Podcast

Transcript

John Goodwin (00:06): Hello and welcome to the Writers and Illustrators of the Future Podcast. This is John Goodwin, your host. This contest is created by L. Ron Hubbard to provide a means for the aspiring writer and artist to be seen and acknowledged with their creative efforts, their art, their stories. And it’s been going on since 1983 when this contest was launched, and then this podcast has been going on for seven years. If you’ve been listening to this podcast or new to it, I thank you very much.

We are here today in Portland, Oregon, at the Independent Book Publishers Association Conference. And my guest is Keith Riegert. Now, Keith is the president of the Stable Book Group and CEO of Brooklyn-based Independent Publishers Company, Ulysses Press and Velo Press Books. He’s also CEO of Perfect Bound Technologies Corporation and a co-founder of the book publicity and digital marketing firm Pacific and Court.

He’s also a member of the Board of Advisors at NYU’s School of Professional Studies in the Center for Publishing, where he also teaches analytics and consumer insights. He also serves on the boards of the Independent Book Publishers Association, which is where I met him yesterday, and the AI firm Inkbloom. Now, the reason why I was so interested in having Keith as a guest was at a panel or actually at a workshop yesterday where someone just kind of like gave him the floor and he just like took off like a rocket and I went, I need to talk to him. So anyway, welcome Keith.

Keith Riegert (01:29): Thank you so much, John. Great to be here.

John Goodwin (01:32): So yeah, basically, so this podcast is designed for the aspiring writer artist, and there’s so much change that’s happening right now that it’s important to keep up to date with. I mean, I’ve interviewed a lot of people in the last seven years, but what you said yesterday was like, this is revolutionary, which we knew that with AI things are changing rapidly. So for the next hour I just wanna basically just riff on the subject of how AI is impacting or and that we’ll distinguish between AI and generative AI too. Sure. You know, because I’m all for AI. I’m not so much on the generative AI as regards publishing and creative.

Keith Riegert (02:13): Absolutely. So, I think the best place to start is probably understanding how AI is transforming search and discoverability. I think that that’s probably the most pressing issue when it comes to publishing books, whether you are an established publisher or a first-time author who is venturing into the self-publishing world. And we’ve seen a lot of changes. If you go on Google now, you know, the first change that people started to see was what we call the search generative experience, which is you type something into Google and you know, three years ago you would get that endless scroll of results for organic click through to a different website. you know, maybe you’re looking up a symptom that you’re experiencing in the first result is WebMD. You go to WebMD, read about it. Now you get this block of AI generated text that may answer your question for you. That was sort of the harbinger of what was to come with AI generated search. And that alone, that search generative experience has had a tremendously negative effect on the organic click-through rates for numerous industries and websites that really depended on search engine optimization. So answering questions that people often queried on search engines like Google saw their traffic completely plummet.

And what we’re seeing now is that that sort of experience is beginning to transition into e-commerce as well. And the biggest one that that we’re concerned with as publishers, obviously, is Amazon. Right. the number one source of or the number one place where people tend to start their purchase journeys is Google.

The number two is YouTube, interestingly. And the number three is Amazon. So Amazon, you know, we may think of it as an e-commerce store, but it is really the third largest search engine in the country.

John Goodwin (04:44): Well, that’s something I didn’t know. I knew for books it was a big deal, but because that’s my world. So, I don’t I’m so myopic on that.

Keith Riegert (04:52): Yeah. And for Amazon books is, you know, a grain of sand on the beach of what Amazon is. So, when it comes to optimizing for this new world of AI generated search, the rules are completely different to what they were just a couple of years ago. And if we focus for a minute on what that means for Amazon.

You know, a couple of years ago, or I guess about a year ago, they rolled out this tool called Rufus, where if you’re on your phone, you can click on a little icon that allows you to interface with an AI chatbot. And instead of typing in a long tail keyword, like you know, Mediterranean cookbooks, bestsellers, you can ask it a question. I’m looking for a great Mediterranean cookbook. Can you make some recommendations? And the big difference here is that, like that experience with search generative experience on Google, you are not getting the endless scroll of results. You’re getting three recommendations. And that is a complete game changer when it comes to discoverability. It makes everything much more difficult for the average author to get discovered. It is going to funnel a lot of traffic to established books. So the question becomes: how do you now optimize your book for a world where you’re catering to humans who are searching for specific books, and you’re catering towards these LLMs that are trying to match these customers’ questions with the exact right book that they’re gonna purchase. And that is a completely different game than the SEO that we’ve been used to for the last 25 years.

