← The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
AI, Creativity, And The Future of Publishing with Nadim Sadek
00:47:38
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Creative Penn 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 more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show hello creatives, I'm Joanna Penn and this is episode number 862 of the podcast and it is Monday 4th May 2026. As I record this in today's In Betweenisode, I'm talking to Nadeem Sadeq, founder and CEO of Shimmer AI, which does AI assisted advertising for mainly traditional publishing. We discuss is AI the end of creativity or the biggest emancipation of creative energy we've ever seen? How can authors thrive in of superabundance when anyone can make anything? And what happens when publishers become technology providers and agents start shopping for books on our behalf? So just in the quick intro today, I wanted to emphasize something Nadeem said in the interview. He said the efficiency of bookmaking and publishing generally, the whole workflow of getting a book out of someone's head and into a reader's hands, I think is immensely streamlined and improved by AI. And this is the AI assistants I talk about in my AI assisted artisan author framework, which is several years old now. It is not about replacing the creative side or any of the aspects that we love. It's about augmenting everything else we have to do as author publishers. And I was thinking about this and I guess I understand why those who primarily write within traditional publishing might not understand this because essentially they are not author publishers. But we are author publishers. Indie authors do everything in publishing marketing business as well as the writing. So we benefit from AI assistance in the way that the business of traditional publishing does, the publishing industry does in working with AI tools to improve our businesses by using AI. Now of course, as Nadeem mentions and I also do, we use Claude and potentially other tools as collaborative creative partners as well in the research, the organization of creative work, and many authors are now using it as part of the writing and editing too. But in general we are not focusing on word generation, which is what people get so hung up about. So as an example, in fact right now I have Claudcode running next to me doing SEO and GEO in my Shopify store. It has connectors into Shopify. It's been analyzing some transactions, we've been optimizing things, sorting out some customer stuff, a task I know many of you already do. It now also works within Xero which is my accounting software and Meta just announced an integration and I am so excited excited about that because I already have AI assisted ads but this will mean they're completely manageable through Claude and I'm going to be going through all these kinds of things in my AI webinars. So much has changed in the last six months from December 2025 when realistically things just took another step up. Things just keep changing and we're in a very different world in terms of what is possible with actually doing work. And my concern is that so many people are focusing on the so called original sin of AI and thinking that it's all about writing words. It really is not. It's about doing everything else so we can get back to doing words. It's very hard to explain this with an audio so hence I am doing two webinars. Firstly the AI assisted artisan author which is really everything you need to know for most author publishers. Certainly lots of prompts that will be useful right now and you'll be able to implement straight away. So if you're early on in your AI usage then come along to that and even if you came last year, last September, things have changed a lot so it will still be useful. To be clear, I am not teaching book generation. That is not what I do. I teach AI assistants. Then I'm doing an advanced session for those who are comfortable with AI use. We'll get into business process thinking and redesign building skills. Claude code cowork for agentic AI and the same principles will apply for things like ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini, Anti Gravity so you'll find it useful if you're getting into those as well with the intent of outsourcing much of the admin and overhead work or at least getting and even getting into things you just haven't done because it would take too much personal time. These are the things we'll be looking at so you can get tickets for either or both. They will be Saturday 16th of May for the first one, Saturday 23rd of May for the second one. Ticket holders get the replays, slides and more so you don't have to attend live. There are discounts for patrons and those who attended my previous AI webinars, so check your email or of course any questions. Email me joannathecreativepenn.com if you're wondering if it's for you, just email me joannathecreativepen.com and you can get tickets. They are linked at thecreativepen.com live L I V E thecreativepenn.com live so my time in creating the show today is sponsored by my community@patreon.com TheCreativePen thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. Years. And if you get value from the show and you want more, you want to come and get basically weekly extra content behind the scenes on writing, craft, author, business and individual AI things then. And the discounts, of course, then come along. It 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 the Creative Pen Right, let's get into the interview. Nadeem Sadek is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Shimmer, an AI powered book marketing company, as well as the bestselling author of children's books and nonfiction books, including Quiver. Don't How Creativity Can Embrace AI. So welcome to the show, Nadeem.
