56 - How AI Bridges the Accessibility Gap in Writing with Lorna Mackie

In this inspiring episode of Brave New Bookshelf, hosts Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite welcome Lorna Mackie, a tech professional, author, and strategist, who sheds light on how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing authorship by making it more accessible. Lorna shares her personal journey and professional insights into using AI to overcome challenges like brain fog and limited energy, demonstrating how these tools empower authors with disabilities and chronic illnesses to focus on their creative passions. Discover how AI acts as an invaluable adaptive partner for brainstorming, drafting, editing, and marketing, transforming the writing process into a more joyful and efficient experience for everyone. 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-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of the Future Fiction Academy, where we teach authors how to use AI in any part of their process. And I'm also the Editor-in-Chief of the Future Fiction Press where we're Publishing AI forward books, and we're having a great time doing all of those things. I'm sure I probably say that every single episode. The thing is I don't go back and listen to any of our episodes over again, so I have no idea how repetitive I am, and I apologize to anybody who's listening. So in, in an effort to not be repetitive, I have been, I've been working on some fun stuff on my own website and whatnot, like trying to figure out how to bring my books over onto my website using AI [00:01:00] automation and workflows and stuff like that. And that's been a lot of fun. I like experimenting with automation, because that makes my life easier, and in fact, we talked about that and one or two episodes ago.

Hopefully that is something that you guys have been thinking about since then. And as part of my automation and working a little bit harder, I'm thinking about putting my books out wider and wider and wider. And that is one of the things that they do over at the Lovely Publish Drive where Danika is from.

So let me introduce my co-host, Danika Favorite, Danika, how are you today? 

Danice Favorite: I am great. Thank you. Yes, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Danica Favorite. I am the community manager at Publish Drive, where we help you get your books out there as wide as possible. We're there for you every step of the journey, whether that is getting your book formatted, your metadata, your book description done, to distributing your books to the widest audience possible, to finally, you know, once you make some sales and you've got people you wanna split royalties with, we can help you with the royalty splitting as well. [00:02:00] So, yeah, between both of our companies, as I always say, we have you covered to learn about all the things and get those books out there and being as profitable as possible. Steph, I wouldn't worry about being repetitive 'cause it's good to remind people of all the cool stuff you do. Yesterday we recorded an episode which, probably by the time you hear this episode, it'll be the previous weeks.

But, Steph and I were talking about all the stuff we do. We do a lot. And AI is the tool for which we without it, we wouldn't be able to do all these cool things. So I think it's important for people to know, hey, we have help, we have our digital helpers, and, that's important to us.

And so today our guest is here talking about an important topic. When I was out asking, hey, what topics do people wanna cover? What can people talk about, Lorna raised her hand, and was like, hey, I've got a great one for you. And it is, so [00:03:00] this is your reminder that if there's topics you want us to cover, or guests you think would be a good guest, please let us know because that is how we found Lorna. So Lorna said to me, well, I've presented on AI. I work for a disability and strategy group in Australia, and so I know all about AI with disabilities, and how that can be used to help people who have disabilities or things like that.

And I just went, yes, because as all of you know, this is where Steph and I are very passionate. I think we both came into the AI space through trying to get some assistance whether that, for me, it was just after my car accident and just saw my life stress and everything, just needing that additional help.

And for Steph, it, it was the brain fog post COVID. And so here we are. Lorna is gonna talk about some other strategies and things that people can use, and I'm excited to do that. So without further ado, I'm [00:04:00] going to introduce you to Lorna Mackie, who, by the way, it's 11 o'clock in Australia, where she's recording for us right now.

So she gets extra kudos today. So Lorna, welcome. 

Lorna Mackie: Hey guys. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to, yeah, talk all things AI and writing and accessibility. Maybe a little bit about me. So yeah, like you said, I I have a background in tech, so I've worked in tech for kind of the last 15, 20 years and the last few years I've worked in the disability sector.