John Goodwin (07:04): So now does it make a difference like the way you’ve you frame your question to be able to get this three versus that three?

Keith Riegert (07:17): Absolutely. I mean it’s gonna home in on a number of different metrics, but I think the important thing is to understand what these LLMs are looking for. Right. So, let’s go back to the world of SEO quickly. You know, a lot of Amazon was based on the long-tailed keyword approach.

If you had a vendor central account, you had access to Amazon’s top trending keywords. And this was a database of, you know, probably a hundred million observations that came out weekly that you could mine for the keywords that people were looking for. There was an entire industry based around, you know, keywords that were multiple words long, that people would try to embed into the titles, the subtitles, the body descriptions, the A plus content, any anything that they could do to try to get the algorithms to pick up on their book and serve that title as one of the top results on Amazon. And for that type of search, it was not quite winner takes all, but it was, you know, the first page takes all. And the first result would take about fifty-five percent of all the traffic for a query like that on Amazon. So, people are gonna click on that first result, and that’s the one that they’re gonna end up buying. With this new world of generative engine optimization, it is no longer trying to get onto that first page. Right. It is trying to be the only answer that AI is giving. And the rules of that are completely different because what these LLMs are looking for is the book that is the authority on this subject. And so, what you need to do as an author is establish that authority within what is pretty limited amount of space on an Amazon page, but it is doable and there are pretty specific ways that you can go about doing that.

John Goodwin (09:49): Good. Now yesterday we were talking about that for Amazon it’s really important that there’s various things you said that are important to make search on Amazon to make what you just said to make that magic happen. And so, we’ll just, you know, go over that stuff. You talk about videos, the A plus content page. And one thing that really struck me, which I’m gonna get more into, is that you need to write for humans and AI, not just for humans now.

It’s a whole different thing there. So first of all, let’s just talk about how you know, this the fact that everything it’s like when you’re out in the wilds, they eat everything, they catch a wild boar, they eat everything except for the squeal. So it’s like right now, everything counts as something that you’re gonna be able to want to optimize for what you’re doing, from your book cover to your title, your everything. So, let’s talk about that.

Keith Riegert (10:45): Yeah, so there’s always been a hierarchy when it comes to what matters most on an Amazon page. And over the years that has shifted, you know, things have moved up and down. If you know search engine optimization, you know that this is an HTML-based system and the H1 tag, the big header that you’re only supposed to have one of on any website page.

Is your most powerful piece of HTML when it comes to SEO. Right. And traditionally that has been true on Amazon as well. And for publishers and for authors, that is the book title subtitle series. That is the big text that appears on that page. And if you can optimize and really sell a consumer using that limited little space that continues to be one of the most powerful drivers. Right. But when it comes to the actual description of your book, the rules have really changed. And this came about in May of 2025 when Amazon moved from their A9 search algorithm, which was the legacy search algorithm that we were very used to, SEO based, to what we’re calling A10, which is AI based.

And what AI is looking for is little snippets that it can pull out of your description and give directly to the consumer that is looking for it. So, if I say I’m gonna go on there and I’m saying you know, I’m going to Hawaii next week and I wanna get the best book on the history of Hawaii, can you make some recommendations? It is gonna go through the repository of all the books on Amazon. And it is going to look for the authoritative resource that it can provide back to you. So, when you are writing now on Amazon, it needs to be clear, it needs to be factual, it needs to be to the point, it needs to be free of a lot of marketing fluff. And you wanna employ things like bullet points.

You know, AI, if you’ve spent any time on Chat GPT or Anthropic or Gemini, it loves a good list or a good set of bullet points. so that is definitely a best practice. And then the next most important thing is making sure that the content on the page is as rich as possible. So have a great cover. That is you know, has always been necessary. But you also want to support that great cover with additional images on the page. And these cannot just be, you know, if you have a novel, it can’t just be pictures of the interior, you know, a screenshot of the PDF. It should be the book in the wild. It should be product images showing what this book looks like, the heft of it, the design of it. It should be from multiple angles. It should really be convincing the consumer of the value of the book and why they should buy it. And then video has become ever more important because in part AI is able to understand a lot of these media for the first time.

You know, SEO relied on alt-image text to understand what was in an image. AI is able to understand what’s in that image. So, when it comes to video, you know, we as publishers have it in our contract that our authors have to produce a video prior to publication. And that may be them just talking about the book, why they wrote it, why they’re so excited about releasing it into the world. It may be them holding up the book and flipping through it. We also do videos if it’s a beautiful cookbook or coffee table book, it’ll just be us flipping through the pages, handling the book to show it off.

