my time was very limited and I knew I’d only have a few hours each week where I’d be well enough to do some work.
And if you have as many books as I have, and I, I never know the number, but it’s at least 200 books across languages and pen names. And so that’s a lot of work to do. And so I was trying to find ways how to make the admin side easier on me. In the beginning, I didn’t even think about proper writing with AI, because [00:10:00] it just wasn’t good enough. I tried it. I’d realized, no, it takes me more time to edit this than to actually write from scratch. And so I was using it more for ways of organizing everything keeping track. But now that the tools have evolved so much, even in the last year, it’s crazy how fast technology is moving.
I have been using it for pretty much every aspect of my author life. Everything from the smallest details and just the very boring admin side, but then also the more creative side. And it’s right now, at the moment, I’m just experimenting with vibe coding and doing all the fun tools that I would in, before AI, I wouldn’t even have thought about doing that because I would had, have had to hire a developer and do all that.
I live in Scotland. I’m stingy. I don’t know if that is the, if you know that outside where you are, but Scottish people are known for being really stingy and so I don’t like spending money. And yes, I’ve had, I’ve [00:11:00] hired developers like to do a website or something for me, but I would never have just spent hundreds, thousands of pounds on doing this little app that I think might be nice, but I don’t actually know if it will be nice. So AI is giving me that opportunity to just experiment. And half the experiments I do will never see the light of day and I just discard it because I realize it’s not actually working in the way my brain thought.
But a lot of them are actual big time savers and are just making my life a lot easier. See, I’m very excited about everything AI is doing.
Danica Favorite: I think that’s what’s nice about AI though, is you get to experiment and as an author, like for me it’s been okay, I wanna experiment this idea or this thing.
But if I have to do that all myself, that is a huge time sink that I’ll never get back. With AI, I can just quickly run this experiment and it doesn’t take as much away from me. So I’m like, oh, cool. Yeah, I did that experiment. It worked or it didn’t work, and I don’t [00:12:00] feel like I’ve lost anything because I’ve learned something from that experiment.
Skye MacKinnon: Totally agree. It just gives you that scope to yeah be very creative. And not always when it comes to the writing, but even just, yeah, seeing ways of how to find new avenues of income or revenue or just, or even just yeah, have some fun.
Steph Pajonas: Have some fun. That’s what I’ve been doing too with Antigravity in the background.
I’ve got it doing tasks for me that, that lighten my load, lighten my admin load so that I can go do more fun stuff. Just yesterday, I used it to redesign one of my author websites, have a pen name, it was running on WordPress, but you know what it’s like over time, WordPress gets bloated. It gets buggy.
There are things about it that I just don’t need for a really simple pen name author website. So I had Antigravity build me a new one, which was great because then all I had to do was just upload these a few [00:13:00] files and let it do the design work and all the programming and then that freed me up.
Now I won’t have to worry about that website again for a while. Tell us a little bit about the kinds of stuff you’re getting Antigravity to do.
Skye MacKinnon: The first big project I did was I had a new I already had one AI pen name and I was adding a second. And I wanted to make it easier for myself, I wanted to combine them under a press website, have it all with FluentCRM, have a newsletter that goes out to different pen names and not have because before or right now for all my other pen names, I always have a separate website, separate newsletter with different providers, and it’s just doing my head in. So I wanted to make a way to make that easy. But the problem is I’m wide with pretty much all my books and with websites, any kind of normal plugins for books or themes, they never offered what I really wanted, which is, for example, having links to all the different retailers, but across formats.
So I want a paperback button, which then [00:14:00] gives you all the different retailers. I want to have hard cover button, which all again gives you all the different retailers and most plugins that I was looking at had buttons for all the different retailers, but not for the formats. And I just want to make it easier for readers.
They also didn’t have things like automatically pulling in reviews. And so basically I just made a wish list of all the things that during building my last website, I tried to figure out and couldn’t, because at that time I didn’t think of AI or I thought of AI for the content and I’d asked it to do an SEO and GEO optimize and everything, and write me some random out text, but I hadn’t even thought about the structure.
And so this time I’ve made a big wishlist and then Antigravity and I, we worked through that wishlist and it took a long time, mostly because it was the first time I was coding anything with it, and there were lots of mistakes and sometimes it misunderstood. And we went back and forth, crashed the website a few times.
