Is AI really the end of creativity, or the biggest emancipation of creative energy we've ever seen? How can authors thrive in a time of super abundance, when anyone can make anything? What happens when publishers become technology providers, and agents start shopping for books on our behalf? With Nadim Sadek. In the intro, my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars. This show is supported by my Patrons. Join my Community and get articles, discounts, and extra audio and video tutorials on writing craft, author business, and AI tools, at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Using AI as a research partner, editor, and constructive critic when writing a book The ratio of dreaming to execution Why publishers still draw red lines at AI-written words, and why that may change Inside Shimmr's three-engine advertising system: Strategizer, Generator, and Deployer Multimodal interactivity, agentic purchasing, and the idea of the Panthropic You can find Nadim on LinkedIn or at NadimSadek.com. Transcript of Interview with Nadim Sadek Jo: Nadim Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmr AI, an AI-powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and non-fiction books, including Quiver, don't Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI. So welcome to the show, Nadim. Nadim: It is lovely to be here. I feel very privileged to be invited onto this. Thank you. Jo: Oh, I'm excited to talk to you today, and we're really talking about AI. I wanted to start with the fact that you do seem to have a sort of relentless optimism. How do you remain so optimistic about AI when the publishing industry that we both work in seems so overwhelmingly negative? Lift our eyes to the horizon—what is the bigger picture? Nadim: Oh my goodness. That is a big one. I think my optimism is quite confined actually in the area of publishing. If you were to ask me to speak about AI more broadly—which you're not, but I'm going to give you a little bit of it—I've got lots of concerns. That includes the advent of autonomous weapons and economic singularity, where the wealth from AI as an industry is going into just a few hands, and energy usage, and cultural homogenisation, I suppose, and the potential for brain rot. There's a whole pile of stuff which is really not very good about AI, and all the normal things about fraud and theft and so on. However, if you recognise that and then you say what's going on in publishing, then the obvious thing that you first have to deal with is what did happen with copyright. Is it appropriate to say that things have been stolen and taken without permission and so on? It is. It's going through the American courts at one pace. I saw that Penguin Random House have started a case against OpenAI in Germany, where there will be a much faster legal conclusion—a judge's conclusion, I think. This will begin to put parameters on how copyrighted materials can be used, and possibly also some retrospective judgment about what has happened to this point and what can be done about it. So it's good that you've asked questions so early in our conversation, because I think — It's important to contextualise my optimism. It is whilst noting with regret the behaviour of the AI industry—the models themselves—in not dealing with copyright in the most generous or appropriate fashion. I think we should also recognise that copyright probably wasn't designed for machine learning in the way that it is. Probably the industry wasn't terribly well prepared to note, negotiate with, and navigate the very fast-moving technological culture of AI companies. So I think lots of mistakes have been made on both sides. When you put all that to one side, what's left for me is an amazing emancipation of creative energy and also a huge efficiency being brought to the publishing industry. We can talk about both those things further, but for me that is what's going on. The efficiency of bookmaking and publishing generally—the whole workflow of getting a book out of somebody's head and into a reader's hands—I think is immensely streamlined and improved by AI. Actually, if you talk about it carefully, which I'm sure we will do, the ability of creators to share and let others experience their creative endeavours becomes so much better, so much fuller, so much richer. So that's why I'm excited about it. Jo: Well, let's get into those two things then. You mentioned the emancipation of creative energy, and you've worked with various AI tools as part of your creative and business processes. You've said that AI can be a creative companion. So specifically when it comes to Quiver, don't Quake, for example— How are you using the various tools in such an emancipated way? Nadim: Well, just to put a bit of a broader context on it, we're an AI-native company at Shimmr, and separately I wear a hat as an author. You mentioned the AI books and the children's books. I'm also writing a book about the psychology of motorcycling. So it's a very odd authorial footprint, but it means that I kind of tramp around the place and learn different things. What I've noticed, even within Shimmr, is that the whole team has been using AI tools very differently. Lots of people are very bright in the company. They're all brighter than me, and I salute them and love them. But they've all used AI to become more creative in their own ways. For example, our Chief Commercial Officer is very numerate and logical, and not loquacious. She prefers to say things straight and simply. She has become an unbelievably creative financial modeller and analyst because she uses AI in lots of different ways. So she has flourished and grown so much, and is creative in a way that she never could be before—not only around numeracy and financial matters, but in thinking through new concepts for sales and marketing and for our commercial development. I've just noticed all around me this going on. When it comes to me, I prefer to express myself through writing. I talk a bit as well, as you can tell, but my favourite means of communication is just writing. When I was writing Quiver, don't Quake, I would use AI in a number of different fashions. One would be for research. One of the chapters is about the psychology of creativity. I'm a psychologist, so I tend to come at things from a psychological perspective. What is the psychology of creativity? Well, here comes a million-word answer from an AI—this person said this, this person said that. Then I kind of focused my research in particular areas and assembled them by drawing from the outputs of several AIs about what has been said about AI, what the science says about it, what sociology says about it, what particular creatives that we're all aware of say about it, whether they're in the advertising industry or musicians or artists or whatever. So that was a very rich way of researching things. I would often put a chapter in—this is a slightly different use—a manuscript that I'd written and say, “Read this as if you're somebody just coming across my book, and tell me where the reader might struggle between one paragraph and another, or where there's a logical fallout, or where the concept isn't really very fully excavated and developed.” It would occasionally prompt me to say, “You could probably do with a line that brings the reader from this point to that point.” And usually I listened to that and then wrote something new. In another use case, I eventually gave it the whole book and said, “I think I've done an okay job here and I quite like the flow and I'm sort of satisfied enough, but before I send it to the publisher and say, ‘there you go,' what do you think? Are there any ways in which this book could become a better and more interesting read?” It came back fairly promptly and said, “Well, what you haven't really done is considered what all the naysayers would say. You've done your dark moments of militarism and all that stuff, but what about some of the other stuff closer to publishing or creativity?” So off I went on a new round of research, and did some myself and used the AI for other bits. The funny thing, really the ironic thing here, is that the book is much better, and most people salute the book for the eighth to ninth chapter that talks about the constructive critics. I assemble them all and articulate all their arguments and say how hideous AI is and how terrible it is for the world and all of us. And then I try to repudiate some of them, not in a defensive way, but just to say, actually, yes, that's one perspective and here's another one. That chapter, ironically, about how AI is terrible was prompted by AI. It said, “You should really have a go at me.” And so I did. So that was another use case. Then finally—perhaps I'll say this—I have a friend who is, I think, the Editor-in-Chief of Penguin in India. I got to know her at a book fair or something. We started chatting, and I told her about my kids' books. I said, “I could really do with an editor on these ten books that are due to be published.” She very generously, amiably, and very constructively gave me feedback on each individual book and then on the whole set. I was really happy with it. I said to her, “That was a delight.” She said, “You'd be much better off working with Edi
