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The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Book Discoverability In An Age Of AI. GEO For Authors With Thomas Umstattd Jr.
00:57:54
How will generative AI change search and book discoverability in the years ahead? How can you make sure your books and your author website can be found in AI tools like ChatGPT? Thomas Umstattd Jr. joins me to discuss Generative Engine Optimisation (GE...
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- [00:01]
Joanna Penn
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 more@thecreativepenn.com and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show Hello Creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 813 of the podcast and it is Thursday 12th June 2025. As I record this in today's show I talk to Thomas Umstadt Jr about book discoverability in an age of AI. We go into GEO for authors, that is generative engine optimization instead of SEO, search engine optimisation and why your author website and Goodreads might be more important than ever. There are lots of links in the show notes to some of the things we talk about and if you'd like to explore the possibilities of using AI, you can join me for my AI assisted artisan author webinar on Saturday 21st of June, 11am US Eastern 4pm UK. You need a ticket to attend live or get the replay and you'll also get my prompt library as well as slides and the video recording. You can find the link@thecreativepen.com live. Any questions just email me joannathecreativepen.com so I hope you enjoy this interview with Thomas.
- [01:38]
Thomas Umstadt Jr.
Thomas Umstadt Jr. Is the CEO of AuthorMedia.com as well as an award winning professional speaker, nonfiction author and host of the Novel Marketing Podcast and the Christian Publishing Show. So welcome back to the show Thomas.
- [01:54]
Thanks Joanna for having me.
- [01:55]
Oh it's great to have you back. Now, for everyone listening, you were on the show a few years back, so we're going to dive straight into the topic today, which is based around a recent episode on your novel Marketing podcast on AI optimization for authors. Does ChatGPT recommend your book? And I was like yes, I really want to talk about this, but why did you decide to get into this topic now? Like what? What did you see in the author community that made you want to help authors see AI differently?
- [02:25]
Well, what triggered this topic was actually the Google IO conference where one of the features they were demoing was the ability to take a picture of a stack of books and then get recommendations on additional books that were like that book. And as somebody who spends a lot of time in tech world, books and authors are often the example that the tech people use to demonstrate new capabilities of AI models. And often, unless people listen to your show, that new tech does not actually get translated to the author community. Because most authors are not watching the Google I O conference or even summaries of it. They're spending time on the conference, as they should. Yeah. And so I was like, oh, I need to do some tests with this. So I started testing different models to see how they would recommend books. And I kind of realized, oh, this is already happening. People are already asking AI all the questions of their life. Google search traffic is way too down. People are moving that kind of big questions of their life conversation away from traditional search engines and towards AI interactions. And if you can get the AI to recommend your book, you'll be well positioned for ongoing sales in this new era. And if you're holding on to ranking on Google Search or even Amazon Search as your only way of finding customers, like, sales are going to keep slipping and you won't understand why.
- [03:52]
Well, it's interesting. I have been using ChatGPT primarily since November 22nd when it first came out. I use it mainly, you know, not mainly. I use it for everything. I use it instead of Google. So I have started to use Gemini again, but I mainly use ChatGPT and also on my phone, like it's what I use. So what about your personal behavior? Do you use a lot of AI for kind of normal life that you once would have used Google for?
- [04:16]
I do. In fact, AI has boosted my productivity so much that we've been able to launch a new podcast, a whole additional podcast called Author Update, which is a news podcast once a week just covering publishing news. And so much of the pieces of that, like taking the transcript and turning it into a blog, creating the timestamps for YouTube, creating the thumbnails for YouTube, creating the titles for YouTube are all done by AI. So different AI tools that I've built for each one of those pieces that. That two years ago would have been incredibly time consuming and there would have been no way we could have added yet another show to the mix.
- [04:54]
I didn't know that. And interestingly, I have also brought back my books and travel podcast, which I stopped doing a couple of years ago because it was too much work. And it's not one that's monetized. But I also brought it back in the last few months because I was like, do you know what? I can now do so much of this with AI that I. It doesn't matter so much. And actually one of the things with that show, which is interesting is a lot of the times I'm interviewing people with different accents and a lot of the Speech to text the transcription previously has been very good with American men, but it hasn't been so good with British women or anyone else of any nationality speaking English. But now I find it's all very good. So it's like people who maybe last year might have said, oh no, that this isn't still not good enough. It, it really is now, isn't it? For a lot of use cases.
- [05:45]
Yeah. There's a kind of person who tried ChatGPT when it first came out. They tried GPT 3.5. They played around with it for a couple of hours, they weren't impressed and then they came to a conclusion. And the conclusion that they came to was not this particular tool isn't ready, but instead the category of AI is no good. And what they haven't realized is that so far in 2025, a new model that's the best in the world has come out. Almost every 10 days, almost every episode of Author Update, we're like, and there's a new AI model on the top of the benchmarks and it's like they all take turns and now they're starting to snipe each other. So like Gemini was number one for like two days and then Anthropic is like here and pushed them off.
- [06:31]
Yeah, here's Claude 4.
- [06:32]
It's like you want to be number one, we're going to take that away from you. And if you were to go back and use GPT now, even the free version, it would be dramatically better than that first experience you had. But really where the power is is once you start paying for the AI models, once you're using GPT 4.1 or 4.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro or I really like Grok for research. I found that grok's deep search functionality is unbelievable. It has real time access to knowledge and real time access to X. And so for doing research on basically any topic, GROK has won in every test that I've done.
