Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams

Summary

The Creative Penn Podcast for Writers

Episode 865 (May 25, 2026):
Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams
Host: Joanna Penn
Guest: Jeff Adams

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Overview

In this forward-thinking episode, Joanna Penn engages accessibility expert and author Jeff Adams to explore how AI is revolutionizing accessibility for indie authors and why these advances matter to everyone—disabled or not. They discuss tangible ways AI tools are reshaping the writing and publishing landscape, lowering barriers that once limited access for both writers and readers, and opening up new creative possibilities. The conversation touches on the shifting meaning of accessibility in the digital era and urges listeners to reconsider their own practices and assumptions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Jeff Adams’ Recent Career Updates

• [20:20-25:32]
  • Jeff and husband Will ended their long-running "Big Gay Fiction Podcast" after nearly 9 years and 470+ episodes to focus on writing.
  • The transition freed time and creative energy, leading to their most successful year as authors in 2025.
  • Shifted marketing focus to email lists and promo services (e.g., Bargain Booksy, Fussy Librarian), finding them more effective than the podcast for book sales.

Memorable Quote:

"We’re not getting as much out of [the podcast] as we might be if we were also writing books, which we also really want to do." – Jeff Adams [22:59]

What Is Accessibility (And Why Should Indie Authors Care)?

• [26:06-30:01]
  • Accessibility means ensuring everyone can interact with and benefit from content, regardless of ability—physically or digitally.
  • For authors, this includes making websites, e-commerce platforms, emails, and social posts usable for all, thus widening potential audience reach.
  • Jeff’s passion for accessibility grew from his day job at Usablenet, where he saw first-hand how digital inaccessibility shuts people out.

Memorable Quote:

"Nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so they don’t miss people." – Jeff Adams [27:56]

The Current State of Accessibility in Publishing

• [28:51-30:01]
  • Awareness of accessibility has improved, but practical adoption still lags.
  • Recent surveys show accessibility errors on top websites have increased, despite legal pressures and awareness campaigns.

How AI Is Transforming Accessibility

• [31:24-39:00]
  • AI tools, such as Anthropic’s Claude Cowork, automate tedious, physically demanding tasks (e.g., updating metadata across book platforms)—reducing strain and opening doors for those with disabilities.
  • AI supports a spectrum of needs: physical (repetitive strain), cognitive (fatigue, neurodivergence), and even temporary limitations (illness, injury).
  • The tools remove barriers not just for disabled authors, but also make creative publishing more manageable for all.

Notable Quote:

"Without that support, I wasn’t more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck… We’ve been taught that struggling is how you know you’re doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong, even when it’s the thing that actually makes the work possible."
– Jeff quoting Hannah Desmond [34:46]

Debunking the Shame of Using AI (Accessibility for All)

• [34:34-39:00]
  • AI use is sometimes stigmatized, but shaming those who need it (or simply benefit from it) is rooted in ableism and privilege.
  • Accessibility also includes financial access: AI services are democratizing previously prohibitively expensive tasks (editing, translation, audiobook narration).
  • Every creator’s needs are unique—blanket anti-AI stances are neither fair nor realistic.

Memorable Exchange:

"I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of ‘I don’t need to use this thing and therefore you should not either…’ There’s some ableism there and some privilege perhaps behind that too."
– Jeff Adams [34:34]

Accessibility Benefits Everyone (Even Temporarily)

• [39:00-41:52]
  • Even able-bodied creators will likely need accessibility accommodations at some point (illness, injury, aging).
  • Joanna shares her experience post-Covid and through menopause, using AI for cognitive support and organization.

Memorable Quote:

"Even if we don’t need these things now, it’s quite likely we’re going to need them at some point—given aging, given the potential for injury and disease. I mean, we don’t escape this alive, do we?"
– Joanna Penn [39:53]

Multimodal AI Tools: Audio, Text, and More

• [41:52-43:44]
  • Tools like 11Labs Reader and NotebookLM allow users to consume content through audio, aiding energy management and accessibility.
  • AI can help create marketing materials, organize research, and automate backlist updates (e.g., alt-text for images, metadata).

Memorable Quote:

"It’s all about the managing of the energy, I think… so many options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business."
– Jeff Adams [42:39]

Amplifying Creative Reach Through AI

• [43:44-47:12]
  • AI empowers authors to tackle previously insurmountable tasks: updating massive backlists, globalizing their reach (translation, accessibility), and sharply expanding marketing without burnout.
  • Jeff shares how Claude is helping him overhaul his websites for SEO, accessibility, and discoverability.

Practical AI Use Cases for Authors

• [44:52-47:12]
  • AI is especially effective for marketing: generating copy, taglines, social posts, and customized promos.
  • Joanna and Jeff both use ChatGPT and Claude for rapid, transformative content tasks (e.g., synopses, blurbs).

Mindset Shifts and Experimentation

• [47:12-51:00]
  • Start by asking AI, "Here’s my situation—how can you help?" and experiment across platforms (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) to find the best fit for your needs.
  • Try routine automation, then steadily increase AI’s role as comfort grows.
  • Be mindful of privacy and security while using plugins/cowork features.

Timestamps:

• [47:12] – Exploring how to begin using AI in your personal workflow
• [48:51] – Security tip: limit AI's access to specific folders

Gaps and Exciting Developments

• [51:00-54:57]
  • Accessibility of digital platforms is evolving (e.g., Amazon’s experiments in personalized digital reading settings using AI, as discussed at CSUN 2026).
  • The future may bring AI-powered, auto-customization for reader comfort (brightness, color, text size) and natural language interaction with e-commerce.
  • Current limitations: AI agents sometimes can’t operate on inaccessible websites or complete file uploads without better APIs.

Voice, Translation, and Global Accessibility

• [56:46-59:06]
  • AI-driven dictation now understands natural speech—removing past awkwardness.
  • Real-time automatic translation is expanding (e.g., X/Twitter translating posts into your language on the fly).
  • Faster, higher-quality translations are rapidly extending the reach of indie books—potentially delivering books to audiences previously shut out by cost barriers.