John Goodwin (15:28): What about if you got like an anthology with like ten, fifteen, twenty different stories, different authors? How’s that work?

Keith Riegert (15:37): I think that you can do it in any sort of way. I you know, in that case, I would probably have the editor talk about the collection of stories rather than try to have multiple authors talking about it. It’s really good to just have that one voice and be able to sell it that way. But having that video on there plays a number of different roles. It signals to the AI that this page is complete. It is incredibly rich. There’s a lot of content on here. It also keeps people on the page longer. So, time on page is one of those metrics that the algorithm is always going to credit you for. So, the longer that somebody is staying on that book page, the better. And it is going to aid in the eventual conversion from just a viewer to a purchaser, which is one of the most important metrics when it comes to performance on an Amazon page and having the A10 algorithm surface you in future discoverability.

John Goodwin (17:00): Okay, now you made a comment, and I realize I’m bouncing around a little bit here, but I’ve got another forty minutes to bounce, so there we go. You said that websites don’t matter for AI, Amazon won’t let crawlers and Amazon won’t let crawlers in. So, I guess maybe it’s two different datums, but they also tends to cross over each other. Websites don’t matter for AI and Amazon won’t let crawlers in.

Keith Riegert (17:27): Yeah, I mean I wouldn’t say that websites don’t matter. I think I was being Yeah, I was trying to make a splash that websites are not nearly as important now as you may have thought they were. Because you know these LLMs have ingested the entire internet.

John Goodwin (17:32): You definitely got people like we did.

Okay, just for those people that are listening to this, why don’t you define and explain LLM what that is and what makes it so different than just well, I thought it was just AI.

Keith Riegert (18:02): Yeah, so LLM is a large language model. And these LLMs like OpenAI or Anthropic have been trained on everything. They have ingested the entire internet. And a lot of that training was done prior to 2023. So, the internet at that time was free of AI generated material. It was all human-made.

They gobbled it all up and the LLMs were able to basically decide in this black box what were the authoritative sources and what weren’t. the LLMs are still ingesting a lot of data, but if you do tests with the models, you will find that they are citing sites like Reddit and Wikipedia and known sites like Barnes and Noble over, you know, an author website. Unless you are a very well-known author and you have a highly trafficked page or highly trafficked website, the authoritative place that it’s gonna go to is probably gonna be the Barnes and Noble author page rather than your website. With Amazon, they do block agents from accessing those pages. For publishers, you know, we are sending out metadata to all the different retailers. So, our book descriptions and our author information is going to Powell’s here in Portland. It’s going to Barnes & Noble everywhere. It’s going to Target and Walmart and all the indie bookstores.

So that is a really powerful way for us to get that authoritative information out everywhere. And if you’re a self-published author, you know, I very much recommend ensuring that your book is available to all those sources by doing a combination of publishing through Ingram Spark or LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing).

Amazon KDP, you don’t want to be limited to just one platform, and you really want that material to get out everywhere. So, in that way, you know, spending a lot of time on your author website is probably not gonna get you to surface when people are using chatbots to get more information.  That’s not to say that it’s not gonna work. but the authoritative sites are probably gonna be a bit different.

John Goodwin (20:59): I got it. Now one thing I’ve observed because I was observing that I write a lot of press releases, I do the podcast and Writers of the Future. It comes up routinely now as the top writing competition in the world, various things like that and it’s that Writers of Future is the top. And when I put my press releases out right now and I do a separate search, on any of these, a Google search and I go to the AI, it’ll pull things from my last press release up there. And so to what degree does one have to be being an authority before it’s recognized as an authority?

Keith Riegert (21:50): I think there’s a lot of that. You know, I’ve done that, you know, looked myself up on Chat GPT and it is not pulling from key3groot.com. It is referencing the Publishers Weekly articles that I’ve been in, and different press releases that have gone out. So, using those avenues is really important.

For any author going forward. I think that the value of a publicist has shot way up over the last couple of months as people have started to really adopt these chatbots as the way that they’re searching. Now keep in mind that these chatbots are still only making up about five percent of search in the country. The rest is still on Google. It’s still classic search, but that is gonna rapidly change over the next year.

John Goodwin (22:53): Yeah, it’s main thing is like it’s changing really fast and whereas a few years ago, nah, this is the way I’ve done it, it’s you’re always gonna have that. You’re always gonna have your phone book to be able to find the phone number there to call your friends.

