Episode 096 - Emerging Tech for the Writing Craft with Michael La Ronn
September 7, 2021
Michael La Ronn discusses how to maximize the value of the author tools that are already on your computer; what writing apps of the future will (and should) look like; how artificial intelligence will impact authors; and the importance of thinking of our books as data, the currency of the future.
Michael La Ronn is the author of over forty science fiction & fantasy novels and self-help books for writers. He also runs the popular YouTube channel Author Level Up, where he publishes weekly advice videos for writers. Michael also serves on the staff of the Alliance of Independent Authors as a US Ambassador, and he co-hosts the AskAlli Member Q&A Podcast where he answers new writers’ most burning questions about self-publishing.
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Michael La Ronn. Hey, Michael, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Michael: Hey, Matty. I'm doing fantastic. It's good to be here with you again.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is great to have you back and as listeners and viewers know, Michael is a familiar voice and face on The Indy Author Podcast. In the past, he has appeared at Episode 90: "Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End", Episode 74: "Perspectives on Personal Branding" and Episode 55: "The Costs of Self-Publishing a Book."
[00:00:27] And so just to give our listeners a little reminder of your many accomplishments, Michael La Ronn is the author of over 40 science fiction and fantasy novels and self-help books for writers. He also runs the popular YouTube channel Author Level Up, where he publishes weekly advice videos for writers. Michael also serves on the staff of the Alliance of Independent Authors as a US ambassador. And he co-hosts the Ask ALLi member Q and A podcast where he answers new writers' most burning questions about self-publishing, and all of those are great resources that I can strongly recommend listeners check out.
[00:00:59] And so we're going to be talking today about emerging tech for the writing craft, a topic you were obviously very enthusiastic about. So that's what we're going to be focusing on today. And the first thing I wanted to ask you is that you were very specific about this being emerging tech for the writing craft versus emerging tech for writers or something like that. So can you talk a little bit about that focus?
[00:01:22] Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I have a 2021 and beyond strategy, a ten-year strategy and I have basically five pillars of my strategy.
[00:01:31] The first part is to be a world-class content creator. Second part is to be a world-class marketer. Third and fourth is to use data and technology to further my writing business, basically a data and technology driven writer, and then to become the writer of the future.
[00:01:45] And so those are the things where I spend my time when I'm thinking about my strategy and where to go. So when I think about tools that can help me write better stories and become a better version of myself, I need tools that help me with the craft. There's a lot of tools out there, and God bless them, but they're for writing. They're not necessarily for writers. There's a lot of copywriting tools out there on the market right now. Basically, they use artificial intelligence to help you write smarter copy. That's great and that's a cool thing you can use for your marketing. That doesn't help me a bit with my craft. So when I think about craft tools, I'm thinking about the challenges that I'm facing on a daily basis. So how do I keep my story straight and how do I keep the character details straight? How do I write more engaging fiction? And so that's where I spend a lot of my time thinking about tools that can help me do that.
[00:02:37] Matty: And one of the subtopics you had suggested was the idea of maximizing the tools that are already on your computer. And I know that's something that I'm always on the bandwagon about using what you have to its fullest extent. So what are some of those things that are already available to people that maybe they're not using? ...
[00:00:05] Michael: Hey, Matty. I'm doing fantastic. It's good to be here with you again.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is great to have you back and as listeners and viewers know, Michael is a familiar voice and face on The Indy Author Podcast. In the past, he has appeared at Episode 90: "Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End", Episode 74: "Perspectives on Personal Branding" and Episode 55: "The Costs of Self-Publishing a Book."
[00:00:27] And so just to give our listeners a little reminder of your many accomplishments, Michael La Ronn is the author of over 40 science fiction and fantasy novels and self-help books for writers. He also runs the popular YouTube channel Author Level Up, where he publishes weekly advice videos for writers. Michael also serves on the staff of the Alliance of Independent Authors as a US ambassador. And he co-hosts the Ask ALLi member Q and A podcast where he answers new writers' most burning questions about self-publishing, and all of those are great resources that I can strongly recommend listeners check out.
[00:00:59] And so we're going to be talking today about emerging tech for the writing craft, a topic you were obviously very enthusiastic about. So that's what we're going to be focusing on today. And the first thing I wanted to ask you is that you were very specific about this being emerging tech for the writing craft versus emerging tech for writers or something like that. So can you talk a little bit about that focus?
[00:01:22] Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I have a 2021 and beyond strategy, a ten-year strategy and I have basically five pillars of my strategy.
[00:01:31] The first part is to be a world-class content creator. Second part is to be a world-class marketer. Third and fourth is to use data and technology to further my writing business, basically a data and technology driven writer, and then to become the writer of the future.
[00:01:45] And so those are the things where I spend my time when I'm thinking about my strategy and where to go. So when I think about tools that can help me write better stories and become a better version of myself, I need tools that help me with the craft. There's a lot of tools out there, and God bless them, but they're for writing. They're not necessarily for writers. There's a lot of copywriting tools out there on the market right now. Basically, they use artificial intelligence to help you write smarter copy. That's great and that's a cool thing you can use for your marketing. That doesn't help me a bit with my craft. So when I think about craft tools, I'm thinking about the challenges that I'm facing on a daily basis. So how do I keep my story straight and how do I keep the character details straight? How do I write more engaging fiction? And so that's where I spend a lot of my time thinking about tools that can help me do that.
[00:02:37] Matty: And one of the subtopics you had suggested was the idea of maximizing the tools that are already on your computer. And I know that's something that I'm always on the bandwagon about using what you have to its fullest extent. So what are some of those things that are already available to people that maybe they're not using? ...
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[00:02:54] Michael: Yeah. So I'll tell you a story. So I got an edit back from my editor, it was probably last year. My editor really beat me up and it was because I made some silly mistakes that I should have known better. I was getting commas wrong, and I was using lay versus lie wrong.
[00:03:11] And I was looking at the edits and there were more edits than usual. And I'm just like, okay, I can't let this happen. My editor is a partner with me, and so it’s my responsibility and obligation, one, to write a good story. But two, also to make things a little bit easier for my editor.
[00:03:24] And so I think I started thinking, how can I catch more errors on my manuscripts before I send them to my editor? It's a professional courtesy and it's also going to lead to a cleaner manuscript. And so I was like, oh wait, was there some sort of AI tool that can help me with this?
[00:03:41] So I looked at the market and there was really nothing that can do what I wanted to do. And so then I stumbled upon Microsoft Word macros. And usually when you mentioned Microsoft Word macros, it's enough to make people run away screaming. It's a boring, sleepy topic. And I bet you did not wake up this morning and say, I'm interested in Microsoft Word macros. But it turns out that there are Microsoft Word macros that can help you with your editing.
[00:04:08] And it turns out there was a gentleman by the name of Paul Beverley, he does this amazing YouTube videos. He's created a suite of 500 Microsoft Word macros to help you catch errors in your story. For example, when you're doing track changes and you're looking at track changes, you accidentally have a double space because you accepted a change, and it added an extra space. There's a macro that can check for that. There are macros that can check for a lot of different things that Microsoft spellchecker or a Grammarly would miss. And so then I thought, okay, these macros are interesting.
[00:04:40] Are there other macros that I can create that can help me catch common errors? Because when people think of editing, they think of editing as an effort problem. Oh, if I could only remember these different comma rules, or I need to go to the Chicago Manual of Style and look at this rule and fix all these issues.
[00:05:01] But if you think of editing as a programmatic problem, then it changes your approach because what if it were true that you could program some sort of a macro to catch errors that happen in your manuscript that you didn't know about? And so that's the path that I went down.
[00:05:18] Matty: I'm surprised that it would take a macro to do something you would think grammar and spelling tools to catch that. But are you finding that there are a lot of holes like that in the tools that are built right into Microsoft Word?
[00:05:32] Michael: Yeah. the spellchecker is not bad, but it's not really that good either. So when I was thinking about the errors that I wanted to catch, I was finding my editor will edit based on certain standards. So can I program some of those standards into a macro
[00:05:46] Because Word is really only going to help you with typos and grammar. For example, I use the word cadence wrong in a sentence once and my editor corrected me. Can I catch that so that I will never use that word wrong in a sentence ever again? Because I write a lot of books. I cannot remember what I wrote in the last book that I wrote. I just can't. I just can't. So I can't remember all of my editor's edits. So there's a macro called FRedit, and what it does is it's almost advanced find and replace, and it will look through your manuscript for words that you can teach it to correct. And so my editor doesn't have to worry about those issues anymore because I know that I can rely on a macro to help me catch most of them. Most of those instances.
[00:06:29] Matty: Is that a scenario where the word that you're typing is in itself a word, but inappropriate for the context. And you know that whenever you type that word, what you meant to type was something else, and that's why a macro can be applied to it?
[00:06:42] Michael: Yeah. If you use the word cadence, insert a comment that says double-check usage. Or if you use a word that should be hyphenated and it's not hyphenated, insert a comment or automatically correct it. It's almost an editor working on your manuscript invisibly.
