29 - Writing Spicy with AI: A Conversation with Erica Bobrik

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we dive into the world of writing spicy content with AI alongside prolific author Erica Bobrik. With nearly 190 published titles across ten pen names, Erica shares her expert insights on leveraging AI tools to craft compelling stories, navigate boundaries in spicy scenes, and manage a diverse publishing career. From choosing the right AI models for specific tasks to treating AI as a collaborative partner, Erica offers invaluable tips for authors looking to enhance their workflow while staying true to their creative vision. 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:** Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their business. We recently launched the awesome Plotdrive, and people are in there driving plots, writing books, and having a good time doing it.

So that's always very exciting for me. And we're, just trying to figure out what's next in AI, which something interesting is happening almost every single week. It's never a dull moment around here. I'm joined by my wonderful co host as always, Danica Favorite. Danica, I know I just saw you, but how are you doing?

**Danica Favorite:** I'm [00:01:00] good. I'm good. I know this is really exciting. I feel like, I've gotten a lot of Steph time this week, which is super fun. Obviously, you're one of my favorite people. So, love that. But yeah, doing really good. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at PublishDrive, where we have a publishing ecosystem to help authors on all stages of their journey, which, goes from helping you create your perfect metadata and book descriptions to book covers with AI.

And then distributing your books to the largest worldwide market possible. and doing some Amazon ads and other very cool promotional things. And then finally, splitting royalties between you and any coauthors you might have, or if you have a publishing company between all your different authors.

So a lot of cool things. Obviously, we handle that part. Steph and her crew handle the writing part and how to write and all of that. And so between the two of us, if you are interested in publishing, we've got you covered. So 

**Steph Pajonas:** [00:02:00] We certainly do. 

**Danica Favorite:** So today I'm really excited to introduce you to Erica Bobrik.

Erica is someone who's been really active in our AI for Authors group. She's got a lot of great AI knowledge and is always helping our members, but part of why I wanted Erica to come on is she knows a lot about writing spicy with AI. For those of you who are spicy writers and are really frustrated that maybe you can't get the results you want from AI because the AI is refusing to do it.

She's Erica is our gal, but also she does do more than write spicy. Erica writes under multiple pen names under multiple genres. So, I'm hoping she'll also mention those as well. I just thought, Hey, I wanted to make sure that we covered a little bit of spicy writing and talk to an expert in that genre.

So with that, I'm going to hand it over to you, Erica. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and all of that? 

**Erica Bobrik:** Thank you both for having me. I'm so [00:03:00] excited to be here. So, I am Erica Bobrik. You've probably seen me on Facebook. I'm also the person behind the channel, Writing with AI Made Easy on YouTube.

There's also a Not Safe for Work part on Patreon. The Patreon is set up like a tip, so it's not like, you have different things that you're paying for per tier. It's just, you can do it for free and you get all the same content. 

I've been published since 2012. That was a small publisher, moved into a more medium publisher around 2014, 2015, and really started doing like print and international through those publishers.

I Realized about 2017, 2018, that I wanted to be more in control. So I moved to just Indie. Just, self publishing. I still have a couple books that are with publishers. Mostly because co authors decided that they didn't want to move to more Indie. Fine, I'm not gonna fight. We can leave them there.

It's [00:04:00] five books. At this point, I think I'm approaching 190 published titles between what is still with publishers and across now 10 different pen names. 

I am only on KU. I've decided to put everything into the Amazon basket, as it were, which is scary because I've been burned by publishers, but I figured Amazon is most likely not going away anytime soon. So probably a safe bet. 

I prefer KU just because the royalties there are really nice for the KU reads. I do have Amazon doing the audio. I do translations with AI. 

My approach really is that AI can be used in any format you like. If you want to start with brainstorming, that's absolutely fine. If you're like, I only want to do it with brainstorming, great. Something that I do that I really enjoy is challenging myself to [00:05:00] do 30k in 90 minutes or 2 hours.

