Crafting Irresistible Book Pages Readers and Bots Love with Thomas Umstattd Jr.

296 / Do you want to leverage your author website, use AI tools efficiently, and prune your tasks strategically so you can sell more books and focus your creative energy where it counts? 

Thomas Umstattd Jr. shares insights on optimizing your book pages, using AI wisely, and making tough choices to thrive in a crowded publishing world.

• Why your book page matters for both readers and AI discovery
• Tips to optimize book pages for GEO (generative engine optimization)
• Innovative uses of AI tools for marketing and productivity
• Strategies for pruning projects and focusing your efforts
• Evolving business model for nonfiction and why community matters now more than ever

💙 Become a supporter of the podcast https://wishidknownforwriters.com/support

• Access to backlist of exclusive supporter episodes
• Private slack group
• Shoutout on a future episode

⚡Links:

Author Media: https://www.authormedia.com

Jami’s workshop: https://www.jamialbright.com/authorworkshops

Sara’s letter subscription: https://sararosettbooks.com/products/mysteries-in-the-mail (Preorder open until Dec 8, 2025)

Affiliate signup for letters: https://sararosettbooks.affiliatery.staqlab.com/partner/signIn

How to Create a Sales-Optimized Book Page for Your Website: https://www.authormedia.com/how-to-create-sales-optimized-book-pages-for-your-author-website/

Transcript

Jami 0:03

Welcome to Wish I Know Men podcast. I'm Sarah Rosette and I'm Jamie Albright. And this week on the show we have Thomas Umstadt Jr. Yes, and I missed the interview because about that time I was eating a questionable convenience store burrito on our road trip. And I'm really bummed because I really like Thomas and I think he's such a smart guy, but you did a great interview with him, I heard. Yep.

Sara 0:28

I held down the fort and it was a lot of fun. We talked a lot about optimizing your author pages for on your website so that the bots will find them. And it is if you're interested in optimizing for AI and being recommended through AI, these are some things you can do. And they're not that hard, it just takes some time. And he had some great ideas on how to create extra content that will make your page better than Amazon. So that the bots will, so your page will show up first, you know. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that was good. And then we talked a lot about AI. He's got a whole bunch of tools that are optimized for authors. And I've I'm a patron of his, full disclosure, because I like the tools. I like being able to go in there and it he has one that will create, you know, help you write a blurb for your book. And he has all kinds of things. And he talks about some of those. But he taught one thing he mentioned was that sometimes it's better to use AI within guardrails, was what he called it, where like you have something that's a pre-written prompt basically to help you get what you want. So it would save time, basically. Yeah. You know, and then you're not in this endless question loop of like, well, I really want it to be more casual. You know, it can help you get to what you want without you know, going through 15 questions and answers with AI.

Jami 1:50

So yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. That is great because I, you know, I say it all the time. In fact, I just said it this morning in the clubhouse room. I I can barely use Google because I don't know the questions to ask. So going to AI is such a challenge for me.

Sara 2:05

That is the deal with research, is that you've got to know how to phrase it, you know. So yeah, anyway, so that's coming up and it's really good. And it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in the US as we're recording this. So what are you doing?

Jami 2:20

Well, we this week uh I worked a little bit on Monday and then I had to get ready because we're leaving town today to go to my daughter's for Thanksgiving. And then Friday morning we get up and fly to New York City because my son's getting married on Saturday, and we're very excited. But yeah, it's a crazy time for us. So I worked a little bit Friday Monday. I was at Starbucks yesterday working a little bit, and a crisis arose and completely derailed me. I mean, I had to deal with it, so I I didn't get any writing done yesterday. And so, yeah, this week's kind of a bust, but that's okay. I have a really good idea of kind of where I'm going with this story. You know, now that looking at the developmental edits, seeing her com her comments, talking to a friend, I I have a better understanding. So I feel good about that. I just now I think it's time to do it. Yes, exactly. So that's that's it for me, except that I wanted to remind everyone that I have I am hosting a branding workshop on December 14th at 2 p.m. Central Time. So here's the deal. I just get a lot of questions about branding, and I hear people talk, you know, I'm in a lot of spaces, so I hear a lot of people talking about branding and they don't they don't really understand it and they don't know how to make it consistent across every all of their platforms. And is it just the colors I use on my website? You know, all of those things, and so I I really felt like I wanted I love branding, and so I I felt like I wanted to do this for a while. And then also with AI, our authenticity and who we are really needs to shine through. And the best way to do that is with your branding. So anyway, I'm hosting that. You're you can check it out, it's in the show notes, but it's jamieallbright.com backslash author workshops.

Sara 4:24

Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that link's in the show notes, and that is great because really that is one of the ways we can stand out. Yep. I think we need to start making a list of the ways we can stand out and be human. And one of those is to have a very distinctive brand that lets people know who you are as an author. Yeah, I agree. I think that's perfect. Yeah. How about you? Well, so I launched the letters, those are out, and now I have this list of things that I do whenever I launch something that I learned basically when I did the Kickstarter. And it's I go through and I launch it to my list, and then I go and mention it on the the previous Kickstarters. I give those people an update, and then I launch on social media, and then I've started some ads. Yeah. That's new. I never did that with the Kickstarter, but I've started some ads, you know, and then it's just like going down this list of things to do, and I've been doing all of those, and it's going well, and I'm really happy. People are excited about the letters, and oh, that's great. Um, it's good. So I'm happy, but I just feel like, okay, I've been running really fast and I'm about to hit Thanksgiving, and I'm just gonna do nothing for at least a day or two. Yeah, and then I'm gonna keep it open until December 8th. But I want to let people know that I'm trying something new with this. This is I'm trying an affiliate code, an affiliate sign-up for this. So if you want to share it, then you can get a 15% commission if somebody uses their link to purchase it. And that link will be in the show notes, yeah. And so, and the pre-order is open until December 8th, and I'm gonna turn it all off and start shipping. So this will go out, I think, on the third. So there'll be a couple days left, and I know it's short notice, but maybe next time I will have a little more runway leading up to it, which would be smarter. It's always like that, though. You can it really is, it is. I got plenty of time, but I am really glad I did think about launching this when we were at the Author Nation uh conference, and I decided, no, let's not do that. That might be too much because I wanted to have a longer open window. Yeah, and I'm running up against Christmas in case somebody wants to order it for Christmas, but I'm so glad I didn't do that because it would there's just too much to do and and try to go to the conference at the same time. So exactly, exactly.

Jami 6:36

Hey, got a question though. So when you with your launch of your book, when you sent it to your Kickstarter list, you had quite a few people buy it. How about what was the result?

Sara 6:49

I did I did see the same thing, not as many. And I think because the Kickstarter was specifically for books, uh yeah, you know, so I think those people they're ready for more books for sure, and some of them like letters. And then I think the holiday time makes it a little hit or miss as well. I mean, there people are shopping for gifts right now, but at the same time, we're also doing like all kinds of travel and stuff.

Jami 7:12

So yeah, yeah, and I didn't see some sales right after that. Just for anybody that's listening that is, I mean, like Sarah is not a forward-facing author, like she doesn't do a lot of forward-facing social media and stuff like that. But her readers, she really knows her readers and she understands what the things they will like, and she knows they will love these letters. Also, they know, though she's not forward-facing, they know her because of how she interacts with them.

Sara 7:46

Yeah, and her friend. But really, my main focus right now is my newsletter. I try and send that out at least at least twice a month. And if things are going bad, it's once a month. But then if I have something new, I email more often and let people know. And yeah, that's how I communicate. And instead of and I do have posts and stuff on Facebook and X and Pinterest and Instagram and all that.

