16 - From Writing Craft to Market Research: Leveraging AI Tools with Dale L. Roberts

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite engage in a dynamic conversation with Dale L. Roberts from Self-Publishing with Dale, exploring the integration of AI into writing craft, market research, and author workflows. Dale shares his journey from skepticism to embracing AI as a valuable tool that enhances creativity and streamlines processes. Listeners will gain insights into how AI can be leveraged for ideation, rephrasing, and efficient content generation, alongside tips on maintaining the integrity of storytelling craft. Whether you're an author looking to optimize your writing process or curious about the future of publishing, this episode offers practical advice and inspiration. Visit our website https://bravenewbookshelf.com to view the full episode notes, links and apps mentioned in the episode, and the full transcript.

[00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts, Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite, as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry.

**Steph Pajonas:** Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm Steph Pajonas, CTO and COO of Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their business. We've had a very fun little break, summer break, and we're getting back to interviewing all of our guests and understanding more about AI in the creative world and publishing world, and we're just so excited to be interviewing more people, aren't we, Danica? 

**Danica Favorite:** Super excited to have our guests here today, Dale Roberts, and he is the creator of the YouTube channel, Self Publishing with Dale and very, very great information for self published [00:01:00] authors. I've had the pleasure of being on his show and also I've worked with him a lot with Publish Drive.

So love talking to Dale about AI and. AI usage for authors. So, Dale, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

**Dale L. Roberts:** Boy, you covered everything. I think that's probably the best part about it. I've been in the business of self publishing and writing for the past 10 years now. And I ended up pivoting to including YouTube and video content creation starting in April of 2016. And since then I've grown a brand of teaching people how I do what I do, and it has been stellar ever since.

Yeah, I've got two channels, by the way. One with Dale L. Roberts and the Self Publishing with Dale podcast. A lot of people get confused about it. One's very polished, whereas the other one's a little bit more raw. Like, a great conversation like we're having here.

**Steph Pajonas:** I love it. What is your favorite topic to cover, like, on your YouTube channel? Is that, do you have a favorite one that you generally go towards? 

**Dale L. Roberts:** I, a lot of people, if you were to look at the content that I've [00:02:00] produced, covers a lot of, like, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, because, well, It's the popular topic. It's going to draw in more viewers. It's going to draw in more listeners. But I have to be honest, like if I were forced to like you have to choose something you really are passionate about and you love talking about I love talking about the craft of writing. Anytime I do a video about that, no one wants to pay attention. They're like, this is the self publishing guy. He's not the writing guy. I love talking about craft and especially in fiction writing I've really been so focused on the craft of fiction writing over the past couple of years that it is something that I just enjoy it. It's so much fun to talk about and it. There's so much to explore in the world of fiction and writing.

So yeah, if I'm forced to answer, I love talking about the craft of writing, whether fiction or nonfiction.

**Steph Pajonas:** I love the craft of writing too. I've been teaching some of our students at the Future Fiction Academy about structure. Like story structure, understanding the three act, four act structure. I've mostly been teaching James [00:03:00] Scott Bell's techniques, which I I love him so much. He's one of my favorite craft people. I like Dale's reaching back into his bookshelf and pulling out, Yes. Yes. Yes. Conflict and Suspense. I've read that one too. I think I've read all of his books. I really enjoy his work. Yeah, so Craft is right up my alley.

So one of my one of my favorite things about teaching craft is really seeing how it clicks in people's heads, right? Like they'll, they'll be like, Oh, Oh, I've seen that before. I've seen that in story. I've seen that in structure. And then you get a chance to to see people take those things and apply them to their own work and then like level up from there. And that's one of the things I love about craft.

**Dale L. Roberts:** There's so much that you can explore. And I guess there's no real one way to writing and I think that's the most exciting part about it that there's so much that you can express yourself through fiction writing, more importantly, nonfiction, it's just so cut and dry for me and I think I've done so much of it that I think that [00:04:00] that's why I'm so excited about fiction is gosh, I I.

Come from the, from the world of professional wrestling. I actually used to be a professional wrestler and part of that, everybody knows, hopefully I'm not spoiling this here for you, Steph it's, it's predetermined, it's entertainment. And what we learn when we were in First breaking into the business and of course as you're starting to apply yourself is it's storytelling. And I think that I had the most rough understanding and education in how to tell a story. How to take people on that ride and it was always so much fun for me to get into the ring, because the ring was kind of a way that I was able to tell that story, but probably in a more physical and violent fashion 

**Steph Pajonas:** Maybe just a little. 

**Dale L. Roberts:** Yeah, when I made that transition into officially writing fiction I pivoted and I started working with a writing coach back in 2022, highly recommend folks.

