Cameron Sutter joins us to talk about Storysnap, a tool he designed to help authors create story bibles and streamline their creative process.
Cameron Sutter is a sci-fi/fantasy author and the inventor of Plottr – the popular visual story planning software. Many authors have used Plottr to outline and flesh out their book creation process. Now, Cameron joins us to talk about Storysnap, a tool he designed to help authors create story bibles and streamline their creative process.
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Kevin Tumlinson [00:00:01]:
You just tuned into 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 [00:00:26]:
We are live. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another rousing edition of Self Publishing Insiders. I'm Jim Azevedo, and I run corporate communications and marketing here at Draft2Digital. And today, it is my pleasure to welcome Cameron Sutter, the founder and creator of Plottr, back onto the show. Welcome back.
Cameron Sutter [00:00:46]:
Thanks for having me.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:47]:
Oh, man. It's been a while. We were talking about this a little bit backstage as we were enjoying our drinks and snacks. And we're like, when was it? Like, a year and a half, two years? I think it's closer to two years, Cameron.
Cameron Sutter [00:00:58]:
It's been a while.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:01]:
So let me read Cameron's bio here because it's I like your bio. It's it's it's not the one of the long historical accounts of one's life, but it's really cool. So let me just quickly read it so that I can get so that our audience out there knows a little bit more about you. So Cameron Sutter is a sci fi and fantasy author and the inventor of Plottr, the popular the wildly popular visual story planning software. He's escaped death by explosion, rock slide, disease, and car accident. Hope that wasn't all in the same day.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:01:37]:
Luckily, no.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:39]:
Alright. He loves doing funny accents for his kids. Me too. We had to talk about that afterwards.
Cameron Sutter [00:01:45]:
Oh, yeah. Okay. Cool.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:47]:
He loves doing funny accents for his kids and believes his life's mission is to serve riders. He He lives near Oklahoma City with his wife, six kids, and too many pets. So, again, welcome, buddy.
Cameron Sutter [00:02:00]:
Hey. Thank you. Yeah. That, that was the best reading of my bio ever. I I need to hire you to read that bio more.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:08]:
Well, you got it. You got it. So, there's a lot to talk about here, especially at the speed of our industry. Things move so quickly as our audience knows. And since we haven't had you here for a couple of years, I thought let's get started by kind of revisiting the origin story of Plottr, if you don't mind. Like, specifically, what led you to create Plottr, and what problem is it that you were trying to solve for writers like yourself?
Cameron Sutter [00:02:37]:
Yeah. Sounds good. So, see, I've been writing on and off my whole life, and I took Brandon Sanderson's, college course for creative writing. If you're familiar with his with him and his his stories, he he teaches a a class every year. And so I got excited about writing again. I started writing, and my process was just really frustrating.
Jim Azevedo [00:03:02]:
In what way? In what way?
Cameron Sutter [00:03:04]:
So I was rewriting the the thing over and over, and I didn't have any organization at all. My notes were all over the place, and, like, trying to remember what version of the notes corresponded with the version of the book that I'm actually writing that actually chose to go down, was was very difficult. And so I was at a so my my first job at a college had nothing to do with writing. I was a software engineer, and, I had this I started this writing group. So on lunches, we would, talk about our writing. We'd sit and write Oh,
Jim Azevedo [00:03:36]:
how cool.
Cameron Sutter [00:03:37]:
Things like that. And Yeah. We started talking about our process and tools and things like that, especially being software engineers and and being able to build tools. And we're like, you know, I I used Crivener. I tried spreadsheets. I tried Google Docs, all sorts of different things to keep myself organized. Mhmm. And it just wasn't, it wasn't what I envisioned in my mind of the ideal tool.
Cameron Sutter [00:04:02]:
And what I saw was I, actually, I didn't even really think about the organization part of it at first. I was just I could see, like, the threads of my story weaving together, and I wanted to be able to visually see what was going on with each thread
Jim Azevedo [00:04:16]:
Mhmm.
Cameron Sutter [00:04:16]:
As the story was progressing. But there was no good tool to do that. And like I said, I I tried spreadsheets, and I think that was close. But, at one point, I was like, okay. Let's just let's just build this. I'm a software engineer. I can build this. So, that's where the idea was born.
Cameron Sutter [00:04:32]:
And from that core kind of, lots of other benefits came out of that, like having a series bible and being organized and having everything in one place and things like that. But the core was being able to visualize the threads of your story as they weave together.
Jim Azevedo [00:04:46]:
Okay. Okay. That's really helpful. So for somebody who hasn't used it yet, Cameron, what makes Plottr different than something like a Scrivener or Google Docs or maybe even just a good old whiteboard? Like Yeah. What kinda sets it apart?
Cameron Sutter [00:05:03]:
So in plotter, you don't write your story. So we're not focused on the writing part, the manuscript part. So Scrivener is definitely better at that or Google Docs, whatever you use, Word, those are better. But plotter visualizes your story. So you can think of it like a user friendly spreadsheet, one that doesn't look intimidating, doesn't look, boring. Mhmm. But you can also think of it as, like, index cards or sticky notes on your wall. And a lot of people do that for their story.