Jami 8:10

Yeah, but they're not, I mean, like you're not that's not what I'm doing all the time. Do yeah, you're not, you're not doing that, and you're also just not for I mean, your face is not forward. You're not on social media making posts talking to the camera. And I know there are a lot of people that don't want to do that, but there are other ways to have a really vibrant relationship with your relate with your readers, other than doing that because you do.

Sara 8:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's just you kind of have to set it up the way you want to go on. And I did do some videos in the past, you know, where I did you know the face to camera and talked about stuff, but it was just exhausting for me. Yeah. And time not your thing. Yeah, yeah. So yeah. But anyway, so that's out. And so that link will be in the show notes for the affiliate if you guys want to sign up. And I figured that might be a nice way to try to test this out and see if it works. I'll let you know how it goes.

Jami 9:03

Yeah, yeah. So that is all I need to finish getting ready this morning to get on the road. So we will get on with this interview because I'm sure it's good. I can't wait to listen. Yeah.

Sara 9:16

Well, today we're really excited to have Thomas Umstat Jr. with us again. So welcome back. How are you?

SPEAKER_03 9:21

Thanks, Sarah. I'm doing well.

Sara 9:23

Good to see you.

SPEAKER_03 9:24

Yeah, it's good to see you.

Sara 9:25

So let me read your bio and we'll get right into the questions. Thomas is an award-winning speaker and host of Novel Marketing Podcast, the Christian publishing show, and the author update. In his spare time, Thomas enjoys reading, blogging on his personal website, Thomas Mstat.com, and listening to an embarrassingly high number of podcasts and possibly audiobooks. You're a big audiobook fan, right? Yeah. Yeah. So give us an update on what's happened since you were last on the podcast in August of 2021.

SPEAKER_03 9:53

The the first big development has been I started my own conference. So there's now the Novel Marketing Conference, which is a once-a-year conference focused just on book marketing. So it's doesn't really compete with any of the other conferences. Because if you want to learn how to write a better book or learn how to publish your book, this conference doesn't help with that. And we've just about sold out for this year. In fact, uh tickets likely will be sold out when this episode goes live. So there's just a few left. But that's been that's been a lot of fun. And one of the things I've been having fun with is kind of innovating what a conference is. Because you face this as a podcaster. Like if you were to have a conference for this podcast, how do you make the conference not just feel like the podcast, but live, right? Because that's not worth flying across the country for. One of the things that we did was not record anything and making it super interactive. So it's almost more of a workshop than a conference where uh there's no recordings, people are free to talk, and everybody's in a writer's group, and you leave with a like a physical plan for selling a whole bunch more books in the next year.

Sara 10:56

Yeah, that's really interesting because a lot of conferences now have a digital option, which is nice. But I find I usually don't go back and listen to. I always think, oh, I can just listen to that one later if I can't make it to a session, but I rarely go back. So it's nice that it's a on like hands-on workshop that you can do in person. That sounds really good.

SPEAKER_03 11:17

And we found that nobody hangs out in the hallway chit-chatting. People are in the sessions every time. The fact that there's no recordings really changes the nature of the conference.

Sara 11:26

Yeah, I imagine it does. Yeah. Well, that's cool. And you've been doing it for a couple of years, right?

SPEAKER_03 11:30

Yeah, we're doing our third year in January of 26.

Sara 11:33

Okay. So if people are interested in that, this one probably by the time this episode comes out, the conference will be either just sold out or starting, right? And so, like if they're interested in for next year, how would they just like go to your follow you online or yeah, novelmarketingconference.com is the website.

SPEAKER_03 11:52

And if there are tickets left, that's where you'll find them. It'll say whether you can get tickets or not, right there on the website.

Sara 11:58

Okay, cool. Perfect. All right. Well, that is good. That's good to hear. It's always nice to hear about a conference in the author space. What's the most important lesson you've learned recently?

SPEAKER_03 12:08

Probably the importance of physical health. It's really easy as an author or as a podcaster to see yourself as this kind of factory where you input coffee and output words. And I remember listening to Joanna Penn talk about this years ago. She's making a big push into health. And I was like, yeah, that's something for other people. And now I'm like, no, this is something for me. And one of the interesting things is that as I have been making health a priority, which takes time and it takes money, I found that I've been getting a return in the sense of like I have more energy during, you know, that working out, for instance, doesn't take away as much time uh as I thought it would, because it helps make the time that I am working more productive. Because it's really easy to sit at your computer as a zombie, quote unquote working and getting very little done. And especially as a creative, right? Like it's not the number of words does not equal the number of sales, right? It's like good, well-written books uh will outsell fast written books, all things being equal. And the same is true with podcasts, right? Like you can crank out a whole bunch or you can be more present and more creative and smarter and more rested, all more have better nutrition, like all of that matters.

Sara 13:24

Yeah, yeah. And I think taking time, I'm doing that too. I'm I try and go for a walk every day and I'm incorporating weights and stuff in my routine, like my not daily weights, but you know, trying to get that in there too. And I find that when I do take the time to do those things, I sleep so much better. And it's really nice to get out in nature and away from the desk for a while. Things that we just don't think about. I have a tendency to get super focused on what's going on, and I must get this, whatever I'm working on, done. And it ends up being four hours instead of one, which is what I planned for in my head. You know, it just snowballs.

SPEAKER_03 13:59

That's right. And it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive anymore. The new Apple AirPods have this voice isolation feature that allows you to record crystal clear audio in a very noisy environment. And there's a five dollar app for the iPhone, an Apple Watch called just press record. Okay. And you it will transcribe, you just push record. It's very simple. It's just a big button. You press record and you start talking, and it gives you a transcription of everything you say. So you can be out walking the dog, you can be out with your kids at the playscape, although that's a little tricky because you'll be talking to them and that'll insert itself into the transcription. And then you but you'll get this really accurate transcription at the end. And then I developed a tool for my patron toolbox that will then take that rough transcription and convert, like put in the paragraphs, make sure the sentence breaks are in the right place, put the quotes in for dialogue, kind of clean it up without changing any of the words, other than to like fix a homophone, right? If you had the wrong there there, it will, from the context of the sentence, swap out the there. So you end up with a really clean-looking rough draft. But a big like paragraph of a thousand words can be kind of intimidating. And so having a tool that will take that big block and give you sentences and paragraphs that look like a rough draft can really help. And now you're out in nature listening to the boys chirping, uh, but still working on your word count.

Sara 15:24

Yeah, and getting some exercise too, which is great. Yeah. Yeah. The cleaning up dictation can be quite time consuming. So since you mentioned, let's talk about the author toolbox, because you have been creating tools for authors using AI to help us do all kinds of things. I mean, the amount of tools you have is crazy. So tell a little bit about what that is and what people can find in there because it's I've used it several for several different things. It's been very helpful.