[00:06:59] Matty: Yeah. So this is a great example because I just had the audio book read for my 4th Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel. And the narrator, bless her heart, at some point sent me notes saying you used the word evidently a lot. I realized that I was doing it to accommodate a point of view consideration. I probably mentioned this on the podcast in the past, but if I'm writing from Ann's point of view and she's observing someone else, she might say, evidently he didn't know what we were talking about. But after a while, that gets awkward. Like obviously if it's from Ann's point of view and it's about somebody else, she's speculating.
[00:07:35] So I added that to a list of things, my end of manuscript list of things to check included evidently. And so I guess what you're suggesting is if I had a macro that said, flag all the cases of those words that I tend to overuse or use wrong, is that an example of how you would use that tech?
[00:07:54] Michael: Absolutely. I even hired a programmer to create a repeating word macro. So I had very similar feedback that was given to me by my editor in the past, that sometimes I use words a lot within a certain radius. So like within 500 words I might use evidently two times or three times, and I don't know that I'm doing it and it's weird, it's well, why did you know that? I just can't see it.
[00:08:19] And so I hired a programmer to write a macro for me that scans the entire manuscript. It highlights it and it color codes every instance where a word is repeated within 500 words. And obviously you can take out the common words like it, was, and the, so it would catch something like that really easily, because then you could visually see it. It'll highlight it in Microsoft Word. It just jumps off the page. And so that's an example of something that's on your computer that you can do.
[00:08:46] Matty: If somebody is intrigued by this, but they're not even up on the whole concept of macros, and they don't want to hire a programmer to do it for them, how would they go about taking advantage of that functionality?
[00:08:57] Michael: Well, first thing, hiring a programmer is actually cheaper than you think. And I'll get into that. But I would recommend people check out Paul Beveley.
[00:09:09] All of his macros, it's like 500 of them, they're all free, which is God bless him for doing that. They're all free. And he does YouTube videos on how to use them. So that's where I would start and then go through his macro set and see which ones work for you. And there's a cool thing he lets you do where you can actually chain a bunch of macros together.
[00:09:28] So you basically just click one button, and it runs a bunch of them. So it's not complicated. And then figure out where the gaps are. Maybe an editor has said something to you that's not available in a macro. You can go to a site like Fiverr.Com and you can hire a programmer for less than a hundred dollars to create something for you custom, if that's what you want and you can brainstorm with them, and they can help you with it.
[00:09:53] But it's not terribly expensive to do. The way I always think about it is it worth investing to catch typos? And to me, the answer is yes.
[00:10:01] Matty: It does seem as if Word is getting better and better at, for example, understanding contextual considerations. But I have to say that the time I use the spelling and grammar checker most is when I've exported the transcript of the podcast interviews from Descript into Word, and then I'm pretty much just banging through. There are a couple of things I know to watch for, where I'm pretty sure I'm not going to want to accept Word's suggestion. But in general, I'm just saying accept, accept, accept, and figuring that if I accidentally accept one that I shouldn't have, it's an interview transcript. Like people are probably going to be a little bit giving without it. But yeah, it is tricky because you can't just say accept all because in there somewhere, if you're working on a document or something, there's something that's going to go wrong.
[00:10:49] Michael: Yeah. And there's another, you made a point of Microsoft Word getting a little bit better. I think that the spelling and grammar has definitely gotten better over time. But there's another app that you can use within Microsoft Word that is actually really useful. And this is another sort of thing you can unlock the horsepower of Word, right? Because I bet many of us have Word on our computers. And we hate using it. That's why we use Scrivener,
[00:11:13] But Word can actually be a very useful tool. There's a tool called PerfectIt, and it's a proofreading software. And this is actually software that editors like proofreaders use to help them keep things straight in your story. So it performs checks that are completely different than Grammarly or ProWritingAid. And they just released a new version that integrates the Chicago Manual of Style into the checks. So what it will do is it will actually scan your work and it'll cross-reference it against the Chicago Manual of Style and flag anything that doesn't fit the rules.
[00:11:49] your editor's probably using Chicago Manual of Style already, right? So that's an efficiency and that means that you don't have to go and reach for the manual. So it's about efficiency as well, saving you some time.
[00:12:00] Matty: Yup. Other examples of tools that are already right there on our computer that we should be making better use of?
[00:12:07] Michael: Yeah. I can give you an example of it's not necessarily going to help you from a craft perspective, but it will help you write more words or at least it helped me anyway. So one of the things that I have to do is I manage my taxes and expenses and all that boring stuff. And at tax time, you've got to keep copies of your receipts, because if you don't do that, then you're going to get in trouble.
[00:12:28] So you've got to keep copies of everything. And everything comes in an email receipt to me. I like to digitize everything. So I get overwhelmed every month with lots of different receipts. I figured out my email software has what's called Quick Steps.
[00:12:43] And so you can set a rule. So if a receipt comes from grammarly.com or whatever, or paypal.com, that's a writing receipt and you can automatically move it into a folder of your choice. That's not huge, I bet people would probably have already done that.
[00:12:59] What I figured out how to do was the Mac operating system has the automator tool. And if you've never used the automator tool, what it allows you to do is, like a macro in many respects, it's a series of steps and it will automatically do those steps based on criteria that you set.
[00:13:14] I click one button and all my email receipts get moved into one folder. Then it saves all of the email receipts onto my desktop. Then what automator will do is, okay, if this is from PayPal, this is a one type of expense. If it's from Grammarly, this is another type of expense and it'll sort it into all of the respective folders. Then all I have to do is go through and check to make sure it's correct. And that actually saves me about an hour a month. So I can spend an extra hour writing.
[00:13:43] Matty: I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit because I have QuickBooks and I have everything coming into QuickBooks. And then once a week I go through and do something similar to what you're doing in the sense that QuickBooks is looking across my checking account, my savings account, and the credit cards that are related to my business expenses. And let's say I get a payment from Amazon and I'm categorizing it as product income.
[00:14:08] And then after a couple of times, it will say are payments from Amazon always product income? If they are, I can say yes. So is what you're describing better than that, because it's cheaper or more customizable? What are you gaining from this more customized approach?
[00:14:23] Michael: Yeah, I'm not a fan of QuickBooks. I must be a rare person. I just never enjoyed it. It's not set up to how me and my accountant typically operate. My accountant can use QuickBooks, but they use different service. For me, it's important to archive my receipts in a very particular way so that I can find them later on.
[00:14:43] Because if you accept the QuickBooks way, then what ends up happening is it becomes very difficult to find receipts because the IRS, they categorize things in ways that just aren't intuitive to writers. And so for me, that's the decision I've made. If you use QuickBooks, that's a good example though, of automation, right? Because now you don't have to check everything. It all comes in and you just have to monitor it. that's something you have to pay for, but it's a tool that you have available to use if you want it to do that.
[00:15:13] Matty: Yeah. You can play devil's advocate on this one, but when I choose a new tool, I'm definitely swayed by how commonly it's used because I've heard many other authors or other entrepreneurs talking about other options than QuickBooks that are not as well known. And the reason I shy away from it is I want to be able to go on like the QuickBooks users Facebook page, or I know that if I have a question about QuickBooks, they're going to be a billion people out there who can tell me how to fix it. Whereas if it's some more obscure thing, not so much.
[00:15:43] So I'm probably paying a premium for some of those things, because of course the more popular they are probably the more expensive they are. Do you factor that in, like how much help is out there to be gotten, or is the facility or the customizable-ness of it more important to you?
[00:16:02] Michael: Yeah, the longer I do this, customization is more important to me than anything else, because I find that I have unique situations that aren't always contemplated. Like I have a lot of expenses and I have a lot of sales. It's a high volume of things. So for me, I actually placed at a premium something that I can mold to what I need it to do as opposed to what's popular. But for the most part of it just so happens that the most popular deal is sometimes the best thing to do.
[00:16:31] One of the things I found as I've grown in my writing career, I find that the things that work for a lot of people don't always work for me, and things start breaking down.
[00:16:41] So like I have over 60 books. It is very difficult for me to do things that someone with one or two books could do. Because I have a lot more to manage. And that's why, one of the things that I think we were going to talk about is thinking of your books as data is important. And thinking about your books a little bit differently changes your perspective and it changes your priorities.
[00:17:04] Matty: Yup. We've talked a little bit about the craft side, the macros you described for the craft and a little bit about the business side. Any other tools that are already out there on people's computers that we should hit before we look at other routes?
[00:17:17] Michael: Yeah. Don't discount the power of Microsoft Excel too. Writers are understandably afraid. I shouldn't say afraid, they're terrified of Excel and data.
[00:17:28] And I used to be one of those people too, but there are a lot of tools that can help you understand the nature of your sales. You're typically going to get a bunch of your sales reports from different people, different places, and to look at each of those sales individually. There's Book Report. Book Report is helpful for Amazon, but Book Report is not going to do anything for Kobo or for Draft2Digital.
