How Readers Find Books Now with Joshua Tallent - ep 39

[00:00:12] Hi everyone, welcome to Talking Tech With Creatives, a podcast where we talk about the intersection of creativity and technology. I'm always eager for my guests and today we're going to talk about creativity, but we're going to talk about data today. We're going to talk about data, we're going to talk about publishing and I've got just a person for you. I've got Joshua Tallent or Firebrand Technologies. Did I get them right?

[00:00:43] That's right. Yeah. Or Firebrand Technologies. I heard Joshua talk at the London Book Fair about data, about GU, SCU, mostly. GU was the one that blew my mind and I was determined to have him on the podcast because that talk at the London Book Fair was aimed at the publishing industry, the publishers and all the people in the publishing world. But I thought this is very interesting.

[00:01:10] This would actually be very useful for authors to know what is going on behind the scene, for indie authors to know what to do with what we have now, which is a new paradigm. We have AI is a new paradigm. Love it or hate it. And I tell you, there's a lot of loving and hating of AI at the moment for different reasons. But I'm an author. I write crime fiction.

[00:01:40] I love my creativity. I love the idea of being creative. I also work in a tech industry as well. So I see both ends of technology and I see the incredible, unimaginable things that AI is going to be doing. In the future. In the future. Currently and in the future, because at the moment we're liking almost where the wild west.

[00:02:07] I'll still call it the wild west at the moment because we're still in discovery phases of what we're doing. We're doing things with it, but I don't think we're even. We're not. We're just at the very beginning of what this thing can do. Then on the other end, you have generative AI. What the AI technology companies did, which was how they script everything, took everything and taught the models how to work.

[00:02:35] And there's quite a lot of issues with that. So now when we have generative AI, it's like the resentment comes from the fact that you've got all this knowledge, collected knowledge from all our resources as creatives, both routine and graphics and all that.

[00:02:55] So I'm not going to tell anybody not to feel what they feel because I feel that, but I also have the fact that we have to accept that this technology is not going away. But it's how we're going to be compensated as creatives and what we need to do as creatives to gain as much as possible from this.

[00:03:20] Having Joshua here is exciting for me because Joshua was talking about things like how we need to make sure that we are ready for how AI will be working in the future because the technology companies are going to be utilizing. They're already utilizing AI anyway, and it's how we're ready for that. So I want to lean forward because I've got to put on my light. I do all sorts of usual things in this forecast.

[00:03:49] My light is dim at the moment. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, you can see me better now. Yeah, so that's it. So I'll tell you something interesting before I go to Joshua and all the questions I want to ask him. So I'm Nigerian. I've got a Nigerian background, and I was speaking to a friend in the capital of Nigeria, Abuja. And we're talking very much into health and wellness. And I was saying that, oh, you can, cocoa powder is very, is as good as that chocolate.

[00:04:18] When you take that chocolate, cocoa powder is good. But we want really good cocoa powder. And I went on Google, and the first thing that came up was the Gemini, the Google AI. And it came up, so I said, so he said, oh, that Abuja did not have, doesn't have cocoa powder. And I said that it can't be possible because there's lots of expatriates in Abuja. So let's check. And I did. And the AI brought out all the information. But let me tell you why this blew my mind.

[00:04:47] And I don't even know whether we're even utilizing this ourselves or not. It was able to bring up this AI chat within Google. I think it's Gemini, was able to bring up the summary of where exactly the indoor supermarket. This is in Nigeria, in Abuja. It brought up the indoor market like a mall. Not only did it bring up that, it was able to list the shops within those, the mall.

[00:05:16] So not only that, whoever, this is what I'm saying now, that there's some countries need, some people need this more than others. It had a WhatsApp number. All I did was I called the WhatsApp number and I said, is this the shop that stocks this? And I was able to speak to someone directly from here. I'm in the UK saying, do you have this brand?

[00:05:45] Because we're looking for a particular brand because we wanted good quality cocoa powder. And they said, yes, they had it. So I called my friend in Abuja when I said, here's all the details. Go get it. And he did. And that's what we're going to be discussing this afternoon. Someone in Nigeria. And he said that shop was tiny. Someone in Nigeria were able to put enough information for the AI to be able to pick it up.

[00:06:13] Not only did my friend, he don't buy one tin. He bought 12 tins. So that's a sale. That's a win for that person. So that's what we're going to talk about again. It's you being found. If you're in business, publishing, whichever way, it's your findability on the system now. Things are changing. And we have to change with it.

[00:06:39] So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Joshua Talents from Firebrand Technologies. And the first question I'm going to ask you is tell us a little bit about yourself, Joshua, and how you came into publishing technology. Yeah. Thanks, Stella. And that's actually, that's a great story. I love that. And we will definitely talk about the value of data and how important that data is. I got my start in book publishing actually at a Bible software company.

[00:07:06] I started as an e-book developer working in Bible software, brand new, fresh out of college, and got a job as an e-book developer. Didn't know anything about publishing. Didn't know anything about e-books even. So I had a theology degree and didn't have any kind of technology, specific technology experience. But I got involved doing that and was an e-book developer for that company for five years. And then I became the manager of the team. And then the Kindle came out in 2007.

[00:07:35] So that was in 2002 when I got started. In 2007, 2008, the Kindle came out. And I was enthralled by this new wave of e-book devices and the idea of e-books on e-ink screens. And so I started making e-books. I actually put a little shingle out and said, hey, publishers, I already know how to make e-books. I figured out how to make a Kindle book in about 30 minutes because I already had the kind of background knowledge of e-book creation and HTML.

[00:08:03] So I just started offering my services on the side. And that eventually grew very quickly. So in 2009, I quit my job and started my own company called e-book architects. We were based in Austin, Texas. We were a U.S.-based e-book creation company. I started it myself in my spare bedroom and grew it to a team of 13 in about five years. And in 2013, we were acquired by Firebrand Technologies.

[00:08:29] They brought us in as an e-book creation department within the Firebrand company. And then in 2013, 2014, things were changing for e-books. And my team started to dwindle in size, thankfully. We didn't end up having to fire a lot of people or anything. But the work was being done in India now. There were a lot of companies that were doing outsourcing. And so it wasn't a U.S.-based company was hard to run. So we ended up shutting down the company or the department now at the end of 2014.

[00:08:58] And I then became the director of education at Firebrand and worked in helping publishers understand technology solutions and how things work and how metadata works and how e-books work. And going to conferences and talking about technology issues that publishers deal with. And then in 2018, I took on the sales role as well. So I'm the director of sales and education at Firebrand. And I do all of the educational things and all the salesy things.