And I'm also an author, so I've been an author. I've always written, like most of authors have kind of always written, but been published for the last kind of four or five years. And I guess my journey with AI really started through my work working in disability. Um, So part of my role, I'm director of strategy, I go to a lot of tech conferences and I sit on the industry boards for a digital tech conference and really noticed four or five years ago, all of this cool AI stuff started popping up at [00:05:00] all of these conferences. And yeah, it really started to get me interested in how that could have a practical application for the customers that we support, but also. In my own life. So I do not identify as a person with disability. I do have chronic illnesses.

I have some stuff that I need help with so I can talk from my lived experience, I guess, knowing that it's gonna be, it's gonna be different for everyone. And I think that's probably one of the first things about AI for me, is just you you, it's so adaptive. You kinda take what you need and you want from it, I guess.

Steph Pajonas: I am so excited about this topic, because I definitely came to AI after having brain fog from COVID, which lasted several months. So I got stuck where I couldn't write, I couldn't think. And AI came in and definitely assisted me with the process of getting the words down, getting past blockages in my process. I would love to hear about the different ways that AI has been [00:06:00] assisting people, not even just authors, but in, in general.

Lorna Mackie: I think the thing that really struck me when I started learning about this is AI's in everything. It's been in things for years that we didn't even consciously think that it's in, because it's become so much a part of our daily lives now.

And I think there's the kind of obvious things that people think about. So things like your narration, your text to speech, your speech to text, and assisting people with communication differences is the, what I think people would naturally think about. But then there's a whole range of other kind of adaptive technology things in that space for, if you're neurodivergent, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff there now that can help you to arrange your life the way that you want to think. So I think I listened to the podcast, I think it was maybe last season, and there was one of your speakers on that was talking about all of the shortcuts she'd been able to automate through make.com for just the things that she wants to do in [00:07:00] her life. Connecting your, your, like your Google automations and your Alexa automation. So there's the practical kind of automation things. But there's also other things like, your voice assistance to be able to control things and even down to, again, things that are still part of day-to-day life, we don't think about 'em as being AI, but if you've got dyslexia, being able to use AI to help you in your editing process. And for me I have, so I have a chronic autoimmune condition. So I also deal with brain fog sometimes, and a big part of it for me, when I started using AI in my writing, was just getting over the cognitive load of having that blank sheet of paper in front of you. To be able to have that, kind of, always interested, always available brainstorming partner that you can train to think the way that you think and kinda get you over those initial humps. And if I think about when I was first exploring this, I remember that I had this like moment of epiphany [00:08:00] around it, where I was listening to someone talk about how they used AI, and how they were, this person with disability was talking about how it helped them just to do whatever they want to do in their life. I remember thinking, oh, like why can't I do that? That's, everyone can do that. It's putting the person in the center and kind of building a tool set around you to do whatever it is you want to do.

Danice Favorite: We don't think about that burden sometimes, so I love that you've mentioned that, because we all hear that quote, oh, you can't edit a blank page. But for some people, that struggle of getting past the blank page can be hard. So for you, how is what's been your personal approach to AI in publishing? Do you have some things that you've, what, when it came on, what were you thinking in terms of how this is gonna impact you as an author? 'Cause obviously we know you saw the potential for the disabilities, but what about you as an author? What did you see? 

Lorna Mackie: So I um, I, I'll be honest, I was a little apprehensive about it, I think. When I first started exploring it was at the peak of the [00:09:00] kind of AI is terrifying and is going to destroy the world, kind of freneticism. So I was a little bit cautious to start with. And so my first exploration was I think what most people do, which is the kind of brainstorming process. So I have been a Claude girl through and through for most of the first part of the exploration. And it was very much like I say, having that brainstorming partner. But as I moved through it, I guess I started to think about, what do I really want out of my writing journey?

You said you're very busy lady. I'm very busy lady. I've got this kind of very demanding day job. What is. What is writing to me? Writing is kind of passion. It's telling the stories that I love to tell. It's creating cool characters, and its cool worlds. That's what I wanna spend my time on.

I don't wanna spend my time on anything else, like stuff that takes me away from that enjoyment process of, that kind of led me through my AI journey. Which is, okay, if I wanna spend time [00:10:00] creating cool worlds and doing that, what are all the bits that I hate that I can.... Can AI do that for me?

