22 - Merging Creativity and Business Acumen with Alice Briggs from Indie Author Magazine

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we sit down with Alice Briggs, the creative director and co-founder of Indie Author Magazine, to explore the dynamic intersection of creativity and business acumen in the world of publishing. Alice shares her innovative approach to utilizing AI tools to enhance both creative processes and business strategies for indie authors. From personalized reader experiences through AI-driven recommendations to efficient marketing ideation, Alice offers valuable insights into how authors can leverage technology to focus more on what they love — writing. Discover how merging creativity with business savvy can transform your author journey. 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 one of your co-hosts Steph Pajonas, C T O and C O O of the Future Fiction Academy. Where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their business. So we have a little bit of, uh, technologies snafu here. We recorded this whole episode, me, Danica and our guest and, Danica's introduction didn't show up. 

So you can imagine I was. on Google. Searching to see if Mercury was in retrograde, which it is not because we've been having all types of technology problems with recording lately. And I I'm trying to fix them. [00:01:00] So I'm doing my best. So I wanted to come on here and redo the intro so that you get a good intro instead of just, nothing. 

And so, my co-host is Danica Favorite as you know. She is the Community Manager at PublishDrive. There's also a sale going on at PublishDrive. From now until November 4th, you can get 50% off your first year so go check that out. It is at PublishDrive.Com. And you can see everything on their pricing page. In fact, A little pop-up window came up and told me about their sale. So I clicked on that right away to go check that out. 

So now you've had the intro. We're going to hand off to our guest. Our guest for today is Alice Briggs. She is at Indie Author Magazine and many other places that she will talk about. So we're going to hand it over to Alice. And let's go get talking about AI and publishing.

**Alice Briggs:** I'm Alice and I'm the creative director [00:02:00] and co founder of Indie Author Magazine. Indie Author Tools, Indie Author Training, Direct To Readers. We keep adding things as we see that there are gaps in the industry that we've got skill sets to, to fill. So we're really excited about, the indie author training, we've done a recent kind of reboot of that. There's a lot of classes, a lot of great discussions. We even have some we're working on like business book discussions that we're really excited about that. 

So there's like a summary that you can read and see, hey, is this a good book for me or not? I think a lot of the first ones, they're not necessarily author specific, but they're broader business books that we can kind of bring to bear in our author journeys as we're becoming more, hopefully, profitable and able to be better business people as authors so that we can do the thing that we love.

So business is the necessary evil and in some ways and if you could but if you can find ways to make it fun and interesting then [00:03:00] That's all for the better for you and for your success. 

So that's one of the things that we're really focused on on IndieAuthorTraining. That's IndieAuthorTraining. com. IndieAuthorMagazine. com, of course. And then Direct2Readers. We're super excited about that. It's been kind of slow rolling out of beta. And so hopefully by the time this goes live it seems like, You juggle multiple websites and then there's always something breaking, so. Don't always go according to your schedule.

You're like, oh, this just blew up. Have to go over here.

**Steph Pajonas:** of my life. 

**Alice Briggs:** So, that happens in life too. Just tech seems to be particularly prone to that. We're really excited about that. And actually we're using AI. Like our own closed LLM to help readers find the next book that they're going to absolutely love. So they can type into our little chatbot, Hey, I really want to read a book about this type of person in this type of setting with these types of tropes. And they'll say, Oh, hey, we've got these for you. So it's [00:04:00] not training a larger LLM for those people who are a little skittish about that, but it's our own little ecosystem that is going to be really, really helpful because there is no one person who can read all of those things. 

**Steph Pajonas:** When Chelle was here a couple of episodes ago, she was mentioning the Direct To Readers website. It sounded really, really cool. One of the things I think most people struggle with is they finish a book and they, Freaking loved it, right?

They're like, Oh, this was the best book ever. And I want to read something just like it, but maybe a little different for the next one. And then they go and they're searching on Goodreads and Amazon, and they're just not, they're not sure how to ask for what they want and their searches are just terrible anyway.

