35 - Exploring AI, Translations, and Zombies with Derek Slaton

In this episode of Brave New Bookshelf, we sit down with Derek Slaton, author of the massive Dead America zombie series. From creating weekly audio stories on YouTube and Spotify using AI narration tools like Play HT, to expanding his global reach through affordable translations with Scribe Shadow, Derek shares his insights on leveraging technology to maximize creativity and income. 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 an episode of the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm one of your co-host Steph Pajonas, CTO of Future Fiction Academy, where we teach others how to use AI in any part of their process. We've been chugging along doing all types of great stuff on the backend of Future Fiction Academy.

We've been doing work on a big fine tunes course that's coming up and a couple of other things. So I've been super, super busy, but I'm excited to hand off to my lovely co-host, Danica Favorite, because she's my partner in crime, aren't you? 

**Danica Favorite:** I am, I am. I love that partner in crime. It's really funny because I just joined a dating app.

**Steph Pajonas:** Oh boy. 

**Danica Favorite:** Oh boy. [00:01:00] But it's so funny because like half of the men are like, I'm looking for my partner in crime and I wanna know what crime they intend to commit because some of them I'm totally here for. And some of them I'm like, oh no, no, thank you. But the crimes, Steph and I commit, I am all for. 

**Steph Pajonas:** We're, yeah, we're, we're doing all the fun stuff, aren't we? 

**Danica Favorite:** We are. We have a lot of fun together, and actually, I say partner in crime, but we actually do nothing that is illegal. You all know, we are all about doing everything legally and ethically with AI. No crimes being committed here.

Anyway, I'm Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on every stage of the journey, whether that's formatting their manuscript, coming up with a book description, a book cover getting their books distributed to the World's largest audience. Then also with doing their financial tracking and splitting royalties, we have you covered. So between us and Steph, who's gonna help you write the AI books, like we are the full package here [00:02:00] at Brave New Bookshelf. So please check out Publish Drive, check out Future Fiction Academy. I already know I'm gonna be doing a few more.

Props to FFA throughout this lovely interview because in our pre-show we were chatting with Derek a little bit and Steph was like, FFA has a course on this, So, we will have all of that information for you in the show notes, so make sure you check those out. 

But without further ado, I would like to introduce you to Derek Slaton. I invited Derek for a lot of reasons. So first of all, for those of you who are in the AI for Authors group, you know this guy is posting every day about all the cool stuff he's doing with AI. I'll like read, like start reading a post. I'm like, wow, that's really cool. I wonder who's doing it, doing this.

And I'll scroll up. It's Derek. And so we're like, yay. I really wanna get him on as a guest. But also one of the requests I've had for the podcast is people to talk about AI and translations. We're gonna talk about a lot of things, [00:03:00] but if you wanna know someone who's succeeding at AI translations, Derek is the guy.

So very, very excited to have Derek on today. And I'm gonna go ahead and say, Derek, please tell us about yourself and what you do, what you're writing, how you're using AI, all that cool stuff. We wanna hear about it all. 

**Derek Slaton:** All right hello everybody. I am Derek. I write the Dead America Zombie book series, which is the biggest zombies series in existence.

It's roughly 3.5 million words. It is the longest running zombie book series that's out there with roughly 140 novellas plus another 60 shorts that are mostly directly to YouTube and Spotify podcasting as well.

**Danica Favorite:** I love that. I think that is great. Why don't you tell us because I know we've talked a little bit about this. When did you start writing these zombie books? 

**Derek Slaton:** I started writing Zombies the original Dawn of the Dead Back in, that was released in 1978. I watched it when I was in high school and it scared [00:04:00] me so badly when I laid down to go to sleep that night because I thought, oh, what would I do in that situation?

That was like a light switch went off and I started writing my first zombie story back then and just kept writing over the years. And it wasn't until 2018 when I discovered self-publishing that it's like, oh, I can put this story out there and, start writing my own universe.

And the first book was published July 2nd, 2018, and has just been going strong ever since. 

**Danica Favorite:** That's awesome. I love that because you've got this long running zombie series and then AI comes into the scene. And this is really great because this is the first question we usually like to ask our guests.