Cameron Sutter [00:05:29]:
They'll, like, have different sticky notes on their wall, and they'll say, you know, this is what this character is doing. Here's this plot line. And so you're able to see what's going on at each point each point of your story. And when you when you think of your story visually like that, it really changes the game for you. It just it it makes it so much easier to think about character arcs and not and not make plot holes and things like that. Because if you're looking at an outline that has 50,000, a hundred thousand words, it's, like, it's hard to keep all of that in your head. But instead, when you see something visual and you're able to drag and drop and move things around, like, okay. This part comes too early in the story or or, you know, too late or something.
Cameron Sutter [00:06:11]:
And, actually, I need to move it around, and that would actually have more satisfying arc to it. Just seeing it visually like that really makes it easier to to have a good story.
Jim Azevedo [00:06:20]:
Yeah. I can actually see it kind of playing out as you're as you're going through it. Who is it ideally designed for, Cameron? Is it does it work across the board for authors who, maybe haven't published their first book? Or is this something that's, you know, maybe it's it's better for those authors who have been through the process several times. They just wanna clean up their process a little bit? Or is it kind of for every author out there to help them organize their their thoughts and plots?
Cameron Sutter [00:06:51]:
Yeah. So that's a good question. Originally, you know, I wasn't thinking about that. Originally, I was just making a good tool for me. Yeah. But it turns out that it a lot of people think the way I do, and their brains work the same way, I guess, because that's what people tell us. Oh, this is the way my brain works. Finally, a tool that works that way.
Cameron Sutter [00:07:07]:
So, so so I but we found out that it's it's useful for different reasons for different types of authors, and I can go through that a little bit. Sure. One difference is plotter versus pantser. So some people plan out their stories beforehand really detailed, and some people just start writing with the seed of an idea or maybe even not really an idea. They just start writing. Those are called pantsers. That's one way to call it or a discovery writer. And so it's useful for that for those people very differently.
Cameron Sutter [00:07:39]:
For the plotters that love to have something planned out, this is really great. They can have a really great plan of, like, each little detail, what each character is gonna go through, and see their character arc beforehand. But for pantsers, that's not valuable. They don't wanna do that. You know? Although some pantsers have said that the reason they were pantsers is because there wasn't a visual way to do this. And so when they use plotter, they're actually like, oh, this is this is what I needed. But that's not everybody. We're not trying to, like, convert pantsers or anything.
Cameron Sutter [00:08:09]:
But for pantsers, it's more valuable as a after the first draft, you put it in plotter, and this is where story snap will come in later. But you put it in plotter, and then you're able to, during the editing, move things around. Or and this helps all authors, having an organized series bible that's searchable and and easy to find when you're on book three, book 10, whatever, trying to find that go through hundreds of characters. If you have a record of something that's easily searchable, you can be like, what's that one character that had blue eyes or what is the eye color for that one waitress or, you know, the backstory of that one waitress? That's gonna be super valuable when you've written more books and if you're a pantser after the fact. So that's kinda one difference. Right. Right. Pants versus plotter.
Cameron Sutter [00:08:54]:
The other one is, like, new author versus experienced author. And I think it helps new authors more, because they don't have a process, because they're just trying to figure out the story for the first time. But for experienced authors, having that series bible is super valuable. And and as a new author, you don't know you need one until you've written three books and you're like, oh, man. I really need some help with this. But for the experience author, the other thing that's really great is templates. And that's, we have these story structures built in the plotter. So if you're familiar with the, seven point plot structure or the hero's journey or the romancing the beat or the 12 step mystery formula.
Cameron Sutter [00:09:38]:
Those kind of, story structures, if you're familiar with those, you can just put in a template, and then it's almost just like drop your pieces of the story in and boom, you're going and you've already got this the bones of a story ready, and it makes it super easy for your process. So that's a couple different, ways that it helps different types of writers.
Jim Azevedo [00:10:00]:
I heard you say on an interview, I think it was, or maybe it it was one of the videos that you created yourself, Cameron, that, that you yourself are a panther. Or maybe you were a panther at one point and may and now you're more of a plotter, but do you still consider yourself? Are you kind of a hybrid
Cameron Sutter [00:10:17]:
now? Definitely a hybrid. I I feel like I bounce back and forth depending on what book I'm writing. And Mhmm. So I've published three books. I've probably written a few others that haven't been published yet. So so not like it's not dozens of books yet. I it's I'm still very early in the writing, like, trying to figure out how I I'm what I'm good at and how my process works.
Jim Azevedo [00:10:41]:
You've been a little busy, but so we'll we'll we'll give you some leeway here.
Cameron Sutter [00:10:46]:
Thank you. That's funny, though. I I made a tool to help writers, and I end up writing less because of it. But I'm helping lots of people write. So I, you know, I I
Jim Azevedo [00:10:53]:
how that works in this industry?
Cameron Sutter [00:10:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. But, so, originally, I thought it was a a plotter, and I was, like, planning everything out. But then as I started writing it, I was pantsing it, and so I started rewriting. And then the next one, I did really good at plotting, and that one worked out great. And that was that's the second one is when I had plotter finally for the first time ever, and I was able to to plan it out really well, and that one went really great. And now where I'm at is I'm I'm somewhere in the middle, and I kinda pants I I well, I kinda plan a few scenes ahead of where I'm writing. So I can kinda see where this is where I'm currently going for a few scenes ahead.
Jim Azevedo [00:11:34]:
Yeah.
