Episode 145 - Speech to Text and Back Again with John Gaspard
August 2, 2022
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John Gaspard talks about SPEECH TO TEXT AND BACK AGAIN. He discusses writing while walking (and how you’ll never get your best ideas on a treadmill); tips for easing the process; expectations of the content you’ll produce; opportunities for repurposing content; and the indy ability to experiment.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out 2 MINUTES OF INDY, where over the week following the airing of the episode, you'll find brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics. You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there. |
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John Gaspard is author of the Eli Marks mystery series, the Como Lake Players mystery series, and four stand-alone novels. He hosts two podcasts: "Behind the Page: The Eli Marks Podcast," and "The Occasional Film Podcast.” John has directed six low-budget features that cost very little and made even. He's also written multiple books on the subject of low-budget filmmaking, and ironically, those books made more than the films. John lives in Minnesota and shares his home with his lovely wife, several greyhounds, a few cats, and a handful of pet allergies.
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"Dictation does bring out a larger theme for indy writers, because it's an experimentation that I'm doing. And as indy writers, we can do that. I did four books with Eli Marks for a traditional publisher. I've done four without publisher. And the amount of experimentation I could do with the publisher was, I want to say, nil. They either just weren't interested or weren't willing to support what I was trying to do. Whereas as an indy author, I can experiment. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but it is that idea of, let's experiment and try stuff." —John Gaspard
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Links
John's Links:
http://www.elimarksmysteries.com
https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/eli-marks-podcast
https://www.fastcheapfilm.com
https://www.facebook.com/JohnGaspardAuthorPage
https://twitter.com/johngaspard
Episode 128 - Lessons from Filmmaking for the Indy Author with John Gaspard
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
http://www.elimarksmysteries.com
https://www.elimarksmysteries.com/eli-marks-podcast
https://www.fastcheapfilm.com
https://www.facebook.com/JohnGaspardAuthorPage
https://twitter.com/johngaspard
Episode 128 - Lessons from Filmmaking for the Indy Author with John Gaspard
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is John Gaspard. Hey John, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] John: I'm doing well, thank you. Thanks for having me back.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you back. Just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, John Gaspard is the author of the Eli Marks mystery series, the Como Lake Players mystery series, and four standalone novels. He hosts two podcasts: "Behind the Page: The Eli Marks Podcast" and "The Occasional Film Podcast."
John has directed six low budget features that cost very little and made even less. He's also written multiple books on the subject of low budget filmmaking. And ironically, these books made more than the films. And John lives in Minnesota and shares his home with this lovely wife, several greyhounds, who you may see in the background, a few cats, and a handful of pet allergies.
And as John mentioned, he is a return guest. He was in episode 128, which was "Lessons from Filmmaking for the Indy Author." And you can tell from the bio that John was well-positioned to discuss that.
And I invited John back to talk about dictation. Because he mentioned he was experimenting with dictation and it's something that I'm always interested in hearing about.
What Made John Start Exploring Dictation?
[00:01:02] Matty: And so, John, let's just dive right into what made you start exploring dictation?
[00:01:08] John: Sure. As an indy author, you're always experimenting in different things and I'd heard other authors talking about dictation, some at great length and with great success, and had always sort of poo-pooed the idea, just because I thought I was so used to, after a million years, sitting in front of a keyboard, that's where I'm used to writing things.
Writing While Walking
However, I found that the best time for me to get ideas in general, was to take a long walk. Not a walk with the dogs or a walk with music, but just a walk where I don't have to do anything else. It doesn't work when I'm riding a bike. It doesn't work when I’m driving a car, because I have to do other things. But with walking, I can pretty much do that and focus on another idea. And I would get ideas while walking and I would know that I'd not remember them. So I'd open up my phone and I'd send myself an email with this idea.
[00:01:53] John: And I might get back from a walk with six to eight emails of different ideas I'd have. A line of dialogue, a way to start a chapter, a twist, any of that stuff. And I realized as I was walking one day, oh, I have a pretty good idea here for how I want to start this chapter and rather than use email, I opened up Notes and I just started talking. And I got a nice chunk of a chapter done with speech-to-text.
And I sent it to my computer and looked at it and realized, oh boy, if I'm going to do this, I either have to talk slower, because the computer in the phone was having trouble understanding me, or I'd have to look at it right away, so I understood what the mistakes were. But I realized, hey, there's a lot of usable things here, and maybe I shouldn't be poo pooing dictation. Maybe it is a way to get these ideas on paper, in a different format. So I experimented and started taking longer walks and getting headphones that had a microphone in it, so I was always close to the microphone, and having the Notes app open.
And I realized that in an hour-long walk, I could write a chapter of a book. There would be holes, there would be gaps, there would be points where I would say, insert character name here, if I didn't remember the character name, or need more description here. But then I would get home and put it on the computer screen and go, oh, I have a very workable first draft. It's nowhere near polished, it needs a lot of work, but it needs as much work as if I had sat down and typed it, except there's more mistakes in it, but it seems like a really viable way to do this.
Tips for Dictation
[00:03:31] John: So I kept at it, and I have experimented this summer. I've written a novella that way, mostly dictated. Wrote half a book that way, mostly dictated. And I learned a couple things. One is, like I said, I've got to edit it almost right away, because speech-to-text comes up with some interesting notions of what it was I said, but unless I look at it right away, I'll lose that.
And I also realized, one of the reasons I'm able to do this now and didn't feel I could do it earlier was, I'm writing two series, Eli Marks and Como Lake Players Mysteries, and I know them really well. I know the characters, I know the tone, I know what the books sound like. And if I were just starting out, I don't think I could dictate a book, because I wouldn't know who the people were. That's the sort of stuff you find when you're writing. But since I know them and I'm in book 3 of Como Lake Players and I'm in book, goodness, book 9 of Eli Marks, I have a pretty good sense of that world. And so my thoughts that dictation weren't for me might have been true earlier, because I didn't know the books well enough, but aren't true now, if you know the books well enough, your tone and your characters, I think you can get a very solid first draft on things, just walking around and talking.
Why Walk Alone?
[00:04:48] Matty: Yeah. So I have a whole mess of questions based on what you've already said. So the first thing I wanted to ask you about, is that you specifically said going for a walk without your dogs. And this is like a bizarre concept to me because I always feel guilty if I go out and I don't have a dog with me. So can you just explain a little bit why you felt it was necessary for you to go out without the dogs? First, since they're both behind me right now, they get a walk first. I do walk them first. And then I go do this, so it's a second walk for me.
