ļ»æMelle Melkumian: So I've got really exciting news today, as most people heard ChatGPT 4.0 was released yesterday.
Melle Melkumian: While I know that some people, you know, I was reading the threads, and some people thought it was a little anticlimactic. Other people were super excited about the new capabilities. What we want to drill down on today is specifically, how do the new capabilities really help support your author business and your publishing?
Melle Melkumian: But before we get started on some of the notes that we've taken, and the way that we think it can really accelerate your publishing business, Jamie, I just really would love to get your first impressions. What stuck out to you? What made you go "wow," and what made you happy about it?
Jamie Culican: So I am a data person. I love numbers. I love being able to kind of like crack the code when it comes to data.
Jamie Culican: And the one thing that I really like about the new ChatGPT 4.0 is that I can kind of dump all my data into it.
Jamie Culican: and it organizes it for me. And it can organize it. It will analyze it for me in words, but then it will also organize it in graphs, in charts, and anything that I need.
Melle Melkumian: So I agree. I was surprised by your response. Because I know you love your graphs and charts, and I know you're gonna talk a little more in detail later about the breadth to which you were able to analyze your data. But I also know I've been getting a lot of dragon photos from you.
Melle Melkumian: So tell me, what was your first impression of the new graphics?
Jamie Culican: The new graphics are really impressive. I've just been playing around with them, and I've been keeping it really simple where I'm just like dropping in like any character descriptions I have, or world descriptions, or even book blurbs, and just saying, "Give me some inspiration based on this book blurb," and I was impressed. I was really impressed.
Melle Melkumian: Yeah, so was I with the ones you were sending. For those of you who don't know, Jamie and I have a series. It's a YA reverse harem dystopian with dragons. And it's actually quite interesting because we started this series a while ago. And a lot of the things we were talking about, like biohacking and people putting chips in their brains, are now really happening in the world.
Melle Melkumian: And I know we're gonna have to revisit that series. So we've got more to talk about in terms of the case study we started, but we'll finish up with that. I want to stay focused on ChatGPT 4.0 right now. So Jamie talked about data aggregation. Basically, how do you make an informed decision about your business? And for anybody who's trying to make money and make a profitable business, you know that God is in the details.
Melle Melkumian: By understanding your data and analyzing both your collection, the collection of data, the analysis of it, the sales data, the expenses, this is what's gonna provide authors or any business owner with detailed insights without having to, you know, you don't need a bookkeeper. You don't need someone to manually enter data and look at those details.
Melle Melkumian: Jamie, can you go into a little more detail about how you, because I know you're wide and you're in KU, can you tell us a little bit more about how you threw all your numbers at ChatGPT 4.0, and it gave you details?
Jamie Culican: So yeah, I kept this simple because I was just playing around with it today. So I just took my reports, my sales reports from KDP, from Draft2Digital, from Google, and I just dumped them in there. And I said, "Analyze." And it was really cool because it broke it down per book. It started with all the sales, so like all the sales per book, and then it would separate it per platform. But then it also gave me direction to go. It was like, "This is the series that sells the most, so this is where you should focus. And this series isn't, so you should just forget about it, basically." And I was like, "Okay, stuff we know that takes us a lot of time normally to figure out because you're putting in all the numbers yourself." But then I took my Facebook ads, and I only did Facebook this time. And I dropped that data in there. And then it was able to say, "Okay, you've spent this much money on this one book series. You didn't spend any on this book series. However, you should still forget about that book series and focus on this one," because even though it's spot on from where I've always seen the data as well, I spend forever putting all this information in and ChatGPT did this in like a minute.
Melle Melkumian: So what you're making me think of, and if anyone hasn't heard of Michael Michalowicz, he's a great entrepreneurial coach. He helps people. The most recent book he wrote was "Profit First," and his whole idea is crunch your numbers, get an idea of your numbers, and then focus on the things that drive your profit. So the description that Jamie was just giving us is really, it's yes, this book makes the most money, and this series makes the most money, but it's also able to, and again, ChatGPT 4.0 is able to analyze your spend per series. So you subtract the cost of doing business or the cost of the goods, and then you end up with the actual net profit from each series. And that is what truly tells you where your profit is coming from.
Jamie Culican: Absolutely. And if you're a visual person like I am too, it gives you the graphs, it gives you the charts, so you can just look right at it real quick and be like, "Okay, I got this."
