Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence in publishing, but today we're talking to Elizabeth Ann West of Sudowrite on how authors can benefit from an AI writing partner.
Today we explore AI as a writing partner with Sudowrite's Elizabeth Ann West. We'll discuss AI as it relates to derivative works as well as potential copyright implications of AI-generated text. Just as a great writing partner can help you bust through when you're stuck or be a sounding board to bounce ideas off of, Sudowrite can make writing more fun, faster, and less solitary.
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Kevin Tumlinson [00:00:01]:
You just tuned in to the hippest way to start and grow your indie author career. Learn the ins, the outs, and all the all-arounds of self-publishing with the team from D2D and their industry-influencing guests. You're listening to Self-Publishing Insiders with Draft2Digital.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:20]:
Oh, hello. We are officially live. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us at DDD Live today. As you may have already realized, I am not Kevin Tomlinson. I'm Jim Azevedo. I'm the Corporate Communications Manager here at Draft2Digital. I am joined today, I'm so excited, we're so excited, to welcome Elizabeth-Ann West from Sudowrite. Hello, Elizabeth. Hello, everyone.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:00:49]:
Hi. Thanks for having me, Jim. Oh my gosh. And you know, Kevin's great too, but I'm glad you're here today. Yeah, well, thank you for that. I appreciate that. And so either usually
Jim Azevedo [00:00:59]:
Kevin, Mark Lefevre, or Dan, but you got me. I got you. So we're all excited to have you. AI is having a moment right now. It's big time. So before we jump into the nitty gritty of all this, let's kind of take a step back and set a little bit of foundation here. Tell us about you first, Elizabeth, so our viewers can get to know you a little bit. So a lot of people will know me in the indie world as EAW.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:01:32]:
I've been a forum warrior since the early 2010s. So 2011, I published my first book. And I've been around, I've been publishing, I was a book marketer for a while in the middle there. And then my big claim to fame is I write Jane Austen fan fiction, which is like your favorite TV show never being canceled. And I was 1 of the early authors doing some different pricing. So I sell my books for 999 in the store. I had a membership site since 2015. So I've always been an author that really was excited about the digital aspect of digital publishing and staying on the forefront of like the latest technology tools and then sharing those with other authors about how to use them, how to take advantage of them. You are a pioneer. You are a fearless pioneer. Well, I mean, failure is just a way to find out the wrong way to do something. You're that much closer to finding out the right way to do something.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:24]:
Right. And experimentation is so important. And it's also, when I say fearless, I mean, you're 1 of those people who are like, hey, here's this new tool. This could be really, really helpful. This can be a time dump. I'm going to jump in and try to break this thing and fail miserably, but then pick up myself and kind of dust myself off and see what worked and what didn't.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:02:45]:
That's my favorite way to do things. Absolutely. Just like that.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:48]:
Yeah, I break things all the time, as people at D2D know. Yeah. So tell us a little bit now, for the folks who have never heard of Sudowrite, Tell us a little bit more about the company, what it is, what it does, who it's for, that sort of thing.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:03:07]:
Sure. I started using Sudowrite actually as an author in November of 2021. There's a group of us that we're like a sorority, like We know our pledge mom and our pledge grandmom. So I think Karen Brown shared it with Christine Breen who shared it with me. So we were there on the early ground floor where it's starting. It was founded by Amit Gupta and James Yu. So they're actually speculative fiction authors. So they were really big in tech and they've done other tech companies and things like that. And then during the pandemic, they started using Da Vinci, the early, early algorithms to make kind of like a toy that they were enjoying amongst themselves. And then they decided, well, this could help a lot of more authors. Let's see if we could expand it. And that's a Sudowrite. And I think they went live in June of 2021, like wide open. And then, like I said, I started in November of 2021. In November of 2021, I was working on a book called A Test of Fire, which was just, I just wanted Mr. Darcy as a fireman, like you do. I just wanted him to have a fireman moment. So I wanted him to carry Elizabeth Bennett out. And so I was describing another ballroom scene. And I think a lot of authors can relate to this. If you write genre fiction, you're going to write the same scenes over and over and over again. And you even like get self-conscious about it a little bit like have I already described a chandelier this way? Have I already described the opulence of the room this way? I clicked the little describe button for the Meritan ballroom, so to speak. And describe on Suterite will give you all 5 sensory details plus a metaphorical 1. 0, wow. To help if you Yeah, exactly. It kind of it's like a transport, kind of transportation device, Because it takes you right into the scene and gives you all of these scents and smells and sounds and stuff that you might not be able to think about or conjure up when you're sitting at your desk. And it talked about the cloying scent of tobacco with a honeyed, something honeyed, and I turned that into molasses. But anyway, I took tobacco and molasses. I never would have thought to put the scent of tobacco in there or talk about tobacco because we live in a tobacco-free society for the most part. It just never dawned on me. So I published the book and 1 of my mentors, he was a New York Times bestselling author, checked out the preview and he was like, oh my goodness, you had me with those details about the tobacco in the back of my throat. I felt it. And I was like, that was the robot. So that was my first foray into Sudowrite and realizing that the junior writing partner actually had the ability to help me become an even better writer than what I was on my own. So the parent company of Sudowrite is human++ and human's the most important part, and we look at AI as enhancing human abilities.