Memorable Quote:

"If the AI can help do [translations] and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that’s such a win for the reading audience."
– Jeff Adams [58:38]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI-Driven Accessibility:
  "There is a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. And I think that rounds it up."
  – Paraphrased from Hannah Desmond, read by Jeff Adams [35:09]

• On the Role of AI Across the Board:
  "You don’t have to have a disability or accessibility issue in order to use AI… decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you and what you want help with."
  – Joanna Penn [37:06]

• On the Future of Personalized Reading:
  "She sees a world where AI perhaps can do an analysis of your reading behavior and then help you find the optimal settings… almost like when you’re at the optometrist: which lens is better, this one or that one?"
  – Jeff Adams (on Amazon accessibility lead’s vision) [52:16]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [20:20] – Jeff Adams’ career/life update & podcast transition
• [26:06] – Defining accessibility for indie authors
• [30:01] – State of accessibility awareness (and shortcomings)
• [31:24] – How AI practically assists accessibility and saves energy
• [34:34] – The stigma/shame around AI and the importance of nuance
• [39:00] – Temporary/latent disability: we all need help eventually
• [41:52] – AI for audio content, cognitive support, and organizational help
• [43:44] – AI as amplifier: backlist, metadata, site updates, translation
• [45:37] – AI as a marketing assistant
• [47:12] – Mindset shifts for AI adoption
• [51:00] – Future-looking: auto-personalization, conversational commerce
• [56:46] – Voice technologies, dictation, and real-time translation
• [58:38] – AI translation’s global potential
• [59:51] – Optimism and encouragement to experiment with paid AI tools

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Takeaways

• Accessibility is a spectrum that goes beyond disability and is becoming fundamental to modern creative business.
• AI is a tool, not a shortcut; it removes barriers, expands reach, and re-centers creative energy on what matters.
• Everyone benefits from better accessibility—creators and readers alike.
• There’s no one right way to use AI; develop your own policy that fits your values, process, needs, and resources.
• Experiment and adapt: The landscape is changing rapidly, and even small steps into AI can pay exponential dividends in productivity and creative freedom.

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Additional Resources

• Jeff Adams’ accessibility & author resources: jeffadamswrites.com
• Jeff’s substack with more accessibility tips: contentforeveryone.substack.com
• Joanna Penn’s backlist and AI tutorials: thecreativepenn.com

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Next Episode: Joanna interviews Jamie Albright on "Writing Through Grief and Rebooting an Author Business."

