19 - Leveraging AI for Book Covers and Ads with Malorie Cooper of The Writing Wives

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we sit down with Malorie Cooper from The Writing Wives to explore how AI is revolutionizing the world of book covers and marketing for authors. Malorie shares her insights on using AI-generated images to create stunning, diverse visuals that are often hard to find in traditional stock photos — especially for marginalized communities. We also dive into the ethics of AI, how it's making advertising more efficient, and why authors should embrace these tools to level up their marketing efforts. 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, and welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm Steph Pajonas, the CTO and COO of Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use aI in any part of their business. We've been super, super busy at the Future Fiction Academy. We've been launching new tools, having lots of great classes, teaching people how to use AI.

Oh, and any part of their process. Just like we said, like from text to images and video, there's just so much exciting stuff out there. 

As usual, I am joined by my lovely co host Danica. How are you doing today, Danica?

**Danica Favorite:** Hi, I'm doing great! Thank you so much. So, I'm Danica Favorite. I am [00:01:00] the Community Manager at PublishDrive, and our company does a lot of similar things in terms of we want to help authors at every stage of their journey. So, we help people distribute their books and use some great AI tools to get metadata and descriptions for the books. And then get those books out to the world. We have some other fun tools like royalty splitting that once those books are out there you can do even more great things.

So, I love that we all have these different tools that use some AI. And what's really great is any author at any stage should be able to get something out of what we're all doing here. And that's really our point is that, we're not saying everyone has to use AI for everything. We're not saying, Oh, you know, AI is the best thing ever, we definitely enjoy pieces of AI, but you get to take the pieces you love and use them in the way that makes sense for you and your writing business. And that's super important to us that we accept [00:02:00] everyone wherever they're at, at their journey. 

And, super excited today that we have Malorie Cooper here with us. Malorie is a wonderful, talented author. She also is one of the wives in The Writing Wives. I'm really eager to hear Mal and her insights today because we've had a lot of really interesting AI conversations over the past couple, oh gosh, years or so now at this point 

**Malorie Cooper:** Has it been 

**Danica Favorite:** Like Maybe like a year and a half.

maybe 

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, 

**Steph Pajonas:** could say two, 

**Danica Favorite:** two years Yeah. Yeah. Like we're coming up on it. So, I love that and I love her perspective. So Malorie, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Tell us about The Writing Wives and then we'll get into the fun AI discussion.

**Malorie Cooper:** Sure. Yeah. So I'm Malorie Cooper. I write military science fiction and space opera under the pen name MD Cooper. And I've written about 130 books. Most of my books and art were done before AI was like a tool that you could [00:03:00] use for getting things done. But some of the later book covers I've done actually have been used AI for my own books. And then as Danica alluded to, with my wife Jill, we run a company called The Writing Wives and our primary goal is helping authors do better marketing their books using paid advertising, but also using other tools too, to improve backlist, to build up their newsletter to build super fans and all sorts of other things like that.

So basically day in day out, everything that I do is working with either my own books, my own writing or other authors and their books and their writing.

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, that's awesome. And I love that because you have such a great perspective on publishing from so many different angles, not just from the success of your books, but other authors and the people you work with. So, it's really exciting to hear from you and see what you're seeing in the marketplace, and I love that you mentioned that you've got some AI use in your covers, because I know as we have talked over the evolution of [00:04:00] AI what's interesting and is that you in your books, your characters have AI, except it isn't the kind of AI that we're talking about here because we aren't there yet.

I think that's funny. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that because I think your characters are super interesting and the whole AI concept that you do is super fun. Because I know you have that tech background to be able to say, Look, this is, even though we keep seeing AI. This is what we, actually mean. 

**Malorie Cooper:** yeah, yeah. I did, I did a lot of research into AI. What AI is and what it can be back all the way starting back at about 2005 2006.

I really dove into it. I put open to a lot of like research around brains, and how they work and what we're trying to do. And there's some pretty wild things like like we have yet to actually successfully model an earthworm's brain, which I think is around 18 neurons which is pretty wild. And one of the interesting things we really [00:05:00] discovered is we can take a whole bunch of artificial neurons and we can connect them together. But as it turns out, brains have a lot of software, so to speak, and we don't even know what it is. We cannot interpret interpolate or extrapolate. The the software in in the earthworms neurons. We're working on it, but we haven't successfully done that yet. 

And so the longest time AI research was all really built around, like, We're going to try and recreate the structure of a brain and then just hope that the communication happens the way that we want it to happen. And, not getting anywhere with that, to be honest, it was interesting thing. And on top of that, we were making things that we were calling AI, like some image recognition tools, even as long as five or six years ago were getting called AI. But they had a really interesting problem back then. Whereas if you took I usually have a coffee cup on hand when I do this, but I don't have a coffee cup. Anyway, imagine a coffee cup. There is a coffee cup, 

**Danica Favorite:** There's a coffee cup.

**Malorie Cooper:** So if you, if you were to tell a computer that's a coffee cup and you show it that picture of the coffee cup, you can show pictures of coffee cups and it would correctly recognize them.

They would say like, that's a coffee cup every [00:06:00] time. And, but if you broke the handle off of it, it would have no idea what the handle or the cup was anymore because it didn't understand the parts of things in a way is a good way to put it. And we were stuck on this. We were like, how do we, teach computers about the parts of things. 

