33 - The Rise of AI in Publishing with Jason Hamilton

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we sit down with Jason Hamilton, also known as The Nerdy Novelist, to explore how AI is revolutionizing the world of writing and publishing. Jason shares his journey from self-published author to YouTube sensation, offering insights into his favorite AI tools, his innovative 40 Chapter Plot Module, and practical strategies for integrating AI into every stage of the creative process. 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 am one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their business. It's mid-February here, coming into late February, and we're just trying to cruise on into summer.

Right? That's what I'm looking forward to. I want summer really badly. I am not a fan of winter at all. My good co-host is with me and she is in probably a more snowy part of the United States than I am. Danica, how are you doing? I hope you're not too cold, are you? 

**Danica Favorite:** It's a little cold here.

We have sun today, but yeah, it has been snowing off and on. Yesterday was [00:01:00] pretty snowy. The weekend was so snowy that some of the plans that I had for the weekend were actually canceled. So 

**Steph Pajonas:** Bummer. That was 

**Danica Favorite:** no fun. I know. Big bummer. So, yeah. Just off and on. I'm with you. I'm like, come on Summer, we're ready.

But, we'll manage, we'll manage. 

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Danica favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on every stage of their journey from getting their manuscript formatted to finding keywords for their books, writing their book descriptions, creating book covers, and then distributing their books to the largest worldwide market and then getting their royalty splitting done and all of that good stuff. So wherever you're at in your author journey we can help you at Publish Drive. 

Or if you're still writing your book, Steph Pajonas and the Future Fiction Academy can do a great job of helping you get those books written. So 

**Steph Pajonas:** we're here for you. Come find us.

**Danica Favorite:** We're, we're here for you. And today's guest is going to [00:02:00] be even more here for you because some of our previous guests have mentioned him as being really helpful in terms of teaching people about AI and how to use AI and also how to write with AI. So, we're very excited for today's guest, Jason Hamilton.

He is the Nerdy Novelist. And with that, we're going to let Jason tell you a little bit about himself, what he does, and all that good stuff. So Jason, we are so happy to have you here today. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Thank you so much. I am extremely excited to be here. I listened to you guys from like the first episodes and I don't listen to a ton of podcasts, but I try to tune in as often as I can because you guys are great.

**Danica Favorite:** That is awesome. Thank you. We are, like I said, we love having you. We're excited to have you. So why don't you tell us about yourself, your YouTube, YouTube channel and your classes and all this good stuff. 'cause you have a lot of great stuff to offer. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Yeah. It's all pretty pretty exciting.

So I got my start as a self-published author back all the way. I [00:03:00] published my first book in 2017, technically published like 10, 12 books or so over the course of the next two years. And then burned out hard. But thankfully Covid hit. And, and that of course made it much easier to write books.

Just kidding. It made it way harder was the, thankfully, I was 

**Danica Favorite:** saying, who says thankfully Covid hit, 

**Steph Pajonas:** who was making me laugh. 

**Danica Favorite:** And we love it. 

**Jason Hamilton:** It was just I had just burned out like six months before and then covid hit and it just made it worse. And but thankfully this, this time is a real, thankfully.

The year after that, I was hired by Dave Chessen at Kindlepreneur to work for him as the content manager. And while it didn't really get me out of my writing funk, I was doing a lot of nonfiction writing again. I was writing articles for the website. So if you go to Kindlepreneur for those who are not familiar with it, it is one of the larger and I'm biased, but I would say [00:04:00] one of the better resources for those who are just starting out in self-publishing.

And wanna get into that. They're also the same people behind Publisher Rocket and Atticus, which are two great tools for authors. So I spent about three years working with Dave. In March of 2023, so this was just a few months after ChatGPT came out. To, to me there was like the, the AI storm started with ChatGPT and version four of Midjourney kind of came out around the same time.

And version four of Midjourney was just like such a head and shoulders above previous versions where everything was like, oh, we can actually do like real stuff with this now. Same with Chat GPT, which kind of just exploded. And so a couple of months after that, working at Kindlepreneur, I was trying to stay abreast of all of these things.

But. Part of it also, I realized I was writing again 'cause I was experimenting with these tools and actually making some progress on some of the projects that had been lying around for a long time. That was really interesting to me. And so, [00:05:00] around March, I had been, because I've been doing all this research, I, I was on YouTube a lot trying to see what other people were talking about AI.

And there were a lot of great channels covering the news and AI and everything like that. But I found if you did a search for something like how to write a book with AI, how to write a novel with AI, all of the search results that came up were these like, dude bros just saying, yeah, you can like publish a book every week, man, and like, make millions of dollars.

And it was clear to me, having been a published author for a little while and working Kindlepreneur these people had never written a book in their life. From that point on, I was just like I can make a video about this. Just show people my process, just for fun. So literally with, I had a webcam and a headset with a little headset, microphone, really low fidelity everything.