[00:09:25] But my real love is talking to people about books and about technology and the way things can be better. How do you help your books be more discoverable in the marketplace? How do you fix data issues? How do you know what is coming and what needs to be handled? So that's what I do right now. That's fantastic. Fantastic. And the question I'm going to ask you, because you've been in this for quite a long time and there's been lots of changes. I'm not even going to go into AI now. I just want to.

[00:09:56] Publishing industry is a very funny industry. My background is in data, is in technology and all that. And so things are changing. If they're not changing, you're not going to have a job, will you? Over the years, what are the changes you've seen in publishing? Do you think they respond quickly or do you think they'd be slow to respond compared to other industries? I'm curious about this. Yeah, there's a lot of changes. Go on. Yeah, there have been a lot of changes in 20 years.

[00:10:26] E-book formats have changed dramatically and capabilities of e-books. The metadata side of things has changed dramatically in 20 years. Onyx as a format is a metadata standard for how data is delivered in the publishing industry. And that's changed a lot in 20 years. I would caution against the idea of saying, I would never say the whole publishing industry is slow to move, right? Because some companies in book publishing are very fast.

[00:10:51] They know we need to react well to new technology changes and we need to have a plan for how we tackle it. Other publishers and even different parts of the publishing industry are going to react in different ways. If you look at book printing, for example, print-on-demand has grown significantly the last 20 years. The ability to get a book printed the next day after a book is ordered is crazy. 20 years ago, you would have thought that was magic. But you can walk into a bookstore now.

[00:11:21] I remember when they first announced the book machine, that book printing machine. And you walk into a bookstore and there you go. Here's a 20 minutes after you order it. Here's the book printed out for you directly from basically a large copy machine. It's crazy how things have changed. Publishers tend to be cautious. And I think rightfully about new technologies because they want to be careful not to have things get uprooted and have their entire business model changed.

[00:11:50] And publishing is an old industry. Book publishing has changed a lot in the last 200 years. And so publishers are especially careful about making sure that they don't react badly to technology changes. But look at the rise of audiobooks. Audiobooks became very popular a couple of years ago. Not that they weren't around before, but it's a big difference when you don't have to carry around a bunch of CDs or tapes in your car and listen to it on the drive. But you just have your iPod or you have your phone and you can listen to an audiobook downloaded to your device.

[00:12:18] And as audiobooks have taken off, publishers have reacted well to that. They're looking at how do I get more of my books and my backlist converted into audiobooks? And how do I make sure that there's more content available in that format? Accessibility is another thing that's changed a lot. It's not that publishers didn't care about it before, but as the regulations started to come into play, the EAA and Title II here in the U.S. came into play in the last couple of years. Publishers have reacted well and said, okay, yeah, we know this is something we need to be doing.

[00:12:47] Some publishers were already on the ball and had accessibility already built into their e-books. And others had been working on it but hadn't done anything about their backlist. And others hadn't even been aware of it. And everybody, I think, said, okay, yeah, this is important. We're going to do it. How do we do it? Let's figure it out. And they started building processes and updating content. And I think that's indicative of how publishing works. When something is very clearly something that we need to do and everybody's going to react well to it and we're going to figure it out and we're going to work together.

[00:13:17] I also think that's where organizations like the Book Industry Study Group and the Independent Book Publishers Association and the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, these different groups that help bring publishers and industry experts and printers and librarians and everybody together at the same table to have a conversation. How can we build the future of publishing together and not just be reactive but be proactive in that approach? Fantastic. I want to ask you two questions.

[00:13:46] Two things. Number one, because I've got a diverse kind of listeners. So could you explain what metadata is? And then you mentioned some organization. You mentioned EAA. Sorry, the accessibility. EAA for my audience. Metadata is just data about your book. So if you think of your book description, the title of the book, the author name, the price, those kinds of details about your book, that's considered book metadata. Metadata just means data about data about another thing.

[00:14:16] So that's what metadata is in book publishing. You could also include other things that some people don't think of as metadata, but images are a good example. Images are technically part of your metadata. So that kind of comes into play as well.

[00:15:00] The e-book file itself needs to be accessible, which means it needs to be readable by someone who has a disability, who can't see or has some other kind of reading disability. Those kinds of changes to the book content and format are necessary to make the e-book accessible. And then in addition to that, you have to add metadata to your metadata feed, give it to the retail partners, and tell the systems out there, this e-book is accessible in these ways.

[00:15:28] Here's what the accessibility looks like. So there's multiple aspects to this, and for publishers that publish one or two books a year, it's not hard. But when you're publishing 10, 20, a dozen, five dozen, a thousand books a year, it becomes pretty difficult to change systems to develop new ideas. Yeah, that's been an ongoing process the last couple of years as that EAA has gone into effect for publishers to address that.

[00:15:52] So in terms of the work you do, because you're an education, educating publishers and in the technology base, so just tell us a little bit about what your work is exactly. Sure. Firebrand Technologies is a software and services company. We help publishers with the data and the process of publishing. Typically, we work with publishers who are already self-distributed, meaning they're not just a small self-published author.

[00:16:22] They have multiple books. They've got books from different authors. They're working with a distributor or professional distributor to get their books out and available. Or they're self-distributed. They're printing their books in however many copies they're printing, and then they're sending them out themselves and fulfilling those orders. When a publisher gets to that size, they typically need a centralized repository or system where they can manage their data. And that's what Firebrand offers.

[00:16:48] We have systems and services that kind of help publishers maintain their book data and maintain the workflows that help them get the job done. Everything from how do I acquire the right books and how do I do all of the editorial and production work to how do I get my data to retail partners and send it out. So that's the kind of work that Firebrand does. And again, my role is the sales director, so I sell things. But I also am the education director, so I educate about things.

[00:17:15] So I love doing both, but I actually really love the educational aspects of it. I like the selling. I like the idea of selling and using things because that means that do you then look at the analytics and all that? Or how is it when you how do you what? Yeah, so your education part is one bit of it, but the selling part, how does that work?

[00:17:35] That's selling our services to publishers, talking to publishers about the metadata services we offer or about the workflow solutions we offer and helping them understand how Firebrand can help them. Okay, fantastic. So in terms of metadata, because and this is just not about the publishers now. This is about indie authors and when they are inputting all of that information. What are the common mistakes that you think authors or publishers make?

[00:18:02] When it comes to metadata, there's a lot of mistakes that every publisher and author makes. I think a lot of times when it comes to metadata, we misunderstand what it is and we don't see the value in digging deeply into it. And I see a lot of authors. I do a lot of consulting with authors how to do better data, better book data. And I think one of the biggest issues is just not having enough data in your data feed.