And AI stagnated for some time because we all remember we first got like Siri and Alexa and all that and they're supposed to be these game changing things and then they just basically barely functioned as voice to speech recognition systems for like, it feels like it must have been around eight years where nothing happened in that arena. 

And then they came around this idea of two, two new things happened at the same time. One was the idea of what is called stable diffusion. And stable diffusion is both the name of AI image generation and the idea behind AI image generation at the same time. And I forget the guy's name. I was just reading an article about him the other day, but there's one guy who actually came up with the idea. But we start with this cloud of stuff, and then we tell it we want it to look like it'll just change it pixel by pixel until it finally gets close to what it should look like. And the same [00:07:00] thing is true in a way for like how the text stuff works, it's, it's a vector map of words that are most commonly appear to other, next to other words, and then if you give it a direction, it will try to find the words together like that. And of course, it's obviously a lot more complicated than that.

But it was really interesting to me when that started coming around because like, this is an entirely different way of solving the problem. Rather than trying to build hardware that mimics neurons and software neurons and whatnot, we're just letting computers basically form brains in a different way which is pretty neat. And it is fraught with problems, and we're at a very early messy stage of all of this. 

The cool thing I think for authors is that I think that a lot of less image based, but more text based stuff is not super useful in a lot of ways because AI has a hallucination problem, which is to say that it makes shit up, but for us, it's perfect.

Right? Like, we're like, yeah, let's make some stuff up aI.

It's pretty awesome.

When, when you, when you look up Google and Google Gemini tells you that you should add glue to your pizza to make it work better. Cause Google Gemini [00:08:00] read an Onion article. And didn't understand what satire was. That does not work at all in that area, but we're like, huh, what if someone did a glue to a pizza? What would happen? We're like, let's write a story where someone does something dumb like that,

or who knows what, 

**Steph Pajonas:** It's fantastic for fiction, right? We make stuff up all the time.

**Malorie Cooper:** Yep. It's like, it's so cool.

Cause it's, it's what we do. And it's really neat too, because speaking of like, a person who writes science fiction, and I like to think about the far future there's this underlying, there's other thing out there that, until very recently, no one was talking seriously about, and it's called AGI, which stands for a general AI, because, for the longest time we're doing AI, we're like, okay, I need a personal assistant, where if I say, schedule something in my calendar, schedule something in my calendar, but I can't turn around and say, and tie my shoes, or make toast.

Go You know, or something like that. It's like beyond its abilities and comprehension in many regards because the dexterity, of course, involved in tying shoes is very different than scheduling something in your calendar. But now that we actually have all of these LLMs and we're able to train them on certain things, we're actually starting to bolt them together and [00:09:00] possibly make AGI, which is pretty neat because it's an entirely different way forward than how we thought we were going to get to AI.

Which I love and who knows if it's actually going to get us to a competing sentient creature like us, or if it's just going to make useful tools, but I think it's a really important experimentation that we need to go through, and it definitely has, things that make us, might make many of us concerned, it's a rapid change coming our way, it's not going away. It's probably gonna be a little bit messy for a while.

But at the same time, I'm kind of like, Oh, do I want to live in like a Stepford world or do I want to live in a world where things are exciting and change and there's like potential for the future? And who knows? Maybe our looming environmental crises will be better solved with the tools that AI give us.

And while we might be like, Crap, there are these negative things like We don't have servers anymore in restaurants because they're robotic now and sometimes they drop my food in my lap. But maybe the other angle is, and the AI figured out a way to save the oceans from microplastics that are killing everything. There's a lot of [00:10:00] potential here. So I'm excited about it. So that's, that's a, like a 10 minute spiel on all the cool things 

and dangerous things and awesome things 

**Danica Favorite:** I love it. because, I know you have this really cool techie brain that has studied it a lot. I know, as we have talked, like I said, over the couple years definitely months and months of discussion. Like I've seen, gotten to hear that perspective from you, which I thought was really cool. And I thought some of our listeners are really going to enjoy that. 

But what I'd love to also hear is what is your approach to AI and publishing? Because I know, like you mentioned, you've used it some in covers, but again, like you're one of those people who I like this piece, but I don't like this piece.

I'm using this piece, but I'm not using that piece. So what is your approach? How are you looking at AI and the uses in publishing?

**Malorie Cooper:** I have yet to actually use AI for writing books at all. And part of the reason for me is I have a super complex universe. I have like 5000 named characters. The story spans 5000, 6000 years. And getting the [00:11:00] AI to understand that context has been pretty difficult. Although, Claude is really coming a long way in that sort of thing. So, my wife Jill writes books in my universe, and she loaded actually the one she's working on is not from my universe, but she loaded an entire book into Claude and then said, and is rewriting a book that she wrote 20 years ago to fit in with today's technology. And it's actually like, she can interrogate Claude about everything she loaded into it and it's giving her correct answers. Whereas up until recently, there was a lot of limitations where they would only read so far and they'd be like, what's the answer to this? And they wouldn't know because they didn't input all that text. And she gave me some stuff that it wrote and I was like, this sounds exactly like you. 