SPEAKER_03 15:52

Yeah, it kind of got out of hand. It started off as a tool. I think the very first toolbox tool that was like a real toolbox tool was a book cover analyzer. So it would analyze a book cover and give you a report of whether or not that book cover was likely to work for ads or not. Because a lot of people they try advertising and they it doesn't work. And they are like, Facebook ads don't work, Amazon ads don't work, book bub ads don't work, XIS, whatever, insert platform. And they make this kind of grand sweeping statement when in reality they didn't work for their book using the cover that they had. It hurts when I say it. So I tell you that your cover is an ineffective cover, you're like, but it's so beautiful. I showed it to all my friends and they all liked it. My readers said they liked it. And it's like, none of that matters. It only matters if it gets clicks and works for advertising. So I built a tool to help with that. And then I kind of accidentally, while we were building that tool, we got an output that was a brief, like a design brief. Kind of came out as a mistake. And I was like, wow, I could tweak this, I could make another version of this tool that you answer a bunch of questions about your book, and then it helps you create a design brief that you could then give to your human designer, and it helps you communicate. Because I had a whole episode on how to put together a book design book cover design brief and a template, but it was a lot of work. And a tool that does a lot of that for you, or at least gives you a rough draft that you can tweak was really helpful. And so, anyway, those first two tools have now turned into like 70 different tools. It's like we have tools that you will help you create a back cover copy, help you create an Amazon description. I I just built a tool that will give you a keyword plan. So it gives you a it will help pick categories for your book and uh help you fill the KDP keyword spots with seven kind of optimized keywords that fit your book that are what people are searching for and don't overlap from one kind of spot to the other. And I built a lot that analyze web pages and tell you what's broken about a web page. A lot of the feedback that people don't want to hear from human Thomas, they'll hear from AI Thomas. So I guess that's the big kahuna of them all. I took all 500 of my podcast episodes I've been doing since 2013 and trained an AI bot called AI Thomas that you can ask questions and it will give you answers based off of my episodes on those topics and link to those episodes. So it's not giving you kind of generic marketing advice, it's giving you Tom Sumsat's marketing advice with links to where Thomas actually talked about that. So it's kind of like authorized to speak on my behalf.

Sara 18:29

Yeah, and probably very time-saving too for you. If people have questions, you can be like, just go over here. I've found the there's a lot of good stuff in there that has been very helpful. I've used the the design brief. It's just helps you forward a couple of steps in most things. And I could use AI for this, but a lot of these are already optimized for exactly what I need. So I just go in there. So if people are interested in that, that's in the patron, novel marketing patron. They sign up for that, and it's like $10 a month or something as we speak right now, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:59

Yeah. I I bought patron toolbox.com. Um take you to the to the list of the tools. My goal is to have a new tool every episode of author update, which is crazy. One of the stories, but occasionally it gets out of time out of hand because I really enjoy uh building these tools and it and it's fun make helping people have more time to write. So none of the tools help you write. The chapterizer one is the closest one to helping you write, but it's not putting any words there, it's just taking your dictation and kind of formatting it and covering it up. And I have some others that will like do fact checking. So we did a whole episode on medical and first aid myths that get passed in TV shows and books. I'm like, we should add a medical fact checker. And then as I was working on it, I was like, oh, this could also do like trauma. It actually makes books with violence way more impactful if you have basically a physician being like, Well, if someone were punched in the face or someone were hit in that part of their body with that kind of bullet, this is the kind of trauma they could expect. And then like fact-checking it, it's like, oh wow, I can make this a lot more visceral or at least more accurate. And then I also added a historical fact checker, which kind of operates on. As a fan of history, I will say, anachronisms really take me out of books when I stumble across them. My wife gets so often when we're watching something together, she'll put my hand on my arm, just enjoy it.

Sara 20:22

Just let it go. It's so hard. It's so hard, especially if you're familiar, very familiar with a certain time period. It's really hard to overlook some of the things that are obviously not historically accurate. So I I totally get that. Yeah. Another thing you could do would be a police procedural checker to, you know, but I that could be hard because different jurisdictions might have different things in different countries, but generally might be might be an idea for the future.

SPEAKER_03 20:47

Yeah, no, that's a that's a good idea because we did that with the naming tool. So I have a naming tool that you put in the character, where they're born and when they were born. And so you can pick, say, 830 AD, and it will give you different names if you select England, as opposed to select Jerusalem or if you select China. And also, you all it also has a feel for like tell us a little bit about the character. And so it'll pick thematically appropriate names. So it'll give you thematically appropriate Anglo-Saxon names for 830 England, and it will give you thematically appropriate names for Jerusalem or for whatever, based off whatever historical documents we have. And then once you get into the 20th century, it uses the Social Security Administration data to be like, this was a comment, because my wife is like a real name nerd. Or we have very nerdy children for whatever reason. And you can give her any name and she'll tell you what name that was, what decade that name was the most popular in. And so when somebody gets a name wrong, like they they misplaced the decade. Uh for her, that's very immersion breaking. So I built this to kind of to help her enjoy affliction a little bit more. But by adding those, so like if I did a police procedural one, I would have the era and the location as a part of it. Right. Because 1850s London. Would have a different procedure than 1950s London. And 1950s London would be different than 1998 LA.

Sara 22:08

Yeah, it could be quite complex. Those are really good tools to use. And I think that you're using AI in a really interesting and helpful way for authors. And I appreciate it because it saves me so much time. But yeah, I'll put a link to that in the show notes in case anyone's interested in checking that out. So let's see, what's the biggest change you've had to make in your thinking lately?

SPEAKER_03 22:30

Actually, probably related to AI. Um, there's kind of two camps when it comes to AI. One is like AI is evil, slash it it'll take over and kill us all, or it creates nothing but slop. And I find that the same people have both of those views, they just kind of oscillate between. They're like, it's the end of his end of humanity, or it creates nothing but slop. And they don't really feel any need to kind of pick one of those, it's just whichever one is more convenient. And the thing is, is that they're not wrong. AI is very dangerous and it is very risky, and it does create a lot of slop. And then you have people on the other side who are kind of techno optimists, and like AI is going to be this force of good and it's going to solve all of our economic problems, and it's going to create new science. We're going to have all these medical breakthroughs, and they're very optimistic. I was listening to Elon Musk talk about this, and he's got this vision of the future where we all have a robot servant and we all live in comfort and ease. And now, to be fair to Elon Musk, he gives that like a 20 or 30% likelihood of happening because he also sees the risk of AI. And the metaphor I had was that it's very much like discovering the new world. So when Europeans first landed in the new world, it was this whole continent full of possibilities, right? There was fields full of fertile soil and there were mountains full of precious metals, and there was also all kinds of deadly diseases. Like a huge percentage of people coming across the Atlantic, going both ways, would just die because there hadn't, you know, the pathogens had been isolated from each other long enough. The people had been isolated from each other long enough that neither side of the Atlantic had immunities going the other way. And so you'd have half a boat's worth of people just dying of disease. And it's really easy to focus just on the disease and the risks, and it's really easy to focus just on that one mountain that's full of silver that will totally change the amount of silver on the whole planet for the rest of history, which really did happen. You can research it, it's very fascinating. They never found the city of gold, but they did find the mountain of silver, and it created a whole economic catastrophe in China, of all places, because of complicated global trade in the 1600s. But the reality is that both things were true at the same time. AI is this unbelievable opportunity, and the authors who are using it are making a lot of money. Right now we're kind of in this gold rush era where there are authors who are very quietly making just a killing because they're able to write better books faster using these various tools to make the marketing more effective or more streamlined to make the editing right. I have a bunch of tools, but there's other ways of using AI outside of the toolbox. And different people are working it into their workflow differently. And the people who are doing it effectively are finding that they're able to, with higher output and higher quality, make a lot more money. And a lot of people are like, oh, I don't want AI to write my book for me. Then don't. Larry Korea puts it really well is like, don't give the AI the work you enjoy. Give the AI the work you don't enjoy.