How are you approaching AI in publishing? Like when that came onto the scene, what was your response and how did you react to that? 

**Derek Slaton:** So the first thing that really drew me into AI was the audio because I was producing so much stuff. Just 'cause, writing books, having new releases every few weeks and then releasing that weekly on [00:05:00] YouTube.

I was quickly running out of content 'cause I started my YouTube channel when I had 80 or 90 books already released. I was like, okay, I got a two year buffer before I start running out of content. And then AI audio came along and it's like, that sounds a lot better than the old computer audio.

So let's give it a shot and see what the people think. So I played around with 11 labs and ultimately settled on Play HT just because they had an unlimited plan and I planned on using that. I tried it, released it, and like anything with AI, if somebody said, oh, that's AI, I don't like that, fist shaking.

But a lot of the people actually enjoyed it. Shortly after that, I released another one and I started changing up my thumbnails. I tried one with a AI image 'cause I was just using cut and paste stock photography before that. And I saw my views and hours. Essentially double overnight, okay, I'm gonna start doing AI, not gonna worry about selling [00:06:00] stuff on Audible or Findaway, I'm just gonna focus on YouTube. I just dove in with both feet and started doing weekly stories on there with AI. And it's just been upward trajectory ever since. 

**Steph Pajonas:** You've been doing so much on your channel. I've been, I've been watching you. I'm not a, I'm not a huge zombies fan, so I don't actually listen to any of your stories 'cause I'm sure that I would not sleep at night.

But I come and I check out your channel every now and then just to see how things are going. You write every week and produce a story every week, is that correct? 

**Derek Slaton:** Correct. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. So that's a lot of content, right? 

**Derek Slaton:** Yeah. So on the short end I'll release standalone shorts and we can get into how AI and YouTube has allowed that to be financially viable.

But my standalone shorts are about 45 minutes long, and they're just fast paced, four chapters. And then my standard entries are hour and a half to an hour and 45. They're eight chapters long. And then every now and then [00:07:00] I'll do the jumbo sized ones, which I have a few that are three hours, and I did one that was six hours, which is Alaska, which is the biggest single story I did and was extremely successful with it.

So I have another one of those giant stories planned for later in the year, but I can do the 45 minute to hour and a half ones in a few days. So I have to build some of those up so I can take, three, four weeks to devote to a six hour one. 

**Steph Pajonas:** When you look at how much content is already on YouTube and you wanna like grab that audience and really hold onto them, doing stuff weekly is pretty important, right?

So like having to sit down and then you are writing a story and you're producing it and you're getting the content up every week. It's just fantastic. I'm really, I'm really in awe because I would love to be able to do that, and I'm crushed for time all the time, so I'm so excited that you're getting out there and you're doing that every week.

That's amazing. 

**Danica Favorite:** And one of the things I was gonna ask you, because I'm [00:08:00] fairly certain I already know the answer, but I know our audience would like to know the answer is are you monetized on YouTube? And how did that all come about? How is all that working for you?

**Derek Slaton:** Yes. I've been monetized for around two years now. It doubled in income from year one to year two, and I'm already ahead of the pace this year. Just because, the more content you have, new people discover it, they go back to the beginning and just keep going with that. Getting monetized was fairly easy.

It took about three months to hit the thousand subscriber mark, with audio books it took about three days to hit 4,000 hours. 

**Danica Favorite:** That's really good to know. Because again, you're sitting here, you're like, yeah, I'm using AI audio, I'm doing all this stuff.

Clearly there is an audience for that, and there is a way to get that out there, get your content monetized. I think that's really important for our listeners to understand because just showing them that there's that opportunity with AI audio because you are using YouTube as that primary audio channel.

**Steph Pajonas:** You have a Patreon too on top of [00:09:00] that, right? 

**Derek Slaton:** Yeah, I make like 60 bucks a month on that. So it's just, it's like, Ooh, big money. 

**Steph Pajonas:** know I've seen it linked there, so I was wondering how that fit into the whole monetization process.

**Derek Slaton:** Yeah, it's found money If people wanna listen to the stories without ads, but 99.9% of them are fine with ads. I will add, in addition to YouTube, I'm also releasing the stories on podcasting via a company called Red Circle, which is, they're fabulous, they distribute to all of the major places.

