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I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that in this episode. This is episode number 433. It's just going to be me a solo episode. I'm going to talk to you a bit about why we're back and what to expect from the show in the future. A bit about what's going on with Learned self-publishing and my writing. And next week I am going to be revealing to the world the brand new co-host of the Self-Publishing Show, which I'm very, very excited about. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what's happened whilst I've been gone. So the first thing is, the reason really for pausing the podcast is it became quite a burden. I mean, podcasts are anybody who does a podcast, you talk to Joe Penn or I know quite a few of you have your own podcast. So you will know that a lot of work goes in every week.

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Our podcast became a bit of a beast that had six people working on it. We had artwork and interviews, and frankly I think we were doing things in an old fashioned way. We'd just got stuck in our groove. Some of the people who came up with a system of doing it when there wasn't tools and technology to help it stayed that way. So we ended up with this lumbering project. I did the separate interviews, which looking back we could have changed, but it felt to me like I was doing interviews on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and I was recording the episode on Wednesday or Thursday and it was dominating a lot of the week. I was becoming quite stressed about it because I have a big to-do list on any one day of the week. And in particular my writing had completely suffered and it's like the last thing I get to in those old days before I reorganised myself was writing.

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And there has been a bit of a reorganisation of myself and the way that I operate. So I'll talk to you about that today as well. And also I think my philosophy towards Indie publishing has changed and developed a little bit with things as they are rapidly changing at the moment. But I sort of missed the podcasting and I wanted to start an easier to manage podcast. And one frankly that was easier to listen to. One that was just people chatting about the industry that we know and love. And I was getting a lot of benefit out of a couple of WhatsApp group author WhatsApp group. So there's one in particular that I'm in every day and we are great friends and I dunno where I'd be without that particular author group. It's such an important part of my life. And so I wanted the podcast to feel like that experience, particularly for people who didn't have many author friends and they wanted to be part of a community where they could ask questions and discuss all the stuff that's happening to us in our industry.

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So I started the Indie Writers Club and it had a podcast which ran for 70, what was it, 74 episodes. My cohost Cara Claire, a romance author. She writes actually, she writes a range of genres, women's fiction through to romance and some of it's wholesome and clean, some of it's spicy and dark. I've read a couple of her books, I would thoroughly recommend it. She's got a really good book coming out soon, which is a retelling of Chatterley of Lady Chatterley's Lover in a Vampire Environment. And it's a gothic novel to start off with. So that's a really good idea that's coming out soon. And what you've got, if you weren't aware that we had that podcast and you haven't listened to the Indie Writers Club, there is now those 74 episodes, which I would recommend if you wanted to go back and listen to a few that we've covered quite a lot of subjects which I think are relevant and pertinent to the way that we operate.

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So we've talked about author scams since AI came along, there's been a real rise in author scams and a lot of them are very convincing in the first instance. And one of them I actually followed all the way through to the point where we got the bank account closed down in Texas. So you can follow that episode if you go to indie writers club.com, that's the website, and you click on the podcast audio tab or video tab, you'll get a list of all these episodes and you can find them their various numbers. We talked about alternative income streams for authors, not just in your books. We had an episode dedicated to those Pixar rules of storytelling, which we analysed. We talked a lot about ai and I'm going to talk about AI in a minute. I'm going to set out my position on ai, the position of this podcast on AI so that we're all on the same page.

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And if you don't want to be a part of it, that's absolutely fine, we respect that. But fair dues, we are going to be talking about AI on here, so I'll talk about that in a moment. But we talked about copyright issues to do with ai, the legalities. We had a brilliant episode about using AI as your assistant and how powerful that can be. And we always covered the latest tools that's coming out. A few fun episodes actually are films. So we looked at a few big films in particular, we were drawn to those big films that we felt for some reason didn't really work, they didn't land properly. And I think that's more interesting to us than a film that's absolutely brilliant. We can talk about Gladiator is a great example. One of my favourite films, gladiator. And I think the story is superb.

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I think it's so simple to follow who you're reaching for at every one point and you laugh and you cry at all the right moments. But Gladiator two was almost the pole opposite of that for me. I felt confused through it. I wasn't entirely sure how the story was going. I wasn't sure at any one point who I was supposed to be rooting for. And so we had an episode dedicated to discussing that and trying to analyse what went wrong in our view with Gladiator two. We had another one similarly about Hamnet very recently actually, I think it was like the penultimate episode. We talked about Hamlet, which is the film about Shakespeare's wife losing their son Hamlet. And again, neither of us felt the film landed properly. And so we talked about what that was and that's an interesting one because it's about that emotional side of our writing, which is such an important part of it.