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Creative Pen Podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots [e-mail] and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show hello creatives, I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 865 of the podcast and it is Friday 22nd May 2026. As I record this in today's show, I'm talking to Jeff Adams about accessibility. How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors? And why should you care even if you consider yourself able bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative? So Geoff is an accessibility expert and a romance author and we explore how AI is opening doors that were previously closed. Also for context. May 21 so last week as this goes out, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. A day to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion. So that was the sort of context for our conversation. And Geoff also has a new substack, contentforeveryone.substack.com so you can check out more tips there. So that's coming up in the interview section in Writing and Publishing. Well, Spotify continues to innovate with new announcements for audiobooks as part of the Spotify Investor Day. Spotify for Authors is Now available in 10 additional French, Canadian, French, German, Dutch, Latin American, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian and Big they're introducing 11 labs within Spotify for authors to create AI narrated audiobooks. Audiobook Creation tools are a new way for self published authors to create an audio edition of their book directly inside Spotify for Authors. The tools use digital Voice models from ElevenLabs to take a finished manuscript and generate a complete audiobook. Authors will be able to produce up to five English language audiobooks for free and will have the ability to review the narration and address things like pronunciation before their title goes live. This is launching as a closed beta with a small group of self published authors to gather feedback, so presumably that will roll out over the coming months to everyone else. Also, a new way to discover audiobooks. Spotify will give eligible premium listeners a more conversational way to find what they want to read next and engage with their existing books. Instead of searching for a specific title or browsing by genre, premium listeners can describe what they're looking for and Spotify will surface recommendations tailored to them for authors. This expands how your book gets found. It opens up discovery to the full texture of a title, the tone, the setting, the emotional arc, and the kinds of readers it's likely to resonate with. A listener who might never have otherwise found your book can now discover it through a conversation about the kind of story they're in the mood for now. This is really why I moved to Spotify about a decade ago. Like I think it was 2014 when I moved over from Apple, or maybe 2016. The years fly by. I moved from listening on Apple to listening in Spotify because the discoverability algorithms were much better for music and then for podcasts. And I could see that this would come for audio. It's taking a lot longer than I thought, perhaps, but and I have said this for years about ebooks as well, you've probably heard me say this before regular listens to the show. But why, when these places have the whole book? So Amazon being the obvious one, but every other store as well, when they have the whole book? Why do I have to choose keywords and categories? It should be so much more granular than that. And this is how it starts. So I am so excited about this writing. Cross genre becomes far easier for Discoverability when we don't have to use the genre silos. So you can find more [e-mail] and on their blog about Investor day. So yes, lots coming there. But the move to introduce ElevenLabs narration within Spotify for authors I think is pretty major and matches the KDP's audible virtual voice, which we can do most of us can do on the KDP dashboard now in terms of ease of creation, but with better narration quality, as Elevenlabs really is top of the pack in terms of good quality audiobook narration. So expect many more audiobooks with a lot of very good voices. But remember, if this concerns you in terms of the amount of volume of audiobooks there's going to be out there. Remember, those of us who do this for a living don't rely on one stream of income. And of course last week I talked about the changes to the ACX royalties as well. So things are changing as ever in audiobooks. But selling audiobooks direct, for example, is a great way to retain a higher percentage of audiobook revenue. Those of you who bought Bones of the Deep from my Kickstarter have got the audiobook now. And of course you can buy my audiobooks from me in bundles as well as individually creativepennbooks.com for nonfiction and jfpenbooks.com for fiction and memoir and over on the Indie Author podcast with Mattie Dalrymple, a Very Different Kind of Business focused episodes on the economics of con life with Tod Farnestock. Now, personally, I hate the word con as a shortened version of convention, as there are so many scams and cons in the author world. But in this context it is about conventions and selling books and book marketing in person, which of course requires travel, holding physical books and transporting them as inventory, staying in hotels, eating away from home, the costs of things like booth hire, banners, giveaways, and more. So Todd actually goes into detail on these numbers and the practicalities of what it's like to sell books at conventions. Some of the interesting things he notes, you need to have really at least five books to make it worthwhile. Some people buy all the books at one time and that's not five books in total, that's five different titles that you then have multiple books of because some people buy all five and that kind of customer is what makes it worthwhile. Now this is a really interesting interview. If you are considering selling in person at physical events. Very good thing to listen to, take notes and figure out whether it's worth it for you. However, I do want to add that it doesn't seem like Todd values his own time, the numbers and I actually talked to another author recently about this, about the value of an hour of our time or a day, or if you do these things regularly, do you cost your own time in travel? Do you take into consideration doing everything yourself and whether it's worthwhile? So let's say you make $1,000 profit from an event weekend. How much would that profit be if you paid yourself even the minimum wage? And should you pay yourself more than a minimum wa. I want us all to start valuing our time more since we have so little of it in this lifetime. And of course, if you love doing these in person events, it might absolutely be worth doing for you. And Todd mentions that he gets lots of email signups as well as sales and gets to practice various angles on his book pictures. So definitely don't write off conventions and don't write them off if you do one or two that didn't work, but you still enjoy it. He says most of the authors who succeed are the ones that keep showing up, refining their pitch, investing in infrastructure that compounds over time. But also, I would say if you hate it, don't do it. Try it once. I think we should. No, you shouldn't try everything once. That is definitely not necessary. But try these things once and if you leave with energy, then do it again. If you leave completely broken with a splitting headache, just desperate to be in the quiet and the dark, which is how I feel after these things, then you can realize that it's not for you. And I used to think this was my introversion, but I've now met since I've met lots of introvert authors who love these kind of in person events. So maybe it's just because I'm also highly sensitive to light and noise and too much visual stimulation and in those book fair environments I just get overstimulated and I often can't sleep. Even though I feel broken, I can't sleep because I'm vibrating at this high level. And so personally it is not my thing, as I have said before, but it's. I keep talking about it, don't I? Because I feel like it is definitely for some people and some people love it. And maybe you don't know until you try it. Like I didn't know I liked podcasting until I tried it. Yeah. And I did try doing video as you know, a while back and decided that's not for me either. But certainly different things work for different people. So go and have a listen to that on the Indie Author podcast and that's Indy. Also on business things, you can listen to me and Orla Ross on the Self Publishing with Ally podcast talking about friction in your business, the types of friction your customer might feel, the friction you feel, and when friction needs fixing and when you should lean into it. And friction here is the stuff that stops people taking action. So reader friction might include which book to start on if you have a big backlist. And I know I run into this or confusion over how to listen to an audiobook if people buy direct, or how to use Kickstarter if you've never bought there before. And you can reduce those things by education and making it clear on what books people might like or how they can use various things. In terms of author friction, a really big one is tech overload and information overload. So there are so many options, there's so much to do and sometimes we just feel like, oh well, I just can't do anything. Or you try and do everything and it just doesn't work. So one of the ways to really deal with this is to make a choice and go all in, as I guess I just said about the conventions and selling in person, I don't do that. So it's just off the table entirely. And Orna talks about in that episode or is going all in on Substack. That's the way she is going. I'm not going anywhere near Substack, but I'm pretty much all in on this podcast, for example, and all in on email marketing. And you can decide what you want to go all in on and also what you won't do again for me, TikTok video in general, in person, convention sales, that kind of thing. So these are the decisions that can help you reduce your author friction. And then we also talk about friction as differentiation and when sometimes it's good having friction. So it is much harder to publish on Kickstarter than on Amazon as an author. But there are, I presume, very few AIs publishing on Kickstarter because the friction is so much higher. So you can bet that I reckon probably 100% of creators on Kickstarter are real humans doing slow creation. And as a reader, there is, yes, friction to buy from Kickstarter, but you can get cool things like signed limited editions and ribbons and foiling and extra stuff. So the friction is the value. And a bit like in person events, there's a lot of friction with traveling to conventions or author conferences, that kind of thing. But any kind of friction like this makes things more precious. So the same reason I want to do all the research for my own books, I try travel to Paris to visit Notre Dame again. I have been to Notre Dame several times, but I wanted to go back with a different view. And obviously there's a lot of friction in having to physically go somewhere that you can also look at on the Internet. But to me, that's part of what makes this job worth doing, is that I enjoy traveling and doing my research in person. And also, this is still human me. This is my human voice. Now, you might notice I'm also a bit bunged up. We're having a heat wave and it's very pollen y today. And if this was my AI voice clone, the quality of my voice would be better. But this is human me. Also, although I obviously do use my AI voice clone for some things, I will still narrate some of my own audiobooks and I still do human interviews. So coming up is me, human me and human Jeff. Now, all of this takes longer and more effort, more friction, but it's part of the point and I hope in an age where you can absolutely get an AI generated podcast directly for exactly what you want to hear, you will hopefully still listen to me when you might not want to hear everything I tell you, but it is still human me. And you know I'm an AI positive person, but I think it's really important to consider what things we fix in terms of friction and what things we keep. So yeah, lots more on that. Orna and I discussing everything to do with that on the Self publishing with Ally podcast links in the show notes there's also a transcript and in personal news, it is fulfillment time for Books of the Deep Kickstarter. If you bought the ebook or the audiobook or any digital bundles, you should now have them. I have emailed them out so log on to Kickstarter and you will get those links to download. And I have put the print order in for everyone whose address I have got for the paperbacks and the large print and the bundle editions and if you ordered the signed copy I'm going up to Book Vault next week. There are a couple of people who have not done their surveys, so please do your surveys if you back any Kickstarter to make sure your address and everything is there. And if you don't have what you ordered digitally you can email me joannathecreativepenn.com and we will sort it out. I've also been working hard this week on my advanced AI webinar, which as this goes out will be finished. I've never taught this stuff before and really it's very new and hopefully will help authors redesign their business processes with agentic AI. Now, as part of the prep for the webinar I discovered so I went and wrote down every single site I log into as an author and it was 5353 different websites and apps for my author business. And that was just off the top of my head. So I'm pretty sure I missed a few. But and that's not even life stuff. That's not even like the council tax for what I pay here or hmrc. It's obviously tax season. HMRC is like the IRS in America. There's loads of things we log into for daily life, but 53 different websites and apps for my author business and it is now a bit of a dream. I'm starting to do it. It's a bit of a dream to hand over everything to my Claude agent and that's what we started on in the webinar. But yeah, my plan will be to do more webinars in the autumn, by which time things will have moved on again. Fun times exploring in the meantime. But I do think we are moving towards what I consider the dream of my author business, which is the stuff I love, love love, which is the research and the writing and I do actually really enjoy editing and I enjoy producing beautiful books. Happy as Larry to outsource the marketing, the admin, all of that kind of stuff. So yeah, more on that to come. Now I am focused. So I've got two things now that I'm focusing on next My dissertation for the masters in death, Religion and culture. It's only 15,000 words, so obviously academic writing is incredibly dense because you need to reference pretty much every single line. So 15,000 words takes a lot longer than 15,000 words of fiction, for example. But I also have a creative project working title Reborn, which I will talk about later on once that settles. I am so glad to be back in the creative phase. So I don't have any emails or comments or photos this week, so put me back on your list. Please leave a comment on the show [e-mail] or on the YouTube channel. Email me. Send me pictures of where you're listening or your sun or your weather or whatever, or your favorite cemetery or churchyard or place of worship. Joannathecreativepenn.com I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. You can tell I'm a little sun happy myself. We did just go out and have a walk and had an ice cream. And this is another thing about living in England is as soon as it's sunny you have to go and have an ice cream. You have to make the most of it before it all stops and then it rains again. Anyway, today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital who I use to publish ebooks wide to Apple, Nook Library Services and more. And you can use them for ebooks for most other services too. They also do payment splitting for co written books which I have used and they have great human customer service if you need more help than some of the other services provide. And in fact I just had a comment from a listener that relates to this. That's why I've put it in this section afifeenatedfiction or on YouTube says I've just published my first short story with Draft 2 Digital. After listening to your podcast for one and a half years I took the plunge and just wanted to confirm that you're right. Draft 2 digital is incredibly easy to use and their support is great. I thought that was a great comment and supports Draft2Digital being one of the podcast sponsors. As you know I only take sponsorship from companies that I use myself and I think are fantastic. Draft 2 digital also do print and with Drafts 2 digital print you can convert an an ebook to a print on demand file with just a few clicks, turn an ebook cover image into a full wraparound print cover. In seconds. Choose from dozens of beautiful interior layouts for that professional look. Choose from a variety of industry standard trim sizes and formatting options. You can also distribute your print on demand files worldwide. You can use free change tokens every 90 days to make changes and many more benefits. So check it out for ebooks and [e-mail] that's draft number two digital.com so this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my [e-mail] thecreativepenn thanks to the nine new patrons who've joined this week and to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all my backlist videos and audio on writing, craft, author, business and AI tutorials. The Patreon oh, and I should say discounts on my webinars. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePenn Right, let's get into the interview. Jeff Adams is the author of YA Thrillers and Gay Romance and the co author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. So welcome back to the show, Geoff.

