57 - Turning Your Pen Name into a Six-Figure Business with Kanika Bailey

This week on Brave New Bookshelf, we welcomed the brilliant Kanika Bailey for an eye-opening discussion on maximizing your author career, especially with the strategic use of AI. Kanika dives deep into her unique approach of treating pen names as valuable, sellable digital businesses, explaining how authors can leverage platforms like Flippa and Empire Flippers to generate significant cash flow — even six-figure sums — from their intellectual property. She also shares her innovative AI workflow, including building a personalized AI editing team, adopting a conversational brainstorming style with tools like Claude, and utilizing AI to craft detailed ideal reader profiles for highly targeted marketing. Visit our website https://bravenewbookshelf.com to view the full episode notes, links and apps mentioned in the episode, and the full transcript.

Speaker: [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. Welcome back to an episode of the Brave New Bookshelf. I'm one of your co-hosts, Steph Pajonas, CTO of Future Fiction Academy and Future Fiction Press. I am no longer the Editor in Chief of Future Fiction Press. This was handed down to me yesterday in true Elizabeth fashion. She saw that I was struggling with a lot of parts of the press, managing the people and getting a lot of other stuff done. And I have just basically stepped up into a technology role for both organizations, and I feel like that suits me so much better, really makes my heart happy to get in there with the technology, working on the websites, working on software, and doing all that kind of stuff.

So I'm, I'm really excited. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. And [00:01:00] Elizabeth has taken over the editing of the press, which is exciting. I'll still be writing for the press. I'll still be doing a lot of stuff for the press, but I am working more in a technology role now, and that's very exciting and happy for me. I'm very happy for myself. 

Kanika Bailey: Yay, technology. 

Steph Pajonas: Yay, right? So I'm I'm jazzed up today. And I'm excited to be talking with my good friend Danica, and to be doing an interview today. So I'm gonna hand off Danica now. Danica, how are you doing? 

Danica Favorite: I'm good. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. It's so funny, you're like taking a weight off my shoulders.

I was literally just googling about weighted vests. Number one, because I read this really weird article that was saying like, it could help you lose some weight, to have the extra weight on you. But then also like for people with autism, a weighted vest can be really calming. 

Steph Pajonas: Yes, I've heard this as well, like weighted blankets, there's like stuffed animals too you can get... 

Danica Favorite: yeah. 

Steph Pajonas: that are very comforting, yes. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. I've got my weighted vest, my weighted blanket, but I mean, my weighted stuffed animal and my weighted [00:02:00] blanket, but I'm like, maybe a weighted vest is what I need. Which sounds really weird 'cause you're like, what does this have to do with AI? But I'm doing this research, and I'm talking to AI about how I can use it.

Because we are using AI for everything. Really. It's lovely. It's great. So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Danica Favorite. I'm the Community Manager at Publish Drive, where we help authors on every stage of their writing journey, whether that is getting the perfect metadata and keywords for your book and using AI, to distributing your book, to once that book is published, being able to use that to split royalties. We have you covered. And then of course, with our great friends at Future Fiction Academy, they're gonna help you with all of the details. And how to write that book, and how to do all the things that we can't do for you at Publish Drive.

So between our two companies, we can do a lot of really cool things. And for those of you who have missed it, I [00:03:00] teased about this in another episode. And I said that episode was going to go live by the time we went live with this announcement. The announcement went live today as we're recording this on October 7th, 2025.

But for those of you who missed it, Publish Drive has partnered with Eleven Labs. And now you can upload your ebook to Publish Drive, and you can click on Eleven Labs, and you can distribute to Eleven Labs through Publish Drive. Yay. 

Steph Pajonas: That's a fantastic development, and I'm excited for you guys. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I'm excited for us too.

I was telling you all and poor Steph, I've been teasing this for a while. Unfortunately, I just couldn't disclose like who we were working with and what we were doing, but I love that this is just one more option for authors to get their books into the hands of more readers, or in this case listeners, because we all know audio book production can be very expensive, very time consuming, and a lot of authors [00:04:00] don't have the bandwidth to do it. And part of why I was looking into the whole weighted vest thing and calming the nervous system, we've all discussed the whole idea of burnout and recovering from burnout. And I'm looking at ways to calm my nervous system and do all these things. But so many authors are relying on the different stages of their author career to be able to produce income and do all these things for themselves. And that's not helping the burnout to be able to be like, oh, great, now I have to do this, now I have to do that. And to me, this is like a really easy thing. Okay, great. You're burned out, but you need a new market for your books.

You need to get your books into audiobook. Why not use AI, do the Eleven Labs distribution, really quick and simple way to do it. And then as you see more success and get more income through that portal, then you can say, okay, which audio books are worth it for me to produce in other formats, other ways, other places, et cetera.

And so what a great, [00:05:00] easy way to AB test without adding more stress and burden to your lives. So that's what I'm excited about and why I'm excited. 