So that was really cool because I think for a lot of authors, the idea of taking a seven book series and rewriting it for modern audience. And I think she's changing, she changing tense as well. I think she's changing tense as well is it's daunting, right? And it's also it's like drudgery and replacing drudgery is what technology has [00:12:00] been about all along. And that's one of the best uses for it. 

But myself I love visuals along with my art. If I'm reading a book, I love to have maps. I love to have pictures of characters. When Anne McCaffrey had the People of Pern book that came out back in the late nineties, actually, mid nineties, I think. I bought that instantly. Because I want to see all the art and all the pictures of what these characters look like in the settings and the scenes and everything. It was like, like one of my favorite things. I still have that book. It's probably getting to be one of the oldest things I own, actually. Some of my old Anne McCaffrey stuff. 

But I've written a lot of books. I've had five custom photo shoots done with like custom armor made for the models to wear and all sorts of things like that. But it's crazy expensive. It's five to ten thousand dollars a pop for that sort of thing. And the idea that I can get that kind of art made by AI to give my readers this visualization is really cool. 

There are negatives and a lot of that has to do with, like, copyright and training. And the fact that it's been determined that some of these AI models do actually store some of more of the original in them than they've said they do which is a problem I think has to be dealt [00:13:00] with. 

But at the same time, democratization of, everything has always been better. Like it used to be that the only people who could paint pictures were people who had a lot of free time, which meant you had to be wealthy or have a sponsor or something like that because regular folk were working from sunup till sundown to feed themselves.

So making art, making music, whatever, meant you had to have a ton of free time. And then it's still, even if you had some free time, the paper was expensive. The brushes were expensive, the paint, the ink, whatever it might be, it was really expensive. And we've bit by bit been making the ability to create art accessible to everyone.

And us authors, we're a part of that because it used to be you need a publishing house, these things, now we're like technologies democratize this, so now anyone can publish. The iPad, be able to draw on your iPad or your phone. It used to be that like, no, you had to drop like 1, 000 on custom art supplies to be able to make something of a certain quality.

And when people started drawing on their iPads, we were like, that's not real art. It's a refrain we've been hearing forever. Or you can't compose music because you're not like this famous composer, you're just someone with a piano. And it's like, or [00:14:00] maybe you're not, the idea of like, you can record music. Back in the day, recording music required an expensive studio, and only if you managed to sign a deal with a record company, would you have the money to actually access the studio and do a good recording, and then press the discs and get them out there.

And now you got an Apple with GarageBand on it, you can put yourself together an album, and you can throw it up on SoundCloud and start distributing it and, maybe it does mean that the people at the very top can't make millions of dollars anymore from selling their art because there's just so much of it out there that people have enough selection that no one's getting ultra rich from it. But at the same time, I feel like the real purpose behind art is to share and to enrich humanity as a whole. And technology has every step of the way just made that easier, better for all of us. So I'm totally behind using that to democratize this sort of thing. 

And then one more example, and I'll let you guys cut in again. That lack of democratization on art has always hurt marginalized communities the most. Because one of the biggest places I use it is in images for Facebook ads and people will say why are you using it for [00:15:00] that? You can just get stock photos. And it's like, I've got a black author who's writing a curvy black girl. With an Asian guy for her books, there is no stock art. It does not exist. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, good luck finding that, 

**Malorie Cooper:** yeah, exactly. Yeah, you'll never find it and or if you do, it's like they're all making goofy poses because it's not the shoots weren't done for romance or something like that. There's so many layers to it on top of just finding the people with the right ethnicities and body shapes that you want to use. But now you gotta get them in this pose and you want them smiling. You want them touching. You want them on a terrace overlooking Paris or something like that. That sort of thing is prohibitively expensive and it's the hardest for people who are writing in smaller niches with marginalized communities and whatnot. 

So this technology is creating a level playing field that I think is also really good. And that's not even touching on like the fact that people with disabilities can't sit and type for eight hours a day.

And AI is helping with that too. Like there's so many, so many angles

**Steph Pajonas:** There's so many angles there, and I agree. And I love the fact that it's basically, like, it's leveling up the whole industry, right? [00:16:00] You don't have to settle for, a crappy photo anymore. You can go generate something that's gorgeous and will catch somebody's eye and really pull them in. So it's like it's brought everything up to a whole other level and that just makes my creator heart happy.

Like I'm happy to see those things and I'm happy to see definitely more diverse people being, showing up in all of these images. I'm happy to see more diverse cultures. Just the representation is fantastic. I love it. I agree.

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I think that's really important. and I love the idea of the Facebook ads, and I really want to hear your perspective on this and get this as part of the interview, because I know you use a lot of AI images in your Facebook ads when you were doing some ads for me. I remember sitting down with you because we couldn't find stock images of the Western stuff that we wanted to do because it's all the same thing over and over and over again. And we wanted something a little [00:17:00] different, a little unique and bam, we got that. and it was great. And so I know you do that with a lot of, your clients. And I've seen people Yeah. Steph's raising her hand. She's done it with Steph as well. 