I used the free OBS software to put my head in the corner of the screen. And then I just recorded my screen and I made an hour long video about how to write a [00:06:00] book with Chat GPT. Now this is two years ago almost. So things have come a long way since then, but it was still my process of how you would actually do it.

And I shared it in the AI writing for authors group, which Steph, you are the founder, right? You started it. Yeah. And an admin for, and then the next day I made another video about like, which are the best tools for this? And again, two years ago, so completely outdated today. But I put that out there.

And between those two and I started making a few more I just started to see some traction. And literally within probably a couple weeks I was monetized on YouTube, which to be monetized, you have to have over a thousand subscribers and I forget what, what the exact number is. 

**Steph Pajonas:** The numbers are squishy in there somewhere because I think that they've changed them in the last year, haven't they? So, yes. I'm also like, I'm not sure how many hours I need. Mm-hmm. [00:07:00] 

**Jason Hamilton:** Yeah, so regardless, I got there very fast.

I hit 10,000 subscribers within about four months. I'm now at 56,000 subscribers. And as far as I'm aware, that's in the specific niche of AI for creative writing. I believe that's the largest channel that there is. There are some other channels out there that are doing a excellent job doing it in kind of a different way from me.

But I try to cater specifically to the brand new beginner. And I think that's, that's worked pretty well for me. So that's, that's my journey up to this point. 

**Danica Favorite:** That is awesome. I I love hearing that because I think it's really important for people to realize that you don't have to have anything fancy to get started.

And I think that's really encouraging because I think there are people out there who are like how do you get started? This is a great way to do it. And also of note that for those of you who are beginners who are listening to us or watching us on YouTube, we don't, we don't have that [00:08:00] monetization number yet.

So no, we don't, we haven't liked, you haven't liked or subscribed to our channel. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Great plug, Danica. 

**Danica Favorite:** Hey, Gotta take it where we can. But 

**Steph Pajonas:** I feel like Jason had, he had this seed of an idea. He saw something that was missing. And then jumped on it even with like, the most barest of essentials, right?

Mm-hmm. Like there are people out there who start a channel and they've only got their phone, like, and that's all they're doing is they're holding up their phone and they're taking video. 

But it's the idea behind things. And it's the willingness to share with the world these ideas that we have, that I think that catches on, catches fire and really explodes over time.

So I think that's basically a lot of what happened with your channel, because I remember those first couple of videos that you posted Yeah. In the group. 

And I was like, look at this guy. He is like, he's going at it, he's posting all these great things and people are really catching on. So I was just like, yeah, keep posting because there is a [00:09:00] part of the market that hadn't been cornered yet, and I could see that you were on the way towards it.

**Jason Hamilton:** Mm-hmm. and I'll add that even though it was kind of done very simply and with, not the greatest equipment and all of that, this was my third attempt at creating a YouTube channel. And the first two times I did okay, but I, again, it like the amount of work that it was taking was not sustainable for me.

But I learned a lot about YouTube and every failure that we have, 'cause we all have plenty of failures teach us something. And I think even though I failed those first two times to make a YouTube channel, it did sort of inform me just enough so that I knew what kind of videos would pop off and which ones wouldn't, and stuff like that.

Don't be afraid of failure. Don't be afraid of starting, without the crazy equipment and stuff like that. In fact, definitely don't start with with all the crazy equipment. The reason being, you can very quickly judge whether an idea has legs even without all of that equipment.

[00:10:00] Now, if you want to scale a YouTube channel or another similar platform, eventually I think you'll want a nice camera. You'll want especially a nice microphone. That's probably number one right there. Microphone, and then camera, and then lights. Actually probably microphone, then lights, and then camera.

Anyway, that's another conversation. 

**Danica Favorite:** No, I think, I think that's a good tip because I think there are people who are gonna be listening to this podcast who are like, Ooh, I do wanna start a YouTube channel. even just those small little tips are really helpful because people need to know that.

So I think that's really good. 

**Jason Hamilton:** And you go look at any of your favorite YouTube channels out there and go look at their first couple of videos. They're all really low fidelity. None of them got started with, the whole setup. Unless it's like a successful YouTuber starting a new channel or something like that.

**Steph Pajonas:** Speaking of successful YouTubers, there's the wonderful Matt Wolfe who's out there talking about AI all the time, and he has done a few interviews where he's talked about his [00:11:00] climb to fame on YouTube and how he was doing, just, I think it was mostly YouTube's about WordPress and website building and all this kind of stuff.

Until he fell in love with AI. He, he saw it, he was like, this is cool. Mm-hmm. I should be talking about this all the time. And it was only then that his channel really took off. He happened to hit on this idea at that time when it was nascent and nobody knew really what it was or how it worked and really took off like that.