- [06:35]
B
It's lovely to be here. I feel very privileged to be invited onto this. Thank you.
- [06:40]
A
Oh no. I'm excited to talk to you today and we are really talking about AI and I wanted to start with your you do seem to have a sort of relentless optimism. So how do you remain so optimistic about AI when the publishing industry that we both work in just seems so overwhelmingly negative? So lift our eyes to the horizon. What is the bigger picture?
- [07:01]
B
Oh my goodness, that is a big one. I think my optimism is quite confined, actually, in the area of publishing. If you were to ask me to speak about AI more broadly, which you're not, but I'm going to give you a little bit of it. I've got lots of concerns, including advent of autonomous weapons and economic singularity, where the wealth from AI as an industry is going to just a few hands and energy usage and cultural, I don't know, homogenization, I suppose, and the potential for brain rot. I mean, there's a whole pile of stuff which is really not very good about AI and all the normal things about fraud and theft and so on. However, if you recognize that and then you say what's going on in publishing, then the obvious thing that you first have to deal with is what did happen with copyright? And is it appropriate to say that things have been stolen and taken without permission and so on? And it is. It's going through the American courts at one pace. I saw that Penguin Random House have started a case against OpenAI in Germany where there will be a much faster legal conclusion, a judged conclusion, I think, which will begin to put, I suppose, parameters on how copyrighted materials can be used and possibly also some retrospective judgment about what has happened to this point and what can be done about it. So it's good that you've asked questions so early in our conversation because I think it's important to contextualize my optimism and it is. Whilst noting with regret the behavior of the AI industry, the models themselves, in not dealing with copyright in the most generous or appropriate fashion, I think we should also recognize that copyright probably wasn't designed for machine learning in the way that it is, and probably the industry wasn't terribly well prepared to negotiate with and navigate the very fast moving technological culture of AI companies. So I think lots of mistakes have been made on both sides. When you put all that to one side, what's left for me is an amazing emancipation of creative energy and also a huge efficiency being brought to the publishing industry. And of course we can talk about both those things further, but for me, that is what's going on. That the kind of the efficiency of bookmaking and publishing generally, the whole work, workflow of getting a book out of somebody's head and into a reader's hands, I think is immensely streamlined and improved by AI. And actually, if you talk about it carefully, which I'm sure we will do, the ability of creators to share and let others experience their creative endeavors becomes so much better, so much fuller, so much richer. So that's why I'm excited about it.
- [10:17]
A
Yeah, well, let's get into those two things then. You mentioned the emancipation of creative energy and you've worked with various AI tools as part of your creative and business processes. And you mentioned that AI can be a creative companion. So specifically, when it comes to quiver, don't quake. For example, how are you using the various tools in such a emancipative way?
