This week on the podcast, we are exploring the massive, fast-moving world of online communities and how they shape the conversation around artificial intelligence in creative spaces. In episode 80, we welcomed Yoav Yariv, the mastermind behind one of the internet’s largest hubs for AI creators: the r/WritingWithAI subreddit.
With a background spanning tech startups and the Tel Aviv music scene, Yoav brings a unique, business-oriented perspective to how authors can leverage AI. We discussed the explosive growth of his community, the reality of “closet” AI use in major industries, and how authors can shift their mindsets from simple hobbyists to full-scale production houses.
Meet Yoav Yariv, Tech Product Manager and AI Community Leader
Yoav Yariv is a product manager by trade, having spent over a decade building tech startups. But he also leads a parallel life in the arts as a musician, DJ, and writer. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Yoav immediately saw its potential—not as a magic button to write perfect prose, but as a tireless, enthusiastic collaborator to bounce ideas off of.
Seeking like-minded creators, Yoav stumbled upon the r/WritingWithAI subreddit. At the time, it was a deserted community of 5,000 members overrun by anti-AI hostility. Recognizing the need for a safe, constructive space for AI writers, Yoav took over moderation, cleaned up the community, and assembled a dedicated mod team.
Under his leadership, the subreddit has exploded to over 100,000 subscribers and generates roughly two million views a month, ranking it in the top 50 AI subreddits on the entire platform.
The Rocket Growth and Culture of r/WritingWithAI
The r/WritingWithAI subreddit has become a melting pot for novelists, poets, screenwriters, marketers, and software developers. The community acts as a real-time pulse on industry trends, hosting weekly “Share Your Product” threads that feature up to 100 new AI writing tools.
The subreddit also hosts highly popular “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) sessions with prominent figures in the AI writing space, including authors like Coral Hart and Future Fiction Academy’s own Elizabeth Ann West.
While Reddit is famous for its passionate and sometimes aggressive users, Yoav and his team of six moderators work tirelessly to keep the space constructive. They aim to provide a safe haven where authors can openly discuss prompts, workflows, and business strategies without fear of being attacked by vocal anti-AI minorities.
The Silent Majority: AI in Hollywood and Big Publishing
One of the most eye-opening segments of our conversation centered around the public stigma of AI versus its actual, private usage. Yoav shared a story from a friend in Hollywood who sat in an executive meeting where everyone publicly decried AI as an “abomination” and a “copyright nightmare.” Immediately after the meeting, however, nearly every executive privately messaged him to confess, “I actually use AI all the time.”
Danica shared a similar revelation from the Bologna Book Fair, where representatives from major publishing houses like Penguin Random House admitted behind closed doors that they are integrating AI across their workflows.
Yoav calls this phenomenon “the AI in the gaps.” Right now, big companies and traditional authors are comfortable admitting they use AI for “acceptable” tasks like SEO, marketing, or tagging. However, creative generation remains a sacred cow. Yoav predicts this stigma will only break when a massive, breakout hit—the next Harry Potter or something similar—is revealed to have been written with the help of AI, forcing the industry to finally embrace the technology openly.
Shifting from Author to Production House
For Yoav, the true power of AI lies in its ability to democratize the entire publishing and media production pipeline. In the past, self-published authors were limited to selling ebooks and paperbacks. Today, AI allows a single creator to act as a medium-sized production company.
With tools that can instantly generate high-quality, dramatized audiobooks or translate text into multiple languages, authors can scale their intellectual property like never before. Yoav is even working on a new startup designed to take books and automatically transform them into short, vertical videos for platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts—a marketing feat that would have previously cost an indie author tens of thousands of dollars.
Instead of thinking of themselves as just writers, Yoav encourages authors to think like CEOs of their own intellectual property brands.
A Business Approach to Writing: Yoav’s Top Three Tips
For authors looking to transition their writing from a hobby into a profitable business, Yoav shared three crucial strategies:
- Start at the End (Market First): Before writing a single word, look at what is actively selling. Analyze current tropes, bestseller lists, and audience desires. You can still write the fantasy or romance story of your heart, but shape it around the power dynamics and structures that readers are already throwing money at.
- Play the Long Game: Focus on building and retaining your audience. Collect emails, build a newsletter list, and establish a direct connection with your readers. Every person you connect with today is a guaranteed customer for your next book.
- Keep Your Unique Twist: While it is vital to be market-oriented, don’t let your writing become completely flat. Always keep one unique, creative twist that is special to you to ensure your voice stands out in a crowded market.
Favorite Tools & Recommendations
During our chat, Yoav and the hosts highlighted several game-changing tools for modern authors:
- Cursor AI: Yoav’s absolute favorite tool for writing. It acts as a fancy text and file editor with a built-in AI agent. It allows you to seamlessly update your style sheets, character bibles, and story drafts across multiple files directly on your hard drive. It is incredibly cost-effective compared to using Claude directly.
- Antigravity: Steph’s preferred alternative to Cursor AI, offering similar powerful local file-editing capabilities powered by AI.
- Midsummerr: An incredible tool for creating fully dramatized, multi-character AI audiobooks with sound effects at a fraction of the cost of traditional narration.