And I feel like that is pretty much the same with you as well, because you saw something in the market that was missing as like AI for writing for books for fiction, and you took off with it. So what was the point when you were using AI for the first time that you thought I could use this for writing fiction?

**Jason Hamilton:** That's a good question. I actually, my experience with AI goes way back before [00:12:00] Chat GPT came out, I was using it via Jasper, just experimenting with some things. And I started out using it more for things like web content rather than fiction content.

It's funny, I was writing this article for my website, which is about different mythologies, and I was writing an article about the holy grail.

And later I went back to update that article. I realized I had been using Jasper at the time to write parts of it, and I was just like, oh that's a hallucination right there. 'Cause back then we didn't know, like, oh, these things hallucinate? And it's quoting from like the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

And I'm looking these up and this does not exist in the Egyptian Book of the Dead or anything like that. So yeah, you learn things. But, that was my first exposure to it. And when ChatGPT came out, I remember I was looking at it with my boss, Dave Chessen, and another person on our team named Hank, who was really good.

He was the one that's just like, you guys need to look at this. And we did a test prompt that was just write a book description for a a time travel romance or something like [00:13:00] that. And it spat out a book description that was actually pretty decent and the title that he gave us, Dave looked at that and was like, that's actually a good title. Like for a time travel romance. And so I was just like, oh yeah, there's something here. And I tested it for fiction. Most of us found that because this was GPT 3.5 at the time, it is not the best for fiction, but it could sometimes can get you unstuck at the very least.

Just by seeing something that's wrong, you can know how to make it right. And so I was playing with it in that sense, but it wasn't until GPT-4 came out a couple months later that I was just like, okay, I think this is starting to get to a point where it could actually write. Still needs a lot of help with a lot of editing, but it was getting there. 

And I feel like I've had multiple moments like that over the years where I was just like, man, what, why was I thinking that GPT-4 was so much better? Because now we have the creative writing update of GPT 4o. We've got Claude 3.5 [00:14:00] Sonnet.

We've we've got all of these things that are so much better. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I remember when GPT 3.5 16 K came out and we were like, hallelujah. 16 K. 

**Jason Hamilton:** 16 K, whoa. 

**Danica Favorite:** Even like the other stuff that writing from back then that we thought was, Ooh, this is so good. And now we're like, really?

We thought that was good. Mm-hmm. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Yeah. 

**Danica Favorite:** Wow. Mm-hmm. And like, it needed so much more editing. And now I don't have to edit as much. And it's so funny how fast the technology is moving, which I think is a good reminder to Jason's point earlier about his early videos, even though, yeah, sure, watch them to see the evolution of his tech and everything, but don't use those for how to write with AI today because it's all changed and it all changes so fast.

**Steph Pajonas:** That's why we have to constantly be updating, right? Our YouTube channel at the Future Fiction Academy, we constantly have to be like, okay, this new model has come out. Let's take a look at it. [00:15:00] Let's talk about how we write with it. Everything stagnates pretty quickly because the technology is moving so fast, it's just leaving those things behind and those things are stagnate.

Who uses 3.5 16 K anymore? Like nobody. 

**Jason Hamilton:** I mean, when you can get a Gemini model with a 2 million context window, like. Right. 

**Danica Favorite:** So, one of the questions that we like to always ask is how you are approaching AI in publishing. Like, we talked a little bit about your journey, but when you first started looking at Okay, AI in publishing, what does that mean?

What's been your approach to that? 

**Jason Hamilton:** I think it would be fair to say that AI has touched every aspect of my publishing journey. I use it to draft everything pretty much. And or to brainstorm. The only thing that I would say I continue to do mostly myself, is the outlining process. 'cause it's my favorite part.

Most people have a favorite area of the writing process, whether that's the drafting, the outlining, the editing or something else. [00:16:00] And to those people I say don't use AI for that thing. 'Cause 'cause that's where you and your creativity can shine. 

I mentioned that I got burned out earlier. I've never really been a fan of the drafting process. I've talked to people and they're just like, oh, it just fills me with energy and all of this stuff. And if I write for an hour and it's just me writing, I am exhausted by the end of the process. And that's just how I am.

Now with outlining it's a different thing. So I do use it in the drafting process at least to give me the first draft, which I can then iterate on and update and make it a little bit less AI ish and more in my voice. 

I use it for marketing. Like one of the things that I teach people that I actually use for myself is I'll go out and find multiple book descriptions from bestsellers in my genre. I'll use those to create a template with AI. Analyze this sentence by sentence, create a template and then I'll give it information about my book and ask it to write using that template. 

You do it that way, the output is way better than just saying, write me a book description about this book.

So I'll do something like that. [00:17:00] All throughout the marketing process, anytime I feel stuck I will just turn to AI and give it the context and what I'm after and it will usually get me unstuck. 

So yeah, I use it practically for everything at this point. 