But in reality, in podcasting, 98% of the listeners are coming from Spotify. And it's the same general idea. You're able to monetize on there just like you are on YouTube. You put ads in and just with the free audio between YouTube and Spotify, it's probably 40, 45% of my income every month.

And it's just giving it away. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. That's awesome. This is the kind of stuff that I think our listeners really do need to hear [00:10:00] because where are those opportunities? And clearly even with the AI audio, you're just doing amazing. 

**Derek Slaton:** I make five to six times a month on YouTube and podcasting as I do on Audible and Findaway combined.

**Steph Pajonas:** And then are you also publishing the stories as eBooks on, KDP and whatnot, or... 

**Derek Slaton:** Yep, I am. I've started combining together the shorts into double features. I just had one come out on Saturday that seems to be doing well and getting good reviews. So just keeping that content just rolling.

**Danica Favorite:** I think that's awesome. So one of the other content things that you're doing that. Again, I alluded to in the introduction that we're really excited about is you're also doing translations with AI. So tell us a little bit more about your AI translations. 

**Derek Slaton:** Awesome. Yeah, I am translating through Scribe Shadow which has been mentioned on the authors group.

Just tried it on a whim. Just got their cheapest plan. Like, let's try, try novella. It'll cost me like [00:11:00] seven bucks to do so put it up there, and within two days with zero advertising, I already made my money back. Okay, there's an audience here. Let's start, producing them.

So focused on Germany first because the first four books in my series are one contained story arc, so I did all four of those in every language that they offered. And Germany was the one that hit the biggest. So I put all my effort into that and within three, four months I gained a fairly significant following in German.

So much so that the first book of my series actually got a KDP All Star bonus, which my English language books never did. And it was all, natural growth, so there was no advertising at all. It was just putting out a book a week. And just letting the Amazon algorithm do its thing.

And since then it's leveled off a little bit, but it's still 30, 35% of my KDP every month. So I've started going back and I'm building up [00:12:00] Spanish and Italian at the moment, which combined, they're about 15% of my KDP every month, but the cost is so cheap to produce them that there's no risk because the books are profitable within 24 to 48 hours upon release, and after that they're out there forever.

**Danica Favorite:** We talked about the reception to the AI audio. What's the reception you're getting to your AI translations? 

**Derek Slaton:** Germany's the one that I've gotten the most response to. I think I, I think book 47 just came out, which concludes the, essentially the first season.

I've gotten 25, 2600 ratings with a handful of reviews on Amazon, and the ratings are actually higher than my English language ones. You're always gonna have those handful of people that, it's like, oh, bad translation, yada. I don't like this.

But a lot of the one star ratings are like, oh, this story's terrible. At least the translation was good. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah. So the translation was great, but they didn't [00:13:00] like the story. That's a fairly normal thing to get from a reviewer, so. 

**Derek Slaton:** And I, I will mention that with Scribe Shadow you have the option.

You just, you click the button, it translates the document, and you can also spend credits to have it human reviewed which I've never done. Because when I first started this, I got probably 15, 20 books into the series before that became an option. It is great if you want that extra level of polish, but I kind of subscribe to the the Roger Corman mindset, which for listeners who don't know, Roger Corman was a prolific film producer in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, focusing on drive-ins and direct VHS, and his mantra was essentially like, do it fast, do it cheap, do it entertaining.

I have no doubt that I'm probably losing 10, 15% of the potential audience by doing it that way, but I'm moving so fast, I don't care because I'm picking up so much more and it's not worth the extra time and money investment to try and [00:14:00] pick those people up. Especially when you have a series this large, 

**Danica Favorite:** I'm just blown away by the number of books you're talking about here, and you're like, oh yeah, I've got 25, 2600 reviews and they're better rated than the English books, which we know. The language in that one is perfect and 

**Derek Slaton:** wouldn't go that far. If you see, if you saw my, if you saw my high school grades.

**Danica Favorite:** Okay, it's a perfect translation. How about that? Yeah. But, and, and you're also, only just a handful of those reviews are like, Ooh, bad translation. And I think that's something that I really want to encourage our listeners about is we're so afraid of these haters and we sit there and we see all the haters in social media and we think, oh no, I can't do this.