- Notion: The ultimate organization and collaboration tool used by Steph and Danica to manage and plan the podcast.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
- The anti-AI crowd is a vocal minority. Millions of creators, publishers, and executives are actively using AI behind closed doors; don’t let the public noise discourage you.
- Treat your writing as a product. If your goal is to make a living, you must study the market, understand popular tropes, and produce consistently.
- Think beyond the book. AI enables you to expand your IP into audiobooks, vertical video dramas, and translations, turning your solo operation into a multi-media brand.
- Local file editors are the future of AI writing. Tools like Cursor AI and Antigravity allow you to manage complex story bibles and drafts directly on your computer, bypassing expensive token limits.
- Protect your creative spark. Always keep a unique personal twist in your stories, even when writing heavily to market trends.
Resources Mentioned
Here are the key links and resources discussed in today’s episode:
Transcript
Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite as they dive into thought-provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.
Steph Pajonas: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Brief 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. Um, just cruising along through spring here.
You are getting these episodes once a week, but we’re we are doing these interviews pretty much back to back all throughout the spring so that we have a bunch of them saved up for the summertime so we won’t have to take off as many weeks during the summer as we did last year.
We will be enjoying ourselves, but the episodes will still be going out, and that’s how that works. Isn’t that lovely? I like the fact that we can batch a lot of stuff. And [00:01:00] I do use a lot of tools to help us with these podcasts. I use Claude. I use a WordPress plugin that I made that will go through all of the notes and give me summaries of everything, and then I read through and make blog posts and do all that fun stuff.
So AI is an important part of the process, even on the back end of this podcast. There’s just no getting away from it. I’m here today with my lovely co-host, as always, Danica Favorite. How are you doing today, Danica?
Danica Favorite: I’m good, thank you. I’m good. Yeah, and also to mention what Steph uses to organize the podcast, actually we both use it, is everything is really extensively organized in Notion.
And we just message each other, letting each other know, “Oh, hey, this is up,” or, “This is up,” or whatever. And it really is so convenient just to collaborate together. And I love that AI makes this so easy. And that’s really what we’re here for, is trying to make authors’ lives [00:02:00] easier.
And I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, I don’t wanna do this for AI,” “Don’t wanna do that,” whatever. We don’t care how you use AI, what you’re using AI for but we always like to share all the different ways you could use it, because maybe there is something that you want to use AI for or you hadn’t thought of it yet.
I’m glad that Steph talked a little bit about our process because I love sharing this with people because you just never know when you’re gonna get that light bulb moment. I feel like with every guest, I always jot something down of, “Ooh, I wanna try that.” So really appreciative of all the guests.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Danica Favorite. I’m the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors at every stage of their journey, whether that’s formatting their books, crafting the perfect metadata and book descriptions, getting your books distributed to the widest audience possible, as well as once your book gets out there, helping you with some promotional tools.
And then if you need it, we can help you split royalties amongst co-authors. [00:03:00] And I said last time I was talking about how with AI and all the AI stuff, different companies are really struggling with how to manage AI content and different AI content farms, and making sure it’s good AI that is getting through.
At least Publish Drive being an AI forward company, we’re very committed to making sure that people who use AI can get their work out there. But one of the things that we always talk about on the show is how to do it well. And I really hope that as people are listening to this or watching us on YouTube, that the message you get is not just throw a prompt in, get something, and try to publish it.
That’s not what any of us are here for. And if you’ve listened to our previous episodes you will know that the people who are producing quality work with AI are doing it multi-step, multi-prompt, and in multi ways. And so we’re always excited to share with people [00:04:00] different ways of using AI, different people who are Bringing voices out to the AI world.
And so today I’m really excited because I was introduced to Yoav, who runs the Writing with AI subreddit. And we had a nice email introduction, and then we started chatting and he and I did a video call and got to know each other, and I was like, “Yeah, let’s have him come on to the podcast,” because he is running this huge subreddit on writing with AI and all the different ways people use AI, and they’re not just fiction authors.
We were just talking in the intro how some of it’s business people and other things, and Yoav introduced us to another person who’s gonna be a guest coming on the show here in a couple of weeks. So that’s exciting. I can’t wait. Because there really are so many different uses for AI and how we’re all bringing our voice and guiding where AI [00:05:00] is going in the future.
With that, I would like to introduce you to Yoav Yariv, and he is the person who runs the Writing with AI subreddit. Hello, Yoav. Welcome.
Yoav Yariv: I really appreciate you saying my name in such a correct way. It’s really amazing. Appreciate you guys for having me. Um, maybe you wanna hear a little bit about the subreddit and what it’s about. So just to wrap our heads around the subreddit now has just over 100,000 subscribers and roughly two million views a month, and it’s in the top 50 artificial intelligence subreddits on the entire Reddit.
So it’s … Like I, I’m shocked by these statistics. Um, just so, so you’ll know like the [00:06:00] history last August we had roughly 20,000 people, and that was crazy. And as you’ve mentioned, we have authors that … we have poets, authors screenwriting people, marketing people, researchers. There are a bazillion gazillion people who actually create tools, not even not even writers.