Like if you ever feel overwhelmed and writing fiction and such, get yourself a good writing coach. It really opened my mind up and it [00:05:00] started to start to identify things. That had already discovered through professional wrestling, everything from identifying your antagonist to your protagonist, which would be your heel and baby face over and professional wrestling.

And, and it was so funny, like my writing coach used to crack up laughing because I would share a story about wrestling and how I would tie those things together and how it would build out that story with that type of stuff. I wouldn't recommend folks getting into the professional wrestling business to learn the craft of writing. You hurt later on because of it 

**Steph Pajonas:** I'm sure you do. One of the things I've been learning about marketing is like the tactic of using story to sell, right? Using story because story is so ingrained in human nature. We're story making machines, right? And so when you're going to be selling your stories or maybe your courses or whatever it may be, giving somebody a story makes them [00:06:00] understand the product a little bit better It makes them understand you a little bit better.

So yeah, I get it. I get it I can see how professional wrestling could be a little bit like storytelling

**Dale L. Roberts:** Exactly. Much like taking your readers on a ride, you have to take those attendees on a ride, the people that pay for the tickets or watch you on television and such. And you have to take them on that ride. And so just going in there and beating each other up for the sake of beating each other up makes no sense.

You have to actually get it. And this was always kind of handed to me by a lot of the people that train me within professional wrestling was like, study Rocky. Rocky is one of the best cases of the actual physicality of things and bringing it all together. But yeah, I, I get so, I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it because it's so fun to talk about the whole craft.

But I'm curious though, and I know I'm supposed to be the interviewee, but I'm going to ask you guys this is How are you leveraging artificial intelligence in your own fiction writing right now? Are you [00:07:00] using it for the full content generation or is this essentially like, are you seeding out ideas with artificial intelligence?

**Steph Pajonas:** Well, I'll take this up since I was just actually talking about this in one of our previous episodes about, and it's funny that we mentioned craft, about how important craft is when using AI. Because you have to know craft and you have to know storytelling really well in order to get a really good response out of the AI. So any one of the LLMs you use, but I really love Claude. Claude is my favorite. So I use Claude a lot, but Claude understands a lot of these craft terms. It understands, your opening disturbance in a novel, an inciting incident. It understands the turns between the different acts. It knows structure, it knows characterization and conflict as well as anybody else, but you have to be able to ask for those things from the AI in a way that it understands, right? So, craft is super important if you're going to be working with these tools.

For AI, I use it in [00:08:00] every part of my process now. Like, it started out with just, help me with descriptions on these things, and then it was, I'm a pantser, so I had trouble plotting for a very long time. So then I was just like, well, maybe it can help me plot, maybe that's, maybe that's what's been missing from my life. 

So I started plotting with it and outlining with it. I'm still very bad at following the outline once I make it. All right. So I won't say it's a cure-all for anything. And then it was, let's pants this novel together. I'll give you the next beat of the story. You give me some prose. I'm going to edit it. I'm going to make it shine. And then you're going to follow my style and we're going to keep going. I'll even use it for rephrasing. So I can find places for it in pretty much any part of the process. 

What about you, Danica? 

**Danica Favorite:** I'm very similar. And like, one of the things that I've realized is it's helped me understand the craft of writing better since we are talking about craft. Like, it was so funny that you started talking about that because. One of the things that it made me realize is that was talking about this in a previous episode where I [00:09:00] don't necessarily plot according to three plot structure or three act structure. Sorry. I'm not that kind of plotter, but I am a plotter. so for me, I don't necessarily do it that way, but what I started to realize as I was breaking down my novels and allowing AI to analyze it, what I realized is I do that all instinctually. Like I already am hitting those different story beats. And so it was really cool because I got to say, Oh my gosh, I am a really good writer in terms of structure. Like I just thought I was a hot mess, but it really taught me, okay. I do know what I'm doing and it gave me, a lot more confidence to be able to say, okay. Yeah, this is good. This is what I'm doing.

So for me, I, use it at different stages. I talked about this in a previous episode and I have no new news to report, but Future Fiction Academy has a process called automatic book machine. Did I get that right, Steph? I [00:10:00] always call it something else. So I'm proud of myself for doing that. But I had AI write a complete novel for me because I wanted to see. Now, first of all, when you just put in that prompt, even knowing all the plotting, all of the stuff about writing a book, if you just put in the prompts and tell it to write you, a book, you will get a book. It will be a crappy book. However, what's great about it is now I can go through and I'm editing it and figuring out where to tweak things and using my skills and author to say, okay, cool. This is how. It needs to learn this. This is how I need to tell it that. This is what it does and doesn't understand about story. And so eventually when it's done, it will be a good book. I will publish it just because I, want people to see that is possible, but it's only possible with an author who understands what they're doing. 