Steph Pajonas: I'm so grateful to Publish Drive for thinking outside of the box and really looking at a lot of different AI opportunities for authors. I think it's, I think it's really great.

I'm really excited for you guys. I'm hoping that this is a true wonderful partnership between the two companies and that authors really benefit from it. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. Like I said, I'm super excited. Love getting to talk about this, but enough about me, enough about Publish Drive and all the cool stuff we're doing, 'cause we could talk about this for a while. And I know our lovely guest has said, oh, we want an episode on this. Maybe at some point we'll put something together. But we really want to shine the spotlight today on our friend Kenika Bailey. I am really excited to have her here today. She's part of the AI for Authors group.

We've mentioned this a lot on the show. And a few months ago I reached out and I [00:06:00] said, hey, you know, like we're putting together our guest list for the coming season. Who do you wanna have? What do you wanna talk about? And Kenika raised her hand and said, Hey, I can talk about AI pen names and getting that business cash flow going. We are here for that because, obviously we are very excited to help people in writing as a hobby or whatever, but I know a lot of people listening to our show also want to make money. And so we are here with the lovely Kenika and Kenika, why don't you introduce yourself, tell us about yourself and let our audience get to know you.

Kanika Bailey: Sure. Thank you Danika. Yes, my name is Kenika Bailey and I live in the Atlanta area, and I write contemporary steamy romance under pen name Joy Jackson. And I've got about six titles right now. What I do wanna talk about is using your pen names to generate cashflow. Just [00:07:00] to give you a little bit of background, I was listening to Side Hustle Nation, another podcast about side hustles and all of that.

And I like that podcast, because he has really interesting side hustles that people are doing. Everything from like a guy that's renting out spas, actual hot tubs, to people that are buying digital businesses and like real estates, right? So you think about buying real estate where you're buying a building or a house and then you're renting it out and you're, using that rental income, you can do the same thing with a digital business.

And a lot of you may know that, but it was mind blowing to me and I'm like, oh, you could actually buy a digital business. And so I took it and ran with it, and back in 2017, I bought a journal business and basically it was in that heyday of the low content information on Amazon.

I just I bought the business. The guy had created about 400 different journals and they [00:08:00] were all basically the same thing, different title, different cover blank pages inside. Some of 'em had quotes at the bottom, but really basic business. And I bought that business, and I took that over. And it was cash flowing great for me for a good while. So this would be the time of the year that would ramp up, because the holidays are coming, and then it would level off around January, February, and then it would drop a little bit, but it was truly passive income for me, which was great.

And I didn't do anything. I had updated a couple of the journals, but for the most part I didn't do anything to those journals. Now, of course, the journal market is pretty saturated, so it's not gonna be the cash cow that it once was. But another thing that you can do is if you are using AI to rapidly release and rapidly generate under pen names, if you get that pen name to the point where it's generating good income, you can actually sell [00:09:00] that business. So if you wanted to use it for retirement or you just wanted to get a good lump sum of cash, you can actually take that pen name and turn it into a business and put it onto a site like flippa.com or the site that I use, which is called Empire Flippers.

And so if someone purchased that pen name from you, they would get your content, of course, your books that you created under the pen name, that pen name, and then if you had any associated email lists or anything like that, you can also sell that and that can be very valuable. I have seen pen names businesses that have, they may have just eBooks, they may have print books, they may have some audio books, but I've seen those businesses go for six figures. And so that can be a very lucrative business for you if you, if it's something that you wanna spin off. And then on the other side of that, if you wanted to take something and buy a business that's already cash flowing, you can use a site like that to go and buy a pen name and incorporate that into your own [00:10:00] business.

Now I won't get into a lot of the technical details about it, but probably one of the big questions that people have is, what about having multiple KDP accounts? I worked with Empire Flippers and they actually were able to facilitate that transfer of those assets from the seller's account into my KDP account. So the KDP account that you have, you can use that and those titles would be transferred to you. And they handle all that. They're experts at doing those transfers and things, so they can handle all of that for you. Yeah, so that's what I wanted to talk about today is just thinking about moving forward, if you're creating books with AI and you're seeing good results in the marketplace, and you decide maybe that you need some cash or you don't wanna do it anymore, you can actually create a business that you can sell on the marketplace and sell those, that pen name and that IP to another individual or a business.

Steph Pajonas: Wow. I don't feel like anybody's talking about [00:11:00] this, right? This is a, ooh, you just blew me away. I love this idea, because there are plenty of people out there that have ...they go through, they try a pen name, they're working with it, they're making books, and it does rather well, but maybe they decide they don't wanna do mystery anymore or whatever it may be, right?

And they're like this is actually doing really well, but it's not my passion. I'm not really into it. What do I do with it? Gosh. You can sell it. Yeah. I never even thought about this before. 