So I started asking Claude, Hey, like I don't wanna do blah, blah, blah. Can you do blah, blah, blah for me? So I very much started there with kind of that brainstorming process and then it moved through. The next step was I jumped to the end and then started using AI in my editing processes to do some dev editing to spot gaps, to... I use Pro Writing Aid.

They've got this really cool new, um. the manuscript analysis stuff, I've played with that a little bit recently, which is quite cool. And so I think that kind of, I started with the peripheral things, but over time it's extended more and more into all aspects of my process now. So, uh, Claude helps me with my marketing.

It does all my marketing copy. It analyzes my Facebook and Amazon ads for me. I fell in love with Ideogram for book covers. Which is also interesting, because I...in a whole other life. I have a [00:11:00] random history. I also owned a theater company for a number of years and used to produce a whole bunch of theater.

So I used to like design all my own posters and stuff for that. So it wasn't a huge jump to designing my book covers. And so I naturally integrated ideogram the same way I used stock photography or other things. And just kind of started to look at with myself in the center as here's what I wanna spend my time on.

What are the bits that I can outsource to AI? So, at the moment, I kind of have AI through pretty much all of the process, apart from the core writing bit, which is the bit that I wanna spend my time on. I have experimented a little bit with having it generate the prose and edit it. I don't mind that, but I, that's kind of the bit that I wanna spend my time doing.

So it's everything else I'm trying to get rid of as much as possible. 

Steph Pajonas: I understand this one completely. There's just so much other stuff that's involved in being an author that a lot of people who aren't authors [00:12:00] or who are new authors don't realize until they get into the business and they're like, oh wait, I have to write my own ad copy.

I have to build my own website. I've gotta do all of these things that are involved in being an author right now in 2025, almost 2026. And it's just there's so much there that you have to do. And now AI can finally help with all of those things. It can help you build a website, it can help you developmentally edit your book.

It can help you brainstorm, do all of the things. It can even help you write the prose if that is what you want, right? So like for me, personally, I hate writing that first draft. I hate it so much. I hate that blank page and whatnot. But I have ideas about what I want to happen, 'cause I'm a storyteller, and I know the story that I want to tell.

It's just getting those words down, it's tough. So I will have it write that first draft, and then I'm going in and I'm like, I, no to that word, yes, love it, no, hate it. 

Lorna Mackie: Yeah. 

Steph Pajonas: [00:13:00] No. And then work my way through it. And then, sometimes, and then I'm in there also, like I'm now inspired. And I'm writing the words between all of these paragraphs or whatever it may be.

So it can literally help anywhere in the process. You just have to pick those things that you need them for. 

Lorna Mackie: Yeah. 

Steph Pajonas: And that is actually what you were doing. Right? So it's sometimes it, it involves a ramp up process. Start small, little brainstorming, little this, little that.

And then as you get used to it and you understand its capabilities, it grows from there. 

I love that. 

Lorna Mackie: I think that's such a, like a good part of how people should approach AI. Like I would never tell anyone to do, but you know, if I'm giving advice to people how to approach AI, it would be like, work out what you love, and then look at how you can outsource the rest of it. And it doesn't have to be just AI. So if I have a human virtual assistant that I will use AI to help me do a marketing copy and stuff. And then I will hand that off to my human virtual assistant who does all my social media stuff, 'cause I despise social media. [00:14:00] Um, you know, I, I'm not a rapid releaser. I probably do three or four books a year, and each book takes 3 to 4 hundred hours of effort for me to produce. That's the same whether I'm using AI or not. The time doesn't app... appreciably, get faster. I wish I could. I just listened to Coral Hart's podcast episode earlier and I was like, oh my God, I wish I could go that fast.

But that's not me. But what I have found with AI is the quality of the prose is better, because I've done a lot of that cleaning with the AI process. When I send it to my human editor, I still wanna work with a human editor, I get a lot of benefit out of that collaboration. It's just a much cleaner draft that I send her.