Cameron Sutter [00:11:35]:
I plan that out and then but I kinda pants it, and things take detours and stuff. But Sure. So, yeah, it it's some sort of hybrid. But
Jim Azevedo [00:11:44]:
I heard at one of the conferences I attended, and it might have been to San Francisco Writers Conference a couple years ago. And I'm kicking myself because I can't remember who the New York Times internationally best selling author was when an author from the audience, was saying that, hey. I think I've finally I'm on my third or fourth book. I've I think I've finally figured out how to do this, how to write a novel. I finally have a process down. And then the author who was on stage, this internationally famous, you know, best selling author said, you figured out how to write that book because it's gonna change. It's gonna change this time and the next time, and it's gotta be nice.
Cameron Sutter [00:12:23]:
I totally believe that. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:12:24]:
Yeah. Let me bring up with some quick comments here from our viewers. Beth says, oh, a user friendly spreadsheet? That exists?
Cameron Sutter [00:12:35]:
Not until plotter. Right?
Jim Azevedo [00:12:36]:
But Not until plotter. Yeah. And then, and Tom says, I could use something that will keep track of characters. I keep having to go back and find out who characters are in earlier books.
Cameron Sutter [00:12:52]:
Yeah. Yeah. You'll find that having something written down about each character is gonna be so valuable for you. Otherwise I mean, I've talked to so many writers. They're like, I'm I've just so many books into the series, and there's hundreds of characters. And they're just like, what do I do? Hundreds of characters. You know? So
Jim Azevedo [00:13:11]:
Yeah. Absolutely. And just one last quick little fun comment here from Meredith. Love the pineapple art on the wall. Yeah.
Cameron Sutter [00:13:19]:
Thank you. My wife actually, watercolored that for me, and I I just have this thing with pineapples. I love pineapples, for lots of different reasons.
Jim Azevedo [00:13:30]:
I would agree. Me too. So you've made a conscious decision to focus on planning and visual planning in particular, you know, not drafting, not writing. Did you make a conscious decision, Cameron, in the early days to kind of stop where there are other tools out there who are trying to to just do everything, or do you have more plans for additional features in the future?
Cameron Sutter [00:13:57]:
Yeah. Good question. Because, so I I've been in the the software world for a while, and I've seen this time and time again where software tries to do everything, and it just becomes too much. And so we're really trying to balance that and make plotter really good at one thing, which is, planning and organizing your writing process and not about the writing. We get so many requests to make a writing tool, and it would be great and awesome, I think. And people can write in plotter. You could write your story in plotter. But if we tried to optimize it for that, we'd get into this we'd be a small fish in a huge pond Mhmm.
Cameron Sutter [00:14:41]:
In the ocean, and we'd there'd just be so many feature requests. Make it do this, make it do that, make it do this. And it could very easily balloon into this thing that's way less useful. So so plotter is just focused on being really good at one thing. And, you know, in the future, who knows? Maybe we'll make a a a writing tool that's, like, using the plot plotter methodology or something like that, and, it'll be the the plotter writing tool or something. But for right now, we're focusing on making it good at one thing.
Jim Azevedo [00:15:15]:
That's good. It's you know, as an entrepreneur, you have your road map. It's sometimes it could be really difficult to focus on that that sort of the end game there, especially when you have enhancement requests coming in that might kinda pull you off track a little bit. You have to stay within those guardrails Yeah. In order to move the company forward.
Cameron Sutter [00:15:35]:
It's so easy to get distracted with all the different requests from people and, like, there's such good ideas and some of them we just can't do. But lots of them, you know, lots of the things that we do in Plottr have come from Mhmm. Users' ideas. So we're still able to take a lot of people's requests, and we're always getting feedback and and improving it because of that. So
Jim Azevedo [00:15:54]:
Okay. Well, good. That's kind of that's a good segue because I wanted to sort of switch gears here and maybe talk about StorySnap and StoryBibles and what led you to that next phase or to that particular feature? Was that based in large part on feedback you're getting from your authors?
Cameron Sutter [00:16:13]:
Yeah. So, part of it is we saw a need. Part of it is it was, kind of a desire to help people that already have several books, kind of get into Plottr easier and and do the work for them so that they wouldn't have to manually input all the characters and everything. Because, honestly, when you're running a business writing and and publishing and things, it's hard to do all that. And that's probably very low value for you until it becomes super important. You wish you had that series bible, and then you're a hundred characters in, and you're like, oh, man. I wish I could do this. Can I pay somebody? You can pay a virtual assistant to do it, you know, and and and things like that.
Cameron Sutter [00:17:02]:
So it was kind of born out of the need of or seeing that need and also trying to get people in the plotter easier.
Jim Azevedo [00:17:09]:
Okay. Can we kind of can we define can can we go back a bit and define what a story model is? And and, specifically, with story with StorySnap, is it specifically designed for you know, to keep track of multiple books or multiple stories, or could a writer can an author start, with just a single story using a story bible that builds up over time?
Cameron Sutter [00:17:35]:
Yeah. Great question. So, and, actually, I I see a few comments coming in from, other people about, about Plottr. Can I answer those really quick before we
Jim Azevedo [00:17:44]:
Absolutely? Please do.
Cameron Sutter [00:17:45]:
Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. We'll get back to that question about story bites here. So I see a couple of people asking about the price and the subscription service, and there's actually it doesn't have to be a subscription. There's a lifetime option, so you can just pay once. Because I know I know people hate subscriptions, and so we've tried to make it so you can do both. Either just pay once or pay a little bit at a time.