[B]

Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back.

[A]

It is. And you were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now. So give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment.

[B]

Sure. So I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband and I, my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended up and ended Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024 after 470something episodes, it was basically time to do that. And so we both focused on writing from that point. And in 2025 we had some of our biggest successes and in getting writing out into the world like I refound, my difficulty in writing kind of went away. Finally we talked a little bit about that, I think back in 2023 too, and will started a new pen name and started producing again. And it was really good to be able to move in that direction.

[A]

Wait, was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time?

[B]

You know, I wish I could have capitalized more on heated rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I get to ride that wave a little bit there too.

[A]

Yeah. And if people don't know about that, that's a super, super popular Netflix series. Was that based on a book as well?

[B]

It was, yeah. Rachel Reed was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and then made into that, I guess, what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. Although I particularly like Red, White and Royal Blue. That was. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey, but anyway. But I just wanted to ask you about the big gay fiction podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You met people. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people and you ended it. And I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it that went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about how do you know when it's time to end something, a good thing rather than something bad? And does that make more space for writing? Essentially?

[B]

It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us. In particular for me, because I have a day job, so I balance everything on the creative side with the day job and will. And I'd been talking about it for over a year and it just was like, it's really time. After it was nine years getting to that 470 mark, and we thought about trying to get to 10, and we thought about if not 10, then getting to 500, but ended on a milestone. But it really, as we kind of looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun and we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do. And it became a time thing. And what was the best use of the time and absolutely miss it occasionally, the whole heated rivalry thing. I would love to have episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, one of the things though, with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. And like this show is a marketing angle mainly for my non fiction. So what did you replace that with in terms of book marketing stuff?

[B]

It was really stepped up email marketing. I mean, I had always had a list will Started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. And so it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with like a bargain booksy and a fussy librarian and a bookbub occasionally to kind of do that work. Because, to be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that should, you know, if you like what we're talking about, you should look at our books. There was never as much of a connection there as you'd kind of want there to be. And so from even that book marketing angle, it's like these other things that we can do. It's also a better spend of the money to get those types of book bargain booksy and stuff than it was to continue running the show.

[A]

Yeah, that is interesting, isn't it? I mean, I've been obviously, I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put books and travel on a hiatus, and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I kind of want to bring it back again because I love doing it. So do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do it again? Because you also quite into all the. The technical stuff and all that kind of thing.