And so her life is easier, my life is easier, and we enjoy that collaborative process more. I think the other thing that I really noticed when I started to come into AI was, I remember talking in some of the chat groups about accessibility, and [00:15:00] someone had made a comment, which was like, oh, if you can't do it without AI, you shouldn't be an author, kind of thing.

And I was immediately like, nope, nope, nope, nope. That's not where we're going. And I think it's like everyone has a story to tell, right? Everyone has a truth. Everyone, if you're an author, a writer, you have a story that you wanna put out in the world. And I really think AI is such an incredible creative catalyst, and like I've seen some of the negative commentary about how AI is making us all dumber.

Like I have the opposite problem. I have had this like explosion of creativity and, I have so many stories. My biggest problem right now is actually finishing the series that I've started and not working on one of the eight or nine other series that I've plotted because, there's this kind of explosion of creativity when you can clear some of the weeds out the way and actually give yourself kind of time to be in that focused flow state. And for [00:16:00] me, I am a massive perfectionist and one of the things that I really had to learn working with AI, is it's not perfect. And that's okay. And that's been incredibly helpful to my process to be like, try and let go of the reigns a little bit in some cases and see what happens.

So yeah, I might have this cool, amazing, happy accident or if not, you check it out and start again, like it's cool.

Danice Favorite: It is. And I like that you're taking this playful approach of, oh, it's a happy accident. Oh, we'll see. And I really wanted to highlight one of the things that you said, because this is important, I think, for our listeners or watchers to understand that previous to AI, it took you 400 hours.

Now it takes you 400 hours. However, it's the difference in quality. Also, it seems from what I've been hearing from you, that the process is more joyful for you because you get to.... It isn't just about the AI improving, but you've been able to take things off of your plate to give to [00:17:00] the AI.

And now you can really focus on the pieces you love. And I think that's really good for people to understand that sometimes it's not about just the fastness that AI gives you, but it's the ability to focus and do the things that you really love. 

Lorna Mackie: That's it. And like I'm really inspired by Joanna Penn's, like AI artisan assisted author.

I think that like really resonates with me. i'm personally, I'm not trying to rapid release. That's not something I enjoy. I like to spend time doing it, and it's really creating the space to focus on that. I used to put a ton of pressure on myself where like I gotta release it at this stage.

So I've gotta write this much, then I gotta leave this much time for marketing. And then so much of the available time, like a lot of authors who have a day job still, you have, a couple of hours maybe in the morning or evening to devote to it. And so much of that was carved up into other things that we can now outsource. I think the other thing that I've really started getting into is [00:18:00] the, I guess the expanding the, so you spoke about going wide Steph. I've started using Eleven Labs for all of my audio narration. I have a monetized YouTube channel, which is essentially episodic AI narration.

And that's fascinating to me. I did try and clone my voice for that. It was terrible. I do not wanna listen to my own voice. I identify with not relistening to your own podcasts. I do not wanna listen to my own voice. So I create like a custom AI voice, and I would say 95% of the comments on that channel are about how good the narration is, even though I say this is AI narration on everything. So that's been really interesting. There's also like a podcast version of that I'm starting to expand out. The other AI tool that I'm loving at the moment is Notebook LM for my multi-series. When you're like, damn was that person blue-eyed or green-eyed?

And where did I leave that sword in that last book? So Notebook LM for that kind of series [00:19:00] bible stuff. I've also been getting really into that recently and that's just like super cool. And then the other thing that I've been playing with, which I'm still on the fence about, is the AI video generation, like Midjourney videos, when it got launched. I started playing with that, and I think they're getting views. I don't know how well they're converting yet, that could absolutely be user error though. I think I might need to do a little more upskilling in that. 

Danice Favorite: It's interesting like, like, I think we were saying before we went live, that the challenge really is there's so many cool things to play with and so really picking and saying, okay, I'm not doing that pretty shiny today.

But I'm curious, do you have any particular workflows that you find useful that you could share with folks today? 

Lorna Mackie: Sure. So most recently for my new pen name that is... so I've got an original pen name that's more AI light, and then I've got a new pen name that I'm doing a bit more AI in.

