In our premiere episode of "AI Publishing Formula," Jamie Culican, a seven-figure fantasy author and seasoned mentor, and Melle Melkumian, an MIT-certified AI expert and technology marketing director, dive into the transformative impact of AI in the publishing world. (Are you curious about how AI is reshaping the publishing business? Then this episode is for you!) Despite common perceptions, integrating AI into the publishing process isn't just for tech enthusiasts. Together, we break down the stereotypes and demonstrate how AI tools are becoming indispensable for authors of all genres. We'll explore how these technologies can streamline workflows, identify readers and even open up new marketing avenues, making life as a publisher and author much more manageable and successful. Whether you're an AI skeptic or a tech aficionado, tune in as we uncover the exciting potentials of AI in publishing, complete with practical insights and beginner-friendly explanations. By the end of this episode, you'll understand not only what AI publishing entails but also how it can revolutionize your approach to writing and selling books. Join us to discover how to embrace AI and make it a powerful ally in your publishing journey. Got questions you'd like answered in the podcast? Email: jculican@ai4ces.com TRANSCRIPT MELLE Hello everybody and welcome to the inaugural session of AI publishing formula. My name is Melle Melkumian, and I am here with Jamie Culican. We are the owners of AI4CES. Our business has been serving authors and helping them to understand AI since early 2023. We are excited to offer a deep dive into the use of AI for publishing in this podcast: AI Publishing Formula. Our goal is to support authors in how they can use AI in their publishing business. We're going to talk a little bit about our experience both before AI and after AI, but I first wanted to make something really clear from the start of our podcast is that AI in publishing doesn't have to be a bad word and it doesn't have to be a problem in terms of copyright and original work. You don't have to use AI for writing. And if you don't use AI in your business, you're going to be missing a great opportunity and probably one of the biggest that we're going to see in the marketplace since the advent of the internet, which completely changed the way that businesses work. We really feel passionately about this. Jamie and I both work in areas that have seen the use of AI really serve the business side of companies in areas like marketing, product delivery, and organization. We really want to bring those capabilities and knowledge to authors who are often working alone or with some contractors and who are really working hard to make a living at publishing. We're going to see so many changes in publishing over the coming years. I think we've already seen a lot in the last 12 months. And so, I just want to kick this off by letting you know that we're really starting this podcast to help you get a grasp not just on AI and writing, but it's really about AI and the business world. Now, before we continue talking about AI and publishing, I want to introduce Jamie Culican. She is my amazing business partner. She has a great acumen both for education and for publishing and writing. Jamie, I'm going to let you introduce yourself. Can you give a little bit about your background and let's talk about pre-AI. Tell us a little bit about what you did with publishing? JAMIE Hi everyone! I'm Jamie Culican and I've been published now for eight years, since 2016. Two years into my publishing I started a publishing company called Dragon Realm Press. This was all pre-AI. I didn't use any AI of any sort. And then AI really came into my publishing about a year and a half ago. MELLE Can you tell us a little bit about the success you had in publishing because, in my world, you're a rock star and I think people really need to know things like you're a 7-figure author which is what a lot of us aspire to be in publishing. JAMIE So, my first series I released was in 2016 and that was the Keeper of Dragons. And that series just sort of exploded out of nowhere. I couldn't even tell you what I did right and what I did wrong to have that series explode, but then I just mimicked it with the rest of the series I released since then. MELLE I think what's really interesting, Jamie, is that you say things like, “I didn't know what I did right.” but you knew enough that you were able to mimic it and I think not only did you mimic it, but you shifted as the market shifted. For those of you who don't know, Jamie and I met in 2016. Although we had both been writing for quite a bit, we were novice publishers. We came out with our first novels. They were both YA fantasy. Hers was on target for the market with dragons. Mine were whatever I wanted to write, which at the time was bird shifters, which, you know, like weren’t exactly evergreen. So, my series didn't do as well as Jamie's. However, since then several things have changed in the marketplace and Jamie, you were able to take your career in publishing and shift with the genres in the marketplace. Can you tell us a little bit about that? JAMIE So, I started out in middle grade fantasy and as my audience got older, I just shifted my books to accommodate them as they grew up. I went from middle grade to young adult fantasy. And I kept with the same genre. I stayed with mostly dragons and fantasy, which was what my readers were asking for. I also was very engaged with my readers. I send out a newsletter every week to them…for years. I also had a reader group that we talked in daily. They were very engaged especially back in 2016 and 2017 when I started. Then, as the years went on and everybody had a reader group and everybody had a newsletter, I did have to shift gears a little more and just connect with them in new ways, with more engaging material. So, I couldn't just say, “Hey, I got a new book coming out next week.” I had to say, “Hey, what do you want to see in my next book? What do you want? Who wants to have a character named after them in my next book?” The engagement had to change. MELLE And I think what's interesting about that, Jamie, is it's something we really talk about a lot in our courses: you must know your readership. If you're just starting out or you don't have the popularity that you had with your first series, then it becomes a little harder for authors to know exactly who their reader is. It’s one of those areas AI is really helping new businesses with or people who want to upscale their business because it allows us to create something in marketing. We haven't really talked about my background much, but I've been a marketing director in technology for about 25 years and we always create these things called user profiles or avatars or, as authors, reader profiles. What these all mean is “Who's my ideal audience?” What I hear you saying, Jamie, is that you were getting that direct feedback from engaged readers. We show a technique using AI and a chat tool like ChatGPT 4.0 to create the avatar to understand our audience. We dig deep into analysis about what your avatar’s age group is, what they like, where they read… and, by doing that, we can use AI to gain greater insight into where we should be providing our material and what we should be providing as our engagement material. JAMIE I agree. And it took me 2 to 3 years to truly understand my audience with me just engaging with them, but now being able to create those reader profiles using AI, we can take that 2 to 3 years and compress it to get that data almost instantly. MELLE So, you pivoted your writing, which I think is key, and you didn't pivot to a different genre, you pivoted in the same genre to the same readers but to a different age as your readers aged up and I think that's a nugget of gold for any author who's trying to make a living at writing. The other thing I think is key, and I know this happened in our careers as authors, is platforms. What do you see as the biggest shift in the marketing platforms? JAMIE There's so many. One of the big ones for me because time management is huge for me is social media and being able to interact on every social media platform out there. Having the time to come up with the ad copy for all of that. So, I would say programs like Buffer to schedule all of my social media. And now with AI, I can fill Buffer for the next 3 months in 2 or 3 hours and then I don't have to focus so much on social media. Which is a huge part of how I market my books. I just go in and in a short time, it's just done. And I think that's one of the keys. MELLE For our listeners, what you're going to find is that Jamie and I use some different techniques from each other, and we use some different tools. I've mentioned I work in technology. I was working in technology in Silicon Valley during the dot com era. Fortunately, I worked for a company that wasn't a dot com. They were a software developer that was working in engineering, but I saw firsthand the rise of a bunch of different dot coms and then the collapse. We are going to see the same thing with AI. You will see a ton of new AI tools come out. They're getting multi-millions in venture capitalist funding because everyone's making bets on what AI tool is going to reign supreme. I’m looking at a couple of social media management platforms and one we'll talk about it in a different episode, but the one that I'm currently investigating is using AI. And one thing you're going to see in this podcast, we're not trying to tell you exactly what tool to use. We're going to tell you what we use, what we've investigated. We're never going to be able to try every AI tool on the market for every aspect of publishing because there are a ton, there's not one tool to rule them all. But we will tell you what we've tried out, what we like, what we d