[B]

It's possible. Like, I've toyed with the idea of, like, doing a short accessibility podcast, you know, geared towards creatives kind of tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does. But then I come back and look at the time. It's like, is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a substack, Which I also toy with the idea of for accessibility stuff? So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet.

[A]

Yeah. And I think that waiting is really good. And as you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again. And I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show, and I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally, it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic. Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition. What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care?

[B]

So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world, whether it's on the. In the online world, that everybody has access to it, has access to the information, has access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately or whatever that is, that the accessibility of the thing is high so that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is. And if we put that into like the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or if maybe reading it through a braille monitor, whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen, check out on Amazon, check out at their favorite e commerce place, be able to get the products into their cart, check out, et cetera. And for creatives, it's about the things that we do, the websites that we build for ourselves, the e commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts that we're making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn hopefully buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan. This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this, like I think most people don't, until I started working at Usablenet back. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this fall and really starting to see the impacts because Usablenet is all about accessibility on the digital front. And so I really started to learn being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. And it just really became something I got passionate about and ended up and wrote the book. Because I realized that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so they don't miss people. And so it's really become. I never expected my day job to interact with my creative side so much, but this certainly has over the last few years.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, has it got better? Like you said, you were on here three years ago. We did talk about some of the things around Hub formats and taking off DRM and what we need to do on our websites, labeling images, for example, and that kind of thing. Do you think it has got better?

[B]

I think the awareness of it has improved both within the creative community and in the broader web ecosphere, that the awareness is better, the ability to create something that is accessible, because there's so much knowledge that kind of needs to go into it sometimes there's so much that you have to think about, you know, these colors and these alt tags on these images and all the little bits and pieces that if it doesn't really become muscle memory, it's easy for it to fall off again. There's a survey that's done by WebAIM every year about the top 1 million homepages out in the universe. And they surveyed those for just the things that an automated scan can detect, which is a small portion of overall accessibility. And the number of errors across that top million actually ticked up this year. Even though there's all these laws around the world, people get sued all the time in the U.S. the number of errors ticked up for the first time in a few years. So, again, I think the awareness is up, but I think being able to take action on it and make the time to take action on it isn't where it needs to be.

[A]

Yeah, so last time you gave us all those tips. So I'll refer people back to that and also to your book Content for Everyone, which has got loads of great stuff in. But I wanted to talk to you for this show because I was sitting watching Claude Cowork, and now I use Claude code a lot more. But updating 140 titles on IngramSpark, where me clicking things and there's like 15 clicks per record on IngramSpark updates for pricing, is absolute nightmare. And I was watching the AI do the work, and I realized this isn't just saving me time, it's actually saving my wrist and my arm from repetitive strain injury. And that's when I thought about this accessibility thing, because, as you mentioned, for example, physically accessible into, say, a building, say someone's in a wheelchair, they can't necessarily get into a building if there's no ramp. And I was thinking that for many years, being an indie author, being a writer online, there's also been these physical barriers, because you do have to. There's a lot of plumbing clicking for a start. So I wondered, sort of starting with an attitude around a shift in who this is opening up to. How is AI, do you think, starting to help people with these accessibility issues?

[B]

Yeah, there's so much opportunity around this. We should note, just to timestamp this, that we're talking on April 14th of 2026, because who knows what will change, like, even in an hour from now. But I think Cowork was one of the first things that we saw and that's only been out since like the very top of this year in being able to do actual agentic tasks. Other things have kind of sort of gotten there, but Cowork really opened it up. And you mentioned the repetitive stress that you would have had clicking all of those forms on Ingramspark across 140 books. But there's that type of stress, chronic pain, cognitive drain for somebody who may have some cognitive disability and trying to work through that form form and just that cognitive energy that just might drain out and maybe knock them out for several days after trying to get through that. Or the tasks take them multiple days to do, you know, someone who has lower vision, someone who's trying to work through that form with a screen reader. All of that draws energy, draws focus. And now we've got something where with plain language we could say something like, here's all my pricing information. I've logged into IngramSpark, go update these books. Obviously the prompt's going to be a little more than that, but in broad terms, that's what we're going to tell it and being able to have it go through and do the thing and if it gets stuck, have it come back and say, hey, I've got trouble with this, please help me. Can just free up so much of the drains that people can have that can take them out of doing the part of the work that they need to do for an author business, which is go right the book, you know, through whatever process you're going to use to do that, rather than getting caught up in something like having to update all those books on ingramspark.

[A]

Yeah, and you mentioned write the book there. And I have this real sense of being an able bodied indie author in terms of my computer use and my ability to write a whole book now like a 70,000 word thriller that I write regularly. I, I mean, we're all special in some way, but I do have a reasonably normal brain where I can do this work without too much strain. You know, it's hard work, but I can do it. And yet I meet people who are now saying using AI to help me write, to help me organize my work. Maybe someone has dyslexia or ADHD or cognitive issues or pain or there's just so many things that I take for granted that don't affect me. And I hear from people who at this point in time in the community are almost shamed for using AI to write. So I wanted to bring this up, to discuss it under the terms of accessibility. I guess so. Do you have any thoughts on that?

[B]

I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of I don't need to use this thing and therefore you should not either, which is adjacent to any anti AI speak that there is out there. And certainly we're living right now at probably the highest point that it's ever been where more and more there's a sentiment towards not using AI for whatever the reason is, and I totally respect that. People can have concerns about the environment and about energy use and water use, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, not to mention all the other things that might, that are on the. The more difficult side of AI. But to shame someone who may not be able to put their story out there without the use of that, of that AI, whichever one they're using, or to shame them because they're using AI to run part of their business, you know, updating IngramSpark, doing other things like that. I think it can come down to there's some ableism there and some privilege perhaps behind that too, where they're just like, I don't need this and you shouldn't have it either. And I want to give people just a sliver of an idea what this can mean for someone who is disabled and what AI can unlock for them. There is a person on LinkedIn that I follow whose name is Hannah Desmond. She's an ADHD coach and a former software developer. And very recently she posted this on LinkedIn and this is a paraphrase of what she said. But. But having something that can meet you where you are and help you bridge that gap is what I think I have found so helpful about using AI. And here's what I keep coming back to. Without that support, I wasn't more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck. That's a bit that. That's the bit that gets lost. We've been taught that struggling is how you know you're doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong, even when it's the thing that actually makes the work possible. Because there's a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. And I think that rounds it up. She's talking about her time as a software developer, but you can apply that to any realm of the AI. When we're thinking about trying to shame someone for why they may be using it and we may not know that they have a disability because some of them, we don't always share that part of ourselves. I really feel strongly about that and how we are in this culture of shame.