- [10:42]
B
Well, again, just to put a bit of a broader context on it, we're an AI native company in Shimmer, and separately I wear a hat as an author. And you mentioned the AI books and the children's books. I'm also writing a book about the psychology of motorcycling, so it's a very odd authorial footprint, but it means that I kind of tramp around the place and learn different things. And what I've noticed even within Shimmer, is that the whole team has been using AI tools very differently. So we've got one I mean, lots of people are very bright in the company and they're all brighter than me and I salute them and love them. But they've all used AI to become more creative in their own ways. So for example, our Chief Commercial Officer is very numerate and logical and not loquacious. You know, she prefers to say things straight and simply has become unbelievably creative financial modeler and analyst, because she uses AI in lots of different ways. So she has flourished and grown so much and is creative in a way that she never could be before. Not only around numeracy and financial matters, but in thinking through new concepts for sales and marketing and for our commercial development. So I've just noticed all around me this going on. When it comes to me, I prefer to express myself through writing. I talk a bit as well as you can tell, but my favorite kind of means of communication is just writing. And when I was writing Quiver, Don't Quake, I would use AI in a number of different fashions. So one would be for research. I would say, I would like to. I mean, one of the chapters is about the psychology of creativity. I'm a psychologist, so I tend to come at things from a psychological perspective. What is the psychology of creativity? Well, here comes a million word answer from an AI. You know, this person said this, this person said that. And then I kind of focused my research in particular areas and assembled them by drawing from the outputs of several AIs. Things that have been said about AI, what science says about it, what sociology says about it, what particular creatives that we're all aware of say about it, whether they're in the advertising industry or musicians or artists or whatever. So that was a very rich way of researching things. I would often put a chapter, then this is a slightly different use of manuscript that I'd written. And say, read this as if you're somebody just coming across my book and tell me where the reader might struggle between one paragraph and another, or where there's a logical fallout or where the concept isn't really very fully excavated and developed, those sorts of things. And it would occasionally prompt me to say, you could probably do with a line that brings the reader from this point to that point. And usually I listened to that and then wrote something new in another use case. I eventually gave it the whole book and said, I think I've done an okay job here and I quite like the flow and I'm sort of satisfied enough. But before I send it to the publisher and say, there you go. What do you think and are there any ways in which this book could become a better and more interesting read? And it came back fairly promptly and said, well, what you haven't really done is considered what all the naysayers would say you've done your dark moments of militarism and all that stuff. But what about some of the other stuff closer to publishing or creativity? And so off I went on a new round of research and did some myself and use the AI for other bits. And the funny thing, really, the ironic thing here is that the book is much better and most people salute the book for, I think it's the eighth or ninth chapter that talks about the constructive critics, because I assemble them all and articulate all their arguments and say how hideous AI is and how terrible it is for the world and all of us. And then I try to repudiate some of them, not in a defensive way, but just to say, actually, yeah, that's one perspective, but here's another one. That chapter, ironically, about how A.I. is terrible was prompted by A.I. it said, you should really have a go at me. And so I did. So that was another use case. And then finally, perhaps I'll say this, that I have a friend who was a. I think she's the editor in chief of Penguin in India. And I got to know her at a book fair or something. We started chatting and I told her about my kids books and I said I could really do with an editor of these 10 books that are due to be published. And she very generously and amiably and very constructively gave me feedback on each individual book, then the whole set, and I was really happy with it. And I said to her that was delight. And she said, you'd be much better off working with Editrix. I said, what's Editrix? She said, well, it's an AI platform I've created where you can go and self edit. I said, you must be kidding. I'd much prefer chatting to you and our interactions. She said, yeah, well, go and try it. So I got an account for the Editrix AI Off I went, gave it my books, and lo and behold, it came up with some incredibly sophisticated and subtle observations on the books that neither Meru nor I had seen. For example, there's a story where a boy who lives in a house on a hill meets another boy on a bridge and they end up in a silly confrontation. They're young and foolish and it sort of materializes that the brain other boy lived in a local village. Now, I suppose in retrospect, it's pretty obvious that this could be seen to be colonialist imperialism and a sense of entitlement from the boy at the top of the hill crossing the bridge first and so on hadn't crossed my mind. And the AI said, I can tell from the rest of your writing that you don't really have a sort of racist or imperialist or superior attitude to things, but in this story there could be a misapprehension that you do. And I thought, wow, what a great warning. And I changed it. There are almost endless ways. And I can tell you others because I'm writing a book about clouds at the moment in which AI can help you as an author. And I've just shared some of those with you.
- [17:02]
A
Yeah, well, I love that. I also use it for research. I definitely use the give me feedback as a reader avatar, as a reader of this type of genre or whatever. And the editorial. I use different tools as well. So I agree with you. All of that is, I think, what a lot of people are doing. And also you said you did a lot of the writing and rewriting, so the human was very much there. This is not an AI generated work in any way. It was using an AI as a sort of collaborator. Creative. Well, I use your words creative companion, which I think is. Is great. But then one of the things that AI positive people like us are finding is that there's so much negativity around the traditional publish, around other authors, around supposedly negative backlash from readers. I mean, I think there's a lot of very noisy people who are probably making this sound worse than it is. But since you're so embedded in traditional publishing in so many ways, how are publishing people thinking about this? And do you think it's just different in terms of the creative side versus, say, the marketing side and what is happening there and what do you recommend for authors?