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And whether we earn the rights as writers to have our readers crying whether we've done enough, et cetera. If that's what you want to do, you might not write those sort of books. We had an episode on how to get your book made into Hollywood film with an actual Hollywood screenwriter, TD Donnelly. More about him in a moment because I'm going to talk about future guests coming up. We had episodes on plotting, on editing, on drafting episodes, on selling direct. So we didn't have a lot of guests, but AP Beswick, Adam Beswick came on to talk about selling direct and doing TikTok lives. And I know that a few of the listeners at the time took that up because on my TikTok feed, I'm suddenly seeing a few people I know listen to the show now doing very similar sets of lives where they're selling books and Adam is going great Guns with his lives.

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In fact, I saw one the other day, it was brilliant. He was in his car saying that the head gasket had blown or something like that and it was going to cost 600 and x pounds and this is how many books he needed to sell during the day to pay for that. So he was doing lives later to get the book sold, to pay for his head gasket. And it was such a clever thing for me to see that because Adam gets that. My light's just fallen over. Adam gets that Readers are into you as much as they are. The books that you are part of what it is that they're buying when they buy a book from you. And that connection with readers is never been more important. It's never been more important because of ai, which obviously doesn't have a human connection, but it's never been more important because again, AI is probably underneath this, but because the advertising platforms we've had have not working in the same way that they used to.

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But what is working, and I can tell you from my position, looking out onto the industry, what is working are those authors who have good followings human following. So you have an active mail list, active Facebook groups, you have active social media, you engage with your readers, you have Kickstarters and things like that. So all sorts of other possibilities come up when you have your own audience and that's been very important. So never more important. One old fashioned thing that's never been more important is to build your mailing list. And that's still the same and it's still the heart I think of a good indie author operation unless you particularly hit one social media platform and that's where your audience is. But that's dangerous social media platform might suddenly change and you don't really own those readers. So we're going to talk about some of those subjects again in more detail.

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We'll probably have some of those guests on again in the next few weeks. So I'll talk about that in a moment. But let me first of all say a big thank you and a welcome to our sponsor because they sponsored the Indie Writers Club and they're going to be the sponsor of this show as well. And that is writing aid. Now I've been a fan of writing aid of the work that Chris and his team have been doing for years. Really early on in my drafting I use pro writing aid so that I actually save money on editors because you are handing over your first manuscript to them, whether it's development or line or proof editing later having done a lot of that typo work and a lot of that tightening of the language. And the platform for me is getting better and better in particular.

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And if you haven't used this, I'd absolutely recommend you check this out. They have a brilliant manuscript critique tool. So it's above and beyond the cost of membership. So I think I have PWA for Life, I bought it a few years ago and they do deals every now and again on that. But however you've purchased PWA, it will be extra. So I think it's up to about $50 per go. But they often have sales. I picked up at Christmas, I think I picked up four or five tokens at half price, so about $25 each. And for that, not very much money frankly. You get a fantastic breakdown of your manuscript. It tells you all sorts of things about what's working, what's not working, where there are problems, sort of red light problems through to amber light problems. It picks up all sorts of stuff. So one of my friends or one of our WhatsApp groups, we were talking to her about her dark moment and she by nature is of very sort of loving person and doesn't like putting characters in deep peril.

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And the manuscript critique actually picked out that and it said you're using devices to cushion your character from that dark moment. So that's the level of detail. So she knew she had to strip that out and work on that again. So I would really thoroughly recommend that. So PWA going to be our sponsor and there'll be a discount I think I am sure it is. The link will be recorded I'm sure at the front and back end of this by me before this goes out in a couple of days time. One thing I'm also going to mention whilst on the subject of Pro Writing aid is they have just launched Novel Beginnings, which is a fantastic looking contest where you can in $50,000, it's aimed at authors who are getting started. It's aimed at authors. I think you otherwise would find it difficult to have their voice heard in the industry.