- [07:12]
Oh, that's interesting. So I use O3. My primary model is ChatGPT O3 for pretty much everything, unless it's just something very basic that I would Google. And then I use deep research on chat GPT with O3 and also Gemini 2.5. So I do use Grok, but only when I'm on X because this, and this is interesting. We're going to come back to like search. But when, interestingly, with all the stuff with the deep research, for example, and people listening, you get like a 20, 30 plus page report on what you Want to research with loads of sources and links and most of them never ever surface social media links. And Grok on X obviously does, but that's the only one. So I find that really interesting too.
- [07:58]
Yes. In fact, that was one of the things I researched for my episode on AI optimization. I was like, I was curious which social networks affect which AI models, Because some social networks affect all of the models and some social networks have impacts on basically none. So like TikTok, blue sky, don't touch anything. Like, you can be the biggest deal on TikTok and none of the AIs will know you exist. YouTube influences. Gemini x is exclusively for Grok. Facebook and Instagram supposedly are tied to Llama, but in my experience, who uses Llama? Llama is so bad it doesn't matter if it's connected to Facebook. Because, like, talking to all AI is like talking to a child, but like talking to Llama is like talking to a toddler that, like, hasn't quite figured out how the words work and how the sentences work. And like, you can learn to understand it, but it's like, why bother when all the other AIs are like talking to middle schoolers who can now do research reports and are actually quite smart.
- [08:58]
I was going to say yes, it depends on the context. Well, let's bring it back. You mentioned the Google I O conference and I also went to the overviews of that and Sundar Pichai said a few things. I've just got a quote here. He said AI overviews have scaled to over 1.5 billion users in two countries, driving over 10% growth in the types of queries that show them. So if people have used Google, I guess really in the last six months, really, but a lot more in the last month or so is if you ask something on google.com and then you will get this AI overview, so you don't necessarily have to click into the article. So given that I've heard it also called geo generative engine optimization instead of SEO. What are some of the principles that authors need to keep in mind if search is changing this way?
- [09:52]
So one of the fascinating things about AI is that it's very much a last shall be first and the first shall be last technology. So it's taken a lot of things that didn't used to matter very much and it's making them suddenly matter a whole lot. And the two biggest winners of this new era is the author website, which has been kind of declining in popularity, particularly amongst indie authors, because most indie authors are all in On Amazon all the time, they're not wide. They dream of maybe someday going wide, but they ku money is just too good. So if your only existence is on Amazon, it's very easy to ask the question, why does my website matter? Now the website did matter. Being able to sell direct was important. Being able to build your email list was important. Being able to communicate directly to readers was important. But there was a kind of author who's like, eh, I'm just on Amazon, I can ignore the website. But now your website is your primary way of influencing large language models that train on the open web. Because you can't fully control Amazon, you can't fully control anywhere else on the web, but you can control your own website down to the robots txt files. You have full control over it. And that is really, really important for educating an LLM about your book and about your book's relationship to your other books and about your book's relationship to to the other books in the world. So it's like this book is like this other book by this other author and your blog on your website is a really useful tool for that.
- [11:23]
Yeah, you mentioned the word control and that's exactly what I've been thinking about. Now I've had my own author websites since 2008, you know, old school like you, and now also have Shopify stores. And Shopify is actually interesting in that they are going AI first and there are rumors of some kind of collaboration between OpenAI and Shopify in terms of surfacing direct links, which is interesting in itself. But yes, your control, your author website. And because also we've seen, well, we're going to come back to Amazon but they're doing a lot of things with their own AI. But what are some specific things that we can put on our author websites? I mean if I say, okay, so I've got an about page which is about me and then do I have a book page? And on a book page what are some of the things that I might add that the LLMs would be interested in?
- [12:13]
Yeah, so here's the classic mistake. An author gets started writing and they have home about book and contact. It's kind of the classic author website. And then they write a second book and they're like, oh, well, I need to put this new book at the top of my book page and I will rename it to books. Well that was a blunder, believe it or not, because now you no longer have a page dedicated to either one of the books. So you've done the new book you just wrote a disservice and, and you did your existing book a disservice. So one really easy change that many of you listening can do right now is you just create a new page for each book and you copy and paste the content from your books page into each individual's book page. And then you make your books page just a bunch of thumbnails for your covers. Big beautiful covers, even bigger and more beautiful than the thumbnails on Amazon. They click on that cover and it takes them to an entire page just about the book. So that's step one. You can do that in 15 minutes. But step two is now realizing this page isn't just for my readers trying to decide about the book. This page is for large language models trying to understand my book. And so you want to actually make that page as rich and as in depth as possible. And you also want to make it really good for humans.
- [13:30]
Right?
- [13:30]
So put discussion questions, have sample chapters, have your audiobook resources. So I'm a big reader of fantasy, but I listen to fantasy books and I really want to see the map. And when I go to an author's website, some low res garbage map and I can't see the towns and it makes me very sad. All I want, fantasy readers, fantasy authors, please, for the love of good maps, just upload a 5 gigabyte version of your map to your book page. I will love it, AI will love it, your readers will love it, it will make everyone happy. And it already exists on your hard drive. It's what you put in your book. It's not going to keep anyone from buying your book. The fact that they can get the map of your fantasy world for free. And it will. And it's just one example of the sort of thing that you can put on your book. Also frequently asked questions. And if you do frequently asked questions, there's a schema, schema.org that you can add to a page through Yoast SEO. So if you're using WordPress, it really is the best for this sort of thing where it's called a question schema, where it will actually surface that question not just on Google Search, but also to the, to the LLMs where they'll see the question and then see the answer and which will really reduce the likelihood of the LLMs hallucinating if somebody else asks that question or a similar question to the LLM.