This is terrible, and we're talking to someone here who has got these great numbers. And the haters are just such a small percentage. And I think we have to remember that, it's really not as big of a deal as everyone's fearing. [00:15:00] And so, yeah, go forth. I love this. 

**Derek Slaton:** So it's funny 'cause on YouTube I'm very open about my AI audio usage on YouTube.

I did several community posts. Here's why I'm doing AI audio. And it basically boiled down to, if I use humans from here on out. I could do a story every three to four months. Using AI, I can do a story a week because it's cost effective and I can move quickly. Overwhelmingly, my fans were like, oh yeah, we love it. We want more stories. 

But a couple months ago I had a commenter who was one of those raging anti AI people. You're cheating your audience. You're using ai. I'm gonna expose you. What do you mean expose me? I've been open about it even had fans coming to my defense too, it's like, dude, he's giving you free entertainment.

What are you complaining about? 

**Steph Pajonas:** it's quite nuts to see the lengths people will go to, to, to try to denounce people using AI. You've been out about it and the quality of the [00:16:00] voices is good, but you can still tell that there's a little bit of artificialness to it.

It's not a lot anymore. And seriously, every single time I see a new model come out and whatnot. It's just getting better and better and better, adding breath sounds and I'm totally blown away by how good this technology is getting. And here you are, you're producing stories every week, and your audience in there, I have gone in and looked at the comments. They freaking love it. 

You're not shrifting anybody out of anything when it comes to using these tools. And I think that's really important for people to understand that when we're doing things fast and we're doing things entertaining, whether you call that like move fast and break things or whether or not you're calling it a minimum viable product, whatever it is, if it's speaking to your audience and your audience loves it, then that becomes the invitation to do more cool things with these tools that we have. 

So I'm totally sold on the idea. I really love it. 

**Derek Slaton:** And to double down on that point, removing [00:17:00] all of the costs involved, 'cause I broke even for the year with all of my costs across audio, editing, translations, everything by probably the third week of January.

So everything from that point on through the rest of the year is profit, which really opens up creativity because I can try anything I want. Back in the grand old days of, 2018, if I wanted to do a new series, I would not only have to invest months, I would have to set aside thousands of dollars to essentially gamble that that series would find an audience.

And now I can have an idea on Sunday night and wake up on Monday morning and start writing it. If I put it out there and even if it's a flop, I still make money on it. But more important point is I don't lose money. So that has really not only opened up creativity, because I've done a couple non zombie things that have been, knocking around my head for years.

But the big thing it did was open up the economic viability of [00:18:00] shorts, because 8,000 word, 45 minute shorts. When you had to pay for editing and audio, you can't sell that. It wasn't viable. But now it's, it's fantastic. So if I have a story idea, this isn't big enough for a book, it's not big enough for a series, I can do it in a short form. And the best thing about those, and my fans love 'em because there's so much chaos and uncertainty because they know it's a one-off. Everybody's vulnerable. So it adds that extra layer of danger to everything. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. I think that would be really fun with a zombie book, knowing that anyone could get killed by the zombies. That's fun. 

I appreciate where you're coming from with the economic viability because I see in these author groups all the time about the investments and the money that people are dumping into paying for a translation or paying for having their books turned into audio. And even something like covers, do we really have that money to invest? And I know [00:19:00] for a lot of authors, that's a stumbling block. That's something that they can't get past to be able to produce this content. 

People are using Scribe Shadow for translations, Steph, with the FFA, they have a class on translations. And so if you're like, yeah, I, I don't even have the money to invest in paying for scribe shadow. Pay for this class. It's a one and done. You've got the class forever and now you can learn how to translate your own stuff. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, I as most people know, and you can see him over my shoulder, my Duolingo bird there.

I love, love learning languages. I'm learning French, Italian, Japanese. There's probably another one in there somewhere that I'm, that I could currently work through. Swedish. That's right. There was one I was forgetting. 