- [18:14]
B
What I'm observing is that there is increasingly confident adoption of AI for corporate efficiency, which is a polite way of saying where one can see profitability being improved. So, you know, could you streamline legal contracting? Yes. Can you manage royalty payments better? Yes. Is there better sustainability prospects with managing a warehouse and distribution and so on with AI? Yes. Could you improve your marketing by looking at competitive titles and trends and optimizing your metadata and your SEO and now your geo, all using AI? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All of these things can be assisted. Can you manage much more of your backlist where you don't have the human or financial capital to manage all of those titles in a truly respectful and invested way. Yes, yes, yes. So wherever there's kind of corporate efficiency, I see publishers being increasingly bold about saying they have integrated AI into their work streams. What's much more tentative and hesitant is where there's discussion of authors. And I do hesitate to use the right words here, being assisted by employing working with AI and I kind of shorthanded as creative emancipation. It really means very many different things. Let me give you the example that I referred to briefly a second ago of Cloudland, which is probably my first real novel. I'm very lucky. I sit working every day at a desk that's got three windows, and I look at the sky, and every day it's different. And I'm fascinated by it. And I've been flying around the world since I was very young. My father worked for the World Health Organization. We moved between many countries. So I've also seen clouds from the sky a lot. And I've noticed that in different parts of the world, there are different cloud formations. It came to me one day that it would be very interesting if the clouds were somehow sentient and that there is a cloud society and that Cloudland lived above human land and observed us. And actually, the more I started thinking about it, the more I thought, well, we kind of evaporate. We give off vapor all the time, and it rises up to clouds, and maybe we're sending DNA signals to it, and it condensates and sends rain and storms and winds and lightning and thunder and all. I mean, there's a huge amount of interaction between Cloudland and human land, if you think about it. And so I went into an AI, said, hey, I've been thinking about this, blah, blah, blah. Any observations on what I've been saying so far? And I think one of the first things it said to me was, you're actually playing with quantum physics. I had no idea what quantum physics were really. And I thought, well, this is interesting. So off I went and researched quantum physics. And actually, there is some of that in it. And so the original idea, the creativity, came wholly from me, if you count Cloudland as a creative notion. And then the development of it has been assisted by working with AI. So I, as a creator, have spent much more time originating ideas about a story than would historically have been true. I probably would have gone to a library, tried to find the right geography textbook, read up about clouds, discovered what the nomenclature is, thought about whether I could put characters to cumulonimbus versus strato something or other, and kind of worked my way gradually through it. But there is something that I refer to in Crividon Quake, which is what I call the ratio dreaming to execution the road. I think previously, without AI, creators would probably spend 80% of their time researching and trying to get information and assembling things and editing documents and spell checking and doing a whole pile of different tasks, none of which I actually dismiss because I think sometimes those, those difficult and inverted commas, menial tasks give you time to let ideas percolate and flourish and grow. And it's just part of the process. But whereas before, I think we probably spent 20% of our time originating and 80% of our time assembling, I think it's inverted now. And you can probably do 80% of the time you want creating and 20% of the time fiddling about getting your act together. And so I feel that that's a huge emancipation of individual creativity. There's also, and if we can talk about this, if you wish, I think a much broader sociological phenomenon going on, which is really about every person in the world, all 8 billion of us being creatives. That's the way I see the world. But I think that only a minority of that 8 billion have the gift of craft that we recognize, of writing or drawing or making music or being an architect or a biomedicist or something that's creative and assembling things. And AI gives you courage and helps you to identify what you wish to make. And I really don't mean creating the artifacts. I don't mean painting or making a song or writing a book. I just mean helping one to express and articulate oneself so that one's creative idea is shareable and experienceable by others.