I've started using [00:20:00] Novelcrafter for that end to end, so I can use the AI interactions, and I love the workflow in Novelcrafter. So I'll start with the Chat and I'll be like, here's my concept. Typically it's Claude Sonnet, although I've been playing with Claude Opus a little bit more as well. I haven't had a chance to look at the new Sonnet yet, the 4.5 that's just come out. So I'll, I like to have a conversation with the AI. Here's my thought, here's my concept, here's what I think, and we'll brainstorm back and forth on very much like an outline plotter. I don't do detail plotting, but I'll do an outline plot and then I think I quite, I like Novelcrafter for the way that you can do that and build your codex as you go.

And then I'll, I will typically draft each chapter, or sometimes I'll have the AI generate it and then edit it depending on how I'm going. And then gradually work through that. I tend to draft and edit once, to try and just get to that first draft. Like I said, the getting to that end of that first draft is the big focus.

And then I'll go back [00:21:00] and do a couple of dev edits and then it goes off to the human editor. And then in that process, I'll typically use Pro Writing Aid for manuscript analysis in the middle of that as well. So that's like the writing process. And then once we've done that, I'll dump the whole lot back into Claude, and then we'll brainstorm marketing copy.

I get typically, will get Claude to analyze, one of the things that find really helpful is getting Claude to analyze the book covers and like the top 100 books in the genre on Amazon and give some thematic analysis, so that when I'm designing my book cover, which as I say, I do a combination of Ideogram, stock photography, and my own artwork. I can make sure that like really fits purpose, and then I'll use Claude to generate all the marketing copy and everything.

That's kind of the rough process. 

Steph Pajonas: What a fantastic workflow. I love it. You get in there, you use it for the creation aspect, and then you take it out and then you dump it back into a new chat to have it do [00:22:00] its analysis and everything like that. I find that's definitely the best way to go with a lot of these things.

I like to give them at least the final in a fresh chat so that there's no...t here's no bias, there's no, it doesn't know how we got to that point. Let's just look at what we have in front of us and give some more unbiased log lines, blurbs, those sorts of things. Anything you may need for marketing purposes.

I love the fact that you can use all of the different tools for whatever works best for them. Like Notebook LM is great for all of, like throwing in your sources and getting lots of information about those sources back. You don't have to worry as much about it hallucinating. You don't have to do any of that kinda stuff.

And then you can use Claude. And I hope to use the new 4.5 Sonnet as well soon. I also have not had time to get in there and play with it to get [00:23:00] to that point where you can hand it off to the editor and you can go on to do the author marketing business portion of the 

Lorna Mackie: Yeah. 

Steph Pajonas: the journey there.

Mm-hmm. 

Lorna Mackie: Yeah, for sure. And I started playing more recently with Claude, like. Helping with the business portion of that. That I would say I've had mixed results with. I happened to see some of the chats in the AI writing group the other day saying that perhaps the other AIs were better fit for that.

And I think that's like a big thing is learning which AI is fit for purpose for which tool. I am very guilty of the, ooh, shiny and like I also, I think one of the problems when you start doing this is everything's got a subscription fee. So kinda keeping an eye on how much you're spending with your various subscriptions is also part of that.

But yeah, I really, I enjoy the process of kind of mixing and matching and like I say, my whole approach to the AI is human at the center. The core of it [00:24:00] is that creative storytelling element that I bring and kind of plugging in the different AI elements. And I think whether you're someone that's a person with a disability or otherwise, it's the same approach, right?

It's using the tool to enable you to do whatever it is you want to do. But the creative core is still, it's still you, it's still the author. It's... the content is still coming from you, which I think is really important. I think there's a lot of kind of myths out there around what AI is and isn't.

But I think the best uses of AI that I've seen in writing or where you still have that author that's directing the story and rolling with it. 

Danice Favorite: Yeah. I think that's important because, and I know Steph and I have talked about this a lot, in terms of you're the creative director. There's only one you with one story idea that's gonna direct the story in a certain way, and being able to keep that control and realize....

