Lauren: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. And today we are going to be tackling the alternative side of a topic that we've done already this year. The very first episode that we did in 2026 was on how the publishing industry, and publishers specifically, can and should be using AI as a back office tool.

Matt: And are.

Lauren: And are, yes. Actually, we just came back from US Book Show and I was listening to a lot of the conversations that were happening on stage where they were talking about AI in the publishing industry.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And almost every single thing that they said that like, publishers are using it for this, and it's great for that, I was like, Matt and I talked about that in our episode. Look at us, we're so smart.

Matt: Yeah, I mean, a lot of them are using it now, and – as they should be.

Lauren: As, as they should be, and as they definitely are. Like, can, can confirm, whether you want to believe it or not, they absolutely are using AI in-house in the publishing industry.

[1:35] – Episode Topic Intro

Lauren: And so we thought we would talk, this time around, about how authors can be using it.

Matt: Yes. Because conversely...

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: While it seems, you know, publishing is, to a degree, embracing AI for all of the stuff they should be, all of the administrative, non-creative stuff. It seems authors, for the most part – most of who we talk to or heard from or – are still somewhat reluctant to use it at all, for fear that it seeps into their creative process. Or that, you know, even if they don't use it for creative and they use it for, you know, administrative, that the witch hunts will come for them. Which is a big problem. So, yeah, we wanted to talk about that and, and talk about some of the really easy and efficient ways to use it to free you up to do more writing.

Lauren: Yes. Right up, right up top, before you hit stop on this episode because you don't want to hear it. Absolutely, 100%. We are not talking about using AI as a creative tool. This is not something that is going to be... We – or we are not recommending that you use it for writing, for designing your book cover or anything like that.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: This is not a replacement for human creativity. This is an administrative assistant, a backend tool, that you can use in some of these ways so that you have more time available for you to do the creative, human side of writing books.

Matt: Yeah. If you look at it this way, you know, one of the big differences between indie publishing and traditional publishing is that traditional publishing houses have a team of people that do a lot of administrative stuff on behalf of the authors. So when you're an indie published author, or when you're pursuing indie publishing, you don't have access to teams like that, you don't have those resources. And if you're not, you know, selling a lot of books, you can't afford to pay people to do these things for you. You are a one person, you know, entrepreneurial sort of entity. So this is your shot right now to be able to, to get all this stuff done for basically the cost of, you know, a pro plan on one of these tools, which is roughly twenty bucks a month. So. Imagine getting, you know, all the stuff we're going to talk about done, every week, every month, for roughly $20 a month. Versus the hundreds if not thousands of dollars that publishers and other people pay actual human beings or, you know, services to do these things for, so. This is a way for you to level up.

Lauren: That was actually one of the really interesting things that... somebody said at US Book Show when they were talking about AI in publishing. And it was actually the former CEO of Random House, so not, not some nobody that didn't know what they were talking about. But what he said was that he, he thought that AI was a really interesting opportunity for specifically smaller presses, indie publishers, and indie authors, to level the playing field, in a way. Because it gave them exactly that. In the past, where there were opportunities that only the, the big name traditional publishers had because they were cost prohibitive. Because it was things like having a whole team in place to get this stuff done.

Matt: Well, because the bigger publishers have bigger budgets that are backed –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: – by the media companies that own them.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: And the private equity groups that own them.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. So and, and he outright said, I think AI is an opportunity for... For people that didn't have those resources available to them in the past now have access to tools that can, can put them back in play, basically.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Which I think is really interesting take, especially to hear from somebody coming from one of the big – well, big six at the time that he was involved in it.

Matt: Yeah. And I think a lot of, you know, publishing executives and, just in general, people, are getting on board with that.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: For sure. The small to medium sized publishing houses, where they lack, you know, financial depth, they do have time.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: They do have bandwidth. They do have, you know, a lot of tech-savvy people that they employ. And so this, this is a great opportunity for them. So.

[6:28] – Buying Back Time

Lauren: Which I think realistically, kind of the summary of this entire episode is what you just said: they have the time.

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: Most of –

Matt: It’s time management, too, but yeah, time.

Lauren: Yes, but most of the listeners of this podcast probably don't. That's probably the main pain point – whether you identify your main pain point as an author or an entrepreneur or whatever as marketing, or product, the production process, or you really, really hate having to, like, cold pitch people, whatever it is, what it all actually boils down to is that there is not enough time in the day for you to do all the things that you need to do as a solopreneur.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Which you are. If you are an indie author, you are a solopreneur.

Matt: Yeah. This is about making time.

Lauren: Exactly.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: This is about using AI as a tool to help you buy back time, make more time in your day, streamline the things that you don't need to be spending an hour on something that generative AI can do in three minutes, and then –

Matt: Or less.

Lauren: Or less. And then you can use those other 57 minutes to work on your next draft.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Or whatever else you want to do.

Matt: We're going to touch on a few key areas. It's, it's operations, it's marketing, it's sales, and it's production.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Right? Those are the four key areas where most indie authors and publishers fall down. Because they want to spend more time being creative, but they end up mismanaging their time. And so it gets spread across, you know – when you add writing to those other four of those five areas, it starts to get stretched across those five areas. And undoubtedly three to four of them, you know, really lack, when you're trying to do all those things and you don't quite know what you're doing. And so, you know, stick with the writing and the creative part. Let these AI tools do these other four that we're about to talk about. And I think that's where you're going to start to find several more hours back in your week, almost immediately. And then in the, you know, the, the, the months after that, you're going to find yourself with quite a bit more time as you continue to practice and do it.