[00:17:50] Excel can help you with that. If you learn how to use it and learn how to use things like power query that allows you to aggregate a lot of data together, then you can start to look at your sales and mine them for trends. What I think a lot of people are doing, and this is just a gut feel, I think a lot of people are doing with their sales is they're just doing whatever they can. It might not be efficient, but it works and that's how they do it.
[00:18:16] But there are ways that you can use the tools on your computer, like Excel or Access, to aggregate your sales so that you don't have to spend as much time on them. You just have to be willing to learn the tools and put in the hours to do it, but it doesn't cost you anything. And I think that’s important.
[00:18:32] Matty: I just started using ScribeCount. Do you have any exposure to ScribeCount or thoughts about them? Yeah.
[00:18:40] Michael: Yeah. I've heard of them. It seems like a pretty cool service.
[00:18:42] Matty: I think it's pretty new and I'm sure they're still ironing some things out, but it was honestly, I wanted to cry with joy the first time I hit a button and it was like, oh, I can see how much money I've made as an author. And it's not completely exhaustive. I used to go through all my royalty reports, and I would enter it on my spreadsheet. And I realized that I was in some cases double counting income because I was failing to distinguish reports that I got that were projected income.
[00:19:12] The other report would come in with the actual income and I wasn't always being careful to discount the projections and just use the actual one. So ease of use is important for me for anything having to do with finances.
[00:19:26] Michael: Yeah. And the easier it will be if you can find a program that does a lot of that heavy lifting for you and if you're willing to invest in something that can take care of that heavy lifting for you, then all you have to do is the analysis. What I suspect happens is people try to do their sales, if they're not using ScribeCount or if they're not exclusive to Amazon and they're not using Book Report, they try to do it manually themselves. And by the time they've entered all their sales and manually, they're so exhausted that they don't want to do any data analysis.
[00:19:55] And it's frustrating. That's what I used to do. I used to get so tired. It used to take me like four hours a month to do my sales. I hated it.
[00:20:01] Michael: And so I found a better way, but that way is a kind of a less beaten path. The longer you do this and the more books you have, the more unique the problems you're going to face are going to be. And so you need customizable solutions.
[00:20:13] Matty: Yep. Well, at some point I should have a panel discussion, with you, me, and Nicholas Erik, because Nick Erik was just on talking about valuing your creative work and we were talking about valuing both in terms of emotionally valuing it, but the objective value of it.
[00:20:30] And he's a big proponent of Excel. That conversation went on so long, I ended up clipping out the part related to Excel and posting it as a standalone offering on YouTube, I believe. But yeah, he's also a big proponent of there are lots and lots of things you can do with Excel. And I use it as a little database, to slice and dice data about like podcast topics or to do lists and things like that.
[00:20:58] Michael: Excel can be amazing. When I was building macros, another thing that I was doing was trying to figure out how to quantify the number of different edits that I got from my editor.
[00:21:09] And so what I ended up doing in Excel, and it wasn't really that complicated. It sounds more complicated than it is. I'm an egghead when it comes to this stuff. But I figured it out. I actually created a data model, like a scoring model, that could predict which chapters in my book would get the most edits from my editor. And I was able to do it at pretty good accuracy.
[00:21:29] That's the kind of tool that you can only use with Excel. There’s a lot of things you can do if you're creative. You can just go take an Excel course online, on YouTube. They have videos that are like six hours long, they take you through the basics of Excel. LinkedIn learning has really good Excel courses. It doesn't have to be that terribly expensive, but it's one of those tools that writers just don't invest in that much, but it can pay off a lot for you if you know how to use it.
[00:21:54] Matty: For that predictive tool, what did you do with that data once you had it?
[00:21:59] Michael: I basically use that to flag chapters for my editor. So basically, I created a Word macro that counted the number of edits in my manuscript from my editor. And it counted all those up, and then I created another macro that divided up all the edits by chapter. And I was able to see, okay, this chapter had this many spelling and grammar edits, and then any comment that the editor made was probably a story comment.
[00:22:23] And this is why, when you think about data, it starts leading you down interesting paths. Because I would look at the chapters that had the most edits and I'd say, okay, why do these chapters have the most edits?
[00:22:32] So when you own your data like that you can do interesting things and get interesting insights that will cut your edits. I was able to cut my edits by 10% and I was able to find a lot of things that my editor no longer has to worry about because I was able to use Word macros and I was able to use some of those predictive things.
[00:22:51] Matty: Yeah. I really like anything that can catch anything before an editor gets to it, because sometimes people will say, they're the editor, that's what they're there for. But I think that there is a finite pool of energy that the editor has to bring to your work. And if they're spending it finding the wrong spelling of "there," then they're not using it to find like a way characterization could be strengthened or something like that.
[00:23:13] Michael: Oh, that's a hundred percent correct. And I'll take it even further. When you were a kid and your mom told you to go find something and your room was a mess and then you couldn't find it, it's a lot harder to find something in a messy room, isn't it?
[00:23:25] And when your editor is having to wade through all the same edits over and over again, they're going to miss other stuff that's in plain sight.
[00:23:33] The cleaner you can make your manuscript when you send it to the editor, the more edits they'll find.
[00:24:09] Matty: What are some other tools that are out there that are available for purchase? Not necessarily ones that people are going to customize or build on their own. What are some writing apps, for example, that you're seeing that you're enthusiastic about?
[00:24:22] Michael: The one I'm watching right now is Atticus by Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur fame. He's doing something really interesting with Atticus. Atticus is an all-in-one approach. Right now, it's primarily like a Vellum killer. It's the solution to Vellum for people that don't have Macs. That's, to me, I think a brilliant strategy. But it’s also a writing app and they're building out that functionality. So basically you can write your book in Atticus.
[00:24:47] You can format your book in Atticus. That's great, It's like Scrivener, but it's easier. You don't have to worry about compile with Scrivener. If you click a button, you'd say what you want and then Atticus spits out a well formatted book.
[00:25:01] In the future, I think if they get this right, I think it's going to be a game changer. They're working on ways that you don't have to take the manuscript out of the ecosystem. You can just give permission to an editor. The editor goes to the Atticus website, edits your book, and then you just go in and look. And then you accept the changes you format.
[00:25:20] I think that's the future. There's something to that, because if you look at it right now, the process of writing is extremely inefficient. You write your story and then you export that story to Word, probably if you're using Scrivener or more sophisticated app than Word. You send that to your editor. Editor sends it back with track changes. You work on the track changes in Word or Google docs, then you have to re-import that either into your writing app or into an app like Vellum. It's extremely inefficient. If you can do it all in one, I think that'll solve a lot of problems.
[00:25:53] Matty: Yeah, I got to chat with Dave a little bit. He was on a podcast episode fairly recently talking about keywords. And then we talked about Atticus, and I'm going to be very interested to see how they handle it.
[00:26:05] One of the powers in the limitation of both Scrivener and Vellum, but at opposite ends of the spectrum, Scrivener you can do anything with, and so as a result, it's sometimes very difficult to sort through all the thousands of functions to find the one that you want.
[00:26:22] With Vellum it pretty much only does one thing. It does great. But it only does one thing. So as you're saying, you could use it to write your book, but I don't think anybody recommends that. I'm going to be interested to see how Atticus balances the breadth of functionality with simplicity of use.
[00:26:39] And I think based on what Dave said, one of the things that we're going to do is try to partner with other apps, not try to build it all in Atticus the way I think Scrivener has tried to build everything in the Scrivener.
[00:26:51] Michael: Yeah. It doesn't surprise me. I also think that something that is an opportunity is a Microsoft Word like ecosystem. And when I say that you can use Microsoft Word today and you can use a Grammarly add in, you can use a ProWritingAid add in, you can use PerfectIt, you can use these macros. There are all sorts of add ins that you can buy for Microsoft Word.
[00:27:13] We don't really have that with a writing app, but I bet there's a lot of really interesting plugins and add-ons that you could add using artificial intelligence or certain things that not everyone in the population is going to need, but some people would. And so I think partnering makes a lot of sense.
[00:27:30] Dabble did this with ProWritingAid. They integrated ProWritingAid into their app, which I thought was a really smart thing to do. It's kind of one of the things is why didn't anyone else do this before now? Because that's another problem. When you edit your book and you want to edit it and Grammarly or ProWritingAid, you either have to export it to Word and then use those plugins, or you've got to put it on the Grammarly website or the ProWritingAid website. So what ends up happening is you're constantly transporting your manuscript back and forth. And that just doesn't work.
[00:27:58] Matty: You had mentioned artificial intelligence. And I think a lot of the things that we've talked about so far are some level of artificial intelligence, more or less sophisticated. So what else do you see on the artificial intelligence front that writer should be keeping an eye on?