But in the end we [00:15:00] got exactly what I wanted, like, to a hundred percent exactly what I wanted. It has so many different features and I can now use that for other websites as well. It’s, it works with WooCommerce because of my current Skye MacKinnon website. I always, every time I create a new book, I then have to do a duplicate, redo the entire entry for my shop.
It’s just the way my designer set it up and it’s annoyed me ever since I got that website because it is so much just unnecessary effort. And my new plugin automatically sends everything to WooCommerce and back and creates images and it just does everything. So that was my first big project and that just showed me the capabilities because it came up with a huge content plan as well without me even asking for it.
It does that a lot. It just randomly gives you extra content, which is nice, except that when it uses credits that you didn’t want it to use. But yeah, that was the first thing, and my website is beautiful now and I’m very proud of it. And, um. [00:16:00] Yes. Uh, sorry. That’s my baby.
Danica Favorite: No, this is amazing. I’m loving hearing this because like I have website woes and I have not yet been brave enough to do any of this stuff. Because on my own it’s just too difficult. But the more I hear people doing all of this coding and stuff on their own with Antigravity, the more I’m like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Because just recently in one of the author groups, somebody was talking about how their web designer had put their own Amazon affiliate links in their books. And my web designer did that to me too. In this person’s case, it was in their contract. In my case, it wasn’t. And I had confronted my web designer nicely. It was just like, Hey, I noticed this. What’s going on? And she’s oh, that’s standard practice. Come to find out, it is not standard practice.
No. But since then, this web designer has retired. She’s no longer doing my website. And every person I’ve tried to hire to do my website is oh yeah, we don’t do websites we didn’t build, [00:17:00] so give us $10,000 and we’ll build you a new website and we’ll maintain it. And I’m like, heck to the no. So I’ve been very imperfectly doing this all myself, and now I’m like, wait, I could have Antigravity fix all of this for me, and I want to share that just because I know that some people out there are in my shoes saying, I don’t know what to do, and they’re just fumbling along and listening to your story, listening to Steph’s story, I’m like, this is possible for all of us. So I’m also curious, because I know you do a lot of other things with Antigravity, and I’d love to hear more about some of the kinds of tasks that you’re able to just offload so you can focus more on the things you love.
Skye MacKinnon: The other like big project just now was the German guide about translations for Kickstart, which is now on Kickstarter. Because it was a huge project with so much research. I don’t know how many emails I send, at least 50 or so, and even though not everyone replied, I got probably at least 40 replies or something that I then [00:18:00] needed to categorize and before they would’ve just got lost in my inbox, it would’ve taken me forever to find them.
So instead. I saved the emails when they came in, saved them to a folder Antigravity had access to that. It automatically categorized them. It tagged them depending on whether I had to reply to that or not, or whether it gave us all the information I needed. It helped me with the general structure.
And then, for example, when I was writing a particular chapter, I would just ask it. What is our research on this? And it would give me all the websites I had saved, all the emails I had. And sometimes I would ask it bullet point me all that information to make it even clearer. And then I’d see, oh, that’s way too many bullet points.
Let’s split this into three chapters. Um, so it’s helped, it’s made it much faster. The one problem was that because I saved every chapter in Antigravity, I didn’t have a word count, and so I only discovered how big the book was when I formatted it, [00:19:00] which was the big awakening because it is more than double the length of the original book.
It is going to be a monster on the shelf. Um, which also is driving my print costs up, which for a Kickstarter campaign when everything is calculated based on the first edition, I’d added like 25% and thinking, oh yeah, that’s a decent amount to add the AI translation chapters. No I did a bit too much research and really indulged and I think Antigravity was part of that because it would keep suggesting like, have you thought of that angle?
Because one thing I also did with it was create a writing team. So I had an entire team of agents where there was an editor, there was a German linguist, there was a marketing person, there was a translator. There was I can’t even think of it, but there were least seven or eight personas I came up with.
And so anytime I’d finished a chapter, I would run it through that and get their feedback. Oh yeah, there were two authors. I had figured out two authors, one who had never done a translation before and one who had published [00:20:00] 10 German translations and was just wanting to find ways to improve their sales and their marketing.