- [23:59]
A
Yeah, well, so it's interesting. I mean, everything that we've discussed, you're really saying that the main line is the actual writing of the words. Because none of us can articulate how ideas come. And especially with a. We might have a creative spark, but I'm sure you found the same. If I go to Claude, which is my favorite, with my creative spark, by the time we've discussed it, possibly over days, I've lost track of who said what. And the idea definitely started with me, because the AI at the moment doesn't have its own creative spark in terms of its own, I guess, drive to write a book, for example. So it starts with me, but then it goes back and forth, back and forth, sparks, new ideas. Something it wrote makes me think about something else. And then I think the difficulty with how publishing seems to be doing this at the moment is that it is just the written words on the page that is their red line around. Have you used AI to generate a book? But even that, I just think surely that will change. For example, in the publishing industry, ghost writing or writing dead authors like Wilbur Smith. Yeah, well, I was going to say Wilbur Smith is a good one. I mean, we've seen them just different dead authors essentially writing in the voice of. Of those people. So I just see that there are many possible places where publishers might want this kind of tool. I don't know. Do you see any openness to the actual words themselves?
- [25:35]
B
I think you're right to identify that that is the place that it gets stickiest. You know what you kind of do in your private time, imagining and dreaming things up and interacting. It's a facsimile for talking to your friends or another author or something. You know, it's just an AI companion. So I think that that is being. You're right. Less scrutinized it is when one examines the words on the page. And it's funny. It's almost as if it's a measure of how hard did you work to do this or did you just splattered down on the page by pressing a button somewhere? It's almost as if as creatives, we have to evidence that we have suffered. And I think there's a different form of suffering. When you write with AI. It's true that if you write, if you command AI in some way to write for you, the default writing will be pretty anodyne, pretty bland, pretty mundane. It is deliberately so. AI is created and it is tuned to be inoffensive, to please most people, to be accessible to most readers and consumers of it. So it's another thing that I encourage people to do that don't approach AI with a kind of Google mindset where you just do a question and answer and what time is it in New York now? Whether it's five hours behind or whatever, but instead you say, hey, listen, I'm thinking about clouds, but I want a bit of spittle going up and down between the two. And I'd quite like a crazy cloud that harasses us. Well, now I'm putting in some of my idiosyncrasy and my eccentricity and my personal perspective. The more you do that, the more that even if you did press a button and say command, I want you to write this book that will no longer be a bland and mundane bit of output. It'll be very tuned by your interactions and it'll exhibit some of your Nature. So I think there probably are factories. There's always factories. They're probably. And actually I know this, I mean they're writing a lot of romantic scene, they're writing a lot of pornography. Things which are fairly well parametered. You know what happens in both of those genres, more or less. And so it's pretty easy for a machine to emulate what an author might write there and go and do it. But if you get into something like a sand dune, was my cousin like, okay, well that's a bit different. What do you mean? And there it becomes a much more interesting bit of writing. So I think we're going to see a spectrum. And to come back to your question about where a publisher is drawing red lines, I think it's where they just see straight away mundane output that doesn't feel like it had a lot of craft or ingenuity or hard work to it. But I believe that as we go on that's going to become harder and harder to establish. And as we become more sophisticated users of AI and AI's capabilities to understand us and to work with us become better. Then I don't think it'll be such a big question where the words came from. Feast on with each other is our creative ideas and how they're expressed, but not how they're produced.
- [28:55]
A
Yeah, I mean I, I always say to people, I'm not a word generator. That's not what makes me my or my books worthy. It's what I do with it. It's the stories I tell or it's the personal things behind it or so generating millions and millions of words, whether you generate them by typing or handwriting or AI or whatever, it isn't the word generation that is the point. You know, it's all of the things that make that finished thing what it is. So anyway, let's come back to the other thing because you mentioned that publishers seem very happy around corporate efficiency, anything that drives profitability. You also mentioned that Shimmer is an AI native company. Now I and many people listening, we are one person company. So I run my own company. It's a publishing company. I do all my publishing, I do all my marketing, I do all my business as just me. So I also use AI for a lot of this stuff. But I wondered how do you see publishers changing to become more AI native and how can we as individual author publishers do that too? Because it feels like a massive mindset shift. Not just plug in Opus 4.7 here.