[00:28:13] Michael: There's a lot happening, but also feels like it's quiet at the same time. I think the GPT-3 thing is really interesting. I think it's fascinating. It'll be really interesting to see where we're at in five years with that.
[00:28:25] Matty: Can you describe what that is a little bit?
[00:28:26] Michael: Yeah, it's basically, and I'm probably not going to describe it as elegantly as someone like Joanna Penn probably could, but it's basically an artificial intelligence engine that can help generate content. And the content that it's generating, is very rapidly, and you could argue in some cases there, in replicating real work. Like you could read it and not know that an AI wrote it. So a lot of people are using that for content generation.
[00:28:55] I think there's some other interesting things out there. I think they're early stages. There's a lot of buzz going on right now about character generation, apps that will generate characters for you, particularly with Dungeons and Dragons or those types of lit RPG novels. A lot of things like that.
[00:29:10] It's interesting. When I first saw that I was like, ah, I don't know about that. But the more I saw it, I was like, okay, this is actually an interesting concept. I think the question there is who owns the copyright to the character if it's generated. So that one thing I probably would be wary of.
[00:29:24] But I also think just from a just general writing perspective, I think a lot of the copywriting tools are very compelling. I tested a few of them where they basically will write sales copy for you. You type in what your book is about, so on and so forth, and it'll give you email subject headlines to use or phrases that you can use in your email marketing or on your website.
[00:29:46] And they're surprisingly good. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought this is going to be garbage and what I actually got was pretty good. So is it a matter of time before we get book description generators that can do that?
[00:30:00] Matty: Oh, please.
[00:30:00] Michael: Possibly, possibly, maybe not. but
[00:30:02] Matty: I just want to hit the blurb button.
[00:30:04] Michael: Hit the blurb button and you get it. But what I do think that's going to have implications for, though, it could have potentially have implications for ads. So you don't have to worry as much about generating ad headlines for Facebook or Amazon. I also think, there's a service called Prestozon, if you've heard of them. They use AI to optimize Amazon ads, which is a really interesting approach.
[00:30:27] And I think that's one of those things where I think AI could honestly do better than a human, because it's just data at scale. And I think if it has a lot of data that you're generating and that the user base is generating. I think it's not out of the realm of possibility than in the next three to five years, people are going to rely on software to do their ads for them, as opposed to doing it manually. It could be sooner than that.
[00:30:50] Matty: I think I'm hampered in, for example, titling my emails because I'm too literal about it. And I think that if I played around on there, I could get something that wasn't misleading, but it was also more engaging for the people who I want to open that email.
[00:31:08] Michael: Well, if it's a data problem, right? Because there are thousands if not tens of thousands, maybe even more, entrepreneurs who are sending emails every single day. And those emails have open rates and click rates. So these companies have these mountains of data because AI only works at scale, right? You need a lot of data to train a model. And with email marketing and things like that, there's a lot more data there. And that's why you can rely on it a little bit more. Whereas with fiction, it's a lot harder because there's not as much data. And the types of stories that we're writing are all so different. That's why I think we're lagging on the fiction front.
[00:31:51] Matty: A technology that I thought would be further along now than it is, is text to speech, produced with a person's voice.
[00:31:58] So the model that I'm used to is I use Descript for the podcast and I have an Overdub Matty Dalrymple voice. And I can type things in and then it generates it in a sort of semi-robotic sounding version of my voice. And I thought by this time it would be better. I know Google has a beta coming that I've signed up for, but then my name disappears into the hopper with everybody else's.
[00:32:22] And I'm looking at this strictly for my nonfiction because it's going to be a long time before I believe there's going to be an AI version that's going to read my novels in a way that I'm comfortable. But with my non-fiction books, if I put myself in the position of the reader, there are lots of non-fiction books that I would love to consume if I could do it while I was walking the dog or driving or something like that.
[00:32:47] And if I had a reasonably non-irritating voice reading it for me, especially if it was modeled on the voice of the author, I would be all over that. And one of the things that I'd like to do is offer AI generated audio book versions of my nonfiction books on my own platform, PayHip or whatever, at a very low rate. Not much more than I would be charging for the ebook of that. But it's just not there. Is that anything that you're tracking?
[00:33:15] Michael: Yup. I've been paying attention to it a little bit. Google had a bunch of public domain books that you could download and listen to and test out the voices. And it sounded a little bit better than, say, your Amazon device that begins with an A, but not that much. I was surprised. You're right. The technology is really not there.
[00:33:34] What's interesting to me though is that it seems to me that in China, it's a little bit better though. So the company that is the parent company for TikTok, ByteDance, either earlier this year or late last year they released an app that does exactly that. It creates AI generated audio books. And from what I understand, it sounded pretty good. It wasn't perfect, but it sounded pretty good. And I wonder if a lot of that has to do with language as well. Because in China it seems like AI has gone a lot smoother. And I read somewhere that it had to do with the Chinese language is easier to program into an AI and to get it more realistic.
[00:34:13] English is just a tough language. I was actually chatting with an AI developer about creating a tool and we just threw up our hands in frustration because English is just extraordinarily difficult to program into any sort of rule. And I wonder if that has a lot to do with it.
[00:34:31] And the sentences run together too. That's one of my pet peeves with audio generated by AI, the sentences run together. If I'm doing my dishes, I can't hear the separation. That is an issue that you would think Google would have figured out. it's coming. They'll eventually figure it out, but it's just going to take a little bit of time, I think.
[00:34:50] Matty: Well, you would think it wouldn't be hard to program, like if there was a period, pause for 0.75 seconds. How hard could that be.
[00:34:58] Michael: That's the thing about emerging tech. There's always caveats, and you don't always know what they are. And that's I think a thing to keep in mind.
[00:35:07] Matty: Yeah, it's easy for us in the outside looking in to say, how come they can't just do this simple thing?
[00:35:13] So I did want to now loop back to the topic you had mentioned earlier about thinking of your books as data. So talk a little bit about that.
[00:35:21] Yeah, it took a long time, but we, I think, as a community have learned to think about our books like products, right? So when I first started self-publishing, people didn't think about their books as products. They would publish the book and do the best they could, but they didn't have that product mindset. I think people like Joanna were really instrumental in getting people to think about that. ALLi, Alliance of Independent Authors. And I think that we're going to have to go over that same hurdle again with data. So there are a lot of writers who have been publishing for a long time.
[00:35:50] Like me, I've been doing this for almost a decade, and I've got over 60 books. Does it make sense for me, it's just a philosophical, rhetorical question, you can answer it if you want, but does it make sense for me to have to go into seven different dashboards to upload my books?
[00:36:05] The answer is no, it doesn't make sense at all. After three or four books, you have an efficiency problem, and you have a maintenance problem too, because things break on your sales pages, and you don't always know about it right away. And actually, I posed this idea to a developer, it was a Silicon Valley company actually.
[00:36:22] And we actually figured out a way to think about your books as data. So for example, right now some author's sales page is breaking. There's some HTML issue or maybe someone somewhere listening to this did a promotion and they forgot to raise the price back up to the regular price. I say that because I'm guilty of that.
[00:36:45] I forgot to do that on one of my best books once, and I can't tell you how much money I lost. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could have some sort of software that served as like an intellectual property manager? I wrote in the book, I used an analogy almost like a Fido, like a dog, like a guard dog that patrols all of your sales pages and checks to make sure everything is what it's supposed to be. And then if there's a problem, like one of your books is at the wrong price, *poof* you got an email. That's when I think about my books as data.
[00:37:16] So then you have to answer, how do you do that? The data is out there on Amazon and Kobo and Apple, and you can get that data, believe it or not. And you can bring that data into an application to use. The only downside is that it's technically against their terms of service. So what I believe that retailers should do if they have the ability to do it, is to open up application programming interfaces, APIs. And what that is, the easiest way, think about it is a socket in a plug, you plug into the Amazon server’s data, and you can download the data for your books, and you can download that data and do what you want with it.
[00:37:52] And when you think about your portfolio as a bunch of data points, then you can start looking at all your prices and then you can start looking at all your book descriptions and looking at all the other attributes without having to go off to individual sites and you can manage it in one place. I think I call that intellectual property management. And the tools exist to do that right now. This is where the Silicon Valley guy and I, we had to part ways because it's against terms of service.
[00:38:18] But that tool exists. And I think that's the future. And I also think that when traditional publishers think about the distribution of their books, there's no traditional publisher house anywhere, Penguin Random House, they don't upload a book one at a time to their retailers. They have a system, it's called Onyx. And what that is it breaks your book up into metadata, and then you transmit your book to retailers based on that. I think at some point in the future, it would be great if self-publishers could have access to that standard.
[00:38:47] I actually do have access to it right now. I can find it, but it's actually complicated to use. But when you think about your books as a stream of data, then you can start to think about distribution differently. You can start to think about how you maintain those books differently, how you maintain the quality of everything that's supposed to exist, like your price and your book description, which version of the book that you have available.