The [00:11:00] AI isn't there yet. And as an author, if you don't have that skill. It's going to show. I can use it in every process, every part of my process, because I understand how to do it and what good writing looks like.

Elizabeth Ann West, who is at FFA, she did a really great uh, session a couple of weeks ago where we were analyzing opening lines of books and it was opening lines of regular books, analyzing the opening lines of books written by AI. So here's the thing, AI cannot write a good opening line on its It just 

**Steph Pajonas:** It's usually the sun, right? the sun the sun like shows up. It goes through the window, dapples on the, the bedsheets, whatever It may be. But it loves to start with the sun. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yes, does. It does. And the thing is, is that all of us as authors, like some of the stuff, the crappy writing AI was doing, we were all like, Oh my God, I feel so called out by this because I [00:12:00] do that. And like, but it was also great because now I can say, yes, this is crappy writing. Yes, I do that. But oh my gosh, look at how much better of an author I can be now. You have to put in the work and you have to be a good writer. 

**Dale L. Roberts:** There's so much to be said right here, and I think this is where a lot of people get the misconception. You've got the one end of things, there's these hypebeasts that are like, Artificial intelligence, you can write a book in 30 minutes and it's gonna be getting you wealth beyond measure. It's like, yeah. I do, I lean in favor of what you were just saying there, Danica. Where the initial foundational stuff that you're gonna get, Is okay, but that could be said the same thing if a human takes that time is sitting down Your first draft will always be your worst draft I don't know of a single person out there that can write a perfect first draft that's ready to go to publication. There's so many things you have to cover in developmental editing structural editing copy editing line editing. So on and so forth. And [00:13:00] that needs to get the same attention. 

You guys have you ever caught the youtube channel? It's hosted by a gentleman named Jason hamilton It's called The Nerdy Novelist 

**Steph Pajonas:** Oh yeah. 

**Danica Favorite:** Oh yeah. Yeah, We know 

**Dale L. Roberts:** Love. Oh my gosh. I love his. And it wasn't until I started watching his videos that the light bulb went off above my head because I'd always been very reluctant to lean towards artificial intelligence because I would get that hammered garbage back. And I was just like, I'm not going to publish that. This is garbage. I was like, I don't like it. 

And then that's when he kind of like, hey, you still have to handle this the same way you would if you wrote it yourself. And I'm like, 

Oh, and that's when it just, it hit me and I'm like, Oh my gosh. And I highly recommend anybody that's, listening to this, go check out Nerdy Novelist.

I love what he does. It's so organic and he's so relaxed about it. And I just enjoy his insights. And that's when it really got me on board with this. Cause I was already kind of, I was on the fence and leaning a little towards pro AI, but as soon as I started hearing that and I saw it's the same systems and processes that you should treat with your own [00:14:00] publications and writing, I was like, That's fun. That's great. You're going to give me a foundational thing that I can just go tear apart. And the nice thing is I don't get romantic about it. I get very romantic whenever I write the stuff. Cause I'm like, Ooh, I like this sentence. I don't want to take it anywhere. I don't know. It's not get rid of that one right there. Whereas something else gives it to me. I'm like, let's butcher this thing. 

**Danica Favorite:** Right. Yes, I feel the same way because I hate editing and I am terrible at editing my own work. And that is one of the things that I do like AI for, is I'll write something and it's not great and I know it, but I don't know how to fix it. And I can say, AI give me some ideas on how to fix this and it will give me ideas. There's no attachment. So I can feel really good about what I'm editing and doing. 

But I really like where you were going with, you know, of that evolution of your attitude to AI. And that really brings us to my first question that we ask all of our guests is how are you approaching AI and publishing? 

**Dale L. Roberts:** I'm a lot more open minded over the past year. I've been working with a company [00:15:00] that is developing their own software for writing and such, so I'm able to kind of give a lot of insights. of how I feel about what something works. But as far as how I use it in my workflow right now, I, I really like it for doing market research. I like for rephrasing. Rephrasing is a big thing because I just love passive sentences. I don't purposely love it. I just do passive sentences all the time and I will just drive my head through a wall. Just trying to figure out how I can reword a sentence that is in passive structure. It for whatever reason It's just always been an issue. Whereas I can just go into something like say for instance ProWritingAid has rephrase I can just highlight that sentence It gives me three different iterations. Sometimes it gives me another passive sentence like, What are you doing with your life? But other times it gives me these perfect rewritten sentences and I really love it that way. 

And then there's also been on the other end of the spectrum of chat GPT where I will be working with them there and I'll say, this [00:16:00] sentence is too long. abbreviate it for me. And then it'll abbreviate for me and I'll read it and I'll go, okay, does this still make sense? Is this better? Is it? And I love that. I love taking a super long sentence and then trimming it down to as basic as possible. So that way I can really deliver even more value within the content that I'm writing, at least in nonfiction goes. 