Sara 25:35

We don't want to do, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:36

If you don't like researching events that you can sell your book at, like from a table that you want to sell in person, because you heard like my podcast talking about how lucrative that can be. I have an AI tool that will do research and find all of the events in your area and your time zone and give you a list of like here's your genre and your event, and here's a list of events coming up and how to get contact with the criteria as for getting in, right? So those sorts of things can free you up for a lot more writing.

Sara 26:03

Yeah. Yeah. AI, I mean, it's just like everything else. Nothing is 100% good or 100% bad, usually. Usually there's pros and cons to everything. And each person just has to figure out how they're going to use it, if they're going to use it. And I think as long as we don't get wrapped up in this sort of this loop where we're constantly worried about it, because a lot of people seem to really obsess on it. And as long as we can kind of get out of that and figure out how it's useful, or even if we're going to use it, then we're much better off.

SPEAKER_03 26:34

Yeah. And an open-ended chat is the most difficult way and riskiest way of using AI. Because part of what spurred this thinking was I watched this video on AI-induced psychosis, where people would lie the AI and kind of start this delusional journey, and the AI would just affirm them in their delusions. And as they got more and more delusional. And that's a very real risk. Like there are people who already have kind of fragile emotional health. And if they get any reinforcement at all into their delusional thinking, they just go completely off the deep end. And that's part of the reason why I wanted to create tools like this was that because the tool just does the one thing, it's kind of on guardrails, right? It's like the chapterizer is really good at taking rough transcripts and turning them into chapters. So the blogifier takes rough podcast interviews and turns them into blog posts. It's kind of the same approach, but for different things. And it's like it can do that really well, but it can't do anything else. And by creating specific tools that do one thing, my hope is to kind of create a safer AI for the humans that are using it.

Sara 27:39

Yeah, I agree. I think that's a really good use. And I think you're right, open-ended chat can be difficult to use in many ways. And it has some things that we need to be cautious about. So I think that's really true. Has your business model changed recently?

SPEAKER_03 27:54

So AI has changed the course business in some really interesting ways.

Sara 27:59

Yeah. You used to do a lot of courses, right? Right.

SPEAKER_03 28:02

And I still do. I still have a lot of courses, and the courses still sell. But for people who are looking for a quick answer to their quick question, AI will give will sort through the big pile and give them the specific answer. And that's actually why I created AI Thomas, because that actually pre-existed the toolbox. I created that as a experiment, partly because I wanted to do it to myself before somebody else did it to me. Yeah, that's right. There's no technological barrier to keep you from creating your own AI Thomas and putting it on your website. Like the the public blog posts that trained it are public, right? It's just a matter of pulling them into RAG and creating the model, right? It would be a lot of work and it wouldn't be as valuable for you to do it as it would be for me. But that but that process has so a lot of people are going to AI Thomas rather than paying for a course. And so the it's kind of accelerated a trend that we already saw in courses. And it's this interesting phenomenon where information wants to be free. And this is really important for anybody who writes nonfiction, right? So if you're teaching the secrets on the Amazon algorithm and you only share them with five people, well, guess what? Those five people now have a huge incentive to share the secrets with a few more people and a few more people. And then one of them is going to write a book on it, and suddenly the secrets are out, right? So it and as it gets shared, the cost of learning the secret to the algorithm goes down and down and down because information wants to be free. But education and transformation want to be expensive, right? People don't want to get a $200 MBA program. They don't want a $200 MFA program. It's the things that like make the novel marketing conference different from the novel marketing podcast, right? Like the novel marketing conference is expensive comparatively, right? Because you got to fly and you got to get a hotel and we've got to be there and I got to get the venue, right? Like there's a lot of very real costs to that experience that you don't have listening to the podcast and that I don't have listening to the podcast, right? Like your cost of putting this podcast with the two of us together is much cheaper than if you were hosting a symposium and I was one of the speakers, and you had to fly me in to come in and speak for an hour. And yet that experience, if you did host this symposium, would be a very different experience. Right. Or could be, right? If you want to make the your conference business work, you got to find some way for it to not feel like just listening to a bunch of podcasts. And the same is true with education and with transformation. And so adding those interactive elements and finding ways to uh work that into the educational experience is really important, but it also makes it very expensive in the sense of like it requires more of my time, more of my investment. Because if I just take the information and put videos and you just watch the videos, that's not really education, that's more like information.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:52

And there's nothing keeping you from going through my course and then making your own course teaching the same things, which I've had. I've had students who've listened to my podcast or go through my courses and then they go on and teach it themselves, right? That's the the nature of education. It's like a candle and the fire will spread.

Sara 31:07

So basically, you have you're more leaning into doing the conference in person. Are you doing less courses online just because the changes in the ease of information being available through AI?

SPEAKER_03 31:22

I still have, but we retired that for our own reasons. My co-host, my co-teacher in that course was was retiring. And and so instead of me doing the course on my own, we just retired the whole course. The main reason I've been focused less on courses is because I've been so busy building these patron toolbox tools. Like it's a lot of work. And each tool creates a certain amount of like because we have the privacy cranked to 11. So I can't see what people post to the tool or if they upload their manuscript for analysis or whatever. I can't see that. Which means if something breaks or if it's not working, the only way for me to find out is if somebody emails me, which has made the like iterative process of improving the tools slows it down a little bit. And so I get a steady stream of emails of people using the tools and asking for features. So, like the chapterizer, one person using that is like, could you have it preserve comments in brackets and parentheses? Because she would, as she was dictating, she'd be like, research this, figure out what hair color hair this guy has, and then she should keep going. And it's like, oh yeah, that's a that's a good idea. I can tune this to to preserve that and not to assume that that's a mistake or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

Right.

SPEAKER_03 32:30

But when you multiply that against 70 tools of little ideas coming in, so we make the job. Yeah. Uh so I've been busy with that.

Sara 32:38

I can see how that would take some time, but it's almost like you're giving specialized, little mini specialized not courses, but things that can help authors that are very niche down, which is very helpful. So that's probably more valuable to us than maybe just a general course in some ways.

SPEAKER_03 32:55

And I am experimenting with combining the tools and the courses together. So I did one experiment this year with a free course actually called the Send Your First Email Challenge. And the the goal was to take authorship, no email list, and they haven't done anything. They've always wanted to, but it's always been insurmountable. And then over the course of a week, at the end of the week, they have email subscribers and they send their first email. And so I built as a part of that process a couple of tools to help help them. Like one uh generates email subject lines, right? So you kind of describe your email, or I think you paste in the whole email, and then it will give you like a dozen or two dozen subject lines that are like optimized to get people to open the email. And that was a part of the course. I found that that worked really well in the sense that because people are being taught how to do it, it makes them very willing to use a tool that makes it easy, right? I teach them how to do it themselves. If they're an anti-AI person, right? It's like here's how to do it yourself, or you can use this tool and it will uh give you some options, but it doesn't tell you which one to pick, right? This is an important thing with AI. Judgment and the responsibility still has to come from a human, right? Your name is on it. You have to stand by every word of your marketing, every word of your writing. And so just because AI says something doesn't mean that it's true. Yes.

Sara 34:13

Very good reminder. Yeah, like that. So, how do you view mistakes and how do you recover when things go wrong?