And this is what I tell authors all the [00:25:00] time is is this idea of, ultimately you're the one in control. And I know Steph talks about this a lot as well. Like ultimately when you look at the choices the AI makes, it's guided by you and your knowledge and your capacities and all of the things that make you unique that's what's guiding the AI to create the story. And I think that's a really good reminder, particularly for someone who might be listening to this or might have listened to some of our other episodes where we're like, oh yeah, this can help you if you've got some kind of disability or if you're struggling with something, and making being an author more accessible and making those pieces in the writer space more accessible. Because I think we have this myth sometimes that the publishing world is accessible to everybody, and it doesn't work that way. There is a level of privilege that you have to be able to be an author.

I was just reading [00:26:00] this article that loosely applies to this in terms of like when you've got somebody who's in like a poverty, hand to mouth kind of thing, they don't have the same bandwidth that someone who has a decent living and has a home to live in and all of that to be able to learn new things and get these new skills.

And so if you're somebody who doesn't have those same abilities to be able to wake up in the morning and, have that extra bandwidth to be able to do something, I think is really powerful. Because it's, like I said, like I, I was reading it totally in a different context, but I think about that every day is the privilege that we have that we just take for granted.

Lorna Mackie: Absolutely. And I think, like I said, my health is quite good at the moment, but with my journey with autoimmune, I've had phases of my life where I had very low energy, where, the brain fog is real and you might only have half an hour or an hour to devote to do something, and you.

Creativity is such a core part of us as [00:27:00] humans, right? You want, you still need to feed that creative part of your soul. If all you're doing is just existing, and you've got this desire to create, I think that's where AI can be really helpful is if you've only got your half an hour, spend it on the things that you wanna spend it on that gives you joy and feeds your soul purpose and not on some of the really soul sucking, horrific stuff that you don't wanna spend your time doing.

I also think another like really interesting aspect as well that I'm seeing more people begin to understand now. I think, and it's starting to lessen some of the fear around AI, is that, I think at the beginning a lot of it was like, oh my God, it's gonna take our jobs and AI is gonna take over the world and we're all gonna be unemployed.

I still see a little bit of that fear, but I think the more people understand how much it can be used to augment rather than automate the less that fear will be. And like I said, I'm in Australia. Our federal government here last month released their kind of [00:28:00] landmark jobs and skills report, which is how they see AI impacting the jobs and skills market in Australia.

And it's a fascinating read, and it's really encouraging. 'Cause basically the conclusion they have from that is they don't see wholesale automation, they see augmentation. They see people still people doing most of the same jobs, but with AI support. And they've put this really good framework out there about how they intend to like steward d ifferent industries through that transition. And so I think the more people understand how adaptive it is, and how, you can plug it in. There's no doubting that it's an industry disruptor for us, right? Like it's absolutely an industry disruptor. It's a massive tech change. And, but I fully intend to continue writing for another 10 to 15 years.

And so I think this is one of those things where, well, let's, let's get on board with it. Let's find a way to make it work for us. And and for me, certainly it's not just working for me, but giving me so much more joy in the process. 

Danice Favorite: And I like that [00:29:00] this keeps being the theme of the season I feel like, Steph, like we started out this fall with Joanna Penn talking about how she's finding more joy in the process with AI.

And it seems like every guest we've had, for the most part has come back to this idea of I'm finding the joy in my writing again. I'm able to do the things again. I mentioned in a previous episode I've got my first novella out in almost two years, and it's the first thing that I've completely completed in about two to three years, somewhere in that range. I was trying to look up dates and I couldn't find 'em. So if I, if you listened from a previous episode and you're like, wait, that's not the same time period. It's somewhere in there. I'm a writer, not a time teller. But I think about that and having that joy. And being able to, I was going through some really rough times in my life and I couldn't write to [00:30:00] produce, but I was always writing for fun. I was always writing for joy. And our last episode when we were talking with Jill Cooper, and I was giving her a hard time about, she, she gets these ideas and plays with them and she makes covers and sends them to me. And then doesn't do anything with them, but I'm like, darn it, I want that story.

