Your Book Is Invisible to AI (Here’s How to Fix It)

Ferol Vernon (00:33.037)

Hello and welcome to the Written Word Media Podcast. This is the pod for authors who want to build a successful writing career. I am Ferol Vernon here with Ricci. I would usually say at this point in the show, as always, but I haven’t been here for the past few episodes. I’ll say as usual. Ricci, how are you doing?

Ricci Wolman (00:52.857)

I’m doing great. We missed you Ferol. Last two episodes we had some great interviews, which were really interesting. And if you haven’t listened to them yet, check them out. But I know that you were literally laid out on your back out of commission. So tell us what happened.

Ferol Vernon (01:09.909)

Yes, think it’s playing basketball while middle-aged is the technical term for what I had. And I had a bulging disc and I was flat on my back for two weeks. So it was extraordinarily painful for anybody out there listening who’s ever had back pain. I feel you. It was really awful. I’m through it now. I’m happy to be back. And thanks for holding down the fort, Ricci, and getting those great interviews on. I’m sure, you know.

I haven’t listened to both of them yet, but I know the one I did listen to the content was really awesome. So I’m glad that we kept it going while I was out.

Ricci Wolman (01:44.847)

Yeah, well, welcome back. Good to have you back.

Ferol Vernon (01:47.37)

Yeah, but let’s talk about you. What’s going on with you? I know you have a couple of things you’ve been working on. And let’s just talk about that before we get into the episode.

Ricci Wolman (01:55.797)

yeah, sometimes we talk about personal, sometimes travel. My big thing at the moment is actually work related. I, we, so the last episode we actually recorded together was the Amazon, 10 algorithm episode. and it was one of our most popular episodes this year or so far. authors really loved it. the research that we did and just breaking down some of the changes with Amazon.

And a lot of authors then came to us and said, Hey, can you help us actually put together promo stacks to facilitate what the new algorithm is looking for? So we did exactly that, or that’s what I’ve been working on. And we already have promo stacks that run for one, three or five days. But what we basically did is we added promo stacks that run for 10 or 15 days in a few genres, just to beta test it out. Because the Amazon algorithm is giving more weight to

External traffic we know, and then also longer duration activity. So the algorithm likes to see activity happening, you know, at least a few days in a row. And so we launched that in, I think, mystery, thriller, romance, and sci-fi in beta, literally maybe two weeks ago. And it’s going really well. Authors really love it. It’s one click. It basically pulls in together Facebook ads, our internal promos.

Ferol Vernon (03:10.677)

Yeah, recently.

Ricci Wolman (03:21.388)

our promo partners and gives you like 10 to 15 days of just traffic and sales on Amazon. So now that we’ve figured out that it works, I’m trying to build it out for all the other genres. It’s great, but it’s a lot of work because we’ve got to figure out what the configurations are and make sure we have all the inventory across our partners and everything else. So that is where my head has been.

Ferol Vernon (03:32.969)

Hahaha

Ricci Wolman (03:47.918)

for the last couple of weeks and probably will be for the next week or two as we start rolling it out across the board.

Ferol Vernon (03:53.867)

Yeah, it’s really, really cool. And like, if you haven’t listened to that Amazon episode, go ahead and give it a listen because we did get a lot of really positive feedback on it. And if you listen to that episode, I think you’ll understand, you know, what Ricci’s talking about and why that solution works so well for sort of the modern Amazon or the new Amazon. So we’re really excited about that as a product. And on that episode, we talked a lot about like algorithms and like the Amazon algorithm and how it looks at your books.

Today’s topic, we’re looking at something very similar but also a little different. So the topic we wanted to tackle today is how the AI engines look at your book. And so to tee this up a little bit, one of the things that historically in marketing has always happened is what was called SEO, search engine optimization. And now as more and more people migrate to using one of these AI engines or AI search,

They’re calling it GEO, or generative engine optimization. And that is sort of the global term for finding stuff using AI engines. But today we wanted to focus specifically on books, because we’ve been getting this question from authors a lot, like, hey, when I promote with you or when I do this, does my book show up in ChatGPT? Does my book show up in Gemini, those kinds of things?

And so we did some background research on this and we are ready to kind of share with you what we found.

Ricci Wolman (05:24.451)

Ferol’s being modest, he did all the research on this. I’m piggybacking on what he learned and we’ll mostly be interviewing him to make sure that we fully understand it all. There are a couple other people within our indie author community who’s doing really great work here. know, Ricardo from Readsy has been sending out emails as he experiments and tries to like hack the algorithm. And then Joanna.