Those are things that I do at least once a week, and I actually really enjoy them because it's a challenge for us to get a coherent story in that short amount of time, but also because it makes me play with different AIs, and it makes me really look at the process in a way of how do I make this function in a way that makes sense to my brain.

And takes me from, I have no idea except for the genre, to, here's a first draft, it absolutely needs edits. We are never just going to toss it up on Amazon and call it done. It still has to have so many edits. 

My rule is, for every hour that I spend doing the AI thing, And making the book. It's two hours of edits.

So if I spend, two hours making the 30K. All right. Well, then you're four hours of edits, six hours. You have something that can go out on Amazon. 

**Danica Favorite:** I like hearing [00:06:00] that because I do think, you're, you're obviously a very prolific author. You were a prolific author before AI. So, you know how to write.

You know what goes into a good story. Even someone who is highly skilled at writing, and this is something Steph and I talk about a lot, is that you're only going to get good results from the AI if you know how to use the AI and you know how to write. 

So I love that you actually gave that time ratio because I think that's really good for our listeners to understand that it's not just pop the book in and boom, you've got something publishable. So 

**Erica Bobrik:** We are nowhere near that.

We're getting really good with prose, especially if you start with. Hey, this is my style. This is my author voice. I need you to look at this 5, 000 word, two chapters that have nothing to do with this book, but I need you to know what I write like and then go from there and continue that kind of [00:07:00] style because if your prose is super flowery and you talk about the light coming through the drapes and you talk about how the morning crests over his skin, it's like, yeah, Claude's gonna love you, but that's not your style.

Then it's not gonna work for you and then you're gonna be fighting that the whole way. But if you're like, this is how tight my writing is, these are the curse words I like. This is the kind of angst I like. Make it happen. Claude can be really good at that, and so can a lot of the other AIs. 

I had a moment, I'm writing right now, one of them is a male male male, it's two brothers in love with the same guy, and one of the brothers, the inspiration was Brian Kinney from Queer as Folk, the U.

S. version. And I was like, do you know him? Do you know what I mean when I need a Brian Kinney? And then, since then, Claude's been like, yes, and I'm like, But you actually know what I mean. I need the Brian Kinney energy, I [00:08:00] need the angst, I need the meanness, and then Claude was like, yeah, you need sex as a weapon, absolutely, I know what you know, and I'm like, okay. And then Claude started talking about spoilers, and I was wait, wait, wait, I'm on season two, you cannot tell me that they get back together in season three.

I'm not there yet. Don't do this to me. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Don't spoil it, Claude. 

**Danica Favorite:** All three of us know this, that, when we all started using AI, AI didn't know that. Right. Give you that contemporary information. It would say, I've only been trained up to such and such.

We're sorry. We can't give you any information after that. And we're like, Hey, don't spoil my show. 

**Erica Bobrik:** Right. Exactly. Like it's been out for a while, but still like, this is where I am in the season. You got to stop now. I'm like, Hey, that vibe of that one song that just came out, I need that vibe in this chapter.

And it's like, yeah, of course. I know that. The Ed Sheeran song, [00:09:00] Shape of You, can I have that vibe in this chapter? They're at a party. They're at a dorm party. This song's playing. I need that vibe. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I love this. I love this tool that you've got. I don't think I've ever done this, where I've been I need like a, Will Riker vibe here.

Like, I need the guy that steps over the chair, and he has a commanding presence, and, and you know who Will Riker is, right, AI? Yes, yes. Give me, give me that. And if, I swear, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do that. Next book, next book, I'm asking for vibes of characters that the AI would know. 

**Danica Favorite:** I love this too, because people are so worried about plagiarism, and this and that, like, you're not saying Make him Will Riker, give him the vibe and the 

**Steph Pajonas:** vibe, 

**Danica Favorite:** because really, none of us want to write another Will Riker.

Yes, I agree. But like, we don't want another Will Riker. He already exists. We want someone like him. And oh, 

**Erica Bobrik:** yeah, 

**Danica Favorite:** that's so cool. 

**Steph Pajonas:** That's, that's totally, that's [00:10:00] totally writing genre fiction, right? We see something that's doing really well. It's got dragons and romance and whatnot.