So we have a weekly share your product post that has usually every week probably 100 products. So- In a sense if you’re looking to understand, like the, like the, the trends and what’s happening in writing in general with AI, that’s a really good place to get an understanding of what people are talking about, what they’re looking for, what are the new…
What is the new Shy Girl story that is being, uh, uh, um, discussed, and what [00:07:00] new products are being launched. And we’re also bringing … We’re doing a thing called Ask Me Anything, so we try to bring interesting people from the Writing With AI community. We had Coral Hart. I guess a lot of people know her by now.
And we had Elizabeth Ann West from Future Friction Academy, and they had like …… Both of them had like 40,000 views, something like that. Was it, which I think is crazy. And we’re always looking for interesting people to come and talk with the community, so if somebody, by the way, watches this, especially authors, like we’re looking for authors.
If there’s an author out there that wants to talk with the community, it’s like, it’s not that easy, but if he wants to or she, we’d be happy to host them.
Steph Pajonas: I love the fact that you guys have a lot of differing lots of differing threads on your subreddit, lots of people talking about lots of different parts of AI, which I find really [00:08:00] fascinating.
Because as most people know, I run the Facebook group AI Writing for Authors, and we talk about that here a lot, and we try to keep the discussions mainly to author related stuff, like actually writing prose or brainstorming or marketing those books and whatnot. So we’re a little bit more niched down than you guys are.
So tell me a little bit about how you came into the AI world and what inspired you to start this subreddit for everybody.
Yoav Yariv: So I’m … Like, my, like my history is in tech. I come from the tech world as, … I’ve opened startups, I worked at startup usually as the product guy. And I’ve did a lot of work there, and I always wanted to have a developer that I can tell him to do whatever I want, whenever I want to and pay him as, as less as possible.
That’s a dream for every product manager. So when the [00:09:00] ChatGPT moment came, 2022- I was like, “Oh my God that’s, that’s amazing.” And then I tried it and realized that it’s not that great at the time. But I also had I’ve been in tech for a decade, but I also had a parallel life in art.
I did music as a producer, as a musician. I was a DJ in Tel Aviv. I actually had line parties every month in Tel Aviv that I produced and DJed there. And I also wrote… so I had a lot of artistic endeavors. So when I started talking with ChatGPT about software development, basically, we started having conversations.
And suddenly it clicked that, okay, this is incredible for writing. And not only that it’s incredible for writing it doesn’t generate the best prose, but I have someone that I can talk to about my ideas, and he has to [00:10:00] listen, and he has to be interested. That’s a dream, I know, for me.
Maybe, Maybe I’m weird, but that was a dream come true. So I realized, okay, this is really interesting for writing. But as somebody that comes from tech I realize that there are better ways to use it than others, and I have to find them. And doing it alone, it’s it’s really hard.
If there’s something in the world, there’s a subreddit for it. So I looked for it. And actually, when I came the subreddit already existed, and it had 5,000 people, but it was completely deserted. There was, um… You know, some people open a subreddit and they don’t understand how difficult it is to maintain a subreddit, especially on, on such a hot topic.
So every post I’ve made there, ’cause I just wanted to know how to prompt it. Basically, that was the original reason for me to join the community, is just, “Hey, how do we prompt this? How do we prompt that? Check this prompt. Check what I did here.” Every post had 90% of the comments there is, “I hate you.
[00:11:00] You should die. Don’t use AI.” So I talked with the guy who ran it. Actually a really nice and cool dude from the Netherlands. And I told him, “Listen, this is, could be really interesting but you have to mod it like crazy and you’re not, so just let me do it.”
And he was kind enough to just give me it and from that point on I knew this is, I always when I talk with people about writing with AI, the subreddit, I always say I always tell them that in a few years we can just change the name to writing, because this is, this is it.
Um, And then it just grew and grew once we started cleaning the… Basically just cleaning it. The 90% of our effort at the start, when I say we, it was me, but then I had to bring a team of mods. Now we’re six or seven people, because there’s just so much hate to, to maintain. Now it’s [00:12:00] actually much better in, in that regard.
It’s more of a soft hate, which is I can deal with that. So we had to clean things up. We cleaned it. We did a very interesting competition called Voltage Verse, which also Future Fiction Academy, where Elizabeth was a judge and also a sponsor. That also made us we reached a lot of people w- with that, and we just started growing like crazy.
That’s the gist.
Steph Pajonas: Yeah, as much as I love sub- uh, love Reddit, I, there are a lot of things that are just, you know, abhorrent about Reddit, right? You’re correct. You have to be a very strict moderator on Reddit in order for people to feel safe in there enough to post, right? And even if they go and they create a throwaway account or they’ve got a second account that they can use on Reddit for posting sometimes people just don’t wanna be attacked constantly for their views.
So it’s a really great thing that you did take it over and you started cleaning house a [00:13:00] little bit. It’s funny that you mentioned that you took it over from somebody else, ’cause I had a subreddit for a while that was Sci-Fi Romance, which I was like, “This is a huge genre. How come nobody’s talking about it on Reddit?”