Ferol Vernon (05:27.294)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (05:41.129)

Yes.

Ricci Wolman (05:49.804)

Pen also talks about this a lot on her pod. So thank you to them for some of the background research that we did. But then we also just asked the AIs themselves, like, how do you find books? And then put that also in the context of some of the ecosystems that we know exist out there. So yeah, let’s jump in, Ferol. Let’s talk about what are the top three AIs right now in terms of market share that authors should be focusing on.

Ferol Vernon (06:03.295)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (06:17.994)

Yep, yeah, so there’s a pretty clear, like there’s AI technology everywhere, right? But there’s, for consumers, people that are looking for books, there’s three main companies that you need to care about, at least right now. And this is changing really, really fast, right? So make sure if you’re listening to this episode in 2027 that things might have changed. But for now, the biggest one is ChatGPT, which is built by OpenAI, okay? There were first,

to the market and they still have the biggest market share as far as we know. Obviously we don’t have all the public data or the private data, but in terms of like consumer adoption, Chat GPT is the biggest. Now, then the other two are Gemini, which is Google’s AI search engine, and then Claude from Anthropic. Now, we’re going to start the conversation with Gemini by Google because I think it’s the most interesting and the most actionable.

But just to set the table on these three, Gemini from Google is their AI search engine. It’s actually built into all the Google searches. So when you go to Google and you search, you get this little AI snippet, I think called AI mode. Now, that is built by Gemini. It doesn’t say Gemini on it, but it’s using Gemini. And we don’t have any data on how often that’s being used, at least not publicly.

So it’s likely that Gemini is being used a lot because every time you do a Google search, it fires up a Gemini search. And then, know, yeah.

Ricci Wolman (07:46.87)

Right. just to like recap what you’re saying, in terms of direct usage of AIs, if people are going directly to ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, either like, you know, to the websites or on the apps, ChatGPT has the biggest consumer base, but that we know of. But if we’re just thinking about search more broadly, we know that Google dominates when it comes to search online.

Ferol Vernon (08:04.233)

we know of.

Ferol Vernon (08:11.667)

dominates.

Ricci Wolman (08:13.642)

And we also know that now that they’ve rolled out AI snippets, those are powered by Gemini. So a lot of people aren’t going directly to Gemini, they’re going to Google, but because the snippets are powered by Gemini, it’s really important to understand how Gemini works.

Ferol Vernon (08:26.995)

That’s exactly right. And then sort of in third place is Claude by Anthropic. And I say third place very sensitively. They have experienced a unreal growth in the last year and a half and the power of their models, especially for folks that do coding and some technical stuff is really, really good. And so while they’re maybe a little bit less consumer focused right now, they’re in third place. And so I think, you know, as an author, you’re thinking about how do get my book discovered?

in this new world of search, those are the three that you wanna pay attention to.

Ricci Wolman (09:01.355)

Yeah. And I think the thing that’s interesting about Claude is that, you know, it dominates the kind of B2B sector and it dominates in terms of most developers and coders are using it. So even if it doesn’t end up being like the consumer engine, because so many people are building on it, anyone who builds an app using Claude, which is owned by Anthropic, is going to be inherently using the Claude model.

Ferol Vernon (09:18.344)

Yeah.

Ricci Wolman (09:28.137)

And so if they have an app that has got something to do with search or got something to do with books or discovery, that is what’s going to be running under the covers.

Ferol Vernon (09:35.657)

So you think about all the engineers out there that are using Claude to write code, which is most of them at this point. If they’re looking for a science fiction book, right, they’re probably going to use Claude because that’s their daily driver, so to speak. So that’s a good note.

Ricci Wolman (09:48.994)

that’s a good point too. Yeah, there’s probably like a different kind of reader genre breakdown, but who’s using which of the different services. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (09:54.096)

Yeah, yes. Okay, so I wanna start the conversation with Gemini, because this is, when I got the author feedback on the idea to do this pod, I didn’t start by thinking about Gemini. I started by thinking about ChatGPT, but the more I did the research, Gemini is actually the more interesting case and I think a little bit more actionable for authors. So I wanted to start there.