Cameron Sutter [00:18:08]:
Oh, yeah. And somebody said that. Okay. There we go. Yeah. The lifetime. And then, Ethan, you had a question about being too expensive, and I totally get that, especially with how things are in the world today with economy and stuff. I would love to to, I don't know, kinda address that.
Cameron Sutter [00:18:25]:
But I know a lot of authors have have told us that, not StorySnap. I was about to say that plotter has been the best investment they have made for their writing career. That has been, hands down, the most valuable thing for them. That and, like, Grammarly, I think most people say. So, or,
Kevin Tumlinson [00:18:46]:
I forget the other one off the top of
Cameron Sutter [00:18:48]:
my head. Sorry. ProWritingAid. There we go. Okay. So so, yeah, it is kind of expensive, and we're we're there's always discount codes and things like that. So, you know, if you have a problem with the price, definitely email us, and we can work with you. But, see if there's okay.
Cameron Sutter [00:19:05]:
Yeah. Good. But I just wanted to make sure I address those because, yeah, thing things are difficult right now. I understand price. So
Jim Azevedo [00:19:13]:
Yeah. Appreciate that.
Cameron Sutter [00:19:15]:
Yeah. But so getting back to the, series bible question. So a series bible or a story bible is, having all the information for your whole story. So all the information about your characters, the magic systems, the the, backstory, the world building, all those kind of things in one place that you can reference. And so it's meant as a reference tool. And if a story by all means just for one book, and a series bible is for the whole series. And, so story snap is a tool that takes a finished manuscript and builds a story bible, and the output of that is either a plotter file or a Word document. So we're not trying to lock people into plotter with StorySnap, but it will build a plotter file for you that is, the the story bible for that that story.
Cameron Sutter [00:20:13]:
And we think that's a better experience than just a Word document. Because a Word document, you can still search and it's we make it really organized and stuff. But with Plottr, it does the visual timeline for you, like the index cards, the sticky notes. It does that for you, and you can see the character arcs. And it just it's easier to search, and it's more organized. But to answer your question about the one book at a time thing, it is it is right now meant for just one book at a time because, and so it does use AI. I forgot to mention that. And, AIs can't handle that.
Cameron Sutter [00:20:48]:
Like, they can't handle a whole series at once, and so that's why we're just focusing on one book at a time. And when I when I say AI, I know a lot of people get worried about that, but we've we've taken a lot of precautions to make sure that it doesn't train
Jim Azevedo [00:21:02]:
on the
Cameron Sutter [00:21:04]:
or the AI models don't train on your book. We're using what's called the API or, like, our servers are talking to chat GPT servers, and it's in their terms and conditions that when you do it that way, it doesn't, they they're not allowed to train on that material. And we never upload your manuscript or anything to their servers, so it never it's never on their servers. They don't have to trust those big tech companies, because it's never in their hands in the first place. And, they don't they they're not training on your work. It's really important thing to say because I know a lot of people are are scared about that, and it it's a it's a big deal right now.
Jim Azevedo [00:21:38]:
So There's still a lot of apprehension out there. Does, does does this the StorySnap just integrate seamlessly with the plotter tools? So you're using StorySnap to just kinda meld into plotter?
Cameron Sutter [00:21:51]:
So it it's a separate site, and what it does is it gives you a plotter file, and then you can just open that in plotter. Or if you're using the online version of plotter, you can just upload it to plotter. So it's not, like, a one button seamless thing, but it makes it fairly seamless to you. And we separated it on purpose, because for a couple different things. One, because of the AI thing. Some people are really worried about the AI, so there's no AI in Plottr. StorySnap is separate, and so you don't have to worry about any AI in plotter. And, also, there's a lot of use cases for, like, editors and publishers and things where they could use StorySnap, and we didn't want people to have to buy plotter to be able to use those benefits of StorySnap.
Cameron Sutter [00:22:38]:
But StorySnap is super easy to use. It's you drag in a file and click one button. And that's, like, one of the big benefits. Instead of having to do the prompting yourself or, like, figure out what what are the right prompts or how to copy and paste it into an organized place or whatever, like, all that manual work, StorySnap does for you. And so you just drag in a file, click one button, and you've got this amazing, super detailed book bible.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:06]:
I mean, I think I'd like I've gone as far as, like, printing out eight and a half by 11, you know, pages, paper pages, all over my bed, on the floor, color coded.
Cameron Sutter [00:23:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:20]:
Old old days. Hey. Real quickly, I wanna bring up a quick, follow-up comment here from Tom. He says, I'm happy to pay for a good product. The problem is I paid for a bunch of them by now and can't find one that really works. So I wanted to ask you though, Cameron, do you do you have, like, free trials or periods of time where people can just kinda check it out and play with it a little bit? Yeah. So Water Okay.
Cameron Sutter [00:23:43]:
Water has a thirty day free trial. You can try it out and, see if it works for you and Alright. Makes it super easy for you.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:51]:
So Okay. Cool.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:52]:
There you go, Tom. Hope that's helpful.
Cameron Sutter [00:23:55]:
Yeah. Sorry. That's that's a good comment, though. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of them don't say what they do on the on the the box. So
Jim Azevedo [00:24:05]:
Yeah. For sure. Gosh. Here's another question. I think you kind of addressed this one already, but a lot of indie authors, especially those who are, you know, writing fantasies, they're often world builders and not just storytellers. So I'm curious. Was StorySnap sort of built with that scale in mind? Because it just sounds like you could just keep expanding, expanding, and expanding with StorySnap.