- [14:48]
Yes. So just on that frequently asked question. So when we just mentioned the AI overview on Google, if you have a frequently asked question on your website, that it can easily pull from it is more likely to do that. But Also useful is NoteBookLM, where you can upload your book and it can actually generate those frequently asked questions for. For you. So, so this is another thing that I would say. I mean, again, read the terms and conditions, but NotebookLM in particular doesn't says it doesn't train on the data you upload into a notebook. If people are worried about that, you can actually use the AI tools to help you build this material. The other thing I was going to say on images, one of the things I was reading about is the alt text. Now the alt text on images we've been encouraged to use for accessibility reasons. So if somebody is, is blind or partially sighted and the alt text gets read when there's an image. But I also was looking to see that it's used by the LLMs when they're sort of going through a website. Yes, they can see in inverted commas now, but they use the alt text. So is that something that you've considered? Because I guess I didn't think about that before.
- [15:59]
So this is one of the techniques that I think is helpful right now and won't be helpful in two or three years. And because this is purely a way of you adding human labor to your website to save the bot from doing bot labor. Because you can upload an image to GPT's image one engine and ask it to describe it, and it can describe that image with paragraphs and paragraphs of detail. But for GPT to do that, it requires a lot of compute and they don't have the compute to do that for all of the images on all of the websites on all of the Internet. And so now the cost is going down. You know, more efficient chips are coming out, the models are getting more efficient. So several years from now, the AI will be able to just go to a page, look at the image and generate a much more useful understanding of that image than what it can currently get with alt text. But in the meantime, adding some descriptive alt text could help before is understanding the image. And not all LLMs are multimodal, which I realize is a big term. So multimodal is being able to interact with text and image at the same time. So GPT is, I would argue, the most multimodal. It's just unbelievably good with images. I'm not a big fan of GPT in general. I find that the other models are better at most of the other specific use cases. But for images it is just hands down the best and it's often the second best in every other category. So it's a good one if you're only using one. But some of the other engines aren't very good with images yet. I haven't been impressed with Claude's handling of images. Grok is only kind of so. So Gemini has made some big steps forward, but I still think it's behind GPT and image rendering. And so you're also helping these other models more because Anthropic may not be able to describe the image in a very suitable way right now. It will in a few years, but right now maybe not so good.
- [17:52]
Yeah, and it's interesting you say that about, I think ChatGPT03, that is my favorite model. I don't really use the 4. The 4 models but I also think where if people are saying, oh well, you know, Thomas doesn't rate it well, I think everyone has. Prefers different models as well because of sort of personality things. So a lot of writers do like Claude, for example, for the more creative side of things. But as we've also said, if you don't like a model this week, try again in a couple of weeks and it. And it may well have changed. I mean GPT5 is, is rumored to be coming out, which I think will be interesting because one of the things is you and I are quite technical, so we're like, oh, this, this number and this letter and. But GPT5, apparently it will do that for you. So you'll just put your query in and it will choose the best model for you, which I think will really help.
- [18:41]
Yeah, one, one thing to help simplify this because GPT has probably the worst naming schema in the history of GPT naming. So they have GPT4O and GPT04, which are entirely different models and have almost nothing to do with each other. And then they have 4.1 which is actually better than 4.5, so the numbering doesn't work. But then like O3 which is based off of 4 is actually better at a lot of reasoning tasks. It's very confusing. So let's simplify it in a way that actually will help across all of the companies because there's kind of three main flavors of LLMs in terms of main features and that is the kind of default model, default model with reasoning, which is what O3 does really well because it can actually think about your question. So if you think about like somebody asks you a question, you can answer off the top of your head or you can like sit down with a piece of paper and kind of think about it a little bit. That left brain slow thinking is what, what we mean by reasoning. And when you're interacting with the reasoning model, it's slower to get back to you because it thinks about it. And then the third kind of model is deep search, where it will actually go and do research. And I don't know if you ever do this, Joanna, on a live call, somebody will ask a question and you'll do a quick Google search to refresh your memory about that thing that they're talking about. That's kind of how the search function. It's called deep search on Grok. I think it's called deep research on GPT. And those three features are rolling out to all of the different models and they're useful in different ways. If you want a quick answer, you just want to talk to the core model. But if you want some like deep in depth analysis, you want to turn on research or maybe turn on thinking as well. And then that'll simplify it to make it not quite so confusing. Because if you're not following this every week the numbers and the letters and the models and the companies is just like make your eye water so complicated.
- [20:33]
Yeah, absolutely. Or I mean my tip is whatever your favorite model is, you just say, I want to do this. How can you help me do it? Because most people aren't as technical as we are, so won't necessarily be driving the machines in that way. But let's come back to the website. So I agree with you that sort of the last shall be first. So the author website sort of fallen out of favor in many ways. For example, blogging. I was blogging from 2008 and then pretty much nobody. Five years ago I probably, I stopped because there were some really, really good websites doing the kind of content I was. So I was like, right, I'm just going to do the podcast. And of course for our podcast we have transcripts and all that. And I thought, well, that gets indexed and my site does still rank for lots of good things because of the podcast transcripts. So if people are now thinking, okay, well if these AI engines want this rich content, but we don't want to upload our books onto our website. For example, what are some of the things, the other things they could put on the website? Is it just the book page or could people be thinking about other forms of content on their sites?