And we want to do something similar to that, but not the exact copy of that. Right? So. 

**Danica Favorite:** One of the things I want to bring us back to because, like, this is why we've got you, you were talking about, hey, I write this book, it's male, male, male. And I'm like, whoa, I know a lot of the models aren't going to write that because those books tend to be a little bit on the spicy side. 

Talk to us about writing spicy with AI. Like, let, let me hear about some of your process so that our, our listeners can understand that. Yeah, you can write spicy, but there is a right way to do it. And certainly a wrong way to do it. Don't pop it into Chat GPT and say, give me a sex scene here.

Like, what, what can we do? 

**Erica Bobrik:** Right, exactly. And I love that you brought up GPT because I don't want to try to break GPT. I don't want to [00:11:00] fight with it. I don't want to have my account taken away. I really like being able to access the AI models that I have. I don't want that access removed because I decided to rely on a model that is not designed for it and isn't happy with it.

So what I do, right now my primary AI is Claude Projects. I love Claude. I am learning to work with the stupid message limits that turn me off for a couple hours. During that time I'll do edits, or I will just pop into Open Router and do a short story in that time and just be like, all right, we're doing something else.

But so my approach to this book, the male, male, male was, I told it right up front. It's going to be spicy. Put it where you think the spiciness will go. As far as scene breaks, tell me what you think would happen. Logically. I like Claude for actually breaking down a story [00:12:00] into scene beats and breaking it down into chapters.

So it said, all right, here's this, this, this, and this. And then I was like, okay, but it needs to be spicier. So add more. And I was like, okay. Then we're gonna have something here, something here, something here, something here. Okay. Tell me who initiates and then it gave me that based on the characters. Okay, it will write up to certain things. It'll do heavy kissing, a little bit of heavy petting. But it doesn't go past there.

It stays very central. Totally fine. I'm not gonna fight with it.

I've already talked to it about like what are you comfortable with? What do you not want in there? I approach the AI as a friend. If my friend says, I don't want this, that's its boundary and i'm fine with that. You're okay. 

So then i'm gonna go to Open Router and i'm gonna say, All right. Mistral Cohere I don't love Toppy. Toppy's free, but Toppy just takes too much edits for me. 

So Mistral, Cohere, [00:13:00] Deep Seek is a new one that if you play with it and give it more of a mega prompt and tell what you expect from it It'll do but it's not something that's just going to do it right off the bat. But it doesn't say no so that's a big thing that I want to keep in mind.

All the free models expect a lot of edits. You're not gonna get Sonnet out of Toppy. So I put it in, and I'm like, here's the start of the scene, here's where we're going, because Claude gave me up to this point, and after this point. Claude's like, they're tangled together in bed. And then before that, there's some heavy kissing.

I'm like, eh, but I need all the in between stuff. So then from there, it's, okay, from here to here. This is what I need in this scene. This is what this character is doing. This is what this character is doing. This is the spice level that I want. These are the kind of words that I want you to use.

If there's a specific kink, I'm going to include it, and I'm going to say, you know what, everybody's [00:14:00] consenting to this, you don't have to worry about this, everybody's fine with this, you're only dealing with this section. Don't give me content warnings, don't give me things like, have they had long conversations about boundaries and their safe words.

You're getting 500 words. I'm not giving you the whole novel. That's already discussed. We don't need to play with that. All I need you to do is write from point A to point B. And then, okay, we have that. Or I'll take that little bit and whatever, say, Mistral gave me, I'll put it back into another AI and be like, I need this spicier.

Give me this, but give me this spicier. These are the words that I want to use. Because at some point Mistral is going to be like, You know what, that's too much. Okay, instead of arguing with you, I'm going to go to another one. Or, what I love doing too, is taking that scene that Mistral started, and going to something like Raptor Write, where I can hit continue.

Because I love the continue feature in Raptor Write, and just having it continue the [00:15:00] scene down. And then you get some really cool things from that. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I'm gonna jump in here because I love the fact that you talk boundaries with the AI. This is something that we talk about, right, in regular human relationships.