**Malorie Cooper:** as well. 

**Danica Favorite:** And, so what I'm wondering is because, of course, you hear like authors. Oh, that has a AI image in the Facebook ad. That's terrible. I'm wondering what kind of feedback are you getting on these AI images for Facebook ads? Because 

**Malorie Cooper:** I don't know that a single reader has ever complained, because I asked my authors periodically, have there been any comments on the AI images or anything like that? And if there ever has been a complaint for in the comments on an ad, it's never been raised to me. And I know that I've talked to authors who've actually asked their readers, do you mind if I use AI images to help to create more art for what the characters look like and everything?

And it's almost always unanimous that the readers are like, yes, give us the art, show us bring us further into the story. And this, so like, I love too, like before, if you want to have like [00:18:00] custom art, only if you were a bestseller, could you do it because, bespoke art is like 500 to a thousand dollars an image. So you have to be making a lot of money to even have five extra images in your book that are bespoke custom images, and 

**Danica Favorite:** yeah,

yeah, that's awesome. And I'm really glad you said that. because I think a lot of times when authors say, Oh, people hate AI. It isn't the readers. It's the authors complaining about other authors using AI and so I'm really glad to hear that feedback. That's the sense I've been getting. 

**Malorie Cooper:** There was an author recently who, and she's actually worked with us in the past, and she did a Kickstarter. And some of the art for her book was AI and some of it wasn't. All the exterior art was all original and then she had some chapter headings that were done with AI. And the interesting thing is that some people found out, and she had disclosed it in her Kickstarter, that she was using AI art in the book. It was very clear and plainly written, not hard to find. And so some authors found it obviously and started trashing on her and [00:19:00] as a result, she funded her kickstarters like 40 minutes later, because there were so many authors who were like, we need to stop shitting on each other and bring each other down that they went and backed her kickstarter and they told their readers about her kickstarter and all the naysayers and doing was making this woman 100, 000 dollars like, I kid you not, it was a six, it was a six figure kickstarter. And I think in large part because of how she was attacked actually did that.

**Steph Pajonas:** Wow. That's a, that's really, wow. I have no words for that one.

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah. It's pretty wild, right? So it actually like it did the exact opposite of what you, because fear tells us like, oh my God, they're saying mean things about me, whatnot. And you want to shrink. And she didn't even address at all that I know of. Maybe she did, but I didn't see anything where she addressed it. I don't think Jill did either. Cause I think she would have mentioned it. She just held her head high and did her thing. So I, I disclosed what I did, I'm not being dishonest, and paid off so well. So rather than hiding from it, she embraced it, and it was, it was huge. 

**Steph Pajonas:** And I'll say that I've been running [00:20:00] Facebook ads for over a year on and off, mostly on, and I've been using AI images the entire time, pretty much. I think when we, when you and I started out we did a few AI images and a few stock photos just to mix it up a little bit, but latter half of the year, I was just like I'm just going to go all in on all these AI 

**Malorie Cooper:** I remember correctly, the stock photos didn't work well for you either.

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. Yeah. And then, and I've never had anybody say a negative thing on any of my ads and people are excited and they click and they go buy the book. So the mission accomplished, right?

**Malorie Cooper:** Yep.

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah.

**Danica Favorite:** And I'm really glad to hear also your results, Steph, because I think it's important for people listening because there is this fear. We see so much of the online bullying. And this is something that Steph and I have talked a lot about in the past several episodes, but we're both very passionate about this, that like you were saying, Mal, like we need to stop shitting on each other.

And I hope that people listening to this have a little more [00:21:00] confidence to say, okay, cool, I do feel better AI image for my Facebook ads, because this is something that's going to help me make more money. And opportunities for authors who previously maybe didn't have those great images for their Facebook ads and were having to pick something that didn't really fit the book but it's all they had, now they have more options and now they have more ability to sell their books which I think that's why we're all here. 

**Malorie Cooper:** So I don't, I don't know if you guys talk about this sort of thing normally, but I think there are some things that need to be watched out for. And I think the industry itself needs to do some things because I don't know if you guys saw the article recently where people were able to prompt, I think it was chat GPT in such a way that it would pretty much completely recreate the source material that it was trained on. And in this case, it was a New York times article. 

**Steph Pajonas:** And that's why the New York times is suing them, right? They need to, yeah.

**Malorie Cooper:** And you can also use Midjourney to basically recreate [00:22:00] Marvel movie posters pretty accurately and stuff like that. So one of the things is I say to people when they bring it up, I'm like, yeah, and I could also pay an artist down the street to do that too. 

This isn't a thing that was impossible and AI is made possible, but I do think that the industry needs to actually put some protections in place to have copyrighted things like that. These are these are copyrighted images. You can't draw Death Stars. You can't draw Darth Vader, and some of them seem to do this. Like I was trying to, we were, I got this weird conversation with someone and we were trying to get different AIs to make Darkwing Duck as Darth Vader of all things. And some of them would do it fairly well and actually make this like Darkwing, like this pretty epic looking thing. And other ones would not give you anything close.

It was like a generic looking duck. With a black helmet that maybe could look like Vader. I'm like, some of these guys are actually, looks like they're taking steps to make it so their programs aren't going to directly create at least, major franchise copyright stuff. I think that's actually a really good step. Um, because because that's like how it is with humans. Like I can, I can look at all [00:23:00] sorts of Star Wars art and use that as inspiration, but I can't recreate it.