Kanika Bailey: I know, and I think a lot of people, or a lot of authors have not thought about this before. Now I know there are some probably in the camp where those are my babies.

I would never sell, blah, blah. Okay. This is not for you. But if you pass something and you're like, ugh, I don't wanna write this anymore, or something like that, consider selling it. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I love this because , this is not something that was on my radar. I was like, what? This is, I gotta hear about [00:12:00] this. Because I see so many times in the author groups, and I know both of you have seen these posts too, where, oh my gosh, I'm so tired of writing this thing.

I don't wanna write it anymore, but it makes me a lot of money. And so I don't know what to do, but like, how freeing is that to be able to say, okay, I can sell this IP. Let somebody else take that over. I'm getting a cash infusion, so I'm not missing out on any income, like depending on how much you sell it for, it could very well be that, it's, however, I don't know however much the deal is for, maybe that gives you that next six months buffer, so you can take six months and rediscover what your passion is and actually write about the new thing you wanna write about. Or maybe, I know, God forbid, but I know authors who've done this where they're like, I just don't wanna write anymore.

Cool. You've got, this whole cash infusion that now you've got some buffer room of here's what I can live [00:13:00] off of until I figure out what that next thing is. And I think that's really exciting. So thank you for sharing about that, because I really think that, I mean, I can, I can already think of names of people that I'm like, Ooh, they need to know about this because this could be the answer to what their writing struggle is right now. 

Kanika Bailey: Exactly. And on the flip side of that, if you were looking for something where you want a proven pen name or something like that, and there...I've seen that in their listings, a lot of times there's opportunities. So they say they have like 30 books out, but they have not turned any of them into audio, but they're selling well. So you could take that business over, create those audio books and create those multiple streams from that. So there's ways, there's just so much, creativity that can be done in this business when you're treating it as a business, right? And you're treating your books as products.

Steph Pajonas: Right, right. Oh my [00:14:00] gosh. 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah. 

Steph Pajonas: And then imagine, so you're one of these people you really like, you like lots of different genres. You read lots of different genres, right? You're like, oh, I write romance all the time. Let me go try to write Cozy mystery, and then you do it, and, and it just doesn't feed your soul, it doesn't work out for you or whatever.

You can easily just take that business and package it up and sell it to somebody else who will take it and run with it. Do audio books, do paperbacks, do all those kinds of things with it. That is such a great idea. Wow. Fantastic. Yeah, I love this. 

Kanika Bailey: Especially if you're using AI to write your books. You can, I would say, include the prompts of your process in what you sell, that IP that you sell to that other buyer, and boom, they can go in and take it over.

It's sounding like the original books that are out there, but it's an income stream.

Danica Favorite: I think that's great, and that's a great way to lead into this idea of AI in publishing. Because I think that [00:15:00] obviously AI gives us a lot of opportunities to extend some of that IP. So I'm curious how you're approaching AI in publishing.

Kanika Bailey: So what I've been leaning into is like there was a post, and I love you guys' group so much, the AI for Authors, because sometimes it's like a fire hose of different thoughts and ideas and things that you can do, but I really glommed on to that concept of having your AI tools as your editors, your developmental editors, and that sort of thing.

And I saw, and I don't remember his name, but there was one member that had created a whole team. Like he had a sensitivity reader, he had a dev editor, and all of these different personas that were acting as his editing team. And I was like, that's fascinating. And so I've been leaning into that, using the group to get the prompts to do what I want, telling it to be super critical. As we all know, AI can [00:16:00] be really nice, really stroke the ego, but, you really want that, that critical feedback so that you can see where the issues are. That's another thing that I got from the group is to tell it to be critical, t ell it to be harsh, tell it to not spare my feelings when you're critiquing this. And I've been leaning into that, and it's been really helpful. A couple weeks ago was the Midnight and Magnolias conference here in Atlanta, and that's for, that's what Georgia romance writers puts on every year.

And AutoCrit was one of our sponsors, and the woman from AutoCrit came and was demoing their new tool and they've got, I think it's called Market Fuel, and it's got a beta reader aspect to it. So you can basically feed your manuscript in and it'll, it, they have different beta reader personas that you can use.

I think you can also create your own, but they've got a romance reader, they've got a big picture reader, they've got a highly critical reader. So you can have all these [00:17:00] different personas go in and critique your book. And so I've been playing around with that and it's amazing. Like it even has like, um, little emojis for each chapter. So I feed in the whole book, and it has emojis for each chapter, so you can tell where the story's kind of dragging, or where the reader's happy, depending on the persona that you pick. And so it was really helpful. I saw, the last thing that I put in there, I saw consistently that I write dual POV from the female point of view, and then from the male point of view, consistently the male point of view was not giving them warm fuzzy.

