Here’s part deux of my key takeaways from the SPS Live conference last month. 

This part is getting down to the business side of writing and AI. 

1: Self publishing is 50% writing and 50% marketing 

I mentioned Steve Higgs in my last email—he grossed £3 million last year. He talked about being strategic with your time and reckoned that splitting it fifty/fifty is the key to success as an author. 

Now, I get where he’s coming from, but it’s important to remember that Steve is already established with a big back catalogue. 

What if you’re only a one or two books in and you only have a couple of hours at night to write? Are you really going to only spend one hour writing and one hour marketing? 

Personally, I think the best way to approach how you split your time is on a sliding scale. If you’re early in your career, you might need to split it 80% writing and 20% marketing. And adjust that time as you scale and your back catalogue grows. 

Speaking of things growing... 

2. “The robots will kill us!”

James Blatch’s talk was called ‘AI: Fear and Loathing’

AI has split the author industry, and many other creative industries, in two. There’s the love it and embrace types, and then there’s the haters. I’ve heard so many stories about haters going on witch hunts, 20year friendships broken, just like that. 

But here’s the thing:

‘The genie is out of the bottle,’ James Blatch said. ‘Avoiding it is impossible, and any resistance to AI could harm your results.’

Now, it’s important to point out that James isn’t talking about getting an AI to write your book (although people do). In fact, he was vehemently against it. What he’s talking about is using it as a tool to increase your efficiency.  

He’s talking about embracing the advancements in AI to automate tasks, speed up workflows, and gather data, generate advertising copy and images, and anything authors dislike doing. So, he advocates using AI as a tool so you can spend more time writing books. 

From speaking to other authors and copywriters, the general feeling is that AI can’t yet bring the type of humanity and emotion to writing in the way a human can. 

I think I’ll end it here. There were more takeaways and I’m going to watch the digital recordings of the show. 

I’m not an affiliate, but if you’d like to see any of the shows, you can buy a digital ticket for $99. You also get to watch any recordings from last year’s show and some other bonuses.  

It’s worth checking out. Here’s the link: https://selfpublishing.lpages.co/sps-live-2024-digital-tickets-sales-page/

Angie 

If you spot any typos or run on sentences or dangling thingamies, please be kind and let it slide. Save your energy for something better.

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