Cameron Sutter [00:24:32]:
Yeah. So StorySnap doesn't help you come up with any ideas or build your world. All it does is it's taking what you've already written in your manuscript and organizing it into something that's easy to reference. And so if you built, like, a magic system into it, it's really good at pulling out the magic system and, like, all the details of how it works and what characters have it and and and things like that. So it'll help you reference that later on when you're done, but it's not gonna help you build anything. It's not not not what meant what it's meant for.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:05]:
Sure. It's but it's meant to help you keep track of what you've built, sounds like.
Cameron Sutter [00:25:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. And it's really really good at getting all the details. It's, like, amazingly detailed. I was blown away the first time that we actually got one through it, and it worked and everything. And I was like, for my books, for example, it goes through like so it goes through every place in your story and kinda explains not only the description of the place, but also the emotional significance in your book, which threw me away. Like, there's this clearing in my story in in the woods, and it talked about the emotional significance of that clearing. And I was like, I never would have thought about that.
Cameron Sutter [00:25:41]:
You know? And, like, the detail on each character and then the detail of the magic system and the organizations or religions and just, like, so detailed. I was so blown away. It's it's really cool to just have all those details that you don't have to do the manual work of pulling them out or even prompting to get all those.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:58]:
Yeah. Do you have any other use cases you could share? Maybe, some feedback that you've heard from authors who are using the system. Because StorySnap, it's it's a fairly new, feature. Right?
Cameron Sutter [00:26:11]:
Yeah. So we, we started kind of secretly letting people use it back in, like, September, but we've just been slowly slowly making people more and more aware of it and and building out the features and things like that. So just, like, a a week or two ago is when we yeah. I think a week or two ago is when maybe a little bit more than that, when we kinda officially announced it to our our whole audience, like, this is it's ready for anybody to use if they want to. Some other use cases, some people are finding that from one, one draft to another, it helps them to see the differences that they've made. And, it's very customizable. So we have what's called add ons, which lets you do whatever you want with it. So one add on is write me an Amazon blurb or a the back cover blurb of my story.
Cameron Sutter [00:27:06]:
And, again, this is AI. You you can't just copy and paste this and put it on the back cover of your book, but it will give you, like, a rough draft of a blurb or an Amazon description. There's another one where it'll pull out, like, the the date, location, and weather of each chapter. There's another one that will generate book club questions, things like that. So we've made it very customizable so it can do basically anything you want. And if you have an idea, we'll build an add on for you to do that in your story. And, I I kinda lost track of what your original question was. But, yeah, the add ons may be customized as far as going.
Jim Azevedo [00:27:45]:
No. That's that's this is really cool because as you're speaking through this, I'm thinking about I'm constantly trying to find, like, a visual way to plan my days, my weeks, and even my months because I've got, you know, probably but service enhancements that are coming up, different, you know, news items that are coming up, and there are different business units that I'm keeping track of. And I'm like, okay. I need to, like, I wish I had this visual out of tool to help me plan better. Like, you know, here's this business unit. Here are different things that are coming here this this quarter and next quarter. Oh, then here's this other business unit. So I'm hearing everything you're saying, Cameron.
Cameron Sutter [00:28:26]:
Well, it's funny because people have used Plottr for lots of different things that we didn't expect, like planning their marketing for their book.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:33]:
This is exactly what I was gonna ask you next. Yeah, please.
Cameron Sutter [00:28:35]:
Cool. Cool. Yeah. So, like, planning out visually, like, okay. Here's or one line could be, like, your emails. Another one could be social media. Another one could be, like, physical events that you go to or something. And then you have dates going down, like, January, February, March, or something like that.
Cameron Sutter [00:28:50]:
And what am I doing for social media? What am I doing for email? What am I doing for in person events? That kind of thing. Or planning out their blog posts visually. And, actually, I use it for my yearly goals. So just to visualize, I'll have, like, months and then personal goals, writing goals, financial goals, those kind of things. And, like, there's one other use case that I can't remember off the top of my head. But, yeah, people use it for all sorts of things and, like, kind of a road map. That was the other thing. We use it I I use it as, like, a road map for myself of what to build next, though I'm not great at updating that very often.
Cameron Sutter [00:29:29]:
But, yeah, all sorts of different ways that and that's something we've noticed with plotters. Like, seeing things visually like that in a a user friendly spreadsheet, like, a a thing that's not intimidating, not very rigid, and not very oh, this is this date or that date. It's just more of a flexible thing. It is really powerful for people. So who knows? Maybe we'll make a a plotter for, just anything. Like, a plotter for anything. I don't know. Yeah.
Cameron Sutter [00:29:46]:
I wanna play with it. I I really do. I haven't played with it yet. Yeah. My job is, anything. I don't know. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:29:53]:
I wanna play with it. I I really do. I haven't played with it yet. Yeah. My job is just to try to get as much awareness for Draft2Digital as possible. Yeah. I'm not a full time novelist, so it's like, yeah. But I hear about some tools sometimes and especially yours.
Jim Azevedo [00:30:06]:
And this isn't the first time I'm like, yeah. You know, I think we need to download this and just start or just, you know, sign up for an account and just start messing with it to keep myself organized.