So I knew I could see right then just looking at that, that little chart, that I needed to go in and work on my male POV character and give him more depth and all that good stuff. So it's been really helpful in helping me edit once I've gotten that first draft done. [00:18:00] So that's the tool that I've been loving.

And then also the Market Fu el piece of that will actually take out memorable lines and give you some blurb help, give you some marketing keywords and stuff like that. So that was helpful as well. So I'm really loving the new version of AutoCrit. 

Danica Favorite: Oh, that's so cool. I didn't know about that new part of AutoCrit.

So that ... 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah. Apparently it's brand new like this month, last month. 

Danica Favorite: Okay. Yeah, that's really exciting. I have to admit that um, I'm working on a new piece. I know you guys look at me writing like a rockstar, and I just put in something for the AI to help critique and clean up a little bit.

And it's been very complimentary to me, and I probably do need it to be a little tougher on me. But right now I'm just loving having it tell me how wonderful I am. So maybe that's not a bad thing either.

Kanika Bailey: No, I mean, that's good. It's like, oh, you're brilliant. I'm like, oh, thank you. 

Steph Pajonas: Thanks. 

I appreciate it.[00:19:00] 

Kanika Bailey: Nobody else has told me I'm brilliant, so thank you. 

Steph Pajonas: So true. 

Danica Favorite: Yes. Yes. Oh, I love it. I love it. It's, so... What do you have... Do you have any kind of workflows with AI or like a process that you go through with your own work using AI? 

Kanika Bailey: So I've been trying to branch out, and I, I really, you know, I'm writing, I've written contemporary romance, and I really love romantic suspense.

And so I've been trying to branch out and write more romantic suspense since I love it so much. And I've decided that I really wanna do like more action adventure, Romancing the Stone type stories, and I just really didn't know where to start with that. So I've been using Claude and Chat just depending on, what I'm feeling like, to help me brainstorm ideas for novels that may work. And that's been really helpful. I like for them to give me a detailed outline, and we go back and [00:20:00] forth. I learned from another member in the group to just talk to it as you would talk to someone else, another person instead of trying to do these detailed prompts and all that.

'Cause that was one of the things that really blocked me is, okay, well if you want this output, you need to prompt it, like these super long prompts. I'm just like, oh, that's a lot. A nd just kind of talking to Claude just normally, I've gotten pretty good results. I'm like, well, I don't like how Act Two is going.

I think we should do this. And Claude's like, okay, what about this? Or Here's some options. What do you think? I've also asked it to ask me questions, whatever it needs to know, which is good. It'll say, hey, do you want the heroin to stay in her hometown, or do you want her to move back? S o we'll kind of talk that way and it's more of a dialogue. It's been really helpful. I have a million ideas and trying to flesh them out and see which ones bring me the most joy, what I wanna write [00:21:00] next, using AI for that has been really helpful. 

Steph Pajonas: I also love to just talk with Claude.

It is a natural language processor on top of an LLM, so it understands natural language. And I tell people all the time that you definitely don't have to do like a huge mega prompt or anything like that in order to get really good results out of Claude. So I love this, because you figured that one out pretty fast and it's working for you. I'm curious, so you said that you you have a pen name you're writing under, right? I'm wondering if you've started up any other pen names as well. You don't have to tell us the names or anything, but if you're branching out into other names as well, since you've been watching people go and flip these other names. Because that's a cool concept too, and you could probably apply a lot of AI to that process as well. 

Kanika Bailey: You know what? I've been thinking about it. I'm trying to put together my goals and everything for the next year, and I've been thinking about that. I'm like, I could do something that's out of my norm. I have a [00:22:00] series that I need to finish.

I'm two books in. And so I'm like, okay, well, you should finish that before you go off on this shiny object rabbit hole thing. But yeah, branching out into different genres with a pen name... On the downside of that um, just, you know, at the conference, half the time I'm Kanika and the other half I was Joy.

So there's that whole pen name thing. Do I need another name to try to manage? People know me as the author as Joy, but then, I was helping out with the conference. I actually helped out with the Maggie Award and co-chaired. And so everybody there just knew me as Kenika and so I'm like.

Yeah, either Joy or Kenika. I'll answer the both. I don't know. 

Steph Pajonas: Well, they could be secret pen names, and then nobody would have to worry about calling you the wrong name.

Kanika Bailey: Yeah, just I'm like, do I have it in me to manage another pen name? But you know, I, I could keep that one secret.

So it's a thought. 

Steph Pajonas: Well, [00:23:00] you opened up my eyes about this whole flipping pen names, and now I'm super curious. So I'm going to be going on there later on today and seeing what people are selling because now I have to know. I have to know.

Danica Favorite: And I also think it's cool because, like you were saying with the experimentation with pen names, as I've got some other things that I want to experiment with writing, but I also don't know.

Okay. I could theoretically start writing some of these things under a secret pen name, but. Honestly, the reason I haven't tried is I'm like, yeah, but do I wanna keep writing that. Or do I just have a couple of good books in me and then I'm over it. 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah. Yeah. 