So I'm really excited about the fact that you guys have this cool ecosystem with an AI chatbot. I 

**Alice Briggs:** yeah, and it should only get better over time, like the more it learns and the more it figures out how to ask you the right questions or how to engage with that conversation to find the actual perfect fit for you, then it should be just a win win for [00:05:00] everybody, readers as well as authors, so, because it's not as narrow to genres, like Amazon or some of the other platforms are, by necessity. Like, you just can't have five million things. But because you can actually search for tropes and character types and that type of stuff, then your ability to target somebody really specifically as a reader is, is kind of infinite, which is exciting.

**Steph Pajonas:** That is very exciting. And I'm going to rewind to a little bit further back in your discussion about Indie Author Training and doing the business non fiction books, right? Are you choosing some business non fiction books to help authors become better business people? Because there are a lot of authors that need this. 

**Alice Briggs:** and that's, so both Chelle and I come from, come to the author world as business people. We started out in business and now we're here. So we've brought a lot of those kinds of things with us. And we're both still involved in other more business 

specific types of things. and that is something, not just authors, [00:06:00] but any creative type profession, it's very difficult to take, like, this is your little baby, And now I have to sell it to the world. In order to shift from creator to business person, from right brained creator to left brained marketer, business person, numbers, data, all that, kind of stuff is, is difficult for a lot of people. 

You need to have some of that or if that's not your desire, then absolutely don't worry about it. Write your thing and don't worry about selling it. But if you want to transition to where this is an income producing thing for you, then you do have to master some business skills. 

**Steph Pajonas:** You do, you do. and then I was having a discussion with somebody on Facebook and, they were asking why somebody picked up AI, you know, and I mentioned myself, I'm aware that AI is becoming very big in the business world. Lots of businesses are taking it on. They're using it on their back ends. They're using it as part of chatbots. They're using it as. research, all this kind of stuff. and I felt that I had to also understand AI and how it worked as part of my [00:07:00] business, as part of publishing. I also said, I'm learning AI so they can be a part of the global ecosystem for business because I have to compete on the same level as all of those people, right? And then the person responded to me and said, it sounds like you missed your calling in a world of finance. And I was thinking, I'm not running a charity here, lady. I'm not running a charity. I'm selling books for money that people give back to me, right? Like, this is how, this is how it works.

**Alice Briggs:** Right. Yeah. Yeah.

**Steph Pajonas:** right? And I'm not running a charity. I'm sorry. 

**Danica Favorite:** Well, and I keep joking about that, you know, like I would love to have a patron of some, Sir. What's-His-Nuts, putting me up in a beautiful castle somewhere. And I could just freely write whatever I wanted to, but that's just not the reality. The reality is I have bills to pay. I don't know about you, but I like to eat.

Eating is good. Um, 

**Alice Briggs:** I like having somewhere to live. Yeah. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. I think I was talking [00:08:00] to Chelle, I can't remember if this was on the podcast or just one of the conversations she and I were having about like the idea of having a book club and having, authors reading books about business because, um, that's something I am just craving in my life because I really want to be able to looking at, okay, where is that knowledge gap and where can I learn the things so many times the author journey and what I hear from authors in the author spaces, they're all emotionally based decisions. 

They're all like this emotion around, this is my creative work, this is what I love, etc, etc. There's nothing wrong with saying, this is what I love to do. Personally, like my current journey in life is to say, okay, what does meaningful work look like? I know I need all these things, but I also want to do it in a meaningful way. So I want to make money, But I fulfilled in that, which for me, being an author, helping other authors, that's that intersection for me [00:09:00] to make that, meaningful work.

But I recognize that in order to do that, in order to make sure that, Hey, the mortgage gets paid, the dog gets fed, you know, and so let's talk to authors about that and train them in ways to think like a business person and understand that yes, there's this creative side. But there's also this business side and I love that you're working with the business side because I think that's what we really neglect is to understand that this is a business and how can we be better business people, not just so we can feed ourselves, feed the dog, but let's be honest.