[00:05:18] Matty: Are they sitting up at all, because we've said the WALK word now, like 12 times?
[00:05:22] John: No, they don't associate it. Oddly enough, the things they associate, particularly one of them has the weirdest connection makes, with when a walk is happening and he's 50% of the time he's right. And 50% of the time you go, hey buddy, this just ain't happening. I'm sorry, we're not walking right now.
So once I get their walk out of the way, I really can't do two things at once when it comes to writing, and that includes, when I'm walking a dog, I'm with the dog. I'm not on music, it's about me and the dog being out for a walk. When I'm out for a walk by myself, I'm not trying to connect with anything else, and I probably am not going to run into a pole, so I can get lost in it. I can't do it while I'm riding a bike because there's just too much going on when you're riding a bike. But it's not unlike just sitting quietly the keyboard.
I know some people can play music while they write. I generally don't. I have in the past, but generally don't. It's just that focus, the same focus I have as a keyboard is the same focus when I'm taking a walk and dictating.
How Much Writing in an Hour?
[00:06:16] Matty: And I should say, I'm not, in an hour-long walk, I'm not talking for an hour. I might get, okay, here's the good first line for the chapter. Record that. Walk for bit. Oh, I know. Yeah. That's what we need to do. And pause, record, pause, record, pause, record. So it isn't a constant thing. In fact I was just at The Self-publishing Show in London and one of the speakers there talked about how he just gets in his car and goes and parks somewhere and will talk for an hour into his device. I don't do that. I'm very stop and start, as the ideas come to me. I don't want to get too deep into the tech, because I want to hold that for the end. But does the mechanism, a tool, the app or whatever you're using, is it voice activated, or do you have to manually turn it on and off?
[00:06:59] John: I have to manually turn it on and off. I use my iPhone and I just use the Notes app in it, which starts a new piece of paper or new sheet, for this particular walk. And I just talk into that and then pause it when I need to pause.
Expectations of and Tools for Dictation
[00:07:11] Matty: And can you talk a little bit about how you had to, or if you had to change your expectation about the results? So let's say you've gotten back from your walk, you've done the technical cleanup. Inexplicably, the couple of times I've tried dictation, the dictation tools always think I swear a lot more than I really do. I always have to clean up a lot of bad words from the transcript. But once you've done the cleanup and you have the rough draft that's resulting from your dictation, do you see stylistic differences between what you're producing in the first draft with dictation rather than through typing?
[00:07:46] John: No, I don't. I think I would be hard pressed to tell later on looking back something that was dictated once it's cleaned up and something that was written right at the keyboard. Part of that comes from having written a zillion book. And as I'm dictating, I'm saying, well, you certainly are an idiot, he said. New paragraph. What do you mean by that, comma, she replied. All that stuff is already in there and when I put it into the document, it already halfway looks like writing, and then you just have to go in and clean it up. But I really can't tell the difference.
And then of course, it's nowhere near final at that point. There are all kinds of tweaks you do, but it's not unlike the tweaks you do if you just vomited up a draft on paper, using a keyboard.
[00:08:25] Matty: And are there any other audio prompts you have to give to Notes or the tool you're using, like where the commas go, where a new paragraph break is? Are there other things like that you have to tell it?
[00:08:36] John: Well, there's things that I wish I could tell it, but it gets confused by it. I mean, if I really wanted to get precise, I could say, quote, what are you talking about? Close quote, that sort of thing. It just doesn't get that. If I don't say "paragraph" quickly enough, it will think I mean, the word "paragraph." Same thing with "period." I know my wife on her iPhone for years had it set to British format and anytime she tried to just dictate an email, she had to say, "full stop" instead of saying "period," because it would just write out the word "period."
So there's a lot of stuff that in particular, the Apple iPhone, as it exists right now, doesn't know, but it sure knows a whole lot more than when I first looked into doing this years ago with Dragon Dictation. It's a lot better now than it was then.
[00:09:22] Matty: Yeah, I do think about all the companies that smartphones in general are putting out of business. Like, I know my husband, who's a pilot, still has a Garmin in his plane, but I've got to believe that Garmin is focusing on those kind of specialized things, and not that many people have a Garmin in their car anymore.
[00:09:38] John: No, probably not. Probably not.
Matty: It's probably a group of listeners who are going, what?
John: Look it up.
[00:09:43] Matty: Yeah.
Dictation with Fiction and Nonfiction?
[00:09:45] Matty: So you write both fiction and nonfiction. and it sounds like you've been using the dictation so far for fiction. Have you experimented at all with nonfiction?
[00:09:53] John: I have not. I have not. Although I was surprised to read recently, there's a comedian named Dana Gould who has a really good podcast called the Dana Gould Hour, and he also does like a weekly sort of blog post about movies. And he was explaining to someone who said, I could never sit down write a blog post. And he said, I don't write this, I just dictate it. I know the subject well enough that I just dictate it, and then I clean it up, which is what I'm doing with fiction.
I just haven't really tried it on non-fiction because I haven't written anything non-fiction lately. But if it was a subject matter that I knew, I bet it would be very helpful, but it's the same thing as with the fiction. If the tone and the feel and the characters, I think it's going to be a whole lot easier to get launched into dictation than it would be if you're just starting a brand-new novel and a brand-new series.
Stylistic Differences Between Typing and Dictation
[00:10:39] Matty: Yeah. I'm realizing that if we sort of expand on the topic beyond dictation to text-to-speech in general, I'm experimenting with the non-fiction side in the sense that I have automated transcripts generated from my podcast interviews. I then have somebody who helps me clean them up, and then I post them on my website as the transcript.
But I've also started pulling some of that transcript information into drafts of nonfiction books. And it takes a lot of editing, but if you have someone who's talking about something that they're knowledgeable about for a period of time, then you have a lot of really good raw material.
And it will be interesting, the books that I'm working on now, all of which are still in draft, are the first time I've used that idea of pulling transcript information into my draft. And I'm going to be curious to look back and see if the resulting book is stylistically or substantively different than the books that I wrote when I was typing it all out. I have the feeling that there'd be more material because the material is just there, and I have to decide whether to use it or not. It's not like I'm having to create it, which could be good thing or a bad thing.
[00:11:48] John: You know, when I did two different books on low-budget filmmaking that were primarily made up of interviews with filmmakers, talking about issues for low-budget filmmaking, the second one being strictly interviews with screenwriters.