Lauren: We just, just recently did an episode on designing a workflow to support your, your growing author brand or business or whatever it is. That, you know, we talked a lot about this in that. It was the seven step workflow that was just kind of like, you know...

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Figure out a way to... not automate it, because we weren't really talking about tools in that one, but figure out a way to make this, like, a routine.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And not something that you were starting from scratch every single time. So that you could kind of make that go faster, and have that as, like, a mentally automated process, even if it isn't literally automated. And, and this is kind of similar to that. This is along the lines of that. The idea that, that you know, you're trying to identify those things that are operational work that slow you down, that take forever to do, that are for some reason just the bottleneck for you. Whether it's because you hate doing it, or because it takes forever to do, or because you're doing it manually and it's tedious, or whatever.

Matt: Well, and for a lot of people, especially if they're still early stage, a lot of it they don't really know how to do –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – the right way. And so they're just kind of stumbling through the dark, maybe getting a little bit of help from people, you know, in online forums or places like that. But ultimately, you know, a lot of that they're not sure how to do it just yet. So, that's also where, you know, you get a lot of help from some of these tools.

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, even that, even if you're not using it as an automation tool in any way, I've talked about this in past episodes where I've used ChatGPT as a, like, gut check for hey, this is my –

Matt: A sounding board.

Lauren: Yeah, well, a sounding board for sure, but like a hey, this is my current workflow.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Where do you see redundancies in here? Are there things that I, I am intentionally or unintentionally slowing myself down? Like, how can I streamline this? And then I'm still doing all the stuff manually. I'm still, you know, 100% in charge of my own process for how I do things. But it was an opportunity to ask somebody or something else like, hey, what am I doing wrong here? How can I fix this a little bit?

Matt: Yeah. Keeping everything bucketed into those, those categories really helps. So creative, operational, marketing, sales, and production, I think, is the best way to break up your author business. And then you attach – or attack – each of those buckets by asking a lot of the questions that you just said. So for each of those, you know, what's taking up most of your time? What could be streamlined or automated, potentially? And like you said, quite frankly, what do you hate the most about your operations stuff? What do you hate the most about marketing? What do you hate the most about sales? And then on the production side, what do you hate the most? You know, and figuring out which of those things, letting these tools help you sort of sort out some automated ways to take care of those things, ones that you're comfortable with. That's what we're going to be talking about, so.

Lauren: Yeah, I think that's also a really good opportunity as you're, you're bucketing those out – In the end we'll talk a little bit about things that you can do to kind of get started with implementing some of these tools and strategies. But, you know, one of the first things that we're going to say for sure is that you should absolutely have very rigid guardrails and guidelines in place for yourself about how and when you will and will not use AI. And so if you start from the beginning of all this by sorting your different processes and workflows out into the different buckets that we were talking about, you can just say right off the bat, like, okay, anything in this creative bucket, I never want to use AI as a creativity replacement. So anything in this, anything in this bucket we're just going to like, we're not even going to consider using AI for this.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: And maybe there's something else that you're like, I'm on the fence about using it as a marketing tool, so we'll put this in the gray. Like, I think that's a really good place to start with understanding this.

Matt: Yeah, I'm a little more black and white than you are.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: Like, I would definitely have and do have a list of things like, absolutely not, never. At least not anytime soon. Everything else is like, up for possibility.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: There's no gray. Like it's, it's either black and white for me. But either way, yes. As long as you, you yourself have an idea of like, listen, these are the things, the activities, the processes that absolutely based on my ethics and morals, I will not ever or in the very near future let AI touch. Claude’s not going to touch these, ChatGPT is never going to see these. You know, Gemini's never going to get its little digital hands on these things. Everything else is up for – that's, that's how I approach it, so.

Lauren: Yeah.

[13:45] – Using AI for Operations

Matt: The first category is, again, barring creativity, we're not going to talk about that, operations. And kind of what's considered operations, as, you know, breaking out marketing and all these other things and just having operations. We're talking about the day to day stuff that you have to do to kind of run your little author business. And that could be everything from the process of checking your emails every morning or afternoon, whatever your routine is, you know. Going through all of those emails, if you're lucky enough to have quite a few, you know which ones need to be answered now, which ones can you answer later? Which ones are, you know, simply somebody asking about, you know, where's my order or whatever that might be. Right? So that's an operational task. Breaking out other operational tasks, things like, you know, reviewing your royalties once a week, your payouts or whatever that might be. If you're a small publisher and you pay out royalties, you know, there's obviously some auditing and review that has to be done weekly and monthly on those things. These are all operational tasks where you can have, you know, Claude or GPT or Gemini or Perplexity or somebody come in and help you kind of do this work. You can train it to understand what to look for when it's reviewing for royalties. And, you know, from that point on, if that spreadsheet of royalties or whatever gets plugged in or dropped into your, you know, if you're using QuickBooks or something like that, whatever you using, like. You can connect all of these things and automate this stuff so that if you're spending, you know, a cumulative hour per week on email checking and sorting, you can wipe that out and drop that down to a couple of minutes. If you're spending, you know, a couple of hours a week on financial tasks that really are simply just mundane auditing and, you know, taking this spreadsheet and dropping it into this program or this tool or whatever, like... These tools can do all that for you once you show it how to do it. And you tell it when you want it to run, you can set up an agent that just handles all of that for you. So when we talk about operations, that's what we're talking about. Like, all that stuff that authors and writers don't want to deal with.