- [21:46]
So blogging is really powerful and I will share this with your audience. I left it out of the blog version of my episode on AI optimization, but it's in the audio and video version. But one of the big things that the LLMs look for when it comes to ranking a book is something called context, where it's in relationships specifically. So relational context is really important for LLMs. And you can guide that with a blog post. So you can say the top 10 posts on such and such trope or the top 10 authors who are similar to J.F. penn. So if you love J.F. penn, you'll love. And it's got these other nine authors and includes J.F. penn. And so if I'm writing books that are similar to J.F. penn, I would include my name in that list and then train the LLMs to start associating. Our names are kind of putting them in a semantic cluster. And a blog is really powerful at this. The other really good thing to do with blogging has been the best thing to do with blogging for the last 15 years, which is just answer questions, right? Your inbox fills up with questions and so you just write one really good answer, you email it to that person, and then you copy and paste it to your blog. Take out all the personal bits, add some bullets, add some headings. Now you've got a really good blog post that already existed in your outbox that you know for sure a real human being asked. And if one human being asked it, probably others asked it. And if they're not asking Google, they're asking the LLM. So it's not that much more work to have a blog of some kind that's driven the topics of which are driven by your own readers.
- [23:16]
And yeah, I mean, you mentioned there. It's easier really with nonfiction because people will ask questions about that. For example, on my books and travel, I did the Camino de Santiago and people email me all the time saying like, what shoes did you wear for the Camino? I mean, just a question like that. And it is in my book and I know I have actually put it on the website now, but it's interesting because that's easier for non fiction slash memoir. For fiction, like you said, I have done blog posts in the past, like 10 action adventure series with female main characters, stuff like that. But this is what I was also wondering because if you use any of the search engines, any of the LLMs and you say, for example, who is or what do you know about author J.F. penn? And it will kind of look at everything and I found that Goodreads is actually incredibly highly ranked. And I wonder if that's because a lot of those posts, like you're saying, are often on Goodreads. Their, their blog. That's literally what their blog is. They're always posting lists of relational things and obviously they're owned by Amazon. But what do you think about fiction authors in particular? Would it be better to be posting lists of that kind of thing on Goodreads and or their website?
- [24:29]
So I love Listopia. That's Goodreads list feature. I don't think authors are allowed to add their own books to lists on Listopia, which means you'd have to work with a compatriot to add each other's books into lists, which adds a little bit of friction. But Goodreads is become incredibly important because Goodreads is one of the only places on the Internet that has schema.org information on books. There's actually no good way to add this to your website right now. This is making me feel like I shouldn't have given away my book table, which is a WordPress plugin for making book pages that I developed years ago and I'm no longer a part of because Yoast SEO doesn't support the book schema, but Goodreads does. And so Goodreads has become like the go to source for metadata and context and information about books. And it also has reviews and rankings and relationships because it can look at shelves and which books are connected with which other books and shelves. It's actually really rich data. And unlike most other social networks, it doesn't have a login wall to access pages. So you can go to any page on Goodreads without being logged into Goodreads, which means there's no good mechanism to keep the bots away. And so having a Goodreads profile at 100% is really important. But I never use Goodreads and my readers don't use Goodreads like. Well, some of your readers do. The mega readers, the readers who take chances on new authors, they're all over Goodreads. If somebody reads 300 books a year, they need Goodreads to find that 301st book. If somebody reads one book a year, they just go to the bookstore and buy whatever the James Patterson book is that's facing the door. And so if you're new to writing and you're still just getting started, Goodreads was always important to you, but now it's even more important because now Goodreads is informing all of the social networks. So when I was doing my research, every single large language model, I don't know about Llama. I don't really care about Llama. But all the ones that matter, they all look at Goodreads quite a bit for informing their context about books.
- [26:27]
Joanna Penn
Yeah.
- [26:28]
Thomas Umstadt Jr.
And that is quite shocking for some people. You know, when I started in 2008, Goodreads was a separate company. It was, it was really big. And then it still looks the same as it did.
- [26:41]
I mean, it's like a time capsule to the days before social media got.
- [26:45]
It really is. And it's, it's quite horrible. So I guess maybe, I don't know, a decade ago I was like, okay, I don't really want to use this anymore. And also, we were all, a lot of us focusing on going wide and building Shopify and all this. And then a couple of years ago when I saw that, oh my goodness, Goodreads is becoming more important. So I've really been making much more of an effort and asking people who buy direct to also review on Goodreads. And of course, if you read on, let's say you read on a Kindle, you read an Amazon device, it. If you rank, if you rate a book at the end, that will automatically appear on Goodreads if you've connected your account. So even if people aren't writing reviews, all these ratings is another data point that does all the linking. Like, like you're saying. So I can't see that another site can be as rich as Goodreads in the English language, I guess we should say, because I think Goodreads is only in English as far as far as I know. But yeah, so I guess this is. Would this be more important than the author website updates? If people are like, oh my goodness, you too. You've just given us too much work. Should people be thinking about updating Goodreads first or the website?
- [27:53]
I think for most people, starting with Goodreads might make more sense because chances are your Goodreads page is already half built, at least, because Goodreads pulls data from Amazon. And if you did a good job with your metadata and having a good Amazon page, which, if you've been listening to Joanna Penn's podcast for any amount of time, you've heard her harp on. If you've listened to my podcast, harp on, you've heard me harp on. I feel like I'm like mentioning my metadata episode every single episode, I'm like, please, this is so important. I don't know if you harp on it, but I definitely harp on it. And if you've been doing a good job with That a lot of the Goodreads stuff is already done. So it's just logging in, making sure your account is attached to your author account, making sure all of the information is corre correct, tweaking the things that need to be corrected. And you could be done in an hour. Building out these web pages could be done in an hour or two if you're savvy. But if you've never edited your website before, there's actually a bit of a learning curve to do it the first time. And if you had somebody build you your website now, it's more complicated, so you got to go find that person and pay them. So the website could be a higher amount of work, but it's still really important. So don't hear me say oh, good reasons. Start there as an excuse to then stop there and do your website as well.