SPEAKER_03 34:20

My dad had a saying that he encouraged us with when I was growing up. He would always say, success is a poor teacher. And one of the nice things about failure and mistakes is that it puts you into a teachable spirit, uh, or at least it encourages you towards teachability. One of the things I found is that authors really are only teachable until they have a book or two on Amazon. And most authors, once they have a couple of books on Amazon, they're like, I know everything. They stop going to conferences, they stopped buying books on craft, they stopped listening to podcasts, and the vast majority of them anyway. And it really hurts their overall effectiveness. And it's one of the things I've noticed about the authors who are like super duper bestsellers, is that that's not the case. I remember I was at a right speaking at a writer's conference, it was the very end of the conference. I'm doing this really technical session on some technical thing. And one of the authors in the front row was this like mega bestseller taking notes. It was like, everybody is tired. I'm tired, they're all tired. This has been a long conference. She was had an attitude of, and I was like 23, 24 at the time. I was really early on in my career. I'm just some kid. She's like, I want to learn what technical things this kid has to teach to help give me an edge. And then I've seen another author came on the podcast. On my podcast, I give a free course to everyone who comes on as a guest on like how to be a podcast guest, like kind of basic steps. I had an author on who sold tens of millions of copies, traditionally published, maybe hundreds of millions of copies, like really big time. And he went through the course. At no point did I actually expect him to go through the course. And he went through the course more than most of our authors who had one or two books. He'd also written over 100 books, really prolific, very successful author. And I could see in the thing that he went through the course and like he still had that teachable attitude. I don't know if he learned anything. Probably on his first podcast, but in it, you know, he's been on all the TV shows, right? Very famous guy. And but it almost didn't matter whether he learned something from me or not. He's learning things constantly, he's constantly getting better. And it's that mindset that sets him up for success. And so, in many ways, you have to be very weary of success, especially early success in your career, because it can poison your teachable spirit. And that in losing that is often a bigger loss than having failed early.

Sara 36:50

Yeah, and that's something people don't think about very much. Everybody, it sounds great to be a success right out of the gate, but there's a lot of pressure that comes with that. And then you have these issues where it may make it more difficult in the long run. Very good points.

SPEAKER_03 37:04

And a lot of expectations you put on yourself where your next book has to be as successful as that first book. And it's like your first book just happened to be the right book at the right time and it set the world on fire. It's you're not going to be able to reproduce lightning in the bottle twice. It's almost never happened. Yeah. That doesn't mean that your career is dead, or all they're going to remember is that one-hit song of yours. If you keep making, if you keep making songs. I was uh listening to an interview of the guy who wrote the song Despacito, which was the song of the summer, I don't know, many years ago. And the journalist asked him the question is like, How does it feel knowing that you've already written the most popular song you're going to write?

Sara 37:43

You've already peaked, basically.

SPEAKER_03 37:45

Which was really true, right? Despacito was like a number one hit around the world, which I don't think had ever been done before, or like hadn't been done since the Beatles, right? And it's never been done since. Like, I think it was like Gangum style and Despacito and like nothing else, right? It's in very rarefied company. No one's done it twice. And I don't remember what his answer was, but I did appreciate that he didn't just dismiss it. He's like, oh no, I'm totally going to do this again. Like he acknowledged this was a special thing that happened with this song. Okay for it to be special. And it's also okay to keep trying and keep making beautiful music. And it doesn't have to be a number one global hit around the planet for you to be valid as an artist.

Sara 38:25

Fortunately, that's a problem most of us don't have to struggle with. So we don't really have to worry about that. Well, one reason I wanted to talk to you is because you have some really good advice for authors about their book pages for their website. And this is something that gets overlooked a lot. Why do authors need to take a second look at their book pages? And you had some suggestions for things to put on your book pages that I thought were very interesting that you don't normally hear. So tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_03 38:51

So this is something I've been talking about for a long time, and the reasons why it's important have really changed. So it used to be you need to create a book page so that when somebody Googles your book title, your book page ranks number one on Google so that you can kind of own your place online, you can get affiliate revenue, sending people to Amazon or wherever, and it can kind of act as a customer support hub for resources for your book. And all of that is still true. But now that people are asking Chat GPT what book they should read next, the question comes: how does ChatGPT know about books? And one of its core sources of information about books are Goodreads and author websites. It also has a bunch of genre-specific sources of information about books. And I actually have a prototype of a patron tool that I haven't released yet, but might be by the time this episode goes live, where it actually helps you identify the websites, kind of the third-party websites that are specific to your genre that ChatGPT or Grok or whatever. Part of the reason I haven't released it yet is that really I have to make like a version for each of the major A's because ChatGPT might put a lot of emphasis on Reddit, let's say. And Grok may not look at Reddit at all, but it looks at these other websites instead. So I'm still navigating, building it, but there's a bunch of third-party sites, and then there's strata, and then the tool will have strategies on like how to get this sci-fi site and you know to review your book based off of the other reviews that it's done. And but that's that's work, and it's work that you don't have a one-to-one control over. You have one-to-one control over your author page on Goodreads, and and you have a certain amount of control over your book page on Goodreads. But what you have 100% control over is your web page on your own website.

Sara 40:35

And so the thing that most of us don't really think about that much.

SPEAKER_03 40:39

They did it the one time or they had their webmaster do it five years ago, and they're like, Oh, that's right, I still have a website. I think I pay for that. I should look at it, like, oh my goodness, this photo of me. I haven't looked like that in front of right. So now you can see if you're asking ChatGPT about authors, especially if you're doing it in incognito mode, you can see it pulling up author websites as a part of its research. And so it's now critical for every specific book that you write to have its own specific page that has everything there is to know about that book, both for potential readers and for existing readers. And the more that you can make this page more comprehensive and more complete and more helpful than Amazon, the better, which is hard because Amazon has something that you're not going to have, and that's customer reviews, which means that you have to put stuff so great on your page that it outdoes customer reviews. So I'll I'll run through some of the elements if you'd like, real briefly.

Sara 41:40

I have a whole episode that goes into this and yeah, and I'll link I'll link to that episode as well in case people are interested.