Lauren: Who does?

Matt: That’s not what they bargained for. That's not what they thought about when they dreamed about being a writer and author, was sitting at a table in front of the window, like, trying to figure out royalty calculations from seventeen different sales channels that all want to report at different times the month, and all want to pay out on different schedules. Like nobody asked for that. This is operations.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: This is where I think you can make some of the biggest impact in getting your time back, especially those that have been doing this for a little while. If you're early stage you might not be as thick into a lot of this operational stuff, but if you're in it for the long haul, you will get into it this thick. And it's nice to have, you know, a little virtual assistance there.

Lauren: We talked about this a little bit in the episode that we did on how you can tell when the, the manual fulfillment solutions that you've been using –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: – are starting to crack under the pressure.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Which is a good sign. It means that you're, you're –

Matt: Growing.

Lauren: – achieving growth and success and all of that. And this is very similar. Maybe if you're listening right now and you're like, okay, well my operations aren't so daunting or overwhelming right now. Like, my weekly operational tasks or monthly operational tasks are not so bad that, that they're taking up a huge chunk of my time.

Matt: Great.

Lauren: Great! That's great. A year from now that might look different. And, and you might not need a solution right now, but a year from now, you might.

Matt: Or sooner. The thing to remember too is, is if you can effectively implement AI in, in at least one small, you know, area in each of these buckets, each of these categories, you're going to drastically increase the amount of time you can spend writing and creating and producing new work. If that's your goal. And that kind of output, you know, begets more growth. And so yeah, it might be a year, but it might be six months, it might be four months. Who knows? It all depends on how much time you're able to reclaim to, to focus on creative efforts. Which, you know, ultimately should equal more output. So. Anyways.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: Yeah.

[17:58] – Using AI for Marketing

Matt: The next category is marketing. This is also, you know, most authors we speak to, their arch nemesis is marketing.

Lauren: Which is fair.

Matt: Yeah. It is fair. But, you know, this includes all of the, the stuff like, you know, running an email marketing campaign or a newsletter program. Social media, creating posts and scheduling those posts. If you're doing other any other kind of paid marketing, like paid ads on Amazon or Facebook or, you know, running programs, paid programs through like, you know, I don't know, like BookBub or –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – BookFunnel or Written Word Media –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – or any of these places, like. This is all marketing work. And again, if you're early stage, maybe you're not doing a lot of this, but you're definitely on social media. You almost can't not be, unfortunately. Hopefully you've started building a small email list. And maybe you're experimenting with some, some paid ads or, you know, trying to do a little outreach campaign to get featured on some podcasts or something, like some publicity work. But if you've been doing this for a little while, then you've got your hands in probably most of these pots. And you're steadily trying to stir all of them, and it's just not working.

Lauren: It's the, it's Simmotion, which is the, Survivor final four challenge, the one that Aubry won. This is not a spoiler, this episode came out a month ago. But it's the balls coming out at the same time –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – on different sides of the track, and you have to be juggling them all at once. And the more balls you add to it, the faster it goes and the more chaotic it gets.

Matt: On the two different tracks, yeah.

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: Imagine adding four more tracks, and –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: You know? Yeah.

Lauren: And trying to keep it all at once. And yeah, maybe, maybe at the beginning when there's only one or two balls rolling through the track at once, it's not that hard. And then all of a sudden you get up to four, five, six and, and you're losing it very quickly.

Matt: That’s a great metaphor because, you know, every season we watch this, and every season I'm like, man, this is probably one of the easier challenges. I always say that. But then undoubtedly, you know, most of the time they get to at least four or five or six balls. And that’s usually where a winner is decided, for that particular one. But then you start to see, like, how fast those things are going when you've got four, five, and six balls running through this crazy maze with two different outlets. And yeah, it's probably an extremely good metaphor for marketing as an author. Like, you know, the more of these channels that you add – which again, you shouldn't be trying to be everywhere all at once, but, you know. Pick one or two social media channels. Definitely be doing email, even if you haven't started, start today. Like if the only thing you take away from this episode is you go sign up for an email marketing account on like, you know, MailChimp or Kit or somewhere like that. Great.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Do it. But yeah, the more channels you start to add, that's what it's like. It's insane. And before you know it, you're spending all your time doing that. And some operational stuff. And maybe some sales outreach. Definitely some production. Where’d all your creativity time go? Where’d all your writing time go?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. It's – again, it's a sign of success. But the success comes at a cost.

Matt: Well, the marketing one, I don't know. It's not always a sign of success.

Lauren: That’s fair.

Matt: Sometimes you can be doing a lot of the marketing things and just be doing them wrong.

Lauren: Well, true.

