Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast.

I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing craft and creative business.

You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more at thecreativepen.com.

And that's Penn with a double N.

And here's the show.

Hello, creatives.

I'm Joanna Penn, and this is episode number 755 of the podcast, and it is Friday the 7th

of June 24 as I record this.

In today's show, I'm talking about selling direct,

the pros and the cons, and click testing ideas for your books with Steve Piper. This is a business

and marketing focused episode, so that's coming up in the interview section.

In publishing and AI related things, Jane Friedman in the Hot Sheet reports on the US book show where there were multiple discussions around AI in traditional publishing. So yes,

it is being discussed everywhere. Some interesting snippets from the report.

Mary McCavony, CEO of Abrams, compared the emergence of generative AI to the birth of the

internet. It's going to be that big. It's not going away. The genie is out of the bottle.

There's nothing you can do to put it back in. She did say on the positive side,

there is a dath of capability and time in publishing companies to devote to data analytics,

where AI can be enormously helpful, particularly in relation to direct-to-consumer marketing,

which of course is interesting for us because as indie authors, we do

direct to consumer marketing. And that is a lot of what we talk about with AI. And I think it's

quite interesting because, of course, publishing is full of book people. Like you and I, we are book

people. We love books. But most people are not data analytics people. And look, most

...