But with fiction though, this is where I have a full conversation with artificial intelligence about some ideas with fiction and where I'll have like a general idea in my head what I want to do for a story, but I don't know how to get there. And I don't know what I want to do for that act one, two, And three. And so this is where I'm able to kind of spitball some ideas. And it's crazy because it'll shoot some ideas back to me. And sometimes I'm like, that's, trash, but I'm like, what if we did this? And so it almost greases my creative wheels. Even if I don't use the ideas, it at least points me in the right direction. And it builds almost like that momentum and excitement as well. 

I don't know about you [00:17:00] two, but anytime I get a super exciting idea in my brain, it's usually like, Ooh, that sounds, sounds fun. But then I get AI to kind of like suss it out for me and figure it out. Like, Oh, oh, and then I'm like, okay, then I'm just, I'm ready to go ahead and attack the keyboard and I'm ready to go because I love, again, writing. It's so much fun. It's an escape for me. So, I could get generative AI to write the content for me, but at the end of the day, I enjoy writing it the most. So, if anything, I just like to use it for the creative process. 

Now, as far as non fiction goes, I love it for outlining like that right there. Like outlining sometimes just takes so stinking long. If you can give me at least the skeleton, the skeletal work, I can go in and say, no, that's, let's go ahead and put this right here and let's do this right here. I did it for one of my upcoming books YouTube for Authors. That's actually going to be coming out in early 2025. And I got a great outline from, and I used a Dibbly Create. Sorry, if, if I'm not allowed to say any of the competitors or anything [00:18:00] else. 

**Danica Favorite:** Oh, Yeah. No, please do. want people to have access to all the tools and all 

**Steph Pajonas:** definitely. 

**Danica Favorite:** the more you can share, the better, because we don't believe in one shoe fits 

**Dale L. Roberts:** Right. Yeah, it's, it's not like this tribalism, like, you must go with Claude or else.

**Steph Pajonas:** But Claude is my boo and I don't, I don't necessarily want to share him with everybody. So we're all good. We're all good. 

**Danica Favorite:** Claude's been letting me down lately, I'll be honest. he's just, he's moody. He's moody. And lately he's been in the mood to not support me. so 

**Dale L. Roberts:** so with, with, with, 

**Danica Favorite:** Steph can have him

**Dale L. Roberts:** With mine, it's I've been using Dibbly Create, they've been fantastic, they keep iterating and improving what they have. Anytime I've had some issues, I will approach the company directly because I know the founders and they've been super, super helpful, but their outline feature was a game changer for me.

That right there shaved off a lot of time. And again, It's kind of like what we've already said before, where the rough draft isn't something you should always stick with, so that outline, I'm not [00:19:00] going to stick to beat for beat. Like, oh, I'm going to go ahead And talk about that. No, I'm not going to talk about that. I don't even want to write about that. What are you doing? That really helps out. 

Market research, outlining, that's what I love to do, and as well as just rephrasing, and anytime I find myself getting stuck for ideation, I go in there and say, okay, this is where I'm stuck, what direction do you think it'd go? 

This is gonna probably singe your eyebrows here, and I don't know Danica that you know about this but I am a musician. I've been playing guitar since I was 13 years old, so I continue to write music on the side. It's nothing I share in public. Actually, I think this is the first interview I've ever brought it up.

**Danica Favorite:** one of Dale's 

**Dale L. Roberts:** Hey, yeah, yeah, exactly. This is this is an exclusive. 

So I was actually writing a song and I, had the general idea of how the lyrics were going to go. As far as the notes go and the how it was delivered and the timing and such. But sometimes I just put gibberish in place. They're completely nonlinear, nonsensical words. Sometimes I just make up words just so I know where it's at on the beat. [00:20:00] And so I ended up getting a fair amount of it written out for this particular song, but then I found, like, two lines in this pre chorus that I was just 100 percent stuck on. I knew the theme of the song. I knew where I wanted to go. I knew what I wanted to communicate. 

So I ended up going into ChatGPT and I said, Hey, okay, here's the lyrics. This is exactly the direction I want to go for. What could you see within these two lines that's going to match beat for beat? 