[00:18:26] If you're going to, say, Amazon KDP and you're going to put your e-book and maybe your POD book up in Amazon that way, a lot of times authors don't extend the amount, put more product data into that system. They fill out a little bit of it and then put some very simple stuff and then they're done. And they think, okay, I'm done. I'm going to go. Now the book is published. But in reality, metadata is much better when you include more.

[00:18:53] So if a book description has 50 words, that's not enough information for a consumer to make a decision about buying that book. I always recommend add a lot more content to your book description. The same thing for keywords. Maximize the number of keywords that you provide. Make sure you're taking advantage of all the different fields. And I've been pounding this drum for years with publishers as well because publishers are just as bad as authors on this. They often have not in the past put enough data into the system.

[00:19:23] And we're seeing this with AI now especially. More data means better visibility. You have to really add more content into the mix if you want the systems to understand more about your book. So that's, I think, the biggest misconception or biggest problem, metadata mistakes I see authors making and publishers making. You know something? I'm going to go into the rabbit hole with this. So some of my audience might not, but I'm like a geek. So when we talk about metadata and discoverability, right?

[00:19:52] How does that work in terms of the way the technology works? So you have your book description somewhere. I know Amazon has its own algorithm and all this, Google and all that stuff. How does that work? How does that? How is the book discovered? Is it like a machine-readable thing? Is that what the machine is going to go and read at the back end? Yes. So discoverability is going to be impacted by a lot of different variables.

[00:20:20] And it's different in different situations or in different systems. So let's talk about discoverability on Amazon first, and then we can talk about discoverability on search engines like Google and AI engines as well. So when it comes to discoverability on Amazon's systems, their search algorithms are built around the keywords, the title, the author, the book description. They're built around the words that you're providing.

[00:20:45] But it's built around, in most cases, very heavily influenced by the keywords. You definitely on Amazon want to make sure you have good, high-quality keywords. And there's a lot of research that's done about what keywords are better than others and how do you write good keywords. I would highly recommend that every author go read the Kadaxis blog. And I can give you the link for this. It's K-A-D-A-X-I-S dot com.

[00:21:10] Kadaxis is a company that helps publishers with keywords, but their blog is really good because Chris Sim, the guy who started the company, does a ton of research about keywords and how keywords impact the visibility of books. And he has some really good instructions and ideas about how to think about keywords differently and utilize them effectively. So keywords are really important on Amazon because of the way Amazon's search algorithms work.

[00:21:35] It's not the only thing, though, because the title of your book matters and the subtitle of your book matters and the description of your book matters. And there's a lot of variables that go into play in that. But that's Amazon. Let's talk about search engines, the way search engines have been forever before AI. So search engines go out to the web and they bring in lots and lots of data and they index that data or put that data into databases.

[00:21:59] And what the search engines are trying to do is just say this web page over here has these words on it. That's essentially what it is. They're indexing that content into a database. And then if somebody does a search that includes those words in some order, then that page is going to come up as a search result. And there's other things that they take into consideration as well. Search engines will often, especially Google, will look at how popular is that page? Is that a really important page that other people link to all the time?

[00:22:29] This is why Wikipedia, for example, is always highly ranked in the search results because everybody links to Wikipedia because supposedly it's good data. Although I would recommend not counting Wikipedia as good data. But it's a good source of data for a lot of things. So a lot of people point to it and that becomes then a source of information and therefore Google ranks it more highly. So that's important. That actually comes into play when we talk about AI search as well.

[00:22:55] But remember, old kind of standard SEO, standard search engine optimization revolves around making sure you have the right keywords on the page and you're talking about the right words and whatever. What AI has done now to make discoverability even more effective or in some ways maybe even a little bit harder is that AI engines aren't just going out and pulling the data off of those pages and saying this word appears on the page.

[00:23:20] What the AI engine is trying to do is to understand the context of what's being said on the page. They're doing sentiment analysis and trying to understand what is going on that page. Is this a page that helps somebody? Is it an instruction page? Or is it a page about opinions and how the opinion, someone's opinion about something? And it's understanding that context in a way that old search engine optimization never understood.

[00:23:48] That sentiment analysis, that context matters. And that's what the AI engines are now able to do. So when you go to an AI search or you just go to Google and even do a regular search and you see that AI section at the top, the search engine is trying to understand what your meaning is. What is your sentiment? Are you looking for something that will help you follow some steps and get something done? Or are you looking for opinions that might help you understand a topic more effectively?

[00:24:16] And so it's going to try to respond to you with that information based on your sentiment and your question. And it's also looking for, it's trying to help you understand things in a broader way. So it's looking at your question and reading and inferring from your question the context of what you're saying. It's not just going to give you, I use the term Japanese in my search. It's going to give me a list of things that have pages that have the word Japanese. No, it's going to try to understand.

[00:24:43] I'm looking for Japanese cookbooks that have this kind of cooking recipe because that's what I'm trying to cook for dinner tonight. Right. It's looking for specific kinds of things in your search and giving you better responses because it understands the nature of your search. And so there's, that's a big difference now. And so we're talking, when we talk about SEO or search engine optimization, that's still necessary. But GEO is generative engine optimization.

[00:25:09] That's where we're trying to understand the sentiment and help the AI search engines understand what we're saying in a more effective way. So how now, how do creatives, because I don't even want to say authors alone, how do they then get, how do they do this? Yeah. A couple of things.

[00:25:30] And one is, first of all, the difference between I have my own website where I'm talking about my creative work versus I'm only just selling my books on Amazon, maybe using IngramSpark or something like that. And I'm just getting the books out there. I don't have a website. So let's talk about the second option first. I don't have a website. All I'm doing is just selling my books or selling my creative works on other websites.

[00:25:53] In that situation, you want to maximize in those stores as much data as you can within the context of what they provide. So let's say you're a creative that creates artwork and you're selling your art on Etsy. That's great. Go into the Etsy store and maximize the amount of content you put into your Etsy product listings. Make sure that you take into consideration all the best practices that Etsy offers for that purpose. My wife actually has an Etsy store and does this.

[00:26:22] This is a big part of what she does to maximize the amount of visibility her products have within that store. Yeah. And then the same thing for a book. I'm selling a book or I illustrated a children's book or whatever it is. You go into the systems where you're selling that product and you make sure that you're taking advantage of every field. Make sure you understand what the fields are for. Make sure you think about the content that goes in the field.

[00:26:47] Keywords especially, that's one of those areas where we as creative people would write a keyword in a different way than the consumer would search for the keyword. You don't want your keywords to include words that your consumers don't use. Think from your consumer's perspective.