And then I tried to get it started up and get it going, people in there talking about it, and people just didn’t wanna talk about sci-fi romance. So I let it go for a while. And then somebody came along behind me and was just like, “I’ll take it over. It seems like you don’t wanna do it.” And I gave it to her.
I was just like, “Have fun. I’m not gonna be doing much more in here anyway.” So, you know, sometimes they, sometimes they turn over and they go on to live new lives past the original moderator who started it. It is a lot of hard work, though. I noticed because I came in recently to attend Elizabeth Ann West’s AMA, her Ask Me Anything.
So I came in and answered a few questions and whatnot, and I did notice at one point you were like, “Look, you guys wanted somebody to come in who actually, you know, does this for a living, yet you don’t want her to be making [00:14:00] money off of her courses. What do you really want,” right? It is tough to figure out what Redditors really want when they’re coming into a subreddit.
And I think you’re doing a really great job because you are asking those questions. You’re saying, “What do you really want from me?” Which is hard. It’s hard to answer that question sometimes.
Yoav Yariv: An honest question. There’s a quote in in the Next Generation Star Trek that Q says to Picard about…
I think it’s when they meet the Borg. It says “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out there. It’s wonders with treasures to satiate desire, both subtle and gross, but it’s not for the timid.” That’s how I feel about Reddit, to be honest.
It’s very not timid. And what you have to keep in mind always on Reddit is that there is a very, very loud [00:15:00] minority. Every community has it. So the fact that a lot of people complain, a lot of people in 100,000 community i- is, you know, it’s not that. It’s, in percentages it’s complete zero.
And the fact of the matter is, from my perspective, is that, the Ask Me Anything had, I don’t know, 40,000, 50,000 views. It’s… That means that it’s interesting. Ideally, I would want everyone to have the best time and great time that, that they can, and they will find it the most…
Like, I’m doing it like volunteer work. That’s… I’m not getting… Nobody pays me to do it. You know, um, I wish somebody would pay me but no it’s, it’s not it’s not in the Reddit like, I, I’ve been the Reddit for a long time, but it’s not in the DNA of Reddit to get paid for it. So we really try to do things that the community would love.
And, [00:16:00] Elizabeth, they said whatever, but Coral, they had also complaints w- which is she’s a much more of an author focused than Elizabeth. So I don’t know. But, but- As long as people watch it and interact, I assume that it’s helpful. And I really try to engage with the community and try to understand who would they want to see.
And that’s why I’m trying to bring now I’m trying to bring full authors, that they don’t do anything else, just writing. Hopefully that will cool the mob, satisfy the mob. But I- I’m trying to be… Like, I don’t try to take it personally, although it’s a bit annoying because you know a bit because you’re behind the scene.
It’s pretty difficult to organize it. We have everyone’s schedules and it’s a bit, and it’s a bit scary. Like, it’s, It’s not easy to put yourself out there and answer. Elizabeth took the risk. [00:17:00] She’s there. She says who she is. She has a picture of her. And everybody, you know, under their pseudo name.
It’s scary. It’s scary. But I try to take it as, okay, so they want something else. Let’s try to help them because I, I think that bringing people that are actually doing it, that’s the most interesting. It’s the interesting thing you can talk about, with people that are actually in the front.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. And I love what you were saying about how it’s the minority that’s the loudest that’s complaining because I think so many people are scared of using AI or admitting that they’re using AI because the voices that are opposing it are so loud. But it’s such a good reminder, even to hear from you with the numbers of people that you have in your community, that it’s a minority.
It’s just they’re the loudest people.
Yoav Yariv: It’s not only the it’s the minority. I’ll tell you a story. For… I have a friend that works in, in Hollywood, and he told me he was [00:18:00] in a conversation with really big shot executives. I don’t know what it means but that’s the framing. And he’s trying to promote AI.
And he said that he was sitting in a room with, I don’t know, six, seven executive, and everyone is, “AI is going to destroy this industry. It’s, It’s an abomination. It’s a copyright nightmare,” blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he said he left, everybody le- left the room. Then he got a message from each one of them, “I use AI all the time.
That’s… What you said was amazing. It was great.” So I think there’s, um… I don’t know how to explicitly pr- pronounce it. Maybe maybe marketing is the right way, but it’s, Ah, there’s a name that we know here. It’s like virtue. It’s a type of a virtue signaling.
Danica Favorite: Yeah.
Yoav Yariv: It became AI bad- I’m good person, something like, like that. Um, So when I talk, I won’t name names, but when I talk with [00:19:00] big publishers and big production companies, Hollywood or in pu- publishing, everybody uses AI. 100% of them uses AI. But it’s very hard for them to say it because of this vocal minority. They feel they’re going to, to lose their audience.
But-
Danica Favorite: Yeah
Yoav Yariv: … time is on our side. That’s how I see it.
Danica Favorite: Absolutely, and I agree with that. I actually just posted a really angry note on Substack the other day because somebody that I personally know uses AI all the time was posting this big anti-AI thing on Facebook, and I was like, “Ugh.” And like I keep people’s secrets.