Matt: And so you feel extremely busy, and that's not a good signal of success. Some of the other stuff we talked about is. There are some other growing pains that are clear signals that you're, you're being successful in your efforts. The marketing one is the tricky one, because you can be doing a ton of marketing, and feel like oh, I must be growing. And then you go and look at your P&L sheet and you're like, oh, I'm not growing, I'm just busier. I must be doing something wrong. So that's the one where I normally I would agree with you, all these other areas if, if you were finding yourself busier with emails, if you're finding yourself busier or some of these other things, it is a pretty good signal of growth. Not marketing. It's very easy to be uber busy in marketing and not growing and in fact, going backwards.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: I've talked to people in the past about using AI in your marketing, and this is where some people are like, oh, I thought you said you won't use it for creativity. That’s, that's – you lied. Because there are times where we'll say, yeah, let the tool write an email for you. In my opinion, I don't think that's crossing the personal creative boundaries necessarily. Depending on what type of email it is and just how much of that draft you use. But also, in my opinion, crafting newsletters or emails for, for specific things, a new book launch or whatever it might be. Yes, it can be fun for a lot of people, but it could also be very intimidating for a lot of people. And so even if you enjoy writing those, what's the harm in letting the tool, whether you use Claude or GPT or Gemini or whoever, start a draft for you and see what happens? That gets you one step further to getting that, that work done. And so even if it saves you twenty minutes in a day, you know, writing a launch email or just writing a, you know, an update email to your, your list so that you keep it warm and engaged and active. Like, I don't see the harm in that. And so I don't feel like that's crossing a, a creative moral line, in my opinion. But I think that's the one area where some people might push back a little bit and if that's the case, then don't use it for that. But nonetheless, creating social media content drafts, creating email drafts, newsletter drafts, like, I'm okay with that personally. I think that's fine. You're going to come in and put your own touch on it anyways, but it's going to save you so much time for those things.

Lauren: I really want to underline what you just said, you're going to come in and put your own touch on it anyways. That's the really important part. Because if you are going to use AI as a marketing tool to help you with any of these things, it is a drafting tool, not a finished product tool. And we've talked about that before. I will always make the point to talk about it again. It's not ever something that you publish as is, the first generated draft.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Without any review, oversight, edits, anything from you. And, and that's – I – we see it more, we see it all the time. Like, we've complained on this show about getting, like, cold pitch emails from people that are so clearly just AI generated slop.

Matt: Just hot dumpster water. Like, disgusting.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: Absolutely. Which like, yeah, yeah that happens. We also get emails on a weekly basis that are written by humans, that are from humans, that are asking for PR boxes for Lululemon. We are not Lululemon. Our emails are not Lululemon. So, you know, I think it's just as easy to make these kinds of errors and just, like, ridiculous pitch mistakes from a human perspective, so why not at least use the tool to help you a little bit?

Matt: Yeah, I just think for, for those types of, those short form pieces of content, things that are – again, you know, the – this is content you're generating literally just to stoke engagement.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: To stoke fire, you know, to make sure that people are, you know, staying aware of you and your content and what you're putting out, when your next book is being released or the book you just released, or the new cover variant you just released for the book that you release three months ago, doesn't matter. But you don't have to create every single word for that stuff from scratch. Like, I just don't – that just seems silly to me. And then when you have these tools that can do a good job of drafting that stuff for you? You know, it's so easy to go into Claude right now and, you know, for your next upcoming title, hey, please draft twenty, you know, Instagram posts that are teasing out this new release, each one different from the other. Each one focuses on a different aspect of the the storyline of the tropes or the characters or whatever that might be, and, and let me see what you got. You just saved yourself hours of doing that for twenty posts. Then that you can have it schedule those posts. Like, there's just – to me, I'm not going to argue moral and ethical gray areas and lines for creativity on that stuff. Because you would still go in and put your twist on it, you're still going to put your touch on it. So again, for social media, email marketing, like, you're going to save so much time in those two areas alone. If you are somebody who's doing paid ads, you know, you're currently coming up with the copy for all those ads. Same thing. Let it do that work. If you are somebody who participates in creating content, you know, to generate really good organic search results, so you're writing blog articles, maybe you're doing some some guest blogging for other people. Maybe you're creating some LinkedIn, you know, content if you're a nonfiction writer, whatever that might be. You know, whatever your contributions to your organic search is... You know again, you now want to be optimizing, to a degree, for LLMs as well. We talked about that in a previous episode. Who better to tell you how to optimize for now LLMs than an LLM?

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: Like. So again, you know. Yes. Don't just take what it spits out and then publish that, or post that to a social channel or send that to your email contact list. Make it your own. But there's nothing wrong with having it help you draft all that stuff up and save yourself hours per week.

Lauren: I think it's also a great tool for creating variable content. So, you know, Matt said paid ads. If you're doing paid social ads, if you're running a Facebook campaign and you're doing paid social ads, and you're doing six versions of the same ad with slightly different ad copy, graphics, whatever it is, and you need a headline or a CTA for each of those.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: You draft one, and then you plug that into ChatGPT and say can you give me ten alternate versions –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – of this?

Matt: It's multivariate testing.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yes. So that they’re slightly different, so that there's something else – but it's still using your language, your wording, getting the same point across. Email subject lines, titles, things like that. Like it's, it's great – even if you disregard 95% of the suggestions.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: It'll still help you get the ball rolling.

Matt: Website design is another good area.

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Claude is especially. But you know, it’s getting really good at doing audits for websites. And, you know, a lot of authors will update their website for each new release they have coming out or things like, like, you know. Feeding your, your URL to Claude, you know, having it do a website audit, you can really find some missed opportunities there for organic search for, you know, really being able to drive readers through your your site funnel and get them to click to purchase. If you're selling direct, which you should be.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Obviously.

Lauren: Obviously.