Jim Azevedo [00:05:43]:
Wow, that's powerful. I was just thinking about like an early, early, early James Patterson book from way back. And I was thinking just yesterday, like what got me into him probably 20 plus years ago. But I remember some of the scenes and it was like, wow, you can smell the gunpowder in the room. Or if you got attacked by a villain or if the protagonist was attacked by a villain, you could feel the pain of that blunt force trauma in the back of the head when he came up behind the corner. Like all these things where you're so viscerally there.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:06:19]:
And sometimes it's hard to conjure that up, especially if you're, you know, maybe you're a morning parent, you have health issues, or it's just a busy time of year, or you're on deadline. So the AI is there to help you. And that helps us give a better experience to our readers because at the end of the day, that's who it's really all about. It's not so much about how the book gets written. It's about who it's for and what their enjoyment is going to be or what their experience is going to be. That's what we're stewards of. Sure. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the, without going into the weeds, I'm sure it's hard not to, but can you talk a little bit more about
Jim Azevedo [00:06:54]:
the technology and how exactly it works? Because if I type in some kind of a prompt to help me, you know, kind of break the chains and just get rolling with my story. How, how does it work? How does it help me? What's it?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:07:10]:
Best way I teach people how it works is your keyboard on your phone. If you start texting someone and you type in the letters TH, you know how your keyboard will start trying to predict what word you want it to do? Sure. Yeah. Like it'll say thanks or that's or this or if you're texting somebody's name, for example, if I type CH, it thinks I'm going to say my sister Christine rather than a different word. Those same predictive algorithms are what the AI is right now. It looks at words as like a token. A token is roughly 4 characters. It's doing like a slot machine prediction thing of it's looking at the context and it's predicting what could be the next token, or in our minds, our next phonic, and then going, okay, so smiled might be, in a particular sentence, for example, smiled might be 7% most likely to be the next word, and support is the more frequent 1 at 23%. The AI makes a decision of which 1 is going to pick based on your dials and your settings, whether you want it like, you know, really off the rails, really creative, or if you want it to be very strict. And so it's really just like a predictive word machine. And so that's why your prompt really matters. If your prompt is basic, if I say describe a rosebed and you put in describe a rosebed, the AI is going to give us material back that looks like, you know, 2 middle schoolers copying off of each other on the homework assignment before the class. But if I say, describe a Victorian rosebed that's been abandoned for 50 years, and you say, describe a rosebed at a tech plaza, now you see how those prompts are very unique, and we're going to get very unique writing out of the AI from those prompts. Making your prompt unique and unique to your story and your branding and your tone is absolutely important.
Jim Azevedo [00:08:55]:
Does the system actually give the writer prompts too? Does it tell you if you're starting from the beginning of a story or or a scene or is there anything like that to kind of help guide you along if you're just brand new to the software?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:09:10]:
So Sudowrite we have a bunch of classes that you can learn live with me. We also have a bunch of tutorials on YouTube. We have a brand new product right now called Story Engine that is coming out. It's in limited beta right now, but you can go from brain dump to summary, to characters, to outline. And then from the outline, there's an interstitial step there where it's coming up with commands for the scene, which is kind of a new concept of writing with AI, thinking about your scene as a set of step-by-step instructions for your characters or the junior writer to do. And then you click a button and it will write 2, 000 to 3, 000 words for you of that scene. You can control the tone, you can control what style it is. And we're even working on tooling in the future, the very near future, of where you'd be able to get it your own writing. And then the AI processes that and figures out, well, what style or what tone is this particular author? And then you could actually apply that to your story engine story if you wanted to. Wow. It sounds like it's almost learning your voice, like your unique voice, if it's going to put it into your tone. It won't learn it. It's more of like it could define it. And if it can define it, then it can follow that definition. We're not quite at the level yet where we have large language models or anything like that that can quite learn us. I mean, you would have to have a lot of data sets for that. And I know a lot of indie authors are like, I've published 10 million words. I've published 3 million words. And I'm like, that's still not enough. We're talking billions and trillions of pieces of data are into these large language models. So that's what I was reading about on your website where it's like it's read. I don't want to say billions and billions of books, but just billions and billions and billions of words and tons and tons of books
Jim Azevedo [00:10:46]:
from all different genres. When as an author, when you give a prompt for a new scene or a new chapter or whatever, is there a limit? Is there a sweet spot for as far as how many words you want to give the system? Is there a point where it's too little? You already mentioned that you want to give it a little bit of, I don't know, a little bit of meat, I guess. But is there a point where it gets to be too much? Is there a sweet spot? Not so much too much.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:11:15]:
But humans have a tendency to contradict each other and we contradict ourselves and we don't even realize it. So for example, I did a prompt the other night in office hours, we do office hours on Wednesdays and they're just free Zoom calls that people can pop into. And I did something where I said lots of dialogue, but then I, or I'm sorry, I remember what it was. I said, I wanted to only use the word said as a dialogue tag. And then I immediately said strong verbs, no weak verbs. So when it ran the scene, I got a bunch of chuckles and assumed and quoted and we were like, what happened? I was like, ah, I contradicted myself in the prompt here. I said, only you said, and then right after that, I said, only you strong verbs. Well, what are dialogue tags but verbs? So the AI was like, okay, this girl's crazy. She don't know what she wants. I'm just gonna go with the last thing she told me to do, which was strong verbs. And so strong verbs is what we got. And all of our characters were groaning and chuckling instead of just said.