And it gave me a good handful of lines, and I think it probably took me I would say at least a half hour of just spitballing ideas until it finally came back. And thankfully it came back and I was able to, go and get the singer lay their tracks down and I heard it and I was like, Oh, goosebumps. I felt so good about it. And I was really thrilled. I think I ended up using those two lines about, I'd say 75 percent of it because I ended up ah, I don't like this word choice. I don't like this word choice. This, this is stronger here. And this is stronger here. [00:21:00] And so that really helped get me out of that creative rut. So it's not just simply for writing books, nonfiction or fiction, sometimes even just generally that creative process in this instance, anybody could probably call it poetry if you, if you will. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. I was thinking that myself, like even poets could use that. And I love that you shared that because that's a new use for AI that makes complete sense. And no one has mentioned that on our show before. And so there we go. Like we have one more new thing that somebody might be thinking, Oh, wait, I can stick that in my back to use, and I think that's what's really cool about this whole AI. World that we're in right now is that the sky is the limit. And so for me, there's nothing that's really gonna singe my eyebrows unless you're like, blatantly steal this thing. Uh, would singe my eyebrows. Like, really what you're doing is I think exactly the beauty of AI and how we can use it. So thank you for sharing that with us, [00:22:00] because I think there are gonna be people who listen to this and say, oh my gosh, yes. 

**Steph Pajonas:** In fact, this conversation is reminding me of all of the people who have said that AI is the end of creativity. They're pounding the drum and saying that this is going to kill creativity in humans. We should not be using it. Don't use it because it's going to make you dumb or whatever it may be you, know what I I hear a lot from the anti AI crowd on this, but, but I see in the same way that you were saying that it actually has been good for people to help enhance their creativity, bring ideas forward that they're struggling with, that they just can't get right. And by, Bouncing the ideas off of AI, they're making progress, finally, and they're being even more creative than they were in the past. So, I'm so glad to hear this from you because the more people who say this, I feel the tide will change a little bit.

**Dale L. Roberts:** Yeah, I [00:23:00] think once the overall like newness and the hype kind of just dies down and we get a little less the hype beasts that are just overplaying it and such, I think people will start to see as it should be like the same way that people probably viewed Photoshop back in the day or the same way people viewed it.

typewriters back in the day. I mean, think about all these different tools. And probably some people felt, Oh, this is the end of times and such. It isn't. Sure, there's going to be some people that are going to leverage it in nefarious ways, but I mean, that's in all walks of business. But to me, I think with artificial intelligence, when we can start to realize that this is simply a tool that's meant to, first of all help you bring out the best in you as well as become more efficient in that process. Because who knows how long it would have taken me to sit down and figure out a specific fiction story that I was probably working on. Who knows how long it would have taken me to outline that book YouTube for Authors. It probably would have been weeks, months. Maybe even years and such. [00:24:00] And I've cut that down considerably.

I mean, just think about how the large language models were trained was with the actual content. And, we can probably get into the ethics of that and such, but I think that you guys can probably address that on future episodes or whatnot. But to me it's almost the equivalent of sitting down, consuming thousands upon thousands of books and having this inside your brain where you can build an almost like an algorithm of sorts as you're starting to build it. Spill your ideas onto the page. 

I really love it and there's so many aspects that I do again, how the LLMs were trained? Yeah, there, there are going to be some questionable areas and such, but I figure I'm going to leave that to the courts to kind of, figure that stuff out.

In the meantime, this tool is 100 percent available to everybody and why just let it just sit there and collect dust or for that matter, just try to make this blanketed statement that anybody that uses AI are bad individuals. No. There are perfectly good individuals out there that are using this the same way that there are graphic designers who use Photoshop or InDesign to [00:25:00] express themselves creatively as opposed to, manually doing all of their art,

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, yeah, and I would say that is very much in alignment with what Steph and I believe as well. It is that idea that like, it's just this whole body of work that the LLM has consumed the same way you and I have consumed a whole body of literature and television shows and YouTube videos and All the things that inform who we are as people and the kind of stories we want to tell.

And I think that's really a good thing to keep reminding people of. That it's just all part of the human existence. And the computers just have the opportunity to learn even more than we could possibly learn. Which is just crazy how much information they have in there. 

**Dale L. Roberts:** For sure. 

**Danica Favorite:** So we talked a little bit about your workflow you mentioned. Do you have any specific AI workflows that you use? 

**Dale L. Roberts:** No, not in particular. I will plug in wherever I see, like I said, outlines or even market research. [00:26:00] I do know that with Dibbly Create, they have a prompt library. That's kind of nice. And it's almost like instead of having to, and I think you two can probably appreciate this, that sometimes going into any type of AI needing to put in a prompt, It's It's a little frustrating at first because sometimes you just don't get the immediate results that you're looking for and so it can kind of be underwhelming.

Having a prompt library available is nice. So for instance, like they have something like social media campaigns that you can put that stuff together. To me, I, I, oh, I, just would rather spend my time doing other things than trying to come up with a social media campaign because it's taking me hours to do months of content before whereas now I can just go into that prompt. I don't need to worry about knowing how to set up that prompt and get a decent enough thing to come back to me that I feel like I can stand behind.