**Danica Favorite:** Right. Exactly. exactly. And that is something Steph and I talk about, but I'm glad you brought it up because I think all of these things are good reminders to say, look, there are ethical ways of using AI. It is not ethical and we do not support people saying, Hey, help me create Darth Vader for my book cover. No, that's not okay. But

**Malorie Cooper:** and that's not ethical no matter what tool you use to 

**Danica Favorite:** correct. Correct. And the reality is, is like you said, I could hire a cover artist to do that for me. I won't again, unethical. Don't do it. But yeah, like we do want, again, I appreciate the reminder that. We do need to use these tools ethically.

Don't go out and say, oh, I want to write a space opera, just like Malorie Cooper. No, you can't do that. That's not okay. Now, like, where Jill was doing [00:24:00] where she said, hey, rewrite this in my voice because I am Jill, that's okay. But if I were to say, Hey, I want to write a book like Jill. That's not okay. And just making sure that we have those protections in place. And all of us are operating as ethically as we possibly can. 

And yes, I know There are bad actors out there. There have always been bad actors. There always be bad actors, but if we can lead that charge to be ethical and act with integrity, then that's where we're going to see that change happening.

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, this sort of 

risk isn't new either. There's a particular spaceship that you'll see on all sorts of sci fi book covers because at some point someone made a 3D model of the ship and stuck it up on all the 3D modeling websites. You could just download all sorts of renders using this spaceship on it. And that spaceship is the Daedalus from the Stargate SG 1 series. And everybody that's using it is basically ripping off this starship from a fairly well known TV franchise, [00:25:00] but like a, it was like, later seasons, on a sci fi network kind of TV show. So not everybody knows about it, but I look at him like, oh yeah, you have to know, you have to know your space regardless, because you can buy covers from well respected cover artists and they might use this image because they don't know. 

So it is still incumbent on the author to understand, like at the end of the day, you're responsible for what you're putting out there. We have to be, unfortunately, we have to be educated on a This is the nature of the beast.

It 

**Steph Pajonas:** it's so hard to, to, to know all of these things. So we've got to give a little bit of grace in a lot of situations and then work through it from there, make the change, learn a little bit more, all that kind of stuff. So it's, 

**Malorie Cooper:** Yep. Oh yeah, like I've talked to a number of authors who've used that ship and I'm like, I don't attack them. I'm just like, hey, just in case you're aware. This is actually a ship from a TV series. It looks exactly like the ship of the TV series. So if you ever get your cover redone, you might want to think about changing that. 

And now it's like Midjourney could actually make good starships. Now it used to be terrible because it didn't understand the difference between starship and a sailing ship. [00:26:00] So it would just give you stale sailing ships in space, 

**Steph Pajonas:** I want to write

that now.

**Malorie Cooper:** I know it's actually cool to be honest. But now it actually can do actual starships too. I was even doing ones where I was like, I'm trying to make an omnibus for a really wealthy it's a series called the empire and it's about a very far future empire that's very wealthy and also decadent and Romanesque in a lot of ways. And so their starships are just gold plated, basically, whatever. So I'm like, make me gold starships. And it actually made some epic looking gold starships. 

**Danica Favorite:** Oh, that's awesome. . So with AI, like making things for you and doing different things, what does your workflow look like? Like, how are you using AI in your workflow? And what kinds of things are you doing? 

**Malorie Cooper:** I'm, I'm mostly, I just pop into Midjourney when I need to make images a lot of the time. Pretty much every day I'm making images for ads. And I don't always use Midjourney because there are some authors who are like, nope, no AI art for my ads. And I'm like, cool, then we'll, we'll use what we can find elsewhere.

But I will actually, I'll still in many cases use generative fill and Photoshop for them . A lot of times you don't want [00:27:00] images to be too busy. And AI is really good at doing images, really good bokeh, which means like the background is really blurred because it's a really short focal length that they have. But a lot of stock images are designed that people take like these nice crisp pictures where everything's in focus. You're like, crap, now there's just too much stuff and there's no good focal point on this image. 

So I'll use Photoshop to help pull background things out to simplify the background and whatnot. And generative fill in Photoshop is like one of the coolest tools ever for that because it's actually getting really good now. Or I'll get things like I'll have some AI art, that, the person's got, like, a really weird looking pants pocket or something like that, and, or it could even just be I'm trying to crop a person out of the picture, and, no matter what I do with the hands on the shoulder, I can use Generative Fill in Photoshop just to select that area. Hit generate and it'll generate the shoulder without the hand. And that's all AI too, and that's super useful. So, so I like that. That's pretty awesome. And also even things like upscaling now in Photoshop is using AI to help do the upscaling. If you enlarge an image, you can choose to have it, use AI to interpret what some of the details actually look like.

So when you upscale, it's not [00:28:00] just a blurry mess. That's all part of it. It's really a lot of stuff to improve image flow. And the crazy thing too is like customizing an image like that used to be like the work of one or two hours, where you'd have to like draw paths and do all sorts of masking and blending and stuff like that. And now it's the work of like 30 seconds, which means that I can make more images and test images faster for clients. Whereas before I would probably have to charge people like an extra couple thousand dollars. Sometimes for the amount of image work we'd have to do to make their images and now it's just like that and we can find out what works and doesn't work and get rolling.