SPEAKER_03 41:45

Yeah, and I also I didn't mention in that episode because I don't think I'd built it yet, but I've also built a patron toolbox tool that will review your book page, check it against the checklist, and then make suggestions and ideas for additions. So the first thing is kind of the bare necessities, and that is you got to have a high resolution book cover, uh, ideally the highest resolution version of your book cover anywhere on the web, so that people who are gonna use your book cover for reviews or put it on a slide for a presentation can get a good high-resolution version. Title and subtitle, your name, right? The one paragraph pitch, buy buttons to all of the places, right? Everybody's doing this already, but some people are doing this on a page that has other books as well. You don't want that. You want you can have a books page, that's fine. You can have beautiful covers on that page, but just you click on the cover and it takes you to a big detailed page. And one of the most important things to include on that detailed page is your metadata and specifically the ISBN number because ChatGPT and Grok and the other AIs are gonna use the ISBN number to link this page with the Goodreads page with the Amazon page if they're able to get in today, because Amazon's constantly trying to get the bots off and the bots keep flying in. It's like keeping flies out of your house. I built a bunch of tools to like evaluate your Amazon page and like give you tips. And they're all in the experimental section right now because on Tuesdays they'll work and then on Wednesdays they won't work, and then on Thursday they'll start working again because of this cat and mouse. Yeah, but regardless, all the other sites are more friendly to the bots. And ISBN is that linking information that will allow your the AI to kind of synthesize information about uh the book. You can also include your ASIN if you want, but I don't think that that's a substitute. So other things you want to have your full backcover copy. This is your kind of extended edition explanation of the book, your endorsements, reviews, uh sample chapters. So linking to a PDF that's the first two or three chapters of your book, the first 20 or 30 pages, AI loves this. It's really hard for AI to get this from Amazon's not going to cough it up, not without a fight, anyway. And so if you're willing to give the AI the first 20 or 30 pages, it will it will train on that. And it now, once it's trained. On it, it's trained on it, right? So, right now we're kind of in this phase where a lot of people are like, I don't want AI to train on my book. And those of you listening in 2026 or 2027, the conversation's gonna change to who do I pay to make sure that AI trains on my book? Yeah, I don't I I don't want it ignorant and recommending somebody else's book, I want it to recommend my book. So, like a list of tropes. This is really powerful because AIs think in terms of tropes, and Amazon doesn't feature trope, doesn't have really a good mechanism for listing the tropes in a book. Uh, for some genres, this is more important than others. For romance, this is just critical. Uh, right now, the way that Amazon teases out tropes is it will look at the description if you're mentioning them there, which is really good. It will also look at the reviews, you know, tease out a trope cloud, but you can just give those tropes to the AI. And I built a tool that will uh read your manuscript, give you a list of tropes, and then give you a genre alignment score. So, based off of the tropes in your book, which genres does your book most closely align with? Because a lot of people think they wrote one kind of book, but they really wrote another kind of book, and this tool will tell you, uh, which sometimes that's all you gotta do. Like you're it's like my marketing's just not working. Why isn't it working? I know this is a good book. I've gotten feedback from people, I trust that it's a good book, and it's just not working. And it may be that your cover is signaling one genre, and in reality, you wrote another genre. And the people that the cover attracted aren't liking the book, and the people who would like the book, the cover is repelling. And so the trope tools is one way to do that. All right, so now let's talk about how to beat Amazon because other than the trope list, which Amazon only kind of sort of has, all the rest of that Amazon has, even the sample chapter. So the things that Amazon isn't going to have are things like bonus chapters, a way to sign up for your newsletter, a embedded Spotify playlist of music to listen to while reading the book, right? A lot of authors have a Spotify playlist that they use to write the book. And some readers like to have access to that to listen to it while they read the book. Or some authors will have a this is the soundtrack for the book, right? It's like this techno thriller is to the Tron soundtrack, and I've got a special playlist that listen in this order. Uh, this used to be basically impossible to do, but Spotify has solved the legal challenge to it. Yeah. Now you'll get Spotify ads unless you're a Spotify premium subscriber. But what you won't get embedding Spotify playlist is a letter from the RIA, RIAA demanding that you come to court and talk about coverage. Yes.

Sara 46:36

So make the playlist and use the options that we have, right? That's right.

SPEAKER_03 46:40

Do not rip the CDs onto your computer and upload the MP3s to your website. That will that will get you a letter from the RIAA. You can also put like quizzes related to the book. Now, there's two ways to do quizzes. You could have a like which Harry Potter house are you type quiz. Those are a lot of fun. But you could also have quizzes for teachers who are using your book in their classroom. Uh, here is a default quiz for like retention of like retention memorization, you know, the kind of quiz that you get in school. And I actually built a tool to do that as well. And the fact that the right answer is often is always a is a feature, not a bug. And if you know a public school teacher, you'll know why because they have to enter the questions and answers into this like website. And the first the correct answer is always a. You can ask it to shuffle the answers and it will shuffle them. And I will just say randomness does not mean an even number of A's and B's. Some people are like, this is a bug. I got more D answers than C answers. I'm like, that's how randomness works. Anyway, dealing with a lot of customer support questions, I'll that I'm trying to answer. So there's some other things you could have, like a special epilogue or special deleted scene or maps, particularly if you have an audiobook. I will say this I listen to a lot of audiobooks, and I listen to a lot of audiobooks of epic fantasy stories. And I go to a lot of author websites, and all I want is a high-resolution map I can pinch and zoom and see where they are in the story. And the number of fantasy authors who provide a decent high-resolution map is in the single-digit percentages. And this hurts me deeply.

Sara 48:18

It's annoying, right? As a as I listen to it.

SPEAKER_03 48:20

Yeah, and I know that the ebook readers and the paperbook readers have a beautiful map in their versions. I just don't have a map in my version. And so put that on the book page. The ammo Amazon doesn't really have a spot for a map download. You could put the map in the A plus content, but it's not going to really be high resolution enough. And the map doesn't really help sell the website, so to speak. I do have a tool that helps with this, but I will say it doesn't work very well because AI image engines don't have good spatial reasoning yet. So this will get better. Next year it's going to be a lot better. Right now, you can take you can like draw out a map on a piece of paper and you can take a picture of it and it will make like a prettier version of that map, but it won't help you with like cartography and like the spaces in between things that's still beyond what the AI can do. But there's more than that. You can have uh compendiums. So if you're writing like fantasy or some epic series, you can have a list of all of the characters in your book. This is actually really helpful, particularly if you're writing a long series and you have a lot of characters. So I remember reading, what was it, Left Behind? I don't know if you ever read those books. And they had so many characters. And they finally had the first five pages of each book was a character compendium telling you who was Rayford Steele, a little bit about who he is, and where is he right now in the story, getting you up to speed because a lot of play new characters. And um, and the same thing with locations and with timeline, you you can have compendiums for items or floor. I have one, I have a tool that I have tools for all of these different kinds of compendiums. One is for flora and fauna. A lot of authors will create this kind of internally just to keep their characters straight or keep the location straight. They might call it a character Bible or a book Bible. But if you have nerdy readers, and I realize not all authors have nerdy readers, uh you romance writers don't have as many nerdy readers as the you know the lit RPG.

Sara 50:15

Right. Or even mystery readers are very nerdy about, especially like I was thinking like for a list of characters at the beginning of each book because of suspect list, you know, readers love that. So if you're putting that in your book anyway, why not put it on your website? So things like that.

SPEAKER_03 50:30

Yeah, or you could create because these tools work on you uploading the book. What you might consider is uploading just the first half of the book, and then halfway through the book, you could take the compendium and actually insert it into the story uh visually or narratively. So you could have it visually where it's like detectives log, right? And it you have like a picture of like this. You take what the AI generated, you tweak it, make sure it's accurate, and then you put it in like pencil format, and it's like this visual image. Or you could work it into the dialogue of the police sergeant pulled me into his office, and he's like, Where are we on the case? Okay, I know this, I know this, so and so is not talking, right?

Sara 51:09

Like there's ways that you could work this in, it'd be like you could make it look like a notebook page out of the sergeant's notebook or whatever. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 51:16

And you could even have fun with it because you could have one person and then you have in like in a different color, somebody else like scratching things off and like, oh, this is wrong. There's a lot of fun you could have with it. A timeline could be really helpful, particularly if you're doing some weird, tiny, whiny things. Uh, the worst books for timeline stuff is the Ender's Game books. I don't know if you've read those. I haven't read that. Ender's Game is this masterpiece, and there's a uh book called Ender Shadow, which is about Ender's best friend/slash rival, who's a character named Bean. And then so book one and book two make sense. But then Ender hops on a spaceship and travels near the speed of light into the future because the Ender's game books follow the theory of relativity in terms of space travel. And so he kind of disappears from the story for like 300 years or 400 years or something. And so, but his very next book takes place after all of Bean, who stays on Earth, has a whole series of adventures. They're like in a totally different genre. And I remember trying to figure out which book do I read after Ender Shadow, and it was so confusing. Confusing, yeah. Chart of like lines and arrows, and it was like, just give me a time timeline. And if I didn't have the chart, it would have been even worse. Another tool or thing you can include, I have a tool to help with, is a glossary. So I built a glossary builder that will find all of the kind of weird or unusual words in your book and then define them based off of how you use them in the book. Um, this is something you could include in the book, but you also could include it in your your book page. A link to buy the sequel. This seems really minor, but you'd be surprised how few authors are like, oh, by the way, there's a sequel. You can click here to buy it. And this link doesn't go to Amazon, it goes to the book page for book two or book three, whatever the next book is in the series. Right. Yeah. So anyway, I have a bunch of other ideas. And I I could that's a great list just to get started. Yeah. And you may find that for your book, there's some unique things about your book or about your story or about your personal story that would make for really cool additions to this book page that are very unique to you. And the more of that personality and information you put here, the more valuable it could becomes, not just for readers, but also for all the AIs sorting through this, trying to figure out if this is a book worth recommending or not.