And so they then gave a lot of feedback on, oh, actually this chapter is great, but there’s all this missing for people who already know all this stuff, who want the advanced version? And usually that’s the advanced stuff is the thing I cover in like my consultations where I go with one-to-one and go deep into people’s stuff.
But this time I decided, okay, let’s put it in the book. Not realizing just how big it would end up.
Steph Pajonas: You were like, thanks Antigravity just blew up my book, right?
Skye MacKinnon: Yes. Antigravity needs a word count, uh, like.
Steph Pajonas: There is a plugin for that, by the way, if there’s a plugin for that.
Skye MacKinnon: I know there is, but it like last time I checked, it wasn’t verified and I’m very careful with what kind of plugins I add to it after hearing all the horror stories, which is why Antigravity is installed on a separate drive on my computer and is not anywhere near my important files, even though they’re all in the cloud and stuff. But still I’m very [00:21:00] careful after reading the horror stories of people finding their drives wiped or, yeah. No, thank you.
Steph Pajonas: I completely understand. This is great because you’re getting, you’re getting Antigravity to do a lot of this, the, it’s like a menial, like grunt work, right? It’s take this, categorize this, give me bullet points of this. All that stuff that we actually, we need that stuff, but like doing it ourselves is so taxing.
Skye MacKinnon: Yes.
Steph Pajonas: So taxing.
Skye MacKinnon: And I love research, but even so, so I do a lot of the research myself, but then I put all the findings in there to do the organization because I couldn’t keep that all in my head.
And just last time when I did my first edition, which was 2021, and I probably started working with that months before, so it’s at least six years ago. Everything was manual. I had these huge folders of all the bookmarks and all the emails and everything, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get all the information in that book in the end because there were just too many documents and I probably missed out some stuff.
And so this time I [00:22:00] knew Antigravity would keep track of it. And in the end I asked it has everything been covered from our research documents? And it suggested Kickstarter stretch goals. It suggested where do we need some graphics? Where do we need some tables? So I think it’s just been great having that extra sounding board, even though I know it’s, a human, would probably have very different feedback.
But that’s what I, why I also have human better readers afterwards. It’s a mix between human and AI.
Danica Favorite: I like that you’re mixing the human AI, and one of the things I was curious about, because you are a native German speaker and you mentioned AI translations are featured in your Kickstarter book.
Um, I’m curious like, because I know a lot of people listening are interested in doing translations and obviously Germany is such a hot market. Do you have any tips or anything when people are using AI for German translations? Any thoughts or tips on that?
Skye MacKinnon: Yeah, lots of people are using AI translation.
I [00:23:00] keep, people keep coming to me and asking like, is this any good? Now, I don’t think AI is quite ready to do a complete translation in a way that is publishable if you want the same quality of your English original. Now it depends on your strategy. There are some people who just want the extra income, who aren’t really interested in the quality.
They just run it through one of the many translation tools. They will publish it, they will put it in KU. In the beginning, they will make money. Then they, the reviews come in or they just realize, I just saw a really good post about that recently where someone who had done lots of AI translations, looked at the statistics and saw that the sell through was just awful compared to their English originals, which is even though they might get quite good reviews, people are clearly not interested in continuing the series, which just shows you there’s something not quite right there.
And for my main pen names, my Skye MacKinnon books, my Isla Wynter books I want that same quality that I put into my English books in other languages. So for those it will [00:24:00] always be human assisted, at the very least, at the moment, still all my Skye and Isla translations are completely human. For my other pen names, I have been experimenting with AI translation, but I, I’ll tell you the big embarrassment story.
So for one of those, it was a new pen name. And I decided very last minute because I was having a signing come up in Germany, my first German signing, and so I decided well actually want these books in German too. Didn’t have time to do much about that, so I quickly ran them through AI. I won’t say which service I used, but it was, and I looked at the first page.
It was okay. There were a few bits that was, were not like how I would’ve phrased it, but I was like, okay, I’m sure this will be fine because everyone is using this and this will be totally fine. I didn’t really have time, so I just formatted it, printed it, and then I put it on Lovely Books, which is basically Germany’s Good Reads.
It is a big community. And you could do [00:25:00] these, uh, can do these kind of book clubs there where you can, uh, where people can apply and they will all read your book together. They will discuss it and at the, in the end hopefully they’ll review it. And I love these because I’ve built up quite a nice following there, a community of readers who are always excited about my books and found some beta readers through that.