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So you can submit your manuscript if you go to PWA and just type in Novel Beginnings, but I think it is providing aid.com/introducing Novel Beginnings. And you can have a look at the rules of the contest, but the grand price is $50,000 for somebody and there are nine runners up prices of $5,000 and even $5,000 is an amazing amount of money to get you started. 50,000 is like a lottery win, but $5,000, we'll get you started and get a lot of that. The stuff that we can't avoid having to pay for as indie authors, get that pay for you and get your career up and running. So we'll feature it more as we get towards the deadline. We'll perhaps have one of the guys on to talk about it, perhaps Haley or at some point to talk about exactly what they're looking for and some tips on entering.

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So what are we going to talk about on the Self-publishing show, the return of the Self-publishing show? We are going to have a few more guests than we've had on with the Indie Writers Club. So most weeks I think it is still going to be me and my mystery co-host. We are going to look at what's happened in the industry that week and we're going to talk about it, how it's affected us, how it is affecting you. We will bring some latest thinking on the subject. So if you are in the indie space, again, I want that feeling that you've got a group of friends and you've got a community who you are chatting with about what's going on because it's very important, particularly for an industry where we very often work in, but we are going to have some guests, and I was thinking about in the next few weeks having Dana Claire on, or Dana probably in America probably pronounced Dana Claire from Influence.

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So I think this is a very important area and Dana's a bit of a leader in this area because she has a company that works with authors to exploit their ip, which is a horribly commercial sounding term, but it basically means you spent a year writing a book and in the old days you'd publish it, okay? You'd publish it in a couple of different formats. So you might have Kindle edition and print edition, but now with special editions, now with Kickstarter and now with merchandising, I mean she was telling me about some romance authors who now have jigsaw puzzles based on their books and their series. I mean there's all sorts of possibilities. And she's a company that works with authors to do that. Now she works at quite a high level with quite big authors, direct printing and so on. But we're going to talk to her about the whole concept and how perhaps we could transfer that into those of us who are doing it at a lower level at this stage, how we can make the most of that idea of really making the most of our books.

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And on that subject, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about AI translations. I think this is a really important area and it's an area I am very deep in the weeds on, but before then, let's talk about ai because AI is controversial, right? And I know it's just the nature of our industry. Feelings are running pretty hard on AI and there will be some of you who think it's the devil. In fact, there was somebody, I think two years ago, author Nation who opened his talk by saying, I think AI is the devil and I will not be mentioning it. And a few people walked out because they thought, well, AI is the latest thing and the tool and we need to understand it. So they thought this talk wasn't going to be of much use. So that's kind of the downside of that.

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So which side of the AI fence am I on? Well, I am very firmly two feet on the ground in favour of ai. I say in favour of ai like you have to be in favour or against it. AI is here, the genie is out of the bottle. There's absolutely nothing anyone can do about that. That is just fact. It's being used brilliantly, positively, and nefariously. There's no question about that. Now, the first clue to us was probably about two years ago was it when KDP quietly said to everybody, Amazon, KDP, said they're going to limit how many books you can upload in a day and publish. And they limited it to three. And most of us are thinking, well, the KDP environment is set up for self-published authors. Funnily enough, we use it, it's a brilliant platform. And I Katie, because the amount of data and information you get is second to none.

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We use it as a publishing company, which does create some problems. And one of the problems are really based on the fact that it is designed for a self-published author of that or which self-published authors are uploading three books a day or more than three books a day. The fact that KDP had to limit it, and this was two years ago, I think it was something like that, that was a clue that people are using AI to publish dozens of books every day and upload to KDP. And if you have a factory set up where you've designed all the prompts and you are outputting all these books and now putting the covers using Midjourney, you don't need to make a lot of money per book. That's a different market. It's a different way of doing it. Now my view is good luck to you. I mean if that's what you want to do, that's fine.

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It's problematic for us. But who am I to say I would like other people in the industry to act differently, to benefit me? That's not how I look at it. I look at it like this. Those books were never going to be in serious competition with human written books. Most of us, whether we like to admit it openly or not, and I will admit it, have played with writing with ai. I mean I'm drafting at the moment and every now and again, I go back to it and I think, okay, so if I give everything I've done so far to AI and I tell it what I want in this scene, will it write a good scene? And for me personally, maybe I'm using it wrong, it never really does that, or I just read it and I think, well, it's not my writing. So it takes away the blank page.