So I love languages and I understand the structure of language. When I go in and I start learning a new language, I look at things like sentence structures. I look at the way that they put [00:20:00] together nouns and adjectives, those sorts of things, right? 

So I understand how languages are put together. So when I decided to develop the course at Future Fiction Academy for AI translations, it was a process of sitting down and understanding what you do with a story in order to convey that same story in another language, in a way that is going to be culturally and, localized to the region in which you are sending your story into. 

So one of the cool things about learning your own prompting is the fact that you can then take that prompt and you can use it to translate all of your books, and then you're only paying AI costs. Depending on which ones you choose.

So there's a lot of opportunity out there for translations and it's not just. Let me say, it's not just English to other languages. We have to also be aware that the stores will also get Chinese to English or French to [00:21:00] English, or all of these other places in the world who can now translate my book into English and hit a very big primary market in the United States.

So this is opening up not just to English, but to all over the world. And it's something we all have to be aware of that when we're going to move into the 2025 and beyond that there's a huge market out there and everybody is getting in on it. 

So I'm really impressed with the people who are trying this early. They're doing the whole move fast and break things. Run those prompts, get the books out. There are a lot of people who are not proofreading them, who are just, maybe doing a reverse translate with Google. Or whatever it may be. And they're hitting those markets early and they're getting in there and finding the readers before other people do.

And I think that this is one of those first mover advantages that's really important to hit when you get the chance to do it [00:22:00] right. So tops to Derek for going in there and really working on it right away instead of waiting and hoping and thinking that he would hit the market eventually. But nope.

First mover advantage is really, really important Sometimes. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, totally agree. I'm really excited to see that, especially like I said, from that bootstrapping standpoint. Mm-hmm. Because like I said, we see in all the groups, not even just ours, how do I do this for free or for low cost?

And there are ways to do it. So find those ways. And even, if you're gonna be paying some things, I, I love where Derek was like, yeah, by the third week in January, I'd covered all my costs and there is a lot more freedom of creativity to be able to say, yeah, I don't need to make money off of this because I've already covered it.

And then you can play more and have more fun. And wouldn't that be great for everyone to get to do that? 

**Steph Pajonas:** I love being able to play more and have more fun. Who doesn't? Right? 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. Yeah. So Derek, with your AI usage , we've talked about a few different things.

[00:23:00] Are there any other things that you're using AI for? Things that you like the AI to do? You've made some thumbnails, you've done translations, you've done audio. 

What else are you using AI for? 

**Derek Slaton:** I have started playing around with the new 11 reader, which came out a week or two ago.

Still in beta, but it's really cool because it's through 11 labs, but you upload your book and it reads it in real time and it has their standard voices, but it has voices, like you can have John Wayne read your book or, Burt Reynolds. Or in my case, what calls me to laugh for 10 solid minutes was having Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, cursed words as zombies as she blasted him with the shotgun.

Stuff like that. It's... you can't pay for that kind of entertainment. That's just, it's the beauty of AI. And I announced that to some of my YouTube people, and they're having just as good a time as that with that too, because it's so absurd, but it's so great at the same time.

As far as other AI uses I just signed up for Claude 3.7. [00:24:00] Just to try it out because I've heard so many things about it. Spent yesterday playing around with it, uploading a few of my books, like, Hey, here's an outline. See what you can do with this. So still reading through it, and it's a little creepy that it's sounding like me, including some of the banter.

But not entirely sure what I'm gonna do with that, if anything. But it's so cool that it's out there. 

**Danica Favorite:** It is cool. I have not had time to play with Claude 3.7 yet, but I, I'm hearing that Claude 3.7 is becoming the new boyfriend of the AI. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Is it, am I gonna have to fight somebody for it?

Oh boy. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. That's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing people are really loving it and I, I went to go use it the other day and there was some kind of weird power outage or something like that, and I'm like, okay, I guess today is not the day. So Claude 3.7 for everybody else, and one of these days I'll get to take him on a little date.

So tell us about your workflow. Like what are you doing with your workflow with the AI? I know people love to hear about how people are doing it with their workflow. Looks like, what does yours look [00:25:00] like? 