- [30:09]
B
Yeah, I have been found saying at various publishing events and it is deliberately a little bit provocative that I believe that publishers have always been technology providers to creatives. It's not only what they do, but it is a part that they don't seem to embrace very early. I mean, if you just go back to Gutenberg, I mean, here's a printing press, it's a bit of technology. I will make your book, I'll make your words into books. It started there and it's always been. And that applies kind of to distribution and e commerce and audiobook manufacture and all sorts of other things along the way. So I encourage publishers to accept the notion that what they should do to attract authors in the future is partly, only partly, develop their own house AIs. So it can be as ethically trained as that house wishes to deal with the copyright. Ferrari. It can be tuned to do editing in a particular way. It can have a specific way of copy editing, it can have a collaborative notion, it can have a sort of assistant that helps you understand genres and hotspots and competitive titles. And it can help you to think about, as Americans might say, what's hot and what's not in the world at the moment. So you might be more attuned to what the market demands, if that affects you at all. Some, some writers don't care and that's fine. But certainly all the marketing, then how can you produce social media content that's appropriate to your book and all the rest of it? So I, I think there's a way in which publishers could massively enable authors. I mean, I talked to tons and tons of authors clearly about Shimmer and what they all kind of resent, I would say, is finding their time stolen by trying to flog their work rather than make it. So the marketing process is just theft of creative time for most authors and they hate doing it and they're often not very good at it because it's a completely different skill set from creating great stories or writing non fiction books about particular subjects. So I believe that authors should be embracing the notion of creating their own house AI. And goodness me, we might even decide which publisher we prefer to go to on the strength of their AI position. You know, wouldn't that be interesting? But that is what I see the future being.
- [32:35]
A
Yeah, I mean, definitely there's some quite significant authors who, Dean Koontz, I think probably one of the biggest, who went to Amazon because of their technical ability around publishing and marketing. He was like, yeah, I want this because of this. Not that I'll be in bookshops or whatever, of course Course, Dean Coutts is. But yeah, so I think you're right there. And I think for individually also, I mean, as you know, we can use AIs to help us market. I, I upload my books to Claude when they're finished and then I've just been marketing today, you know, create 10 mid journey images based on this book and give me all the marketing copy. And so I think we can use it now to help us be more efficient. But on the other side of that, I think the bigger thing that's starting to happen is marketing is now much easier in one way, so it's getting full even more. So how do we deal with this? Because Shimmer AI is an AI marketing company. So how are you thinking about this? Like the just predominance of very, very good, actually, AI marketing now.
- [33:44]
B
Yeah, and it gets better all the time. It's a great question. And obviously, strategically, as an enterprise, we've really had to think about this one. If I go back one step, I always believe that innovation succeeds when it starts in a narrow space. So when Shimmer launched, we put ourselves forward and were quickly embraced, I have to say. And it was delightful as automated advertising that sells books. Nothing particularly complicated in that. Okay, you do ads, you automate it for me and it'll help flog my books. Yeah, that's it. We had a rush. We've worked with about 250 publishers, as you might anticipate. It started with smaller ones that got bigger. We now work with the biggest as well. And so that notion of automated advertising sales books was successful. Actually, that was about three years ago, A bit shorter three years ago. And what's happened in that time is that we have now collected a ton of data and meanwhile the AI models have become more sophisticated and competent. What's happened, we have noticed, and maybe I should just pause briefly and say what Shimmer actually does. We've got three main engines that are all chained together, to use pretty old language. The first one is what we call the strategizer. It reads the book, it understands what we call it. It's book DNA. So it's the structural elements of what the narrative is, who the protagonists are and all the rest of it. But it's also a psychological study of it. So what's going on? What are the emotions, what are the values, what are the interests, how they intersect, where are the tensions, all those sorts of things. And that Strategizer decides, well, this is the best, you know, reading everything between the covers of this book and understanding the Author's intent. This is the best way to put this book forward, because here are its strong points. It hands that off to the second machine, which we call the generator, which says, thanks for the creative brief, I'll make you the ads now. And it does videos and music and captions and all the rest of it. And then it presents its newly baked campaign to the third machine, which is the deployer that says, okay, well, I know where to find the audiences for this. If that's the DNA of the book and this is the campaign that manifests it, then I know where to find these people. And it goes and autonomously deploys it in various media