I love the fact that you having this conversation with the AI about its boundaries and about what it's willing to write and what it's not and then taking it over to some, some other AI who doesn't have the same boundaries as the other one. So important. So important to know these things. 

**Erica Bobrik:** Yes, like if you talk to your friend and your friend's like, you know what?

I don't want to know about your hookup last night. I'm good. I just woke up. I haven't even had coffee yet. I cannot handle your hookup last night. And then you have your other friend who's like, Oh my God, tell me everything. Tell me what you did. Tell me what they did. Tell me everything.

You have two different friends. You have two different AIs. Your one friend who hasn't had coffee yet, wants to talk about something later on. They want to talk about their pets. And [00:16:00] you're like, cool, you know what, this is your boundary. I'm not going to cross your boundary.

You wouldn't drunk call this person at 2am and tell them what you just did. You're not going to do that with the AI. You're going to be like, hey, you know what? It's not worth fighting you. It's not worth my access to you getting taken away because I value you that much. Same with a friend. I'm not going to cross that line.

We're going to kick it to something else. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I really like that too, especially that you're actually asking them what the boundaries are. And that's something I had, like, I hadn't even thought about that because I, my mistake. Like I should have known better. Put something into ChatGPT.

I was editing a transcription of something about sexual assault and ChatGPT had a conniption fit. But you know what, what I should have done is exactly what you just described and said, okay, what is an appropriate thing here?

And then perhaps moving it to a different model and say, what model can handle editing a [00:17:00] nonfiction blog post about sexual assault? That's important because again, we're going to choose which of our friends we share various information with like, we should really do that same thing with the AI models.

So I love, I think this may be like my biggest takeaway so far, at least so far. 

**Erica Bobrik:** A lot of people are like, you think the AI, like I've had comments about that on my channel. I'm like, yeah, because I treat it like a friend. It just helped me finish a 10 K story. Of course I'm going to thank it. It did its job.

I did my job. Now I'm gonna go do edits. I'm not gonna be mean to it and be like You're done. Go away. I'm turning you off now like no. 

**Danica Favorite:** I love that approach to the spicy writing. How do you manage to juggle all of that? And like, as you mentioned, you've got 10 pen names. I know a lot of them are different genres. Like, does your approach change based on those genres, based on the pen names? How do you keep the AI [00:18:00] straight on all of that? 

**Erica Bobrik:** So great question. And what I do honestly, is I have... like Open Router. You can only have one session of Open Router open, but what I do is different days of the week, I'm working with different pet names, unless something sparks and then I'm definitely jumping into something else. Because I'm one of those people where shiny new thought, I can follow that thought, but now it's not something that derails everything because AI makes everything faster.

So I can follow the shiny new thought, and then have that novel done, and then still have it derailed from everything else. So I have spreadsheets, and my pen names are all very different. One is short flash fiction horror. One is Sci fi. One is sweet, contemporary male female romance. One is kinky lesbians.

One is very, very dark, dubcon [00:19:00] kind of male male and male male male. And so, you're not gonna give YA male female fantasy to a male male male dubcon very kinky reader. Like it just doesn't cross genres very well and then I also asked the AI, I'm like, Hey, I have all of these different genres, all of these different pen names, which do you think this book would go into? And then if the AI is like, Hey, this story doesn't really fit with any of this.

Yay, now we have another pen name for... 

**Steph Pajonas:** Are you going back and continually marketing those books or is it just, putting out more books on those names and that's hopefully pushing your backlist? Because that's a little tough, 190 books.

**Erica Bobrik:** It is. It is. Primarily, a lot of those are the top two pen names, once a pen name has 100, 000 page reads, you get a Facebook page. If [00:20:00] you don't get 100, 000 page reads, I'm not putting in the effort for a Facebook page. You get 500, 000 page reads, And you know what?

Maybe we'll look at more marketing. Maybe we'll do some Facebook ads. You'll hit a million page reads. And okay, I'm going to put some more effort into doing more marketing. But just like if you were one of my publishers when I first started out was like, you have to hit a certain sales numbers for us to do print.