But yeah, there's no necessarily any workflow or anything else. I'm usually just it's like patchwork. I'll get this a little bit of this a little bit of that [00:27:00] we get a little bit of this.

I think the part that I'd never want to strip away from myself is the ability to write itself. like I really enjoy that process. That's something that brings me back to when I was a kid and I would just be absorbed in books for hours at a time, days, weeks, months and years at a time. That was my escape as a kid. Many other kids where I probably loved playing sports and me, I loved reading books and playing music. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Same. 

**Danica Favorite:** I'm very similar. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Same. I read a lot of books as a teenager. 

I have very fond memories of being off in the summer, putting a blanket out on the lawn and just staying there all day and reading. It was one of my favorite things. 

And I tell people all the time that the way to bring AI into your process is to find the pain points in your process. That you think that can be alleviated by AI and then keep all the stuff that you love. So you found the pain points, which were, social media campaigns. I'm sure you are not alone there. There's [00:28:00] a lot of people using it for that, right? But then you kept the stuff that you love, which is the actual writing.

And this is why I'm such a big advocate of this, because I feel like we can get back to the stuff that we love. We can have more hours in the day for the stuff that we love by leveraging these tools and using them, I don't see anything wrong with that. Nothing. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yep. Totally agree. I think that's really important because as I've talked about, I have not yet completely written a book using AI. will let people know when I do, because I do believe in transparency and also I want people to see that level of success. But for me, I do. Enjoy the writing part. Similar to You Dale. 

What I like to do is I, like to dictate my books. What I've realized is that how I process language, how I process information is verbally. And so for me, to be able to dictate a book. I can speak all the book, I can talk about it and then places where I'm stuck or [00:29:00] whatever, then I can put that in AI. And of course, I've been using AI to transcribe all of this. 

But I like what you say about your process being kind of a patchwork because I'm the same way. While there is certainly value sometimes for when you're stuck to be like, okay, I need to think through this. Some of those stuck places are really just, I just need to get this task done.

And so boom, how can I efficiently get it done? And I'll even ask the AI, Hey, AI, I'm stuck in X process. What are your tips to help me through the stuck point? What are your tips to help me through this pain point? Then it gives me. some really good, useful ideas. Going back to what Steph said, that's what we want to give people is those tools and that ability to just say, okay, I need help with this. How can I get help? 

I used to have friends I brainstormed with all the time, but guess what? As we all got busy and everyone has different contracts, different things going on. I can always pick up the phone and phone a friend at 2am and [00:30:00] say, Hey, help me with this point. I'm stuck on. I could, but I probably wouldn't have that friend afterwards. 

**Dale L. Roberts:** You can text me. Danica, I'll just give you my phone number. Just, yeah, just text me. I'll take, I'll take

**Steph Pajonas:** See, I, and I'm 

**Danica Favorite:** Yes! Dale's 

**Steph Pajonas:** I'm here saying, don't, don't call me at 2 a. m. please. Please don't. Ha ha ha ha ha. 

**Danica Favorite:** See, this is what we've learned. The friends I can text at 2 a. m. and the friends I 

can't. I love this. This is awesome. 

**Dale L. Roberts:** there you go. 

**Danica Favorite:** So, yeah. So tell us what your favorite AI tool is. Do you have a favorite? 

**Dale L. Roberts:** I'm I'm gonna I'm literally not being paid to say this or anything else, they've been strong sponsors of me, but I've enjoyed Dibbly Create. Only because I feel more invested in it. They just launched it a year ago, actually this month. it. was a year ago that they had launched Dibbly Create and now they're continuing to expand it. They do have a content writer that they just launched and it's in beta for non fiction. And I'm running a case study. 

It's so funny that we're bringing this up because I'd actually, I wanted to write an entire book with AI, but I [00:31:00] also knew that we had to go through the whole process, as I had mentioned before, so I wanted to do this case study. It was funny. I lost a good handful of subscribers because of that. A lot of people were like, Oh, Dale, you sold out and blah, blah, blah. But the funny thing is, for all these people that had left my channel I got dozens more. A lot more people that are very curious about that, that they really want to see the whole process.

And I explained, hey, full transparency, I just want to see if this is possible, and I don't want people to feel like, Oh, you're not an author if you use AI. That's fine, that's just your opinion. Like, I was having a conversation with some friends of mine about heavy metal, and they were like, you don't get into Black Sabbath, you're not a true metalhead. I'm like, that's just your opinion, I don't care what you think. At the end of the day, I'm still going to enjoy the music that I enjoy. 

And the same thing goes with writing content with AI. You can argue however you want to, but at this point. I am very intrigued by this whole process and that's why I'm doing the whole case study. 