- [29:13]
Yeah, and I guess we should also say that it's early days. In 2008, it was. Do you remember back then it was, it's the year of mobile. Or, you know, 2010, 2012 was still the year of mobile. Like it was the beginning of mobile commerce and all that. And nobody believed it for years until some one time everybody woke up and were like, oh yeah, you buy things on your phone. And I suppose that's what they were talking about. And this is the same thing. I mean, this is gonna grow. So right now we're still early, I think, on this. So yes, have a look at your goodreads, have a look at your website, but let's carry on. So you did mention no robots txt earlier, which everyone's like, oh, no, no, that sounds complicated. Or they're saying, well, I don't want things to search my site, I'm against AI. Or I don't want them to see my website or to search things that I've spe time doing. So what will definitely stop the AI search engines and you know what? Why should we not do that?
- [30:09]
I guess I think that some of the all AI is evil all the time is actually being advocated by people who themselves use AI and don't want other authors to have the competitive advantage that they have. I don't think it's all of that, but I think that some of the most vocal people secretly have pen names where they're making a lot of money with AI everything. And it's kind of like you're the first farmer in town to get a tractor and you're way more productive on your farm than all the other farmers who are still doing it with their hoes and their backs. And if you can convince the other farmers that tractors are evil, or if you can get somebody else in the town to do that for you, then you can buy the fields from everyone else who's doing the work with their backs. So it's like, I'm not convinced that this fear is all in good faith. There is some of it. You know, some people, really, all they know about AI is they watch the Matrix and they watch the Terminator and it's really scary. But those people tend to not be very vocal because they don't know the difference between a large language model and machine learning. Right. Like an AI, like it's all just a bunch of jumbo for them. And it's all scary and evil and strange. And that kind of person isn't going to know how to put a no robots. Txt file on their website. I don't think that LLMs txt or no robots. Txt are going to go anywhere. I think what's going to happen with AI is the same thing that happened with mobile. So back in 2008, when it was like the year of the mobile, if you remember, we were building mobile versions of our websites. So you had the website and then you had a completely separate website for mobile. And then in the early 2000 teens, this new approach to web design, called responsive web design was developed where everything had percentages instead of fixed number of pixel widths. And pages could get big and they could get small. And now you only had to build one version of a web page for both mobile and for web. The robots. Txt file has plenty of space for instructions to LLMs and what you can and cannot do. We don't need other. Txt files on a website to accomplish those purposes. And I think it's simpler for everyone to just use the page we already have for talking to robots, rather than having other pages to also talk to robots, but say different things. So I may be wrong on this, but I don't think the alternate files, no robots or LLMs are going to take off. But I do think people are going to add instructions to robots. Txt and some of them will be encouraged by other authors, well meaning or not to start blocking the LLMs. I don't think that's going to work for one. I don't know how you block Google without blocking Google. Right?
- [32:46]
It's like Google Bot.
- [32:48]
Are you the Google search bot or the Google Gemini bot? I'm the Googlebot. Right. Do you really want to block Google? You can. It's your right and Google won't surface your website, but you have to be found if you want to be read. You can't hide in the wilderness and not let anyone read your book and then complain that no one's reading your book. You either want to be found or you don't. And I think for some authors, they're afraid of being found and they're maybe using AI as an excuse. But I think pretty soon people are going to be paying Money to get AIs to learn about their book. This fear of AI doing it for free I think is going to go away pretty quickly.
- [33:24]
Well, yes. And I mean we should just come back to Amazon because people are like, oh well, I don't need to know any of this because I am just on Amazon. But of course Amazon is also moving to Generative Search and I'm kind of annoyed because this mobile app that you have in the US with this Rufus shopping bot is now using it and you can ask really detailed follow up questions and it's more granular. But I can't see that because I'm in the uk. But are there anything, I mean, I'm really pleased about this because I am sick of loading seven keyword terms into my metadata. I want if I give Amazon the whole book, I mean surely they can do useful things and do all that themselves. It's very rich data. But is there anything that people need to do specifically with Amazon other other than listen to your metadata episode?
- [34:12]
So one advantage you have being in the UK is that you can still be blissfully unaware of how not great Rufus is. So I would rank Rufus above Llama and below all of the other LLMs. I know that Amazon has a bunch of different AI models that they're developing. I was doing some experiments with one of them. I forget what it's called. Started with an A and it had the most delightful hallucination about me I have ever seen an AI do in my life. It was so I just, I was testing, I got this tool where I had access to all the LLMs and so I was asking them a lot of the same questions, see what answers they would give. And it was like, Thomas Olmsted is a professor of book marketing at Texas State University. And then it started listing all of these book marketing books that I had written and they were all like vaguely associated with like podcast episodes that I had done. But like it was all like close enough to be believable, but none of it was true. Hallucinated an entirely different Thomas Olmsted. And I'm like, oh, Amazon is behind on this AI thing. So right now Rufus in my tests is somewhat better than just a pure review search for answering product questions, but just barely. It's not where the other AIs are at yet. Now they just Amazon, just this week as we're recording the signed a licensing deal with the New York Times. So they're now the only company that has an agreement with the Times for licensing data for AI models. So now suddenly, because it used to be the New York Times didn't matter for AI training because they had walled.
- [35:51]
It off, they're suing open AI and all kinds of things.