Danica Favorite: And like now I could write in a couple books in this pen name, say, okay, who wants it?

Sell it. And then, I've got a little extra income, but, I also have that freedom to do the next big fun project. Who knows? So it, it's fun. And I also just wanted to give a shout out, because you've mentioned Georgia Romance Writers. And I know you're um, part of, you know, they [00:24:00] just had their conference and all of that.

If you wanna give a little shout out to them as well. 'Cause I know people are always looking for cool writing organizations to join and be a part of. And obviously they get to hang out with cool kids like you.

Kanika Bailey: Yes. So yes. You do not have to be in Georgia to join Georgia Romance Writers.

We are accepting of any romance writers around the country, around the world. And we do an annual award called the Maggie Awards, and you do not have to be a member to submit for the Maggie Awards. Now, we just awarded this, the 2025, but if you keep an eye out around March or so, we'll open that up for 2026.

And so you can join as a published author or if you've not published anything or never published anything in the last five years, you can join the pre-published categories as well. So all the romance categories there. We're always looking for applicants. We have [00:25:00] judges that are editors and agents, so if you are looking for a way to stand out this is a good way.

We've had people that were judged in the contest, that editors and agents reached out to them wanting to represent them, wanting to take their books. So it's always an incentive. And there, there's the bragging rights. So you know, you can say that you won a Maggie Award, but yes, if you're looking for an organization, we meet about four times in person.

But the rest of the meetings are in Zoom, so you can be anywhere and join Georgia Romance Writers. 

Danica Favorite: Yes. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. I, I just thought we had this great opportunity to talk a little bit about that, so I thought I would share about that. So are there any other fun things that you're doing with AI or anything that you want to share and talk about?

'Cause I know, like we were talking beforehand, it's ooh, there's just so many juicy, good little tidbits with AI 

Kanika Bailey: So another thing that I learned, and I don't know if it was the AI for Writers if it was somewhere [00:26:00] else, but I'm in so many groups on Facebook, but somebody suggested taking your reviews.

So like taking your page from Goodreads with all of your reviews on it, and asking AI to generate your ideal reader. And I did that. And it was very insightful. It gave my reader a name, and said that she was in her thirties to forties, and she didn't have much time to read, but when she did read, she liked to read characters around her own age, and that had depth and she mostly likes to do eBooks or audiobooks. So it was very insightful on what it gave me and it looked at, based on looking at my reviews from my Goodreads page. So it's stuff like that that takes me down rabbit holes.

'Cause I'm like that's fascinating. Have I done anything with that material just yet? No, not yet. 

Steph Pajonas: Okay. I was wondering if you had done anything [00:27:00] with that yet, like some marketing or whatever, because I think with an ideal reader profile, that could be really fun. You could use that to help you target ads, write copy for ads for that ideal reader, those sorts of things. That's a great idea. I'm loving this idea, and I'm gonna steal this idea now. Thank you. 

Kanika Bailey: Yes, definitely. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. 

Kanika Bailey: And yeah, so I was like, okay, let's take this a little bit further. And that's the thing, it's like, you can start on this path, and then sometimes Claude will suggest, Hey, do you want to maybe come up with a schedule for posting or something like that? Or do you want to come up with some alternative things that you can do for reader magnets? And I was like. Oh, that's interesting. Yes. And so my books, my heroines are tech savvy.

Steph, I love that you're leaning into technology, 'cause I'm a techie girl, so that's what my heroines are. And it suggested that I put together like a data pack with like a digital journal that I could give to my readers, playlists it also suggested. [00:28:00] Since one of my books is based in Barbados, it suggested like doing a trip planner for a 30 or 40-year-old woman going to the islands.

And so it just gave me a lot of really good material. And now the hard part is actually going and fitting this into the schedule, finding time to actually go and create all of this stuff and sitting down, and balancing that with writing. But yeah, it was really insightful.

Danica Favorite: I love that. And I love the idea of the Trip planner for this book set in Barbados, because I started reading romance. I was like 12 or 13. My grandma handed me one of her Harlequin romances. And I was...

Kanika Bailey: Lucky you, I had to go sneak 'em. 

Danica Favorite: Oh, I tell you, my grandma, she was a character.

She was a character. But it was one of those I, I'd run out of my Nancy Drews, and she liked to read every night before bed. And so...I was, I would visit my dad in the [00:29:00] summers and we didn't have air conditioning. And it was so hot, but I would always have to share a bed with my grandma, which actually is, now I look back and I think, okay, yes, we were sweating and hot and it was awful, but it was also wonderful and some of my favorite memories.