[00:27:04] Understand your key customer profile and all of the kind of understand your audience and use that audience information to help you create better keywords or better book descriptions that actually help people find your book that way. Now, let's say you have your own website. This is where things get even more powerful because in addition to your website being a source of truth about your content or your creative work,

[00:27:31] you also can use the website itself to help drive discoverability in ways that you don't have control of on Amazon or Etsy or some other store. So if you have your own website, there's a lot of stuff you can do to help your website become a center point of information about your creative work.

[00:27:51] A good example of this is publishers or creatives who have blogs on their website, and in that blog, they're talking about topics that people are interested in. Now, that website isn't just a product listing for a bunch of products, but it's a place where people can go to learn something about the industry or the topic or the area that this person really knows about.

[00:28:14] If you specialize in most of your books are fantasy novels, then on your blog, you'll talk about fantasy writing and you'll talk about the characters and the character development that you do. Your blog will reflect the creative output in a way that's different than the book itself. The same thing for art, right? If you're an artist and you love cubist art, then you're going to talk about that on your blog,

[00:28:38] and that's going to become now a source for search engines that are looking for answers to questions about that kind of thing. So you want to think about the website as not just a product listing, not just a place to sell something, but as really the source of information that can be used by other people to learn and grow and benefit from. And you want to think about how the search engines will work at it. So I'm going to keep on talking here unless you tell me to shut up.

[00:29:05] I'm quite happy for you to keep talking, and then I'll, of course, ask more questions. Good. So, yeah, go on. So if, let's say, for example, on that blog or on one of the product pages on your website, let's say you know that certain people, when they're looking for this kind of book, they ask you these questions all the time. They're frequently asked questions. Having those on your website in a structured way helps a search engine,

[00:29:31] especially in a generative AI search engine, have answers to that question. If you answer a question for the search engine, it's going to give your answer as the answer because it knows that's an answer it can just pull directly out and quote you and say, Stella said this is the way it works. Here's a link to the website where she said it. So it's a great way to help the search engines do a better job of finding answers while also making your website be the source of the answer that they cite in that response.

[00:30:01] So there's a lot of other stuff you can do. We can talk about more technical things as well. But I think when it comes to website creation as a creative, you want your website to be more than just information about the products you're trying to sell. You want it to be a source of truth, a source of information, a helpful alternative, a place that search engines will be able to pull information from and use and show as a authoritative source. And quite a few indie authors are now selling direct.

[00:30:31] This would be quite useful for them. Yes. The ones with a good backlog of books. So that will really be quite interesting for them to actually have. I don't know whether people will not think is this more work, but it's going to lead to sales. I will do it. Just add a blog. I love because there was one time where they were saying blogging was dead. It was like dead. Nobody is blogging. Everybody is using audio video. But I feel that people are still reading.

[00:30:59] And I feel that people are still watching whatever. If they go to on any of the social media platforms, they're still watching. I feel like there's different kinds of ways that people are consuming data. And one of them is actually reading. People are still reading. And they are. But also a lot of what we're talking about is discoverability, which has less to do with who actually ends up reading the content and how the search engines respond with that as an option in answer to a question.

[00:31:29] So another example. If I have videos on my YouTube channel and I'm talking about this topic of whatever, I'm really interested in coffee cups. So I have a YouTube channel that shows off different styles of coffee cups through the centuries. I don't know. Just an example. Whenever I'm talking about that on video, the video has a transcript. The AI tool is not going to sit there and watch the video.

[00:31:54] The AI tool is going to look at the transcript of that video and use the transcript as content for its search results. And so you want to have the behind-the-scenes data structured in a way that the system that's doing all the searching and indexing and trying to answer questions for consumers, that it's going to offer the information to that consumer from your source. So again, if it's a video, great. Make sure your videos have transcripts.

[00:32:22] If it's your website, it may be that nobody ever reads that blog post from top to bottom. But if you had a list of bullets in the middle of that blog post because you're talking about a topic and how important this thing is, let me give you five points that you need to remember about this one thing. That's searchable, indexable, interesting, structured information that a web engine, a search engine, is going to be able to use to answer a question that someone might ask about that topic.

[00:32:51] And that means that it's going to be giving your site as the source material, as the authoritative source for that. That's what you want because what you really want, even if somebody never reads the whole blog post, you want the AI engine to say, Stella said such and so about this, and then the user clicks on that to go read your website, and the first thing they see on the website is the blog. But the next thing they see is the book that you're selling that talks about that in more detail or the product that you're selling or the creative work that you have or whatever.

[00:33:20] So it's more than just having a person read a blog post. It's really about the structured data in a way that a search engine system can index in a way that will then answer those questions people have. And you get the sell in the end. Well, we know that it's not that straightforward, but it might result in a sell. I was asking about, you've asked most of this question, but I was thinking about authors.

[00:33:45] There's a lot of challenge with authors at the moment now in terms of what is out there. There's a lot of AI slop out there, AI work that is out there. So there's quite a few authors are complaining, even well-known authors of nonfiction work. We're saying that they've sold less of their book and it's more.

[00:34:08] I have no idea what is really going on, but it looks like the readers, is it that they have more to read or is it discoverability? I don't know if you've heard about Tim Ferriss. What's Tim Ferriss talking about? He's still going down. What do you think that is all about? Yeah. Tim Ferriss, I read his blog. It's a really interesting blog post and I think he makes really good points in it as well about where things might be going for nonfiction specifically.

[00:34:35] You have to remember the kind of content that he writes and what his content is. He had the five-hour body, for example, which I have a copy of and I followed the diet for a long time. It's a great book, has a lot of great information, but it's also very dense and it's a very detailed program of doing this and this other thing. If somebody is looking for a quick answer for how do I lose weight, they're not necessarily going to go looking for that book. They're going to go ask an AI tool, how do I lose weight?

[00:35:02] And the AI system is going to take a lot of information, not just from Tim Ferriss' books, but also from other places. And it's going to aggregate that together and help you create your own custom weight loss plan that will help for your body type, your blood type, and your whatever. And so that's where AI is actually benefiting us in a lot of ways as humans is it can aggregate data in a way that we can't do easily as an individual.

[00:35:28] But for an author like Tim, the problem that he's running into now is that his books are not going to be sold as much because people now can get the same kind of content, the same answers in many ways to the questions from the AI themselves. Is that a problem? Yes, it is potentially a very big problem for certain kinds of authors.

[00:35:50] And AI slop is real and there's a lot of fiction content being put out there now that's just written by AI and it's not very good and things like that. So we have to worry about that as book publishing experts and as authors and make sure that we're competing in that market and providing a better service. And I really think that's what book publishing is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future regardless of AI.

[00:36:15] I think book publishing as an industry is a great tastemaker and gatekeeper system for ensuring that content that is being put out in book form is available in a – that is better, is good quality. If you look at especially – Quality control, right? Exactly.