Keith Riegert (23:05): Yeah. You know. Yeah. It’s changing every single day and it’s very hard to keep up with.

John Goodwin (23:12): Yeah, I’m in the middle of a book right now. “If Anyone Builds It Then We All Die.” That one’s just a scary proposition, period. Yeah. All right. So now with, again yesterday as you were talking there. The crawlers, you said Amazon will let the crawlers in. What’s the significance of that?

Keith Riegert (23:34): So, Amazon has always been incredibly good at tracking down bots on Amazon. There is a large, large industry that is dedicated to trying to game Amazon. And what Amazon has done is really focused those players onto their API, which has limited amount of information.

And I remember, you know, trying to do this a decade ago, where I would try to scrape as much information from Amazon using Python and I would have to use VPNs all over the world and they would just keep catching me. And now it’s basically impossible. I helped train it.

John Goodwin (24:25): You trained it.

Keith Riegert (24:30): So, you cannot have an agent like Claude go and access Amazon and it’s gonna block a lot of that information from being gathered. But you know Amazon is a leader at developing and utilizing AI, and it is gonna continue to really lean into that as a way to optimize the shopping experience.

So, if we can get back to the Amazon optimization for a minute. Yeah. You know, the other things that are really leading the way are things like making sure that you claim your author page. So go on to Author Central, set up your account, put your bio in there and your photo, link to your book. That makes a big difference. Getting third party sites to link into your author page is now more valuable than internal traffic from Amazon going to a book page.

John Goodwin (25:41): Really, so explain that more ’cause for a while it was like the big deal and then it was like and that’s not so important, but now it’s coming back again.

Keith Riegert (25:46): Yeah. Yeah, so it’s as simple as using your website to direct traffic from your website to Amazon, or Facebook and Instagram ads to Amazon, TikTok, you know, viral videos to Amazon. Those are all being treated with a lot more respect than they were a couple of years ago. And then the last really big piece is the A plus content. And if you have, you know, a KDP account or if you’re an established publisher, this is still a very manual process, but it’s really important because the A plus content allows you to dominate a lot of the real estate on the book page. You can put six modules on there.

And these modules can be visual; they can be very text heavy. And we have a set of best practices for our books where we are really building that A content around what AI is looking for. So what AI is looking for is it wants to know what this book is about, who it’s for, what it covers. So where does the novel take place? You know, who are the main characters? What is not in the book. So if it’s a nonfiction book and it’s a guidebook to Norway, this is not going to cover the, you know, the other Nordic countries. It’s sort of giving the LLMs the geography of the book.

So that it can deliver it to consumers. Then what you know, one of the big things and one of the most challenging things for us is these LLMs, because humans spend so much time asking questions of them and detailed questions, you have to come up with frequently asked questions for basically every book. And that is one of the hardest things that I’ve found that we’ve had to do. And the answer that we have found is let’s just have AI do it. So we have enterprise versions of Claude and Gemini and Chat GPT. And we will actually put in quite a bit of the manuscript and have it generate what it anticipates the frequently asked questions are going to be.

And then that becomes a module within the A plus content. And then all of this is accompanied by visuals, by you know, beautiful pictures of the book. If it’s a travel guide, it’s going to have images of the place. It is doing this… It has this dual purpose of selling to the human and trying to get them to convert into a purchaser and trying to inform that LLM as much as possible of everything that this book is about.

John Goodwin (29:14): I get it. So now if you’re very familiar with your book, would you be able to just go through… There’s a reason why I’m asking ’cause like you know, you’re willingly scanning your book and we just finishing the Anthropic settlement and now there’s all these other settlements come up because of having ripped off the books. How’s that work?

Keith Riegert (29:37): Yeah. it’s one of the most controversial things in publishing, obviously. I mean, we’ve had you know, at our company alone, we had about six hundred books that were found in the Anthropic case. You know, the accounts that we have with all of these platforms are professional accounts that have training turned off.

What does that mean? We’re hopeful, right? But there are a lot of much more important companies than ours that are dealing with much more sensitive information than we are, that are using the same types of accounts that we are, and the data is not being trained upon. So we do not upload entire manuscripts but just uploading the table of contents and maybe a couple of sample chapters tends to be enough to generate a good frequently asked questions. But it is, you know, it’s one of the biggest challenges right now in publishing is the risk that you’re taking by uploading a manuscript to any one of these LLMs with the potential benefits that you could get out of it. Because there’s you know so much that you could do with marketing, with creating book club questions, with generating fantastic press releases, with doing all of this really intensive manual labor using AI, but the fear is that it is going to rip you off.