But, she would sit in her bed, reading in bed, reading her Harlequin romance, and I'd be right next to her reading my Nancy Drew. And I ran out, and I was like, Grandma, turn off the light so I can go to sleep, 'cause I'm done with my book. She's like, well I'm not done. Here, read this. And and so then after that, that just became the thing like Grandma and I would just trade our books back and forth. But anyway, going back to the travel thing, like that's what get gave me my wander loss from an early age, because all of these books set in these amazing locations. And now as an adult, I would get to go do that. And so for me to read your book about Barbados, which is a place I haven't been, I would love to [00:30:00] go.

I would love that. And to have, oh, yeah, and in this book they went to this historical site and that, you know, all those things or what, whatever it is, I would be all over that because that's, you know, over the summer I had a dream come true getting to go to Paris, and mostly it was all the things I've read about from the time I could start reading. So what a... 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah, that's the awesome thing about reading. You can go anywhere in the world or outside of the world. 

Steph Pajonas: Anywhere in the universe. 

Kanika Bailey: Yes, the universe. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah could you imagine, Steph, if we did like a visitor's tour guide of some of the locations for your books?

Which... 

Steph Pajonas: See, I did that. I did that. This is why I love my blog. I'm a huge blog fan. I've been blogging since 2003. It's been a long time. So I, this is why I love my blog. I actually, I have my flight series, which has got a bunch of different planets in it, as Danica knows. I created travel posters for each one of the [00:31:00] planets in the series, right?

And I put them on my blog, and I have a little bit of text about each one of them. Come visit this planet in the Duo Systems, and whatnot. So this is why I like blogging too, because this is a great place to put all of that extra material that you can get from AI.

Like AI has all of these great ideas, right? Make a travel log, make all of these different things. But sometimes you don't necessarily have all of the resources or the time to do those kinds of things. So for me, I'm like that's just a few images and maybe a video, and then I post it on my blog, and then my readers have a chance to get a little bit more immersive with the stuff that I write.

And that's, it's one of those fun things I just really love about AI. It has made that process so much easier for me in the past. Before AI, I had to do a lot of that myself, and now I get a chance to still do a lot of that, like the editing, and I like this and don't like this, but it has made the process so much easier.

Really love that. [00:32:00] 

Kanika Bailey: Oh, I guess you were put in my path to make me think about blogging again. 

Steph Pajonas: Blogging is great. 

Kanika Bailey: That's a great idea. 

Steph Pajonas: I keep telling people like this might be the actual new revolution of... the next revolution of AI is because, if you can put the content out there on the internet, then it can be crawled by the LLM designers, right?

So Open AI's crawler can come and crawl your website, crawl your blog, see all the different things that you're talking about about your books, and then be better off to recommend those to readers who come to ChatGPT or whatever and say, I really want a book about a woman who travels in the Caribbean. And it's gonna be like, boop, you're gonna love these books, Kanika's pen name. And you're gonna, you're gonna read those, right?

So this is why I keep telling people like, blogging is not dead. It has changed a little bit. And now you can actually use it to your advantage. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah, I really love that. And we don't really talk about this, but [00:33:00] Steph and I both have Substacks. I know Steph's Substack is really focused on the AI stuff, which is amazing.

I try to reshare all of her posts. Mine is really, I'm using it like a regular blog and just, it's a hodgepodge of stuff, but I keep thinking, again, based on these conversations, even though I have everything on Substack, How else can I get this out there? Because yes, you know people don't realize. And Steph, I'm gonna put you on the spot about this, except that I think it's a soapbox for you. Sorry, Kanika, but I think you'll hopefully appreciate this, is like with the whole Anthropic settlement and everything coming out and really the point people keep missing, and I want Steph to make this point, is that even though everyone's, Oh no see Anthropic, it just proves that they stole our stuff. No, they did not. And what it proves is, number one, Anthropic, you guys are a company with a lot of integrity that you're [00:34:00] willing to settle and pay out all of this money for all of these things that yes, you admit you did do a bad thing, because you used a source that was known stolen material, but you admitted that.

But also training off of others works isn't a bad thing. It's actually a good thing, because that's what's informing the LLMs about all of us as authors. And what's, again, what you're posting online that's training the LLMs too. 

Steph Pajonas: Yes. 

Danica Favorite: And all of it is training. And do you, or do you not want these LLMs that are becoming increasingly reliant on, on.... You know, our search engines are now relying on those LLM results. Do you want them to know about your stuff? And Steph, I'm giving you your soapbox now, because I think you made such great points about this recently that I want you to share your [00:35:00] perspective because everybody needs to hear this a million times.

Steph Pajonas: All right. And I'll keep it brief, because we're in the middle of talking about other things as well. But if you go and look at the Anthropic settlement website. There, there is a link to it out there. I'll find it and add it to the show notes. But if you go into the FAC, in the FAC area, number 13, and I remember it's number 13, because that's the Taylor Swift number, right?