[00:39:09] I think that's the next frontier. And I think that the authors that have prolific catalogs who figured this out are going to do pretty well for themselves because it because become the data issue. I think
[00:39:21] Matty: it's also going to be important for all the different platforms to become more standardized on how they're collecting the data. Because just as one example, I know that there's one platform that I distribute to that doesn't accommodate subtitles. So on most platforms I would have, let's say THE SENSE OF DEATH is the title and then "An Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel" as the subtitle. But this one, I have to put it all in the title field and that kind of stuff makes it harder for there to be a more centralized management system.
[00:39:57] I will point people to Episode 42 was THE IMPORTANCE OF METADATA with Joshua Tallent. So if people are intrigued by the metadata or by Onyx, which you had mentioned, there was some information about that in there.
[00:40:09] Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And you're absolutely right about that. And that issue with the subtitle that you mentioned, that rears its ugly head downstream, too, when you start downloading your sales report. Because they all store their data differently. And so then you've got to deal with that.
[00:40:25] So yes, I have a book series it's called INDIE AUTHOR CONFIDENTIAL and it's basically like The Writer's Journey. We talked last time about my podcast, The Writer's Journey. It's like The Writer's Journey in book form. So The Writer's Journey, rest in peace, went on to heaven, but this book lives in its image. And I publish it quarterly. And I talk about topics like you and I are talking about, just things are on my mind. And I wrote a letter, an open letter, to Amazon, Google, Apple. And in one of the things I asked them to do is dear Apple, dear Amazon, if you're listening, Kobo, all these places, please standardize your data. Standardize the data so that we can upload it the same way consistently most of the time. And we can download it in a standardized format as well. Because then we can start actually creating tools that'll help us.
[00:41:10] Because the biggest advantage we have is that we're nimble, right? We can turn on a dime. But that nimbleness, it gets a little bit negated if the processes we're using are clunky and they're not efficient. And so we have to think about ways that we can remain nimble so that we're not spending all of our time doing data analysis or data cleanup just because there's a retailer that gets the subtitle wrong.
[00:41:34] Matty: Do you have any plans to capture this in book form, if you have not already? This whole conversation about emerging tech and those kinds of considerations?
[00:41:45] Michael: Yeah, I thought about it. A lot of it is in books that I've written already. Like I wrote a book called THE AUTHOR INCOME PROBLEM, where I talk about the sales issue. I'm going to be writing a book about the editing problem and thinking of editing as a data problem and not as an effort problem. So, yes, maybe I will think about writing an emerging tech book at some point.
[00:42:04] Matty: Yeah. I think you'll have a ready audience. Well, Michael, this has been so interesting and thought-provoking. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all the many, many resources you offer online.
[00:42:16] Michael: Yes. You can find me first and foremost at authorlevelup.com. That is my website. You can find links to all my books, my YouTube channel, and all that good stuff. And thanks for having me. This is always, it's always great to come back and talk to you about stuff.
[00:03:11] And I was looking at the edits and there were more edits than usual. And I'm just like, okay, I can't let this happen. My editor is a partner with me, and so it’s my responsibility and obligation, one, to write a good story. But two, also to make things a little bit easier for my editor.
[00:03:24] And so I think I started thinking, how can I catch more errors on my manuscripts before I send them to my editor? It's a professional courtesy and it's also going to lead to a cleaner manuscript. And so I was like, oh wait, was there some sort of AI tool that can help me with this?
[00:03:41] So I looked at the market and there was really nothing that can do what I wanted to do. And so then I stumbled upon Microsoft Word macros. And usually when you mentioned Microsoft Word macros, it's enough to make people run away screaming. It's a boring, sleepy topic. And I bet you did not wake up this morning and say, I'm interested in Microsoft Word macros. But it turns out that there are Microsoft Word macros that can help you with your editing.
[00:04:08] And it turns out there was a gentleman by the name of Paul Beverley, he does this amazing YouTube videos. He's created a suite of 500 Microsoft Word macros to help you catch errors in your story. For example, when you're doing track changes and you're looking at track changes, you accidentally have a double space because you accepted a change, and it added an extra space. There's a macro that can check for that. There are macros that can check for a lot of different things that Microsoft spellchecker or a Grammarly would miss. And so then I thought, okay, these macros are interesting.
[00:04:40] Are there other macros that I can create that can help me catch common errors? Because when people think of editing, they think of editing as an effort problem. Oh, if I could only remember these different comma rules, or I need to go to the Chicago Manual of Style and look at this rule and fix all these issues.
[00:05:01] But if you think of editing as a programmatic problem, then it changes your approach because what if it were true that you could program some sort of a macro to catch errors that happen in your manuscript that you didn't know about? And so that's the path that I went down.
[00:05:18] Matty: I'm surprised that it would take a macro to do something you would think grammar and spelling tools to catch that. But are you finding that there are a lot of holes like that in the tools that are built right into Microsoft Word?
[00:05:32] Michael: Yeah. the spellchecker is not bad, but it's not really that good either. So when I was thinking about the errors that I wanted to catch, I was finding my editor will edit based on certain standards. So can I program some of those standards into a macro
[00:05:46] Because Word is really only going to help you with typos and grammar. For example, I use the word cadence wrong in a sentence once and my editor corrected me. Can I catch that so that I will never use that word wrong in a sentence ever again? Because I write a lot of books. I cannot remember what I wrote in the last book that I wrote. I just can't. I just can't. So I can't remember all of my editor's edits. So there's a macro called FRedit, and what it does is it's almost advanced find and replace, and it will look through your manuscript for words that you can teach it to correct. And so my editor doesn't have to worry about those issues anymore because I know that I can rely on a macro to help me catch most of them. Most of those instances.
[00:06:29] Matty: Is that a scenario where the word that you're typing is in itself a word, but inappropriate for the context. And you know that whenever you type that word, what you meant to type was something else, and that's why a macro can be applied to it?
[00:06:42] Michael: Yeah. If you use the word cadence, insert a comment that says double-check usage. Or if you use a word that should be hyphenated and it's not hyphenated, insert a comment or automatically correct it. It's almost an editor working on your manuscript invisibly.
[00:06:59] Matty: Yeah. So this is a great example because I just had the audio book read for my 4th Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel. And the narrator, bless her heart, at some point sent me notes saying you used the word evidently a lot. I realized that I was doing it to accommodate a point of view consideration. I probably mentioned this on the podcast in the past, but if I'm writing from Ann's point of view and she's observing someone else, she might say, evidently he didn't know what we were talking about. But after a while, that gets awkward. Like obviously if it's from Ann's point of view and it's about somebody else, she's speculating.
[00:07:35] So I added that to a list of things, my end of manuscript list of things to check included evidently. And so I guess what you're suggesting is if I had a macro that said, flag all the cases of those words that I tend to overuse or use wrong, is that an example of how you would use that tech?
[00:07:54] Michael: Absolutely. I even hired a programmer to create a repeating word macro. So I had very similar feedback that was given to me by my editor in the past, that sometimes I use words a lot within a certain radius. So like within 500 words I might use evidently two times or three times, and I don't know that I'm doing it and it's weird, it's well, why did you know that? I just can't see it.
[00:08:19] And so I hired a programmer to write a macro for me that scans the entire manuscript. It highlights it and it color codes every instance where a word is repeated within 500 words. And obviously you can take out the common words like it, was, and the, so it would catch something like that really easily, because then you could visually see it. It'll highlight it in Microsoft Word. It just jumps off the page. And so that's an example of something that's on your computer that you can do.
[00:08:46] Matty: If somebody is intrigued by this, but they're not even up on the whole concept of macros, and they don't want to hire a programmer to do it for them, how would they go about taking advantage of that functionality?
[00:08:57] Michael: Well, first thing, hiring a programmer is actually cheaper than you think. And I'll get into that. But I would recommend people check out Paul Beveley.
[00:09:09] All of his macros, it's like 500 of them, they're all free, which is God bless him for doing that. They're all free. And he does YouTube videos on how to use them. So that's where I would start and then go through his macro set and see which ones work for you. And there's a cool thing he lets you do where you can actually chain a bunch of macros together.
[00:09:28] So you basically just click one button, and it runs a bunch of them. So it's not complicated. And then figure out where the gaps are. Maybe an editor has said something to you that's not available in a macro. You can go to a site like Fiverr.Com and you can hire a programmer for less than a hundred dollars to create something for you custom, if that's what you want and you can brainstorm with them, and they can help you with it.
[00:09:53] But it's not terribly expensive to do. The way I always think about it is it worth investing to catch typos? And to me, the answer is yes.
[00:10:01] Matty: It does seem as if Word is getting better and better at, for example, understanding contextual considerations. But I have to say that the time I use the spelling and grammar checker most is when I've exported the transcript of the podcast interviews from Descript into Word, and then I'm pretty much just banging through. There are a couple of things I know to watch for, where I'm pretty sure I'm not going to want to accept Word's suggestion. But in general, I'm just saying accept, accept, accept, and figuring that if I accidentally accept one that I shouldn't have, it's an interview transcript. Like people are probably going to be a little bit giving without it. But yeah, it is tricky because you can't just say accept all because in there somewhere, if you're working on a document or something, there's something that's going to go wrong.