**Danica Favorite:** And I love that. And I think what I wanna pull out from that is something that I would say, Steph, we pretty much pull out pretty consistently from all of our guests, and that is use the AI for the parts you don't like and the parts you do like keep doing.

Because when you're sitting here going, I don't lie. I, I like outlining, I'm going. You do. 

**Jason Hamilton:** My favorite part! 

**Danica Favorite:** That, because I think that just really goes to show what we have been proving pretty much in every episode is that everyone has their own AI thing. So do that with AI and the parts you really love, keep doing that.

You don't have to give everything to ai. You get to pick which part of the process. You're like, [00:18:00] Ugh, AI, take it over, man. And this part is mine and I'm keeping it. I'm so glad you said that because I feel like Steph, we're pretty much every single episode, the person tells us this. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like every single episode somebody tells us where their pain point has been in their process and how they used AI to alleviate that. There's not one person who has come on here and been like, I used AI to write every single thing about the book. Like from the characters to the outline, to the writing, to the editing. Though there's always some part of the process that somebody really loves and they don't wanna give it up. 

And that is, that is awesome. We totally stand by that because this is part of our creativity, part of being human but also being human, we can get burnt out just like you did. I've been burnt out in the past. I have felt burnt out a couple of times in the last two years doing all this AI stuff. 'cause it has been a lot. But one of the [00:19:00] better parts about this is the fact that now I have an assistant. My AI assistant who can help pick up the slack on the things that I struggle with, and that makes my life so much easier.

So I'm a big fan of telling people to find that pain point in their process, fill it with AI, get the AI to do those things, and then double down on the stuff that you love. Mm-hmm. 

So I was like, you've talked about your out outline, and it's interesting because one of our previous guests, Alicia, I believe it was Alicia Wright who said that she found your a 24 chapter template on your website.

**Jason Hamilton:** 40 chapter template. Yeah. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Thank you. Yeah. Derek Murphy 

**Jason Hamilton:** made a 24 chapter one. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Okay. Yeah, you should tell us about that a little bit, because I thought that that was super interesting. And she said that she had used it a couple of times to help get her process going and get her outlining going. 'cause I know you love outlining.

**Jason Hamilton:** Yeah. Sure. This is another instance of a skill that I think people can harness, which I consider to be partially responsible [00:20:00] for my success on YouTube and also my success for this thing. And that is looking for the little opportunities. 

So in the case of YouTube, the reason I believe at least one of the reasons why it took off is because I was able to identify, Hey, there's a need here.

I was on YouTube, didn't find any really good videos about how to write a novel with AI, so I made one. That's the same thing for this 40 chapter plot. I call it the plot module. And I've written a book about it, released that about a month and a half ago. And funny enough, it's been my best selling book ever.

It's already selling, like if you combined everything else, it's selling about the same as all of that. So, part of what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make writing as accessible to everybody as possible. AI is of course a great tool for that. But this was not an AI thing and yet it's been really well received by my audience in the same way.

You guys are familiar with Save the Cat, right? So the Save the Cat is a [00:21:00] plot structure that was developed by Blake Snyder. It has 15 beats and in the book Save the Cat, he mentions that a screenplay, 'cause he was writing to screenwriters should be roughly 40 scenes.

And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I was reading another book, I think it was Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, and I think, don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure he also mentioned 40 scenes. And I heard this 40 scene thing from multiple people, and I thought, oh, that's, that's really interesting.

Now of course, novels are different than screenplays although I think they could potentially learn from screenplays and making the stories a little tighter. But that's a separate issue. So this number 40 came up as like the number of scenes, and I'm fine. Okay. And it's nicely divided into like 10 scenes for act one, 20 scenes for Act two, 10 scenes for Act three.

But the problem I ran into is that for instance in Save the Cat, he's got 15 beats and 40 scenes. What's happening in the other 25 scenes? Right. [00:22:00] In some cases, some of the beats happened over three or four scenes. What's the difference between the first of those scenes and the fourth of those scenes and like trying to figure all of this stuff out.

And so I went on a deep, deep, deep, deep dive on plot structure, read every single book I could find on the subject. And also went through a lot of movies and things, just looking and seeing what they're doing, which, funny enough, a standard like average two hour movie is pretty close to 40 scenes in most cases.

And from all of that, I boiled it down into a 40 scene or 40 chapter template that I call the plot module. Now, it's certainly not something that you have to follow. There's a lot of instances where you might wanna merge certain scenes or for instance, I have a chapter called The Drop, which in some cases could just be a paragraph.

It's just a moment, but it's an important moment. And there are other scenes that you might wanna expand, so there's flexibility to it. But I thought [00:23:00] by giving newer authors a exact template of 40 scenes, and this is the sort of thing that happens in every single one of these scenes it would be a way of making the whole process of figuring out plot much more accessible.