Cameron Sutter [00:30:15]:
Yeah. You might find interesting uses. And if you do, then, send them my way. Well, somebody somebody plans out their workshops. I just remembered. They plan out their workshops, like, they have a two long two day long seminar or something. They plan out and plotter visually. It's pretty cool.
Jim Azevedo [00:30:32]:
Oh, for sure. Just a couple of quick comments here. One from Elyssa, our own Elyssa Dolinger, who says, sounds
Cameron Sutter [00:30:44]:
Oh, I think I lost you. Oh, so he froze. I thought it was me that froze. Oh, man. I was, like, trying to find out if my Internet was still up and everything, but, okay, it looks like he froze. So, yeah, I'm the new, the host. Welcome to, the the the show today. No.
Cameron Sutter [00:31:25]:
I'm just kidding. But, yeah, just respond to Alyssa's comment there, that accuracy between books is really important because as a writer, you're gonna get you're gonna get emails from from your readers, and they're gonna say things like, why did you change this character? He was, I see the comment, though. Look at me. I'm the host now. Yeah. But I can't I can't highlight that on the screen because I'm not the real host, so I'm not able to add that there. Anyway, so you're gonna get emails from readers that tell you, you know, why did you change the character? This is my favorite character or, you know, things like that. And now he has green eyes.
Cameron Sutter [00:32:05]:
I like the blue eyes. Don't change that. And you're gonna look at them like, oh, I had no idea. You're just gonna have so many characters. You're not gonna be able to keep them in your head. You think after the first couple books that, yeah, I can keep all that in my head. But when I was writing the sequel of one of my books, it was, like, years afterwards, and I didn't remember a lot of the details. So I had to go back, to I had I had to go back and reread book one before I could write start writing book two.
Cameron Sutter [00:32:36]:
And, man, you can't do that when you get four, five, six books into the series. You can't go reread all of them again. It's just gonna be really difficult. So you'll get emails like that from your readers saying why did you change things. So it's important to have that series bible, and it it's a little painful. But I think with StorySnap, it's gonna make that process a little less painful because you can just upload a manuscript, and it'll make that series bible for you, and you can just search it and stuff. But, but, yeah, it's a it's a little painful process, and there's different ways to go about it. There's, like, you can pay somebody, a virtual assistant or something.
Cameron Sutter [00:33:12]:
There's companies that'll build it for you. You can upload it to, like, ChatGPT and ask it questions and things like that and and different things. But yeah. So if anybody has any other questions, feel free to answer them. I guess I'm answering them now. Let's hope, let's hope he gets back.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:37]:
Oh, hey, Cameron. Oh, hey. Surprise. It's not Jim. Yeah. No. Jim's Internet cut out. So so sorry.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:46]:
So sorry that that happened. And, and I was, I was in a different room when it happened, so I didn't even know that he was gone. But thanks for carrying it carrying it forward.
Cameron Sutter [00:33:55]:
Yeah. You came at the exact right time because I was just running out of stuff to say, and I was like, I'm just gonna start making stuff up here. So they better get somebody.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:03]:
So I'm I missed out on the earlier part of the conversation, but what was it that you guys were just chatting about before we, before we lost Jim?
Cameron Sutter [00:34:10]:
Yeah. So we were talking about, series bibles and how important it is to have those
Cameron Sutter [00:34:15]:
And how we've created this new tool called StorySnap that takes a manuscript, a finished manuscript. And using AI, it just kinda organizes everything into plotter, into a series bible for you.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:26]:
Oh my god. That's amazing. So, I mean, if okay. The and this is a this is a new technology. I knew you were working on something like that. I didn't know it was available already.
Cameron Sutter [00:34:34]:
Yep. Yep. Just recently, we we we announced it.
Jim Azevedo [00:34:36]:
Oh, god.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:37]:
So I have used Plottr in the past, and it was actually a coauthor that talked me into it because I normally don't plot. And she talked me into it because we we really had to use something. I can't just make things up when I have a coauthor. So Yeah. We were we were using Plottr. And then I was using Plottr to try to make a story bible because it's a seven book series. But now are you telling me you've made it that much easier for us?
Cameron Sutter [00:35:00]:
Yeah. It's it's you drag in a file, click one button, and you've got a whole a a story by well, just for one of your books. You'd have to do it for each book individually right now. But, yeah, just one click, and it it's super detailed. It gets everything about your characters, the places, it builds outline, the timeline, and plotter and stuff for you. So
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:17]:
Oh my god. So I can so could I take, book one and then book two, book three? Does does it combine them, or how does that work?
Cameron Sutter [00:35:24]:
Oh, yes. So it doesn't combine them yet. So you'd have an individual file for each one. But in plotter, you can, import a file into each other so you could combine them all manually. And we're working on the series version of this. The LLMs can't handle it, but I have some ways that I think we can do it.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:40]:
My god. I'm so excited. I can't wait I can't wait to give you my money. So to that end to that end, Karen has a question I'm gonna pop up that says, how, where do we find StorySnap? And and she said it in that very enthusiastic voice. I could tell.
Cameron Sutter [00:35:53]:
Yeah. I I can tell too. It's StorySnap.ai. That's the website.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:58]:
Okay. Storysnap.ai. I'm gonna put that in, and I think Lexi's gonna help by dropping it in the comments, the link in the comments. But I'm gonna, unless, well, we got plotter.com, Jim already put in.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:10]:
But I'm gonna do storysnap. So storysnap.ai?