Like, there's also people out there who would take advantage of authors and. If we can think of things as a business, then we're in a better position to advocate for ourselves and get the best deals for ourselves moving forward. So I'm excited for that. I can't wait till you do more of these things because I'm here for it.

I'm ready. 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah. and I think, cause, so often we tend to just completely divorce the two, like it has to be all creative [00:10:00] and feed the muse or whatever, or it's all practical and money, and, there, there should be a blend of both, and part of that is finding the blend for you that's your happy medium. So it's like you were saying, so you can have that fulfilling work that's also helping you to pay the bills to whatever, degree that you want to. And I think so often we tend to think that, oh, that means we have to write to market. And that means exactly this. specific, one book every month, or two books a month, or it's very regimented, where no, not necessarily. You can make money in a lot of different ways. You just have to approach it differently, depending on what your goals are, who your audience is, and what you're doing. 

So, I look at Pierre Jeanty, he's killing it, selling poetry. Like, who would think that I it just I'm, I'm so excited for him. I think that's amazing, but that's like a test case of this is really a niche thing that he is doing, and yet he's doing really well because he knows how to market, he knows the business side of it, and he balances those two things [00:11:00] really well. And I think he can do that in pretty much anything. 

**Danica Favorite:** You know, Pierre is so successful. And he's number one, he's a great human being. But also just, the poetry that he writes, I'm like, wow, that touches me. It's beautiful. And yet he has this successful business that I hope someday I can emulate. I think that is where thinking with that business mind in realizing, okay, we have this IP, we have this thing we wrote. How many ways can we take it and use it? Our last guest that we just had was doing translations and we're going to have someone coming here in a few weeks about doing audio books and like all of these things. That are all the doors that are open to us now because we have the AI to assist us and we can then do a better job as business people, but then that frees up also that creative side. 

**Alice Briggs:** And that's a lot of the business tasks are not necessarily, I [00:12:00] think some people really enjoy them. I don't tend to and like putting on your marketing hat for, if I, I don't know how to describe my own stuff, like it just is, but that's one of the things I love using AI for is because then I can just upload a thing and say, Hey, describe this to this type of person and then it'll spit it out.

Well, I've never thought about that. Or what are other ways that I can use this thing to help, to either to market it or just package it differently, like you're saying, like translations or AI or doing a game or I'm have a Kickstarter right now where I'm taking a novel And I've pulled out parts of it and delivering it as letters. 

So there's all these different things that you're taking your same story, your same idea and you're just packaging it in different ways so that you can meet different people where they are. 

So you're expanding your reach, but you're not having to like just. agonize over all that. Just feed it in, ask it, like, oh, I like that one. I'll try that one [00:13:00] next.

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I love that I was really disappointed because I was like Ooh, I want to get Alice in for the show and everything. I was like, Oh, darn it. Her Kickstarter is going to be over. 

**Alice Briggs:** It tomorrow, but yeah. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I love how brilliantly you planned out that Kickstarter and it's just such a unique idea. Okay, so I know it's over, but could you just tell people a little bit about it just to get a taste of this amazingly clever idea that you came up with? 

**Alice Briggs:** So the, the backstory I started writing this story and I started out, I was like, I'm going to write, I've never really written fiction before. So preface this by saying like complete novice. I've written a lot of nonfiction, published a lot of nonfiction, but haven't so much done fiction. So I love cozy mysteries. I'm going to write a cozy mystery. I get, 30, 000 words in and I'm like, that's even a cozy. I don't know what it is. It's not a cozy. 