So that became the plot module and it's actually been selling pretty well right now. So yeah. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. I, I love that and I'm glad that we had you talk about that because, we do get a lot of people from all aspects of writing and at all stages of their journey. And so for someone who is looking at, Hey, how do I plot a book? Or how do I do this? This is really an excellent resource. Hey, if you're struggling with plotting here is this assistance for you because as much as Steph and I talk a lot about all things AI, sometimes we do miss the craft part.

And that's something that we also like to emphasize is that part of what makes AI writing good is being good at writing [00:24:00] craft. And until you know writing craft, you can't be good at writing with AI. And so a tool like this is something that can help people learn how to be better writers so that then they can write better with AI.

**Jason Hamilton:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. And absolutely agree that is what I was going for when I developed it. 'cause in my community, I try to make sure that I'm teaching not just AI, but a more well-rounded experience. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. One of the things that we learn when we're working with AI, is what the AI knows about story. Because that's an important part of the process, right?

We can't ask for help me with a Save the Cat outline if it doesn't know what a Save the Cat outline is. So by coming up with a lexicon of information and definitions of what we're looking for, that helps us communicate with the AI in order to get the kinds of outputs that we want back from it.

[00:25:00] So I always tell people that craft is really important. If you don't know how to ask for a turn for the second act, if you don't understand these points in a story and the structure, you can't ask for those from the AI and get something back that's going to be usable for you. So it is really important that people understand plot structure and understand outlining, even if you're a pantser let, let's put that out there for the pantsers in the audience. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Structure. Structure's different than outlining 

**Steph Pajonas:** It is. 

**Jason Hamilton:** A lot of people mistake that I call this a plot structure. It is not necessarily a plot outline template. You could just take chapter one and read through the template and be like, okay, and then just. Write your chapter one, then look at what the template says for chapter two and move in a pantsing format that way.

But every book needs structure, whether it was plotted or pantsed. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I agree. I agree. And I'm a big fan of James Scott Bell. I'm a real big fan of him. Love James. Scott 

**Danica Favorite:** Love. I've got a couple of his books right there. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. [00:26:00] Yeah. And I have a screenwriting background, so I love the structure of movies and screenwriting, and he talks about that a lot in his books.

He uses a lot of movies for his examples in his books. So once I learned his super structure that he talks about in his books, it was easier for me to pants because I was always looking towards the next signpost. I know I have to work towards this thing that's coming up. I need to look towards the inciting incident. I need to look towards the first turn to the second act. Right? 

So it was all of these things that I had to internalize and know in order to write the next part of the book.

Anytime you can make that a real thing in somebody's mind, then you're succeeding. It's like, it wasn't until I, I mean I read Take Off Your Pants, I read all of these books on Snowflake structure, everything, so many books. And it wasn't until his book that the little light bulb went [00:27:00] off in my head and I was like, Aha, I get it. I get it. Even if you've read every single outlining structure book on the planet, reading another one is definitely going to help you.

**Danica Favorite:** And it's funny too because I think because I'm a plotter and so it's always fun Steph and I talking about the difference between pantsing and plotting. And so I finally did finish my first AI assisted book. Really excited. So now I'm editing it. 

Congrats. Congrats. 

I, I know, I know my, my, my blockage is finally cleared, sort of.

**Danica Favorite:** But what's was interesting was I am a plotter and I was experimenting with pantsing using AI. And so I let the AI pants it, but I didn't give it a really good structure. And so now as I'm editing it, what I'm realizing it is that, wow, this book has no structure and it's terribly structured. And so my edit is actually going back and restructuring this [00:28:00] book.

I had never pantsed a book before in my life. So, like I didn't even think about the structure as I was having the AI pants it, and now I'm like, oh, wait a second, here we are editing this book and the thing that's missing is the structure. So I'm reverse engineering it a little bit and adding the structure to it.

But it was a great learning tool and a great learning process because again, I had never pantsed before, so I didn't realize that even when you pants, you have to give it a structure. So the next time if I decide to get a wild hair and pants a book, I also need to, as I'm pantsing, talk about structure with the AI.

That's something that you learn as you learn about writing, as you learn about craft and as you learn things like outlining. 

So the next place I wanna go in this interview, we usually like to ask our guests what your workflow with AI looks like. And I know you have a lot of different workflows and a lot of different processes. So if [00:29:00] you could pick something that you think, Hey, sharing this workflow that I do with AI would be super helpful for people to use, we would love to hear that. 

**Jason Hamilton:** I wish I could say, oh, I've got this really cool hack and maybe if I worked harder I could figure it out.

But, part of the problem is that it changes month to month because of just updates and different models and things like that. I'll give you an idea of how I'm doing it now though. 'Cause I am writing fiction again. I've spent a long time just not really writing my fiction as much, at least not long form. And I am doing it now. 

So what I'm doing is I usually start with a chat bot to just kind of brainstorm ideas. I know chat bots aren't necessarily the most effective or the most flexible, but you don't necessarily need that. And so I'll just use that to brainstorm ideas. I usually have what I call a list of things that need to happen.