And so in those cases, and this was, 15 years ago, whenever it was the interviews were recorded, I transcribed them myself, and then edited them into interviews in the book. And what I found then is making that transition from, for example, you and I speaking right now, to text that you would want to read in a book. Took a lot of editing, because people, as you can see now, I am shifting the tense of what I'm saying, and I'm not completing sentences. And I ran into really articulate writers who couldn't put together a sentence without shifting halfway through their sentence, into something else. And that's the big difference that I've found, is that taking those interviews that I did years ago and cleaning them up took a long time.
And now that I have a podcast, couple podcasts where I interview people, I will occasionally run into what I call a Roger Corman. Roger Corman, as a producer, made a lot of low-budget movies. And the time I interviewed him and took the transcript, it was letter-perfect. He spoke in complete sentences that were perfect and pristine, and you just had to type what he said, and that was what you got. With the interviews I'm doing now, it's a podcast. People aren't watching the way that they're changing tenses and moving things around. And so when I look at the transcripts, I leave them because that's for the podcast, it should be what they said, but I go, I really wouldn't want to sit down and try to turn this into a book right now.
[00:13:29] Matty: It is interesting, further expanding our topic area, that the use you put content that you're moving from one format to the other. So I'll use, go back to my podcast transcripts again. So we're chatting, pretty soon people will be able to go on the website to the John Gaspard episode and check out the transcript and the person who helps me with my podcast, we were having a conversation about, should he optimize the transcript for captions, or should he optimize it for the transcript?
Because I use Descript and what it generates is used for both. I can put out videos that are captioned and I can also have the transcript, but it's only one set of text, so it's not separate. I suppose it could be, but it's not. And so the way I was talking with Cristi, the guy who helps me with the podcasts, hi, Cristi, is that I'm assuming that optimizing for the captions is easier because let's say, I don't want "hi Cristi" to show up in the transcript. He could edit that out, and the captions would have this blank place where I'm saying, Hi Cristi, or he could edit the audio out, there's that whole complication but I certainly don't want hi Cristi to show up in the transcript.
Consider Repurposing Opportunities
[00:14:41] Matty: And so, I'm just thinking of it in terms of content repurposing, because I'm a huge fan of content repurposing. But I remember back when I was in the corporate world, I worked for an online retailer and for a while, the battle cry was, create once, publish everywhere, cope. And then that got modified because I think there was a realization that you have this content, but reusing it everywhere is not necessarily appropriate.
So if Cristi were optimizing for the transcript, then it would be an easier shift to a book than if he's optimizing as he is for captions. So yeah, I guess I'm just issuing a cautionary note. And actually the reason I thought of that is that I had an episode with Dale Roberts called "Outsourcing Your Content Creation." And I can imagine, I've not tried this, so I'm not recommending it, I'm just speculating that you could take a piece of content like an episode transcript, and then hire someone through a platform like Upwork or Fiverr or Reedsy or whatever, to massage that into something that would be more like a blog post, and then further massage it into something that would be more like an article and more like a book chapter. Yeah, just so many opportunities that are opened up by the whole speech-to-text concept.
[00:15:54] John: And the way I do it is with my phone. Now, when I was at The Self-publishing Show, one of the speakers on a panel who was either from Scotland or Wales, I forget which, the one who goes and sits in his car somewhere for an hour and dictates an entire whatever. He doesn't use speech-to-text, he simply records for an hour, and sends it out and has someone literally transcribe it and then he cleans it up. The way he explained it was, the phone simply cannot understand my accent. It just doesn't get it. And he has a transcriber now who does, and that's a whole 'nother way of doing it, where someone would perhaps clean it up a little bit for you before they send it back or just send back what they heard. But that's another way of doing it that people might want to consider.
When I do the transcripts for my film podcast, I have that done on Fiverr, a person just does that for me, and then I go in and I clean it up because they don't get all the stuff. But I wouldn't consider running it through a text-to-speech program because I just don't think it would get it, because it's so conversational.
AI Transcription is Constantly Improving
[00:16:55] Matty: And I do think that people should always revisit the approach they're using now. So I mentioned that I used Descript for the podcast and I can see that as each month goes by, the transcript it creates is cleaner and cleaner. And I know that although it is currently optimized for an American accent, it's very high on their feature request list to include optimization for other accents.
And so I might know that I'm going to have to spend twice as long or Cristi's going to have to spend twice as long if we're interviewing someone from New Zealand. But in a year, I don't think that's going to be true anymore. So people should always be looking at that kind of tech and saying, am I now employing someone to do something that the machine now does for me? Now we're getting into the scary AI topic.
[00:17:43] John: Yeah. It is a little scary, but I have a narrator who does all my Eli Marks books and he will always do all the Eli Marks books, because he just gets it, and I can't imagine AI getting the jokes in it. On the other hand, one of the filmmaking books, just as an experiment, I went through and did an AI version of that. And because it was an interview book, it has well, maybe 12 different voices in it, so I was constantly switching back and forth on narrators and all that. And it sounds okay for nonfiction, if you're paying four bucks for this audio book, you’re not going to be too upset by it.
But I also did another filmmaking book where I used real voices and hired a dozen different voices, and it's not substantially better because it's nonfiction, there's not a lot that I have put into it. But I think with my fiction, I'll always use a real person.
[00:18:33] Matty: Yeah. I never say always, but I feel confident that my fiction audiobook narrator has nothing to worry about for the next five years or so. Like I think eventually, it's going to be possible to create a perfectly listenable fiction book with AI but not in the near future.
[00:18:50] John: Well, if they do, then I'll let them capture my narrator's voice, Jim Cunningham's voice, and turn that into an AI, and make sure that he gets a royalty split and he doesn't have to come over and sit in my spooky little booth and read all the time. He can just press a button and still get paid.
[00:19:07] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So now see, we've further expanded into text-to-speech and speech-to-text. See what dictation has led us to?
The Indy Ability to Experiment
[00:19:15] John: Well, you know, for me, dictation is an example of a big fan of The West Wing, and in the first season, there's an episode called "Galileo" in which the president is going to be talking about a space probe. And he keeps saying, we want to talk about larger themes. And dictation does bring out I think, a larger theme for indy writers, because it's an experimentation that I'm doing. And as indy writers, we can do that. I did four books with Eli Marks for a traditional publisher. I've done four without publisher.