[A]

Yeah, it drives me up the wall, actually. And. But I will also say you don't have to. You don't have to have a disability or accessibility issues in order to use AI in whatever way you personally have decided is okay. Talking to the listeners now. I think Orna Ross from the alliance of Independent Authors says it well, which is you should have your own AI policy. So you personally decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you and what you want help with. And I was also thinking in terms of accessibility around money. So again, for many of us, professional cover design, professional editing, professional human level translation, these are things that are pretty pricey for many people. And so again, this makes it more accessible. And one of the reasons we got into the indie way and being indie authors was to try and remove the barriers to entry to people who have been excluded from the environment of publishing. So, yeah, it is really hard to talk about this. And yet that's why I wanted to talk about it because there's so many variables for each individual and there's no situation that's the same really. Is it?

[B]

No, not at all. You know, the things that I may need to do my work in the most efficient way possible is different from the way that you're going to work, is different than the way my husband's going to work is different than every other person and the way that they're going to work. Which is why any kind of blanket statement about I don't need something and therefore you shouldn't need it either can just be so problematic because we have no idea what someone else is going through. Either it's a permanent part of their lives or maybe it's something that is happening temporarily with them where they might need to leverage other tools.

[A]

Yeah, talking about that temporary. I think I really got the first sense of this when I had Covid the first time, which was really bad. And I remember I was so sick the only thing I could do was listen to an audiobook I couldn't think, I couldn't read. And it was really probably months of not having my brain back. And then the other thing that's happened as I age, as women age, as menopause kicks in, and the brain fog is a real thing. And so I've heard from other people too who've said having Claude or whoever to help an AI tool to help with the brain fog is so important because Otherwise I just wouldn't be able to gather my thoughts. And again, as you said, even if we don't need these things now, it's quite likely we're going to need them at some point given aging, given the potential for injury and disease. I mean, we don't escape this alive, do we?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, that's a great point because unless we're extremely lucky as individuals, we're all likely to have some sort of a disability in our lives at some point. I know for me, as I age and my eyes get more and more tired, that after being in front of a screen all day for work and then whatever creative stuff I do in the afternoon on a book when it comes near bedtime and I do want to read, I probably want to do that with an audiobook, a much more audio, especially for any long reading project. And that can also be like if I have a long document or a long article to read, I am likely to give it to 11 reader, let it load itself up and then listen to it it because I take the information in better than trying to follow words across a screen to take something like that in.

[A]

Yeah. Jonathan, my husband now also listens to a lot of academic papers on 11 reader. Most of us will know it as where we publish some audiobooks from 11 labs or you can also publish other things there. So it is super useful to think what we can do with with 11 reader. And another thing that I found really useful recently is NotebookLM. So on NotebookLM, which is is there is a free tier, you can put various things in there and then create a custom audio. So this is something I've been doing as part of research is you can put in say 10 YouTube videos or some PDFs or your book or whatever and then you can create a custom audio. And then I'll go for a walk and I'll listen to the custom audio and then I'll go back and look at the detail of what it was. But it gives me the framework of whatever I'm thinking about on a broader level and then I can come back to the details. So again, it's this multimodal approach that can help us manage our energy, I guess.

[B]

And it's all about the managing I think of the energy too is a great way to think about the accessibility of it all. Because you mentioned a great use for 11 or not 11 reader. You mentioned a great use there for a notebook LM. But that could also be putting your book in there and helping it have you and having it help you Build a world bible or something like that, or building marketing materials off of that. Because there's a lot of things now that NotebookLM can do in terms of like helping you create FAQs, maybe for a newsletter or for your website and building video stuff off of the material that it has. So there's a lot of options there and ever growing options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business.

[A]

Yeah, and in fact talking about Claude, there's a lot of Claude plugins now and skills and Shopify just released a Claude plugin and many of us now have Shopify stores and I have a lot of products with a lot of different variations. And the metadata, there's so much metadata and again I'm just so pleased now that I can work with Cowork and get it to actually update directly into Shopify. And in fact coming back, you mentioned updating alt tags earlier. That's something again that AI could help you update the backlist of your alt tags on a website or I've now got my co work doing epub so I could finally update all my epubs with back matter and all of this kind of thing. So I feel like perhaps we could go beyond accessibility to talk about amplification. Like all the things that we didn't do because it was too tiring and we just couldn't be bothered or it would just be way too much work that now it's kind of opened up as a possibility because of these tools.

[B]

Absolutely. I mean you look at a backlist as large as yours and the things that you're now able to do. I didn't know that Claude had a Shopify plugin. So the abilities that we have now to maybe do things in the business that we hadn't before. One of the things I've been working with Claude on is rewriting my website and creating a more proper website for Will and really making sure that it is not only SEO prepared but also GEO prepared with all the metadata and all the, the back end code schema that it needs so that LLMs can find me, can understand what I do, can understand the books branch out to the other areas that it needs to. And doing that through WordPress would have been so much more difficult even with Claude that to be able to rewrite the site in a way that is going to let me manage it better so that I will do it on a more consistent basis. Whatever that thing is. We're now able to do these things. Things you Know that could be updating keywords in Amazon or making sure we're aligned across all of the sales platforms that we might be on and things like that that Claude can do and do. Well.