That, that they say right there that Anthropic, says that they actually didn't train on any of the information that they got from these two sources, which is interesting, right? So if you actually go in there and you drill down and you look, Anthropic said to the court that they didn't actually use any of it to train their models.

What they're being punished for is for grabbing the LibGen and the, it's called Palmeri (PiLiMi) or something like that, the two libraries of stolen material, it was all pirated books they're being punished for [00:36:00] downloading that and holding onto it. What they should have done was they should have, first of all, not downloaded it in the first place, and second of all, if they had downloaded it, they should have gotten rid of it right away.

The problem was, is that they held onto it, and now the court is punishing them for that. Now, I would've preferred it if we had actually punished actual pirates, the people that put those libraries together in the first place, because that's really what is damaging to our business. But here we are, right?

Anthropic is going to fall on its sword and pay out all of this money to authors whose books were pirated and ended up in these two libraries. It turns out the two of my books were in there which is interesting. It was like Crash Land on Kurai, which is like right there over my shoulder in the video.

And another book of mine, Face Time, which hasn't actually been on sale except for direct for a very long time, so I could, I could say, Hey, you owe me money, and I decided not to. I decided not to go [00:37:00] ahead with the whole thing, because I was just like I actually want them to train on all of my content anyway, because I want to be recommended to people.

I'm excited about another thing that I'm about to do with my website, which will also make it easy for LLMs to train on my content, and I'll talk about that at some future point. But I was just like, you know what? They're gonna pay out all this money and I'm just going to let other authors take it.

It's fine. That money that I would have claimed will get redistributed to other authors who feel more wronged by this than me. So that's fine. So I just wanna reiterate that Anthropic did not train on the content. They said that in front of the court, so I'm assuming, though I can't be a hundred percent sure that they did it, you know, that they would be punished if they were lying. So let's assume that they're not, and that this is actually much different than people think it is. Yeah, so that's my thoughts on that issue. I'm excited about the fact that we can go forward [00:38:00] now and keep working with AI, keep giving it information that will train it and will make it better.

I am excited about it being better in the future. It's already pretty great now. We've come a long way in the last two to three years, so I'm excited about the fact that we can continue to improve from here. 

Danica Favorite: Yes. I love that. 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah. Thank you for breaking that down. 

Steph Pajonas: You're welcome. 

Kanika Bailey: I, yeah, I didn't know that, but yeah.

Danica Favorite: And thank you Kenika for letting us go off on that little tangent. I just, it was the perfect segue, and I really want this information to get out there, because I think the more we can all share information and educate one another, the better we all are, which is why we're here.

And why, gosh, we're so grateful you're here today, because we just had a mind blowing piece of knowledge about being able to sell this IP, which is incredible. And so, the one thing we didn't ask you about, we've talked a lot about AI tools and things.

Do you have a favorite [00:39:00] AI tool? And if you have multiple ones, totally great. Tell us what you're using and what you like. We know about Auto Crit, you've mentioned Claude, which is owned by Anthropic. So give us some of those favorites. 

Kanika Bailey: So yeah, so AutoCrit is like my favorite at the moment.

Of course, you know that may change just depending on what else comes out. But, using that one and then Claude and then also Chat GPT, which I renamed Chatiana for me. And I'm using that one for just like everyday purposes and that's the one that I use for my marketing stuff, coming up with that ideal buyer and going and looking at my Goodreads and reading the ratings and all that.

So yeah. And I've seen that Chat is, more for things like that. And then Claude is more for writing. So I use Claude for my brainstorming, outlining, stuff like that. And then Chat for the marketing stuff and then [00:40:00] AutoCrit for these other things like the beta reading and stuff like that.

So those are my, probably my top three. I don't know that I'm using anything else right now. I probably am, I can't think of anything right now, but probably those are my top three that I'm using the most. 

Danica Favorite: And it, it's okay. If you've only got your three tools, I think that's one of the really great things that I want to highlight to our listeners is that you don't have to use the latest and greatest, you don't have to use all of the tools. Like seriously we all talk about Ideogram all the time, right? Can I just tell you all, I've opened it once, because I'm not a visual person and seriously, I just don't care what stuff looks like. I really, someday, I hope the world understands my level of not caring on that, and I can just have somebody take it over for me, and I never have to even think about it. Because that's my level of not caring. So I I've opened it once. [00:41:00] Claude I use once in a while, but I have a process that works for me that I love, and so I don't need to use all the other tools. And so, I think it's amazing that you know the tools that you love and are using them.

Although I probably will, even though I just said that I am happy with who I'm using, I will go check out the AutoCrit thing, 'cause I do have AutoCrit. And I just, again, I haven't opened AutoCrit in probably two or three months.

Kanika Bailey: I hadn't opened it in a while either. I'm one of those people that will buy licenses when they're on sale. And I have a lot of tools that I probably don't need, but, so they had a sale on the lifetime license, and so I bought it at some point and it's just been there. And then she brought that up and I'm like, oh, let me go check that out. And I'm like, oh, this is nice. This is very nice. Back on the AutoCrit bandwagon. 