[00:10:49] Michael: Yeah. And there's another, you made a point of Microsoft Word getting a little bit better. I think that the spelling and grammar has definitely gotten better over time. But there's another app that you can use within Microsoft Word that is actually really useful. And this is another sort of thing you can unlock the horsepower of Word, right? Because I bet many of us have Word on our computers. And we hate using it. That's why we use Scrivener,
[00:11:13] But Word can actually be a very useful tool. There's a tool called PerfectIt, and it's a proofreading software. And this is actually software that editors like proofreaders use to help them keep things straight in your story. So it performs checks that are completely different than Grammarly or ProWritingAid. And they just released a new version that integrates the Chicago Manual of Style into the checks. So what it will do is it will actually scan your work and it'll cross-reference it against the Chicago Manual of Style and flag anything that doesn't fit the rules.
[00:11:49] your editor's probably using Chicago Manual of Style already, right? So that's an efficiency and that means that you don't have to go and reach for the manual. So it's about efficiency as well, saving you some time.
[00:12:00] Matty: Yup. Other examples of tools that are already right there on our computer that we should be making better use of?
[00:12:07] Michael: Yeah. I can give you an example of it's not necessarily going to help you from a craft perspective, but it will help you write more words or at least it helped me anyway. So one of the things that I have to do is I manage my taxes and expenses and all that boring stuff. And at tax time, you've got to keep copies of your receipts, because if you don't do that, then you're going to get in trouble.
[00:12:28] So you've got to keep copies of everything. And everything comes in an email receipt to me. I like to digitize everything. So I get overwhelmed every month with lots of different receipts. I figured out my email software has what's called Quick Steps.
[00:12:43] And so you can set a rule. So if a receipt comes from grammarly.com or whatever, or paypal.com, that's a writing receipt and you can automatically move it into a folder of your choice. That's not huge, I bet people would probably have already done that.
[00:12:59] What I figured out how to do was the Mac operating system has the automator tool. And if you've never used the automator tool, what it allows you to do is, like a macro in many respects, it's a series of steps and it will automatically do those steps based on criteria that you set.
[00:13:14] I click one button and all my email receipts get moved into one folder. Then it saves all of the email receipts onto my desktop. Then what automator will do is, okay, if this is from PayPal, this is a one type of expense. If it's from Grammarly, this is another type of expense and it'll sort it into all of the respective folders. Then all I have to do is go through and check to make sure it's correct. And that actually saves me about an hour a month. So I can spend an extra hour writing.
[00:13:43] Matty: I'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit because I have QuickBooks and I have everything coming into QuickBooks. And then once a week I go through and do something similar to what you're doing in the sense that QuickBooks is looking across my checking account, my savings account, and the credit cards that are related to my business expenses. And let's say I get a payment from Amazon and I'm categorizing it as product income.
[00:14:08] And then after a couple of times, it will say are payments from Amazon always product income? If they are, I can say yes. So is what you're describing better than that, because it's cheaper or more customizable? What are you gaining from this more customized approach?
[00:14:23] Michael: Yeah, I'm not a fan of QuickBooks. I must be a rare person. I just never enjoyed it. It's not set up to how me and my accountant typically operate. My accountant can use QuickBooks, but they use different service. For me, it's important to archive my receipts in a very particular way so that I can find them later on.
[00:14:43] Because if you accept the QuickBooks way, then what ends up happening is it becomes very difficult to find receipts because the IRS, they categorize things in ways that just aren't intuitive to writers. And so for me, that's the decision I've made. If you use QuickBooks, that's a good example though, of automation, right? Because now you don't have to check everything. It all comes in and you just have to monitor it. that's something you have to pay for, but it's a tool that you have available to use if you want it to do that.
[00:15:13] Matty: Yeah. You can play devil's advocate on this one, but when I choose a new tool, I'm definitely swayed by how commonly it's used because I've heard many other authors or other entrepreneurs talking about other options than QuickBooks that are not as well known. And the reason I shy away from it is I want to be able to go on like the QuickBooks users Facebook page, or I know that if I have a question about QuickBooks, they're going to be a billion people out there who can tell me how to fix it. Whereas if it's some more obscure thing, not so much.
[00:15:43] So I'm probably paying a premium for some of those things, because of course the more popular they are probably the more expensive they are. Do you factor that in, like how much help is out there to be gotten, or is the facility or the customizable-ness of it more important to you?
[00:16:02] Michael: Yeah, the longer I do this, customization is more important to me than anything else, because I find that I have unique situations that aren't always contemplated. Like I have a lot of expenses and I have a lot of sales. It's a high volume of things. So for me, I actually placed at a premium something that I can mold to what I need it to do as opposed to what's popular. But for the most part of it just so happens that the most popular deal is sometimes the best thing to do.
[00:16:31] One of the things I found as I've grown in my writing career, I find that the things that work for a lot of people don't always work for me, and things start breaking down.
[00:16:41] So like I have over 60 books. It is very difficult for me to do things that someone with one or two books could do. Because I have a lot more to manage. And that's why, one of the things that I think we were going to talk about is thinking of your books as data is important. And thinking about your books a little bit differently changes your perspective and it changes your priorities.
[00:17:04] Matty: Yup. We've talked a little bit about the craft side, the macros you described for the craft and a little bit about the business side. Any other tools that are already out there on people's computers that we should hit before we look at other routes?
[00:17:17] Michael: Yeah. Don't discount the power of Microsoft Excel too. Writers are understandably afraid. I shouldn't say afraid, they're terrified of Excel and data.
[00:17:28] And I used to be one of those people too, but there are a lot of tools that can help you understand the nature of your sales. You're typically going to get a bunch of your sales reports from different people, different places, and to look at each of those sales individually. There's Book Report. Book Report is helpful for Amazon, but Book Report is not going to do anything for Kobo or for Draft2Digital.
[00:17:50] Excel can help you with that. If you learn how to use it and learn how to use things like power query that allows you to aggregate a lot of data together, then you can start to look at your sales and mine them for trends. What I think a lot of people are doing, and this is just a gut feel, I think a lot of people are doing with their sales is they're just doing whatever they can. It might not be efficient, but it works and that's how they do it.
[00:18:16] But there are ways that you can use the tools on your computer, like Excel or Access, to aggregate your sales so that you don't have to spend as much time on them. You just have to be willing to learn the tools and put in the hours to do it, but it doesn't cost you anything. And I think that’s important.
[00:18:32] Matty: I just started using ScribeCount. Do you have any exposure to ScribeCount or thoughts about them? Yeah.
[00:18:40] Michael: Yeah. I've heard of them. It seems like a pretty cool service.
[00:18:42] Matty: I think it's pretty new and I'm sure they're still ironing some things out, but it was honestly, I wanted to cry with joy the first time I hit a button and it was like, oh, I can see how much money I've made as an author. And it's not completely exhaustive. I used to go through all my royalty reports, and I would enter it on my spreadsheet. And I realized that I was in some cases double counting income because I was failing to distinguish reports that I got that were projected income.
[00:19:12] The other report would come in with the actual income and I wasn't always being careful to discount the projections and just use the actual one. So ease of use is important for me for anything having to do with finances.
[00:19:26] Michael: Yeah. And the easier it will be if you can find a program that does a lot of that heavy lifting for you and if you're willing to invest in something that can take care of that heavy lifting for you, then all you have to do is the analysis. What I suspect happens is people try to do their sales, if they're not using ScribeCount or if they're not exclusive to Amazon and they're not using Book Report, they try to do it manually themselves. And by the time they've entered all their sales and manually, they're so exhausted that they don't want to do any data analysis.
[00:19:55] And it's frustrating. That's what I used to do. I used to get so tired. It used to take me like four hours a month to do my sales. I hated it.
[00:20:01] Michael: And so I found a better way, but that way is a kind of a less beaten path. The longer you do this and the more books you have, the more unique the problems you're going to face are going to be. And so you need customizable solutions.
[00:20:13] Matty: Yep. Well, at some point I should have a panel discussion, with you, me, and Nicholas Erik, because Nick Erik was just on talking about valuing your creative work and we were talking about valuing both in terms of emotionally valuing it, but the objective value of it.
[00:20:30] And he's a big proponent of Excel. That conversation went on so long, I ended up clipping out the part related to Excel and posting it as a standalone offering on YouTube, I believe. But yeah, he's also a big proponent of there are lots and lots of things you can do with Excel. And I use it as a little database, to slice and dice data about like podcast topics or to do lists and things like that.
[00:20:58] Michael: Excel can be amazing. When I was building macros, another thing that I was doing was trying to figure out how to quantify the number of different edits that I got from my editor.