**Derek Slaton:** So, Monday morning after I chug a couple cups of coffee I pick out whatever story I'm gonna do that week.

I have a folder filled with ideas and the half the time that gets thrown out because I'll have an idea on Sunday nights, like, Ooh, I wanna do that one today. So I'll do the quick little bullet points for each chapter. 'cause ever since YouTube I've changed how I structure my stories.

And I do it with ad breaks in mind. So I write in 2000 word chapters, which breaks down to about 12 minutes of audio, which is perfect for, ad break between chapters. So I'll just go through like chapter one, beginning end, chapter two, beginning end. And then I'll sit and start writing. 

I write in screenplay format 'cause that's how I started. And it really speeds things along, especially with dialogue. 'cause I don't have to worry about proper punctuation. I don't have to worry about formatting everything. if you've ever seen a screenplay it is just a dialogue block. So it's, hit B bill's, name comes up, hit [00:26:00] enter dialogue, and you can just ramble back and forth and it speeds things up.

So depending upon if I'm doing a four or eight chapter story I'll typically wrap up by Tuesday afternoon. Run each chapter through Chat GPT, with a prompt that's essentially telling it to check the prose for correct punctuation and tense, and to turn the dialogue blocks and screenplay into properly formatted text.

Usually I have to correct it a few times because it's like negotiating with a drunk five-year-old. Like, do that, I did that. No, you didn't. Yes you did. All right. But once I get that done I'll put it into Play HT in the chapters, listen to it, do whatever corrections I need to which honestly isn't all that much.

Drop the video and usually have things wrapped up by the end of Wednesday, beginning of Thursday. Then the rest of the week is translations or more YouTube or whatever the hundreds of things on the list of things to [00:27:00] do. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Your videos are basically just like a, an image on the screen that just kind of like goes back and forth, right?

So do you like create an image that goes with each one of your stories? And 

**Derek Slaton:** So, in Final Cut Pro, which I use to put the video together, it has the just generic motion backgrounds. So I'll put a brightly cold one on chapter one, a dark one on chapter two and flip flop. So it's easy to find when I go and try and place the ads.

And then I'll just have the thumbnail for whatever that week's video is, just slowly moving across the screen. But yeah, it takes two minutes to set up and Final Cut Pro. 

**Danica Favorite:** Listening to you, I'm glad that you told us about your writing process because it's really interesting that you are now writing with the intention of understanding that YouTube audience and where the ad breaks and all of that stuff is going to be, because that in and of itself is a whole new skill for writing and plotting out what that story's gonna look like.

**Steph Pajonas:** I was thinking, wow, this is like writing for tv. When you had to write for [00:28:00] TV and you had to think about your ad breaks, your commercial breaks, and teasing the audience , and then getting them through the commercial break to come back and get into the story.

I think this is a whole new skillset. I love it. 

**Derek Slaton:** And I actually improved my writing and really sped things up because I know where the chapter begins and ends, and I will do the, copy, paste into the word counter to see where I'm at with any given chapter.

So I get to the end of the chapter, I'm like, oh, 1600 words. Like, no, let's go back and put in two minutes worth of banter because I love the characters love dialogue. And there's always a spot no matter where you are, for characters to just talk smack to each other for a couple minutes and it speeds everything up. 

It's ultimately made it a better product because have built in cliffhangers with each chapter, and I'd like to think it really grips the listener and based on the responses I get on YouTube they seem to like it.

So,

**Danica Favorite:** I love that you're like, yeah, this has made me a [00:29:00] better writer. Because I think that's been the experience of a lot of us as we've adapted different AI tools and AI techniques, that it really does make you think about how to write and how to structure things. And I know Steph has the same goal of eventually putting books on YouTube and it's like, okay, let me think about this. 

Can I, as I'm writing, write with that in mind because I love the Stephen Covey quote of, begin with the end in mind. Like, what do you want with that end product? Not just thinking, okay, I'm writing a book, but really, what kind of products are you turning that book into?

This is super cool. I think this is probably the marketing goal that I've gotten out of this one right here. 