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If you're getting really low on energy and you're really low on ideas and you just want the scene written, it takes away that blank page that you can then rewrite or disregard completely. But for me, that's kind of in the writing, that's where it is. And I look forward to writing and I barely ever open the AI when I'm drafting. After I finish drafting, I am absolutely all over ai, not least pro writing aid has a lot of AI built into it, but I also use it for research. I use it for checking some of the scenes that they scan and they flow properly and get some feedback on that. The manuscript critique technique is fantastic in PWA. I use it for images, I love it for images. Now I write Cold War historical fiction. Do you know how difficult it is to get pictures?

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I mean, I've got my, if you're watching on YouTube, so this is the final flight. There's a picture of a Vulcan bomber, ideally that bomber would be in anti flash whites, what colour it is in the book. But we are very limited on pictures that you can use and we have to obviously pay for that from a stock library. And it's a modern picture, not a 1960s vintage aircraft. One of my other books, which is on the shelf behind me, we didn't even get the right aircraft. We've got a Swedish, I think a Swedish or Swiss, perhaps a Swiss export version of it from the fifties. And of course my audience and they know these sort of things and they got back to me now, there was a good image of one, but it was with Pathe and Pathe wanted 700 pounds to use it, which I just thought was extortionate for that picture.

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Now funnily enough, I got speaking to my friend Robin Bennett Freeman, who writes brilliant nonfiction books in Cambridge, got in touch with Parve. He's a very heavy user of photography. And it turns out it was just a conversation and Parve were completely open to the idea of reorganising their model to suit the indie world. And they did. And I ended up buying that image for something like 70 pounds, much cheaper. And we got it changed onto the book. Now, I'll still go to those original images from time to time, but to get exactly what I want, AI has been a boon. Midjourney is my one of choice, but there's Leonardo and there's others around as well. It will now produce authentic looking aircraft from that period. And another thing, this is a bit nerdy, only pertains to me, but as an example, there's a fantastic collection of REF pilots wearing obviously exactly the right gig because it's contemporary pictures taken of them in the fifties and sixties, a really big collection and they're great and I'd love to cut them out.

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For instance, on the front cover of my very first copy of the final flight, had one of these pilots walking away from camera on the front, but they are owned by the Imperial War Museum, a bit of a bug bear of mine by the way. They were taken by the government, they crown copyright. Why the IWM has the law now, I dunno why they have dominance over them and have ownership of them, but they do. The IWM is Imperial War Museum in the uk and they were very snobby when I said, how do I licence this image? I said, what do you want to licence it for? I said, well, I want to write a book. What sort of book? Well, it's novel. Who are you publishing it with? Well, I'm publishing it myself. Well, we don't think that's a suitable use of our photographs, which drove me insane as I'm sure it would you as well.

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And again, I'm thinking these are public pictures taken of the Royal Air Force paid by taxpayers. Why are they in a draw at IWM and why are they saying no to people? I should probably have just used it and put Crown copyright on there and then try to work out how I'd defend it in court. But now I don't need to because Midjourney can produce those images. It can get people looking as they did in the 1950s and sixties, and that's amazing and I can get them in exactly the right pose. I'll speak into some science fiction authors yesterday who said it's been an absolute godsend to them because they had the same old generated graphics from the same cover designers for years, which brings us on to the point about cover designers and people losing their trade from this. So the first thing I'm going to say about this, there are many issues.

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There are many assets to this debate on ai. I understand that and we'll talk about them stealing images and stealing copyrighted works in a moment. But in terms of you are taking income from other people, you're taking money away from people alongside you who are working. That is not an argument. Let me be crystal clear about that. There's no point in human history where it was the right thing to do to not use a new technology to protect the way things were done in the past. Never a point. If we did that at any point in human history, we would literally be on horses now rather than have the motorcar. The horse industry obviously was decimated when the motorcar came in in the twenties and thirties, but there would've been no stable owners who adapted a couple of their stables to service cars and started companies that are probably still around today.

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And that's the same with cover designers. I find it hard to have sympathy with cover designers who say, I hate ai, it's taken my work, it's slop, it looks horrible. I'm not using it. I don't know any cover designers who say that, but I do see them posting and I talk about this on Substack, so I get quite a few comments on there. The cover designers I know are using ai. Of course, the ai, it's just the tool, right? So all it is, it's just a tool that's come along and it helps 'em fill in the blanks and it actually elevates someone like me when I do my ads, it elevates me from being slightly rubbish at it and cropping out bits of somebody else's work. Basically, my cover designer's work with permission of course, and now I can generate amazing looking advertising images with the right aircraft on it, et cetera.