But yeah, doing the full non fiction book. In fact, actually later today I need [00:32:00] to get with Dibbly because they actually have an open marketplace for freelancers and they have editors available through there. So I'm actually going to be working directly with their team. So that's the beauty of how their software works is it goes and integrates directly with their freelance marketplace and you can ask, Oh, I need a I need a developmental editor to go through something like this and it'll recommend three different editors and you can go in and pop them out. If you don't want those ones, you can find some different ones. 

That's one of the ways I could say that, like right now I'm just enjoying it so much, but I'm a bit biased because I do personally know the founders in Marco and Natasha Motino. They're two fantastic human beings I've known for, gosh, we're going on. Seven years now. It's it's been a while that I've known them. So when they started to explore this. At first, I like I said, I was a kind of a fence sitter and I'm like, I don't know where I stand just, yet. They're like, oh we're gonna launch this. I was like, Good luck. Let me know how that goes. And when they finally showed it to me. I [00:33:00] was like Okay, I'm listening. 

And it definitely turned out for the better. But I don't want to sit here and say that that's the be all end all because I've had some great success in using ChatGPT. 

So, I took, you guys are going to love this idea, I took four of my previous book descriptions and I fed it over to ChatGPT. I was like, just read these, study these. I want you to look at the structure, I want you to look at the pacing, I want to see the words that I'm using within there, and that's it. Okay, great. Went through, I fed it one at a time, and it said, Okay, great, whenever you're ready. So I said, if I give you my title, my subtitle, my series name, my author name, the keywords that I want to use, as well as the table of contents, could you write me a book description? And it was like, yes, absolutely, provide me with all that. 

Oh. My. Lord. Literally, just one. One time. I just went ahead, popped it through, boom. It spit out a book description that was, I would say it was 90 percent exactly where I wanted to. I just had to tweak a [00:34:00] couple of little things here and there. But beyond that, you know how long it takes to write book descriptions, at least for 

**Steph Pajonas:** Mm hmm. 

**Dale L. Roberts:** Yeah, I would literally rather eat glass. Like I just can't stand it. You can get me to write an entire whole book in a day, but Heaven forbid if you get me to sit down and write a book description within a day because I just every time I'm like Oh, this is horrible. This is not gonna convert any buyers. I'm terrible. I'm just that's it I'm going back to a nine to five job forget it. But this right here made it so much simpler. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, and absolutely. That's one of the things I also do with my book descriptions, although PublishDrive has pretty cool metadata tool where, you upload your manuscript and it will give you all that from reading your manuscript, which is for people who don't want to do the prompting themselves and don't want the control of the prompts.

That's also a fantastic tool because oftentimes we're too close to our own work to be able to pull that out. Like we think, Oh, this is a wonderful story. This is a love story [00:35:00] about Rapunzel and the prince. And then the AI takes a look at that and says, no, actually, this is a story about Rapunzel and her evil stepmother. And so then you're like, okay, wait, do I have a different story here? Maybe now if I start marketing it as Rapunzel and the evil stepmother, holy crap, now I'm selling tens of thousands of books as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel and make the book be something it's not. 

I love that because again, there's that flexibility. You can use that done for you tool. Or if you're like, Hey, I can prompt it and I want to do the prompting, you can do the prompting yourself. And that's the thing when we were saying earlier, you can talk about whatever you want because it isn't that we're saying you must do this. It's okay. Here's all the options. Everyone gets to do what they feel comfortable doing. If you don't feel comfortable letting AI write because you love to write, don't. If you want [00:36:00] someone to bounce some ideas off at 2 a. m., I'm now going to text Dale. But otherwise those of you listening won't have Dale's number. So 

**Steph Pajonas:** ha! 

**Danica Favorite:** you guys will still have to ask Claude. 

**Dale L. Roberts:** Danica and I here 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, 

**Danica Favorite:** Mhm. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. This is a you-two thing. I just go back to your your prompt that you put into AI, because I think that'll be great for the listeners to understand, is that sometimes when you're getting material out of the AI and it's just not that great and you're not happy with it, it's because you haven't given it enough examples. You haven't, what I call, primed the pump. 

You haven't given it enough to understand what you want back out of it. So I love what you did there because you gave it a bunch of previous descriptions of your books. You gave it keywords, you gave it a lot of stuff that it needed in order for it to give you back something that you could actually use. So I'm just going to highlight that little thing there for any of the listeners. It's really important to get the context going with the AI in [00:37:00] order to get better results.

**Dale L. Roberts:** Yeah, the big thing about description writing too, and I think this can be so difficult, especially if you're really looking to leverage search engine optimization, is getting the right keywords to become more discoverable. And trying to do it on your own, again, it's just Like pushing a boulder uphill.

It's just next to impossible. And when you put it there, it's just like, it reads real rigidly. Whereas I felt like when I gave it over to AI and it was like, Oh, you need these keywords, no problem. I got you, bro. And it just shoots it back. I even asked it to highlight all of the keywords that it had used.