- [35:53]
Microsoft, yeah, they're suing for big money. And Jeff Bezos is like, big money. I have big money. And so now they've got this really good source of data, or mediocre source of data, depending on your view of the New York Times, but they're the only ones that have access to it. But that's not going to fix Rufus ability to find the needle in the haystack in a bunch of book reviews. So Amazon will get there. If it worked better, you would have it in the uk. People don't want to give you the kind of mediocre stuff they want, like royal quality for the uk. And there's a reason it's like, this isn't good enough for the King. And the Brits aren't going to take this trash. We'll just keep it for the colonials right now.
- [36:33]
Oh, fair enough. Well, we should also say Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic, which does Claude. So it would be nice if they could use some of the claw juice or something. But yeah, I mean, again, all these things are going to get better. So if people are like, oh, well, I don't like the Amazon automatics review overviews or whatever, it's like, look, all these things are going to get better and better. And again, I want to stay really positive about this. As I said, I. I think we've been in the long tail for like 20 years already, right? But we're in the very, very, very long tail when we're thinking of generative search and the conversational search. So I do a lot of book recommendations through ChatGPT and often I'll have gone backwards and forwards several times before. I'm happy with the level of granularity I'm at. So no longer do we have a sort of basic keywords, but we're having a whole conversation about what we like. Or like you said, I've I sometimes just upload a screenshot or a picture of my whole bookshelf. I did this the other day like at my bookshelf with, with probably hundreds of books on and said here's my bookshelf, what else might I like? And it can read all the books on the bookshelf and all of that. So I think again, all of this is going to get better and I.
- [37:46]
Think it's also going to reward good writing, especially that kind of relational stuff. So you have a really deep relationship with your O3 mini model, right? Like it knows you really well. You've spent months, maybe years building its context window so it has a good sense of your preferences. This is one area where GPT really shines is like a per user context window that persists across conversations. So when you ask your O3 for a recommendation, it's going to, it has really good knowledge of books. The GPT book recommender is already really good and it has really good knowledge of you. So it's going to make very likely very good recommendations. And those recommendations are likely going to be the kind of books that are well written. And so as we talk about schema.org and all these technical things, don't forget the fact that none of this will fix a bad book. None of this will fix a bad book. If your book is not fun to read, if it's not engaging, if it doesn't pull readers in, if it doesn't leave them happy at the end or they're leaving a good review, if it doesn't deliver on its promises, then it's not going to matter. These things are great tiebreakers and they can be really helpful if you're obscure to move you from obscurity to notoriety. But you can't make that move if your book doesn't thrill readers. And so your book has to thrill readers first. And I probably should have started with this, this is not like a get out of learning the craft of writing free card. It's just the opposite actually, because the AI is much more discriminating on quality than the search engines were. You type a search into Amazon and it's going to surface whoever paid the most first and then it will pick based off of the very limited information you gave it. Some books to rank and none of that really had much to do with the writing. Some of it was connected, you know, it would look at review data and sales data and things like that. But a lot of it just became self reinforcing, right? Popular books got more attention which made them more popular. And my hope is that these new AI recommendation engines will have more nuance and make better recommendations and it will also be better for, for people on the fringes of society. So I'm not sure how it is in the uk, but conservatives got pushed out of publishing. There's hardly any conservatives in the traditional publishing world. And if you're writing a book for a conservative audience, it's hard to find your readers right now. Whereas I think AI is going to help bridge that gap where conservative authors and conservative readers are going to be able to find each other and they're going to get really excited. And that's true with every kind of niche, niche group of readers and authors that were really limited by the search engines, that were really reductive. Now all this nuance is going to be like, oh, you're interested in this kind of unique subgenre that doesn't have a category in Amazon. Well, guess what, I've read all of the books in that and here's the best one that I think you'll like really well and suddenly you're reading more books. I think this is going to be good for the industry overall.
- [40:46]
Yeah, I think so too. But it should reduce or hopefully reduce that sort of paid ad effect. Although inevitably these companies are going to have to monetize more than they are now. So it'll be very interesting how it changes. So we're also really interested in what else is coming now. People have been kind of saying agents and agentic AI for a while, but mostly these have been assistants. So something like deep research reports. They're kind of an agent. You give them a task, go research this and then it goes away and it will come back and bring you a report. So it's early days. But what is really interesting to me is zero click. So zero click with agents. So you might say to your agent or for example, I just have done booked some trips in the US to Antelope Canyon and I got my deep research report, but I still had to go buy the tour and I did go with its recommendation. Zero click is that I say to my agent, my travel agent, let's say, go and find me the best trip to Antelope Canyon, here's my budget and just arrange it. You know what I like in terms of hotels and the brands I like and all of that, that go do it. And people are like, oh no, that's years off. But Visa, the Visa card now has intelligent commerce. So they actually have a card you can use with an agent. So you essentially Task it with buying for you. And I was thinking about this with books. It's like, here's my bookcase, this is what I like. Here's my budget per month. Just send me a book a week or buy me some cool books and deliver them to my house. And I'm like, actually, that's quite fun. So the human never does the browsing, the human never clicks and things turn up. So what do you think about this?