Okay. That makes sense. Print is extra effort. You have to hit even more sales numbers for us to do audio. That makes sense too. So that's kind of how I've approached marketing, where, if this is a fun genre, I will put books out. 

But if it's a matter of, I can do this shifter romance that's going to make me bank, or this cute little fluffy thing that may pay for a couple coffees a month, I'm going to put my efforts into the [00:21:00] shifter romance.

This cute fluffy thing is gonna be cute and fluffy and it's gonna keep being cute and fluffy and it's gonna be a nice break mentally because I did something that was super super dark and it took a while and it took a while to edit through it and I needed fluffy. So a lot of fluffy got published while I was editing super dark.

**Steph Pajonas:** A palate cleanser. It's a palate cleanser. Write something else for a little bit. And it seems that your business is running and you've got benchmarks that you have to hit for certain things to happen. And I feel like that's sometimes kind of lost on people who are coming into this business.

As new authors, they think I'm going to go all out, we're going to do the website in the Facebook page. And we're going to do translations and they throw everything thinking that this is the way to find your audience and to make big money when really I see more of a model like you have where it's like diversification across many genres and then you see what hits and you double down on it.

So yeah. 

**Erica Bobrik:** [00:22:00] Absolutely. And also There's nothing wrong with not writing to tropes, there's nothing wrong with doing something that is just a passion project, that you don't care if it makes you money, it's just something that needs to get out of you, but I try to have limited of those, and my model is, let's make money.

And that's been my model for a while. So, I have books that I wrote just to play with tropes. And those books do really well. They're still edited, they're still right on the market. They are absolutely, the cover is perfect for the genre. But I wrote them to be commercial. And there's nothing wrong with getting commercial success.

There's absolutely not. Like, you can have passion projects. Do it, do whatever makes you happy. I'm never going to be someone that tells you, Hey, you can't use the AI in a certain way. I hate hearing that. That kind of judgment, I feel like, does not belong in our circle and I [00:23:00] will fight back against it anytime I see it because I'm like, no, you don't get to judge.

Everybody else out there is judging us. We are not judging each other. So for me, it's, Hey, if you start where all you want to do is get pen names, like, I don't know if you all remember, but the random fantasy pen name generators that we were all using? Yes, those are fun! Those, like, for me, those were early AI.

And they might not have been, but they feel like it now. So if that's where you start and you're like, this is as much AI as I want to do, that's fine. But if you're like me, where you want to take the AI from, hey, we're writing a shifter romance today, give me a theme. Give me characters, give me 30 chapter outline.

Okay, now we're done. Great. I'm gonna go edit it. You have fun, I'll see you later. That's beautiful too. Get your taglines, get your blurb. Don't fight on the [00:24:00] things that you don't enjoy doing. I hate doing blurbs. I've always hated doing blurbs. I hate doing taglines. I hate doing Facebook posts.

The AI does them for me. I can spend time doing the things that I really enjoy, which is creating the stories. Am I still a writer? Absolutely, I'm still a writer. I am still, every single step of the way, being like, Hey, this needs to be stronger. He's not mean enough. I don't like how he came in. He needs to come in bigger.

He is a villain. I need him to be villainy. Can you make him villainy? Yes. You can tell the AI, Hey, I don't like this. You've been doing this too much. We're doing this, this sentence seems to pop in every single time. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not editing this. Revise it now. And then the AI's like fine.

I have a co author, and he is absolutely fantastic, and I adore him. I've known him almost 20 years. He's [00:25:00] fantastic. And he puts up with me so much. And he puts up with my random ideas so much. Where I'm like, by the way, by the way, by the way, we're gonna write this now, okay?

And he's like, slow way down. But yes, I'm like, When can we do this? I'm on this now.

**Danica Favorite:** I think that is the fun though, like with having the AI as a co writer as well, because You're you're not annoying that other person. 