Everything that's been percolating in my brain for a while. And I just make that [00:30:00] list. And then from there I start to just figure out like, okay, who, who my character's gonna be. Start to kind of put together a three act thing figure out the motivations of the villain and all of that.

And there's not really a good process to share with you on that because it all just sort of comes out in little pieces here and there. And a lot of it is done just in my brain. 

Then I move on to the outlining phase. As I mentioned, I don't use AI to do the outline for me. I will occasionally get to a chapter and I'm like, I'm not really sure what should happen in this chapter. And I do go linearly. I start at the beginning and work my way through the whole outline. 

So if I get to like chapter 16 and I'm just like, I'm not entirely sure what I should do here, I do use the plot module that I developed for myself. So I will go in and say, okay, here's what I put in the plot module as what should happen. Here's the template. And I'll give that to the AI and I'll give it the outline that I've done so far and say, given this template and [00:31:00] this background gimme like five ideas of what should happen in this next chapter. 

And so I'm using it in a brainstorming capacity, and then I can look at those and pick one, or sometimes I don't want any of them, but it gets me unstuck so I can just continue on.

And now. I used to have a whole process where I'd go like, okay, build from the ideas to the outline, to a more detailed outline of each chapter and to the finished prose and et cetera. 

Now I go straight from the outline to starting to write the prose. 

I've been using Sudowrite recently. The reason being they came out with a new model called Muse that I've been beta testing for them. It is not actually publicly available yet as I'm recording this, but it is the best thing I've seen since slice bread.

It is so much better at doing everything we want it to do, and it's just so much easier. So I'll have on like one screen, I'll have my summary of the chapter, and then I'll describe what should happen over the next, like two to 300 words. Usually in just one sentence and it'll write that. [00:32:00] 

And it does such a good job and has a much better understanding of what makes a good scene than most AI models do. It can block and do all kinds of things reference past events in ways that make sense and all of that. By this point, I will have developed little bits of information about my characters and my world building all which goes into Sudowrite to help it write better. And it'll write 250 words or so. And then I'll just put in the next sentence, it writes that, and because of how good this particular model is that they use, I don't have to do very much editing, I just have to guide it. And the only problem I have with it is that sometimes it goes on a little too long.

So that's the only issue I have with it is so sometimes you have to shorten it up because it's drawing out the pacing.

But in general, it does a fantastic job. So for me personally, that's what I'm actually using these days. Because of that model. Even though Sudowrite as a piece of software is not my favorite, they do have that model, which [00:33:00] is actually pretty good, at least for writing prose.

**Steph Pajonas:** That's awesome. Find the thing that works for you and go with it. Right? I understand what you mean by like having go on and on and on about maybe as particular point of your book. You're like, oh my God, it's being so verbose.

Like, why is it just keep on and on? I think that's a trait of a lot of AIs, unfortunately. I'm constantly editing it out and shortening it. Make it shorter. Make it shorter. Make it shorter. Because I was never a big fan of the stuff you do in like comparative literature, like, Faulkner, like, just makes me wanna sleep. I don't know how many chapters that man could spend talking about fields of wheat, but it appeared to be a lot, but I 

**Jason Hamilton:** remember getting to the end of the catch of the r Oh my gosh, gosh. And I was just like. Oh, this just wasted all of my, like, several days of my time, like, why did I read this?

**Danica Favorite:** We know that the AI was likely trained on Faulkner.

**Steph Pajonas:** Probably.

**Danica Favorite:** And, and all of his contemporaries. So, it, it probably came by all of that, [00:34:00] honestly. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Yeah. But this goes back to what you were saying Steph, about you need to know craft in order to make a good book with AI.

And if you don't, I. It's not gonna be good. And, and so part of this that we're talking about right now is just understanding what makes a good cohesive scene and when is the pacing dragging on a bit, and how should you tighten that up to make it move? Or maybe you want it to drag on a little bit, you have to understand the nuance 'cause pacing is a thing that can go slower or faster depending on what part of the story you're in.

And it requires a lot of knowledge on that sort of thing.

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, I think that that is interesting, thinking even about pacing and genre and all the different things. Maybe there are some people out there writing Faulkners and who love Faulkner, so I'm very sorry to any of you who love them and are, are like, what?

**Steph Pajonas:** I know, I'm sorry. Like I routinely piss off some English lit person by saying that, and I apologize. It's just not for [00:35:00] me. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, yeah. Same. I, I was going through some old books and, and getting rid of some to donate and I actually I inherited my grandmother's book collection when she passed away.

I actually could not bring myself to get rid of the Faulkner 'cause that was her favorite. So, 

**Steph Pajonas:** Then, that's special then. That's different. It's okay. It's okay. Nobody has to be involved in my dislike for Faulkner except for me. It's okay. 