- [42:24]
I think AI agents are going to start creating zones of the Internet that are devoid of humans. And I don't think that's a bad thing. So the first place we saw this was actually about two decades ago, and it was the stock market. So if you've ever seen an old 1980s video of the stock market, there's actual men in suits with pieces of paper and they're all shouting at each other. And then somebody was like, oh, we'll connect it to computers. And so then somebody had to type on the computer to place an order. And then there was one company that literally created a robot that just typed on the keys because the NASDAQ wouldn't allow automated orders. So something had to push the keys on the typewriter on the keyboard. And then they're like, okay, this is stupid. You can just place the orders. And then they're like, okay, well, let's create AIs that will evaluate a stock's price and make purchases. And now almost all of our stocks are managed by agentic AIs. So we moved away from mutual funds and something called an exchange traded fund, which is entirely run by an AI. It's algorithmic. And this has been around for 10 or 15 years. And now the New York Stock Exchange is a film set. And if you go there today, it's just a bunch of reporters reporting on what the computers are doing. And stock trading is no longer getting the call from the pushy salesman about this really good scoop on such and such stock that you've got to buy. And it's this real scammy thing. I don't think we were taking a lot of our really smartest people and putting them in a room and having them shout at each other to buy and sell. And I don't think that was the best use of those really smart people. And now those smart people are doing other things that are more beneficial for the economy than shouting at each other to buy and sell shares of IBM or whatever. And that's what we're going to see with these other agents, these other sectors. So you buying a ticket for a train, that's not a very emotionally rewarding experience for you to buy that ticket and for the person selling you the ticket, it's not a very emotionally rewarding experience for them either. Right. That's not. Nobody wanted to grow like when they were a kid. All I want to do when I grow up is sell tickets for trainers and answer questions from tourists who are all asking the same stupid questions over and over again. And I've answered this question 500 times this week. And having an AI handle that is going to be better. I think it's going to be slow. I think right now we're in the phase where early adopters like us are playing with it. But right now we're building our own agents. And it's, I think, a good model to look at is the spreadsheet. So back in the 80s and 90s, we'd have Microsoft Excel and you could build your own spreadsheet. And the 2000s have all been about taking features that you could do yourself in Excel and building a whole product around it. And now there's a website that does that thing that Excel could do, but the website is for just one purpose, for one kind of user, and it does that same sort of thing. And I think we're going to see that same thing with AI, because most people don't want to create their own agents. They don't want to create their own personal AI butler. They want to buy an AI butler off the shelf that does just one thing. And so don't feel like you have to learn how to build your own agents in order to use them. You'll just have to wait. And who knows, maybe Joanna Penn will build some AI agents that she can rent out in the future.
- [45:42]
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting to think where it's going to go. I tend to put this in the general category. For example, we've just talked about updating your Goodreads pages or updating your website. Hell, I don't want to do that. So I will just get my admin agent to do that. And right now there isn't one particular thing that can do that. But I can do it with AI, but I'll still have to drive it. Whereas, I don't know. I mean, let's take about. Let's talk about ads as well. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that all you'll need to do on Meta, because, let's face it, meta ads are just awful now. They're so complicated. And what he said is, you'll be able to say, this is my book, this is the page I want to drive traffic to. Off you go. Do all the creative do everything and here's a budget. I don't have to do anything again tool except say this is what I want to sell. That will be great. I think authors will be all over that because most people want to do the writing and they do not want to do the marketing as, as you know. So I think there, there are some great use cases and I, I don't know how long that's going to take. I mean Zuckerberg has said like end of next year, I think 2026.
- [46:53]
Well, it's already here for websites actually. So if listening to Joanna and I talk about websites stressed you out. If you get Divi from elegant Themes, it has AI built in and you can just tell it to build you a homepage and what you want on it and it will just do it. I played around with this a couple weeks ago because I was like, can I really build a webpage? And it did. I was kind of flabbergasted. Then I went in and tweaked and I added and I would copy what it did and add more things to make the page longer. But it's like it's already here and it's already here a little bit. But for advertising, the Amazon auto targeting has gotten a lot better just over.
- [47:28]
The last few months.
- [47:29]
Yeah. And it's self reinforcing. So if you want to understand what machine learning is, there's some really good cartoons on YouTube you can look up. But machine learning is the computer kind of getting better on its own, like improving itself. And these ad engines are using machine learning to get better every month. And so if you tried auto targeting on Facebook or auto targeting on Amazon a few months ago, just realize that they're now better because the machine learning is training the algorithm. There's not some developer at Meta going click, click, click to tweak the algorithm. The algorithm is tweaking itself. Facebook's algorithm has been tweaking itself for over a decade. This is for people who are against AI and they complain about it on Facebook. I hate to tell you this, but you've been using AI on Facebook or.
- [48:16]
Buying on Amazon or any of or using Google.
- [48:20]
It's like Facebook particularly, the entire experience is AI start to finish. It's like, oh, but I don't want you to have AI. I only want this powerful Californian to have AI, not the regular people. It's like, okay, now we're getting to a Class conversation. This isn't really about AI anymore.
- [48:38]
Well, I mean, we could talk about this forever because you and I geek out on this, but there are some people who are like, seriously, how is everything changing so fast? And how are you two so relaxed about the fact that everything is changing? So how are you staying positive and curious? And obviously there are bad things about AI, which, you know, we try and stay on the positive side of things. But any tips for people who need encouragement to keep going in this time of change? You know, they thought they knew the rules, and now it seems like the rules are changing yet again.