I do use some other tools like I use Notion for keeping notes and for analyzing things. I'm getting more and more into using Notion for that. Notion is not entirely AI driven, but they have a bunch of really cool new AI tools that I really like. I'm not using it nearly to its full potential yet, but I'm bit by bit.

I'm getting there. And I guess, the funny thing is there is an AI that's part of my life is like both getting you more useful and also the bane of my existence. And that's the Facebook targeting system for ads, which is all AI powered. Thank God it's improving because it was terrible [00:29:00] back when they rolled it out in January. But it's actually getting pretty good at doing ad targeting now. Which is actually nice because it'd be really, really cool in the future, if as a marketer, I could just focus on messaging and creative and not on having to build complicated audiences, hoping that I can find the right people.

If the AI actually could figure out who it is that likes the thing I'm pushing and I don't have to jump through those hoops, I'd actually be pretty happy with that. So if they could, the next year or two, if they get that nailed, that'll actually make advertising a lot easier. So much of advertising right now is targeting and negative targeting and all sorts of other hoopla like that which is all like a relatively new thing.

It's like it's solving a problem that we made. Because it used to be that, if I want to run a sci fi ad, I would put an ad in a bunch of sci fi magazines. I could be pretty sure the sci fi readers were seeing that. But then we made these global platforms that anybody can see the ad. And then we had to make all this complicated targeting stuff.

So in a way, maybe, I don't know, like maybe in like five years, my job won't even exist anymore. Because the AIs will be so good at targeting ads that you can just make an ad and it'll find the right people. then readers will just judge in the merit of your book. Which would be [00:30:00] fine, to be honest, and then everybody would have an even shake at getting their books out there.

**Steph Pajonas:** Anything's possible at this point, 

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, totally.

**Steph Pajonas:** right?

**Danica Favorite:** yeah, I think that's true. Like just the crystal ball, if we could have it. Unfortunately, it's so broken at this point. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Well, the magic, I feel like the magic 8 ball works better in these things, because it's always very vague about its answers. It's like, maybe.

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I love that. So you've talked a lot about the different tools and things you use. Do you have a favorite? Do you have a favorite AI tool? Can you pick one? Or,

we've talked about a lot, but

**Malorie Cooper:** I think if I had a favorite AI tool, it would be Midjourney. It's just so simple to use. I don't think they've rolled out their web based tool to everyone yet. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I believe it was just this week, they gave it to people, like everybody, and they had rolled it back to you have to create a hundred images, and then it was down to 50, and then it was 10, and then last week, I think they were like, okay, everybody can do it now.

**Malorie Cooper:** Cool. Yeah. Yeah. I'm part of the, at that point when they first rolled out, I was 5, [00:31:00] 000 club. I'd made 5, 000 images. So, I got in pretty much as soon as they rolled out the alpha. Because I know one of the big burdens for Midjourneys people did not, there's a lot of people who find discord confusing to begin with because discord is confusing. It has a dumb user interface. 

But the web based version of Midjourney is so easy and so convenient that I really do feel like it's going to be great. Although I feel like version six of the Midjourney engine isn't as good as version five. So I actually do most of my image generation still on version five, but I also do use Stable Diffusion. Dall-e I think uses Stable Diffusion and then, and actually Open AI has a website, I think it's stable diffusion.com where you can use it too. 

But you can also download and run Stable Diffusion on your own because it is an open source project. So I actually have a system that has like the local version of Stable Diffusion running, which is pretty cool because you can turn all the knobs. Whereas the web based ones, they really dial back what you can actually change. But when you have it yourself, you can customize so much about it. 

And you can do something called Photo Booth, which is a really cool plugin for Stable Diffusion where you can take a bunch of images [00:32:00] and feed it in there. Like take pictures of my main character, Tannis. I had a model do a photo shoot for her. So I have 15, 000 images of Tannis and I can feed in these images. Now, I think technically based on model licensing, I can actually only feed in the ones I used in book covers. But either way, just the idea being I can feed in a bunch of these images and then have it run a training session and I'll say, this is Tannis. And then I can say, draw Tannis standing on a bridge. and it knows that. I don't say like draw a blonde woman in space armor, yada, yada, yada. I can just say draw Tannis. and it will do Tannis. It knows who she is, which is a really cool thing.

Because that's one of the hardest things with image generation thus far is getting it to maybe consistent results. And there's ways to do that with Midjourney and whatnot, but it's not quite as good as Stable Diffusion. 

And the other thing, and this is one of my drums I like to beat. If, AI becomes a really important tool that we have, right now, AI is largely in the hands of a few large corporations. And that could eventually work against this whole like, hey, we could democratize this new tool, make it so that everybody can do things. So I'm a [00:33:00] really big believer in work being done to make it so anybody could actually run their AIs at home. And that way you could feed and train your data AI on your own data that never leaves your house or your business or whatever, and then have that and that would be in your control and not in someone else's control. Because there is a lot of privacy and security concerns, especially for businesses. and feeding information into these large, larger AI. 

So I like playing around with that stuff. It's still very much a super nerdy tinkering thing. It's like back in the late eighties, when the super nerdy guy would buy a bunch of boards and put together a computer. That's where it is right now for building your own AI at home. But I really do feel like in 20 years, not, five years, I was thinking 20 years is how long it took from like the late seventies to the nineties originally for computers. But I think in five years, you'll be able to buy an AI box. And your AI stuff will actually run locally in your house and you can load it up with the models that you want and do your own training and stuff like that.