And a few things came up when you start looking at this. So first one is like, hey, what’s the difference between Google searching for a book and AI searching for a book, right? And I think there’s a few key differences, but there’s actually an overwhelming amount of similarities, right? So, you know, in the old world of SEO, was kind of like keyword stuff. So you’d have a page on maybe your website that had all the keywords about the book. And that’s how you kind of got your book ranked.

AI takes a broader view of the actual content of the book and, this is really important and actionable, the content about your book. And so I think whereas a Google search, you might search, hey, show me a cozy mystery book that’s set in Martha’s Vineyard, for example. And you get a list of pages and then everybody be trying to be the first one of those pages. And as you’re looking for that book, you might click on link one, two, three, or four.

but being on page two is like death, For discoverability. Now, instead of that, the AI is actually doing that search for you, consolidating all those links or that information underneath those links, and then providing an answer and a recommendation to you. And so, you know, instead of building one page that’s really awesome and SEO optimized, the sort of newish technique would be, you gotta have your book in lots of different places that are authoritative. So when the AI does a search,

It comes back and says, hey, this book seems to be everywhere. I should recommend it to this user.

Ricci Wolman (11:54.451)

Got it. So it’s kind of doing what we used to do as humans, right? Like you would, you would go through page one and there’d be 20 links and you’d kind of click on them and you’d be like, this book is showing up on five of the pages. So that’s the one I’m going to choose. But now Gemini is basically looking at and saying, Hey, this book seems to be showing up a lot for that particular search that you’re, that you’re putting in. So that’s what I’m going to include in the AI overview snippet, or just give to you if you’re using the Gemini.

Ferol Vernon (12:00.379)

Yes.

Ferol Vernon (12:22.053)

Yeah, exactly. And I think the thing that’s interesting about Google is it actually has access to these huge libraries of information. So YouTube, right, the second biggest search engine in the world, and Google, and all the Google web pages, and then the Google bookstore. So Google and Gemini, it’s the only company that we’re going to talk about today where they own an AI engine and a bookstore, right? And so this is the second thing.

Ricci Wolman (12:48.018)

and the two biggest search engines. Right.

Ferol Vernon (12:49.817)

And the two biggest search engines, right? So it’s sort of like, you you think about where to focus and it’s like, well, they may not have top market share right now, but you know, I think it’s a decent bet that they’ll be that they’ll be high up for a long time. you think about the bookstore, right? And so the first thing I’ll say is this is great news for our friends in the wide community, right? They want their book published in all the different stores, because each one of those stores has a page on a retailer.

You know, you’re at Kobo, you’re at Nook, you’re at Google, you’re at Apple, whatever. And that all generates authority for you, right? Because the AIs look at all of those pages. And then this is also good news for our folks, our customers who are exclusive to Amazon, who may say, hey, I can’t put my book on Google Play, or that violates the KU terms and conditions, right? But there’s actually a way you can. And this is, thought, was a really cool thing that I got in my research.

Google Play has the partner center where you can upload books and you can actually upload a preview of your book and not make it for sale. And when you do that, you’re not violating your KU terms and conditions. And there’s a detail that it’s very important. So don’t stop listening now. But you can do that. It doesn’t violate your terms. So you have to like, you know, upload your book again, put in your description, put in your ISBN if you have one.

Ricci Wolman (14:04.574)

You

Ferol Vernon (14:13.092)

all that stuff, but then you’re part of the Google Books ecosystem. So Gemini knows about your book. And when you ask Gemini, hey, how do you find what books to read? It says, I look at the Google Play first, kind of like that’s, that’s his primary thing. Here’s the one really important caveat. So by default, and this is a detail, but by default, when you upload your book into the Google Play Partner Center and you make a preview available,

which the AI needs, the default is 20%. And so that means 20 % of your book is public. And that actually does violate the KU terms and conditions. So what you have to do is put in an amount of your book that’s 10%, right? So you actually have to re-export your book, maybe use like Vellum or one of those great tools or whatever tool you use to get your books created and like, you know, just do the first chapter or whatever, like a little bit less than 10 % of your book is.

then you can upload that and you won’t be violating the KU terms at all. And that’s a huge win to add AI discoverability to your title.

Ricci Wolman (15:21.182)

Got it. And when you say KU terms, you’re saying if you’re enrolled in KDP select and your book is in KU. Yeah. So if you’re, so if you’re wide, you’re all set. Cause you’re, your book’s on Google play and that’s great. And if you’re in KDP select and your book is in KU, you can still put your book on Google play, but set it not for sale and only have 10 % preview. And that way you can still keep your Amazon books in KDP select. Okay. Cool.