So I love Lovely Books. So I made a new account for that new pen name, put up the first AI translation. Because my cover was very much up to the German taste and that’s an important thing. Tastes are not the same across country. So I always recommend doing the research and very likely it is that you have to get a different cover style for Germany.
So I had one. People loved it. I had more applications for that book club than I ever had for any of my Skye MacKinnon books, which was slightly depressing. And. Then the first, and then I, I was already on the way to Germany for that signing when the first reviews came in and oh my God, they were scathing.
It was all, a story is great, but the translation is awful. [00:26:00] And so while I was sitting at a train station in Germany, I then went over that translation by myself, sentence by sentence, doing all the edits, but by the time I had formatted it that days later. I didn’t have access to Velum while I was there, so yay.
By the time I’d formatted it, the damage was done and the reviews were there. And if I’d just put it on Amazon without doing the Lovely Books thing, maybe it would’ve been fine. But because on Lovely Books, people are more critical, it is a bit like Good Reads. It’s not as bad as Good Reads. Good Reads is a place I don’t go.
It just depresses me. Lovely Books is nicer, as the name suggests, but it’s still definitely people are more critical. So I learned my lesson. The other translations I see are still AI translated, but they’re always human edited now, and looking at the edits I’m doing, I mean there’s at least five to 10 a page and that’s just to get it to that isn’t even perfect.
I know there’s still going to be some constructs or some bits [00:27:00] that if it was a human translator it would be different, but I’m trying to save time with these, so, to answer your question in a very long way. I think it needs that human touch, especially when it comes to things like either cultural differences and romance.
Like anything emotional. Humor is a big one where the AI just can’t handle some of it. Especially if it is a a play on words and that doesn’t exist in the other language. Good luck. Um, I mean. Unless you you know about exactly that bit and you go into your AI yourself into an LLM and ask it, can you find an equivalent in German for this particular pun?
But even then, if you don’t understand the language, it’s hard to know if that is an actual pun or it just completely made up something that doesn’t, isn’t actually said in German. So, um, I think if you do use AI translation, I would get it human edited and I would get a human, some human beta readers or [00:28:00] just, yeah, ARC readers to give you some feedback. Again, that is with, if you have the aspiration for it to be good, if you have it, if you have want quality. But I always feel sometimes looking at some of these AI translation groups, people don’t really consider that these audiences, for example, in Germany, any other foreign language market, they have the same desire to read a good book, and they don’t just want a bad translation because they have authors in their own language. And if they have the choice between someone who wrote natively in German and a book that is translated, they might go for the native German one because they know the probability of it being good quality is higher.
Steph Pajonas: Let’s be real here. There are plenty of people who English is their native language and they still cannot write a good book, right? So.
Skye MacKinnon: That is very true. That is very true.
Steph Pajonas: Let’s be real here. This is not totally just a human or an AI thing, but [00:29:00] I agree with you because like I wanna read good books and I also wanna read good translated books.
I, I happen to love Japan, as many people know I do. I love Japanese books, and so when I buy a book that’s translated from Japanese, I actually look to see who the translator is because there are like three or four of them now that, that do a majority of the books. And I, there are definitely ones that I prefer from a certain translator over another translator, and that’s because that human in the mix is expressing like opinions about which words they’ve chosen, which sentence structures they’ve chosen, et cetera, to, um, bring to life what the original language writing had been. Right? Um, but there are also plenty of books that I want access to that I’m never gonna get access to unless it’s been translated by AI.
So this is one of those things where we just kind of hope it gets better, [00:30:00] really hoping it gets better over time. In the meantime, we have to find this good middle ground here where we’re, maybe we’re using AI for the first pass and then we go to a human. Or maybe you’re doing, you are sitting down as the author and doing several passes with AI and going over every chapter and looking at things like puns or allegories or any of those kinds of things that may be tripping up with the AI, so I think we’re at a time of great abundance, but not necessarily all that great in quality either.
Danica Favorite: Yeah.
Skye MacKinnon: Very true.
Danica Favorite: And I love your story too because again I like that perspective of being a native speaker, and that’s why I wanted to ask you, because it’s so important for people to understand what those creative decisions they’re making are and why.