Cameron Sutter [00:36:14]:
Yeah. Dotai.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:15]:
Okay. Let's see if I can spell things properly without my glasses on here. Is this the right URL? That's the one. Yeah. Oh my god. It's like cool. It's like I listen sometimes.
Cameron Sutter [00:36:26]:
And we've actually got a discount code that we can give people. I don't know if I can can I put it in the If you
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:32]:
put it in the private chat, I'll copy it over.
Cameron Sutter [00:36:34]:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:35]:
That'd be great. And so so, again, as a as an existing plotter user, can I find it from there, or do I have to go to story staff separately?
Cameron Sutter [00:36:42]:
You have to go to story staff separately. Yeah. We we made them a separate tool for a couple different reasons, which you missed in the podcast, but but, yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:49]:
Okay. Cool. Alright. Thank you, I'm just gonna pop that up. I'll pop that over. So so this coupon code, I'm just gonna add that banner right now. 50 story snap demo. Right? 50STORYSNAPDEMO for those listening on the podcast.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:08]:
Looks like again. Sorry. It's okay. Hey. You're giving a you're giving something to authors here. We're not don't don't apologize. So what does that get what does that get, authors?
Cameron Sutter [00:37:20]:
So it's 50% off, and the reason for that big discount is because it's it's at the beginning of the launch phase, and we're still trying to figure out where's the value, who's it valuable for, and stuff. So we're
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:30]:
Right. Alright.
Cameron Sutter [00:37:30]:
Figuring that out. So you you get to take advantage of that, and it's it's way cheaper right now for you.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:35]:
I know what I'm doing immediately after this broadcast is over. Yeah. So exciting. Awesome. Okay. So we had some other and, again, I'll pop that up. It's storysnap.ai is where you can find that. And lots of comments coming in.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:48]:
So, again alright. So let me see.
Cameron Sutter [00:37:51]:
I see one about plotter, and Scrivener and Notion.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:55]:
Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah. For me and Ethanverse. Thanks. Thanks for that one. So, Ethanverse says, Cameron, is plotter actually better than Scrivener plus Notion?
Cameron Sutter [00:38:04]:
Yeah. So I've seen some people use Notion for their story planning. I've never heard of the combination of the two. Right. And it really comes down to a a question of preference. Store or plotter isn't gonna be great for everybody. Yeah. You know? And so some people just have a different process.
Cameron Sutter [00:38:22]:
Some people just like different things. So, plotter works for me for a lot of different ways, and people find different uses for it that we found. But, you know, if Scrivener or Notion work well for you, I'd probably say don't change that unless you have a reason to change that. If you've got a process, just keep writing. Don't lose lose your momentum.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:40]:
Oh, man. Oh, that is fantastic. Thank you. And I don't know if this comment from Tom, this comes to earlier in the conversation that you had with Jim is, oh, a back cover blur, Banana's not description. Might be worth it for those alone. So for for somebody who just joined, the broadcast or or somebody who just joined as a host of the broadcast, so does that mean when when I load it, I'm not just getting the story bible stuff, but I'm getting other elements?
Cameron Sutter [00:39:05]:
So we've made StorySnap have these add ons, which are customizable things that you can do. Okay. And there's a few of them, like, it can write a Amazon description or back cover blurb for you, and it takes the context of your story and and writes one. It's AI, so it's only a rough draft. You know? You'll still have to
Cameron Sutter [00:39:24]:
Do that. But but it there's a bunch of those add ons, and some are for marketing things. Some are for add more to the book bible. Some are, like, for editors, like flagging potential problems in your story and stuff like that. So these add ons we have, like, a dozen of them, maybe a little bit less, and we're building more. So if you have any ideas, please let us know, and we'll build these add ons. And they're they're just customizable things. You can do anything.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:39:50]:
Oh, man. And and so this is an important thing I wanna I wanna illustrate to people who are listening. When a service provider says, let us know what you're looking for, take Cameron up on that. Right? A lot of the stuff you've developed is based on what authors are looking for. Same thing with Doctor. Right? I mean, how much how much of, when you decide because, again, you've got a road map. You've got all these things you wanna do. How much of that is decided upon by users giving you feedback?
Cameron Sutter [00:40:18]:
Yeah. So that's a difficult question because it's not always direct feedback, you know, because a lot of people would have different ideas. And so one Peterson will say, don't do this, and the other person will say, do this, the exact opposite. You know? And so we definitely have to be captain of our own ship and and decide the the vision direction that we're going in. But we'd listen to people's feedback, and if, like, 10 people are saying, we want a better way to do this. We're like, okay. That's valuable. Let's start working on that.
Cameron Sutter [00:40:46]:
And so for, like, little quality of life improvements, those often come directly from users. They're like, oh, this is annoying, or one person recently said, this interaction within plotter really is bad for my, motion sickness. And so we immediately change that. Uh-huh. So, like, little quality of life things like that, very often, if you send them to us, we'll fix them quickly. But, like, bigger changes of, like, I've got this idea for a feature. We'd love that idea or love that feedback, and we take it and we're like, okay. What is the best way to solve this problem? And then we come up with new things.