Ferol Vernon (15:25.071)

That’s right. Sorry. Yes. That’s exactly right.

Ferol Vernon (15:30.981)

You’re all set.

Ferol Vernon (15:47.769)

That’s exactly right. Yeah. And I thought that was really, yeah.

Ricci Wolman (15:49.937)

And the reason we care about having the book in Google Play is because what you’re saying is Gemini uses Google Play as a primary source when it’s recommending books. I see.

Ferol Vernon (15:58.233)

That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. And so if you think about people Googling books saying, like, you know, Hey, show me a cool science fiction book. That’s like project Hail Mary, right? then that’s a Google search. It’ll show you web pages, but because Gemini is showing you that little AI snippet at the top of the page, people are going to often jump off into Gemini to sort of finish their search. And so you really need to make sure that you’re at the top of the list there.

Ricci Wolman (16:29.361)

Yeah. And I think it makes sense. You know, Google’s obviously using the Google infrastructure. It’s putting more weight on the Google infrastructure when, when I think it makes sense because Gemini is part of Google and then Gemini is going to give priority to other Google sources, which would be Google play, which would be YouTube. This is something that I came across. I was reading, that having content on YouTube, having transcripts on YouTube, where you talk about your book can be helpful.

Ferol Vernon (16:49.188)

Yes.

Ferol Vernon (16:57.39)

Yeah.

Ricci Wolman (16:58.042)

And then just the general, as you mentioned, SEO best practices. So if your book is on many different websites, it’s listed on many different listicles, whether that be on a Goodreads site or an author site or a new in book site, all of that data is being pulled in by Gemini as well.

Ferol Vernon (17:15.884)

Yeah, that’s right. And when you promote with like written word media like us, a big part of the value of that promotion is that we send it out to email subscribers, right? But a side effect of that is that you get published on our website as well and that builds authority for you. So it’s a good way to sort of say, hey, I’m getting the promotion from the email, but also you’re getting sort of increased discoverability by being on that webpage, which is really…

Ricci Wolman (17:40.06)

Got it. So you’re saying even not if it’s just, you know, obviously on New Year books, we have listicles, but you’re saying just having your books listed on like Free Booksy or Bargain Booksy on the website when you’re running that deal, that’s getting indexed and cataloged as well.

Ferol Vernon (17:53.122)

Yeah, I think that’s the thing that the AI is like you said, I think you did a really good job saying it’s like having somebody else search for you, right? And the more places do you find than the AI thinks to itself, hey, this must be a really important book or this book is being talked about a lot. And I’m glad you brought up that YouTube because that’s like the next point on my list is that YouTube and YouTube transcripts. And so it’s like, well, how do get your book on YouTube? Right? Well, you can talk about it, right? And to tease an upcoming episode, we’re going to have an episode dedicated to YouTube.

Ricci Wolman (18:18.0)

Right.

Ferol Vernon (18:22.82)

You know, we as authors sometimes may feel a little sheepish about being on camera. And it’s time to figure that out because this can really help your book, right? And it doesn’t mean that you have to sit there and talk for an hour and a half about your book. Even a two minute video that gets a few comments will help. I think, you know, the new world is get your book talked about in a lot of different places and that will help increase the authority. from an AI perspective.

Ricci Wolman (18:54.044)

This is very reminiscent of the Amazon episode, because we talked about the new Amazon algorithm is all about contextual search, right? And that’s what we’re talking about. Like Gemini is just going out there and is grabbing all of this data and getting as much context of the book as possible and then saying, okay, based on all of this context that I have, this is what I think my answer should be.

Ferol Vernon (19:01.089)

Yes.

Ferol Vernon (19:13.943)

Yeah. I think another one of the techniques that we discovered that works and that like the AIs, know, the funny thing about doing this research in the past, you you read papers and like for that Amazon episode, we read like an academic paper, but for this, it’s like you ask the AIs about themselves. So was like, Hey, chat, GPT, how do you discover books? And then you go over, you know, to Claude and you’re like, Claude is chat GPT telling the truth? Like, is that really how he does it? You know? And then you kind of go back and forth. And I felt a little crazy doing some of the research, but it was interesting.

Ricci Wolman (19:44.869)

can talk to the bots now.