And again, if you’re like, okay, I just wanna sell the book, I don’t care. Okay, that’s a choice. But if you’re someone who wants to build a career under that name and have the read through, [00:31:00] there are other choices. But you know, Steph was like, oh, I hope it gets better. I’m in the club of, it’s going to get better.
Because so far that’s what we’ve seen across the board, but I really appreciate hearing that if you really are in this to produce the best quality work, you want to make sure that you’ve got that human pass and that there is that oversight that’s happening.
Skye MacKinnon: Yeah, it’s I think I’m someone who very much thinks long term which again, I’m wide and I will always be because I do have that long-term aspiration of it. Um, yeah, just having that slow, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. When I couldn’t work for almost two years, barely had a new release or anything. It was my wide sales that were carrying me through. They didn’t dip it all.
My Amazon, oh yeah, big Cliff, big fall off the cliff. But my wide sales were pretty much the same. [00:32:00] And that’s the same I think with quality that it is a long term game. And yes, I’ve been experimenting with some AI pen names where I wasn’t so focused on the quality where I was actually my first AI pen name was supposed to disprove that.
I was hoping it would fail because I wanted to feel like it’s still worth like writing my books myself, a hundred percent human. Um, annoyingly that pen name did really well, especially in German and did several records for me in German. Yeah it’s very frustrating when an experiment goes the other way than expect other than planned.
Steph Pajonas: You weren’t planning on it, but there it went.
Skye MacKinnon: Uhhuh. Yeah I think it really depends on what your strategy is and if you just want to have a throwaway pen name and you don’t really care for the long term effect or building a brand or anything and just want the immediate profit in the beginning.
Then I think AI [00:33:00] translation is a very good tool now, and it’s only, as you say, both said, it is only getting better. I think the one problem with it is if you don’t have a good style guide for the target language it is harder to make it sound or make it for the reader, make it sound like it is one author.
Which is the same thing with writing an AI in English. If you don’t have a style guide or some way to guide it. It will just sound like a different person from book to book. And it’s the same for translation, and that’s something I think where some of those tools aren’t quite there yet. Because they don’t always require a style guide or where you can’t always set, like this is a book in that series, so it needs to sound exactly the same as the other books.
It needs to have the same kind of rhythm and pacing and vocabulary. Because otherwise it will just sound like if you have a nine book series, like nine different people wrote that and obviously it’s for a different language. You just want the same recognition effect that Oh yeah, that is Skye’s kind of humor.
[00:34:00] That’s her kind of whimsy. That’s the thing I’m looking for when I buy a Skye MacKinnon book. And that’s the thing where you’re, as always with AI, you need to guide it in the right way. And yeah, I think we can all agree on that. That prompting very important.
Danica Favorite: I think that’s a huge tip to just pull out for the listeners is this idea of having a style guide.
We’ve talked about that with fiction writing, but also I love this point about for the foreign language, do you have a style guide for that language that’s geared towards that culture? And I always think about this because most of Publish Drive their employees are Hungarian. And they’re in Hungary.
And I had a really rough start at the company because Americans and Hungarians have very different worldviews and different ways of putting things. And in the beginning a lot of comments to my boss were like, yeah, she’s way too American. And, and you know, and now I’ve [00:35:00] gotten used to how Hungarians are and they’ve gotten used to me.
And so now we have this amazing working relationship. But it took me a while to understand that doing things the Hungarian way and at least understanding how they are culturally, really makes for a much better relationship and I started doing some Hungarian on Duolingo. And, uh, it’s so interesting to me to see, again, going back to the cultural linguistic differences of how they describe things and how they see the world.
And yes, the style guide that is about that culture and that language is so important, and I think about people who try to do Spanish translations and, are we talking about Spain Spanish, or Mexico Spanish, which totally different languages, even though it’s the same language. One of my friends spent a year studying abroad in Spain, and then she married a man from Mexico.
And she could not communicate [00:36:00] with his family. His family didn’t speak English, and it was just baffling because I’m like, but that’s the same language. She’s oh, no. It’s different. So I really appreciate having that perspective of always keeping the culture in mind. And is your story appropriate for that culture even?