John Goodwin (31:43): Like for all our books we always have, we create question and answer for schools. Yeah, for them to do that. So, we run through each chapter or each short story or something like that so they can have that. Is that the type of thing that would be loaded also as a module on Amazon?

Keith Riegert (32:02): I think that’s a great idea, yeah.

John Goodwin (32:05): Covers different topics and what’s the theme and what’s the moral or what’s the what was he trying to challenge to do? What would you do in that?

Keith Riegert (32:12): Yeah. So, you know, we as a company have everything on Google. I’m making my bet that Google is the only one of these models that ends up surviving just because the massive amount of capital that it’s gonna take.

But you know, with a tool like that, already you can use Notebook LM, which is a really fantastic tool and that will generate, you know, a reading guide questions. We use it for our internal employee handbook so that our employees can go on and instead of having to look something up in the handbook, they can just ask a question of it. So I think that the applications there are really powerful, but it takes a big leap of faith to upload your IP to these LLMs.

John Goodwin (33:28): With all this, the horror stories about it, yeah. So now, you made a comment about yesterday about you need to be able to write for humans and AI. So, we talked about, but let’s just address it as its own thing. Like we’re used to writing for humans. You know, I just went to the last seminar, you gotta be able to do this, you gotta have some type of hook and you gotta have this and that, but I don’t know, you need to hook a computer.

But if you do, it might be different.

Keith Riegert (34:01): Yeah, I mean it’s again, it goes to authority, right? And it is writing clear, concise, authoritative, marketing free, fluff free copy. And that tends to be a difficult thing for people to do right off the bat. So one of the things that I train our editors on is the strapline in writing their book descriptions. And the strapline is that single bold sentence that you will see on a lot of book descriptions that leads into the paragraph. So it’s one or two sentences in bold and then a line break and then you get into “the what” of the book. And that is something that almost everybody when they come into publishing cannot get right. Cause I think the inclination is to just start it off with as much fluff as possible. The greatest, the best-selling, the you know the this is gonna be the loveliest book you’ve ever read.

And that is something that doesn’t really work on people, and it definitely doesn’t work on AI. So the way that we normally start those is with a call to action and then it leads right into the what, why, where, when of the book, and then something that is going to anchor it to being the authority. So it might be, you know, discover the authority.

Heartwarming novel set in County Carey, Ireland, featuring, you know, this character and this character on their way to discovering why, you know, love is the most important thing in what Publishers Weekly calls the best thriller of the summer. Now we’re really mixing genres, but sounds like a great book and that’s it. You know, you stop there and then you get into the book. And the LLMs are looking for that type of snippet where they can just pull that sentence directly and plop it into an answer.

John Goodwin (36:47): So not looking for sound bites, we’re looking for an actual sentence.

Keith Riegert (36:50): Well, I mean that is that is essentially a sound bite in the LLM world. Okay. Because they are, you know, if you ask a question of an LLM, it’s not just gonna give you a two-word answer. It’s gonna give you a sentence or a paragraph.

John Goodwin (37:07): So that sentence it gives you, it’s just pulled that sentence, it doesn’t compose that from like taking these different things and putting it together.

Keith Riegert (37:13): It might directly quote that sentence. It might pull your exact bullet points and put them in. And you’ll notice this a lot with if you look something up on Chat GPT and you get that citation in there, that is now one of the most valuable things to own is to be the authority that gets that citation.

Because again, we are no longer playing to be in the top three results. Yeah, you’re not above the fold. You are playing to be the answer, the one answer. And most companies have about six months left to become the answer to some of these questions organically before they have to start paying for it.

John Goodwin (37:49): I went above the fold. So yeah, so on that we can talk about that in six months. I’m not prepared to get into purchased authority. Now I obviously got this podcast that we’re doing here. So in terms for people that have podcasts, because there’s only about a half a jillion of them right now in the world. So to make them do well, like mine I was syndicated, so that’s how that’s what made mine really continue to grow. Like a couple of months ago I broke three million and then last week I broke four million. So it still grows really. I’m very happy.

So now in terms of making a podcast, but same thing also for a blog or website. So you talked about you need to have images, you need to have the transcripts if it’s a video or a podcast.