Sara 53:34

Yeah. I think these are wonderful ideas. So I would ask, yeah, if you're just starting out as a new author, I don't think this would be too much to do for like if you have one or two books out. If you're a more established author, would you recommend maybe just working on these, making like the book ones, focusing on that first and really establishing a good because that's where most readers are going to start, and then adding in the rest as you have time. Because you know, some authors have 30, 40, 50 books. So where what would you recommend in that case?

SPEAKER_03 54:05

Well, one, I'd recommend the toolbox because that for somebody with 40 books, the toolbox becomes at $10 a month. Like a bargain. Yeah. When I would use the Rudy Giuliani is that one step back approach for when he cleaned up New York City. So when Giuliani came into New York City, all the subways were covered in graffiti. It's really high crime. And he one of his goals was to clean up the subways. And what they would do is they would pick a subway car and they would clean up every single bit of graffiti off that subway car. And then they had a policy that they would not allow a single bit of graffiti back on that subway car. And so if at the end of the day it had graffiti again, they would take that cleaned-up car off of the train, clean it up again, and put it back. And then they it's slowly, train car by train car, they eventually got every single bit of graffiti off. And then, you know, people are constantly putting new graffiti on the cars. And but now it's just a matter of as soon as they see it at the end of the day, they clean it off right away. And so at eight in the morning, all the subways are clean of graffiti. And so I would do that same kind of approach of anytime you find yourself updating a book page for whatever reason, be like, okay, now it's the time to upgrade this one, right? An author or reader asked me a question about such and such book. It went to the book page and I realized didn't have the information. And so, and then you just keep working on it and get it better. But I also really like your idea of prioritizing first in series and also all new books, right? So I'll be like, kind of resolve in your heart. All new books that I write from this point forward are gonna have a good, solid book page.

Sara 55:36

Because a lot of your attention will go to your new releases, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 55:39

But it's your older books that will benefit the most from that kind of deep cut AI recommendation. Um and so I would work on it. And this is also the sort of thing you could put a kind of a virtual assistant. This is a good kind of encapsulatable virtual assistant project, right? You do have book pages together and then you set them loose. There's some WordPress plugins that help with this. There's one called My Book Table that I actually developed back in the day. I don't run it anymore, but we built it to kind of optimize this process. And if you have a lot of books, My Book Table becomes a huge time saver because it will generate like series pages for you automatically. Yeah and like co-author pages automatically. So let's say if you're 50 books, you're at 10 with this one co-author and five with this other co-author. My Book Table handles all that really well. And you click on the co-author's name, it shows you the books with that co-author's and it kind of a lot of the metadata in SEO, it kind of handles quietly in the background.

Sara 56:36

That's good. So let's see, we're almost run out of time. We kind of we spent a lot of time talking about. I feel like this is very practical, hands-on stuff that we can deal with. But I before we go, I wanted to talk about thinning down because this is something that came up. I'm just back from Author Nation. We did talk a lot about AI, we talked a lot about search and how AI is going to be searching books. So this is we've covered that. So now let's talk about thinning down because you had a season where you really cut back and you had to prioritize. So I feel like we have so much that we can do, so much, so many tools and things. What would do your recommendations? Tell us a little bit about what happened for you and what your recommendations would be if somebody feels like they're in a season where they need to cut back.

SPEAKER_03 57:19

Yeah, I was way overcommitted back in, I think it was 2019. I was running like five different podcasts. I was a literary agent, I was doing my website business. I was running all these meetup groups, and I was just kind of meeting myself coming and going. And and I was also serving kind of different audiences. So, like one of the meetup groups was for like board game designers and playtesters, which had nothing to do with the author stuff at all. And I'd written this book on dating and relationships, which was nothing. So it was all I was very scattered. And I had this problem of when I'd meet someone, I wouldn't know which business card to give them. I had like three different business cards for like three different, like whole different jobs I was doing. And I was so overwhelmed with the number of projects and the number of tasks that one morning I just couldn't get out of bed. I I was just I just had this like mental breakdown. And some friends, uh, I was in a mastermind group and we had this tool in this mastermind group that we had developed that was this really simple spreadsheet uh with three columns, and they were easiness, joy, and revenue. And so uh we listed on the rows all the different activities and then ranked from one to ten. How easy is it? How much joy does it bring in, and how much money does it bring in? And then you multiply those rows. I have a template for this on my website, but it's such a simple spreadsheet, you can literally recreate it just from this description. And then you multiply those three rows and you get a score, and then you just sort the spreadsheet, and then you start cutting from the bottom up until you're not stressed out anymore. For me, I basically had to cut off half of that spreadsheet, which was the bottom half of the things. But what I found was the things that were scoring low, cutting them gave me more time and energy for the things that were scoring high. And it meant cutting some of the podcasts, and it meant cutting back on some of the other podcasts. So I went from five podcasts down to one and a half podcasts. Now you'll notice I know our podcasts are creeping up again.

Jami 59:14

They are, yes.

SPEAKER_03 59:15

I have a new, I now have two weekly podcasts. I have author update and I have novel marketing, and I have the pitch and toolbox. And this is one of the things about pruning is that it's something that you have to revisit, right? In fact, we just got our trees pruned yesterday at our house. And these are trees that I got pruned several years ago, but they they've got to get pruned again. And so it's easier like, oh, pruning, I did that. Like, when did you do it? Like, well, it's six years ago. I might need to revisit and and re-evaluate. We have this practice in the Texas government that is really good called sunsetting. So when the Texas legislature creates an agency or a department or spends a good amount of money on something, it's not created in perpetuity, it's created with an expiration date. And so, like the Department of Housing and Urban Development only has money for five years or 10 years. And at the end of those 10 years, if nothing happens, the Department of Housing and Urban Development just goes away. Now, what ends up happening is that it never actually goes away because killing a government agency is not a good thing.

Sara 1:00:19

Because we're it's government, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:21

But it does force the legislature to actually pass a bill continuing that department or that agency, and it forces that department or that agency to basically make a case for itself. It's like, here's all the good things that we're doing, here's how we're being good stewards of our tax dollars, right? And that for efficiency. Nobody's like, what's a good beacon for something well run and efficient? I know state government, and yet those two words don't go together, those two phrases don't go together. And I love being a Texan, I love Texas government, but even I'd be like, Yeah, Texas government's not known for efficiency. And yet this one packed practice of sunsetting is a great practice, and it's a great practice to apply to aspects of your life, including being an author. I one of my most important and least popular episodes is titled When to Quit Writing. And it's a very honest episode. Basically, the way I presented it is like listen to this now and then listen to this again when you're thinking about quitting. And the kind of conclusion of the episode is maybe you should quit writing, maybe you shouldn't. Here are some questions to ask yourself to see if this is even something that you should be doing, right? Because the amount of time and money that you're putting into writing is time and money that you're not putting into the next best alternative. And some people they're like they they've been given a terminal diagnosis, and and the doctor says you have so much time to live, and they're like, I've got to write a book before I die. Maybe, but maybe you should spend that time with your family, right? But if the choice is I've got to write this book before I die or watch TV, okay, well, that's the comparison, right? Because your family's busy doing their stuff, yeah, and you you're spending as much time with them as they can spend with you, but you still have time left over and you're gonna write a book, right? So for each person and for because that every the answer is different, and we're all gonna quit writing at some point, right? A hundred years from now, Sarah, as much as we love you in your books, you will be dead in all of the Sarah books that will ever be written will have been written.