So I'm like, okay. And so I just shelved it for several years, and [00:14:00] then I actually fed it into ChatGPT, and the premise, I just put that, I'm like, what kind of book would this be? And then it gave me like, seven different genre options of how it would fit into those, and I was like, oh, okay, so it's a cozy thriller, is what it is. Cause it's not dark enough really. It's still that light, cozy kind of feel. So I have this novel, and one of my beta readers, she's like, What is she doing?

Like, because, I talk to strangers, so my character talks to strangers, and they're like, What are you doing? You don't tell strangers your stuff, and I'm like, Well, but I do. 

So I got wondering about how would she explain that to people back home? She's from Michigan, she's traveling to the UK. So if she's writing somebody back home, how would she explain her behavior? 

So that's kind of where the whole thing got started. And then there are other places out there. Like the Flower Letters, there's several different similar type things. So I figured there would probably be a market for it. But [00:15:00] the Kickstarter is partly just to test the market. Are people interested in this thing? 

So and she's an artist, which I'm also an artist, so she's sketching as she goes and then her artwork ends up being clues to the mystery. All that kind of stuff. So it's like this whole big complex 

thing that I have done for my first fiction.

So, they'll be mailed physically. I'm doing email as well, so that they'll be weekly letters over 12 weeks. So, either emailed or printed, and actually mailed through the mail. 

**Steph Pajonas:** That's fun. I haven't seen a Kickstarter like that before. That's cool. 

**Alice Briggs:** I don't know what to do with me, but here I am. Hi. It's a story. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I know. And that's what I loved about it. I was like, okay, we have to at least have her like tell people what she did, because I think it's really cool. And, hopefully we'll see, really great success with that because I just loved it. I thought it was the most clever idea I'd seen in a long 

**Alice Briggs:** Oh, thank you. Well, and that's, it has gotten some, starting out with zero audience. It's really done quite well. I funded within 24 [00:16:00] hours, which I was pretty impressed with. It's not tens of thousands, but we're doing pretty good. I'll have them on my website eventually. Once I get the Kickstarter all delivered and everything, then I'll do that, because then I will have created this thing that needs to, people need to be able to buy it if they want to.

**Danica Favorite:** Absolutely. Absolutely. So stay tuned. Those of you who are listening and missed out on the Kickstarter, be looking on her website, cause it'll eventually be there. 

**Alice Briggs:** and that's aabriggs. com. So I have a bunch of websites of my own as well as magazine ones. 

**Danica Favorite:** okay. Awesome. So let's go back to the AI stuff. Cause you, you have talked a little bit about how you've used AI and the fact that you even use AI to come up with this whole plan cool Kickstarter idea. So tell us a little more about how you're approaching AI and publishing.

**Alice Briggs:** So for me, I am using primarily as a brainstorming tool or to do task s that are somewhat repetitive, that I can say, here's a [00:17:00] template, please give me this for this other thing. So my favorite is Chat GPT because I love the custom bot. So I will create a custom bot for nearly everything. They're like, oh, I have this thing that I'm gonna do two or three times. Well, I'm just gonna tell a bot like, this is what I want you to do. And then I love that you can just upload your PDF and then you can ask it whatever questions. I'll do that for marketing things a lot of marketing things, a lot of just ideation.

And I have experimented. I haven't done a tremendous amount with it, but I did feed my novel into there. And I was amazed at how similar the feedback was that it gave me versus my initial beta reader, so I was pretty impressed with that. I'll be using that more as. I then go and read and develop the novel. 

So I have I don't know, I have probably like 30 different bots that I use depending on what I'm going to do. And I'm always creating new ones. I'm like, scroll, [00:18:00] scroll, scroll through the list to find the one that I want. But I love the fact that you can just basically automate anything that you're wanting to do quickly. And then , a lot of times, I don't really care what it says, I don't like the things, but usually there's a few of them that I like, or I like bits and pieces of them, so then I combine those, and then I'll do whatever it is. 

I'm taking a Facebook ads class, and so I created a bot. That I can just either give it a webpage, or I can feed a product in a PDF or something like that. And so it'll give me the headlines, it'll give me the ideas for creative and the primary text, all of those things. I just upload it, click, go, and it just goes.