**Danica Favorite:** I feel you. I feel you. So the last question we like to ask our guests is about their favorite AI tools. And I know we have discussed how everything is evolving and changing. Mm-hmm. And we find a model we really like, and then boom. Oh my goodness. There's this new update.

So, you don't have to stick to this one forever. And I know you probably have lots of favorites, but if you could just share about your favorite AI tool or tools, like maybe you know, a couple of top ones if you've got more than one. Mm-hmm. But yeah, tell, tell us about your favorite AI tool. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Yeah def things definitely are changing.

Like I would never have said [00:36:00] Sudowrite a couple of months ago, but they developed their own model and suddenly they're back on the map for me at least. I also am a big fan of Novelcrafter. I think it's the most versatile tool that I've come across. The amount of things that you can do in there is crazy. Not just writing books, but I know people that are using it for planning their tabletop games and and using it as a brainstorming companion where you put all your information in there and then it just knows all of that stuff. For me, who builds these big, huge universes and stuff, it's really handy to have a well structured way of storing all of that information. And Novelcrafter does that sort of thing really, really well. 

Also, the other thing that I will mention, it's not any one tool. There are at least three people that offer this now that I really think is, I think all authors are gonna be using this at some point, and that's Deep Research. ChatGPT has a version of deep research. Google was the first one to launch a version of it with Gemini. And now Perplexity has a version of [00:37:00] deep research. And what this is, is it's like a Google search on steroids where it will go out and do a very thorough search of the web on any topic you give it, and it will give you a very nuanced and thorough article, going really deep on that thing . I write mythology inspired fantasy, and so the other day I went in there and I was just like, can you tell me about what daily life was like in 35th century BC Egypt, and it asked me a follow up question and just like, are you just talking about the commoners or the nobility? Both. 

And then it went and thought about it for 15 minutes and gave me this very detailed and very good breakdown of what daily life would've been like in 35th century Egypt. And like that to me is super valuable and also sources everything. So you can see where it got that information.

I'm not worried too much about it hallucinating, but I do worry that it might be drawing from a source that isn't accurate. But that's something you would have to deal with even [00:38:00] if you weren't using AI just doing your own research. But authors, we often need to research the craziest things.

For me, historical fantasy, it's pretty obvious the kind of things that I would research. Having a way of really researching that thing effectively is I think a super valuable tool for authors. And so I recommend to any authors listening, you should definitely go check that out. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Write a lot of books that have Japanese influence to them. Lots of Japan, whether it's Japan the mainland country, or Japan and the diaspora. And before AI. It was like I would sit down and be like, I'm gonna research this one thing about this Samurai, blah, blah blah from this time. And then three hours later I would come up for air because that would lead to another thing, which would lead to a Wikipedia article where I would click on like five links in there and then see it and then all of a sudden, boom, there goes my day.

I didn't get any writing done, I just spent a lot of time going down [00:39:00] rabbit holes. And it's fun and certainly very inspiring. Really, I only needed that little bit of information. So this is where I like the AI for these kinds of things because I can tell it, I'm interested in this information.

You can go ahead and give me some peripheral information as well that will help me contextualize what's going on. But I don't need to get sucked into a three hour rabbit hole down many, many, many, many links. And I do enjoy using the Google deep research for those sorts of things. My husband is a big Perplexity fan.

He calls it Pepe. He's like, I'm gonna go ask Pepe about Oh, nice. Such and such. I I, I 

**Jason Hamilton:** legitimately use perplexity more than I use Google these days. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, yeah. It's a great tool. And people really, really love it. So I also agree that I think it's really important for authors to have these particular tools in our disposal.

Not only just because it's easier, you can go and ask one question and get back some answers after it's given it some thought, but [00:40:00] also because it's a way of remaining authentic when it comes to your writing, and you can add those little bits of information in that really just bring a whole story to life.

This is fun. Mm-hmm. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, and I just wanna point out like what Jason was saying, 'cause I'm also a perplexity fan. Apparently saying that is perplexing. But anyway I really like it because as Jason mentioned, it gives you the source. And so I think a lot of times especially even in the early episodes, Steph and I were like, Hey, check the research on this.

It's gonna hallucinate. And, we're all worried about hallucinations. And even Jason was saying early articles written by Jasper and I, I did that too at my previous job that with Perplexity and these other deep research tools, they actually give you your sources and so mm-hmm. You can click on it and you can say, okay, is this a valid source?

Do we want to quote this source? Because [00:41:00] that, is part of that critical thinking, part of knowing your stuff as an author and doing your due diligence because like some of those sources, it is going to quote a source that is maybe not the best source, but you have the ability to go in and see and double check that source to make sure that's the source you wanna use.

So I'm, I'm so glad you were here, Jason. 'cause I think, like you brought in a lot of good things that we've been wanting to share with our audience, and I think it was really important and inspiring to share also just about your journey as a YouTuber and all of that. And I think that was really encouraging.