Ferol Vernon (19:46.359)

You could talk to the bots now. But one of the, I think, yeah, I think it’s, it’s very mixed, right? But one of the really interesting things was, you know, when you do a search query in the old world, you would look for something and then you’d have to dig through stuff. In the new world, you ask a question and you get an answer. Right. And so one of the techniques you can use, and this is great for on your own webpage or

Ricci Wolman (19:48.377)

I don’t know how I feel about this new world. I’m going to have to sit with that one for a little while.

Ricci Wolman (20:10.651)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (20:16.322)

If you do an interview with somebody is having an FAQ section on your sort of book description where you literally have questions that are asked and answered. So I’ll give you an example. It’s like, Hey, what kind of person would enjoy this book? And you’d be like, Oh, somebody that likes dark sci-fi and reads on their Kindle would love this book. Right. And then you start building those questions. And then that way, when people start asking them, you’ve helped the agent, the AI answer them and they love things being easy.

and then you’re able to get in front of consumers. So I would say, you know, make sure that you’re putting sort of FAQs about your book at the bottom of your sort of description on your page, on your own website.

Ricci Wolman (20:57.133)

Interesting. So you’re saying on the author websites, when you’re listing your book, you now put additional information, like you have the book description and maybe you have some editorial blurbs and like reviews, but then you’re like, yeah. Cause we, we do this on the written word blog. Well, we’ve started doing it right. when we started looking at geo last year. And, you know, honestly, I hadn’t thought about it for a product. Our, our content is, is all educational, right? So it makes sense to have like an FAQ, but yeah, why not have FAQ?

Ferol Vernon (21:00.855)

Yeah.

Of course.

Ferol Vernon (21:10.594)

Mm-hmm.

Ferol Vernon (21:24.119)

Yes.

Ricci Wolman (21:25.828)

about the book itself. Who is this book right for? Where is this book set? Does this book have any trigger warnings? Things like that definitely could be helpful. Love that.

Ferol Vernon (21:33.62)

Exactly. You know, and for romance, you know, hey, like, does this book end in happily ever after? Why yes, it does, or no, it doesn’t, or like, you know, all those kinds of things. And you actually, you know, you got it. What’s the name of that series? And then like, you know, you can always validate these things when you look at the really big players and what they’re doing. And so

Ricci Wolman (21:44.95)

Is this book part of a series? What do people love about this book? Yeah. Okay.

Ferol Vernon (21:58.721)

When you look at Amazon, a product listing, and just forget about books for a minute, like let’s say you’re trying to buy a lamp, or you’re trying to buy shoes, and you go down to the product description and they have these FAQ sections. And so you’re starting to see product pages, non-book product pages that have these FAQ sections and there’s a reason for that. And I think that’s something that our authors can take advantage of. It’s like an actionable to do you could do today. Whether you’re doing direct sales or not, most authors have a website.

And on that website, there’s a book page and just add a few easy FAQs to that page. You know what I mean? And just make that best practice every time you add, you know, a new book to your website.

Ricci Wolman (22:38.746)

Great. Those are great tips. So for Gemini, get the book on Google Play, at FAQs, try and your book in as many places as possible, other websites. Goodreads is still, I think, a major source for all three of these, right? Yeah. So Amazon and Goodreads, that’s going to count across the board, but then any other places you can get it. Okay. So how do things get different for ChatGPT or do they?

Ferol Vernon (22:46.581)

Yes. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (22:51.765)

For all three of these, yeah.

Ferol Vernon (23:04.981)

Yeah, so when I was doing this research, there’s actually more similarities than there’s differences. So the technique that these AI models use is all very similar. So a lot of what we said about Gemini is true for ChatGPT and honestly for Claude. So get your book on the Google Play Partner Center. Get your book as many places as you can and put some FAQs on that page. But then when you start thinking about ChatGPT and Claude, the interesting about Google is it’s a search engine.

And so they have real time live access to like essentially every webpage on earth. Whereas chat GPT and Claude do not. And so they have an interesting dynamic where they have a sort of cutoff and it depends by model. You don’t have to worry about that, but after some point they have knowledge that they’ve learned and then they have web browsing that they do going forward. And for knowledge that they’ve learned, it is mostly on content that has

what you would think of as traditionally published backgrounds. Now you’re, if there’s a lot of indie authors listening to this pod, you’re like, well, how does that help me? So here’s how. So what you want to do is essentially copy what trad publishers do, which is like they get their book reviewed and they get that review published. Now you can pay for services like I think Kirkus does this, you know, new in books, one of our properties does this for you, but you can find even other authors to review your book.