- [49:10]
You're not going to believe this answer, but I'm actually going to encourage you to study history because we're not actually living in a time of rapid change compared to what our great grandparents went through. So I have a great great grandparents. My great great grandfather was born in 1880 and the steam engine was new that we were just starting to have the industrial revolution. And when he was a child, the first car rolled into his town, a horseless carriage. And then suddenly there was electric light bulbs and the telegraphs that had already existed when he was a kid. Now there was lines that would go to people's houses and they could actually hear a voice of somebody on the other side of town and even the other side of the country. But it didn't stop there. Then a few years later in his life, something flew over the town that was heavier than air and yet floating in the sky. And before this man died, there was an American putting an American flag on the moon. And that's not to mention radio and the nuclear bomb. And like so much innovation. And then we invented the semiconductor in the 1960s, 1970s, and then the innovation basically ended. And after that it was all of this really slow iteration where the transistors got smaller and smaller, the computers got faster and faster, but there wasn't this big like life changing technology like what we were getting every two years in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until you have kind of critical mass of the transistors where they get cheap enough to enter people's homes. And then we have computers and we have the Internet, but we've had the Internet for a long time. The Internet's not new. It goes back to the 70s in the States. The World Wide Web was developed by a Brit in the 1980s. And then we didn't have much innovation, right. Web pages got a little bit more complicated, animation got a little bit better. Right. Really slow evolutionary change. Then the phones came around and the phone was a big shift, but from a technological perspective, the phone wasn't that different than a computer. It was just smaller. So it was that same trend of smaller and lighter. So in this way, AI is the first time for me to experience the kind of transformation that my great, great grandfather went through, but on a much smaller scale. Right. Like, the tractor was unbelievably disruptive. One man in the town with the tractor could do the work of 10 minutes, which meant that those other nine men had to find something else to do to provide for their families. And what it was was doing things for the farmer, because the farmer was now making almost the same money. So this is the flip side. The people who use AI. There's actually a report just came out yesterday about industries where people are using AI, they're three times more productive and they're making 50% more money on that individual worker perspective. And so just like what happened with the track, there's nothing new under the sun. And the guys who left the farm and started doing jobs for the farmer, those jobs are actually super rewarding. It's things like being a podcaster. I could not have my job of being a podcaster if there wasn't some blessed farmer somewhere in the sun and toil on his tractor making food for me. I can't make food. I can hardly keep my grass alive. I realize in the UK grass just grows on its own, but in Texas, it's a fight. It wants to wither and die in the sun. And so I'm really thankful that I'm not working in the fields like my ancestors did. And yes, there's going to be just some disruption, but the history of technology shows us that technology creates more jobs than it destroys. We were all, 95% of us were working in the fields back in the day, and that was awful, awful work for little pay back breaking. It killed us, literally killed us. And I don't think anybody wants to go back to that. So technology isn't good or evil. People are good or evil. So I'm not afraid of AI. I'm very afraid of humans and what humans will do with AI. But I'm too much of a Texan to let those humans have AI and me not to have AI too. The only thing that can stop a bad man with AI is a good man with AI.
- [53:14]
Or a good woman.
- [53:15]
Or a good woman.
- [53:18]
No, I mean, I think so, too. We need to be on the side of the angels. And the more we're involved, that's the other thing. Obviously, people Listening. Thomas and I are interested in the technical side, but you don't have to be super technical anymore to get involved. And the more creatives and other types of people I think who are getting to grips with these tools, the more they will represent the whole of humanity. So that's why I try and encourage people. But also, you're right, it does make you more productive. And, and also it's a lot of fun. So I have fun with my AIs like every and so, yeah, lots for people to think about, but we're out of time. So where can authors find you and everything you do online?
- [54:02]
So my website is Author Media. That's where you can find all three of my podcasts. And I have a suite of over 30 AI tools that are really easy to use. They're very specific things like an about page builder where you answer a few questions about yourself and it will write a very interesting about page builder for you. Or you upload your book cover and it will analyze the COVID and give you tips on how to make it better or it will create a chapter summary. I even have a tool here called Not a Literary Agent that can review contracts and even like write a rights reversal letter based off of the contract that you signed with that publishing company 10 years ago. And creating book blurbs. There's a bunch of different tools that are there. And my hope with these tools is that they're kind of training wheels for using AI because they're really easy. You just, just answer a few questions and you push a button and that's it. So you don't actually have to be good with AI to try using these tools. And I've gotten just incredible feedback from folks who've tried these out. One, you just upload your book and it creates a strategy for advertising on Amazon, like a five page strategy based off of the content of your book, including who to target and how to target them. So my hope is these will help make you more productive. They're almost all focused on marketing. So they're not gonna help you write the book, they're gonna help you sell the book. Cause that's, that's my focus. If you want to learn how to write the book, listen to Joanna Penn. But novel marketing is more focused on getting more sales for the book you already wrote.
- [55:27]
So those tools. Is that on authormedia.com yes. Yeah. Okay. So that's fantastic. And definitely have a listen to Thomas's podcast as well. Well, thanks so much for joining me today, Thomas. That was great.
- [55:39]
Thank you for.
- [55:44]
Joanna Penn
So I hope you found the discussion with Thomas interesting and that you take it as a positive change that the more perhaps unusual content, the more original content and different kinds of content might be surfaced in an era where paid ads are not so powerful, where an in depth conversation with an AI tool like ChatGPT might lead you to find the perfect book to read or the perfect book to buy as a gift for someone, and where your books might have more of a chance to be discovered. I am personally really looking forward to more granular search, which I think will help those of us who write cross genre rather than in very distinct categories. And this will hopefully mean the days of pure category and keyword optimisation are numbered. So have a listen to my episode on Generative search back in December 2023. Still totally relevant episode 727 links in the show notes and also to Thomas's episode on the Novel Marketing Podcast, which is certainly not just for fiction. So let me know what you think of this episode. Please leave a comment on the podcast show notes@thecreativepenn.com or on the YouTube channel, or email me joannathecreativepenn.com and remember, send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next week it's back to writing craft as I talk about finding your voice, writing across genre, and loving book marketing with Betsy Lerner, who has worked across all areas of the publishing business. 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@thecreativepenn.com podcast 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 the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook fpenauthor. Happy writing and I'll see you next time.