I'm glad you said that this wasn't your first attempt at a YouTube channel and really trying to learn from it. So, before we let you go, is there anything else you wanna share with us? Anything you think our audience would be benefiting from that maybe we didn't touch on that you're like, Ooh, ooh, I really wanted to talk about this.

**Jason Hamilton:** That's a good question. I think if, if I could leave people with one thought, it [00:42:00] would be to just hang in there. Whether it's with your books or some other business you're trying to grow. It's gonna appear like you're not having any success for a long while, or at least it might.

But in reality, you are gaining a lot of experience and a lot of skills that will help you down the line. And eventually you're gonna get to a point where it works. 

There's an analogy of you've got an ice cube and you wanna melt the ice cube and the temperature is at zero degrees Fahrenheit and you go from zero to one, to two, to three to four, and you get all the way to 31 degrees Fahrenheit and the ice still hasn't melted and it feels like you've made absolutely no progress.

But all you need to do is get it up to 32 and then 33. Then suddenly the ice will melt. And just going from zero to 32, it's gonna feel like you made no progress, but you actually were making progress the whole time. And I think that's a great analogy just for life and business and everything is just like, you might not seem like you're making it work, but you [00:43:00] are raising the temperature and eventually you're gonna get to that point where the ice melts.

**Danica Favorite:** I think that's really important. Also, just as you were saying that, I'm like looking at the thermometer going, okay, it's 25 degrees out. Woohoo. We're almost there. The ice will melt soon. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Right. 

**Steph Pajonas:** I need that right now. Yeah.

Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your Story Hackers, right? You have a course membership. So tell us about that before we head out for the day. 

**Jason Hamilton:** Sure. And thank you for bringing that up. So, I do have a membership called the Story Hacker Gold Membership. That's the paid one.

I do have a little bit of a step-by-step course for people who are just beginning, who want to understand like, how do you write a book with AI, but also how to publish that book, how to market that book. Like where do you even start? There's information about the Plot Module in there, and you can get all of my books that are for authors for free ebook and audiobook in there.

And then I do have a free group that people can check out too they don't wanna commit to that which has [00:44:00] a couple of those things that you can get started with. But the paid group, I go live inside of that group every week, so they get direct access to me.

And then I also have an AI art guy who's a graphic designer using AI. And so he teaches AI art for those who wanna understand how to do that. I just hired a developmental editor to come in and teach people about good storytelling. And we have two accountability calls every week where you can come and just share your goals for the week and then report on how they've been going.

That's my biggest goal, is to get you to actually finish your book and get it published and get it out into the world and get that whole career started. 

So that's the main stuff that you get when you join my group. And yeah, it's a great place. I try to make it more of a well-rounded thing.

So it's not just about AI, it's about good storytelling, it's about publishing. It's everything you need to know to start a self-publishing journey. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Excellent. And where can they find it? 

**Jason Hamilton:** So is it 

**Steph Pajonas:** story hackers.com? I can't remember. Yeah, 

**Jason Hamilton:** so it's through a platform called school, S-K-O-O-L. And if you search for story [00:45:00] hacker inside of school.com, you'd find it that way. I can also get you guys a link. There's a short link that's nerdy novelist.com/go/ai-storyteller, which I know is a mouthful.

You can get to the free group by going to nerdy novelist.com/free. That's a little bit less of a mouthful. So, 

**Danica Favorite:** Steph is good about putting all these links in the notes, so yeah, if people didn't quite get it from me sharing it, the, these will be in the notes. And also, I know we talked about your YouTube channel, so tell us about your YouTube channel as well.

**Jason Hamilton:** Yeah, it's just search for the Nerdy Novelist on YouTube. As far as I know, it's the only, only one there. And I usually put out two to three videos a week. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Excellent. I'll make sure that everything is in the notes for everybody. Jason, thanks so much for coming by and talking with us because I love to talk craft and outlining and AI and all that good stuff.

So this was lovely for me, especially. Danica, do you have anything else that we should talk about before we head out? 

**Danica Favorite:** No, I think we're good. I [00:46:00] was right there with you geeking out and learning all the cool things. But yes, remember subscribe to our YouTube channel. Like and follow our Facebook page. Make sure that you are also subscribed on your favorite podcast channel so that you get those notifications of our podcasts. And we look forward to seeing you again next week. 

**Steph Pajonas:** All the good stuff. So thank you everybody for listening.

Come by brave new bookshelf.com to check out the blog post that we'll put together about this episode. It'll have all of Jason's information in there, including any links that we mentioned today. And don't forget to come subscribe, all that good stuff.

All right, so bye everybody. 

**Danica Favorite:** Bye. 

**Jason Hamilton:** See ya. 

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@bravenewbookshelf.com. Sign up for our newsletter and get all the show [00:47:00] notes.