You can trade reviews, things like that. And that next time there’s a cutoff or next time Chow GPT solidifies its learning, it’ll think, hey, this is like one of those books that has editorial review pages, right? Looks more like something traditionally published, something that was written up on the New York Times, that kind of thing. And so you can kind of…

Ricci Wolman (24:50.85)

And so where are you saying authors should put those editorial reviews on their author websites?

Ferol Vernon (24:56.934)

Ideally, you want them not on your author website, right? You want it on somebody else’s website. like, if you have your own website, maybe you have your other author friends, like, hey, some of my favorites, and you review their books, and then you get them to review yours, that kind of thing. And you start to build this sort of knowledge graph that the AI can leverage. And then, you know, those are like the things that I thought were like the most interesting. And then the final one I wanted to talk about is Reddit.

Ricci Wolman (25:02.325)

I see.

Ferol Vernon (25:27.015)

And so all of these really take Reddit very seriously. And it’s actually, they were so overweighted on Reddit for a long time, they’ve actually diminished a little bit, but it’s still one of the top sources. so, you know, as much as you can engaging with users on Reddit or actually listing your book on Reddit, talking about it can feel a little scary, right? To open to the masses to talk about it. So it’s a decision every author has to make for themselves.

But books being talked about on Reddit matter a lot, especially for chat GPT and for Claude that don’t have access to the same sort of library information that Google does.

Ricci Wolman (26:07.159)

Yeah, so I have a little experience with reddit it can be a scary place and reddit is very anti self promotion and so if you’re do anything on reddit you do have to tread very very carefully the ideal scenario for reddit is to get other people like your super fans your readers talking about you there

Ferol Vernon (26:17.261)

Yup.

Ricci Wolman (26:29.909)

And ideally these are people who already have a reddit footprint because that’s the other thing like reddit is very suspicious of somebody who comes in sets up a new profile and then he’s starting to like, you know, talk about or promote their book. but something that might be worth doing is you could always email your audience and say, Hey, if any of you are active on reddit and would be willing to, you know, post a thread about my recent book and what you liked about it. Really appreciate that. And then you actually have a user with some history who’s.

doing something on there because it is very easy to get banned. The other thing I think that some people have had some success with on Reddit is actually when you find a group that might be the place to talk about your book to actually contact the moderator before you post. So you could join, there’s a group called like Avid Sci-Fi Readers group on Reddit, you could join, not talk about your book, but just kind of start chatting to people.

Ferol Vernon (27:15.359)

Yeah, find out the rules.

Ricci Wolman (27:27.425)

but then you could message the mod and be like, hey, I’m an author. Can I talk about my book? Should I not talk about my book? And the mod will help you because the mods are the ones who are gonna land up banning or deleting your stuff. So if you kind of get them on your side first and understand what the guidelines are for that discussion group itself, that could be helpful.

Ferol Vernon (27:46.504)

Yeah, that’s great. And I think, know, cause I, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what matters for book discovery, but you know, there are some things that are trickier than others, right? And I think for YouTube, for Google play partners, like these things are somewhat easy, right? Low risk Reddit, you’re I’m glad you feel like that’s like a little bit higher risk, a little bit takes a little bit heavier touch, but can be really impactful if you can get your book discussed there.

Ricci Wolman (28:11.915)

Yeah, I would say it’s probably advanced or level of complexity high for Reddit. Where’s Google play and some of the others level of complexity and risk low. okay, cool. the, only other thing about chat that I was thinking about is, chat does have these partnerships that has at least announced with certain e-commerce players. One of them being Shopify.

Ferol Vernon (28:15.301)

Yeah. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (28:22.139)

Yeah, exactly.

Ricci Wolman (28:41.746)

And I don’t want to go too much into agentic commerce because I think that’s a whole separate pod that we’ll end up talking about. But I do think that if you have an author store on Shopify, that is going to be a plus in the column of chat GPT, because I do believe that there is some sharing of catalogs going on. And right now I think if someone asks about a book, it just kind of gives you a shopping card that you then click and it directs you to the Shopify store.

Ferol Vernon (28:56.84)

Mm-hmm.