Skye MacKinnon: Oh yeah, definitely. I see that quite often in German, especially when you have books about the Second World War, for example, which is written from the victor’s perspective where all the Germans are bad. You, there’s lots of books about the Second World War and that time period written by Germans.
But I think it’s important if you write historical books to think very hard, will this work in that particular market. Because if you portray every single German as a Nazi and every single American, British person, whatever, as the absolute hero, and you don’t have that differentiation that there, there’s always gray tones in every [00:37:00] country.
That’s just the way things are. That won’t work, I’m afraid. So, um, being culturally aware before you start translating is important. And that’s, that’s just a really crass example. There’s like much smaller bits and pieces. Um, I’ve recently had a consultation with an author who writes later in life stories, but her heroines were pretty much all in their thirties and they were like, they already had kids and were like in that stage where they were basically like they had teenage kids and they were in that next stage of life. While in Germany, of course there’s people getting kid kids early, but the general trend is more you get kids later. And so in your thirties you might just have a baby, if at all. And so it was a very different, like now do we change the age of the characters or do we have to add a little forward that this book is set in this particular area and is therefore different?
And so stuff like that where you wouldn’t even think of maybe in the beginning. [00:38:00] There can be a big cultural differences that might just alienate the reader if, because yeah, if they’re not used to 30 year olds basically having like teenage kids, then it might just be weird for them. And so yeah, that sometimes it just requires an extra explanation or some thinking.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. Yeah. I think those are both good points. And even though, the World War II was extreme, we have to remember that what’s hot in America may not be hot in Germany. And…
Skye MacKinnon: Yes.
Danica Favorite: Or whatever country you’re trying to publish in. So I appreciate those tips. So, um, any other workflow things or things that you’re doing with AI that is, has been really helpful and interesting that our audience might enjoy?
Skye MacKinnon: I’ve been doing the whole yeah, different writing things with AI, especially again, Antigravity. So I’m. I see all these sparkly new toys, all these different platforms, but as I, as I said, I’m stingy, so I don’t want to spend money [00:39:00] on every single tool out there. So I have been forcing myself to restrict to just a few of them.
So I know everyone is using clo Claude Cowork at the moment. I’m not there yet because that would be yet another subscription, and I’ve always used Claude in Typing Mind or now Antigravity. Yeah, at the moment I have Antigravity. I have still ChatGPT, which I will cancel at some point, but it’s just, it was my first and my first love and I’m still just emotionally attached to it.
Plus it knows everything like about me and about all the things I did. Yeah, I just can’t yet. But to be fair, that’s not one of the expensive ones. And then I use Typing Mind a lot for the writing, although Antigravity is taking over from that. So I’m not sure yet if I’m going to stick with Typing Mind or try to centralize everything in Antigravity.
What else is there? I feel like I’m missing something. Oh, yeah. Notebook, of course. Which has been amazing in I was, I [00:40:00] wrote a book in a series, an older series where I hadn’t released anything in three years. And of course in my brain there was nothing left of any of the character names, place names.
I used to have them all saved in a software, a plotting software. And that software decided to delete its entire database and all the information I had added over years over that for that entire universe was gone. And at first I was like, okay, I’m not actually going to write that book now because I don’t have the time and I hate reading my own books.
So I didn’t want to go through my backlist and reading all these books. And it’s a universe, so it’s five or six series set in that same universe and there’s crossover and it would’ve absolutely driven me crazy. Discovering Notebook was just amazing because I could just put all those books in there and ask who was that character?
Or who had the blue hair? Or what language do they speak on that alien planet? And it is also great for consistency. So now any new book in a series I upload there and [00:41:00] ask it. Does this work with the canon of the entire series? And quite often it will tell, no, actually you said that she had short hair in book one.
And yeah, so it’s the stuff my beta readers would’ve probably found before. Although things like, like that sometimes slip through the net. So it’s very good to have that as a safety net to make sure everyone looks the same in every book because I’m very bad with describing people, and I just make it up as I go along.
And then sometimes I realize like books later that I should have really not made her hair green, because otherwise every character should have really remarked on that because it is not a normal thing. Anyway.So Notebook I like.
Danica Favorite: Because that’s, I think that’s one of the big challenges for authors, and I know I’ve talked about this a lot on the show.