Jim Azevedo [00:12:11]:
So the systems are like, really?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:12:13]:
Yeah, the system sometimes is a little smarter than I am. And I'm like, okay, well, let me fix it. But Sudowrite has, I call them laser tools. The Sudowrite that most people are used to, and I call them laser tools, cause it's like pew, pew. You can have your own writing in there and you can get changes down to like the sentence rewrite or down to just the word rewrite. That's where we have describe and rewrite and our expand feature. Expand is really cool. If you're ever stuck, I say that it cures blank pagitis because I've done things like, I don't know what goes here, just write a transition. I highlight the sentence above and the sentence below and that command and click expand expand turns up to 100 words into 400 words so it just wrote a transition for me and I was like okay I like that part don't like this part So I just never get stuck with it. That's what I love about Sudowrite as a writer, if I'm ever stuck. And it's kind of bad too, because it means that I can never really justify not writing on a day, because if I don't want to write, I'm just being lazy. Like I could just use, like work with Sudowrite and get something done, so.
Jim Azevedo [00:13:16]:
Yeah, the issues. But so let me ask you this, let's say, okay, I'm a writer, and this sounds intriguing, But I'm worried that it's so good that it's going to kind of blunt my mind a little bit, because I'm going to get too used to using this to kind of help me break past those stuck points. Like, you know, if you asked me what my mom's phone number is right now, I don't know. I don't know what her mobile number is or what her landline is because I've got everything to my phone and I don't have to worry about that anymore. What would you say to somebody who's like, well, I'm just a little, I'm a little worried because I don't want to blunt that sharpness of my mind and write new stories.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:13:58]:
I think everybody has different goals with their writing. And certainly if you are someone who leans more into the artistic side of writing and I'm not saying that I don't it's just I am an author who like the actual writing part was my least favorite part of the whole workflow. I love idea generation, I love outlining, I love plotting, I love editing, I love marketing. That writing in the middle part was always my struggle bus. So I would actually dictate my books. And people would say, you know, that's not real writing or whatever, because you're speaking it, it feels different for me. And I'm like, it's the same brain. As to your point, though, I think it depends on what your writing goals are. I'm someone who's walking around with a spreadsheet full of ideas. And I think there's a lot of authors out there who have notebooks full of ideas. And artificial intelligence can open the door for you. You can look at it as closing the door for you if you don't remember mom's cell phone number, for example. But you replace that in your brain with other information. And so if you look at AI as an enhancement, as you know, we've all been waiting for our letter from Xavier's School for Gifted Children, right? I always wanted to be a mutant. So AIs that now have superhero powers in writing. You could write every book you've ever imagined, and you no longer have to calculate, is it worth it for me to spend 2 to 3 months on this when I know it's going to have a small audience? The answer is if you want to write it, the AI can help you write it faster.
Jim Azevedo [00:15:24]:
Wow, that's okay.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:15:27]:
I'm getting it now and it's making me more excited. Yeah, be a superhero,
Kevin Tumlinson [00:15:30]:
superpowered.
Jim Azevedo [00:15:32]:
Right, okay. Yeah, because I mean I have to admit I haven't played with any system just yet. And I want to, but I'm just like, oh, what happens if I just, if I get into it too much, then that blunt effect occurs with me.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:15:47]:
But I think working with AI, you also read a lot. You're constantly validating is what we call that step. You have to validate what the AI comes out of. And we all know that the number 1 thing to make you a better writer is reading more. So I have found that my process, because I'm using AI, requires a lot more reading. And I'm catching, like I can catch crutch words now like that, that the AI has. And I can't catch crutch words in my own writing. Yeah, I've become a much better editor
Jim Azevedo [00:16:14]:
since using AI. Well, I have to say that the website is superb. Like, just going to the website and watching the videos of how it works, that's what just got me jazzed. And then I'm like, oh, when's Elizabeth coming on? OK, she's here. This is going to be cool. So for our viewers out there who haven't checked out sooner right calm. There's the link Check it out. Look look at some of their tutorial videos or the video that just explains what it is What it does and how you can get started. It's pretty neat Maybe within a like a two-minute video you could see how it can help prompt your writing and get you rolling. So what have you heard, Elizabeth? Maybe I've already kind of talked about this a little bit, but what are some of the common skepticisms out there that you've heard? You probably heard over and over and over again, and we won't dwell on these because I think that we're moving past all that. But what are some of the common skepticisms you've heard when it comes to artificial intelligence?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:17:15]:
I think the big concern authors have, and I understand it, is how the LLMs learned. And that was scraping content or reading content online. A lot of fan fiction, my own fan fiction was read because my stuff is on fanfiction.net, for example. And I hear their concerns. Unfortunately, though, these were decisions that were made years ago. And nobody complained when Google was scraping websites so that we could have better search, which you and I both know happened 20 years ago. And so if we kind of have this, we already have the precedent established. Now that said, this is why I decided to join Sudowrite as an author. From Hamilton, I want to be in the room where it happens. I want to be in the room where decisions are being made and where, you know, guidance is needed. So if we want to have the best tools and we want to have tools that work for our industry, I think more authors are going to need to get involved in AI and have a voice at the table. So I think that's 1 of the big concerns is like, well, I object to how this learned. It wasn't fair. The other thing I think that they fear is the copyright aspect of it, like what happens copyright-wise. Now, I was lucky that I was uniquely positioned for this as well because I literally write derivative content for a living. I write Pride and Prejudice fan fiction. So the AI generated words are actually public domain. They're yours to use however you want to. And just like Jane Austen's original Pride and Prejudice is public domain. I can't stop you Jim, for example, taking chapter 3 in Pride and Prejudice and writing your own short story off of it. Just like you can't stop me from doing it either. What we can't do is I can't go, oh, Jim wrote chapter 3 and I like all of this, so I'm just gonna take all of it. No, I can't take Jim's words. I also can't take the exact way that Jim arranged the words. And so that's where the latest copyright, and I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a professional author. That's what the latest copyright advice from the US Copyright Office was, is that there needs to be significant human involvement when working with AI for it to be a copyrightable work and you can copyright a compilation basically the the pieces of the AI writing plus your own writing and different authors are in different percentages some scenes the AI probably writes 60 to 70 percent for me. Other scenes it's less. It just depends on what the scene is. But when I look at the novel as a whole, you couldn't take me out of the novel and you couldn't take the AI out of the novel and have a standalone product. So together we blended together and we made something bigger than ourselves. So and that's that's my copyrightable work. Interesting. So those are the 2 big things I would say. Okay. Okay.
Jim Azevedo [00:19:53]:
Why do you think that AI are, yeah, well, why do you think AI is having a moment right now? And the reason I asked that is, you know, back in the early days, I don't know if you know this or not, but I started at Smashwords back in 2011. And back then we used to talk about how eBooks and self-publishing was having its moment because It wasn't like it hadn't happened before, especially in terms of e-books, self-publishing, and e-books in general. But 2008 to 2011, when it started just to really take off, it was because all of those so-called ingredients of that primordial soup were just in place there. We had e-book reading devices, we had the tools for self-publishing and distribution, the retailers were coming online, so all of those ingredients were just kind of there. So why now is AI just having this huge moment, and especially in terms of what it's doing for creatives.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:20:51]:
I think OpenAI has a big part of this. The different algorithms are named really cute names. The first 1 is Ada after Ada Lovelace, then you have Babbage, Charles Babbage. So they're all like early computer invention names. And then the C 1 was Curie, Marie Curie. And then D was Da Vinci. So Ada, Babbage, and Curie, I think when you play with those in the playground, unless you are someone who's a futurist or who can kind of look to see the potential in it, it's not anything that's gonna blow away the common person who looks at this and goes, isn't this great? And it's like, it's a simple sentence. Like, good job, You did a simple sentence, Curie. But then 3.5, chat GPT 3.5 dropped in November. And suddenly everybody's grandma even knew what AI was because it was on Good Morning America. I got calls from my mother-in-law and she's like, are you seeing this? I'm like, yes, use it. It's okay. God bless her. Yep. She doesn't even have an email address. So, I mean, so she doesn't have an email address, but she, she knows what ChatGPT is because it was all over the news. It was on Good Morning America. Yeah. It was all over the news because it was so accessible. You could just type something in there. It had the Staples easy button all over it. You could just type something in there and it would give you a response. But then we learned it could lie to you. It could make something up. You could use it for some not so great ways. And I know that as a company, they've been trying to put guardrails and then people break the guardrails and then they put more guardrails. It's kind of a never ending thing there. So I think that that was the big watershed moment for AI. But there was a lot of people for the last 5 years who have been working on these tools and these projects, and it just kind of all got ripped open when ChatGPT went mainstream.