Steph and I both do this. People will confess to us privately, “Oh, I use AI.” And then you see them heaping on the pile of anti-AI sentiment, and I’m just like, “Stop it.” And so for those of you who are listening, I’m gonna say it again. Please stop doing that. I [00:20:00] love that you’re using AI, and if you don’t wanna admit publicly that you use it, that’s fine.
Just don’t add fuel to the anti-AI fire.
Yoav Yariv: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: And like you were saying-
Yoav Yariv: It’s all o-
Danica Favorite: … with people in big publishing and everything using AI our CEO Kinga just returned from the Bologna Book Fair. And she just sent me a note about how she was talking for… Oh, get this, Steph, ’cause I haven’t told you this yet.
They were talking to Penguin Random House, and someone from Penguin Random House was like, “Oh yeah, we use AI for everything.” And we’re like, “Yeah.”
Steph Pajonas: Yeah.
Danica Favorite: And so-
Steph Pajonas: We knew that. We knew that.
Danica Favorite: And that’s just what I’m saying, is like we knew that, but now they’re starting to publicly admit it at the book fair.
So maybe it’s not out there in, like, all of their press releases and everything, which, hello, it’s not ever going to be. But it’s out there. And so I love your story, Yoav, about Hollywood because [00:21:00] that’s what we’re seeing across the board. And so my encouragement to people listening is please if you’re using AI secretly, good for you.
Please continue using it secretly. But just stop adding fuel to the anti-AI fire.
Yoav Yariv: It’s so bizarre. I… It’s so bizarre for me. Again, in, in tech is it’s just a tool. Nobody cares if you use AI or not. Do whatever you want. So it’s so bizarre for me that people are using it and are, externally fighting against it, and they’re using it.
It’s just- It’s crazy for me that I would never have believed this is what’s happening if I wasn’t in the, in the, in the frying pan and actually seeing people do it. It’s just so bizarre. And for the publisher and Penguin and whoever they’re actually going to work now it’s like God of the gaps, it’s the AI in the gaps.
They’re not going to say, “We’re using AI for everything.” They’re going to say, “No, we use AI [00:22:00] only for um, marketing and only for uh, SEO.” They will… It will take time until they start admitting they use it for creative stuff. This is like there’s a hierarchy of what it is allowed to use AI for, and the creative, everything that is creative in spec- specifically generating the prose is more of a holy grail, like a ho- like not a holy grail, but a holy cow.
I don’t know if… how to say it i- in English. What’s the-
Steph Pajonas: I think it’s-
Yoav Yariv: … appropriate …
Steph Pajonas: Sacred cow. Sacred cow.
Yoav Yariv: Sacred cow. Correct. Sacred cow. So it’s a sacred cow, so they won’t admit it immediately but you’ll start seeing, “Oh, no, they use it just for marketing. That’s fine. Oh, no, they use it just for tagging.
No, that’s fine.” This is how it’s going to work until, you know, there’s going to be a really big author. That’s how I imagine it, it’s going to happen, and maybe I might be wrong, but there’s going to be a big author that is [00:23:00] going, for marketing and publicity reason, going to say, “I’m using AI all the time,” and then it’s going to be okay.
That’s, that… Unfortunately, that’s what I believe. I ho- hope I’m wrong, but that’s the way out that I see right now.
Steph Pajonas: I think you’re right. I think as well like I’ve said for a few years now, that there’s going to come a time when there’s gonna be some breakout hit. It’s gonna be like the next b- next Harry Potter.
It’s gonna be the next big thing, right? And then it will come out that person used AI, and everybody will be like, “Oh, really? Really?” There will come that shift where somebody is going to succeed because they managed to use these tools in a way that amplified their creativity, got them to market faster, managed to reach their audience in a way that they couldn’t before, and all of that will come together into some really big hit- And then people will realize that AI [00:24:00] had a really good, strong part of that.
Obviously the person who is driving it is the creative vision, just like Steven Spielberg is the creative vision as a director and still has a whole bunch of people working for him, right? So I just, I don’t think that you’re wrong. I think that we’re gonna see it probably within the next two to three years, and it will blow things up, I think pretty big.
Yoav Yariv: Yeah. I totally agree. That- that’s why I think that, Shy Girl is actually interesting a interesting case because it’s not big enough for people to change their minds. That I think that’s the, It’s a timing issue, and the fact that it wasn’t big enough. So it was, like, in an awkward position that people are still very, I don’t know if the word bigoted is correct for that, but it’s bigoted for using AI.
And it’s not that [00:25:00] successful, so from the publishing perspective, the publisher perspective they had to take a risk. It was safer for them to cancel it. It was just safer. Which is sad, I think, to be honest. Which is sad.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. It’s sad, but I think that tide is turning. So one of the things that Kinga learned at the book fair there are publishers who are putting out AI books and not saying that they’re AI books, and they’re outselling the ones written by authors.
And I was just like, when she said that, I was like, “Oh my gosh, Kinga, that’s amazing.” And we saw this coming. And so I think that as soon as one of those books turns into a breakout hit we’re already seeing them outselling what happens when it turns into a breakout hit. So I think you both have hit the nail on the head with that because that’s what’s gonna happen.