I’m a very similar writer to you in that I don’t pay attention to what they look like. I don’t I don’t care. Like whatever, give ’em green here, it’s fine. And then not thinking about those implications. So being able to stick it all into something like [00:42:00] Notebook is really a great way for authors to be able to keep track of that stuff.
Skye MacKinnon: Yes. It also does great infographics. I have one of my series is set in a village in Scotland, and so in my head I had it, like the pub is over there and there’s the hotel and bits and pieces, but Notebook made me an entire map of the village and A readers love that, and B, it was really helpful for me.
Writing to know exactly, yes. They go out of the pub and then opposite is looming that big hotel and whatever. So because yeah, I have written a lot of books and my brain can only handle so many details and I feel like the older I get, the worse my memory gets. It’s definitely, there’s only a thing so much I can remember.
So yeah, these tools have been really helpful.
Danica Favorite: Yes. I’m so excited about that. Like the infographic one, that’s another one. I swear like every episode I learn [00:43:00] something new I didn’t know before, and I didn’t know that Notebook LM would be able to give you this infographic of what your world looked like.
And so, um, now you all know what Danica’s doing this afternoon, so thank you for that.
Skye MacKinnon: It’s got some amazing features. It does character cards. It can do a podcast about your book. Which for like fiction is a bit, yeah, I mean it’s quite fun, but this would be more helpful for a nonfiction book, I think.
But there’s so many little features and they keep adding things. It’s like Christmas every single day. The automation thing is a thing I’ve been trying to get more into. I had a make.com account and, problem was again, extra subscription costs. And if you haven’t got the message yet, I don’t like spending money.
Which is why now I’m building my own system at the moment, my own like author operating system, which will combine social media newsletter, website management, a database of every single book I’ve ever written, which will finally answer the question, how many books do I actually [00:44:00] have? Um, which is something people keep asking me that.
Don’t know at all. Um, but then how do you count that? Do you count box sets? Do you count every translation? Do you count those little prequel novellas that are just on book funnel? It’s, yeah. How long is a piece of string, but instead of, I think doing all these like automation sites, I’m, I’ve decided instead to build my own thing and then using API
for as many tools as I can. My, the software I use for my social media scheduling has an API, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I try to connect existing platforms that I know that have proven themselves useful and connect them rather than build something new for everything. Because as much fun as building things is,
I also need time to actually do the whole writing thing, which I feel like in this kinda world where we have all these tools and all the fun stuff, writing seems to go into the background [00:45:00] sometimes because there’s just never enough time in the day.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. That’s so true. And I love that. So are you using Antigravity for all those automations?
Skye MacKinnon: At least I’m build uh, using Antigravity to build the things.
Danica Favorite: Mm-hmm.
Skye MacKinnon: But I’m trying to do more little apps and software and web apps and yeah, I’m, at the moment, I’m still discovering what format I like the most. Because I work on different platforms. I have a computer up here. I’ve got a laptop down on the sofa.
If I’m, like, if it’s cold, I prefer to work on the sofa with a blanket rather than in my office. I’ve got a Mac for, mostly for velum formatting, but I still want all the information to be on there in case I have to check something. So sofa, I’ve always been using OneDrive to sync all my files, but with the apps that I’m letting Antigravity write for me, they basically need to be accessible, but I also want to be very aware of privacy. I don’t want it to be hacked. I don’t, I still want it to be safe. And so yeah, it’s that finding the [00:46:00] balance of where to host them, how to have them, that I’m still experimenting with, of what I prefer and what gives me the best balance of being efficient and being available everywhere, but also not just putting something out on the worldwide web where someone could access all my book files or something. No.
Danica Favorite: Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair. I love that.
Steph Pajonas: I’ve been using Antigravity to build, like WordPress plugins. I have a install on a domain that I’m not using anything for like a front facing website or anything.
There’s just nothing there. But then I use WordPress’s authentication, its database and all of its tools that it already has to run plugins that do all of these automations for me. I definitely wanna do something like you’ve been doing where it’s like an author dashboard and you can see all your sales and all that kind of stuff.
That’s something that’s on my to-do list, definitely for this year. I built an expense tracker to track all of my expenses for tax time, [00:47:00] that sort of thing. So anything I can think of that’s just going to make it easier for me, I make a WordPress plugin for it using Antigravity. That works out really well.