And the amount of experimentation I could do with the publisher was, I want to say nil. They either just weren't interested or weren't willing to support what I was trying to do. So I couldn't get information back. You know, particularly in marketing and advertising, if you can't get daily reports of what's happening, you just never know.
Whereas as an indy author, I can experiment. I can try dictating and it doesn't hurt anybody, and it doesn't cost anything. And it's a way to get some new ideas in it. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I didn't think it would work for me. I don't think it'll work for all books, but it is that idea of, let's experiment and try stuff.
For example, this summer I'm not doing any advertising at all on the books, but I'm just using TikTok and the occasional book funnel promo to see, how does TikTok work, for me and for my books? The short answer right now is, not well. But it's been interesting and it's an experiment I afford to do because I don't make my living from my books, it's my hobby. But it's the sort of thing that I never could have done with a traditional publisher. I could have done it, but I wouldn't have gotten any answers at all as to whether or not it works.
And because we are indy, we're more nimble. You know, back in your corporate days and in my corporate days, companies that were smaller could make things happen bigger than companies that were bigger. And we can do that, we can try something out and you just have to not be afraid of it and just go, let’s try this for a month and see what happens.
[00:21:06] Matty: Yeah, yeah. I want to loop back to a couple of more tactical topics about narration. So you had said that you are using it so far only for fiction. And you had also said that the end result doesn't seem substantively different than when you were typing it out.
Dialog-heavy Books More Fit for Dictation?
[00:21:22] Matty: But I'm wondering about dialogue specifically, are your books specifically heavy in dialogue, and do you think that lends itself more to dictation than if it's less dialogue heavy?
[00:21:33] John: Yes, and yes. I was always surprised at how much dialogue I have in my books. Particularly, I picked up a book by an author who I kind of know, and I wanted to check out her work and got two pages in, and went, I have two pages here and this character's not said anything. And the number of chapters in an Eli Marks book that begin with the dialogue exchange, most of them begin that way. Yeah, particularly in Eli Marks, the stories are driven by the banter or the conflict between whoever two or three people are in that chapter, in that scene. And it is heavily dialogue -driven. I'm not a big descriptive writer, you're not going to know if the sunset looked like a bruise or not in any of the Eli Marks books. Because it's oh, partially, because it's all from Eli Marks's point of view.
[00:22:20] Matty: He's not a sky as a bruise kind of guy?
[00:22:22] John: He's not a sky, he doesn't really describe anything like that, and I've purposefully kept character description to a minimum because I want to make sure that anyone reading this could possibly see themselves in it. So Eli Marks could be black. There's no reason why he couldn't. I do go with gender right now, although I'm doing a screenplay version of the first Eli Marks book, and there are several characters who I'm just giving generic Pat type names so that they can decide later on the gender. It would work either way. But yeah, with Eli Marks, it is mostly dialogue. And so I just walk along the streets here in Minneapolis, talking into my phone, having a conversation between Eli and his Uncle Harry.
[00:23:07] Matty: I also wanted to loop back on your comment about the AI-narrated nonfiction audio book you did. Did you do that through Google Play?
[00:23:17] John: You know, I tried to, and I actually just had a chat with the Google Play woman, because she was at a table at The Self-publishing Show. And I said, I really wanted to do it with you, but you only allowed one voice per book.
[00:23:30] Matty: That's what I was going to ask.
[00:23:31] John: And I needed a dozen voices. And so I went, I forget what service was I bought it for a month. Got all the voices I needed and then edited together. And then the conversation I had with the woman from Google Play was, I'm trying to upload the book to Google and that's really difficult because you have to become a Google publisher, and I'm not getting any traction with that.
[00:23:52] Matty: And she said, I'm so sorry, yes, everyone's having that problem. I promise you, we will have that entirely fixed within six months and you'll be fine. I said, okay fine. So it's nice to talk to an actual person about it. But, yeah, it would've been easier to do it through Google, they just didn't give me all the voices I needed.
The Right Environment for Dictation
Matty: What do you see as your future for dictation? Do you want to use it more and more? Do you feel like you've gotten to the point that you like, where you take it to a certain point and then it's time to switch over to the keyboard? What are your plans there?
[00:24:19] John: Well, I live in Minnesota, so that drives decisions like that.
Matty: You're going to be more productive in the summer, I'm guessing.
[00:24:25] John: I am. And not only will I be more productive in the summer, but I would have an excuse to be less productive in the winter. And I'm a writer. We all don't need a lot of extra excuses not to write. So I have to get to a point where I'm just as comfortable sitting down at the keyboard again, as I am going out for a walk. Walks are important. We need to keep up our health. But there are certain times that I'm not going to be able to do that, and I am going to have to sit down.
And the problem is, whether I'm dictating or not, I get my best ideas while walking. Whether I write them down or not, it doesn't matter. Always. The last Eli Marks book was a book of a dozen short stories, and two of them were already done before I started it. The other 10 were all launched via walks. Only a couple of them had much dictation in them, but over the course of an hour-long walk, I went, oh, that would work, oh, do that. Oh yeah. Okay. Oh, and that's a story. And I could then come home and sit down and write it. Generating ideas, sitting here at the keyboard like this, well it's hard, because you're sitting and watching me. You'd have to stop watching me while I did it. It isn't as easy, and I've just got to get better at doing that.
Matty: Could you walk indoors or is walking outside a key part of the creative process?
[00:25:32] John: I think it's the walking outside. I've tried it being on like a treadmill, And it's just not as effective, although Matty, it's probably just an excuse, really.
[00:25:41] Matty: No, I think that being outside gives you that perfect balance between a certain amount of sensory stimulation, not just staring at the wall in front of your treadmill, but not so much that it's distracting from your effort.
[00:25:51] John: Or that I'm going to get hurt, that I'm going to walk into something.
Applying Dictation in Other Creative Areas
Matty: Are there other areas of your creative life that you might expand your use of dictation to? For example, if you were to work on another film, do you see opportunities for applying dictation there or other creative areas?
[00:26:07] John: I don't see any reason why I wouldn't. I'm always going to be in a situation where, when I'm out in the world, and idea occurs to me, I'm going to use my phone to get it to me somehow. Whether that's doing the first page and a half of a chapter that I'm quickly reading into notes, or just an email that says, Uncle Harry's surprise party. I'll always be doing something like that.