[00:36:36] And we need that more and more, which is why we need for publishers to be considering how their books are being written by these authors and be vetting whether they're being written with AI or not and being very clear about that when it is. And not to say it's necessarily how horrible are you to use AI to write a book. I'm not going to give a judgment on that. But the question should always – it should always be visible for that purpose. We should always have that.

[00:37:01] But if you're thinking about it, look at what the AI engines are doing in order to feed – the AI systems, the AI companies are doing to feed their engines. They're going and buying books.

[00:37:13] Matter of fact, they're buying – in bulk, buying thousands and thousands, even hundreds of thousands of books, trying to find every book they can that was published before 2022 so that they can find pre-AI books and use them as source material for their AI engines. Why is that? It's because books are a great source of information. And as a great source of information, I don't think that's going to go away.

[00:37:40] I think that authors and publishers still are going to be the best source of good information. If we take the time and we research and we do a good job with the story development, the plot development, the character development, if we take the time to make the content better, then that's going to be still a source of value to the consumers who are looking for something valuable. The AI engines are only as good as the content you put into them.

[00:38:06] So there's still a need for good quality content going forward, and that's where we can be the tastemakers, the gatekeepers, and the content creators to generate that kind of information, generate that kind of content that hopefully will sell books but also will benefit the people who want to use that information in other ways. Yeah, I understand that.

[00:38:26] One of the things that is painful, just pointing out what happened with Tim Ferriss was that the aggregation of information came from books that were scripts anyway. Yeah. Because if they didn't have those books that are scripts from Tim Ferriss and all the kind of books that authors wrote, there wouldn't be any aggregation. Sure. Yeah. So that is quite painful for authors. Yeah. We have to deal with that. Yeah, it is. And I totally understand it.

[00:38:53] And from Tim's perspective, too, in addition to the five-hour body book that he wrote, there's a whole group of people on Reddit who have been using that book and doing their own testing, their theories themselves on their own diets. And all of that data is online. So in addition to the book content that was pulled out and scraped and used potentially inappropriately by the AI companies, there's also all this other information that now is aggregated for it.

[00:39:21] So now if you go to an AI search engine and you ask it specifically about the five-hour body, it can not only give you results from the book itself, but all the other data it's collected from other people who talked about it. So there's, again, there's a benefit to a person who is looking for a good diet and I'm looking at the five-hour body idea and has this actually worked? How did it work? What's the results of it working? It's not just what was in the book. It's now all this other data.

[00:39:47] But again, this is where I think certain parts, certain types of book publishing are going to be deeply affected by this. Self-help is obviously going to be deeply affected by AI in ways that other parts of publishing might not be. But that doesn't mean, I don't think that means that we stop publishing those kinds of books. I think it just means we need to be, we need to adapt and figure out how the content we publish is more effective and more helpful to the people to answer the questions that they're still having or that they have about those topics.

[00:40:17] So do you think, because this one came up in the community as well, do you think building, I know Tim Ferriss has a very strong community around him. Do you think that authors or creatives need to build a different kind of community? Do we need to niche down? Would that be less sales? Would it take for easy to pull loyalty to yourself? Because it looks like that's more like it now.

[00:40:44] I think it really depends on the author more than it depends even on the content. Look at Brandon Sanderson. He's a fiction fantasy author who has a very big following and now owns his own publishing company because he publishes so many books. He has done a great job of building a following of people who love to read what he writes. And he writes really well. I've read his books. It's great. And it does a great job with it. Same thing with Matt Deniman, who wrote the Dungeon Crawl of Carl series, right?

[00:41:11] That's another series, a lit RPG series that sure, there's other lit RPG authors out there. But Matt Deniman has become a stellar example of the kind of person who just loves to write that kind of content and people love to read what he writes. He doesn't have to have – Sanderson has a community and I think a curated community in some ways that Deniman didn't and doesn't necessarily have. But it's different for them because of their different approaches to publishing and what they're doing.

[00:41:40] And you look at others. There's a lot of other authors out there that some of them are really stellar and they don't want to talk to people. Or great authors that don't want to have a community or build a community. I'm going to write this book and I'm going to write this other book and I'm going to write this next book and I'm going to do a really good job of that. But I am not the kind of people person that wants to be out there in the public eye or having a community. And other authors and other small publishers even are building those communities because they see value in having those conversations and building out that network.

[00:42:09] So I think it really depends on what your personal perspective is or personal proclivities are. If you're an author that doesn't have a community and really is having a hard time building one, it might benefit you to work with a publisher, to talk to a publisher about if your books are selling, if they're doing well, then that publisher can help you build the community. That publisher can help you.

[00:42:29] This is where, again, smaller publishers benefit authors in many ways that bigger publishers can't because the smaller publishers, because they're so niche, they know their market really well and they're able to target that market and have the same benefit to multiple authors that a single author would have a hard time doing. So there's a lot of benefit in kind of building those communities around multiple authors, not just around one. And that's where smaller publishers can help. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:42:59] So in terms of community, do you think, yeah, I know you talked about building them across multiple authors, but do you think it favors authors to actually build communities? I think it favors. I'm putting you in a spot in a way. Again, I think it depends on the author, right? If you don't have the people personality, if you're not the kind of person who can have a really easy conversation with anybody and just build that community natively, you're going to have a harder time.

[00:43:28] And it may not benefit you to take that time and do it. I've talked to a lot of authors over the years in doing consulting and working with them on different projects that a lot of authors that don't have the time for that even. I've got a day job. I've got a day job and I write books in my spare time and I'm trying to build my brand and build my book catalog, but it's hard and it's not something I have a lot of time to do. Where do I focus my energy? Is community the most important thing? I would say probably not.

[00:43:52] Metadata is probably more important to an author who doesn't have a lot of time because you want your book to sell and that means good quality metadata and better quality writing and good quality artwork and those kinds of things are more important than the community. But if you can build a community easily, if you're working in authoring topics and content that naturally leans toward community building, then definitely try to do that if you can. And what does that community look like? It might be different for you than it is for somebody else, right?

[00:44:20] Some people are very great on camera and TikTok is a great place to build that community. And other people are bad on camera. I want nothing to do with a camera. Don't put me on a phone. I hate selfie mode on my phone, whatever. And so they're not likely to do very well in the TikTok world. And that's fine. It really is about where are people, consumers, engaging with that content? And can you engage them better as building community around that? Or are your efforts better spent doing something else?

[00:44:49] That's a good one. I'm looking at smaller publishers and independent authors. And I wrote a question about them competing. Really, no, it's not really about competing with larger publishers when it comes to technology and discoverability. How they survive or how they use technology. Are the bigger publishers, I know the publishers are different. Are they responsive to all of this?