And then sometimes I'm like, can you give me more of those and it does certainly It likes that word so I really like that because that's the the method that I'm using is rapid [00:19:00] testing of so you're looking for 20 at least different ideas that you're going to test all at the same time to see which ones people really respond to, which they're never the things I think that they would, so 

it's a, it's good that ChatGPT is not inside my head, it's outside and can pull from like a wide variety of things that I can test. So it's been incredibly helpful that way, 

**Danica Favorite:** I love that I think, what you, were saying is a great segue into the next question is, what does your workflow with AI look like? Because I'm telling you, I am so fascinated with you using your AI bots. and I know you've got some integrations and things that you use with Zapier.

And like I sit there, I've tried to grill Chelle on some of it, going Chelle teach me how to do this. And she's like, Oh, Alice is the expert. And I'm like, okay, 

we are here. We're asking Alice, let's talk about your 

**Alice Briggs:** yeah, I, I do more of the bot, so I'm not so much as Zapier, as that Chelle usually does that.

Can I [00:20:00] write an actual cozy mystery this time? So I have a series of books. And so just starting like in the author realm I said, this is what I want, give me ideas as to, what type of heroines might be involved in the cozy mystery.

And so it gave me a list of, okay, I like this. Then give me, a list of three friends, or give me a list of possible titles in West Texas, or names of towns in West Texas. And so I asked it for an outline, I asked it for a fuller outline. I don't have it to where I can write the full thing yet. It might be close, I don't know.

I have images for some of my characters, so I can keep those straight.

I have one of the things that it can do really well is and it's getting better at remembering and remembering across conversations. 

So, some of the things that I've used in the past, they're not as helpful now because it's the tool itself has adapted and gotten to where it just kind of does that [00:21:00] naturally, but like you can upload your whole thing in there and then ask it questions like, oh, what arm was broken and in the story or, who had this happen to. So you can create your series bible just using it by asking it questions and uploading your things. And then I like on the, the back end. So okay, you're, you're a cozy mystery writer and these are the things and then I keep adding to that bot. So I keep helping to flesh it out more and more to where, anytime I'm asking it on the front end, a lot of times I'm like, well, put that in a bot, like, 

So it just automatically knows that this is what it's supposed to be doing. So, but then you can have it, 

**Danica Favorite:** As far as the workflow,

**Alice Briggs:** yeah. And 

**Danica Favorite:** you know, like, like telling it, Hey, add this to the bot. I, I like, that's something that I've been using AI stuff for a long time now, and this is the first time that it, like light bulb. Oh, I could just say in the chat, Hey, add this to my bot. 

**Alice Briggs:** well, I haven't, I [00:22:00] haven't tried that but I probably could. So I've just gone and edited the bot and just added it in at the end. 

**Steph Pajonas:** What I've noticed about the bots is that they're great for the two main things that they're really great for are for this memory feature, right? and like a specialized task. So you give it all the memory stuff and it can do this specialized task. And then it's great if you have like a repeatable task.

That you're doing over and over and over and over again. You don't want to have to seed that conversation every single time. 

You can come back to the bot because you've already set it up. So I'm guessing you use 

a lot of that in your workflow. 

**Alice Briggs:** So, and that's in anything that I'm like, well, then either make a bot for it if you don't, if I haven't already, or, add that to the bot, so it's going to automatically do that. Because it'll do multiple steps of things fairly well, and with greater and greater detail, the longer it goes, and I can only imagine that it's grown in its abilities so much in the last year that who knows what it's going to [00:23:00] be able to do in another year. So it'll be amazing. Then, like I mentioned before, I really like it for marketing things. You can just upload your whole book and say and so I've, I've tested that a lot with for my, I teach a course on bots. on IndieAuthorTraining. And so, because I didn't have my own fiction, I used public domain works. And so I uploaded Agatha Christie or whatever. And partly because I know those works very well, so I wanted to verify that, okay, the bot is doing what I think it's doing. 