And I think it's going to get, it's going to get to be pretty cool.

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, I think the future is definitely with open source. 

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** It's getting really, it's getting really good.

The models are getting smaller but more powerful at the same time. [00:34:00] So it's that curve, that curve of development where it's, we're going up, up, up, up, up right now and we have so much more we can, we can still do.

I love Midjourney as well. I'm on that website like all the time typing in stuff, hitting buttons and whatnot. And I follow a bunch of Medium writers who use a lot of Midjourney and they've been in contact with the people at Midjourney. Control Net is coming to Midjourney at some point. So you'll be able to upload a picture of your character in a certain pose and you'll be able to get those poses to come alive in 

**Malorie Cooper:** cool. That's gonna be exciting.

**Steph Pajonas:** Really exciting. Everybody is pushing forward and it can really benefit us as authors. Definitely.

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, That's awesome. It's so funny. When we were talking before the show started, I was telling you both that I had just canceled my Midjourney subscription because I felt like I'm only using it for like two or three images a month. That's not worth the 20 dollars a month I was paying. And now I'm like, Oh man, I [00:35:00] shouldn't have canceled it. So I think there's always that FOMO of saying, ah, but. I think I'll play around more with the free plan, which the free plan is not on the website. You still have to go through discord for the free images. But I will continue to play with it. And once I start using it again enough to justify paying that monthly subscription fee, I'll jump right in there.

But 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, I guess you're not, I guess you're not making tons of images of dinosaurs every week, are you?

**Malorie Cooper:** the 

**Danica Favorite:** not, I'm not! I know you are, you have the cutest dinosaur 

**Malorie Cooper:** had 

**Steph Pajonas:** It was like, I had no idea my life was going to be so full of dinosaurs someday, but here we are. 

**Danica Favorite:** here we are. Oh, I was Just thinking, that's something that, is important to say. And I just said this in the AI for Authors group this week, Of, especially with FFA launching their new free tool and everything, there is always a sense of FOMO. And, you think, Oh no, I've got to have This tool. I've got to try that. I've got to try that. 

No, you don't. Do what makes sense for you and your author business right now. Like I said, [00:36:00] it made sense for me to cancel Midjourney because I'm not doing all these dinosaur images every single day. I'm doing a couple images here and there. Like this morning, I was trying to put together a fun image of me and Steph and ChatGPT failed miserably at this with their Dall-e model. Just failed. It was terrible. So I was like, oh man, I wish I had Midjourney because then I could have upscaled it and done this and done that. I'm like, okay, so later I'll try it in the free version and see what I get.

But, don't feel bad if we're talking about tools or we're doing something you're like, ah, that's not in my budget right now. There are a lot of free tools. Use the free tools and learn what you feel comfortable with and don't feel like you have to do all of the things. because you don't.

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, I think Microsoft Bing still has free image generation. If you go to bing. com, there's like a link somewhere on there for image generation. You can play around as well, because, and that also uses the same thing as Chat GPT, because Chat GPT is owned by Microsoft ish, so. So they're all, they're all in [00:37:00] cahoots. which was back to my, the big corporations are going to own all the AI. So we need to own our own, but that's like, I got a little, I got a tinfoil beanie on, for that. It's not like a full hat or anything, 

**Steph Pajonas:** it's important. 

**Malorie Cooper:** thanks. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Now, this is an important thing to talk about because yes, there are lots of big corporations that are going to be running a lot of these tools in the future. And if we want to make sure that we keep it democratized so that people, everybody could use it, then we have to be championing the, the open source tools as well. So 

**Danica Favorite:** Right, right. And I think that, open source tools, I can remember, again, in the beginning, thinking, oh, these are terrible. And even with the LLMs and the writing stuff, I can remember when Steph was like, Oh yeah, try this one. And it was terrible. it's gotten so much better. I always forget the different names of the ones I mix them up.

But even for writing the other steamy stuff. Originally, those tools were not great And now, in the AI for authors group, someone showed [00:38:00] something that she had just written with one of the open source tools, and it was like, Oh, my goodness. This is like reading a published book. What I love about the open source AI tools is that since they aren't. beholden necessarily to these large corporations, they can do a little more in terms of innovation.

So my suspicion is that as we move into the future, we're going to see better open source tools and they're going to blow some of these other ones out of the water. That's my magic eight ball prediction.

**Malorie Cooper:** Nice.

**Steph Pajonas:** I like it. Alright, did we cover all the questions?

**Danica Favorite:** We did, we got through everything. I know Mal, you were starting to say something. Earlier about Jill. I don't know if you remember that or if that's still

**Malorie Cooper:** Oh, yeah. One of we were talking about when Steph's talking about dinosaurs, one of Jill's friends loves playing with AI and every now and then she gets on a kick where she'll make just all sorts of AI images around a certain topic. And every time she does, she like fires up a mini business, like selling t shirts and mugs and [00:39:00] all sorts with these images on them. 