[00:45:16] Or are the smaller publishers and independent authors more agile from your own experience? Yeah. Bigger publishers tend to have bigger systems. And in some ways, it's not about agility at that stage. It's really about the kind of the systems they've built that allow them to get books out into the market in a way that a smaller publisher can't. I think systems work is important for smaller publishers.

[00:45:40] You need to make sure that you're not just using print on demand, that your books are available through normal buying channels. You need to make sure that you have the visibility and the marketing work that's going into it and publicity work that's going into it. If you look at larger publishers, most of it's systems work.

[00:45:58] They've built up these systems and processes and people over the years that have now given that now give them with every single book they publish the ability to tap into the resources they have internally and externally that help them make those books successful. But if you look at books that are sold, a lot of small publishers sell more copies, more units of a book than larger publishers do for many of their imprints. A lot of most books that are sold today, I think, sell less than 5,000 copies in their lifetime.

[00:46:28] It's not a lot of books that are sold, honestly, single copies of books that are sold. And publishers know that, so they focus all of their attention on the big books, the ones that they know are going to do well and the ones that have been authors that are proven and things like that. So I think that smaller publishers and independent authors can compete directly with larger publishers on technology if they're not afraid of technology.

[00:46:52] And if they're not afraid of building systems and building workflows and building the right connections and using systems that are already in place to help them do that. This is where I see independent distribution as a really great solution as well for smaller publishers.

[00:47:06] If you work with a distributor, say Simon & Schuster Distribution or IPG or CDC if you're a university press or whatever, if you're working with a distributor, you're gaining the benefit of the multifaceted aspects of book publishing that they represent.

[00:47:23] They are essentially aggregating a bunch of small publishers together into a single group that gives them buying power and flexibility and meeting the demands of the market in the way a big publisher does on their own. That's the benefit of book distribution, and a lot of small publishers shy away from that or don't build their business in such a way that the distributor will want them to come in and use their services because distributors have to be careful about who they pick up and what they do.

[00:47:51] So I think there's a lot of things that small publishers and independent authors can do to compete directly with large publishers, but you have to do it on purpose. There has to be purpose behind the movement. You have to actually take the advantage where the advantage is and not consider yourself an outsider. You're not an outsider. If you're publishing, you're not an outsider. You're part of the publishing world. But how do you help take advantage of the same systems and processes that those larger publishers are taking advantage of themselves?

[00:48:18] So when you talk about, give me an example, because you talked about systems and workflows. Do you have an example, the kind of scenario of a system with workflow that we can picture? Yeah. Again, part of that is things like book distribution, right? If you're an independent author and you are dedicated to being an independent author only and never working with a publisher, then if you want to succeed the way a publisher succeeds, you need to act like a publisher even if you're not one.

[00:48:47] You need to think about the systems and the processes that they do. How do they do book publicity? How do they do marketing? Are they using NetGalley to get their book out there and visible to book readers and reviewers? How are they getting their book distributed? Can you become essentially a publisher as an author and take advantage of those same workflows and processes? I would say the same thing for a small publisher. A lot of times small publishers, especially very small publishers, are still using print-on-demand as the only option,

[00:49:16] the only way that they make their books available. And I think that might be problematic for book buyers because bookstores don't often want to buy books that are very clearly POD because it runs into concerns about the quality, but also it's questions about how available is this? How quickly can I get the books? Do I have to be printed right before or whatever? So there's things like that come into play. So look at your books that you're publishing and see,

[00:49:40] is this book going to be good enough that I could get 5,000 copies printed and make it available as a book in the broader market? You just have to think about the systems that are there and take advantage of them the same way. And again, that's where book distribution comes into play as well. If you can, as a small publisher, get connected with a book distributor, they're going to give you access to some of those systems that you wouldn't have access to before. And it's going to give you the opportunity to compete on that same level

[00:50:08] because they already have aggregated enough other publishers into their system that they have access to the kind of the broader workflows and processes. And I noticed at London Book Fair that quite a few technology companies or whatever that were exhibiting, some of them were exhibiting or selling automated workflows. So would that work for someone? The last London Book Fair was about AI, using AI.

[00:50:38] Do you have any comments on that at all? Yeah, I think there's always going to be companies at book publishing conferences that are talking about new AI tools or new tools of this or that. And I would say, as someone who works for one of those companies, right? I work for Firebrand. And our solutions are not for independent authors. We don't have solutions that work at Firebrand Technologies for independent authors

[00:51:02] because our software is made really around other kind of small publishers and larger. And that's just the way our systems are built. There are other companies out there that are doing really innovative, really interesting things. And I think authors can benefit from that. So when you go to a book fair and you're talking to a technology company or you're surveying the landscape of book technology, it's always good to know what your needs are and your own requirements. Like, what are you struggling with first?

[00:51:30] And don't get caught up in shiny, shiny answers to the questions, but know your needs first and go looking for solutions to those needs. And then look at the research, look at the company itself and say, is this technology company actually doing something? Have they been around for a while or are they fresh off the boat? Do they have successes? They have other companies like mine, other publishers like me, other authors like me that they're working with that are finding success using this tool.

[00:51:56] If there's success behind it and people are talking about it as a successful tool, then yeah, that's a great, maybe a great opportunity for you. But just be careful about brand new stuff that it's big and shiny and has the word AI in it. Just because it says AI doesn't mean it's necessarily any good. Yeah. So I want to ask you a question on GEO because at London Book Fair, you talked about, and I've forgotten the name of the site, that people need to have structured dates, structured data or information.

[00:52:25] And you talked about a website where they could actually learn how to do it. And I forgot the name of that website. Do you remember? So I was probably talking about JSON, about schema.org JSON data. I think, yes, schema. Yeah. So schema.org. Yeah. S-C-H-E-M schema.org is an international standard, website standard, that is for structuring data on websites. So we were talking earlier about I've got my own personal website with I sell my books on it.

[00:52:54] Maybe I've got a blog and I've got some other pages or articles or whatever. Every page on your website behind the scenes, hidden in the HTML, in the code of the website should have structured data that engines, computer systems can read and index. And there's different types of structured data for different types of pages. So blog posts, for example, there's a structured schema.org structured data that's just for blog posts,

[00:53:21] that describes what's the blog post about, what's the article about, what are the key points, whatever. It's got a bunch of little data fields that when an AI system or a search engine comes and reads your website, your webpage, it can pull that information out and say, oh, okay, now I understand at least the basics of what this page is about. The same thing is true for book product pages. So if you go to your website and you've got a product page and it's got your book cover and it's got your title, author, the price, the buy now button, the book description, all of that data.