Jim Azevedo [00:22:41]:
Yeah, it was so interesting. I think those of us in the publishing industry, it's, you know, obviously it's been kind of bubbling up in the background, but then it seems like it was all of a sudden we're just like, hey, it's 2023. Let's just talk about AI now. Yep. But I think it's helpful. I think that
Elizabeth Ann West [00:22:57]:
it was, it reminds me of, I wasn't that old. But I do remember when the internet kind of came about. And I remember the early parts of the internet. I remember being, you know, hooking up my phone line and just being on like a local board. I could only reach people who were dialing in locally. And then AOL came along. And actually before AOL, I had Prodigy and I had something else before that too. But AOL, I think was the big thing that suddenly made the internet everywhere. That was what got on Good Morning America and everybody was equally scared. And now I don't think we could even imagine living without the internet in 2023. So I think AI is gonna go that way too. It's scary at first, but then you get to know it and you realize like you can still control it. And at the end of the day, you can always unplug it. It can't plug itself back in. Right. Yeah, we've been, the way I look at it is we've been here before. We've had these kinds of experiences before with new technologies that sort of freaked everybody out in the beginning.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:48]:
And then we all wonder, well, gosh, I can't live without this technology. Yeah. Like a cell phone. When the first time I got a cell phone, I thought, or a smartphone rather. Yep. I remember thinking like such a curmudgeon. I just want a phone that works. I can just make a phone call. I mean, come on, who needs all this other, who needs an app on your phone? But now, you know, we all love these, these devices.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:24:10]:
On my birthday, which was a few weeks ago, my phone quit working, and I had to get a new phone. And I just suddenly had this like, I can't transfer money. I have to go all the way home to my computer if I need to like transfer money between my bank accounts. I can't reach anybody. Nobody can reach me. I can't, I don't even have a home phone anymore. So that it was a eyeopening for me how much my life is on my phone. I know. So I wanna thank everybody for posting some comments and questions out there. I'm going to start getting to some of those now. There's quite a few of them. Fantastic. Let's see.
Jim Azevedo [00:24:41]:
John asks, if you reversed strong verbs and then asked for language tags, like said, order of ask, would it respect that?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:24:50]:
That's a great, John, and it's good to see you. So hypothetically, I believe it would. So in my experience with the AI, it's top down in terms of how it looks at prompting. Whatever the last thing you said is kind of the last thing it follows, kind of like first in, first out. But so that's my hypothesis there, but I would actually have to test it to make sure.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:13]:
Interesting. This is more of a comment. Steve says, what I have really sought from AI, though, is the ability to plug in a chapter and ask the AI to improve show, not tell.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:25:27]:
That kind of goes to what you were saying earlier. Yeah. We have that with SudoWrite. It's called our rewrite function. You can go 300 words at a time. You just pop the chapter in, highlight a couple of paragraphs, click rewrite, and it's a preset, show, don't tell. It'll give you 2 cards and you can choose. You can kitbash them together, but you can get some examples there. And sometimes what it puts there may not be what you want but it can also prompt you. We call it don't be a T-Rex. Don't forget that your hands reach the keyboard. So a lot of times the AI will actually just like prompt you and get you unstuck. You're like oh no I don't like that. Oh but I do want this. And so it can help in both ways. It can actually rewrite it for you, or it can inspire you to rewrite it yourself.
Jim Azevedo [00:26:06]:
Very cool. Another comment from Sally. I like this 1. Be sure, I'm going to add in the be sure. Watch some of Elizabeth's one-on-one vids on YouTube, and you will like it with a free trial of having a go on top. What can you talk about the free trial and how long it lasts and how to sign up?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:26:21]:
Yeah, you get you get 4, 000 words with a free trial. There's also kind of like a little bit of a demo product on our website that you can kind of play around and get the gist of it. And then I run Sudowrite 101 classes all week long. So there's classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. I have them at different times of the day. So whatever your time zone is, there's something on the calendar that will work for you. The link for that is l-u-dot-m-a slash Sudowrite. So it's luma slash Sudowrite for all of our classes. Our classes are completely free. That's 1 of the benefits of being a member of Sudowrite. And then on Wednesdays, we do office hours, which is open for everybody. And we're just talking about writing with AI and different workflows and best practices. We call it as we're all on expedition together. And so we're all exploring together. And then our Slack group is where you can also get more information about prompting and how to work with it. And people share best practices for them. So it's a very exciting time. And I've been really blessed to be part of the Sudowrite community. I love the authors that are in our community and they teach me new things every day. I learn something new every class I teach, which is incredible. And so It's really fun.
Jim Azevedo [00:27:31]:
That's cool. I mean, it's so fun and exciting to be on the front lines of this new technology. And I'm not just speaking to you. I'm speaking to everybody here who's listening. And as a viewer, we're all on the front lines of this just remarkable change that's going on in the publishing industry right now. These new tools that enable your freedom and your liberation to get your books out into the world and to find those readers. Can you talk a little bit about the pricing structure? I think you have, is it 3 tiers that you have?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:28:04]:
We do. So we have, so I'll talk about the monthly first. Now, all of these plans have a significant discount if you do go annual, but we'll talk about the monthly. Monthly hobby student plan is $19 a month for 30, 000 words. Our professional account, which is where you can, the earliest account you can have access to Story Engine right now, is 90, 000 words for $29 a month. And then our max plan is 300, 000 words for $139 a month. Now what's great about it monthly is because we're all authors here. Sometimes we have busier months. We're on deadline. We need a lot of words. Some months we know work's going to be crazy or our life's going to be crazy or just taking a sabbatical. If you're on the monthly plan with SudoWrite, you do have the ability to just change your plans in between the monthly plans, with the monthly plan. So you could be a professional and then go, oh my gosh, I've got 3 books to let me bump up to max. And then when those are all done and you're taking a month off and you're going to Bermuda or whatever, you can bump down to the hobby or back to the professional plan. So I love that they're very author first in the company because they're authors themselves. So they understand what the life is like. Absolutely.