[00:21:09] And so what I ended up doing in Excel, and it wasn't really that complicated. It sounds more complicated than it is. I'm an egghead when it comes to this stuff. But I figured it out. I actually created a data model, like a scoring model, that could predict which chapters in my book would get the most edits from my editor. And I was able to do it at pretty good accuracy.
[00:21:29] That's the kind of tool that you can only use with Excel. There’s a lot of things you can do if you're creative. You can just go take an Excel course online, on YouTube. They have videos that are like six hours long, they take you through the basics of Excel. LinkedIn learning has really good Excel courses. It doesn't have to be that terribly expensive, but it's one of those tools that writers just don't invest in that much, but it can pay off a lot for you if you know how to use it.
[00:21:54] Matty: For that predictive tool, what did you do with that data once you had it?
[00:21:59] Michael: I basically use that to flag chapters for my editor. So basically, I created a Word macro that counted the number of edits in my manuscript from my editor. And it counted all those up, and then I created another macro that divided up all the edits by chapter. And I was able to see, okay, this chapter had this many spelling and grammar edits, and then any comment that the editor made was probably a story comment.
[00:22:23] And this is why, when you think about data, it starts leading you down interesting paths. Because I would look at the chapters that had the most edits and I'd say, okay, why do these chapters have the most edits?
[00:22:32] So when you own your data like that you can do interesting things and get interesting insights that will cut your edits. I was able to cut my edits by 10% and I was able to find a lot of things that my editor no longer has to worry about because I was able to use Word macros and I was able to use some of those predictive things.
[00:22:51] Matty: Yeah. I really like anything that can catch anything before an editor gets to it, because sometimes people will say, they're the editor, that's what they're there for. But I think that there is a finite pool of energy that the editor has to bring to your work. And if they're spending it finding the wrong spelling of "there," then they're not using it to find like a way characterization could be strengthened or something like that.
[00:23:13] Michael: Oh, that's a hundred percent correct. And I'll take it even further. When you were a kid and your mom told you to go find something and your room was a mess and then you couldn't find it, it's a lot harder to find something in a messy room, isn't it?
[00:23:25] And when your editor is having to wade through all the same edits over and over again, they're going to miss other stuff that's in plain sight.
[00:23:33] The cleaner you can make your manuscript when you send it to the editor, the more edits they'll find.
[00:24:09] Matty: What are some other tools that are out there that are available for purchase? Not necessarily ones that people are going to customize or build on their own. What are some writing apps, for example, that you're seeing that you're enthusiastic about?
[00:24:22] Michael: The one I'm watching right now is Atticus by Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur fame. He's doing something really interesting with Atticus. Atticus is an all-in-one approach. Right now, it's primarily like a Vellum killer. It's the solution to Vellum for people that don't have Macs. That's, to me, I think a brilliant strategy. But it’s also a writing app and they're building out that functionality. So basically you can write your book in Atticus.
[00:24:47] You can format your book in Atticus. That's great, It's like Scrivener, but it's easier. You don't have to worry about compile with Scrivener. If you click a button, you'd say what you want and then Atticus spits out a well formatted book.
[00:25:01] In the future, I think if they get this right, I think it's going to be a game changer. They're working on ways that you don't have to take the manuscript out of the ecosystem. You can just give permission to an editor. The editor goes to the Atticus website, edits your book, and then you just go in and look. And then you accept the changes you format.
[00:25:20] I think that's the future. There's something to that, because if you look at it right now, the process of writing is extremely inefficient. You write your story and then you export that story to Word, probably if you're using Scrivener or more sophisticated app than Word. You send that to your editor. Editor sends it back with track changes. You work on the track changes in Word or Google docs, then you have to re-import that either into your writing app or into an app like Vellum. It's extremely inefficient. If you can do it all in one, I think that'll solve a lot of problems.
[00:25:53] Matty: Yeah, I got to chat with Dave a little bit. He was on a podcast episode fairly recently talking about keywords. And then we talked about Atticus, and I'm going to be very interested to see how they handle it.
[00:26:05] One of the powers in the limitation of both Scrivener and Vellum, but at opposite ends of the spectrum, Scrivener you can do anything with, and so as a result, it's sometimes very difficult to sort through all the thousands of functions to find the one that you want.
[00:26:22] With Vellum it pretty much only does one thing. It does great. But it only does one thing. So as you're saying, you could use it to write your book, but I don't think anybody recommends that. I'm going to be interested to see how Atticus balances the breadth of functionality with simplicity of use.
[00:26:39] And I think based on what Dave said, one of the things that we're going to do is try to partner with other apps, not try to build it all in Atticus the way I think Scrivener has tried to build everything in the Scrivener.
[00:26:51] Michael: Yeah. It doesn't surprise me. I also think that something that is an opportunity is a Microsoft Word like ecosystem. And when I say that you can use Microsoft Word today and you can use a Grammarly add in, you can use a ProWritingAid add in, you can use PerfectIt, you can use these macros. There are all sorts of add ins that you can buy for Microsoft Word.
[00:27:13] We don't really have that with a writing app, but I bet there's a lot of really interesting plugins and add-ons that you could add using artificial intelligence or certain things that not everyone in the population is going to need, but some people would. And so I think partnering makes a lot of sense.
[00:27:30] Dabble did this with ProWritingAid. They integrated ProWritingAid into their app, which I thought was a really smart thing to do. It's kind of one of the things is why didn't anyone else do this before now? Because that's another problem. When you edit your book and you want to edit it and Grammarly or ProWritingAid, you either have to export it to Word and then use those plugins, or you've got to put it on the Grammarly website or the ProWritingAid website. So what ends up happening is you're constantly transporting your manuscript back and forth. And that just doesn't work.
[00:27:58] Matty: You had mentioned artificial intelligence. And I think a lot of the things that we've talked about so far are some level of artificial intelligence, more or less sophisticated. So what else do you see on the artificial intelligence front that writer should be keeping an eye on?
[00:28:13] Michael: There's a lot happening, but also feels like it's quiet at the same time. I think the GPT-3 thing is really interesting. I think it's fascinating. It'll be really interesting to see where we're at in five years with that.
[00:28:25] Matty: Can you describe what that is a little bit?
[00:28:26] Michael: Yeah, it's basically, and I'm probably not going to describe it as elegantly as someone like Joanna Penn probably could, but it's basically an artificial intelligence engine that can help generate content. And the content that it's generating, is very rapidly, and you could argue in some cases there, in replicating real work. Like you could read it and not know that an AI wrote it. So a lot of people are using that for content generation.
[00:28:55] I think there's some other interesting things out there. I think they're early stages. There's a lot of buzz going on right now about character generation, apps that will generate characters for you, particularly with Dungeons and Dragons or those types of lit RPG novels. A lot of things like that.
[00:29:10] It's interesting. When I first saw that I was like, ah, I don't know about that. But the more I saw it, I was like, okay, this is actually an interesting concept. I think the question there is who owns the copyright to the character if it's generated. So that one thing I probably would be wary of.
[00:29:24] But I also think just from a just general writing perspective, I think a lot of the copywriting tools are very compelling. I tested a few of them where they basically will write sales copy for you. You type in what your book is about, so on and so forth, and it'll give you email subject headlines to use or phrases that you can use in your email marketing or on your website.
[00:29:46] And they're surprisingly good. I was pleasantly surprised. I thought this is going to be garbage and what I actually got was pretty good. So is it a matter of time before we get book description generators that can do that?
[00:30:00] Matty: Oh, please.
[00:30:00] Michael: Possibly, possibly, maybe not. but
[00:30:02] Matty: I just want to hit the blurb button.
[00:30:04] Michael: Hit the blurb button and you get it. But what I do think that's going to have implications for, though, it could have potentially have implications for ads. So you don't have to worry as much about generating ad headlines for Facebook or Amazon. I also think, there's a service called Prestozon, if you've heard of them. They use AI to optimize Amazon ads, which is a really interesting approach.
[00:30:27] And I think that's one of those things where I think AI could honestly do better than a human, because it's just data at scale. And I think if it has a lot of data that you're generating and that the user base is generating. I think it's not out of the realm of possibility than in the next three to five years, people are going to rely on software to do their ads for them, as opposed to doing it manually. It could be sooner than that.
[00:30:50] Matty: I think I'm hampered in, for example, titling my emails because I'm too literal about it. And I think that if I played around on there, I could get something that wasn't misleading, but it was also more engaging for the people who I want to open that email.
[00:31:08] Michael: Well, if it's a data problem, right? Because there are thousands if not tens of thousands, maybe even more, entrepreneurs who are sending emails every single day. And those emails have open rates and click rates. So these companies have these mountains of data because AI only works at scale, right? You need a lot of data to train a model. And with email marketing and things like that, there's a lot more data there. And that's why you can rely on it a little bit more. Whereas with fiction, it's a lot harder because there's not as much data. And the types of stories that we're writing are all so different. That's why I think we're lagging on the fiction front.