All right I think we’re coming towards the end of this discussion because we’re, we have discussed a lot today. We’ve gone through AI translations and different Antigravity things that we’ve been working on. I wanna make sure that we send people to all of your stuff that you are interested in putting out there.
Would love to hear, um, main, uh, main website, URL any pen names that you wanna talk about. And then it is possible that the Kickstarter will probably be finished by the time this one goes live. So, um, tell us about where people will be able to find that, uh, German translations book as well.
Once that Kickstarter is over.
Skye MacKinnon: Okay. So I’m going to make things very easy. I’ve got most of those things on one website. It’s SkyeMacKinnon.com/authors. And there you can find the Kickstarter book. [00:48:00] And at the moment it links to Kickstarter, but as soon as the Kickstarter is over it will to a pre-order, and you can buy direct in my store.
Please do. I’m all about the whole selling direct. Um. There’s also a link to consultations if you want to chat one-to-one about anything with me, I do everything from translations, audiobooks, being wide, going wide, marketing. I’m happy to talk about AI too. I know there’s much better experts like YouTube, but if it comes to the basics, I have also talked about people, uh, to people about that.
So yeah, Skye MacKinnon is my main romance pen name that I’m as most of the time. If you like cute little children’s books, you can check out Isla Wynter. She is still a hundred percent human except for some social media posts. But I’m going to revamp her website very soon because having children’s books, most plugins and things aren’t set out for square covers and lots of extra graphics of looking inside and all that.
And it’s a whole different. Beast. [00:49:00] So yeah, that is on my list for in the coming months. She will get a completely beautiful new website and she’ll get her own store. My other pen names, most of them are secret. If you would like to check out my latest one, which is Lana Dunmore. I’m very proud of her because she is very Scottish.
Um, you will find if you any pen name you look at, they always have a Scottish angle, whether that’s set in Scotland or having Scottish sort of characters like Nessie. If you like erotica, you can look at Philomena MacKinnon. She writes things like auto, um, erotic Self Checkout Machines, or, um, Bred by Nessie or, um, Taken by the Horny MRI Machine.
She’s basically my palate cleanser. If I feel I’m hilarious, I write a Philomena MacKinnon book or Taken by Caveman. It is nothing taken to be serious.
Steph Pajonas: That’s a little bit of a [00:50:00] Chuck Tingle feel to it, doesn’t it?
Skye MacKinnon: Oh yes, definitely. It’s. That pen name was actually my very first before the serious pen names came along because I lost a bet while I was still at university.
So Philomena is now 13 years old. And yeah so I am highlighting her because she never gets any attention. I feel like she should be mentioned. But yeah, basically those are the main pen names. SkyeMacKinnon.com/authors is where you find all the bits and pieces. I’ve got a new newsletter now too for authors, because I realized I was sending things to my consultation clients all the time and then realized actually I could just open this up and make it a bit easier for myself.
And yeah, so now I’ve got a very new newsletter which has, I dunno, 90 subscribers. So please subscribe.
Steph Pajonas: We’ll definitely send people to them. And to Philomena, I mean, she sounds like she could use a little love.
Skye MacKinnon: Oh yes, especially The Platypus [00:51:00] Shifters.
Steph Pajonas: Absolutely.
Danica Favorite: She sounds like a blast.
Steph Pajonas: She does sound like a blast. Danica, anything else you wanna wrap up with here?
Danica Favorite: Yeah. So speaking of newsletters Steph always likes to mention that we have the Brave New Bookshelf newsletter. You can subscribe to that and the day after our episodes go live, you will get all the show notes and all of the cool information about whatever the speaker talked about. And then also make sure you are liking and subscribing on Facebook and YouTube for Brave New Bookshelf. We’d really love to get more of those YouTube viewers. ‘Cause who doesn’t wanna see these cute little faces? And also make sure you like, subscribe to Publish Drive, as well as Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press.
We’re all over all the different socials, and so make sure you’re following us all and yeah, look forward to seeing you all next time.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, come follow us and join us for the next one, okay, so drop by bravenewbookshelf.com. Check out the show notes, [00:52:00] subscribe to the newsletter, click on the links to do all the good stuff of the following, and the subscribing and all that good stuff, and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.
Okay, bye everybody.
Danica Favorite: Bye.
Skye MacKinnon: Bye.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show notes.