Matt: So that's another great use of it as well, is website audits, and it's getting really good at – Because again, it's an LLM, it understands what it's looking for, but it's also very well versed in what some of the other search engines are looking for.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: You know, again. Marketing is an area where, you know, we get some pushback from people, because they're like, well, you're supposed to be creative in marketing or nobody's going to read it. And to a degree, that statement is true. But that doesn't mean that for these, you know, again, mundane utilitarian activities that you can't use, you know, these tools to help you draft and get a jump start. Especially when again, time and time again, this is the biggest sort of category of work that authors despise. You know? They'd rather do almost anything. Walk across a floor of broken glass like John McClane in Die Hard than, than, you know, draft up a newsletter for their email contacts.

Lauren: I understand. But I do, also, I want to point out too – and I think this is a good transition into the the sales and outreach bucket. When it comes to using AI as a marketing tool for reaching people that speak the same language as you, but in different industries. So not necessarily using it as a translation tool for translating your book into French, but as a way of saying, hey, I'm reaching out to... you know, I'm, I'm used to writing pitch letters for pitching my book to libraries and bookstores, and now I'm trying to pitch myself to be a guest on a podcast.

Matt: Right.

Lauren: What are podcast people interested in? Like –

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: – the pitch letter does not look the same for that as it would for getting your book into a library.

Matt: Yeah that’s that PR bucket that falls under marketing.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: And sometimes in that gray area between marketing and sales, PR can, can tend to sit in the Venn diagram of things right there in the middle. But yeah, you're right. Like, if you're going to pitch yourself to a bunch of podcasts, or something like that, or if you want to be a speaker at a, at a local or regional or national event that is, is somewhat relevant to what you write about or something like that. Yeah, you need to know how to speak to them. And that's going to be different than how you might speak to a library buyer or somebody like that –

Lauren: Right.

Matt: – that you're pitching your, your titles to.

[31:26] – Using AI for Sales

Matt: So category number three.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: So we've talked a little bit about operations. We've talked a little bit about marketing. Sales. For those that even attempt to do any form of sales, I've never seen or talked to somebody that didn't downright loathe the sales process. Most people never get past the starting point, especially as early stage indies, but even, you know, late stage. Even small publishers. Honestly, even medium-sized publishing companies often struggle with sales activities. This is probably one of the best, I think, wins you can get using, you know, Claude or Gemini or GPT or whatever your tool of choice is. It's really intimidating to write a pitch letter, like you said, to, to an indie bookstore or to a group of indie bookstores. Or, you know, to, a library organization or a library, a singular library. Or any, any reason you might have to craft sales content. If you write nonfiction, you are often times pitching your book and yourself to different corporate entities, or events or things like that. There's no step in that process that's fun. At all. There are true salespeople that are cut out for it. And they, they live their whole lives as successful salespeople. We affectionately refer to them as sociopaths. But, you know, at the end of the day, like, this is the least favorite category for anybody in any industry, I think. And it's one of the hardest ones. Because nobody wants to get rejected.

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Nobody wants to get told no. Nobody wants to feel like they're bothering somebody, like, just popping into their inbox out of the blue or, you know, things like that. So this is a great one, if for no other reason, just to make you feel better about understanding the process. For those of you that are early stage, you might not even know who to send the email to for a particular organization or a whole industry that you're trying to tap into. If you write, you know, a book... I don't know, on, on grief, you know, dealing with the loss of a loved one. You know, you've got a whole industry of people that you can tap into to potentially stock your books in the lobbies of their psychiatry offices or places. Like, how do you even begin to, to build a lead list of who to reach out to, and then craft a cold pitch email to those people? Like, that's what these tools are great for. And this is where most people get stopped right at the, the front door. Like they're just, like, I don't even know how to begin this. I don't know what to do. I don't want to spend hours on the internet researching, you know, different organizations or places, like – this is, this is a huge win, I think.

Lauren: Especially because it is the place where it can go very, very wrong very quickly. Because it is such a time consuming – like, such a time consuming task if you're doing all this manually from, from the author side. Where you're the one doing the research, crafting the pitch, sending like, you know, cold outreach to different people. And all it takes is, is one person to look at it and go, you spelled my name wrong. Delete. And then –

Matt: Oh yeah.

Lauren: – all your work – like, you pitched to the wrong person. Here at Lulu, all the time, I get emails that might be relevant, but they sent it to the wrong person. Why are you emailing me about, about our email marketing best practices? Nowhere in my work history at Lulu does it say that I had anything to do with email marketing. But Laurie, not Lauren, Laurie is our email marketing manager, and if you send me the email instead of Laurie, I will delete it. And if that's the, that's the only thing that's stopping you from, from getting your content in front of the right people, that's a real bummer. That's –

Matt: Yeah. I mean, there are definitely worse examples. You know? Like –

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: I get emails that are meant for Lululemon. And more... I guess grossly, or inappropriately identified, they’re for the HR department at Lululemon. Like, I'm so far removed from what an HR department would be and in a completely different company and organization.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Like it's, it's insane. So yeah, I mean, there's so many ways that, you know, once you get past the hurdle of crafting a sales outreach email and you get yourself a nice lead list that you're going to send these to. One word out of place, and potentially you've, you've closed the door already and, and that bridge is burned and you're, there's no coming back from it. So again, you know, the example I used was if you wrote a book on grief. Our friend Allison Garwood Jones, she wrote a nice book on, on grieving the loss of a parent. You know, she realized that there's this whole sort of industry she could tap into. That example sticks out in my head, because it's a creative way to get your book in front of an audience, and generate book sales, that you might not have thought of prior. But it requires some pretty intimidating efforts, you know? And so it's a great example, I think, of how you can use, you know, Claude or somebody like that, to literally cut out hours in your week. And potent- like, listen, if it took ten minutes for Claude to do all this work for you, and then you were able to send, let's say, fifty cold outreach emails, and one generated in some book sales... You just generated book sales off of maybe fifteen to twenty minutes of work, that would have taken you, normally, hours and hours. So, you know, again. Like. It's a win.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: In my opinion.