[00:26:31] Matty: Very cool. Well, John, thank you so much. This was so much fun to talk to you again. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and everything you do online. The simplest thing to do is to go to AlbertsBridgeBooks.com. All the books are there. If you just want to focus on Eli Marks, he's at EliMarksMysteries.com. And you can listen to the first two books in the series, Eli Marks, for free on the Eli Marks podcast. And you can listen to some really interesting film interviews on The Occasional Film Podcast.
[00:27:01] Matty: And is AlbertsBridgeBooks.com your publishing imprint?
[00:27:06] John: Yes. I pretend to be a company called Alberts Bridge Books.
[00:27:09] Matty: You are in fact a company called Alberts Bridge Books.
[00:27:11] John: According to the IRS, yes, I am.
[00:27:13] Matty: Great. Well, thank you again John, that was fun.
John: Thanks, Matty.
[00:00:05] John: I'm doing well, thank you. Thanks for having me back.
[00:00:08] Matty: I am pleased to have you back. Just to give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, John Gaspard is the author of the Eli Marks mystery series, the Como Lake Players mystery series, and four standalone novels. He hosts two podcasts: "Behind the Page: The Eli Marks Podcast" and "The Occasional Film Podcast."
John has directed six low budget features that cost very little and made even less. He's also written multiple books on the subject of low budget filmmaking. And ironically, these books made more than the films. And John lives in Minnesota and shares his home with this lovely wife, several greyhounds, who you may see in the background, a few cats, and a handful of pet allergies.
And as John mentioned, he is a return guest. He was in episode 128, which was "Lessons from Filmmaking for the Indy Author." And you can tell from the bio that John was well-positioned to discuss that.
And I invited John back to talk about dictation. Because he mentioned he was experimenting with dictation and it's something that I'm always interested in hearing about.
What Made John Start Exploring Dictation?
[00:01:02] Matty: And so, John, let's just dive right into what made you start exploring dictation?
[00:01:08] John: Sure. As an indy author, you're always experimenting in different things and I'd heard other authors talking about dictation, some at great length and with great success, and had always sort of poo-pooed the idea, just because I thought I was so used to, after a million years, sitting in front of a keyboard, that's where I'm used to writing things.
Writing While Walking
However, I found that the best time for me to get ideas in general, was to take a long walk. Not a walk with the dogs or a walk with music, but just a walk where I don't have to do anything else. It doesn't work when I'm riding a bike. It doesn't work when I’m driving a car, because I have to do other things. But with walking, I can pretty much do that and focus on another idea. And I would get ideas while walking and I would know that I'd not remember them. So I'd open up my phone and I'd send myself an email with this idea.
[00:01:53] John: And I might get back from a walk with six to eight emails of different ideas I'd have. A line of dialogue, a way to start a chapter, a twist, any of that stuff. And I realized as I was walking one day, oh, I have a pretty good idea here for how I want to start this chapter and rather than use email, I opened up Notes and I just started talking. And I got a nice chunk of a chapter done with speech-to-text.
And I sent it to my computer and looked at it and realized, oh boy, if I'm going to do this, I either have to talk slower, because the computer in the phone was having trouble understanding me, or I'd have to look at it right away, so I understood what the mistakes were. But I realized, hey, there's a lot of usable things here, and maybe I shouldn't be poo pooing dictation. Maybe it is a way to get these ideas on paper, in a different format. So I experimented and started taking longer walks and getting headphones that had a microphone in it, so I was always close to the microphone, and having the Notes app open.
And I realized that in an hour-long walk, I could write a chapter of a book. There would be holes, there would be gaps, there would be points where I would say, insert character name here, if I didn't remember the character name, or need more description here. But then I would get home and put it on the computer screen and go, oh, I have a very workable first draft. It's nowhere near polished, it needs a lot of work, but it needs as much work as if I had sat down and typed it, except there's more mistakes in it, but it seems like a really viable way to do this.
Tips for Dictation
[00:03:31] John: So I kept at it, and I have experimented this summer. I've written a novella that way, mostly dictated. Wrote half a book that way, mostly dictated. And I learned a couple things. One is, like I said, I've got to edit it almost right away, because speech-to-text comes up with some interesting notions of what it was I said, but unless I look at it right away, I'll lose that.
And I also realized, one of the reasons I'm able to do this now and didn't feel I could do it earlier was, I'm writing two series, Eli Marks and Como Lake Players Mysteries, and I know them really well. I know the characters, I know the tone, I know what the books sound like. And if I were just starting out, I don't think I could dictate a book, because I wouldn't know who the people were. That's the sort of stuff you find when you're writing. But since I know them and I'm in book 3 of Como Lake Players and I'm in book, goodness, book 9 of Eli Marks, I have a pretty good sense of that world. And so my thoughts that dictation weren't for me might have been true earlier, because I didn't know the books well enough, but aren't true now, if you know the books well enough, your tone and your characters, I think you can get a very solid first draft on things, just walking around and talking.
Why Walk Alone?
[00:04:48] Matty: Yeah. So I have a whole mess of questions based on what you've already said. So the first thing I wanted to ask you about, is that you specifically said going for a walk without your dogs. And this is like a bizarre concept to me because I always feel guilty if I go out and I don't have a dog with me. So can you just explain a little bit why you felt it was necessary for you to go out without the dogs? First, since they're both behind me right now, they get a walk first. I do walk them first. And then I go do this, so it's a second walk for me.
[00:05:18] Matty: Are they sitting up at all, because we've said the WALK word now, like 12 times?
[00:05:22] John: No, they don't associate it. Oddly enough, the things they associate, particularly one of them has the weirdest connection makes, with when a walk is happening and he's 50% of the time he's right. And 50% of the time you go, hey buddy, this just ain't happening. I'm sorry, we're not walking right now.
So once I get their walk out of the way, I really can't do two things at once when it comes to writing, and that includes, when I'm walking a dog, I'm with the dog. I'm not on music, it's about me and the dog being out for a walk. When I'm out for a walk by myself, I'm not trying to connect with anything else, and I probably am not going to run into a pole, so I can get lost in it. I can't do it while I'm riding a bike because there's just too much going on when you're riding a bike. But it's not unlike just sitting quietly the keyboard.
I know some people can play music while they write. I generally don't. I have in the past, but generally don't. It's just that focus, the same focus I have as a keyboard is the same focus when I'm taking a walk and dictating.
How Much Writing in an Hour?