And I feel bad that with the whole Shy Girl controversy that isn’t even proven to be AI because she denies it. Like- … yeah, people are afraid right now, [00:26:00] but as soon as they start seeing the sales numbers on some of these other books, they’re just gonna be like, “Oh, oops.” And it’s not gonna be a big deal anymore.
Yoav Yariv: I, I think… and that’s where it starts, I think, to get a little bit messy, from my perspective what you just said because I come from tech and I said I was a product guy, and a product guy that if people don’t know what a pr- what product is, so basically a product manager, it’s really dependent between- Companies.
But in general, it’s the guy who connects between, the guy or the girl that connects between the tech team and the business team. So it’s somebody that needs to know a little bit of both. Oh so the business person in me think- starts to think about the economics. So if I’m Penguin and I can write books [00:27:00] myself that can outperform the, an author, it’s much cheaper to do it myself and not having not having author at all, or maybe having an Instagram account of an author, which is also made by AI, like the UGC phenomenon that we’re seeing.
It’s going to be, it’s going to be extremely hard as we move forward. It’s going to be extremely hard economically for basically the publishing model to to stay alive because you have people like Coral Hart which are making, crazy crazy money, that’s, that, that’s crazy successful.
And she has a group of people that are doing it. She’s not that she’s alone. And I guess, Steph and Elizabeth probably know more people like that. So the entire business model, the economics of being a publisher, I don’t know if they’re going to [00:28:00] make sense.
I don’t know if they’re going to make sense i- in the long term. And that’s something that on the one end might be sad for several reasons, but I think for authors the promise of e-books and indie authors in general was, “Let’s kill the gatekeepers.”
That was the promise in, y- in, in some level, and I think it’s going to happen now. AI is the real killer of the gatekeeper because it’s also helping you with the marketing. It also help you generate the book, but also generate things that are adjacent to the book but are also worthwhile, like maybe audiobooks and maybe
I’m working on a, on … my next startup is going to be taking other media, especially books, and transforming them into short, [00:29:00] vertical videos made by AI. So- And that’s something that would would’ve cost an author millions, and I can give an author a a show in 10,000 bucks, and probably much cheaper maybe even free if he has a lot of audience.
So you get a show for free. This is crazy. You can be… You can basically be… Like, Coral Hart can basically be a production company. She has 200 books, 200 audiobooks, 20 uh, 50 shows. This is a produ- this is a medium-sized production company. This is… I think it’s cr- I think it’s crazy.
I think it’s crazy.
Steph Pajonas: I think it’s a revolution in where we’re going. I- as soon as AI tools, we’re able to do a lot of these extra things that people who are content creators are looking [00:30:00] for, whether it’s vertical dramas, like you said, or maybe graphic novels, translations, movies, all of this kinda stuff.
You become, instead of just an author, you become a production house. You become a publisher, right? And so I think that is a mindset shift for a lot of authors. They thought of themselves as just writing a book, telling one story, but now they need to think bigger. They need to think wider along the different horizontal ways and vertical ways in which we can publish and market our stories.
It doesn’t have to be just a book. It doesn’t even have to be just a hardcover, really pretty book that you do on Kickstarter or something like this. It can be multimedia, multimodal, all this stuff now that we have these tools for it. I just I k- I keep encouraging authors to try to start thinking more like a business.
Try to start thinking more like a business. Think in [00:31:00] terms of profit and loss. Think in terms of what you’re putting into, what you’re gonna get out of. Not just a story of your heart anymore. It is now a product, a commodity that needs to be sold and distributed, and in many different ways. And like I said, this is tough for some authors.
There are plenty of authors out there who don’t have two dimes to rub together. They’re fairly, they don’t have a lot of capital to run their business or get it up and running, and AI tools can help bridge that gap, especially when you get started. And then if you do become some huge powerhouse with lots of stories and lots of stuff, you can actually hire people to come in and run those AI tools and to help you run your business, but you have to start someplace small.
And I keep telling people that it’s time to start thinking forward into the future when you could be making all of these other things that go along with your IP and your property.
Yoav Yariv: [00:32:00] It’s… so there are two things that I think really important in, in what you said. One, one is i’ll start with the last actually.
I think that it’s coming so soon, people will be… It’s practically there. Like, I just… I, I, I, I work with a company called Midsummer that does dramatized audiobooks, completely AI. You can get a book, I don’t know, maybe b- between $40 and $200, that something like that the range, depending on the length of your book.
But you get it fully dramatized with characters, with audio, with sound effect now. Like in… th- this is c- th- today this is crazy. And what I’m talked about with the dramatized v- like getting your book transformed into a dramatized video, this is something that it’s a month it’s a few months away.
It’s just crazy. So I think the future is… People, I think, [00:33:00] don’t really understand how forward are we in that process. We- we’re super… We- we’re… Like, technology’s there. So that’s one. The other thing is I think, and that, that’s really important, you touched, I think, about one of the biggest conflicts or points of contention in the community which I just realized it in the la- in the last few weeks. There are a lot of authors that all they want really is to get a story that they have, that they dreamed of, that’s… It’s usually fantasy, sci-fi world. This is what they want. And for those people AI is also a great tool. But if you want to make a living as an author um, you’re just- Extreme…
[00:34:00] Making your chances really slim. That’s what you’re doing. So yeah you can write an amazing one book which will be tremendous and everybody will love it. Good for you. The chances are really small and not even because that your book isn’t good. Your book can be amazing, but getting people to read it, that’s, it’s a difficult thing.