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And so it's absolutely an onus on all of us all the time to adapt to the industry that we're in. When the industry starts changing, we adapt or we die basically we stay where we were. Same in the animal kingdoms the same in the self-publishing industry. And so I think cover designers who are using AI and they can offer a range of services, it can absolutely say to some authors if that's what they want, there'll be no AI in your cover. It's going to cost them more, it's going to take a little bit longer, but they can increase their rate of production and they can increase the range of images that they are offering because there's a lot more possibilities with AI than there is with the stock libraries. The stock libraries themselves are quickly adapting Shutterstock now, I think a lot of their images are AI derived rather than those old photographic ones.

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There's always going to be a place for some of that old stuff for authenticity, but so that's more or less my view on ai. I'm pretty positive about it. I think there's a place for it. I think we need to adapt. We need to call out bad actors who are stealing. And on that question, of course there's a big anthropic court case going through there. The people behind Claude at the moment, because they, along with meta, they lifted pirated versions of our books from websites to learn from. So the question about that, there are two parts to it. One is, should they have paid for the books in the first place? And I think that's a pretty straightforward yes, they should have done, even if it was just the cover price, they should have paid us for those books. The second question is, were they right to use copyrighted material to grow their project, to build their tool?

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I actually think they were okay to do that and so does the court, the courts come down on that side as well. And I think that reflects the way that humans operate. All of us as writers have read copyrighted material. We've read authors We Love. So on the shelf behind me, again, if you watch it on YouTube, you'll see some books like Flight of the Intruder by Stephen Konz. And his third book was called Final Flight. I was completely inspired by Stephen Konz, a fantastic writer. And when I first started writing my novel, it was basically a complete copy of a Stephen Konz novel back in when I was 19, 20. And then years later when I started writing a proper novel, it was about my dad in my era, the era I was interested in the sixties and the British, but Stephen Konts style of being authentic and being in the crew room led into that.

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That's what I learned from. So I learned from copyrighted material. I did pay Stephen Kuntz for the book of course, because I bought it in a bookshop back in the day and that's what they should have done. But they can absolutely, I think build their tool on it. And the court has ruled the same thing, said, that's fair use Google Built itself. It's an incredibly useful tool. Google and it built itself basically skimming the entire internet, everything that was published on there. And yes, AI is incredibly useful and there's a huge list, long list of its positive contributions to humanity, particularly in the medical sector as well. So if you're really anti ai, you've probably turned off by now. Your blood will be boiling and you won't want to be a part of this podcast, which makes me sad because there's going to be lots of things on this podcast I think will have nothing to do with AI and are the fundamentals of storytelling, et cetera that are more important now than they ever have been.

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So we'd love to have you with us, but I completely understand if my pro AI stance is not going to gel well with where you are. If you want to argue with me about it, I do have a substack. If you go and find that, I think it's called Writing with James. I'll look it up. I'll put it in the show notes, the link so you can post it in there and I'll try and respond to you politely of course, and respectfully as we always do. So that brings me on to AI Translations for Authors. So this is a new course that I'm writing and it's come from a place of solving a problem, which is the best type of online course that we've ever done as well. Answering a question someone was asked, and that is the question is how can I do AI translations, right?

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Because we had a few tools come along. Scribe Shadow is the most famous. There's also Globe Scribe and there's also just doing it want chapter by chapter inside an ai. They can translate your book into myriad of different languages. The problem with that, and it became quite clear after a few weeks and months of us all doing this and all rushing our books up onto into Germany and France and Spain, is that the first draught isn't good enough. The one you get out of Scribe Shadow and Globe Scribe is probably the best, but it's still not good enough. And that's the truth of it. And I like these companies and I work with them. I probably will ask them for sponsorship for the show, but I have to be fair and honest here to everyone. I think it's a start, but it's not the end product.

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And I know that from the comments I'm getting on my books that come out of that product, and I know that because I've had a couple of them Beta red as well. So I was trying to work out, well, how do we use AI to get a good translation? And that's when we started to develop, and I say we have worked with a couple of other clever people, started to develop a series of passes that starts with building a bible, a handbook, a guide to your book, and that is used at every subsequent stage. So it brings consistency and accuracy to those stages down the line. Now that takes a little while to build because it's specific to one book and one language. So the final flight, German, for instance, would have its own handbook and it's long it goes on. You don't create all of this, AI creates it, but you have to set up how to create and we have a very clever prompt to do that.