[00:06:16] Matty: And I should say, I'm not, in an hour-long walk, I'm not talking for an hour. I might get, okay, here's the good first line for the chapter. Record that. Walk for bit. Oh, I know. Yeah. That's what we need to do. And pause, record, pause, record, pause, record. So it isn't a constant thing. In fact I was just at The Self-publishing Show in London and one of the speakers there talked about how he just gets in his car and goes and parks somewhere and will talk for an hour into his device. I don't do that. I'm very stop and start, as the ideas come to me. I don't want to get too deep into the tech, because I want to hold that for the end. But does the mechanism, a tool, the app or whatever you're using, is it voice activated, or do you have to manually turn it on and off?
[00:06:59] John: I have to manually turn it on and off. I use my iPhone and I just use the Notes app in it, which starts a new piece of paper or new sheet, for this particular walk. And I just talk into that and then pause it when I need to pause.
Expectations of and Tools for Dictation
[00:07:11] Matty: And can you talk a little bit about how you had to, or if you had to change your expectation about the results? So let's say you've gotten back from your walk, you've done the technical cleanup. Inexplicably, the couple of times I've tried dictation, the dictation tools always think I swear a lot more than I really do. I always have to clean up a lot of bad words from the transcript. But once you've done the cleanup and you have the rough draft that's resulting from your dictation, do you see stylistic differences between what you're producing in the first draft with dictation rather than through typing?
[00:07:46] John: No, I don't. I think I would be hard pressed to tell later on looking back something that was dictated once it's cleaned up and something that was written right at the keyboard. Part of that comes from having written a zillion book. And as I'm dictating, I'm saying, well, you certainly are an idiot, he said. New paragraph. What do you mean by that, comma, she replied. All that stuff is already in there and when I put it into the document, it already halfway looks like writing, and then you just have to go in and clean it up. But I really can't tell the difference.
And then of course, it's nowhere near final at that point. There are all kinds of tweaks you do, but it's not unlike the tweaks you do if you just vomited up a draft on paper, using a keyboard.
[00:08:25] Matty: And are there any other audio prompts you have to give to Notes or the tool you're using, like where the commas go, where a new paragraph break is? Are there other things like that you have to tell it?
[00:08:36] John: Well, there's things that I wish I could tell it, but it gets confused by it. I mean, if I really wanted to get precise, I could say, quote, what are you talking about? Close quote, that sort of thing. It just doesn't get that. If I don't say "paragraph" quickly enough, it will think I mean, the word "paragraph." Same thing with "period." I know my wife on her iPhone for years had it set to British format and anytime she tried to just dictate an email, she had to say, "full stop" instead of saying "period," because it would just write out the word "period."
So there's a lot of stuff that in particular, the Apple iPhone, as it exists right now, doesn't know, but it sure knows a whole lot more than when I first looked into doing this years ago with Dragon Dictation. It's a lot better now than it was then.
[00:09:22] Matty: Yeah, I do think about all the companies that smartphones in general are putting out of business. Like, I know my husband, who's a pilot, still has a Garmin in his plane, but I've got to believe that Garmin is focusing on those kind of specialized things, and not that many people have a Garmin in their car anymore.
[00:09:38] John: No, probably not. Probably not.
Matty: It's probably a group of listeners who are going, what?
John: Look it up.
[00:09:43] Matty: Yeah.
Dictation with Fiction and Nonfiction?
[00:09:45] Matty: So you write both fiction and nonfiction. and it sounds like you've been using the dictation so far for fiction. Have you experimented at all with nonfiction?
[00:09:53] John: I have not. I have not. Although I was surprised to read recently, there's a comedian named Dana Gould who has a really good podcast called the Dana Gould Hour, and he also does like a weekly sort of blog post about movies. And he was explaining to someone who said, I could never sit down write a blog post. And he said, I don't write this, I just dictate it. I know the subject well enough that I just dictate it, and then I clean it up, which is what I'm doing with fiction.
I just haven't really tried it on non-fiction because I haven't written anything non-fiction lately. But if it was a subject matter that I knew, I bet it would be very helpful, but it's the same thing as with the fiction. If the tone and the feel and the characters, I think it's going to be a whole lot easier to get launched into dictation than it would be if you're just starting a brand-new novel and a brand-new series.
Stylistic Differences Between Typing and Dictation
[00:10:39] Matty: Yeah. I'm realizing that if we sort of expand on the topic beyond dictation to text-to-speech in general, I'm experimenting with the non-fiction side in the sense that I have automated transcripts generated from my podcast interviews. I then have somebody who helps me clean them up, and then I post them on my website as the transcript.
But I've also started pulling some of that transcript information into drafts of nonfiction books. And it takes a lot of editing, but if you have someone who's talking about something that they're knowledgeable about for a period of time, then you have a lot of really good raw material.
And it will be interesting, the books that I'm working on now, all of which are still in draft, are the first time I've used that idea of pulling transcript information into my draft. And I'm going to be curious to look back and see if the resulting book is stylistically or substantively different than the books that I wrote when I was typing it all out. I have the feeling that there'd be more material because the material is just there, and I have to decide whether to use it or not. It's not like I'm having to create it, which could be good thing or a bad thing.
[00:11:48] John: You know, when I did two different books on low-budget filmmaking that were primarily made up of interviews with filmmakers, talking about issues for low-budget filmmaking, the second one being strictly interviews with screenwriters.
And so in those cases, and this was, 15 years ago, whenever it was the interviews were recorded, I transcribed them myself, and then edited them into interviews in the book. And what I found then is making that transition from, for example, you and I speaking right now, to text that you would want to read in a book. Took a lot of editing, because people, as you can see now, I am shifting the tense of what I'm saying, and I'm not completing sentences. And I ran into really articulate writers who couldn't put together a sentence without shifting halfway through their sentence, into something else. And that's the big difference that I've found, is that taking those interviews that I did years ago and cleaning them up took a long time.
And now that I have a podcast, couple podcasts where I interview people, I will occasionally run into what I call a Roger Corman. Roger Corman, as a producer, made a lot of low-budget movies. And the time I interviewed him and took the transcript, it was letter-perfect. He spoke in complete sentences that were perfect and pristine, and you just had to type what he said, and that was what you got. With the interviews I'm doing now, it's a podcast. People aren't watching the way that they're changing tenses and moving things around. And so when I look at the transcripts, I leave them because that's for the podcast, it should be what they said, but I go, I really wouldn't want to sit down and try to turn this into a book right now.