Cameron Sutter [00:41:23]:
And, actually, somebody asked Lexi asked earlier about, new tools or or updates. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:28]:
Yeah. I was just about to ask you that one. So yeah. Lexi says, yeah. Any plans? What what are the things that you are on the sort of road map for
Cameron Sutter [00:41:36]:
Yeah. So this kinda leads into that. One of the big things that we're working on right now is a family tree feature. So you'll be able to visualize a family tree within plotter.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:44]:
Oh, that's so cool. I mean, like, you're talking about characters and and generations and and oh, which is phenomenal for romance writers particularly. Right?
Cameron Sutter [00:41:52]:
Yeah. Well, if and, like, military fiction, if you have a government organization or something like that, you'll be able to
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:57]:
Big epic fantasies, like, all kinds of stuff. Oh my god. I could so many so many things. Oh, wow.
Cameron Sutter [00:42:03]:
Hopefully, we'll make it so story snap will build that family tree for you automatically. Yeah. We haven't tested that yet, but that's kind of the plan. And then another thing we're gonna do is make it so that within Plottr, you can see multiple different things. So you can look at your list of characters or a specific character while you're working on the timeline. Right now, you can't really do that without flipping back and forth a lot, but we've got this cool way where we're gonna make it so you can see multiple things at the same time.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:42:30]:
Oh my god. I love that. This is like, I mean, Plottr has long been, a great tool, but now you're taking it to a whole new level. They're trying to do you ever imagine when when you first started this journey, did you ever imagine that you would be adding all these layers and dimensions to it?
Cameron Sutter [00:42:46]:
No. I I just thought I was building a tool for myself. I never knew what this would turn into and and how much people would say it helped them and and how much I would be able to just be in service of other people all day every day. Just it's so cool to be able to do this.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:02]:
Oh, and I'm so glad you took the time to share some stuff with us today. Just gotta pop up these comments. Alyssa, I just love me some flowcharts. And Lexi says, gonna George r Martin the heck out of that. Yeah. Of course. Nice. With all those family trees, etcetera.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:18]:
Oh my god. That is amazing. Any any sort of last things that you would you know, we didn't get a chance to ask you about that you wanted to share about what's going on with Plottr or, obviously, with StorySnap?
Cameron Sutter [00:43:29]:
Man, I think we've gone over everything probably more than you guys wanna hear from me. But, yeah, we're just, we're just really excited to be able to serve writers. So if you have any ideas for how StorySnap or Plottr could help you, we'd love to do that, especially StorySnap where it's a new thing, and we're trying to figure out where it's gonna be useful for people. And with those customizable add ons, it's really easy to add new things. So if you've got ideas, send them our way, and we'll make StorySnap this really awesome automated pipeline to just make something really powerful for you. So
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:59]:
Awesome. Thank you for that. And and just, I guess, one final question before we're about to close comes from Ethan Bursch, because Ethan Bursch is curious as what, if if you can share what AI you're actually using. Is it GPT? Is it Gemini? Something else?
Cameron Sutter [00:44:13]:
Yeah. Right now, it's just ChatGPT on the back end, but we're explore exploring other ones, and we may switch and may maybe for certain types of things, it'll be better to use one or the other, and so we're still exploring that. But right now, it's just simple in using ChatGPT.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:27]:
Awesome. Well, Cameron, thank you for Plottr. Thank you for StorySnap, and thank you for sharing, sharing your wisdom and and this great update with us today.
Cameron Sutter [00:44:35]:
Yeah. I mean, I I rarely get to talk to you on, like, a podcast or something, Mark, so I'm glad you got to fill in.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:41]:
I mean, I'm I'm sorry Jim had, the I don't I hope he's okay that the Internet went out of his place and stuff like that, but I'm so glad I got the chance to chat with you. So thank you so much.
Cameron Sutter [00:44:51]:
Yeah. Let's hope Jim is okay. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:52]:
We'll hope he's okay. We're going to, hope that Jim's okay because he'll be back next week as the host of Draft2Digital Live. If you do not want to miss Draft2Digital Live, which happens every Thursday at 1PM eastern, be sure to mark d2dlive.com. There's no exclamation point in there. That's just Com. There's no when you're entering that URL, make sure to like, to share, to comment, to subscribe so you don't miss out on the fascinating conversations with amazing folks like Cameron who not only, you know, put out great tools for authors, but when tech happens, he just manages the show all by himself, one handed show. He's doing this. He's just taken over, providing great content, not phased in the slightest as well.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:33]:
And if you have not if you have not ever, checked out self publishing yourself, you can create a free account over at Draft2Digital.com. Cameron, thanks again for hanging out with me today.
Cameron Sutter [00:45:46]:
Thanks for having me. This has been fun.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:48]:
And thank you, listeners for your patience. And and and and, you know, you had a really good looking host, and now you got some bald guy jumped in at the last minute. But appreciate you guys being here. And as I get over to the close, I'm gonna probably close with a word, from a voice you probably know and love, talking a little bit about, a little bit about, D2D print.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:46:10]:
Ebooks are great, but there's just something about having your words in print. Something you can hold in your hands, put on a shelf, sign for a reader. That's why we created D2D Print, a print on demand service that was built for you. We have free beautiful templates to give your book a pro look, and we can even convert your ebook cover into a full wrap around cover for print. So many options for you and your books. And you can get started right now at draft2digital.com. That's it for this week's self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital. Be sure to subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with your will be author friends, and start, build, and grow your own self publishing career right now at draft2digital.com.