So even if you have that one book maybe generating a lot of books in that world so you can push people back into that magnum opus that is… That, that might be the right tactic for you. But the thing is that I think that a lot of people can’t wrap their head around the fact that it’s almost impossible in any, not only in, in writing books, screenplays, plays, music, whatever writing a single piece and expecting it to, to fund everything in your world is just really [00:35:00] not probable. Not impossible, just highly improbable. And I think that’s something really hard for authors.
And when they see Coral, it… You know, that’s not the right way to use AI from their perspective because AI should only help you create your magnum opus. And I think that’s that’s a big misunderstanding that, that people have, that it’s not enough. In most… Again, in, in 99.99% of cases, it’s just not enough.
And if you want to write, if you just wanna write a good book just do it. Good for you. Have fun. Like I’m… Hope you’ll make a lot of money of it. Like I’m all… Like I’ll read it. I’ll gladly. But if you really want to make money in anything, you have to produce a lot.
And I think that the more you produce, that’s actually where you can actually see the value of AI, is the more you produce.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. I think it goes back to what Steph was saying about this is a business. And I say [00:36:00] this a lot to people where, you know, there’s a difference between writing a book to write a book because you wanna write a book, and writing a book because you want income.
And the moment you say, “I want to make money off of this book,” it becomes a commercial product, not just a reflection of your creativity. And so I really love this perspective from you as a business person who’s done startups and things like that to say, “Look, this is how, as writers, you need to look at your writing as a business.”
And so I would love to hear some of your tips on what are things that writers looking to make that business are, should be looking at.
Yoav Yariv: I think that that personally the… First of all, again, I’m, I’ll just say that I’m totally fine with somebody just writing because he wants to write. I did music and DJ and I didn’t see it as [00:37:00] something that I’m gonna get, not going to be my main source of income.
It didn’t make me, it didn’t made me feel less connected to it. But I knew that I’m not going to be making money from it enough to survive, so I had the privilege of doing it whenever I feel like it. But if you want to have a business, you have to have um, um, you know, you want to make the best sandwich in the world.
If you have only one it’s probably wo- won’t be enough. So I would actually say that at this age I think that the number one thing that you can do as a writer is start at the end. And not the end of the story, but start at what is selling right now. What is the number one? What are the tropes?
What are people looking for? Like, you know, I didn’t know that m- most of the books today are between power dynamics of an enemy turning to a lover. I didn’t [00:38:00] know that. I’m… First of all I’m a guy, and I don’t I don’t think about these kind of things ever. So I had no idea. And what it hit me that, okay, this is a trope, or this is the top selling uh, uh, books today.
They use these tropes. I wanna do a fantasy world with orcs and elves. I don’t know. I can do a fa- a a romance book about this particular power dynamics about an orc and an elf. It doesn’t really matter. I can do it. But that’s the way I would go about it. Start at the end.
Who is the audience? What are they looking for? What is selling right now? What’s the market? That’s the first question. And this is one of the things that actually, you know, analytics and AI are pretty good at, help you with that. First, you have the tools, and you, you have the bestseller tools um, for, for Amazon and stuff like that.
Ev- everything is available. It’s pretty easy to see. So this is actually how I would start, ju- just doing [00:39:00] that. And the second thing I would always consider is I’m playing the long game, which means that I want to create a connection between me and my audience. And I’m not even saying a connection, like in brand and Instagram and show them that I’m in the beach and stuff like that.
No, just getting emails, building your audience, knowing who they are, where they are. Start building a list of people. These are the people that I want to share with my books. Maybe it’s an Instagram influencer or a TikTok influencer, something like that. But understanding that you’re playing for the long run.
So you have to… Every person that you have a connection with, you’re going to sell them the next book, at least you hope so. So always think about it like that. So know what your audience want and keep your audience. Don’t forget it. Um, [00:40:00] And then again, if… That’s a personal take, but the third one is try to have a twist of your own, something that, that is special for you.
Which I think is, is, is, uh… You know, when you, when… It’s a risk when you’re very market audience oriented to, to start being very flat. So try to keep that one twist. I have to have this one twist. It’s for me, special for me. I really love it. Tr- try to keep that. But that’s, that, that’s how I would approach it.
That’s how I would approach it. That’s the top three things for me.
Danica Favorite: Yeah. I think that’s great because it really is the conventional wisdom of a lot of successful authors. And, coming at it from a business person it’s really the same thing. So I love that that you were able to share that with us.
And so as we start to wind down, do you have any favorite AI tools or things that you love to use with AI?
Yoav Yariv: So I’ll tell you something. The best [00:41:00] AI tool for writing by far it’s not even close. People always think about models. Claude the best, ChatGPT the best. like, obviously ChatGPT is not the best.
