I think that for me is the big change that's happened recently, but also like why that that kind of thought is existed previously.

Yeah, and I want to speak to that evolution too, because I think before indie publishing became more common and we had more books coming out that had the opportunity to break these molds that Nikki's talking about, romance was so templated intentionally.

You know, you can go back and look at if you're submitting to write category romance for Harlequin, your heroine has to be between the ages of 22 and 28. and the hero has to be eight to 12 years older than her.

They're allowed to have sex, but not until they're married.

If they do have a sexual encounter before that, it has to stop before sex and maybe it can be because of shame.

They write all of this out.

It has to be 60,000 words or 200 words double-spaced when you submit it.

And then we're going to dive into one of them.

Great

... to frame the conversation.

Which is that, you know, we'll say not even y- two years ago, but five years ago, search was mostly exclusively text-based phrases.

So people could go into Google and type in the phrase, you know, Finger Lakes landscape painting, and they would have to be able to articulate in text what it is that they were looking for, and then ho- you know, Google would go out and it would crawl the internet.

It would have already crawled most of that and say, "Okay, what, who is using that phrase somewhere on their website? Where does that phrase appear? Finger Lakes landscape painting." And they would try to track down...

They wouldn't go like, "Oh, which Finger Lake? Is this Seneca Lake? Is this Cayuga Lake?" They would look for that phrase, Finger Lakes.

They would look for the phrase, landscape.

Yep, yep, yep.

And so Meg, whenever I talk to someone who has really delved deeply into a topic as you obviously have about AI discoverability, I'm wondering what you saw either in your own career or the career of the authors around you that was indicating that a change was taking place.

Well, I think my experience with AI discoverability wasn't necessarily in the author space to begin with.

So I founded Love at First Search in 2013, so I've been around this sort of digital online economy for over a decade, and it was a search consultancy, so it was SEO.

It was getting people found on Google when Google was the only option for where you could search.

And that was pretty much essentially true until about 2023.

I mean, yes, YouTube, yes, podcasts, yes, Amazon is still technically a search engine, right? And we can talk about that if you'd like to.

But until about 2023, 2024, with the rise of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, I was talking all about Google all the time.

They, it will be l- looking for those less time-bound things like reviews or references or-

... 'cause you had to go through your other iterations to get there.

Exactly.

So I always loved language.

I took classes in linguistics, but I didn't major in English because I looked at the syllabuses of what I would've had to read, and I'd already read it all, and I was like, "I don't wanna read these classics again.

Blah, boring." So I majored in political science instead, and I went into nonprofits, and I went into small businesses, and then I landed in marketing, and I've been in marketing ever since.

And marketing, especially, like, now in AI marketing, it's all back to linguistics.

It's all back to words and choices and the ways that we phrase things, and so it's all coming full circle in its own way.

Mm