And it would show me each one of those. And I was just like, look at what you did. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It was really cool. And, I also built it to where I would get it to do a shortened description that was under 350 words, I think it is. So that way I could put that and file that with my international standard book? number because you always need to come with just a short blurb that you can put in with that. And mine's split up with marketing copy. Like I really try to separate all my [00:38:00] paragraphs and have it laid out in a certain way. So it's visually appealing and it's easier for people to disseminate at a quick glance. Whereas with a single paragraph, it's boom, done And yeah, that makes life easy. 

Especially in, this is something I would recommend to you guys and anybody else that might be listening in here is, is put together a good metadata sheet and get all that information all on a single thing.

Your title, your subtitle, your series name, author name, number of pages that you have, all your ISBNs, your short description and your long description. So that when you go to market and promote your stuff, all you got to do is just copy and paste that stuff. And when you go to prompt AI again, hopefully you already have a thread kind of put together anyways that you would build off of, but in the unlikely event that you lose that for whatever reason, you'll have your metadata sheet and you can use that to retrain AI.

So that way you can create even more descriptions that are robust with search engine optimization and keywords. 

**Steph Pajonas:** And we keep all those in in notion, don't we, Danica? 

**Danica Favorite:** And gosh, this is a long time ago. Steph helped me set [00:39:00] up a database in Notion where I had all that information. I'm using all kinds of other stuff in Notion, but it's so nice to just have that all organized in one place.

I love that because Notion also has AI tools, so if I don't remember where in Notion I put it, I can ask Notion's AI tool and it says, oh, here you go. Thank you. much. for keeping me on track.

**Steph Pajonas:** All right, well, we're almost done today, right? Do we have any other questions yet? 

Okay. 

**Danica Favorite:** We are. I was just thinking um, we wrap up, I know dale's book coming out and I wanted to give him a moment to be able to share about his new book. he's got a couple of minutes, he wants to do that and then we can 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, that'd be great.

**Dale L. Roberts:** Yes. Currently I have part one of an eight book series right now. It's called self publishing for new authors. If you're brand new to the business and you want to know where to start, this is the best place to start. That's Self Publishing for New Authors. It's available in every online major retailer and library. You can also [00:40:00] look forward to Advanced Self Publishing for Authors. That's actually going to be released on August the 15th. So we're right around the corner. This episode might even be out well after that at that point. So, and then there's going to be a new book. coming out every month on the 15th.

So following that's going to be Amazon Advertising for Books and then Networking for Authors, which by the way I've never been more proud of a book than this Networking for Authors one, and I really truly believe that that's going to be the game changer. But stay tuned to any of my different, activity on YouTube.

You'll be able to get more details about that. But in the meantime, you got Self Publishing for New Authors. It's a banger. It's already getting good reviews. 

**Danica Favorite:** Awesome. We love that. We love that. So thank you for sharing that. I wanted to make sure we had a chance to talk about that book because I know you've sent some information about the stuff you've got coming out and uh, really, really excited. Cause I think it will help a lot of authors. And again, that's what Steph and I really are about is making sure that authors have tools that they can use or [00:41:00] choose not to use, but at least they know the options available to them. And they know of one more option where they're wanting to learn more about self publishing and getting those books they're working on out, we've just given them another really Fantastic. resource.

So thank you for being a resource to us, Dale. Thank you. I appreciate it. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Fantastic. Do you have also any URLs you want to send people to before we wrap up here? 

**Dale L. Roberts:** If you'd like to join any of my advanced reader copy team, you can listen to this any point in the future. Dalelinks. com slash ARC team, A R C team. That's Dalelinks. com slash ARC team, You'll be able to join any of the upcoming launches that I have.

If you miss one book, you'll be able to get the next one, because I'm publishing all the way into the new year. There's going to be a total of 12 books in this entire series when it's all said and done.

**Steph Pajonas:** Nice. Nice. fantastic 

Well, thank you so much for joining us here today. It was a pleasure to talk to you. I love hearing about other tools, about other journeys into writing, especially yours is unique for me. I don't think I've ever talked to anybody who [00:42:00] was in wrestling first before they became an author.

So that's pretty awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. Everybody who's listening, please come to bravenewbookshelf. com where we will have a blog post about this episode. We will put all of Dale's links in there so that you can also go find them and any tools that he's mentioned.

And we will hope to see you guys all next time on the next episode. So thank you for dropping by and listening. 

Bye everybody.

Thanks for joining us on the Brave New Bookshelf. Be sure to like and subscribe to us on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. You can also visit us at BraveNewBookshelf. com, sign up for our newsletter, and get all the show notes.