Jim Azevedo [00:29:10]:
Let me see. I'm gonna show a comment here from, oh, I'm gonna put it to Robbie. Do you know if Amazon and KDP have released any regulations on how we can or cannot use AI to assist with our books? I don't know the answer to that.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:29:29]:
They haven't come out with anything specifically. However, there is a catch-all phrase that's in the terms and conditions of KDP that goes back to poor reader experience. And this is an umbrella term that Amazon has used over the decade plus that I've been publishing with them to basically catch anything that they didn't anticipate. So here's my advice. If someone can look at your book and immediately think you used AI because it's just a mess, it's just word soup, that's not a great reader experience. So that's something that Amazon would have an issue with, whether you used a ghost writer or whether you just kind of didn't do your due diligence on your editing and everything. But if you're using AI to assist you as an author and you create a book experience that is a good reading experience, Amazon's probably not going to have a problem with it. Because Amazon at the end of the day, just wants to make money like the rest of us. Wants to serve readers. So I would say that the onus is on the author. The best way to use AI is that no 1 can tell you you used AI. I have 3 books in the Amazon store. They've been there since November of 2021. Nobody knew there was artificial intelligence in them, because you can't really tell where my words begin and where the AI begins. So that would be the advice I would give to early adopters. You might hear that there's AI detectors out there. Right now they do not work, especially for fiction writing. They can sometimes tell with nonfiction writing because it's so formulaic, but when it comes to fiction writing, you're making stuff up. So if it's, I've tested a great deal of them and I've given them words with no AI at all. And it's like, oh, it's 100% AI. And I've given it stuff with words with AI and it's like written by a human. So I think it's flipping a coin, honestly. But that's been my experience. That could change in the future. But I think that as long as we as a community make sure that when we're using AI, we're providing a good reading experience, Amazon's not going to have any reason to have a problem with it.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:21]:
OK. While I'm thinking about it, is there anything that you think the general population is kind of missing when it comes to AI, especially in its ability to help authors and their fellow creatives?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:31:37]:
I think that sometimes authors especially get a little bit narrow-minded thinking about how AI is going to affect them. And I get it. We're all worried about number 1, which is ourselves. But they're missing the number of authors with disabilities, with chronic health issues and stuff that AI is helping. And these are people that you've seen in these author groups and stuff like that. These are your friends and your colleagues who may have, were once upon a time, you know, publishing 6 books a year, and now they've fallen off, and now they have this new tool to help them get back. We've all known for a long time that publishing fast and publishing consistently are the 2 main criteria to building up a readership and building a career in this crazy world. And now AI is there as a tool to help people to level the playing field. So you're really, it's a great time that you can now bring all of your best zany ideas and you can actually get them published and you can get them into reader's hands.
Jim Azevedo [00:32:28]:
Oh, great answer. Perfect answer. So I want to show this comment from Leland, because it kind of speaks to exactly what you just said. Using AI has really upgraded my writing, and it helps overcome writer's block. Having something that can offer some suggestions for me to riff on instantly at an hour of the day is incredible.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:32:47]:
Yeah, Leland is 1 of our super users. So he is phenomenal. He is always in that Slack group, helping others, answering questions. And he has really pushed. Yeah, love you very much. He has really pushed Sudowrite to really cool heights of what he's able to get with his epic fantasies and his mysteries that he writes.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:07]:
Super cool. Are there any use cases that have kind of just blown your mind that some things that maybe Sudowrite's users have done that you or the founders hadn't even thought of where you're like, oh my goodness, like we hadn't even thought about that. Like what are some of the things that have just
Elizabeth Ann West [00:33:24]:
blown you guys away? We have this tool called a canvas tool and it's like a visual way of you to play with your story. So it makes cards and you can either get the AI to generate the cards for you or you can put stuff on the cards and a group of them realized because we have a generate more like this Which means the AI looks at the card and goes, okay, you want this as a card? Let me make more like it They created a whole character dossier and then they're using the generate more like this to like build out a village of characters for like a small town or something like that. Now we make a joke that if you ask any AI for like a top 10 list of small town names Willow Creek will be number 1. So we make jokes that we're all citizens of Willow Creek established 2023. But you can use, we never expected the canvas, the developers thought that the canvas tool would basically, people would view it as plot points. But no, they're using it as character generators, as like, here's the character's name, eye color, occupation, backstory, generate more like this and then you get 3 more characters that are completely different from the first card. And you can either keep or delete them and you can like make people
Jim Azevedo [00:34:28]:
with clicks. All right, now I'm a little scared.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:34:34]:
Another different thing that we found is the rewrite function. We thought rewrite would just be used for like these presets, but we do have a customized ability and there's a prompt that they're using called convert to screenplay. So you can like highlight 300 words, click convert to screenplay, and it turns it into screenplay format for you. So we have a lot of screenwriters that use cedar right and then take that to their, their industry tool, which I think is called first draft or final draft, I think is what it's called. But they have screenwriting, screenwriting software that they use and they bring the stuff over Another crazy 1 is I mean, there's just so many different ways you can use it But people are always putting Oh close third close close third. There's like a whole list of words that separates you from the reader. And so you can actually do a rewrite with close and it gets rid of the wass and the felts and the founds and the, and these are things that you can use. That's what I always need, that passive voice. Same. So I think that there's great tools on the market there for editing and we've always had access to them where a couple of them will say, you have too many founds in this section. And it's like, great, tell me how to rewrite them. And I think some of them are starting to bring on these AI tools, but Sudowrite already has it. So if 1 tool has told you you have too many founds on them, you can pop it into Sudowrite, and you can actually use the laser tools, pew, pew, to fix them
Jim Azevedo [00:35:59]:
at the different levels, different lines. I'm going to bring up this question here from Scott. I think it's a pretty cool question. Scott Weaver says, are you foreseeing complimentary embedded immersive and interactive experiences like virtual reality worlds, video songs, illustrations, photos, et cetera, becoming automatic expectations of all genres?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:36:20]:
Um, I think there's a ways a little ways off on there. I mean, I don't know. I've been waiting for the VR to like take off since the 90s because I think that's when I mean, like we've had VR promises for a long time and we're going on 30 years yet and I still mean Oculus I guess is is in people's homes and stuff like that. I do think that more interactive multimedia experiences for books is coming. There have been some just off the top of my head, I can think of Belgravia, which was, oh my gosh, now I'm Julian. Now I'm losing my mind, but he does the same thing as Downton Abbey, but he wrote Belgravia and he had this whole immersive website that like you could click on and stuff moved and you could read the chapters and I really enjoyed it. And I think that now that we have AI that can literally like write you code for a whole website like that, I think that this is going to allow for more interactive reading experiences. Also AI can allow you to do a choose your own adventure. So 1 thing with Story Engine, when you generate a scene, you have the ability to generate the same scene again with different tweaks on your commands and stuff. So you could literally have 2 or 3 different versions of your chapter 1 or your chapter 7, so that you could actually create a flow chart for your readers to go through the story a bunch of different ways and get different endings or get different middle points.
Jim Azevedo [00:37:38]:
Whoa. That's really cool. That's really cool. Here's a question from Steve I wanted to bring up. How would you best describe how you are different from chat GPT when it comes to narrative writing?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:37:52]:
So I think that chat GPT is a fantastic tool. We are actually built off of the algorithms of OpenAI and then also some algorithms from Anthropic like Claude. But we're specifically tailored for fiction writing. So are there going to be users out there who are like super prompters and they know exactly how to write the prompt and everything in chat GPT and it works better for them? Probably. But what sudo write allows you to do and what chat GPT doesn't quite yet is I can just highlight a line and fix it with AI. I find with ChatGPT, because I even use that tool, it's really good at giving you big chunks of words. It's not so great if you wanted to do laser targeted AI adjustments to your writing. So We have a lot of users that use chat GPT and Sudowrite in tandem. And we have a lot of users who just use Sudowrite because they don't want to learn how to prompt. It's just bandwidth. They're focused on getting their stories out. So they want a tool that when they're there to write a story, they just want to write a story. They don't want to have to worry about all the other things that AI can do for them.
Jim Azevedo [00:38:48]:
Interesting. What's next on the agenda for you guys? Do you have any other tools or services planned for this upcoming year, later on in the future?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:39:00]:
What's going on? So I think Story Engine is going to be our big thing here. And it's actually going to kind of morph into something called a story studio, where we're really thinking about this immersive experience for writing a novel. And I think if we can provide that experience to authors, number 1, it's really fun. It has made me a lover of writing again and there's a lot of people who use Sudowrite that they're realizing like letting the AI's ability to let me step into my story as I'm writing it rather than having to feel like it's all up here. It's just been a lot of fun and it makes it feel like work is play. I feel like I go to work every day and I get to play. So that's what's next for us is story engine and expanding even that.
Jim Azevedo [00:39:41]:
Are you guys going to be out and about this year?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:39:45]:
Writers conferences, that sort of thing? Like yep, I will be at Novelist Incorporated Which is in September so meek and then we are also going to be at 20 books to 50k And I think the whole team is actually going to be there So then you can meet Ryan who did the amazing website and Amit and James and Josh Who are Josh and James are our back-end big developers for everything. So we will have a big table at the Vendor Day in Vegas and I'll wait to the Draft2Digital table that's really big across the way. But and I think Vegas is going to be a lot of fun. And I know my friend Steph, but Jonas and I we plan to kind of organize for us all to get drinks at the tipsy robot, which is a robot makes your drink tipsy robot. Yeah, it's around the corner in the Millennium Shops or whatever it is. That's going to be our AI author meetup. I think that's where we're going to put together. Is that a new place? I didn't see that place last time. It was there last year. My sister went actually with the guys from, I think she went there with Soundbooth theater. We made really good friends with them last year. And so I think that they got out to the tipsy robot.