[00:53:51] All that data that a person sees is not structured data in a way a computer can see it. And that's what json schema.org data can do. On that product page, hidden behind the scenes is some code in the schema format that allows the reading, the system trying to read that page to know the price of this book is $9.99. It is a book product. Here's the ISBN. Here's the name of the author.

[00:54:17] It's structured data, almost the same as metadata we send in Onyx or other formats out to retail partners, but it's that structured data that is readable by a computer system. So it's helpful. It really is helpful for helping the computer systems know this is what the page is saying and what the information is about on it. So for those that are tech savvy or who would ask for help from people to do this, when they, so let's say something like WordPress, for example, I've got a WordPress and I build my own websites.

[00:54:47] So let's say someone like myself, what do I do with a WordPress? Because sometimes I feel it's quite rigid in a way. And I might not, I don't, I've not even gone to look behind to see what is there, but I don't know whether, do I have access to that? I haven't checked. Yeah, you probably will need to add a plugin to your WordPress site that will help you add schema data to your pages. And there's plugins, tons of plugins available for that. The same thing with Shopify sites or any other kind of website.

[00:55:14] You want to make sure you understand and go read the documentation and see what kind of data is already being added. You can also add a plugin or an extension to your browser. I have one on my browser. It's a schema reader plugin. You can get it for free. And that extension, if you go to the website and you pull up the page, you can click on the extension and it'll show you a little box that says, okay, here's all the schema data that's on this page. And here's the things that are missing. It's got a good score. It's got a bad score, whatever.

[00:55:42] So there's, yeah, there's really easy to figure this stuff out. You never should have to actually go look at the code on your WordPress site and figure out if it has schema.org. You should be able to use a plugin to do that and add that data where it needs to be. And then have the ability to understand JSON, right? Correct. Yeah. And JSON is not hard to understand. It's not a really difficult format, but it's not something, it's computer language, right? So let the computers talk to computers. Yeah. So if you're kind of computer literate and you understand it, go do it.

[00:56:10] If you're not, go ask for your web designer to do that for you. So we're like, we're not getting to the very end, but we're getting to it. So I want to talk about your, oh, before I go that. Ah, okay. This question, like, I know you've answered quite a lot, but I'll ask you this question. What changes do you think AI and new technology will bring to publishing over the next few years? That's a great question.

[00:56:35] I'll try to have to be Nostradamus here and do some predictions and analysis. I think AI is going to continue impacting book publishing. It's very clear that it will. And I think the impact that it has on book publishing will depend a lot on how book publishers respond. Most book publishers today are looking at AI and trying to figure out how can we use it effectively without it hurting our business? How can we use it ourselves internally for workflows and data creation and things like that?

[00:57:04] But also, how do we react to it in the market? And trying to have really deep conversations about the possible problems that come with AI. I think every publisher should be involved in those conversations. We should all be engaged in the organizations that are working on the problem and trying to help find solutions for it. Working with, if you're with the Authors Guild or you're with IBPA or BISG or whoever, all of those organizations are having these conversations. So get involved and make sure your voice is heard.

[00:57:31] I do think that new technology changes every day. We've been dealing with this for decades now. It's not AI is any different in that regard. I would caution anyone against being too skeptical about AI in such a way that you actually ignore it. There's no benefit in us ignoring it. It's here. It's here to stay. And we have to deal with it. So let's engage with it in some way. Do I know what's going to happen in the next five years or the next two years even? Maybe even what happens tomorrow?

[00:58:01] No. I have no idea what's going to happen with technology. I think it'll become harder to sell books in some ways and easier to sell books in others. I think it'll be harder to be an author in some ways and easier in others. And we're seeing changes in even authors who are being accused of writing with AI when they say, no, of course I didn't use AI for this. So it's going to be a mixed bag and we're going to have to deal with the problems and the consequences that come with that. Be adaptable. That's my best suggestion. Be adaptable.

[00:58:29] Do you think this will affect, which I believe, but I'm going to hear what you have to say across all creative formats. So we're talking about Hollywood is already impacted. So tell me about other creative industries that, you know, just your own personal knowledge about how do you think this could. Because, I mean, look at Spider-Man came out six days and made $1 billion. I was gobsmart. I love Spider-Man. Yeah. Made $1 billion.

[00:58:55] So it's like the spectrum is one is diving, the other one. It's so hard to understand. It's a bit confusing. What's your thought on that? Think of, OK, so the movie industry specifically has been benefiting a lot from AI in ways that I think, honestly, what we're seeing with AI is just the tip of the iceberg of what it can do. And in some ways, we've been leading up to it with other technological improvements. AI didn't come out of nowhere.

[00:59:23] The capabilities of AI that we see today have built upon the earlier technological improvements. A great example of this, I think, in the movie industry is how The Mandalorian was filmed. Are you familiar with how they did the filming of The Mandalorian? I've heard of it. I don't even know. There's really good videos that kind of show how they did this.

[00:59:43] But they used this system, this gaming engine called Unreal Engine, as a way of creating backdrops, backgrounds behind the actors that are on a massive LED screen. So instead of, you think in the first season of The Mandalorian where he lands on that ice planet and he's walking over to the town from where he landed his spaceship, that entire scene was done in a soundstage without CGI.

[01:00:10] It wasn't computer-generated after-the-fact green screen effects and whatever. It's the actor on a soundstage actually with a massive TV screen behind him, basically, that is tied to the camera. And as the camera angle changes, the angle on the background is changing to match the camera angle and make it look like the guys walking down this ice path.

[01:00:35] It's things like Unreal Engine as an engine is really powerful and a really great tool. And it made it so much cheaper to make that really high-quality TV show in a way that it would have been impossible to do 10 years earlier. And the same thing is true for other types of creative work that we're seeing as well. Look at how Adobe has implemented AI now in all of their products and especially in their image tools and graphic tools.

[01:01:02] You can do the same thing now on your iPhone that five years ago they were talking about as part of Photoshop. It was like, oh, you want to take that person out of the photo? Just kind of cut a thing around them. The AI will fill it in for you. I can do that on my phone now in my Photos app. So it's all advancing and the technology is going to continue advancing and changing and it's going to have an impact on creative people.

[01:01:26] How can you be creative and take advantage of the creativity that you have as a human while taking advantage of the tools that are being given to you? I have a really good friend who is working on a series of Dungeons & Dragons books and all of the stories that go into creating a world, a D&D world. And he's doing this because he's really interested in this and he's building a lot of characters out of it and monsters that you fight and all this other stuff.

[01:01:56] And he's a very creative person and he's using AI to help him enhance his creativity and use his creativity more effectively. So there's so much value in thinking of yourself as a creative person, as a human, as using tools that benefit you. What is that? What are the tools that are going to benefit your creativity in the most effective ways? And take advantage of those tools, whatever they happen to be. Fantastic. Because I was going to even ask about authors.