But the great thing is for her, and I think for all of us, we're finding those fun little ways to play again. And a lot of the work that I've been doing via the coaching I've been receiving and the coaching that I'm going to be starting with people is finding that joy. And some of that is going back to that inner child and what makes little you excited and happy about writing, and I think we're all finding it.

So I'm really grateful for that. 

Lorna Mackie: Absolutely. And I think, like it's my belief, if you love the book, if you love what you're doing, like the money will follow, right? Like I can tell, I can tell the books that I love doing are ultimately , generally are better books, because [00:31:00] there's more of me and them, there's more care, there's more love, and those are the books that sell better that respond better for me.

But. You're absolutely right. It's the playfulness. Like I love Ideogram, and I can't tell you how many times I've gone on had, this, o oh, exactly that. Here's a fun like idea for, oh damn, I'm gonna have to go and write that book now. No, No, I can't. I'm gonna finish one of the three series I currently have before I start writing another book.

But I feel I've had that conversation with a few authors where that's something that it just gives fun and inspiration and even if they never use that book cover, it sparks a thought. I think you can see like with, there was the Bookbub Report that came out back in May, that's saying about half of authors now are using AI in some way.

I think we're gonna start to see more of that trend as people find ways that they're ethically comfortable with. 'Cause I think can acknowledge there's people still have some ethical challenges with it. They'll find ways that they're ethically comfortable with exploring it. And I do [00:32:00] genuinely believe, like I'm old now, old enough to remember when digital cameras first came out.

And that was like, and like Photoshop was gonna be the end of photography. And we'd never be able to trust the photo ever again, 'cause everything could be photoshopped. And I remember when Indie Publishing came out and, that was gonna destroy literature. Whereas now, if you would like to find a spicy romance about, I don't know, purple cactus, you can probably go and find it.

It's kind democratized this whole experience. So it's my belief that's where it's all going as well, that it will find its waterline. But hopefully it will find a waterline in a way that's actually more inclusive and accessible to a whole bunch of other people that have always had stories they wanted to tell, but just couldn't quite overcome the barriers that are there.

Steph Pajonas: Well, someone's gonna hear this episode and go out and write a steamy book about a purple cactus, So I'm sure of it at this [00:33:00] point. I wanna hear about some of your favorite tools that you use. You definitely went over some of them in this chat that we're having. But I wanna hear about the things that you're using the most right now.

Lorna Mackie: Part of the problem is that they just change so often. So what is my favorite chat now was probably not my favorite last month. At the moment I'm really loving Novelcrafter. I really like the ability to use the codex function. And one of the things I used to spend a lot of time doing when I was writing was in my plotting, I would produce the matrices that have like the by character, what's happening by chapter, by plotline, what's happening by chapter.

And it just does it automatically. And that was like mind blowing moment when I realized it could do that. So loving Novelcrafter And I'm finding that much more cost effective for me as well. Claude is always like bestie, so your first love, right?

Can't go past Claude. And probably Ideogram. I love Ideogram. I've tried some of the [00:34:00] other image generators, but I keep coming back to Ideogram. I use Ideogram mostly for my marketing imagery. And more recently I've been playing with Midjourney video as well. And doing like little short mini trailers, which is fun to play with.

I'm still not sure how, like I say, I'm not sure how effective they are at converting, but people seem to like them. Like I put one out a few weeks ago, I had about 60,000 views, so people seem to like watching it. I haven't had 60,000 book sales obviously. But yeah, probably, yeah, Novelcrafter. Claude is the AI and Ideogram.

Yeah, Ideogram's just fun. It's just get in and have a play. 

Steph Pajonas: I love Ideogram too. Mm-hmm. But I also, Midjourney is my first love. I've spent a lot of time in there. I like to just, I just like to make images. Like I see a style that I like, I prompt and I get something, and then I just move on to the next thing.

Ideogram is more of my author workhorse type [00:35:00] thing. Like I, I use it for, I need icons. I need book covers. I need images for my website. I need to design a new website for somebody else. I, all of those things, and I will use Ideogram for all of that. So it's like Midjourney is more like art for me and for playing and trying out new styles and doing other things, whereas Ideogram is like an actual workhorse where I actually use it for things that.