Lauren: For sure. Even for something like just putting together a list – I could realistically open ChatGPT right now and say... put together a list of podcasts that people that listen to Publish & Prosper might also listen to these podcasts. And it could do that for me.

Matt: I'd be scared to see that list. Actually it’d be kind of cool to see that list.

Lauren: It’d be kind of cool, I kind of want to do that when we’re done with this episode.

Matt: I’d love to see what other people listen to.

Lauren: So we can see that on Spotify I can see what other listen- like, people that’ve –

Matt: Really?

Lauren: – listened to this – yeah.

Matt: I'd be curious about that. Okay.

Lauren: But it, it can be a great opportunity to help you just kind of, trim down that research time a little bit. And, and give you a, even just a starting point. Even if you're not comfortable – again, you're not comfortable with it writing emails for you or using it to actually, like, template or draft anything like that. I understand that, I totally get that. But it can give you a jumping off point for like, here are twenty potential outlets that you could reach out to. And, and even if you do everything else manually after that, where you research those outlets, confirm, find the contact info for whoever you want to reach out to, draft the email – Even if you do everything else manually. That starting point of giving you a list of research already done. It's going to save you a huge chunk of time.

Matt: Yeah, 100%.

Lauren: A cool way that you can use any of the generative AI tools in that, especially if you are manually doing this yourself, is use it as a sounding, as a sounding board, but also as a... I kept trying to think of the word and like, antagonist is not the right word, but. Use it as, like... your, your foe, I guess? I don't know.

Matt: Devil's advocate.

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And say, okay, if you received this pitch letter, why would you reject –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – my pitch?

Matt: Poke holes in.

Lauren: Poke holes in it.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Tell me what, tell me what is off-putting about this, or what I've done wrong here, or whatever. And use that to, to kind of perfect your pitch.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And try that out a couple of times. Because most of the people that are going to reject your pitch are not going to tell you why they've done so.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So why not give yourself the opportunity to actually get a response and get a better understanding?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, you know, once you get comfortable with your tool of choice, it's fun to just sit there and do things like that. You know, and ask it questions just about random different things or, you know, have it try and poke holes in things and spot gaps or areas where you might be missing opportunities. I mean, most of that is gonna result in some sort of effective and beneficial changes you're going to make to, to your content and your marketing, your sales. So again, I don't really see the harm in, in trying to get comfortable. And at the end of the day, if you’re freeing up time so that you can be more creative and write more content. While at the same time, you know, generating more audience, build more sales, you know, more connections within the industry... It's a no brainer.

Lauren: I think so too.

[40:33] – Using AI for Production

Matt: Production is the last category.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: This is one where some people also feel like it's a gray area, or they want to push back a little bit. And again, the, the normal caveats here. Like when we say production, we're not talking about having AI produce content for your book, necessarily. We're talking about like some of those things that, you know, it could do a little easier for you. Like making a first pass at some simple editing, right? You know, making sure that all of your commas are in the right place, all your periods are where they need to be. That way when you do pass it on to an editor, it's a lot easier for them to focus on the important stuff and not get so tied up in like, you know, the simple things. Whether you wrote out the word percent or used the percent symbol – Like, when I wrote my book, poor Kate. So many of the things that she dinged me on that I had to go through and were just, you know. When I'm writing, sometimes I use a percent symbol, sometimes I'd write out percent, sometimes I'd write out the number one, O-N-E, and sometimes I just use the number 1, like. So many inconsistencies and things that we don't always think about when we're creating. Especially if you're writing long form content or a big book, like. You're just going, you know what I mean? And some people are better conditioned to, to use the same case and tense every single time. But I mean, little things like that. If, if, if this tool can fix all that first, before you send it to an editor, they're not wasting time. Most of the time you're paying them per word or per hour to edit your stuff anyways. Why wouldn't you want to streamline that?

Lauren: Inconsistencies is a, is a huge... Because that is something that can be so time consuming. And especially if you are... whether we're talking about for your book or for marketing copy or anything else that you're doing, you should have some kind of brand and style guide in place. Where you have rules for yourself that any piece of copy that you put out for your brand, this is... you always use an Oxford comma, and these are your capitalization rules, and these are your...

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But if you have those rules for yourself, if you have a style guide and you share that with your generative AI tool of choice and say, hey, can you make sure that I am consistently following my own rules in this copy and content that I've written? That is a huge time saver.