[00:31:51] Matty: A technology that I thought would be further along now than it is, is text to speech, produced with a person's voice.
[00:31:58] So the model that I'm used to is I use Descript for the podcast and I have an Overdub Matty Dalrymple voice. And I can type things in and then it generates it in a sort of semi-robotic sounding version of my voice. And I thought by this time it would be better. I know Google has a beta coming that I've signed up for, but then my name disappears into the hopper with everybody else's.
[00:32:22] And I'm looking at this strictly for my nonfiction because it's going to be a long time before I believe there's going to be an AI version that's going to read my novels in a way that I'm comfortable. But with my non-fiction books, if I put myself in the position of the reader, there are lots of non-fiction books that I would love to consume if I could do it while I was walking the dog or driving or something like that.
[00:32:47] And if I had a reasonably non-irritating voice reading it for me, especially if it was modeled on the voice of the author, I would be all over that. And one of the things that I'd like to do is offer AI generated audio book versions of my nonfiction books on my own platform, PayHip or whatever, at a very low rate. Not much more than I would be charging for the ebook of that. But it's just not there. Is that anything that you're tracking?
[00:33:15] Michael: Yup. I've been paying attention to it a little bit. Google had a bunch of public domain books that you could download and listen to and test out the voices. And it sounded a little bit better than, say, your Amazon device that begins with an A, but not that much. I was surprised. You're right. The technology is really not there.
[00:33:34] What's interesting to me though is that it seems to me that in China, it's a little bit better though. So the company that is the parent company for TikTok, ByteDance, either earlier this year or late last year they released an app that does exactly that. It creates AI generated audio books. And from what I understand, it sounded pretty good. It wasn't perfect, but it sounded pretty good. And I wonder if a lot of that has to do with language as well. Because in China it seems like AI has gone a lot smoother. And I read somewhere that it had to do with the Chinese language is easier to program into an AI and to get it more realistic.
[00:34:13] English is just a tough language. I was actually chatting with an AI developer about creating a tool and we just threw up our hands in frustration because English is just extraordinarily difficult to program into any sort of rule. And I wonder if that has a lot to do with it.
[00:34:31] And the sentences run together too. That's one of my pet peeves with audio generated by AI, the sentences run together. If I'm doing my dishes, I can't hear the separation. That is an issue that you would think Google would have figured out. it's coming. They'll eventually figure it out, but it's just going to take a little bit of time, I think.
[00:34:50] Matty: Well, you would think it wouldn't be hard to program, like if there was a period, pause for 0.75 seconds. How hard could that be.
[00:34:58] Michael: That's the thing about emerging tech. There's always caveats, and you don't always know what they are. And that's I think a thing to keep in mind.
[00:35:07] Matty: Yeah, it's easy for us in the outside looking in to say, how come they can't just do this simple thing?
[00:35:13] So I did want to now loop back to the topic you had mentioned earlier about thinking of your books as data. So talk a little bit about that.
[00:35:21] Yeah, it took a long time, but we, I think, as a community have learned to think about our books like products, right? So when I first started self-publishing, people didn't think about their books as products. They would publish the book and do the best they could, but they didn't have that product mindset. I think people like Joanna were really instrumental in getting people to think about that. ALLi, Alliance of Independent Authors. And I think that we're going to have to go over that same hurdle again with data. So there are a lot of writers who have been publishing for a long time.
[00:35:50] Like me, I've been doing this for almost a decade, and I've got over 60 books. Does it make sense for me, it's just a philosophical, rhetorical question, you can answer it if you want, but does it make sense for me to have to go into seven different dashboards to upload my books?
[00:36:05] The answer is no, it doesn't make sense at all. After three or four books, you have an efficiency problem, and you have a maintenance problem too, because things break on your sales pages, and you don't always know about it right away. And actually, I posed this idea to a developer, it was a Silicon Valley company actually.
[00:36:22] And we actually figured out a way to think about your books as data. So for example, right now some author's sales page is breaking. There's some HTML issue or maybe someone somewhere listening to this did a promotion and they forgot to raise the price back up to the regular price. I say that because I'm guilty of that.
[00:36:45] I forgot to do that on one of my best books once, and I can't tell you how much money I lost. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could have some sort of software that served as like an intellectual property manager? I wrote in the book, I used an analogy almost like a Fido, like a dog, like a guard dog that patrols all of your sales pages and checks to make sure everything is what it's supposed to be. And then if there's a problem, like one of your books is at the wrong price, *poof* you got an email. That's when I think about my books as data.
[00:37:16] So then you have to answer, how do you do that? The data is out there on Amazon and Kobo and Apple, and you can get that data, believe it or not. And you can bring that data into an application to use. The only downside is that it's technically against their terms of service. So what I believe that retailers should do if they have the ability to do it, is to open up application programming interfaces, APIs. And what that is, the easiest way, think about it is a socket in a plug, you plug into the Amazon server’s data, and you can download the data for your books, and you can download that data and do what you want with it.
[00:37:52] And when you think about your portfolio as a bunch of data points, then you can start looking at all your prices and then you can start looking at all your book descriptions and looking at all the other attributes without having to go off to individual sites and you can manage it in one place. I think I call that intellectual property management. And the tools exist to do that right now. This is where the Silicon Valley guy and I, we had to part ways because it's against terms of service.
[00:38:18] But that tool exists. And I think that's the future. And I also think that when traditional publishers think about the distribution of their books, there's no traditional publisher house anywhere, Penguin Random House, they don't upload a book one at a time to their retailers. They have a system, it's called Onyx. And what that is it breaks your book up into metadata, and then you transmit your book to retailers based on that. I think at some point in the future, it would be great if self-publishers could have access to that standard.
[00:38:47] I actually do have access to it right now. I can find it, but it's actually complicated to use. But when you think about your books as a stream of data, then you can start to think about distribution differently. You can start to think about how you maintain those books differently, how you maintain the quality of everything that's supposed to exist, like your price and your book description, which version of the book that you have available.
[00:39:09] I think that's the next frontier. And I think that the authors that have prolific catalogs who figured this out are going to do pretty well for themselves because it because become the data issue. I think
[00:39:21] Matty: it's also going to be important for all the different platforms to become more standardized on how they're collecting the data. Because just as one example, I know that there's one platform that I distribute to that doesn't accommodate subtitles. So on most platforms I would have, let's say THE SENSE OF DEATH is the title and then "An Ann Kinnear Suspense Novel" as the subtitle. But this one, I have to put it all in the title field and that kind of stuff makes it harder for there to be a more centralized management system.
[00:39:57] I will point people to Episode 42 was THE IMPORTANCE OF METADATA with Joshua Tallent. So if people are intrigued by the metadata or by Onyx, which you had mentioned, there was some information about that in there.
[00:40:09] Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And you're absolutely right about that. And that issue with the subtitle that you mentioned, that rears its ugly head downstream, too, when you start downloading your sales report. Because they all store their data differently. And so then you've got to deal with that.
[00:40:25] So yes, I have a book series it's called INDIE AUTHOR CONFIDENTIAL and it's basically like The Writer's Journey. We talked last time about my podcast, The Writer's Journey. It's like The Writer's Journey in book form. So The Writer's Journey, rest in peace, went on to heaven, but this book lives in its image. And I publish it quarterly. And I talk about topics like you and I are talking about, just things are on my mind. And I wrote a letter, an open letter, to Amazon, Google, Apple. And in one of the things I asked them to do is dear Apple, dear Amazon, if you're listening, Kobo, all these places, please standardize your data. Standardize the data so that we can upload it the same way consistently most of the time. And we can download it in a standardized format as well. Because then we can start actually creating tools that'll help us.
[00:41:10] Because the biggest advantage we have is that we're nimble, right? We can turn on a dime. But that nimbleness, it gets a little bit negated if the processes we're using are clunky and they're not efficient. And so we have to think about ways that we can remain nimble so that we're not spending all of our time doing data analysis or data cleanup just because there's a retailer that gets the subtitle wrong.
[00:41:34] Matty: Do you have any plans to capture this in book form, if you have not already? This whole conversation about emerging tech and those kinds of considerations?
[00:41:45] Michael: Yeah, I thought about it. A lot of it is in books that I've written already. Like I wrote a book called THE AUTHOR INCOME PROBLEM, where I talk about the sales issue. I'm going to be writing a book about the editing problem and thinking of editing as a data problem and not as an effort problem. So, yes, maybe I will think about writing an emerging tech book at some point.
[00:42:04] Matty: Yeah. I think you'll have a ready audience. Well, Michael, this has been so interesting and thought-provoking. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and all the many, many resources you offer online.
[00:42:16] Michael: Yes. You can find me first and foremost at authorlevelup.com. That is my website. You can find links to all my books, my YouTube channel, and all that good stuff. And thanks for having me. This is always, it's always great to come back and talk to you about stuff.
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