Keith Riegert (39:03): Definitely with podcast. Like anytime you have a podcast, transcript needs to be on the page with the podcast, whether you have, you know, I don’t know what it is, SoundCloud or Spotify, whatever the link is there or the streaming plugin, you need the transcript right there as well for AI to be able to pluck out that information and deliver it to people.

John Goodwin (39:31): Now for people have had a podcast going for a while.

Can it be retroactive? Like can you find do the transcripts and then go back and reattach them to the podcast?

Keith Riegert (39:42): Absolutely. I mean, at this point, it is as much content as you can transcribe and put out there, and you never know what is going to resonate and get picked up. You know, we have in our experience with Ulysses Press, we repurpose a lot of the book IP as blog posts and use that to draw people in. So we have a blog post, a true crime blog post on our site that is one of the most trafficked pages on the stable website. And you know, we take advantage of that by linking to the book and then drawing people into the website. But you’re never gonna know whether a blog post is gonna work, or whether there is IP sitting deep in your backlist or in your back catalog as a podcaster that could have the answers to some obscure questions that are gonna come up over and over. And I think the one of the most important things to understand is that the industry that grew up around SEO was really about the autocomplete aspect of sites like Google. So when you go on to start Googling, you know, best spinach recipes, it autocompletes it for you, right? So you end up basically being steered into little canals of search. And those are the search terms that begin to build up massive quantities of searches and then they become really competitive when it comes to optimizing for those search queries. And then there’s advertising dollars that are spent against the search term “how to cook spinach.” And that whole industry, you know, balloons and grows up and you know Google becomes a massive company because it’s selling ads against those search terms. The way that people interact with AI is completely different, right? You’re not auto completing those questions. You are essentially having a conversation with the chatbot. So there’s no more predicting what people are searching for. And as a content creator, that means that there’s a lot more freedom in trying to figure out what you can use from the IP that you’ve produced to answer the questions that people are going to have. And those questions might be subtly different. And you might have that answer for a million people who are asking slightly different questions to the chatbot. And the chatbot is going to say, you know, John really knows what he’s talking about in this podcast, about this topic. I’m gonna, you know, make this the authoritative answer for people who are asking this question. And all of a sudden, you have a phenomenal amount of traffic that is coming through Chat GPT or Google Gemini, and it’s hard for anybody else to replicate. So that I think is one of the most valuable exercises that people can go through right now.

John Goodwin (43:38): Good. And then on terms of, I don’t know how broad you are on how you advise and I mean you’ve only got about fifty different corporations that you run, created, or supervise. But now in terms of creating title pages and creating the name naming your podcast or naming your blog or naming your vlog, your YouTube channel, what are some do’s and don’ts, maybe with a little more emphasis on the don’ts?

Keith Riegert (44:09): The like the rules for it going forward?

John Goodwin (44:13): We’re going forward now, yeah, ’cause people have I’ve loved this ’cause I dedicated this to my mom, so I called it mom’s page.

Keith Riegert (44:20): Yeah, yeah. that is a really good question. I honestly don’t know how that’s gonna play out over the next couple of years. I think that going forward, regardless of what industry you’re in, and regardless of what you’re doing when it comes to you know, creating books, whether you’re an author or a publisher building a brand is going to be more important than ever before. In my NYU class, I teach very early on about the concept of the branded house and the house of brands when we’re talking about publishing. So a branded house in marketing is something like Moleskin, you know, the notebooks. So you’re just advertising that one name, Moleskin, and all of the notebooks that it creates fall under that name. And it makes it a lot easier to try to build that brand. Now if you know some of the notebooks start exploding all of a sudden, then you’ve got a problem for the brand. But the value of that is right there.

Then you have the House of Brands concept, which is more like Unilever. Nobody goes on and shops at the Unilever website, but you might buy Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, you might use Dove Soap. In publishing, we have one of the most difficult branding setups, which is nobody knows the publishing company that we work for, that we own. Nobody buys a book because it was published by Ulysses Press. Nobody really even buys a book because it’s Penguin Random House publishes it. So, the brand recognition isn’t there. And then every single one of the books that we publish has to become its own brand. So if you are thinking of this as an author or as a podcaster, you’re creating something.

You should be thinking two or three years down the line, what is this brand going to look like? Is this something that I can carry forward that I can continue to build on? And so, you know, is mom’s page going to stand the test of time when you want to move that on to grandma’s page? You know, should that have been, you know, my family page or something like that?