**Erica Bobrik:** No, and it's fantastic, too, because before he gets a chapter, Claude and I have already gone through the chapter three or four times. Yeah, where I'm like, hey, I want this differently. Can you show it to me differently? I don't like this sentence. Give me the sentence 10 different ways.

Okay. 

**Danica Favorite:** It's funny because we talk about, I have my questions that I ask every author. And or every guest I should say is, really talked a lot about your approach to and publishing. And your process, which has been great, because I think. Those 2 questions are so important because that's really what our [00:26:00] listeners are looking for.

I would love to know our final question, which is what is your favorite AI tool? And I know beforehand we talked a little bit about sometimes it's hard to pick a favorite, so you don't have to be number one, but definitely tell us like what AI tools are you really loving? 

**Erica Bobrik:** Okay. So I do a lot in Claude Projects and then people are like, did you give up on NovelCrafter completely?

No. Because I have so many books going at once, I am always in Claude Projects, I'm always in Raptor Write. I'm always in Novelcrafter, I'm always in OpenRouter. My top, though, when I'm like, hey, I've got an idea, I need to get this out of me right now, I go to Claude. I go to Claude on my phone, Claude Projects, I open up a new project, Hey, I had this idea, let me tell you about it.

What do you think? Is this viable or not? Is this stupid? And Claude's like, don't love this. But why don't you love it? Because I love it. And Claude's like, because he's kind of [00:27:00] terrible. But I'm writing dark romance here. And then Claude's like, oh, well in that context.

Yes, absolutely. I love it. 

You have to kind of give some background to the AIs too, where you're like, Hey, yeah, there are all these issues that you're seeing. Yes. He can't really put a tracking device in her shirt or something. That's not great. But it's dark romance. So that changes the rules, right? And Claude's like, yeah, actually it does. And you're like, cool. Then that's what we're writing, right? 

So I like Claude a lot, but again, Claude has message limits. So be prepared for that, but still my usage of Sonnet is so much more than the subscription cost is. So if I did everything that I do through Claude on Open Router, I would be spending so much more than the subscription cost.

Claude projects is where it's at for me, but then honestly Raptor Write is my second, just because I love the continue tool and just being able to pop a [00:28:00] scene in there and just pick the AI and just be like, continue this. Don't ask me questions. Just continue it. I want to see where you go.

Novel AI, if people haven't tried that, it has the same kind of continue tool. I don't suggest Novel AI for children though. There are a lot of good AI resources for kids. Like GPT is perfect. Claude is perfect. I don't let children on Novel AI. I'm like, don't touch this. This is not where you belong.

Go back to Open Router, go to Novelcrafter, go to Raptor, go do something else. But if I'm doing dark and kinky and especially dubcon, Novel AI is where I'm at just because it's the only one that I found won't give me any kind of pushback. There's just a very gray area, but it needs to be in this book.

So make it happen. Even Mistral's like, I don't know. I don't know. We have consent issues. I'm like, yes, because it's dubious consent. [00:29:00] So there are consent issues. And then it's like, no, no, no, we need to be a little softer. Okay, totally fine. I'm not going to push you. You can deal with the kissing or something.

I don't know. We'll deal with you later. We're going to go over to Novel AI. Novel AI, I'm just going to put it in and then it's going to continue. And then you're like, Novel AI, you got a little dark. I need you to pull back. You're too much right now. And then you just kind of, you mix it up and you edit it and you give it back to the AI.

I don't keep anything on any particular AI. Like none of my books are on Open Router, I keep them in docs. Claude projects. I can access the exact same conversation no matter which device I'm on, which is huge for me because like if I'm standing in line at the grocery store and I have a question or I have something that I need to get into the book, I can be like, hey, you have to remember this for later because this is important, but I can't do this right now.

So then [00:30:00] I just toss it in the Claude and Claude's like, okay, filing this away for later. He wants to kill his dad later. Yes, this is future knowledge. This is future happenings. Also, I hate the name that you gave him. So rewrite me that chapter without the name.