Matt: Yeah, yeah I think so. Another area where I think a lot of people struggle, and they typically will pay somebody to help them with this and that's great. But there are some other tools out there besides the big five, you know, besides Claude and GPT and Gemini and – that are really good at formatting. Formatting is such a pain in the butt. And again, if , if you've got the money and you've got a good formatter that you already work with, great. Just keep doing that. But if you don't, if you're early stage or if, you know, you just, you're running on a really tight budget. There's some really good tools out there now that can format your interior file. Really well, you know? You might have to adjust a few things or, or give it a few revision instructions. But for the most part, you know, that cuts out a big chunk of cost and time when you have a tool. Or some of these tools can help you with your formatting, structuring your front and back matter. You know, again, like, that's... When I wrote my book I used, I used Claude to help me with front and back matter and structure and things like that. Like I don't care. I'll admit it. I'm terrible with structure. I can write, but it comes out like, almost stream of consciousness. And, you know, I'll hop around a bunch. And so it was very helpful in getting started, I've talked about this before. I had it help me with my outline. And then once I would start writing, I would just be all over the place. And so I'd feed it back in and say, please restructure this, have it makes sense, like. You know, these paragraphs should be here with this chapter, and I jumped over to this, but it should probably fall under... So keeping myself structured was really helpful. But again, you know, front and back matter. Like, I don't think it's a big deal if you have a tool that’ll help you create that, and then you just put your own spin on it. Like, these are not creative constructs that are, you know, I think moral gray areas. Or black and white, I should say. So yeah.

Lauren: Yeah, I think it's the... especially the things that are supposed to be standardized. I think this is exactly where you would want to use a tool –

Matt: Metadata and stuff.

Lauren: Exactly.

Matt: That too, yeah.

Lauren: Things like your metadata, keyword research, picking a BISAC category. There are so many authors that we see that either phone in it and don't choose one at all, or just choose like the, the, like highest level.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Like the general category that applies to them. Because there are like, 500 of them or something like that.

Matt: Yeah, it’s hard to do it right, it really is.

Lauren: Yeah, I don't blame you. It is tedious to scroll through – and some of them like the, like the name you think they would use is not the name they use. And –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – you have to – But if you can, if you can say like hey, this is, these are the keywords that I'm using, can you identify the three BISAC categories that most accurately reflect these keywords. And then go check those. And if they are correct, that's going to save you a lot of time.

Matt: That's right, yeah.

Lauren: Absolutely it is.

Matt: And there's other tools out there that are using AI to –

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: You know, if you're playing that Amazon game... well, sucks for you. But if you are, there are tools out there that do the same thing. So, you know, Amazon categories yes, to a degree, try to mirror and mimic BISAC. But everybody knows they have their own swamp of, of different, you know, categories. And Amazon now has a bunch of ghost categories. Like, you can choose them in their category tool, but they're not going to tell you that those actually aren't even being shown, or they're basically ghost categories. Like there are tools out there right now, and some being developed, Publisher Rocket is one of them. Where you can feed your, your manuscript and other stuff in there, and it'll help you optimize to play that Amazon game. Again, sucks for you, but these tools exist. There is, there's AI out there that helps you with that. There's no reason you should fight that. Let the tool do its thing. Put better metadata behind your books. You'll get better discoverability across the board. It's just silly not to. So.

Lauren: Yes. Which, which I think is like, the, the real interesting way that this can be used. It's all just, at the end of the day, trying to get more books into the hands of more readers, right?

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That’s, that's really all anyone's goal is in the publishing industry. I guess some people are trying to make money too, but, you know, whatever. But it's really, it's yeah, how can I get as many books as possible into the hands of as many readers as possible? And if using an AI tool to optimize your metadata will optimize your discoverability and will get your books into the hands of people that might not have come across it if you were more generic with your efforts... That's worth it.

Matt: Agreed.

Lauren: That is absolutely worth it.

[47:47] – Getting Started with AI in Your Workflow

Matt: So a couple of things to remember and to help you get started. Again, you know, you need to give it some very clear sort of guiderails – or guardrails, I should say. Guides, guardrails, doesn't matter. But. Some of these are just for you to remember as you create these inputs. But you can create projects inside of, you know, Claude or GPT or Gemini where, you know, you feed it a bunch of different documents, you give it a list of guardrails and guidelines and things. So make sure that you're, you're definitely, doing that. You want to make sure the output is, is what you're looking for. And it's not generating things or storing things or learning from things that it shouldn't. You always want to put your touch on it, right? You never want to just take whatever it spits out and use it verbatim. That's never a good thing. Always, you know, where, where there's facts that have been indicated or stats or data, you're going to want to double check that. Again, we're not advocating for using it to write your book at all. And most creative things should be limited to, you know, again. A draft of a newsletter, a draft of some social media copy. You know, unless you're just a sociopath and you love writing tons and tons of social copy every day, like. This is, this is a big help.

Lauren: It's great for organizing your thoughts. Not for writing them out verbatim.

Matt: Administrative, all day long. Not creative. Administrative. Like I said, you can create projects inside there where you can upload documents and things. You can upload your manuscript into a particular project. So it gets a nice feel for, for your book, for you, for the way that you write. You've got something listed in here that we've seen before, that I think is really smart, I've actually had Claude do this, and that is you have it interview you.

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: You ask it to interview you for a certain purpose or for certain things. Or, you know, if you're practicing for a podcast or whatever that might be. But having it interview you, it also learns more about you. And it learns more about how you might want to not only, generate output, but interact with with certain activities and or readers and audiences.

Lauren: It's a really... symbiotic relationship, maybe, I don't – It depends on how you look at it. But the more you feed into it the, the better the results will be.