Steph Pajonas: I'm gonna use that too. I've got an AutoCrit lifetime license.

I was on their website for a very long time on the homepage, like me with a picture of my book and like a, you know, a [00:42:00] testimonial for me. Because I did use them a whole lot. I switched to Pro Writing Aid for a little while and now that AutoCrit has all of this extra stuff on it too, I've gone back and forth between the two of them. And I'm excited about this beta reader function because I did not know about it either, so I will go check it out as well. 

Kanika Bailey: Yes. Let me know what you think, 'cause it was very helpful for me. It's like, oh, okay. 

Danica Favorite: Yeah. And that's why we're here, right? Because we're all learning from each other. Seriously, I know if there's a new tool or something, I'm gonna go to Steph first and say, Hey, have you heard about this?

But even Steph is. Oh, I didn't know about this. And so we all get to learn from each other. And again, that's, that's why we're here, that's why we have this podcast. I will also say, I love that you named your chat Chatiana. I think at some point we need to have a way for everyone to send us what they call, you know, Chatiana or whatever they've named, because I've heard some really cool names for Chad and Claude and all these things.

We should have a thing. Like send us your favorite name of what you [00:43:00] call your favorite AI tool. 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah, because my sister calls her's Sean, and she's always, Sean was saying, and I'm like, who is Sean? And I'm thinking it's one of her other friends and she's, it's her ChatGPT. 

Steph Pajonas: My husband loves Perplexity, and he calls it Pepe.

He's I'm gonna go ask Pepe what I need to do about about this thing. And then, there for a long time I was doing the editing of these episodes and when it all gets AI transcribed, right? It kept saying that ChatGPT was like, Cha-cha-michi. I was like, Ooh, that's a great name. Cha-cha-michi.

Kanika Bailey: That was very cute.

Steph Pajonas: It's very cute. Very cute. Oh, okay. This was a great conversation. I'm so glad you stopped by today, because we had lots of laughs and learned a lot of cool, really cool things. I'm super excited about all of these new tools. I'm gonna go check them out, and I'm gonna go check out what people are selling on Empire Flippers.

I've never seen that before. 

Kanika Bailey: Yes. 

Steph Pajonas: So I will go check that out. 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah. I tell you, there was a romance one that [00:44:00] was on sale for 385,000. 

Steph Pajonas: Wow. Good for them. I hope they sold it. 

Kanika Bailey: Yeah, it was gone, so I'm assuming they sold it or they took it off. But, but yeah that's pretty common to see those big six figure book businesses.

Steph Pajonas: Excellent. Definitely gonna go check that out. I wanna make sure that we send people to wherever you are online. All right? So if you've got a website or whatever to let our listeners know about, now it would be a great time to tell them. 

Kanika Bailey: So you can find me. My books are on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, all of that, I'm wide.

Then my website is purplepeacockpress.com. That's my publishing company. And so if I do find some time to go and create a new pen name, it'll probably be under that. But yeah, that's where you can find me Author Joy J, or Joy Jackson for my socials. Yeah, I didn't uh, rookie mistake.

[00:45:00] I did not set everything up in the same thing, so I'm all over the place in my socials. Lesson learned. 

Steph Pajonas: Lesson learned. But I'm sure people can find you with a good search. I will find you and make sure that I add the links to the show notes. Danica, do you have anything to you wanna talk about before I do the whole sign off thing here?

Danica Favorite: No, I'm good. I kind of hijacked that a little bit with wanting that Anthropic stuff in. So thank you all for indulging me on that because, I just thought that was really important information. I've been trying to find a way to sneak it in, and I did, so yay me. And yay Steph, for giving everyone that perspective.

So thank you for that. Just remember, if you wanna follow us make sure you're liking and subscribing to Brave New Bookshelf on YouTube, on Facebook. We also have a newsletter, so subscribe to that, and you'll find us on bravenewbookshelf.com. And also obviously we've got the Future Fiction Press, Future Fiction Academy, Publish Drive, [00:46:00] and Steph and I both have our own personal stuff as well, so you can find us on all of the places and we would love to have all of those likes, subscribes, follows, et cetera, so you can get all the good stuff.

Steph Pajonas: We definitely cannot fall off the face of the earth at this point, because we are everywhere. All right, thank you Kanika for coming today. Everybody who's listening, please drop by bravenewbookshelf.com. Check out the show notes for this particular episode, all the links, all the good stuff. And we will be back next week with another great guest.

So in the meantime, everybody, we're gonna say goodbye now. 

Kanika Bailey: Bye. 

Danica Favorite: Bye. 

Kanika Bailey: Bye everyone. 

Speaker 2: 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 notes.