**Derek Slaton:** And I come with a TV mindset, I spent years working jobs where I never got to read because, especially if it was like a five or 600 page book. Because, I never had time. I'm gonna structure this for somebody like me who would've loved to have read this. So that's [00:30:00] why I write a novella series. Each book is a standalone story, but I treat, like an episode of TV show. So the full story, and it pushes the overall narrative forward.

Transitioning from that into the more structured 2000 word chapters, it was just a natural progression. 

**Danica Favorite:** I think that is really, really great because we are talking about AI as writers and as authors and people I think don't understand that there's so much craft that we still have to think about through every piece of the process we're doing, and part of that craft is thinking about what would this audio look like? What would all these pieces look like? And it's cool that you've already put all those pieces together. 'cause I'm like, yeah, yeah. Those are some good pieces. 

So we've talked a lot about different AI tools. Do you have a favorite, do you have a favorite AI tool?

We were like talking about the Claude boyfriend situation, but what do you like or do you have a favorite tool that you use a lot? 

**Derek Slaton:** Play HT is probably my favorite out of all of it, which is the audio. [00:31:00] I did a story set in London, so I switched over from my normal AI narrator to a British one, and it just really, it brought it just a different tone to the story. And it got me thinking because ultimately I wanna go worldwide with the story. I can just have somebody with a British accent reading that, Australian accent, a German accent. And it opened up the idea for, more creativity.

**Steph Pajonas:** I love more creativity, give me. 

**Derek Slaton:** It's great, especially when people tune into it. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, absolutely. Every, all the talk is, oh, AI takes away creativity. And from the people that I've talked to who are using it a lot like you, like Steph, like, all these different people and the guests we've had.

It's making us more creative. it's adding to that creativity. And I love that there are more options and more ways to get those stories out to people who may not have otherwise experienced them. 

**Derek Slaton:** I had a perfect storm last year 'cause I went [00:32:00] full-time as a writer last January.

That wasn't entirely by choice 'cause I had been right on that, teetering on the edge of making enough to go full time. It was a natural stepping off point from my previous job. As I was having the conversation with my old boss, I hung up going, oh my God, I'm a full-time writer.

Oh my God, I'm a full-time writer. So for about six straight months, I just was like, hyper-focused, I need to implement all of these AI tools. How do I do that? And it was just a caffeine fueled like, ah, but it again, it spurred me along and It was some rocky going there for a little bit, trying to find my footing.

But I think I've got my process down now, so it's a lot more calming, only two cups of coffee instead of the caffeine IV drip to keep me at the computer. 

**Danica Favorite:** It's cool to like see that all of this AI and innovation is what helped you [00:33:00] get to that point of being the full-time writer.

So I think that is even more encouraging that, it's helped you in feeling like, yes, I can maintain this full-time writer status and I don't need that iv, I can just have my normal coffee load. 

**Derek Slaton:** Oh, yeah, a hundred percent. Without a doubt, without AI, I would not have been able to go full time, a hundred percent. Not only the cost difference, but to me the biggest benefit of AI is it moves as fast as I do. Writing a story before, if I spend two days writing a story, it's like, okay, send it off. Gotta wait two, three weeks for the editor, get that back, gotta wait another two, three weeks for the audio.

And now I can do all that in a few days if I focus and stay at the computer. 

**Danica Favorite:** That shortening of the time period. This used to take all this time and now boom, I actually can produce at the rate that the readers, and in your case, the listeners are looking for, they want that fast turnaround.

When's your next book coming out? And you're like, ha ha, [00:34:00] it's not completely up to me. And now it's way more up to you. And you get to decide if you wanna work at that pace, or you're like, no, you get to wait 'cause I'm going to relax for a week or something. I hear that's what the people do anyway.

**Derek Slaton:** Yeah. Well it, it's funny because I have a lot of fans on YouTube. Because I release 12 o'clock, 12 noon eastern standard time every Saturday morning and within 10 minutes I'll have, a couple dozen comments. 'cause people are waiting on that story to come out and they're like this is my Saturday morning cartoons. Just ultraviolet adult, 

**Steph Pajonas:** just, zombie eating your face type, violent, right. Yeah. 

**Danica Favorite:** Some kids are into that, I'm sure. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Oh my goodness. 