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: Just because it learns, it learns from you. I have used a paid ChatGPT account for coming up with podcast episode outlines and titles over the last year and a half. And I started by using it for titles, and I would upload the transcripts from episodes, and it got to know both of our voices really well because of that. Because my transcripts are also identified, you know, line by line –

Matt: Right.

Lauren: – who said what. And after sharing enough transcripts, it got better at being – It’ll, it'll even say like, when I ask it for title recommendations, it'll now say to me, here are are titles that are better suited to Matt, here are titles that are better suited to you, and here are titles that kind of like, fall in the middle of the two of them. And it's usually right. But even then, I never use those titles exactly as is.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: We still tweak them, but that's the jumping off point for... okay.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Here are some good titles recommendations. Now how can we customize these to make them better fit both of us and Publish & Prosper as a whole?

Matt: Yeah. And then lastly, the tools and technology themselves. Like, we haven't touched on that much, but, you know, there's the, the big five or whatever they are. You've got Claude, you've got ChatGPT, you've got Gemini, Perplexity. And then the one that nobody really uses, which is Mark Zuckerberg's llama or whatever that is. Like, nobody cares. So yeah. But, you know, beyond that, you have a lot of tools that are now built on AI, or AI assisted that are specific to publishing or marketing or sales or whatever area you need the most help in. So, you know, do your own research. I wouldn't spend a lot of money, honestly. You know, you use GPT a lot. I'm now mostly, if not all, Claude. Like, I'm just more comfortable with Claude now. And I use Claude for almost everything. And I've yet to run into something that I've asked it to do or generate or – that it wasn't able to. The hallucinations are a lot less than they were. They're very, very infrequent. And if, if it spits out something that you think is false, you literally tell it like, I don't trust this, please produce the source or tell me where you got this information from. And I've literally had Claude tell me, you know what, you're right. I think I made that up. You know? Or it'll go, I completely understand, and it'll go and fetch the source for you, the URL from whatever article it was, whatever. So, you know, again, the more you work with these tools, or you – pick a tool, the more comfort level or the more your comfort level increases, the more accuracy you're going to get. The more efficient and effective it's going to be for you and what you're trying to do. And yeah, just don't overdo it. Like, pick one or two and just work with those.

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, it's the same advice we've given with other areas, like the workflow episode and the automation, our automating fulfillment episode. Start, start with one. Start with one problem that you're trying to solve. You absolutely never want to automate your entire workflow or your entire production process, or whatever it is that's, that's actually going to be more inefficient than whatever you're doing right now.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Realistically. So find one thing, pick one. We, we said at the beginning, separating it out into different buckets, different categories. Pick one of those that is a real problem child for you, or is, or is the most annoying, or whatever. And pick one thing within that that you can streamline, that you can try to plug in a new solution there.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Test out different versions of things. You don't have to jump right away into the paid things, like Matt’s already said. We clearly, as you just said, you and I have different preferences for what tools we like –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – to use. That is, that's, that's just trial and error.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So go through, test out a few different tools, pick one that feels right, and then build on that a little bit. You know, don't... Don't, don't burn the whole house down and build it up from scratch. It's not going to work.

Matt: Yeah. And nobody's an expert on this stuff, by the way. Like.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: If you, if you see anybody listed as an AI expert or somebody refers to themselves as an expert, just head the other direction. There's no need to feel inadequate or intimidated, like, if you've not really messed with any of this stuff, just get in there and do it. It ends up being a lot of fun. But again, at the end of the day, if you, if you start doing some of this stuff, you're really gonna streamline and create a lot more time for yourself to, to focus on the fun stuff, creating more content, things like that.

[55:17] – Episode Wrap Up

Matt: I think the, the last thing, probably the most important thing, what do your bracelets say today?

Lauren: I'm so glad you asked. My bracelets say... Awake and Unafraid, Asleep or Dead, and Grim and Grinning.

Matt: I like the third one.

Lauren: I know.

Matt: The other two seem to cancel themselves out.

Lauren: Well, so the other two are one of my favorite My Chemical Romance songs –

Matt: Of course.

Lauren: – is Famous Last Words. And awake and unafraid, asleep or dead are, like, lyrics in the song. But because I always wear three every day, I needed a third thing to fit in there.

Matt: Gotcha.

Lauren: And I, and I thought about it for a while, and then grim and grinning came to me and I was like, ha, wait, I love that.

Matt: Alright.

Lauren: So.

Matt: Cool.

Lauren: Thanks for asking.

Matt: Yeah. As always –

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: – if you have any comments, questions, you can leave comments on Spotify. You can leave them on YouTube.

Lauren: Yes you can.

Matt: You can email us, we always like emails.

Lauren: Podcast@lulu.com.

Matt: That's right. Otherwise –

Lauren: Come back next week.

Matt: Hit the like button. Do all the things.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Leave us a review. Send Lauren, you know, angry emails if you need to.

Lauren: Sure. Yeah.

Matt: Whatever.

Lauren: But if you don't get our names exactly right, I will delete it.

Matt: Have Claude create a comment for you to leave on our YouTube channel. Let's see if we can spot it. No?

Lauren: No.

Matt: There's enough of that out there.

Lauren: Yeah, there's plenty of that already.

Matt: Alright.

Lauren: But.

Matt: Well, hopefully you come back next week and listen.

Lauren: Please do. And until then, thanks for listening.

Matt: Later.