Ricci Wolman (29:09.889)

But eventually it’s probably going to be more integrated. and then I think that also have a partnership with Walmart, but that’s, I think less relevant obviously for our authors, but yeah, if you’re on Shopify, that’s a plus. And if you’re doing some of the things we talk about, like if you do have products, you’re selling on Shopify, adding those FAQs on those pages is probably going to help you with chat GPT. And if you’re considering opening a store or going direct, you might want to.

put Shopify at the top of your list for that reason.

Ferol Vernon (29:40.539)

Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think, you know, a lot of the things that we talked about on the Amazon pod are actually still relevant here in terms of like your description. And so we talked about FAQs, but also when you think about Claude and you think about ChatGPT, they’re very good at like taking text and figuring out patterns there, right? And so the more text you give them about your book, the more able to recommend they are. even on your Shopify description,

while maybe something short and marketing and punchy used to be the way to do it. You wanna make sure you actually give a decent amount of description of the book because any sort of theme that comes up is something that I can latch on to recommend that book, right? And so, for romance, we talked about this on the Amazon pod, like, hey, if it’s bittersweet enemies to lovers, like any of those tropes that you know people are gonna wanna know about, make sure you literally say that out loud and write that in the description and that’ll help.

Ricci Wolman (30:38.208)

Yeah. And that’s where reviews become really powerful as well. We haven’t talked about that specifically here because it’s another, terms of left level of difficulty, that’s probably moderate. Like it’s really hard to build up your review base. but anytime you do have reviews of your book, that, that is such like data rich context, rich, content that the AIs across all three of them can actually grab because the readers are talking about how the book made them feel. They generally list like, you know, very.

Ferol Vernon (30:47.782)

Yeah, for sure.

Ferol Vernon (30:57.821)

Mm-hmm.

Ricci Wolman (31:07.333)

specific things about the book that maybe you wouldn’t think to put in the description or in your FAQs, but it’s called out by the readers in the reviews. So reviews, you know, always important as an author, no matter what you’re doing, but also important here for AI.

Ferol Vernon (31:17.701)

always.

Ferol Vernon (31:23.303)

Yeah, absolutely. And something I just want to make sure we mention as we kind of come to the sort of close of the episode is, you know, we’re talking about these different AI engines in terms of like how people are going to discover your book. We are not in any way recommending any of them as the one you should use. like, you know, authors that are, maybe don’t want AI included in creating their work. That’s fine. We’re not talking about that at all here. All we’re talking about is from a reader standpoint, when they start to use these tools to discover your books.

how you can make sure that your book, whether it was written by a human or with AI or however you decided to write it as an artist, that it’s discoverable and ready and that you have the best chance of getting that reader you can.

Ricci Wolman (32:06.741)

Yeah, think the way to think about this is like we’re in the early stages of GEO kind of like, you know, I started working in the internet back in like 2007 and everyone was trying to figure out like Google and Google search and it was in its infancy and now it’s become so much more complex. That’s where we are today in GEO and I think it is, it’s pulling a lot of the practices from SEO because as humans, we tend to kind of follow a lot of the same things. Um, but there are some small things that you can be doing to be at the front of the.

Ferol Vernon (32:29.404)

for

Ricci Wolman (32:35.913)

the curve as this new world of geo and discovery through AI starts to mature.

Ferol Vernon (32:43.261)

Yeah, absolutely. and I would say, you know, as we kind of close, we’ll do a wrap up here in a minute, but I think, you know, the, the, the last thing that we recommend you do is, you can ask, right? So if you aren’t sure if the AI can find your book, ask it, say, Hey, Gemini, my book is about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How can you find it? How can I make my listing better? How can I do it? Right. And, again, we’re not recommending that you use the AI to write your book, but

you can ask it how it views your book, right? And use that to help you build your little mini to-do list of being discoverable. And that’s one of the great things about these tools. While it can be a little bit new and a little bit scary talking to the bots, they’re readily available to answer your questions. They will. Yeah, that’s right.

Ricci Wolman (33:30.226)

will answer your questions. You may not always like the answers, but they will answer your questions. okay, cool. So let’s recap in order of difficulty, let’s go easiest to hardest. What can authors do today to increase their visibility on AI search? And I would say even a lot of these are going to help you increase visibility on just regular search. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (33:40.766)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ferol Vernon (33:49.541)

Okay, so

Ferol Vernon (33:54.64)

Regular search. Yeah, yeah. So I would say number one is add this FAQs to your product page on your website, right? You have totally control over your website. All you gotta do is go in, think for a few minutes about what some good FAQs are for your book, put them at the bottom of your description, and you’re off to the races. If you can do that for, depending on how big your catalog is, that should be a relatively low lift and something that hopefully all authors can handle.