Because, always a little sketchy. But then you can say, okay, what are some great ideas , to market this? And. I think, can't remember, one of the ideas that it came up with was so creative and off the wall that it would be great, and it was something about, like, having an actual train trip that you were basically having, a murder mystery thing on a train which Poirot does travel a lot on trains, so, it was kind of a perfect fit for that book.

And yet, I [00:24:00] don't know that I would have thought about that. So then, it's like, well that, in the States, we don't do trains at home, so, I have to figure out how am I going to adapt that, but it just, it got the wheels turning. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I think that's great. So I know you have the class on making bots, but you have any like tips or secrets you can share with our listeners that might help them with their bot creation and get them excited. 

**Alice Briggs:** One of my favorite things that you can do is you can upload PDFs on the backend. So, I will do a lot of templates . You can upload one, and you can either put that in the text on the back end, so, like, for a blurb, for example, I had a series of non fiction books, and I had a template for the blurbs, so I fed that template in, and then I said, and here's several examples of this, so this is your knowledge base that you're working on, and then on the front end, you can ask it.

Then you can upload the specific book that you're working on right then, but you can have it have a broader base and understanding of who you are, [00:25:00] what you're doing, all of that kind of stuff by uploading files on the back end. And you can tick the box that says, don't use this for training or whatever, no idea how much that means, but I'm not all that worried about it either, so I'm comfortable with doing that. 

I like when I first get started with something that I haven't fine tuned, I will use a very, very simple prompt, and I'm just going to see what the bot gives me, because sometimes it, I'm like, I would not have thought of that in a million years, and I really like it, so then, like, do more of that, and you can ask the bots too, or you can ask that just in, in the conversation, how can I prompt you to give me more like this? And then you can add that on the back end. So, those are kind of a couple of the things that I use a lot. So, let the bot have it.

**Steph Pajonas:** I love prompting. I love 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** ask for prompts. 

**Danica Favorite:** That's my favorite. 

**Steph Pajonas:** prompting for Prompting and I guess they call it meta prompting. But, yeah, I like to ask, how 

do I get this out of you? [00:26:00] And believe it or not, when it gives me the right text, to turn around and turn into a prompt. It 

always works. So this is why I say, 

you know, have a conversation with it, understand what it's looking for, even ask it how to approach that. 

And you're going to be so much 

**Alice Briggs:** Mm 

**Danica Favorite:** I agree. It's one of my favorite tricks as well, because like when you know I want you to do this thing, but I don't know how to get you to do this thing. I can say, Hey, I am trying to get this result. I don't know how to get there. Help me get there.

And it's so much faster than trying to rack your brain, figuring out, how do I get there? The AI tells you how to get there. 

**Alice Briggs:** And I like to ask it to give me like a number of something. So in fact, one of my bots, I call it a brainstorming bot. And it's just, whatever I ask, I want 20 of them. But that's, this is the whole, the whole bot. 

I just don't want to write, give me 20, like every time. Because then you can ask it and say like, Oh, I really like five, seven, and 12. Can you give [00:27:00] me more like those? And then, then you've got somewhere to start and to suggest, just to build off of, rather than, you know, no, I don't like that, but I don't know what else to ask you. If you've got a whole bunch of them, then usually there's, several that you're like, well, that's close. We're getting closer, then you can do the same thing and eventually. Narrow in on, on what you're looking for.

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, I do the same thing when it comes to any kind of writing anything. Give me three examples of this blurb. Give me five examples of how to rewrite this sentence. I always ask for multiples of everything because it's never going to be right on the first shot. So I always ask for like three, five, give me 10 names. And then sometimes, if you can go 10, 20, you get more variety and you're less likely to be stuck in one of those, one of those areas where, every 

**Alice Briggs:** Right. 

**Steph Pajonas:** named Willow creek. You know what I mean? So like, you don't want to get stuck there. I don't know what Willow Creek 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** but it is everywhere for some reason. So yeah. [00:28:00] So yeah, that's great. I love the fact that you made a bot

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah.