[00:13:29] Matty: It is interesting, further expanding our topic area, that the use you put content that you're moving from one format to the other. So I'll use, go back to my podcast transcripts again. So we're chatting, pretty soon people will be able to go on the website to the John Gaspard episode and check out the transcript and the person who helps me with my podcast, we were having a conversation about, should he optimize the transcript for captions, or should he optimize it for the transcript?
Because I use Descript and what it generates is used for both. I can put out videos that are captioned and I can also have the transcript, but it's only one set of text, so it's not separate. I suppose it could be, but it's not. And so the way I was talking with Cristi, the guy who helps me with the podcasts, hi, Cristi, is that I'm assuming that optimizing for the captions is easier because let's say, I don't want "hi Cristi" to show up in the transcript. He could edit that out, and the captions would have this blank place where I'm saying, Hi Cristi, or he could edit the audio out, there's that whole complication but I certainly don't want hi Cristi to show up in the transcript.
Consider Repurposing Opportunities
[00:14:41] Matty: And so, I'm just thinking of it in terms of content repurposing, because I'm a huge fan of content repurposing. But I remember back when I was in the corporate world, I worked for an online retailer and for a while, the battle cry was, create once, publish everywhere, cope. And then that got modified because I think there was a realization that you have this content, but reusing it everywhere is not necessarily appropriate.
So if Cristi were optimizing for the transcript, then it would be an easier shift to a book than if he's optimizing as he is for captions. So yeah, I guess I'm just issuing a cautionary note. And actually the reason I thought of that is that I had an episode with Dale Roberts called "Outsourcing Your Content Creation." And I can imagine, I've not tried this, so I'm not recommending it, I'm just speculating that you could take a piece of content like an episode transcript, and then hire someone through a platform like Upwork or Fiverr or Reedsy or whatever, to massage that into something that would be more like a blog post, and then further massage it into something that would be more like an article and more like a book chapter. Yeah, just so many opportunities that are opened up by the whole speech-to-text concept.
[00:15:54] John: And the way I do it is with my phone. Now, when I was at The Self-publishing Show, one of the speakers on a panel who was either from Scotland or Wales, I forget which, the one who goes and sits in his car somewhere for an hour and dictates an entire whatever. He doesn't use speech-to-text, he simply records for an hour, and sends it out and has someone literally transcribe it and then he cleans it up. The way he explained it was, the phone simply cannot understand my accent. It just doesn't get it. And he has a transcriber now who does, and that's a whole 'nother way of doing it, where someone would perhaps clean it up a little bit for you before they send it back or just send back what they heard. But that's another way of doing it that people might want to consider.
When I do the transcripts for my film podcast, I have that done on Fiverr, a person just does that for me, and then I go in and I clean it up because they don't get all the stuff. But I wouldn't consider running it through a text-to-speech program because I just don't think it would get it, because it's so conversational.
AI Transcription is Constantly Improving
[00:16:55] Matty: And I do think that people should always revisit the approach they're using now. So I mentioned that I used Descript for the podcast and I can see that as each month goes by, the transcript it creates is cleaner and cleaner. And I know that although it is currently optimized for an American accent, it's very high on their feature request list to include optimization for other accents.
And so I might know that I'm going to have to spend twice as long or Cristi's going to have to spend twice as long if we're interviewing someone from New Zealand. But in a year, I don't think that's going to be true anymore. So people should always be looking at that kind of tech and saying, am I now employing someone to do something that the machine now does for me? Now we're getting into the scary AI topic.
[00:17:43] John: Yeah. It is a little scary, but I have a narrator who does all my Eli Marks books and he will always do all the Eli Marks books, because he just gets it, and I can't imagine AI getting the jokes in it. On the other hand, one of the filmmaking books, just as an experiment, I went through and did an AI version of that. And because it was an interview book, it has well, maybe 12 different voices in it, so I was constantly switching back and forth on narrators and all that. And it sounds okay for nonfiction, if you're paying four bucks for this audio book, you’re not going to be too upset by it.
But I also did another filmmaking book where I used real voices and hired a dozen different voices, and it's not substantially better because it's nonfiction, there's not a lot that I have put into it. But I think with my fiction, I'll always use a real person.
[00:18:33] Matty: Yeah. I never say always, but I feel confident that my fiction audiobook narrator has nothing to worry about for the next five years or so. Like I think eventually, it's going to be possible to create a perfectly listenable fiction book with AI but not in the near future.
[00:18:50] John: Well, if they do, then I'll let them capture my narrator's voice, Jim Cunningham's voice, and turn that into an AI, and make sure that he gets a royalty split and he doesn't have to come over and sit in my spooky little booth and read all the time. He can just press a button and still get paid.
[00:19:07] Matty: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So now see, we've further expanded into text-to-speech and speech-to-text. See what dictation has led us to?
The Indy Ability to Experiment
[00:19:15] John: Well, you know, for me, dictation is an example of a big fan of The West Wing, and in the first season, there's an episode called "Galileo" in which the president is going to be talking about a space probe. And he keeps saying, we want to talk about larger themes. And dictation does bring out I think, a larger theme for indy writers, because it's an experimentation that I'm doing. And as indy writers, we can do that. I did four books with Eli Marks for a traditional publisher. I've done four without publisher.
And the amount of experimentation I could do with the publisher was, I want to say nil. They either just weren't interested or weren't willing to support what I was trying to do. So I couldn't get information back. You know, particularly in marketing and advertising, if you can't get daily reports of what's happening, you just never know.
Whereas as an indy author, I can experiment. I can try dictating and it doesn't hurt anybody, and it doesn't cost anything. And it's a way to get some new ideas in it. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. I didn't think it would work for me. I don't think it'll work for all books, but it is that idea of, let's experiment and try stuff.
For example, this summer I'm not doing any advertising at all on the books, but I'm just using TikTok and the occasional book funnel promo to see, how does TikTok work, for me and for my books? The short answer right now is, not well. But it's been interesting and it's an experiment I afford to do because I don't make my living from my books, it's my hobby. But it's the sort of thing that I never could have done with a traditional publisher. I could have done it, but I wouldn't have gotten any answers at all as to whether or not it works.
And because we are indy, we're more nimble. You know, back in your corporate days and in my corporate days, companies that were smaller could make things happen bigger than companies that were bigger. And we can do that, we can try something out and you just have to not be afraid of it and just go, let’s try this for a month and see what happens.