And she's been writing these sweet romance stories for some time and hadn't really been doing much with them, and AI actually inspired her to create covers and art to go along with them and all these marketing things, and now she's actually building, a legit business around her writing, fueled by her love of the art she can make. That goes along with it. And she's getting readers and all sorts of things. So it's, it's pretty cool how this has been working out. And she's like, she's always like on some sort of new kick. So like the dinosaurs thing sounds exactly like what she's doing to work. 

And Jill actually does it some for some things too. She made some t shirts just for us. And she did them with AI art. 

**Danica Favorite:** That's awesome. That's awesome. I do like that story about the friend of yours who has all these sweet romances that she hadn't done anything with, and now that the AI art is there. Because I'm in a similar position where I have. Some books that I was wanting to put out and unfortunately, I spent a ton of money on a cover designer who ghosted me and all this other stuff and it's like, gosh, I have all these books, [00:40:00] but no covers, and the money to produce a bunch more covers because now I have to do a whole new series of covers. 

**Malorie Cooper:** series 

**Danica Favorite:** it's like, oh, it was so discouraging. And now, with AI art and the ability to have these covers done, Oh my gosh, I'm excited again. Because now, I can do the covers and put the books out. Where, before, going back to that democratization idea, I didn't have another few thousand dollars to drop on a bunch of covers, and now I don't have to, so my readers will get those books sooner. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yay! 

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, that's. And on top of that, that like, sometimes you have to test different cover art. Sometimes you make the, make the wrong choice with cover art and previously it was like, what was so expensive that as most authors you were just stuck with the cover 

**Danica Favorite:** Mm 

**Malorie Cooper:** that you had.

Now you can theoretically use AI to help you rough up a bunch of different covers. And then run ads to them and see which ones convert the best and then go with that, which is also like a cool thing you could never do before. It would have [00:41:00] been prohibitively expensive to do that in the past and now it's totally an option.

**Steph Pajonas:** We just have so much more available to us now, and I'm really excited about that.

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, absolutely. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I think every author, particularly the ones who feel like they've been held back by lack of resources or lack of ability to do certain things like we now have these tools that we can use and again Use them, don't use them, but they're available. And for someone who's always wanted to write a book, or always wanted to publish a book, or whatever that case is, there's now more opportunity than ever. 

**Steph Pajonas:** All right.

I think we've come to the end of our discussion on this and I'm excited now to like go, go get into Midjourney and create some more images. I don't know, just even talking about it. more dinosaurs, maybe. I don't know. We'll see. I do have some book covers I need to work on as it were. 

Mal, do you wanna tell us about any URLs you wanna send people to, maybe writing wives [00:42:00] and your books as well?

**Malorie Cooper:** We're actually launching a new membership program that's starting up in October and where we're helping authors with the holistic whole marketing package around everything they have to do with their books and it's a year long program. Really focused on community and working with other authors and growing your knowledge base and your experience base, not just through your own efforts, but by, by being in a group of people that are up leveling and seeing what they're doing. 

And we also have a cool talk I'm going to be giving coming up in September that's all about how to build rabid fans for your stories, just like Star Wars and Star Trek have done, or Star Wars and Marvel, I think we're using as examples, actually. And that one's pretty exciting, too, because I've done a bunch of talks on how to build superfans, and this is the updated, modern talk on how to build superfans, and really , get the grassroots angle working for you as well, because if you can get word of mouth and grassroots working for you, as well as paid marketing, you can really accelerate things. So that's going on. 

And if you want to check out my fiction books, you can go to Aeon14. com. That's A E O N 1 4. com. And [00:43:00] you can check out all my books there. And there's a lot of them. So there's a top menu item that says where to start if you if you're not sure where to start. It actually has a little quiz. where it'll ask you, like, what kind of sci fi things you like and then point you in the right direction for where to start.

**Steph Pajonas:** Oh, quiz is a great idea. I love that. Ha ha ha. 

**Malorie Cooper:** Yeah, when you write a lot of books, you discover new problems that you didn't have when you had a few. You're always like, I don't have very many books, I'll write more and that will solve my problems.

But then people are like, I don't know where to start, there's too many. And you're like, crap, it's a new problem. So, yep, the quiz.

**Steph Pajonas:** Great idea. Great idea. Awesome. Everybody who listens in today to the episode, you can come by BraveNewBookshelf. com, read the blog post that goes along with this episode, get any of the URLs that Mal has mentioned, and all of the other information. So you gotta like, like and subscribe and all that good stuff.

All that good stuff that I never tell people about. But you know, you probably should 

**Malorie Cooper:** those things, 

**Steph Pajonas:** do those 

**Danica Favorite:** should. We do have a newsletter you can sign up for and we have a Facebook page. So make sure you like and subscribe there. [00:44:00] Because we have a lot of cool stuff. We'd love for you to share this with as many people as possible, because, again, our point here is to educate people even though obviously we're very pro AI here, we really want people to just have the information, and whether or not they choose to use it, that's completely their decision, and we respect that decision, but we want people to at least have the information so that they can make an informed decision on how to use aI responsibly and ethically.

**Malorie Cooper:** Mm

**Steph Pajonas:** Absolutely. Great. Okay, everybody. We'll see you guys in the next episode. Bye 

**Malorie Cooper:** Bye! 

**Danica Favorite:** Bye. 

**Malorie Cooper:** Bye. 

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.