[A]

Yeah, I think marketing is just, it's the killer app really for people, isn't it? I think most authors do not enjoy marketing and I, I actually find ChatGPT is, I find Claude better for creative work, for strategic work, for doing work through cowork or code. But chatgpt with copy is very, very good. So I, I've actually been using that as we record this. I've got a Kickstarter launching next week, so I, I've been getting it to do ad copy and social media copy and all that kind of thing. And it, this is stuff when you have to produce. Give me 20 taglines, give me 20 hooks, give me another 20 and another 20. I mean we just cannot do it as humans. Right?

[B]

Yeah. I have found GPT wildly helpful. I mentioned trying to get bargain books and fussy librarian promos and you have to give it the marketing hook and it can't just be the blurb that's on Amazon. It's got to be something fresh and they each have slightly different requirements and having GPT. Here's the blurb. Give me a dozen different options that then I may take pieces of all of them and create one of my own. But it reworks that much faster than my brain was ever going to try to find the right thing. I want to give to Bargain Books Galaxy.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, you're right. And. Or it says Write this in 300 characters or less.

[B]

Yes,

[A]

I do exactly the same. And that kind of transformative work can be really good. In fact, there was somebody I know who has been rampantly anti AI for years and then said, would this help me? I have to do a synopsis for an agent. So I've got this 100,000 word book and it needs to be a 10 page synopsis. How would I do that with AI? And so I was encouraging her to take each chapter and ask it to summarize the chapter and of course read through it and everything. But I mean, doing a synopsis, once you've actually written a book, I mean that can be super useful. And so I think, I guess what we're saying is there's levels of need in terms of both the author and also the audience and then there's levels of your personal use from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of how far you want to go in every areas of the business. And in that way, it is just different for everyone.

[B]

One.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think getting to the mindset shift that we were talking about a little bit, it can be so easy to kind of dip your toes in. I mean, that one author came to you and said, do you think it could do this? And I think that's the beginning exploratory area for perhaps anyone. People are going to hear us talk about this and it might inspire them to go try something that we've talked about. But these things, whether it's Claude or GPT or Gemini or whichever one it is, you can come to it and say, I'm an author, I have XYZ going on in my life. Whether that's a disability, whether that's a time constraint because you have a day job and maybe you have kids and a family that need your attention. I have these time constraints. I want to do X, Y and Z in my business. How can you help me with that? And it's going to tell you what it can do to help you with that. And I would even say if you've got that, if you have the ability to have multiples of these, you could ask the same question to GPT and Claude and they're going to give you similar answers in some instances, but they may also have different ones because of the abilities that the different platforms have around these things as well. And that can help you make that mindset shift of, well, now I see that it can do that. Could it also do this and then ask it if it could do that? Because I know for me, Joe, I've taken so much from you and your journey with Cowork that's like, oh, she did that. I wonder if I could do this. And all of that kind of piles on top of itself. And then eventually I think your brain starts to think on its own, oh, I have to do this task. Can Claude maybe do this for me? Let's go find out.

[A]

Yeah. And if it couldn't do it for you yesterday, you never know, it might be able to do it tomorrow.

[B]

Right. Because, like, I have it tested yet, its new ability to actually use your computer. And I'm curious what that might open up, because one of the things that I've seen that I wish it would do is be able to take the epub that's on my drive and actually put it into a platform I'm trying to upload to. And it hasn't just Cowork on its own, hasn't been able to cross that barrier. But I Wonder if with computer use added to that, if it could. Here's the ePub, upload that over there. Be able to pick it from the file picker, essentially.

[A]

Yeah, I think. Well, a little tip for everyone. I wouldn't give access to your entire file system to the.

[B]

That's a good point too. Use what you're comfortable with.

[A]

Yeah. And definitely. Well, I have a Claude folder in my drive and it only has access there, so if you put files in that drive, it might be able to do that. But I know what you mean. I have been using it to say help me publish things in German on kdp. Now it can use the browser, so you can actually do that, but in terms of uploading the actual file. I know what you mean, but these things will change. And as. As we record this again, middle of April, we are almost about to get the next models being Mythos, which might be 4.7 opus or also chatgpt has a new model coming and these models are getting very powerful. With every shift they can do more things. So as you say, the very first thing to do is kind of ask it. I want to do this. What are my options? Some of them, like for example, doing a AI narrated audiobook. ChatGPT and Claude don't do that. You want 11 labs or one of the other things like that, but they can tell you what your options are. So that's one thing. But I wondered if you have any thoughts on the gaps that you're seeing. I guess you mentioned one there around file uploads, but what do you hope might come and. Or some of the things that might be exciting if. If they arrive? Because you never know, they might be here already.

[B]

There's certainly some movement in some areas. And I think one of the things I'll share is in March, I was at the 2026 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference. And CSUN is California State University Northridge, and they've run this conference for some 40 years now. And one of the sessions I went to was from Tara Maisel, I hope I pronounced her last name right. She's a senior project manager in books accessibility at Amazon on and she was doing a session specifically on readability. And she had all kinds of statistics and information about what goes into making something readable. And one of the things she talked about with AI was the future of personalized reading. And if you think about the Kindle app, for example, there's a lot of settings you can make there on the font size, colors, brightness, text spacing. There's a lot of tools in there. And she was pointing out that potentially readers don't even know what they actually need for the optimized visual reading experience. And she sees a world where AI perhaps can do an analysis of your reading behavior and then help you find the optimal settings, even multiple optimal settings for, like if you were reading in. In a room that had daylight versus at bedtime and the ways you might shift it. I was almost thinking of this, like when you're at the optometrist and they're like, which lens is better, this one or that one?

[A]

Sometimes it's very hard.