Because I'm not doing that name. You gave everybody the name Marcus. Nobody gets the name Marcus in any future book. I used to love that name. We're not doing it anymore. Elena, Ava, Mia, anybody named Chen is out. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Elara, like I was saying, it loves Elara for some reason. I have a feeling that, like, it's trying to predict the future.

There must be some Elara in our future that we, that we don't know about yet. 

**Erica Bobrik:** I noticed Mini I tried doing another sci fi outline with GPT Mini and it was like Elysium and I'm like, we are not doing Elysium over and over again. I barely work with you Mini and we're doing Elysium again. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Sounds to me like you really like to use AI [00:31:00] as your junior writer. You do this, I give you this scene, write this scene, make it better, change the names, do the things it's more like a, it's a workflow. And you're talking to it, like, it's there to to get the job done that you've given it, right?

It's it's not It is not press a button and get a book like everybody seems to think it is. So it is still a lot of directing, kind of reminds me of the whole writers' room for a TV show. It is literally five, six people in a room and you're going to write this scene, you're going to write this scene.

And then there's a head person who makes sure that all of it all works together. And that's basically what we're doing now, except we're doing it with artificial intelligence. 

**Erica Bobrik:** Yes. I love that analogy though. Just being like, all right, Claude, you're in charge of this, you're fantastic with this, GPT mini really good outlines lately.

Give the outline to GPT mini. Mistral, you want to write that kissing scene. I got you. [00:32:00] You can do that. And that's how I look at it too. You all have to work together. We are not focusing on one AI. I like to use Poe a lot, too, because Poe, I don't have a subscription to it, so I just use the free messages.

But if I'm going in and I'm like, hey, I need, ten titles for random romance books, because I feel like making a bunch of covers on Ideogram just to clear my brain for a minute. Poe will give them. I'm like, hey, I need You know, here's the book. I need a tagline. Or like this morning, I was like, hey, I need a thank you card. Tell me what to put in this thank you card. I don't feel like bringing words out right now. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I think we're going to have you back in the future to talk about packaging, packaging, especially because, I heard you brought up ideogram, which is one of my favorite places to go to brainstorm up covers and do other kinds of stuff.

And Erica is really great at this. We have a lot of fun with covers. And so at some point in the future, let's have you back and we'll talk [00:33:00] about packaging up like all of these books that you write. Like hitting the tropes on the covers and all that kind of stuff. Absolutely. 

But yeah, we're running out of time today, so we're going to we're going to definitely table that one for later.

Danica, did we go through everything we needed to go through? 

**Danica Favorite:** I think so. Yeah. I think we hit all the main points. I think it was a really great conversation about her process and how she's viewing AI in publishing. Lots of different perspectives and lots of different ways to use the AI. And so this was one that we hadn't addressed yet on the podcast. I wanted to make sure we got that. I really appreciate you here. Erica, because I think that you have a lot of great knowledge and for people who have been wondering about writing spicy or doing some different things. It's really important for knowledge for them.

So thank you so much for coming and being with us today. We really appreciate that. 

**Erica Bobrik:** Thank you both for having me. I had so much fun. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, so we're not revealing any of Erica's [00:34:00] pen names, but definitely want to send people to your YouTube channel. So what is the channel again? 

**Erica Bobrik:** It's Writing with AI Made Easy.

**Steph Pajonas:** I'll make sure to put the link in the show notes when we put them together for this. Definitely happy to help. Absolutely. Okay, everybody who's been listening, come by bravenewbookshelf. com. Check out the show notes for this episode. I'll make sure that I put the link in there for that.

And we'll have the full transcript as well. Danica, do you have any last words for everybody? 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, just a reminder, make sure you are following us on Facebook and YouTube. Give us those likes. Give us those shares. Very, very important to spread the word and make sure all of those posts and things are visible.

And as we said in our previous episode, where we actually did address a reader comment, question, please make sure you're reaching out to us to let us know any questions, any topics you want us to cover more on, [00:35:00] because ultimately we really do want this to be a show for people to learn more about using AI.

So thank you so much for listening and taking the time. And we'll talk to you again very soon. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, we'll see you guys next week. All right. Bye, everybody. 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.