Sep 17, 2026 · 44 min · 13 segments
This week on The Self-Publishing Show, James Blatch is joined by author Sky McKinnon to dig into the numbers behind BookBub Featured Deals and ask whether they still offer authors the same value they…
James BlatchHost
Sky McKinnonGuest
And last week, I sent out a tutorial on using multiple AIs to produce... better advertising images which is something I've been working on recently and it's it's one of those little exponentials you can use one AI or you can use book brush or whatever you want to use and you have your ad but combine two of those suddenly it's I think three or four times better by doing a separate background against your cover it starts to look like a graphic design workshop in a big traditional publishing company has put this ad together so i was really pleased with the results of those and i put that tutorial together out to our patrons sort of thing you can get when you're a paid subscriber there i'm gonna do some more of those this week um i have two ai related things to talk about before i invite sky to join us one is A really interesting post that I saw, and it was on TikTok.
It was a woman demonstrating something about AI that I think we all need to be aware of.
And so she said to Claude... we're going to play guess who you think of somebody i'll ask you questions you can only answer yes or no and i will try and guess who it is so they did this game and she said things like is it a person are they an actor are they alive today and so on again yes no yes no And in the end, the answer was whatever it was, George Clooney.
And again, the answer at the end didn't match the answers that she was being given.
And again, when pushed to be honest about it, Claude said, yes, I came up with that answer.
human and sometimes
it is right to think of it as human when we're moving away from the way we would work with a more traditional computer software.
It literally is looking at the form of words that have gone in and responding to those words, trying to put those words together.
So there are instances where however many times you ask it to do something, it's actually incapable of doing it.
Now, these gaps are going to be cleared up at some point, but it's a reminder of how AI actually works.
And last week, I sent out a tutorial on using multiple AIs to produce... better advertising images which is something I've been working on recently and it's it's one of those little exponentials you can use one AI or you can use book brush or whatever you want to use and you have your ad but combine two of those suddenly it's I think three or four times better by doing a separate background against your cover it starts to look like a graphic design workshop in a big traditional publishing company has put this ad together so i was really pleased with the results of those and i put that tutorial together out to our patrons sort of thing you can get when you're a paid subscriber there i'm gonna do some more of those this week um i have two ai related things to talk about before i invite sky to join us one is A really interesting post that I saw, and it was on TikTok.
It was a woman demonstrating something about AI that I think we all need to be aware of.
And so she said to Claude... we're going to play guess who you think of somebody i'll ask you questions you can only answer yes or no and i will try and guess who it is so they did this game and she said things like is it a person are they an actor are they alive today and so on again yes no yes no And in the end, the answer was whatever it was, George Clooney.
And again, the answer at the end didn't match the answers that she was being given.
And again, when pushed to be honest about it, Claude said, yes, I came up with that answer.
human and sometimes
it is right to think of it as human when we're moving away from the way we would work with a more traditional computer software.
It literally is looking at the form of words that have gone in and responding to those words, trying to put those words together.
So there are instances where however many times you ask it to do something, it's actually incapable of doing it.
Now, these gaps are going to be cleared up at some point, but it's a reminder of how AI actually works.
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