[01:02:24] I know, like you said, we talked about different kinds of authors. There are authors. I'm a very curious author. And I don't believe in just one medium. So at some point, do you think some authors like myself will be able to, I'm actually playing with different mediums at the moment. But do you think because we have all the tools now, we can like. Yeah. Play around. Why not? Yeah. I know an author that is doing trailers. She's writing scripts. She's Jonah Penn of Creative Penn. She's doing lots of experimentation at the moment.

[01:02:54] She's bringing some of our work to life using AI tools. Yeah. If you think of yourself just as an author, then you limit your creative capabilities, your creative output to just writing books. If you think of yourself as a creative person, then what are you doing? Let's say you love writing fiction. You love writing fantasy novels. That's the kind of content that you really love writing. You're not a fantasy author. You're a fantasy content creator, right?

[01:03:21] And maybe your main medium is books, but that doesn't mean you can't take that medium and turn it into something else. A great example of this, I think, for authors to consider is if you're writing a novel, you're building a world. Now, that world, if you're just writing literary fiction, it could be the current world you live in. That's the modern American whatever. If you're writing historical fiction, it's the historical world, the setting of that story.

[01:03:45] If it's fantasy or it's sci-fi or whatever it is, it's going to be world building for you as to what it is that you're trying to get across. What's the world that you're building? If you go and take, let's say you sit down with ChatGPT or something and you start having a conversation with that AI tool, you can help use that tool to help you build your world, right? You can take advantage of the capabilities of these AI systems to help you think through the things you're missing.

[01:04:13] It's not that you're less creative because you're asking it questions, but you're more creative because you're having it help you figure things out that you never would have thought of on your own. And that's the benefit of AI tools, I think, in a lot of creative work is helping us be more creative and think more expansively and take advantage of the capabilities of those tools around us.

[01:04:36] There's been a lot of news in the last couple of weeks about AI tools that are finding solutions to math problems that mathematicians have struggled with for generations, right? 40, 50, 60 years, people trying to come up with proofs that they couldn't figure out. And the AI tool working with the mathematician was able to find an answer, and that's the key. It's still working with the creative person. It's still using the person is still the one directing. It's still the one doing.

[01:05:06] We're not to the point yet where AI is doing its own thinking. It still needs you, and you need to use it in a way that's going to help you be more creative. And I think that's going to be the future use case for a lot of authors and other creative people. Thank you so much. You've given us so much. It's incredible. So I know you've got the Booksmart podcast. Can you tell us a little bit about the podcast, what you've learned from some of the conversations?

[01:05:33] I listened to one on bookshops today, and it was quite a nice, a good way of looking at book and distribution, looking at it through data. So tell us a little bit about the podcast. Sure. It's just a monthly 20-minute podcast, typically with somebody in the book publishing world that's on the more technology side of things, although I have conversations with other people as well.

[01:05:57] The one you're talking about is I talked with someone from Books A Million in one of the latest podcast episodes about bookselling at Books A Million and how Books A Million came about. They're celebrating a big anniversary this year, so we talked a little bit about that. It's really about the benefit that booksellers bring to book publishing and kind of the way booksellers can work. And so I think there's a lot of value in thinking about different aspects of book publishing. So that's what Booksmart is really about, is me trying to talk to smart people and learn more about book publishing.

[01:06:28] Good. So you guys go out there and listen to it. I found it very interesting looking at it from that perspective. Yeah. So I've got two kind of questions that I want to ask. These are my last questions, and then we're going to be asking about how people can reach out to you if they want to in terms of discovery. And it might be publishers that are listening to this. So question that I'll be asking everybody at the first one is, what gives you hope about the future of creativity?

[01:06:57] I really think human beings are awesome. And as creativity is a human trait, and obviously AI tools can help us be more creative, but human beings are uniquely creative. I am convinced 100% that regardless of whatever technology tools we develop, we will always have more creativity in the end. And I really do think that there's a special human creativity that we can't replicate.

[01:07:25] Yeah, that gives me hope that there's always going to be something more interesting, more exciting. And I love seeing every single creative person I know and people I don't know even who obviously are who are creating new things and thinking about new ideas and taking that and putting it into practice somewhere. Nice. That's fantastic. In fact, you've answered the two questions. So, okay, I'm going to just throw this question at you.

[01:07:50] You think that some we haven't thought of, and I will be like, this synergy of AI and human, and you come out from some kind of Gen Z in their basement somewhere. Yeah, it always happens, right? Things come out of left field. I do think most of the technologies we have today are built on earlier technological grounds. It's not like AI came out of nowhere.

[01:08:18] We've been talking about machine learning for years. There was a publishing conference 10 years ago where we talked about machine learning and early AI tools before any of the chat GPT kind of stuff came out. We've been talking about this forever, so it's not new. It's just now it's more visible. So will something come out of left field? Probably. Will it include some combination of AI and human creativity? More than likely, yes. Is everything going to go down a tube and everything is horrible? No, I don't think so.

[01:08:46] Again, I have a lot of faith in the creativity of human beings. From my perspective, we're made in the image of God, and we have a unique ability to be creative in a way that He is creative. And so I see that as the very powerful part of the whole conversation. But yeah, new interesting things, there will always be something new and interesting, always something that's crazy and out of left field. And I'm looking forward to it. I think it'll be great. Fantastic. That's a sign of a curious mind. Yeah.

[01:09:13] So where can people connect with you? Yeah. Where are you? You can find me on LinkedIn, Joshua Talent, T-A-L-L-E-N-T on LinkedIn. I'm on Firebrand Technologies. Our website is firebrandtech.com. And then the Booksmarts podcast is at booksmartspodcast.com. So yeah, always happy to be available and answer questions publishers and people have. Oh, Joshua, this has been a massive... I'm so happy that I got everything I wanted out of you.

[01:09:44] Thanks so much. This has been incredible. Thank you so much for coming to the podcast and I look forward to publishing this and listening to you, going back and listening to our conversation. So thank you. Thank you for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you. That was Joshua Talent or Firebrand Technology. It was a brilliant conversation, one that I've been waiting for a long time.

[01:10:10] I really wanted to just understand the mechanics of publishing, of metadata and all the technology that goes behind that. And of course, of the internet. So this is just a connection between the technology tools we have and how they get their information. So I hope it's useful to you, the publisher who even haven't heard about Firebrand technologies or what they do.

[01:10:37] At least this one is a good one for you to take into consideration. And yeah, there's going to be lots of changes coming in the future. So I'm looking forward to really helping the community in terms of the technology and how we iterate and how we manage it in this new world that is coming. So thank you for listening to the podcast and bye-bye. Till next time.