**Danica Favorite:** We're all just big kids. Right. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Excellent. I love that you've managed to cover so much when it comes to your career, You move through all of these different phases of your career and AI tools have been there to help you along the way, and I think that's [00:35:00] important for people to hear. This is not like people using AI to cheat at their business, right? This is people using AI to enhance themselves, enhance their creativity, give their audience more of what they want and what they're excited about this.

This is the new revolution, and we are one of the people who is out in front of it. So I really appreciate you coming here today to tell us all about this. 

**Derek Slaton:** Oh, absolutely. And on that point, I've experienced this my entire career 'cause I started out doing video when Final Cut Pro 1.0 came out and I had people tell me, oh, you're not a real video person.

You're not doing real, real film editing. And then I went and I was one of the first people to get the digital Rebel, which is the first professional digital camera. I would go shoot concerts and talk to other photographers and they're like, oh, you're not a real photographer, you're not using film.

And I spent 20 years traveling the country and they didn't. So, going through the next [00:36:00] thing, it's like, it's just the next technological step. So I'm gonna embrace it, I'm gonna have a good career. And if others want to come on for the ride, we'll teach you. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Excellent. I love that we got a Yes.

I'm right there with you. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah, we're all on this great ride together and I hope more people join us. If they don't, that's okay. But I think that we've got the best people all, all around us doing the funnest things and I was just messaging with Steph yesterday. I'm like, I'm so glad to be on this journey with you and this is fun.

This is what I want to be doing with my life, is just having fun adventures with really cool people. And we get to do that. 

**Derek Slaton:** I get to wake up every day, walk up a flight of stairs, hang out with my cats, and be creative for a living. even a year plus into this, it's still just feels surreal when people ask, oh, what do you, oh, I'm an author. It sounds like one of those like fake careers. You say when somebody asks you in the fifth grade, like, I wanna be a astronaut, I wanna be a professional baseball player, I wanna be a writer. It's one of those things that you see other people do, but it just [00:37:00] never feels like, is an achievable goal.

And in one day it is. 

**Steph Pajonas:** And one day it is. 

**Danica Favorite:** Yeah. And I am so excited that for so many people, this goal that seems so far off is achievable. And I love that. I'm excited to see how many more people are gonna get to achieve those goals that they've been dreaming of that they didn't think were possible.

And here we are. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Excellent. All right, Derek, we're almost out of time. We'd love to send people to all of your socials and your YouTube and all that kind of stuff. Where should we send people at the end of this podcast? 

**Derek Slaton:** YouTube is the best place to find me. I'll send you a link to put in the description. But if you just google my name it pops right up in YouTube. 

**Steph Pajonas:** Fantastic. Okay, we're definitely gonna do that and no worries, because I have your link. 'cause I go visit your channel all the time to check you out. All right, everybody who's been listening in as usual, you can come by brave new bookshelf.com and listen to the episode. We usually put the YouTube [00:38:00] right up at the top of the page and we have a player on there too. So, if your phone is outta commission, you guys can always come by the website and check it out. We'll have a blog post about this episode and the full transcript as well.

Danica, do you have anything that you wanna say before we sign off? 

**Danica Favorite:** Yes. Make sure you like and subscribe to our YouTube channel as well as our Facebook, because we want to make sure that this gets out to as many people as possible. So tell your friends share it with folks and. If you do have questions, like I said, part of why I was eager to get Derek on is we knew people wanted to hear about translations.

So are there questions? Are there topics? If there's something that one of our guests has spurred a burning question in you, please make sure to reach out to us and let us know. Number one, we wanna know that we're hitting your needs, but number two, if we can find another guest to further the education, that's something we're really excited to do.

**Steph Pajonas:** You can contact us via the website. We have a form there. And then always feel free to just leave a comment on any one of the [00:39:00] posts. So, we'll see it and we'll be happy to respond to you that way too. Excellent. Okay, so everybody thank you for tuning in and we will see you guys all later in the next episode.

Right. Bye everybody. 

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