[00:21:06] Matty: Yeah, yeah. I want to loop back to a couple of more tactical topics about narration. So you had said that you are using it so far only for fiction. And you had also said that the end result doesn't seem substantively different than when you were typing it out.
Dialog-heavy Books More Fit for Dictation?
[00:21:22] Matty: But I'm wondering about dialogue specifically, are your books specifically heavy in dialogue, and do you think that lends itself more to dictation than if it's less dialogue heavy?
[00:21:33] John: Yes, and yes. I was always surprised at how much dialogue I have in my books. Particularly, I picked up a book by an author who I kind of know, and I wanted to check out her work and got two pages in, and went, I have two pages here and this character's not said anything. And the number of chapters in an Eli Marks book that begin with the dialogue exchange, most of them begin that way. Yeah, particularly in Eli Marks, the stories are driven by the banter or the conflict between whoever two or three people are in that chapter, in that scene. And it is heavily dialogue -driven. I'm not a big descriptive writer, you're not going to know if the sunset looked like a bruise or not in any of the Eli Marks books. Because it's oh, partially, because it's all from Eli Marks's point of view.
[00:22:20] Matty: He's not a sky as a bruise kind of guy?
[00:22:22] John: He's not a sky, he doesn't really describe anything like that, and I've purposefully kept character description to a minimum because I want to make sure that anyone reading this could possibly see themselves in it. So Eli Marks could be black. There's no reason why he couldn't. I do go with gender right now, although I'm doing a screenplay version of the first Eli Marks book, and there are several characters who I'm just giving generic Pat type names so that they can decide later on the gender. It would work either way. But yeah, with Eli Marks, it is mostly dialogue. And so I just walk along the streets here in Minneapolis, talking into my phone, having a conversation between Eli and his Uncle Harry.
[00:23:07] Matty: I also wanted to loop back on your comment about the AI-narrated nonfiction audio book you did. Did you do that through Google Play?
[00:23:17] John: You know, I tried to, and I actually just had a chat with the Google Play woman, because she was at a table at The Self-publishing Show. And I said, I really wanted to do it with you, but you only allowed one voice per book.
[00:23:30] Matty: That's what I was going to ask.
[00:23:31] John: And I needed a dozen voices. And so I went, I forget what service was I bought it for a month. Got all the voices I needed and then edited together. And then the conversation I had with the woman from Google Play was, I'm trying to upload the book to Google and that's really difficult because you have to become a Google publisher, and I'm not getting any traction with that.
[00:23:52] Matty: And she said, I'm so sorry, yes, everyone's having that problem. I promise you, we will have that entirely fixed within six months and you'll be fine. I said, okay fine. So it's nice to talk to an actual person about it. But, yeah, it would've been easier to do it through Google, they just didn't give me all the voices I needed.
The Right Environment for Dictation
Matty: What do you see as your future for dictation? Do you want to use it more and more? Do you feel like you've gotten to the point that you like, where you take it to a certain point and then it's time to switch over to the keyboard? What are your plans there?
[00:24:19] John: Well, I live in Minnesota, so that drives decisions like that.
Matty: You're going to be more productive in the summer, I'm guessing.
[00:24:25] John: I am. And not only will I be more productive in the summer, but I would have an excuse to be less productive in the winter. And I'm a writer. We all don't need a lot of extra excuses not to write. So I have to get to a point where I'm just as comfortable sitting down at the keyboard again, as I am going out for a walk. Walks are important. We need to keep up our health. But there are certain times that I'm not going to be able to do that, and I am going to have to sit down.
And the problem is, whether I'm dictating or not, I get my best ideas while walking. Whether I write them down or not, it doesn't matter. Always. The last Eli Marks book was a book of a dozen short stories, and two of them were already done before I started it. The other 10 were all launched via walks. Only a couple of them had much dictation in them, but over the course of an hour-long walk, I went, oh, that would work, oh, do that. Oh yeah. Okay. Oh, and that's a story. And I could then come home and sit down and write it. Generating ideas, sitting here at the keyboard like this, well it's hard, because you're sitting and watching me. You'd have to stop watching me while I did it. It isn't as easy, and I've just got to get better at doing that.
Matty: Could you walk indoors or is walking outside a key part of the creative process?
[00:25:32] John: I think it's the walking outside. I've tried it being on like a treadmill, And it's just not as effective, although Matty, it's probably just an excuse, really.
[00:25:41] Matty: No, I think that being outside gives you that perfect balance between a certain amount of sensory stimulation, not just staring at the wall in front of your treadmill, but not so much that it's distracting from your effort.
[00:25:51] John: Or that I'm going to get hurt, that I'm going to walk into something.
Applying Dictation in Other Creative Areas
Matty: Are there other areas of your creative life that you might expand your use of dictation to? For example, if you were to work on another film, do you see opportunities for applying dictation there or other creative areas?
[00:26:07] John: I don't see any reason why I wouldn't. I'm always going to be in a situation where, when I'm out in the world, and idea occurs to me, I'm going to use my phone to get it to me somehow. Whether that's doing the first page and a half of a chapter that I'm quickly reading into notes, or just an email that says, Uncle Harry's surprise party. I'll always be doing something like that.
[00:26:31] Matty: Very cool. Well, John, thank you so much. This was so much fun to talk to you again. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and everything you do online. The simplest thing to do is to go to AlbertsBridgeBooks.com. All the books are there. If you just want to focus on Eli Marks, he's at EliMarksMysteries.com. And you can listen to the first two books in the series, Eli Marks, for free on the Eli Marks podcast. And you can listen to some really interesting film interviews on The Occasional Film Podcast.
[00:27:01] Matty: And is AlbertsBridgeBooks.com your publishing imprint?
[00:27:06] John: Yes. I pretend to be a company called Alberts Bridge Books.
[00:27:09] Matty: You are in fact a company called Alberts Bridge Books.
[00:27:11] John: According to the IRS, yes, I am.
[00:27:13] Matty: Great. Well, thank you again John, that was fun.
John: Thanks, Matty.
A question for you ...
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with John! Are you already using dictation and, if yes, how has your experience been similar to or different from John’s? If not, are you tempted? What would you use dictation for: fiction or non-fiction?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
However, I don’t get notifications of comments posted here, which means I may miss some, and my website builder doesn’t enable commenters to respond to a specific comment, which makes it hard to engage in any kind of dialogue. So I’m recommending that you post any comments on YouTube.