Ricci Wolman (34:22.174)

And if you have a large catalog, you’re probably running into series. So instead of being like, my gosh, I have to do this for 70 books, just go do it on book one of each series. So you have seven pages or the series page. So you’re at least putting something out there because the AI is smart enough that it’ll figure out, these seven books are all part of the series and these FAQs relate to all seven of the series. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (34:30.895)

Yeah, or the series page.

Ferol Vernon (34:43.707)

There you go. Yeah, exactly. Number two, get your book on Google Play for partners. Remember preview only and 10 % right of your book. If you’re in KU, if you’re in wide, you’re good to go. Like as long as you’re on Google Play, you’re in good shape. So if you’re wide and you’re somehow not on Google, highly recommend you fix that right away. But I think most of our wide listeners are probably already there.

Ricci Wolman(34:52.879)

if you’re in KDP select.

Ferol Vernon (35:12.804)

And then I would say third is get your book in other places. that’s, buy promotion with folks like us. So you have another web presence, another post from an authoritative site, do trades with your other author friends, you know, hey, these are books from friends that I recommend that I like, that kind of thing. If you can do reviews, that helps as well. But there’s like, there’s sort of this, this bucket of stuff that’s get your book.

in a lot of authoritative places as many as you can.

Ricci Wolman (35:45.415)

And one easy way to do that is to just go into Goodreads and you can create a listicle in Goodreads, know, books to read the summer and you can include your book there. And now here, there’s your book on a third party site. And it has some context as to why people might want to read it based on the title of your list.

Ferol Vernon (35:55.653)

Then you’re done, yeah.

Ferol Vernon (36:02.405)

Yeah, and if you, know, one of our properties, NewInBooks does this. So if you, if you need help with that, you know, certainly let us know. And then I would say, you know, finally in the advanced category is Reddit and YouTube. And that is, I probably put those in order, do YouTube first. And then Reddit is probably the most advanced. And YouTube can be hard to come up with things and put yourself on camera, really simple videos help, right? As long as it’s there and it’s in the Google catalog.

And then I think listen to Ricci’s words on Reddit, know, proceed with caution, proceed with authenticity, self-promotion is not tolerated, but anything you do to get your fandom to actually start talking about you on Reddit will absolutely help with discoverability.

Ricci Wolman (36:51.613)

And YouTube, as you said, is a whole episode in and of itself, which we will have coming up in the next few weeks. So if you’re listening to this a couple of months from now, go and look for the YouTube episode, because there’s, I think, to be a lot of great content and examples there of things that you can do. And again, from easy to advanced.

Ferol Vernon (37:10.168)

Yeah. Okay. So that’s what we got for you today, authors. Hopefully this was helpful, sort of helping you navigate this wild world of discoverability with all these new technologies. As always, shoot us an email. If you have questions about the pod or you have comments, you’re like, hey, I’d love to hear something about this. Email us at info at writtenwordmedia.com. We love hearing from authors, especially about the pod, but about anything at all. And that’s the pod. That’s the show for today, Ricci.

Ricci Wolman (37:38.79)

Yeah. And I would say, you know, a lot of the content that we’ve put out this year has come from authors messaging us or emailing us or, or, know, commenting on the part and being like, you know, we’ll do an episode and then we’ll, get a couple of questions and we’re like, okay, we needed to dive, dive deeper into that. Or, you know, we’ll get a bunch of questions or comments from authors being like, Hey, can you guys do an episode on this? So, we are here for you. And if you just tell us what you want to hear, we’re, we’re happy to provide that content, do the research.

Ferol Vernon (37:45.368)

Most. Yeah.

Ricci Wolman (38:07.566)

Ferol’s happy to do the research on this one. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (38:09.823)

It’s fun going down these rabbit holes. summarize by, we take requests. So please let us know. All right, well that.

Ricci Wolman (38:14.982)

Yes, we do. All right. All right. Well, great to have you back, Ferol. Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting on this one. And we look forward to seeing you all in a couple of weeks.

Ferol Vernon (38:26.264)

Awesome everybody, talk to you soon.