So that’s the way that I’m really thinking about these things is if we’re going to expend resources on building up this author or this title, what comes next? You know, is there going to be another book in this series? Is this title something that can continue on as a series? And is this title something that can be protected from competitors in an ever increasingly difficult market. Can we build a moat around it? Is it something unique and something that we can really own going forward?

John Goodwin (48:01): Yeah, because there’s some definite authors. They start off and they’re writing YA science fiction. And so they’re known because they’ve had some good successes with it. Now I want to go off and do it’s like what happened with Harry Potter and then going into the mystery. Yeah. You know, she used a different name. And that may or may not have been she just wanted to see if she could do it. It didn’t last very long that people didn’t know who she was. You know. But like I publish all the fiction works of L. Ron Hubbard. So he’s the one that created his Contest, Writers of the Future. But he used fifteen different pen names. And a lot of times in the Pulp magazines there were three stories written by him under three different pen names. He said his problem was finding enough magazines to sell for. Yeah. He was so prolific. But that also because his Western books were written by Winchester Remington Colt, you know, and Humbert Reynolds was his adventure and he had these different names that he used.

So anything on that in terms of is that gonna in today’s you know, from looking moving forward, should an author who’s looking at spanning multiple genres should they just go for building their name, is their brand and they do all these different things, or how would that play out today?

Keith Riegert (49:16): I think that that’s been an issue for artists of every ilk forever, right? Whether you’re Bob Dylan moving from acoustic to electric or you’re a painter who’s moving from one type of style to another, like people expect one thing out of you and one thing only, and that’s a very painful transition.

John Goodwin (49:44): But that’s your brand you’ve…

Keith Riegert (49:45): That’s your brand and it’s your decision whether you want to make that change or whether you want to try to do it silently and secretly. I know plenty of authors who write under multiple pen names. I’ve written under different pen names.

John Goodwin (50:09): Those were just his fiction pen names. He had other pen names also for his nonfiction.

Keith Riegert (50:13): Yeah, which I think is a completely valid thing to do. I think the one thing that you have to recognize is that it is that house of brands situation where now you have a brand new brand that you have to build up. And you are not going to get the benefit of name recognition. You’re not going to get the benefit of linking on websites, and you’re not going to get that following that moves over from one to the other. But you know, unlike those exploding Moleskin journals, with the House of Brands, when Ben and Jerry’s ice cream starts exploding, Dove Soap is protected. And in this case, if you write a terrible YA book, but your mystery thrillers are still beloved, you haven’t sullied that name.

So, it’s a decision that I think every author has to make and it’s a tough one.

John Goodwin (51:18): Well that’s a good answer. That explains that too. I mean, nobody’s planning to lay an egg, but it doesn’t mean it never happens.

Keith Riegert (51:24): Right.

Yeah, and it’s you know, audiences within publishing are very intense. And if you decide to venture too far afield from where they’re expecting you to go, you will hear about it. So, it is something to always keep in mind. Okay.

John Goodwin (51:50): Good. Now, one thing you mentioned too is and make sure that people really get this covered is also metadata, just the image itself. So, explain how it just recognizes that it’s a dragon on there with a with over a mountain, or what does it do that makes that metadata?

Keith Riegert (52:11): Yeah. It can definitely recognize what is in the cover. I think that, you know, if you’ve been playing with generative AI over the last couple of years, you’ve seen how dramatically it has changed. It went from not being able to render faces and fingers to now being able to embed text. So it can understand what’s in a cover and it can determine, you know, whether this cover fits with the genre or not.

John Goodwin (52:43): Is that also important then when you create then your BISAC thema codes to make sure that you’ve defined what the cover is? Is that where you put that data, or how it’s not just gonna look…  I mean I like to think, yeah, okay, it’s gonna look at it and get what you’re trying to say. But also if there’s some place where you said embedded where you put the data that says, Okay, this is for the sight impaired, you know, this is a green dragon over the rolling green hills that and defines what it is that they’re looking at even though they can’t see the color.

Keith Riegert (53:18): Yeah, I mean you still wanna have that on sites like Amazon and within the new guidelines for ebooks and everything, being as accessible as possible is very important. Having those alt image texts throughout your ebook. That is that is really critical.

John Goodwin (53:42): So, it is critical to have the alt image text.

Keith Riegert (53:45): Absolutely. Okay, good. Absolutely.

John Goodwin (53:48): Because such a pain in the zorch to have to do that.