[B]

Yes, it is. That AI could kind of step you through that a little bit to help you find that optimal reading in that moment. And then they even notice potentially, if you're changing something in the way that you're moving through a page that it might flag to say, hey, do we need to adjust something? And some other areas that I think are really exciting for everyone and perhaps particularly for people who are disabled and needing the support of some assistive technology, is what we're seeing in the browsers. OpenAI's Atlas has been out for quite a while now, since sometime, I think, fall of last year. Perplexity's Comet has been around even longer. And then we've got browser extensions from Gemini and Claude that are available that can let you just type natural language. Please go find for me jeans in this size that are on sale on this website. Find me the best price for blue jeans on this site in this size and it'll just go do it. Which can certainly speed things up for people in the disabled community to find things quickly, to spend time navigating less and maybe ending up with the AI coming back and say, I found these five things. Which one would you like me to buy for you? Or I found this one thing that you do need and it's one waiting for you in your shopping cart. The ability for that, I think on the horizon is an amazing jump from an accessibility point of view. But really it's one of those things that accessibility will then help everyone, because we can all just shop that way if we choose to. These are early days for these browsers and these extensions. And the other side of it comes back to a little bit of basic web accessibility too, because I've seen these type of activities not work so well on a site that may not actually be accessible on its own own. A great example is that something I ran into with Claude Cowork about a month ago. I was testing to see if it could help me navigate and get things uploaded together for a site where I wanted to upload books, knowing again that it's not going to upload the actual file, but it could fill in the metadata from my master database of metadata stuff. But there were areas on the site that it actually couldn't hit the button because the site itself was also not functional to a screen reader. So there's gaps there and it's early days, but I really see that as an interesting future that'll really help people with disabilities, but again, kind of help everybody to just manage time better.

[A]

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean there. I've done some sort of collaborative work with Claude code when it's like I can't click the button and I'm like, well, I'll click the button, you fill in everything else.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And it's actually quite a funny situation. But goodness, like coming back to Ingramspark, again, these things need APIs, we need. Need better functions. And it's funny because that's. I think a lot of traditional publishers have these APIs or backend upload things that you can do. And I'm like, well, we need to get to that with these systems. But I think things will change. Another thing that I think is also shifted is the use of voice. So voice for dictation. And it used to be with dictation that you would have to say, comma, open quote, you'd have to. And new line and all of that and you'd also have to make sense and. Whereas now I feel like you can just dictate a whole load of things to these AIs and then say tidy that up and they will do a lot more than the old situation. So I think voice will also help and also automatic translation. I don't know if you know this about X and if you're on X anymore, but just this week they've made it multi language. So, as in, I can read tweets by people who've posted in another language in English, so I can read something from Korean or read something that someone French has posted and it gets translated. And it has made a huge difference to the content I'm seeing, which is fascinating because I don't think we've ever had this kind of automatic everything is translated into your language situation. And it's really got me thinking about how that might work for ebooks or other things if the rights are there. I don't know. Have you seen stuff like that?

[B]

Yeah, there's so much available now with voice and the ability to not have to speak all the other stuff that went with it, comma, full stop. Next line. It was like that was a little mind bending sometimes trying to think about quote marks and all that stuff. And now it's so good. Different platforms do it to different degrees of ability and even being able to speak your prompts into the very platforms themselves without having to type all of it, that can be for some chronic pain comes to mind. Any kind of mobility thing, all the typing would be a drain or maybe even impossible. So the voice ability is so powerful there and unlocks more things. And at the same time those translation abilities, like I believe AirPods now have the ability if you've got the right stuff on your phone that you could be talking to somebody, they may speak back to you in a language you don't speak, but your AirPods will give it to you in that language. You know, Google has I believe a live. A live captioning app that you can use. So or. And I think there's even a split screen, I don't know if that's available now or something in their future where like you could put the phone on the table and it tell it who's looking at what side of the screen and it'll put the language that I need on my side and the language the other person needs on the other side. So there continues to be such a shift in how we're being able to translate stuff that really opens up communication and can open up our books to so many more people. I'm very interested to see I haven't pulled the trigger on this yet, but how Amazon's auto translation rolls out and how that's received in terms of the accessibility around our books and being able to put it in someone's hands who doesn't speak. I think it's only English to other things right now, but, you know, not doesn't speak the way in the language it was written, but wants to read that book. And we could never as indies or really even Big five publishers wouldn't have the money to create custom translations everywhere. But if the AI can help do that and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that's such a, that's such a win for the reading audience.

[A]

Yeah, I think it's so exciting to think what might be coming and that's what I want to stay on the side of on the AI discussion. There's enough negativity out there and you can get that information somewhere else. But. But for me, I want us to stay on the positive side of how this helps, helps both the author and the reader and hopefully the community to create more and read more and then enjoy being human more. Right. Because I find that I can, I, I do get out more and listen to stuff or I'm out walking instead of at my desk and I mean, that's what it's about. So, yeah, I'm pretty excited about the future. How about you?

[B]

I am, I think there are, are quite honestly some scary things that could be out there in the future. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about what Mythos is capable of, but on the other side of it, there's all these advances. I also look back at Google and AlphaFold and what DeepMind was able to do there for science. And there's more of that stuff out there and individually for each of us spending a little bit of time. And I do have to say I think you need to spend time on a paid plan because the free stuff doesn't give you the idea of what these platforms are actually capable of. So if you only drop in even briefly to experiment on one of the 20amonth plans and ask it, you know, give it your situation, ask it what it can do for you, I think you'll see where on a personal level that AI will help you unlock some things, can help you move some things to the next level in your business that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do and you don't have to use it for everything, you may decide that it's still not for you for whatever reason, and that's fine. But I think there's so much to explore here and to let your curiosity kind of run for a little bit to see what's possible and what you might unlock with it.

[A]

Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?

[B]

So pretty much everything [e-mail] well, thanks

[A]

so much for your time, Geoff. That was great.

[B]

Yeah, I loved it, Joe, thanks for having me.

[A]

So I hope you found the interview with Geoff interesting. And remember, Jeff also has a substack with lots of tips. Contentfor everyone.substack.com Let me know what resonated from the interview or the introduction. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@the creativepenn.com or on their YouTube channel. Or email me joannathecreativepenn.com and please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday, I'm talking to Jamie Albright co host of the Wish I'd Known Then podcast about writing through grief and rebooting an author business. And Jamie is such a delight, so I know you will enjoy it. So happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes in show [e-mail] podcast and you can get your free author [e-mail] blueprint. If you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook. Fpenauthor Happy writing and I'll see you next time.