That I need it for? 

Lorna Mackie: Well, like I write, um, so I write spicy sci-fi primarily. Or a Stark Trek is one of the reviews I got recently and, I'm like, that's what we're calling it from now on the new genre Stark Trek. But I write spicy sci-fi and the amount of time I used to spend hunting for stock photography that could be made to look like the specific alien that I'm trying to write the romance about, whereas like AI has just been a game changer for that. So I do use use it for character imagery a fair bit. So when I'm doing like character driven [00:36:00] marketing, I'll use that a fair bit. I really like they've just launched the character consistency option with it.

So I think that's, that's really exciting as well. And as I say, I paint and I've done my own stuff as well. So I like to mash together stock photography, the AI, bit of my own painting and kind of create something from that.

Danice Favorite: I like that a lot, because I think that is one of the things that we've been talking about a lot this season, is this idea that, you for your genre, didn't have all of those things available to you before and now you do. And that's exciting to me. And I think we can look at this AI stuff as, oh no, this sky's falling, or we can say, okay, where's the opportunity for me? And I love that you are one of those people who said, okay, where's the opportunity for me? And so this is for people of any ability getting that opportunity. And so I'm really glad you came here today to talk to us about [00:37:00] how that has helped you and how that's worked for you. To me, everyone has like this common theme, but then we also have all of these lovely little differences that I really hope some of our listeners will be able to take a look at this and say, oh my goodness, this person is like me. This person is able to do it. And so maybe I can too, and that is hopefully the message people are getting from us is that yes, I can do it too.

So thank you for coming. Any last thoughts before we let you go? 

Lorna Mackie: I think you've summarized it really, really lovely. Like I'm super passionate about accessibility in all forms, including, using tech to bridge that divide and the digital divide. And I think having that person in the center, being able to construct a suite of adaptive tools that fit their lifestyle, is so empowering. And I'm so excited for the people that are gonna have the chance to tell their story, do whatever they [00:38:00] wanna do. I just think it's really cool. 

Steph Pajonas: I think it's really cool too, and I'm glad you came here to talk about it with us today, because it's really important to remember that there are people of many different abilities and they use the tools in whatever ways suit them best. And it's best for us to let people make the decisions for themselves about the things that they want to use and how they want to use them.

Before we go, I wanna make sure that we get all of the URLs or links that we want to put in the show notes and send people to about you and your work. 

Lorna Mackie: Sure. So my pen names are private, so I won't share my pen names. But I'm happy to share my my LinkedIn, Lorna Mackie where I do talk at conferences and that sort of thing.

So if people wanna talk about AI and accessibility, they're welcome to find me on LinkedIn, and we can have a chat and I can connect them to some people that wanna talk about it as well. It's a really thriving community that are working in that intersection of AI and [00:39:00] disability. 

Steph Pajonas: Fantastic. All right.

So everybody who's been listening along, we're going to produce up some show notes for you so that you can come by the blog at bravenewbookshelf.com. Read the show notes, check out all the links that we have in there um, and like, and subscribe to us. And I'm going to pass off to Danica for all that great closing stuff that she usually does for us.

Danice Favorite: Thank you. Yeah I'm so glad you were here with us, Lorna. So everyone please, if you are passionate about disability and accessibility look her up on LinkedIn, and invite her to speak. And also, I love that connection with the information about what Australia's doing.

And yeah look up Brave New Bookshelf on Facebook. We've got our website. And make sure you sign up for the newsletter if you wanna be notified of our episodes and things like that. So check us out on socials. Make sure you're checking out Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press on all their socials, [00:40:00] Publish Drive on all of our socials and, oh, and make sure you're liking and subscribing to us on YouTube. We wanna get those YouTube viewers and subscribers up. So thank you all. Looking forward to next time where I know we're gonna have another amazing guest. 

Steph Pajonas: Always. All the amazing guests. I'm excited, because this has been such a great season so far, and I can't wait to see who else comes by.

So thank you again, Lorna. And from all of us here, we're gonna say goodbye now. Okay. Bye 

Danice Favorite: Bye. 

Speaker: 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.