**Steph Pajonas:** like, give me 20 of everything. I love it.

**Danica Favorite:** Funny thing a lot, too. I'm like, wow, I never thought to just make it a bot. Like, I just type out, give me 20, but no. 

**Alice Briggs:** I like, I like to automate as much as I can. Of the things that I enjoy doing. And so I don't automate those, but anything like that, nah, that's gonna speed it up. And I'll get to the stuff I really want to do here faster. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. 

Anything, anything tedious. Let's just farm that out. We're not 

interested in being tedious. So Yeah. 

I get it. I get it.

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. Well, and I think that that's really the important thing with AI. And this is what I think Steph and I both like to tell people, is do the stuff you love to do and give the rest of it to AI. And I think I first even heard this from Chelle is giving yourself that stuck list of that brain dump of all the stuff you don't like doing. And then, see what of that you can [00:29:00] farm out to AI. And with you putting that into a bot, that just makes so much sense to say, okay, here's all the stuff I don't like, boom, the AI bot's handling it, and now I can move on to what I really love to do, and that list is going to be different for everyone. 

**Alice Briggs:** Mm hmm. Yeah, it is. And it should be. And that's, part of what, like y'all's podcast and other discussions It's, finding out what the realms of possibility are so that then you can say, Oh, here's this thing that I would really like to do something else. And if you can try the AI and if that doesn't work, then think about hiring out that to somebody else. You're not locked into any one particular thing, but yeah, definitely do less of the things you hate and more of the things that you love. All things being equal. If you can make more money and still like, why, why torture yourself needlessly? 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, and I love that description you just gave of the podcast. I think Steph and I need to adopt that a little more and say, You know, we're sharing the realms of possibility. [00:30:00] because that's really what it is, is the realms of possibility. 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Hundred percent. Mm 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. So, let's take out final question and. tell us about your favorite AI tool. 

**Alice Briggs:** Chat GPT. So, and partly, that's where I started, so I'm used to it. I think probably the other one would be Midjourney for images. I enjoy that quite a bit. although. so I'm, I'm an artist, I'm a painter, I draw, I do all those things. But I like the fact that it's so much faster and easier to do something unique and different and that either I can pull elements out and do something else with it, or it's just not my style, but I like it and it's fun.

So it does things that I can't or don't really want to do. So, I tend to be pretty old school on all of that. I've been like watching in the group on Raptor Write and all that kind of stuff. That looks really cool. Like, I don't have time to learn that right now. 

**Steph Pajonas:** It's funny that we're like two years into this, and then you've, we've already 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** [00:31:00] an when it comes to only two years old and we old school already, 

**Danica Favorite:** Well, and it's funny because I was thinking about that when you were saying, when we've been talking about doing all the bots, of course, I'm in my head going, Oh yeah, she uses ChatGPT And then I thought, wait, a second, I'm so used to that being the default norm, and so I knew answer to your favorite tool was going to be Chat GPT, because everything we've been talking about is really the 

**Alice Briggs:** It's pretty obvious what I use. Yeah. 

**Danica Favorite:** And I was like, Oh wait, we may not have clarified this is a Chat GPT thing. And so some of the listeners might be like, okay, well wait, where is she creating bots? How is she doing this? Is she a programmer? No 

**Alice Briggs:** No No 

**Danica Favorite:** It's right in Chat I love 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah. Yeah. And they're, they're very easy to do. They're very, very easy to do. So it's a pretty quick learning curve. And a lot of it is just kind of more the fine tuning of getting the output to be what you want it to be by tweaking the stuff on the back end. That's the difficult. part. It's, [00:32:00] that's not super difficult. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, this was a great 

invention for them to 

introduce this last year. Because everybody has these tasks that they're doing over and over again. And So we might as well make that so that. It can be repeatable and 

it's easy. as long as you start making 

things easy for people, then they're going to keep coming back. Like, let's face it, nobody wants to work with anything that's difficult, like over and over and 

over again. So if you were user experience designers and your engineers can come up with something that's easy and fun to play with, then Hats off, because I think you've got a winner there, right?