But I use C- Cursor AI. It’s very similar to Antigravity. I think pe- a lot of people know more about that because Google released it- Basically for free. But what Cursor is … Now you have Claude Code, so I think people are starting to understand what it does. But basically it’s a fancy text and file editor.
That- that’s what it really is technologically. It’s just a fancy text editor and folder editor that you have an agent that you can tell them, “Change files, create files, read files.” That’s basically it. Is … And from that simplicity also comes its strength because everything you do, you can update all the documents that you have all the time. [00:42:00] So I’m starting writing something, and I’ve made … I … This is the first draft, and then I’ve done a lot of work, and I’ve reached something that I really like. I want to reach that point much earlier, and having a fancy text editor that knows what happened log it for me, and then be able to retrieve it, that’s- that’s the magic because…
And again, it also comes to- to scale and thinking long-term. The more I use it, the easier it is for me, the better it is for me. So- so that’s the tool for me. Always constantly updating files, updating my style sheets, updating my style guides, updating my characters, updating my- my story bible, and being able to access multiple models.
And, Claude is- is great, but using Claude directly, it’s just … it’s- it’s unbearable. It … Y- [00:43:00] the credits, the tokens run so- so quickly, it’s just crazy. A- and first of all, in Cursor it’s- it’s much, much cheaper, per token much cheaper. And also they have a lot of models there for free, basically.
So you can switch, and you know there’s particular tasks where they would prefer Gemini to do, for example. So having Cursor really changed the way I- I- I approach writing, and I recommend everybody to use it, really.
Steph Pajonas: That’s a great tip because I also … I used Cursor first and then I switched to Antigravity.
It’s just one of those things where it just felt more natural to me for some- some reason. It really isn’t all that different. I look at the two of them side by side and I’m like, “I- I don’t know why I didn’t jive with Cursor, but I do with Antigravity.” But either way, I- I use it for both coding and for writing.
I think that it’s a great tool because it can manipulate files directly on your hard drive. Um, you know, you don’t have to worry about- the cloud being down [00:44:00] or anything like that. It’s all happening straight on your computer, which is really helpful and nice. So I like this tool recommendation because I think that a lot of people sometimes overlook a lot of these extra, this this software.
They think they th- need to go straight to ChatGPT or straight to Claude AI chat, or do any… go straight to Gemini Chat when you can literally have all of those in one place in Cursor or a very similar platform. So thank you for that. That’s a great that’s a great suggestion.
Danica Favorite: And I like it-
Yoav Yariv: Don’t,
Danica Favorite: because we haven’t talked about Cursor, so this is also another really great suggestion.
Yoav Yariv: B- But don’t tell anyone that software engineers, at the end of the day, just manipulate text files, or most of the work is changing text files. Don’t tell anyone.
Steph Pajonas: That’s funny you said that because I remember telling people at the Future of Fashion Academy, I was like, “Understand that when you’re programming in a language, right?”
This is a language. A lot of these languages are actually based on the English [00:45:00] language. You don’t find… there are no programming languages that are in Japanese. You know what I mean? So we’re manipulating a language when you’re programming, and that is the same as manipulating the English language for stories or doing those kinds of things.
Yeah, there’s a parallel there for sure that we never really touched on before. All right, so we’re we’re winding down here. I wanna make sure that we send people to the right place when they wanna come and check out the subreddit. And anything else that you want to give a URL to either your own work or your own business let’s be sure to tell everybody where to find you.
Yoav Yariv: So you want me to send it to you or say? Because I think I’ll-
Steph Pajonas: Let’s say it out loud so the people who are listening to the podcast can write it down and come on over.
Yoav Yariv: So on Reddit, just go to Reddit and search on the search bar WritingWithAI altogether, no spaces. Or just search r/WritingWithAI. R is the subreddit.[00:46:00]
And for me, to be honest and ashamed to say, LinkedIn is currently the best place to find me, unfortunately. So just LinkedIn, Yoav Yariv. And I’ll be there doing my, my, my stuff there.
Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. I’m gonna make sure that we put all that into the notes. So everybody who’s listening, come on by bravenewbookshelf.com.
Check out the show notes for this particular episode. We’ll include any links in case you did not have a pencil and paper handy or your phone was in your pocket and you couldn’t write this stuff down quick enough. We will have them there in the notes. We will also send you the notes if you sign up for our mailing list.
So click on subscribe at the top of the page and sign up for the mailing list. We’ll send you the notes the next day after the podcast goes live. Danica, what else do we need to tell everybody?
Danica Favorite: Just as always, I’m gonna remind you to like and subscribe to Brave New Bookshelf on Facebook and YouTube, as well as your favorite podcast provider.
But just remember, you [00:47:00] can always watch us on YouTube, and we love getting those YouTube views. And finally, make sure you like and subscribe to Future Fiction Academy, Future Fiction Press, and Publish Drive on all of the various social media channels.
Steph Pajonas: Excellent. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening, and we will see you in the next episode.
Okay, bye.
Danica Favorite: Bye.
Steph Pajonas: Bye.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us on The Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us bravenewbookshelf.com, sign up for our newsletter, and get all the show notes.