channels to specific audiences who might be interested in that content. So that's what we started doing, and that generated a huge amount of data. Where we've got to recently, really in the last six months, is understanding that, as you've just said, most people can generate their own stuff, so in some ways they can look just like a mini shimmer. But the thing that differentiates the content is always the strategy and what we have learned to do now. And it's because of an agentic framework. So we've moved beyond what's between the covers of the book to look at life. We look at culture, what's going on, what are the trends, what's in and what's out. Even if you take a particular trend, like, let's say, fascism, what's the language associated with it that's being treated positively and respectfully, and what's the stuff that leads to it being dismissed straight away? All those sorts of nuances around everything. But equally, as well as going deep with a set of agents on what fascism might be in today's culture, we also go wide and say, well, how does that sit next to loyalty or hedonism or ambition or something else? And so we get this very, very circumspect analysis of the market. And indeed, if you do write a book about going off piste here, but you know, the hedonism of fascism, like, God, that would be a weird book, you discover that actually you're not really competing with another book, but you are competing with that specific podcast and this movie that came out and another movement that's born in Italy, but it's moving across Europe now or something. And so we were able to produce strategies which now lead to a much broader offer and one which is much more sophisticated and much more likely to drive success in a book or in a creative enterprise. And so it informs product listings, metadata, author communications, pr, SEO, Geo. And of course, the thing that we started with advertising. So things that you see made by Shimmer should be much more resonant and much more attuned to the world and commercially, much more likely to drive success than simply saying, here's a book, make 10 midjourney images out of it. It's really about the quality of the briefing and the quality of the assets that you're able to produce by having a much more sophisticated strategizer. So we've kind of gone back into the intellectual property and the human analysis in a way of the world. And to understand where a specific piece of creative work sits in culture and society, it's become a much bigger proposition.
- [38:53]
A
Right, so you did mention podcasts there. So as in you might present to a publisher, these are the podcasts that they should pitch, for example.
- [39:02]
B
Well, there's that, of course, but it's also, don't think that this book is competing with these three titles which your team put together. So it's more that if people want to listen to hedonistic fascism, they can listen to that podcast before they read this book.
- [39:17]
A
Okay, that's interesting. Interesting times. So, I mean, we don't have much time left, but I think one of the biggest questions that people have, even if they're AI positive as I am, and many people listening, are it's not that we're worried about AI replacing us because we know we're individuals and all that, but we are slightly concerned about the volume of books in the market. And not just books, but TV shows and YouTube and tick tock, and it's very hard to stand out. And you do say in the book, when anyone can make, maybe creativity lies not in the making, but in making others care. And how can I move up the value chain? And so for many of us who make an income this way, what are your recommendations?
- [40:05]
B
Great question. And actually, I think it's really central now. My, my latest catchphrase is that in a time of superabundance, we need super discoverability. So it's exactly as you just said, tons of work, tons of movies, tons of podcasts, tons of everything. And if you believe in what I've been saying, which is that we're emancipating the creative spark of 8 billion people, there's going to be even more. So I believe that the solution is what I call multimodal interactivity. That doesn't mean multimedia, it means multimodal. Multimodal means you can engage with and experience in different modalities. The same idea so my conviction is that if you write a book or make a painting or have a piece of music that you've come up with or anything really creatively, and you wish it to both survive the first six weeks of its birth and then thrive in a kind of more perpetual way in society and culture, then people have to be able to experience and engage with your idea in multiple modalities. So I would always write a book because that's what I do. Others, you know, produce a podcast or write a piece of music, whatever the same sort of things they've been mentioning. Any one of us needs to make sure that that reappears and is experienceable and interactable with in different modalities. So my book should have some Instagram reels. There might be a YouTube short, there might be a podcast, there might be a piece of music associated with it. It could be a movie, whatever it is, it could be a game, it could be an app. You really have to think about allowing your creative idea more than your creative artifact to live in culture. Sure. You want to make an income from the artifact that you're good at producing. You know, as many of your listeners and I would be writers of books, we want that to persist as a revenue stream and it should do. And I would simply argue that making sure that whatever you've produced in your book is manifestable and people can interact with it in other modalities is the surest way to get it seen and discovered.