So, ChatGPT is definitely cornering the market on that kind of stuff. There are 

other tools, I'll say, out for any of the listeners. There are other tools out there that let you make bots, too. I think it's Poe. com lets you make some bots on their system. And then TypingMind has these characters that you can make that are very similar to the bots. So, there are other ways to do that if you're not a ChatGPT Plus subscriber. But I have to admit that [00:33:00] ChatGPT is doing a great job of this. 

**Danica Favorite:** to typing mind, I know actually Steph, you're the one who turned me on to typing mind as well. So. 

**Alice Briggs:** I haven't heard of that one. I'll have to check it out. Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, it's typingmind. com and it is basically like a shell portal type thing for a bunch of LLMs, right? So you can give it keys to Anthropic, you can give it keys to OpenAI or Gemini and OpenRouter and a bunch of other places. And it allows you to switch back and forth between any LLM that you're looking for so and I like the fact that it's got organization on the left hand side, it lets you put your chats into 

folders and rename them. 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah. 

Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Which is the thing that I really missed. I was like, why is there no organization in this thing? And so this is why I ended up switching at some point to Typing Mind because I was spending time scrolling through the list of chats, trying to find things.

And there was like, Oh, this 

**Alice Briggs:** Right. Which defeats the whole point. Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** and I'm in this thing for the time saving aspect of [00:34:00] it. 

So yeah, so TypingMind is pretty great. 

I highly recommend it to people. 

**Danica Favorite:** yeah. So this was really good. I'm so glad we had you because again I think that you're doing so many cool things and with the bots and that's really what our goal is is, learning from people, learning from each other and helping other authors as they figure out what this journey looks like and how to handle their author business in a better way.

So, thank you again for being here. 

**Alice Briggs:** Thank you so 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, thank you so much for being here and 

talking to us. I'm so glad that you were able to make it. Would you want to go through like the URLs and stuff of where everything is one more time 

**Alice Briggs:** Yeah, 

**Steph Pajonas:** that I have it all? Yeah. 

**Alice Briggs:** Sure. So the magazine is IndieAuthorMagazine. com. And then we have IndieAuthorTraining dot com, and my course, if you're interested in that is called Clone Yourself with ChatGPT. 

And then we have direct2readers. com, and it's direct with the number 2 [00:35:00] readers. We have both, the TO as well as the number 2, but I think it's the number 2, And then what else? My personal fiction is aabriggs. com. 

**Steph Pajonas:** So thank you so much for being here with us today. I'm going to let everybody know who's listening that you can find a transcript and a blog post about this particular episode up on brave new bookshelf.com. And I'm going to make sure that Danica doesn't have anything else to say before we sign off. Do you? Danica 

**Danica Favorite:** Just a reminder, the final days of the PublishDrive Sale, 50 percent off until November 4th. And also please remember a Brave New Book shelf does have a Facebook page. So be sure to go ahead and add your likes to our Facebook page because we definitely want to start growing that a little bit more. It's kind of pathetic right now, but we also always forget to mention it in the podcast.

So here we go. We've just 

**Steph Pajonas:** We forget to mention that. And we also forget to mention that we're on YouTube as well. I think a [00:36:00] lot of people listen to us on podcast apps, but we're also on YouTube. You can come see our smiling faces and whatnot, on there, so like and subscribe as well there. Excellent. Okay. I'm glad we got it all in.

So everybody, thank you so much for tuning into this episode and we will see you again next week. 

Okay. 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.