Keith Riegert (53:51): It is very painful. It is also something that AI can help with quite a bit producing that alt-image text because AI can now recognize these images. And I think that that is probably something that goes away pretty soon. It’ll just generate that alt-image text for you. But when it comes to cover design and this relationship between cover design and BISACs (Book Industry Standards and Communications), you know, I think as an author, you want to make sure that your cover is fitting within the genres that you’re publishing into. And there are very obscure rules within the publishing world about, you know, what type of fonts go for different categories and genres, what placement of the text is used for romance novels versus thrillers. And you know, we pay so much attention at the stable to things like, you know, what are the Pantone colors of the fashion industry next spring as we’re preparing our spring list for that same time. And the reason is that there are stores that will buy in books just because of the color of the cover. Right. So there’s all of these considerations. And then, you know, the BISACs is something that we didn’t cover with the Amazon optimization, but that is a really important thing. You want to have your three BISACs, you know, that’s the rule. And it should start as specific as possible and then end general.

And you should have some sort of variation in there. So if you’ve got, you know, a Mediterranean baking book, it might start with Mediterranean and then go to you know healthy baking, and then the last one is cooking baking. And all of that is going to facilitate the discoverability regardless of whether it is a human who is looking for it or an AI agent or just an algorithm.

John Goodwin (56:23): Now this whole thing came about my interest in talking to you, all the listeners right now on this, is that in 2025, I think I saw one over there was over five million books published alone in 2025. And so discoverability is such…. It’s continuing to grow, it’s getting bigger and bigger. How do you get your book discovered over literally the millions of other titles? And so, with our last couple minutes here, what would be, I guess all these things here. So probably to narrow down, you’ve got a lot of online material, you’ve got books. How can a person learn more about you and what we’ve just been talking about, or what would be a book on this or a website or a service or whatever that they’d have to be able to learn more about what we’ve been talking about.

Keith Riegert (57:11): I mean we have plenty of material on our on our platform perfectbound.io. So we support independent publishers through the publishing journey. And a lot of our clients are publishers who are just starting out, and we really want to make that as clear and easy as possible to understand. We also have a book coming out called the The Book Publisher’s Handbook. That’s just everything that you need to know about book publishing.

But getting back to your question there about or your comment about you know the five million books published, like this is a really important topic, right? Like between 2024 and 2025, the number of books that came onto the market increased by one million.

Right? Like we went from four to five million in one year, which has never happened before. And if you look at the number of titles that came out from established publishers and the big five, no change at all. Like completely flat year over year. So what we’re seeing now is a continuation of what has happened for the last decade and a half plus.

Which is the self-publishing market has continued to grow. And the addition of AI has turbocharged the number of new titles that are coming onto the market. And a lot of it is AI Slop. And what the AI Slop is doing is making it very difficult to foster discoverability of a book organically on Amazon, especially. So your job as a publisher or as an author is to figure out how to build discoverability in brand new ways and do it in an in such a way that you are actually going to make money. And the economics of publishing are tough, right? Like you sell a book for $20. $10 is taken by the retailer like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You have your printing costs. You have the costs associated with editing, with creating the cover, with marketing the book, with shipping the book. You end up with about 50 cents to a dollar to market an individual unit of that book and sell it before you start losing money on your marketing dollar. Right. So that right now is the most challenging thing for every publisher and every author in the country is what is the way? What is the best way and the best bang for your buck to market your book and actually get a positive return on that investment?

In a world that is continuing to sort of fracture when it comes to the media environment and even these social media algorithms that are serving up completely different content to every single user. So it’s a really interesting time to be publishing and trying to market books. But I think that there’s a lot that can be done with AI to move it forward.

John Goodwin (01:01:05): There’s a lot of readers out there. Great. So for somebody to be able to reach you, so you recommend them go to…

Keith Riegert (01:01:11): perfectbound.io. You can also visit us at the stablebookgroup dot com. So stablebookgroup dot com and my personal website, Keithriegert.com. My contact information is there as well. Great. Thank you.

John Goodwin (01:01:25): Thank very much, Keith.

And thank you for listening. Writers of the Future and Illustrators Future are contests created by L. Ron Hubbard to provide a means for the aspiring writer and artist to have a chance for their creative efforts to be seen and acknowledged now for over four decades. And we just celebrated over 1,000 writers and artists being published. We’ve also been syndicated on the United Public Radio Network and can be heard in over 150 countries. Visit WritersoftheFuture dot com to listen to past episodes of this podcast, to sign up for free online writer workshop, to enter either contest and see the past volumes and winners.

Again, thank you very much, Keith.

Keith Riegert (01:02:00): Thank you, John.