Melle Melkumian: Yep, and that was the second thing I was gonna bring up about the informed decision making, and that's the custom dashboards. So you can use ChatGPT 4.0 to create custom dashboards displaying real-time sales and expense data. And that's the type of fast look information that's gonna save you time and help you make more informed decisions, because these more informed decisions are ultimately what's gonna drive profit in your business.
Melle Melkumian: So the next thing that we also found from the new release, and this isn't the hype that you got in, you know, if anybody out there watched the OpenAI presentation yesterday, this isn't the hype that you got from that. Yes, we know it can talk. Yes, we know it's gonna become like "Her," that robotic character. But what I wanted to talk about is some of the tactics that it provides, like trend analysis. So ChatGPT 4.0 can analyze historical sales data. And that's great, like we were just talking about. But based on that, it can actually predict future sales trends. And it can predict it based on what you have that sells. So why is that important?
Jamie Culican: Well, one of the big reasons that that's important is time management. I'm always talking about time. Every time, I think every podcast I brought it up is there's just never enough time.
Melle Melkumian: That is good.
Jamie Culican: I know, I know. But with this, it's telling you where to spend your time. It's telling you where the market's going. It's predicting where the market's going and telling you, "This is the series, or this is the market, or this is the genre. This is where you need to spend your time."
Melle Melkumian: And it's analyzing that based on what you have already sold. So what it does is it takes out that, "Oh, I feel like writing ladybug shifters today. So we're gonna write ladybug shifters." Instead, it redirects you and helps you focus. And it says to you, and you guys are gonna find out more about this in my case study, which we have uploaded the first video to YouTube. But it will help you to focus on what of yours has been successful. And because something of yours has had even a modicum of success, even if it's 10 readers, 100 readers, 1,000 readers, it will show you where that is, and that you should head in that continued direction to grow off your foundation.
Jamie Culican: It'll also tell, like my books are wide, so it'll also tell you which platform to focus on. Because it has all your sales data, it can say, you know what, this book here, you're selling it on Barnes & Noble. That's where you need to focus your time.
Melle Melkumian: And it'll even highlight the best genres per platform. And I think that's something that's also really interesting, because sometimes, and you guys will see in my case study introduction, I have genre-hopped like a lunatic. And it will help you look at that and be like, "Okay, cut this, cut this, cut this, cut this, focus on this. This is where the magic happens for your brand."
Melle Melkumian: It can provide a comparative analysis between your books and your series, but it can also provide insights into the themes and genres that are most popular with the readers of your books and books like yours. So it can provide a comparative analysis between your book and the market against other books in the market. And that's a performance evaluation metric. When you look at these numbers, it really allows you to see if you're hitting the tropes, to see if you're hitting the themes. And again, it
can help you get laser-focused. It's one tool that's the amazing thing. But this tool, when used in the right way, will help you laser-focus in on the market you want to sell to. And this goes along with campaign analysis. And, Jamie, you're big on marketing campaigns, and you know, tell me a bit about analyzing changes in sales figures before, during, or after each campaign. Have you tried that out with ChatGPT 4.0 yet?
Jamie Culican: Briefly. I have taken the report that I currently have, and I was able to dump it in today and just see what it came up with. But what I can say is prior to this, I spent I don't even know how much time analyzing campaigns, analyzing sales, and trying to compare and figure out where I should focus. And the new ChatGPT literally just said, "This is what you need to do."
Melle Melkumian: Yeah, it's funny. I remember years ago, I think it was like 2018 or 2019, Craig Martelle, who's a great guy and has always been very supportive of us, he dropped a spreadsheet into a Facebook post and was like, "I look at this every month to analyze my business." And I do this as part of my corporate work, and I'm actually gonna create an author spreadsheet that I think you guys will love. But when I saw that, my eyes crossed and my blood ran cold, and I just thought, I just can't. You know, I just can't do this. And so for me, it's very exciting to see that I can take, I can download the spreadsheet from Amazon, I can upload it to ChatGPT 4.0, and I'm on my way with a visual chart that helps me understand it better.
Melle Melkumian: So one of the next things, this is always leading to something that's super valuable, and that's financial planning. So we've talked a little bit about the profitability reports that it can produce. How does it provide you with the ROI, or the return on investment, Jamie?
Jamie Culican: Well, it's interesting because you can also dump your expenses in there, and you can get those reports. If you primarily use PayPal, you can drop those PayPal reports in there. And it will literally tell you how much you're actually making. Not like, "Hey, Amazon's saying I'm making $200 a day on this series." But if you spent $200 a day on any kind of promo or ad or anything, you're really making $0. So by dumping all of that in, you get real-time data that's accurate.