- [42:30]
A
Yeah, it's interesting. I've actually started looking at making my non fiction books into skills. Yeah, and also making Markdown MD files, books as markdown files for agents to buy.
- [42:42]
B
Very good. You're way ahead of the curve.
- [42:45]
A
Well, I just, you know, I, I'm, I sell on Shopify, as do many listeners, and Shopify has, I'm sure, you know, we're now enabled for agentic purchasing and we're in ChatGPT. And so it's really interesting to think, well, if the agents go shopping for people now and in the future, what you want is to be able to, to find it. And also, I haven't actually put an explicit license, but people email me and say, can I upload your books into an LLM? And I'm like, if you buy a copy from me, then yes, you can.
- [43:15]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:17]
A
So I think, I think it's changing and as you say, I do think that people are more and more going to want to say, buy the PDF and put it notebook LM or use it as a skill.
- [43:26]
B
That's something yeah. And then they go on a walk with their dog and they listen to the podcast about your book, which they've created on NotebookLM. It's exactly that. And I think my worst fear for publishers is that they lose so much of the value chain distribution, creative collaboration, all sorts of things along the way that the worst position they could end up is simply as book manufacturers, which would be just one small manifestation of a creative idea.
- [43:55]
A
Well, I'm excited about the future. I hope you are, too. I think you are. But what are you particularly excited about in terms of the changes coming?
- [44:04]
B
Well, if I can be my most extravagant. Now, my greatest excitement about AI and the changes that are coming are that it'll produce what I describe as the Panthropic. The Panthropic is a way of seeing AI not as a kind of companion or some anthropomorphic being, but instead the repository of everything that humans have ever thought or felt or created or shared, accessible to us all. And in a kind of anonymized way, it's just a. It's just a. Well, a repository of interactable information. And my excitement about it is that the liberation that gives to information, which becomes knowledge, which of course we all know leads to some power, should result in truly new thinking, new philosophy, new spiritualism, possibly new questions about what it is to be a human being and what life on Earth is all about. New economics, new employment, new education. I think one can too easily underestimate the massive liberation of intellectual consideration and creativity that's about to surf across the globe. And I'm so excited by it.
- [45:34]
A
Yeah, me too. Very interesting times ahead. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online?
- [45:43]
B
I think the easiest thing is just to go to LinkedIn and find me there as Nadeem Sadiq. You can also go to my personal website, which is nadeemsaddick.com and that'll take you wherever you want on different journeys and different parts of my career. And it'll also give you links to books, but of course, they're available in all formats, audio and paperback and ebook, and in many different languages, all through Amazon and other platforms. And Spotify and Audible and all the usual things.
- [46:13]
A
All the usual things. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nadim. That was great.
- [46:17]
B
It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
- [46:23]
A
So I hope you found the interview with Nadeem interesting, particularly as he works with big publishers, and it is now very clear how much they are using AI in the marketing and business side of things. Let's not be left behind creatives, so let me know what resonated. Please leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the Creative Pen or on the YouTube channel, or email me joannathecreativepenn.com Please send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next Monday it's back to writing craft, as I'm talking to Sarah Kaufman about how to write more strongly with verbs. And in the meantime, 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 and show notes@thecreativepen.com and you can get your free author blueprint@thecreativepen.com 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.