Sara 1:02:21

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:22

And so you'll be kind of frozen, and AI is a hundred years from now, will be writing books in the style of Sarah Russett, I'm sure.

Sara 1:02:28

We will see that would yeah, it's an interesting thing to think about that we do have a finite amount of time in how do we really want to spend it? And I think it's important to give yourself permission to look at something and say, this isn't gonna, this isn't what I want to do right now, and it's okay because no one wants to be a quitter, you know, like there's that stigma with not being able to stick with something, but sometimes you don't need to, and sometimes it's better not to. So tough choices.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:54

Yeah, don't think of it as quitting. Yeah. Um, and this actually goes back to that pruning conversation, right? For me, it was it was saying no to those things on the bottom half of that spreadsheet, but really it wasn't. It was about saying yes to the things on the top half of the spreadsheet that I was failing at because I was doing the things at the bottom half of the spreadsheet. And so every when somebody says, I don't have time for something, what they're really saying is I have something else that's more important, right? It's more polite to say, oh, I'm sorry, I can't come to your bake sale, I'm too busy. Yeah, it's not saying your bake sale is not important to me. That's too disagreeable for a polite society. But the reality is that we all have that terminal diagnosis, right? We just haven't been given a precise amount of time. And some of you listening may have been given that terminal diagnosis. And I'll tell you, the doctor doesn't know how long you're gonna live. I know people who were given a year to live and they're on you know, year five or year 10. So don't let that run your ruin your life. But if you haven't been given that yet, you still need to live with that kind of intentionality of like, I am gonna die someday. And dying with a book that's half finished is kind of a waste because the half-finished book isn't gonna make any difference. The authors who left half-finished books and their heirs try to resurrect it and publish it, that almost never goes well. Never goes well. I mean, it makes the heirs a lot of money. It's like, hey, we found another Jules Verne book in a in a uh trunk in in the basement.

Sara 1:04:13

It's like, oh yeah, Jules Verne book, and everyone reads it and like and maybe there was Vern was smart to put this in it, but maybe there's a reason that was left in the trunk. Yes, that's sometimes the case.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:23

Yeah, yeah, and so yeah, quitting on purpose, but also sticking with it because it maybe you need to quit something else, right? So it's all about making choices on purpose, and that's what pruning is really all about because there's the easy things to quit. Like, I'm gonna spend less time on Facebook, you lose nothing, right? Facebook isn't doing anything good to your life. Half of your content that you're seeing on Facebook is AI generated, it's all of it is AI curated. Uh and so you're kind of giving every time you swipe up, you're letting the AI choose what you consume, which is a very passive, kind of toxic way of engaging with media. So you don't lose very much on getting rid of Facebook or TikTok or whatever. But the things that are harder to quit are those things that are making you a little bit of money, they are a little bit fun, they are they're not that difficult. Oh, it's it's not that hard. Like, yeah, but it's still an open loop, right? It's still something that can trigger like your Shopify store. I just did an episode on why Shopify is a bad idea for authors, for most authors, anyway. And that Shopify store being open on your website is a risk of a an urgent customer support email coming at any time. Probably not gonna get one tomorrow. You're probably gonna get one in the next month, right? And and you'll certainly get one in the next year, and you might get a whole bunch, or you might get that email of like some scammer was using your website to clean credit card numbers and you had 30 transactions for five dollars. Now all of these people are calling you angry, asking who you are. They didn't buy from you, and you're getting these $25 chargebacks and this big mess, right? And so it's like, is it worth the money that I'm making? And the answer is it depends, right? If you're if you're Making $5 a month on Shopify, certainly not worth it. If you're spending $50 or $30 and you're making five, that's an easy cut. But if you're making $100, it's hard to say no to what feels like $50 free dollars.

Sara 1:06:13

Yeah, but you're right. You have to take into account the drain, the mental drain and the drain on your time of handling these things that are not, they're not monetary, but they're they cut into your mental mental health kind of.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:26

Yeah. Yeah.

Sara 1:06:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:27

And and the one rule, I'll give you one rule of thumb that's really helpful for this. And that is to not, and this is really helpful for like marketing activities. Because people often ask me, is such and such marketing activity a good idea? And my answer is almost always it's it depends. Because it does. Yeah. But then I'll give them the criteria of how to figure it out. And instead of thinking of some marketing activity is good or bad, that's not very useful because anything can sell books, right? You standing on the side of the road with a cardboard sign selling books, you'll sell a certain number of books every day if you did that for eight hours every day, right? Like that's not gonna get you nothing. And it will give you people giving you money without you even having to give them a book, right? So the real question is, and this helps with all of this, is from economics. And it's this concept of comparative advantage, or how does this compare with my next best alternative? And so before you decide to spend money on going to the novel marketing conference or getting this course or getting a hardback fancy special edition cover of your book printed or spending a thousand dollars on advertising, right? Whatever your big purchase is of of money or of time, right? Like I'm about to spend, you know, all these hours updating my website and upgrading all 50 book pages, right? That's an expensive project in terms of time. Ask yourself, what is my next best alternative? And then do some work to actually have a next best alternative that is best, right? Because, like, well, it's better than standing on the street corner.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:54

It's like, okay, that's not your next best alternative.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:57

Yeah, it's better than being on Facebook. It's like, yeah, because the real question is all right, I could spend a thousand dollars revamping my website. I could hire an assistant who'll go in and change these pages, or I could spend those thousand dollars on Amazon ads or on Facebook ads, right? It's three different things, and now you can compare and make a choice of like, well, the last time I spent a thousand dollars on Amazon ads, I brought in twelve hundred dollars in profits. So I I've got an expected return there. Last time I spent money on Facebook ads, I made 200 bucks and I lost 800 bucks. And so that will allow you to kind of make some comparisons. And one thing that can help is if you can get it down to a cost per reader acquisition, which can let you compare different channels. I realize we're getting kind of into marketing tracking theory. That question, next best alternative works for all of your life. It's a really useful question.

Sara 1:08:50

That's very good. Very good advice. Well, thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Tell tell everybody where they can find out about your podcast and the novel marketing conference and all that.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:00

So it's all at authormedia.com. So it's like it if you go to authormedia.com right in the menu, we have a link for the conference and we have a link for the podcast and the blog and the toolboxes. It's all there at authormedia.com. Perfect. Okay. I I try to practice what I preach when it comes to websites. So while I have other domains, all they do is redirect you to a specific page on authormedia.com in most cases. So yeah. Just all nice.com.

Sara 1:09:27

Okay, perfect. All right. Well, we will link to that. So thanks for being here. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:31

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Sara 1:09:33

All right. Well, thanks for listening today, and we'll see everybody next week. Bye, everyone.