Melle Melkumian: And I think the thing that's important to realize there is that it's not just, "I made $200 a day. I spent $150, so my net was $50." This tool is actually giving you reports for each book. So you can say, "Oh, I sold this trilogy for $1,000 a day, but I ran ads on it to $1,200 a day, so that's a minus $200." While this other little series I have made $500 today, but I didn't actually advertise it at all. So then your $500 a day series is actually more profitable than your $1,000 a day series, and it breaks it down with that level of granularity. So again, getting back to Profit First, it really hones you in on where does your business actually make money, and where do you want to invest more of your time and effort into to grow that part of the business.
Jamie Culican: It'll also show you, like if you have a series, if, say, Book 3 is not performing but Book 1 and 2 did, you know that you need to go back and figure out why, or you need to scrap this series and move to a different series that is making money.
Melle Melkumian: Yeah, I've always found that fascinating. Like, even I, and I think I've covered it in some of the talks we've done, like Cougar Creek Coven has, I don't know, I think it was like Book 4 was super popular and Book 3 lagged. But everybody, you know, continued to read on to Book 6. So it's interesting to look at those dynamics. I might run some of those numbers through ChatGPT 4.0, just to see what it really looks like.
Melle Melkumian: The last thing I wanted to mention on financial planning, and this is something every corporation I've worked in does at very, dare I say dull but important meetings that I've often been a part of, which is budget forecasting. So ChatGPT 4.0 can create these budget forecasts for you. What they do is they base it on spending, they base it on revenue trends, and then it helps you to get better financial planning for the future. So I don't know how you run your business, but you know a lot of us are earning the money and then taking the money and saying, "Okay, I made $300 this month, I'm gonna spend $100, 30% on ads." Well, with budget forecasting, you can identify that next month you are predicted, you know, you're gonna come out with one new book, you're gonna run this sale. With all of those different toggle points in there, it's gonna tell you like, I anticipate you'll make $500 a month. So you can adjust your ad spend. Or it might say, you know, next month is May, not historically, or June, not historically a good time, and you don't have any new releases out, so you might only make $200. So you can reset your ads to a lower budget before the month even starts. So it kind of gives you an idea of where you should spend and how much you can spend before the month takes off.
Jamie Culican: It'll also tell you where you should allocate your money for your best return on your investment. So if one of your series needs ads and the other series doesn't, it's gonna tell you, "You need to focus your budget over here to make money where over here is already making money," and it'll tell you that.
Melle Melkumian: You know, it's funny, I know we're shooting a video podcast right now, Jamie, but this is gonna make such a fun video. We're gonna be taking ChatGPT 4.0 through its paces in exactly these steps, showing you how to manage your business better in our AI Publishing Formula course. So I just can't wait because even looking at these, you know, I've got strategic planning on my list of things I wanna do because you can use ChatGPT 4.0. It's got access to optimal times for book releases, and then you can marry it to your historical sales data along with the market trends, and you can find out in your genre, based on your sales, based on market trends, when should I be releasing books? And this is something I've seen so, so much of, Jamie, those discussions that everyone has a different opinion of when you should launch a book.
Jamie Culican: Right. And this is gonna literally create your launch plan for you.
Melle Melkumian: And of course, along with strategic planning, we have platform optimization, which I think is fairly self-explanatory.
Jamie Culican: Well, each platform has their own peaks and lows when it comes to releasing. So again, this will be all part of that launch plan that it will create for you.
Melle Melkumian: On all of these platforms, Jamie, that you sell on, do you download a spreadsheet with the data in it? Is that what they output to?
Jamie Culican: Yep. It's just a sheet.
Melle Melkumian: That's so exciting because you can just upload all of that together and come up with clear, and ChatGPT will just analyze it all.
Melle Melkumian: Okay, so we've talked a bit about the enhanced reporting. We've got not just interactive, not just visuals, but interactive visualizations. So these charts are gonna allow you to dig down into the data. So you know how, when you scroll over something and you can do a limited amount of this in Amazon KDP reports now where you can scroll over a month and then click on it, and it'll give you a deeper dive into the data. But now you can aggregate all your content together and get this same type of reporting across your entire business profile. And so we've been talking about multiple platforms. But I'm also talking about if you use a subscription site, if you do a Kickstarter, if you do Vella. So in my case study, I show you that there were months where I was earning no money from KU, but at the same time my Kickstarter or my Vella was accelerating in income. And so I can use this tool to dump it all in and get a really clear idea of how the last few years of publishing have actually been to me, and I can't get all that in one place at the moment.