Jim Azevedo [00:40:53]:
How fun. Yeah, we'll definitely see you there. Gosh, let's see if there's any comments. There's a lot of comments. I'm trying to cycle through the comments, make sure I haven't missed any questions. Let's see. Gosh, so many, so many, so many. Oh, I popped that 1 up already. Yeah. Well, gosh. Yeah, I don't want to double up if we've already answered it.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:41:26]:
Well, if I was an AI, I would answer it in a slightly different way because that's what also happens with AI. You can prompt it the exact same prompt 10 times and you will get slightly different variances. It really is like pulling a slot machine because it's making those calculations of the tokens.
Jim Azevedo [00:41:41]:
Is that something that you should do as a best practice? If you're going to prompt it, just kind of put your same prompt in like 10 different ways and see which 1 you like best?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:41:50]:
Yeah, it depends on what you're trying to do. If you're just trying to get some extra help, then you probably only need 1. And if that 1 response works for you, move on. Keep going with what you're doing. If you're looking for a bunch of different ways. Some other ways that I've used, Sudowrite for example, like a good villain thinks they're the hero of the story. And story engine makes the ability for you to basically run the entire story from the villain's point of view or from a different character's point of view so that you get that really rich offstage experience that then peppers into the story and then that's providing a better experience for readers because all of your characters are really fleshed out. So that's another thing with AI. So yeah, you could change your prompts of like, write a scene from the hero's point of view and then be like, what's the villain's point of view on this? Cause the villain's gonna think like they're the hero of their own story.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:38]:
That's right. That's true. We've been talking a little bit about sci-fi and other genres. And I talked about thrillers earlier, But Bria asks, is it good for romance novels? Yes. I am a romance author myself. And our romance
Elizabeth Ann West [00:42:51]:
plot help in Canvas, we have an outline tool. I did the prompting for the romance part of it. And it's really important to me that it can actually handle menage, reverse harem. It can handle LGBTQ. A lot of the AI tools like chat GPT, if you just ask for a romance novel outline, it's going to give you a very male, female, I don't want to even want to say traditional, but just like old fashioned kind of romance outline of like with nothing new. The romance genre, I think is always on the cutting edge of some tropes. So our romance outline can actually handle science fiction romance, it can handle fantasy romance, it can handle, like I said, reverse harem, it can also handle male-male, sapphic romance, and that was really important to me for representation as indies especially have really helped move the needle there to make sure that all readers and all groups are shown and represented in literature and not just certain ones that were decided because of it's mainstream and it'll make the most money. So now you can really do a lot of niche publishing with AI helping you. Wow.
Jim Azevedo [00:43:55]:
Another quick question here. We'll chat from the Bowlingbrook Babbler. Will GPT-4 be incorporated in the future?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:44:04]:
Yes, we have GPT-4 incorporated in our new Story Engine feature right now. And then it's also going to be filtered into all of our laser tools. So all of the Sudowrite tools that people are most familiar with, like write and rewrite, but also different algorithms. So what we do for our team is different algorithms, believe it or not, are better at different things. Like I talked a little bit about Ada and Babbage and Curie, but like DaVinci versus ChachiBD4 versus Claude, certain ones of them are better at writing prose, others are better at outlining, others are better at actually writing prose or rewriting something. So we take a look at that all on our back end. And I think that as AI gets even more robust, we can help users so that You don't have to figure out which algorithm or which model is best for what you're trying to do. We'll just have it primed up for you so that you're getting the best experience.
Jim Azevedo [00:44:54]:
Wow. So I've been peppering you with questions this whole interview. And Thankfully, our viewers, thank you so much, everybody, for chiming in with your comments and your questions as well for Elizabeth. But I want to give you a chance, and we have like a minute left only. That was quick. But Let me give you the floor. Is there anything else that you want to add to tell people about Sudowright, your experiences with the company, and anything that just excites you so much about the technology that we haven't had a chance to talk about yet?
Elizabeth Ann West [00:45:26]:
Yeah, the company is great. I love going to work. I love working with Sudowright. I'm actually getting to meet them all in person soon. So we do complete work from home, like we're remote. They are always hiring. They have like a hiring thing for, they're looking for more developers and stuff. And I think that too, that If you're walking around with a bunch of story ideas, it's time to look at AI. I myself have a spreadsheet full of story ideas and we only get 1 lifetime. So we might as well put them out there and get them in readers' hands and out of our heads.
Jim Azevedo [00:45:58]:
Perfect. I love it. Well, everybody, I want to thank everybody, all our viewers and commenters and people asking questions. Thank you all so much for being here. We really appreciate your time. We really appreciate you interacting with us and asking your questions. If we did not get a chance to answer your questions, Feel free to drop them in the comments after we close out this video, and we will try to answer all of those as soon as we possibly can. Don't forget to bookmark this page. Come back every Thursday for DDD Live. We have some experts, some industry luminary from the indie publishing space to help guide you along on your author careers, on your author journey to help make you a more professional writer. Elizabeth, Thank you so very, very much for your time today and for joining us today. I can't wait to see what you're doing next with Sudowright.
Elizabeth Ann West [00:46:53]:
You're welcome. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon this fall.
Jim Azevedo [00:46:56]:
Yep. Looking forward to it. See you soon. Yep. Bye. Thanks, everybody.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:47:01]:
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