Melle Melkumian: Okay, so we've got a couple more points I want to bring up here that are really exciting. We've got the competitive advantage. So you can do industry benchmarking, which means that you can take your benchmark, how many books you sell, and then you can compare it to industry averages. So usually that is an XY axis chart, and then there will be a blue line running across that chart which shows sales over time, and then there will be a red line somewhere else in a horizontal line across that chart, and that'll tell you what the industry is doing. Obviously, you hope that they're either close together or yours is maybe above the median of the industry. But you can actually get this level of content out of ChatGPT 4.0, which also drives down to a market analysis and an understanding of the competitive landscape.
Melle Melkumian: Jamie, have you done
any work in it yet on that?
Jamie Culican: Not yet. I mean, there is so much it can do, and I was focused on dumping all my spreadsheets in, because again, you know how I like the numbers, and just seeing what it said, and to see if I was going in the right direction before I was able to dump everything in there. And I mean, it was comparable. But it was crazy to see how quickly ChatGPT 4.0 was able to compile all of that.
Melle Melkumian: And I think there's something that I want to look at more. It has greater memory. So it's going to be able to retain the content that you get out of it. So it's allowing for task automation and quick data insights. Now, I haven't played with this capability yet, but in my head, the way it plays out is I create a thread that says, "You know, these are the reports I want you to generate. I'm gonna upload these 5 spreadsheets. And once I do, this is the report I want," and then it'll feed me that report. And because that becomes a repetitive task automation, you don't have to keep telling it every time. You don't have to remember how you do it every time. You just have to know that you need to upload these 5 sheets, and it'll deliver the report without you thinking about it.
Melle Melkumian: So that's a lot to take in. And I think that it's, you know, we're gonna do a video on ChatGPT 4.0, and we're gonna cover these tools. It will be inside our course. There's a couple of things that I wanna mention before we sign off for today.
Melle Melkumian: There's 2 new items on our YouTube channel. The first is a tool that I love, and we're gonna end up talking about it a lot inside our course. It's called Hunch. And it's really this amazing whiteboard that can write a book, that can create a marketing plan for a book, that can do the market research for a book, and it can do it all on a whiteboard so you can move things around and connect them. So just today, I uploaded a demo of that. And I'm sharing it. I really recommend that you go to our YouTube channel, which is AI Publishing Formula, and take a look at that, because this is the future of AI tools. If you remember how we've, you know, we went from vinyl to CDs to digital in what feels like seconds, and you're gonna see a fallout of a lot of the early AI-developed tools because these new, streamlined, incredible tools are coming along, and Hunch is a leading-edge tool that's going to show you how it works more in line with the way a creative mind works.
Melle Melkumian: And then the second video I put up is my very personal case study introduction. I talk a lot about my personal life and my publishing, and how all that works together. And Jamie is going to be giving me some feedback and some quick action steps based on that video that I'm gonna start putting into play over the coming week so that we can see if we can improve. I'm thinking we're gonna focus first on analyzing my current sales like we've been talking about today, and at the same time promoting my backlist so that we're increasing our current sales.
Melle Melkumian: So I think those are all for me right now. Jamie, did you have any final words about ChatGPT 4.0 and how awesome it is for business?
Jamie Culican: Besides what we talked about already, it is definitely quicker than ChatGPT 4.0. And go play around with those graphics. I was really impressed.
Melle Melkumian: I was amazed because you were giving me graphics. I know your books, and you were, you know, and some of them were our books, and I was looking at them going, "These are our people," and you know, by putting in some of your blurbs and some of your, you know, little content, it's amazing what you can get out. And like the half dragon, half man face was incredible.
Melle Melkumian: Jamie, I just thought of something. You need to post some of those in our groups. See if you can pull them down, and just, you know, show what you were quickly able to dive out of ChatGPT 4.0.
Jamie Culican: No, I definitely will.
Melle Melkumian: Yeah, cause I'd love to see those in public. It makes me excited to write. That's why I love visualization.
Jamie Culican: Same. It's a great inspiration, too, as you're writing.
Melle Melkumian: Exactly. Alright! Everybody have a great day. We look forward to talking to you next week.