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Your next stage is the translation stage, which is best done chapter by chapter. The next stage after that is the accuracy stage where we go back to the English, and this time we use a different ai, which is something I'm really huge about at the moment. It's like a ninja tip on AI use. If you're using AI seriously, you need to use more than one to check each other's work. It's a bit like humans and treating AI more like humans than computers is a key way to work well with them as well. I think. So anyway, it's complicated getting this course together. The prompts have been the most complicated part of it, but that's what you get with the course. You get detailed instructions to make it easy to follow, and you get these prompts that are built in the first place for you. You obviously then adapt them for your book and your language where you've got different prompts for different languages, you adapt them for your book and you get your handbook out.

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The result is amazing. So I've been putting my, I've changed my translations of going up there and suddenly my star ratings going up and the big change on my French translation. I've noticed they were the first ones to say because I think French is the most difficult one. They were the first ones to say, I think this is an AI translation, or the translations really clunky and hard to read in places, but I quite like the story. They're the one, those comments have stopped, they've absolutely stopped. So it won't be a hundred percent and obviously you've still got that five to $10,000 option of a human to do it. That will be your best bet as long as they're good. Although I've had problem with human translation as well in the past, but we are really, really excited about this. So that's AI translations for authors.

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It's going out to beta in the next seven days. So the first part of the course, the big chunky part of the course where it does all this workflow business that's going out to my beta readers and there'll be another round of beta in a few weeks, and then we'll launch hopefully this month in February. That's the aim for it. If you want to know more, if you want to sign up to the wait list, there's going to be also an early bird offer just for the wait list. So you need to sign up there if you want to get that. It'd be a really good offer to get it up and running if you go to learn self-publishing dot com slash ai translations all one word. So I'm looking forward to that. Deep in the weeds on that. A couple other things to mention.

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So the Self-Publishing Show live at the moment, it says on the website there are four tickets left, which is not many for the show. So maybe even by the time this goes out that will have sold out, there's a possibility of more tickets. So we have a site visit next week on the 10th of February. We're going to be looking at county hall. We can have a sit down conversation with them. Once we've done that planning, we will have a final number of how many people we can fit into the venue. And so we hope that number's going to be higher than the one number of tickets we sold, not less because that will give us some problems. It's also this thing that I know from organising this conference, and this is one of the biggest indie shows in the world, is that some people don't turn up.

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So there's usually a little bit of leeway on the total number of tickets. We can probably oversell it a bit like overbooking an airline. So we will come up with a number. But as it stands, I'm recording this on Wednesday, the 4th of February, there are four tickets remaining if you want to come to the show. So it's on the South Bank in London over two days in June. It's got a fantastic lineup. You're going to get incredible tuition from people, you're going to get inspiration from people as well, and I'm very excited about it. The scheduling is in progress at the moment. We've announced quite a few of the speakers. There's a few more to firm up, but we're going to have, and we added actually Ora from Kickstarter this week, so she's going to be joining us as well there. And excitingly over those two days on the night of the first day, which I think top of my head is the 12th of June. Is it 11th and 12th or 12th and 13th? I think it's 11th and 12th. So it'd be the 11th of June. But don't check the website rather than me. We are going to have a party boat. So reminiscent of what happened in 2020 just as COVID was breaking out, we called the plague ship then, but this is going to be a fun party vote.

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So Catherine and I went to London last week and we checked it out and it looks great. In all honesty, it doesn't look amazing from the outside, like the last sort of paddle steamer we had last time. But the inside is perfect for us. So in the basement you have a dance floor, it's going to be eighties and nineties bangers all night. On the mid deck you've got a bar seating area, a bit more music, a DJ there as well. And on the top deck you've got an open air area with another bar up there. We've got space for 360 people maximum on there. It's going to be a Prosecco reception, it's going to be a first drink probably in that as well. We'll have to number crunch a little bit before we make that final decision, but you'll definitely get Prosecco reception and there's a bar on board.

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We'll do what we can with the drinks tokens for sure, and it's likely to be in the region of 40 pounds and we think it's going to be a 40 pound charge that is expensive for us to hold this. I'm going to ask if we can get a sponsor as well to try and guarantee that we're going to get the coverage we need to pay for it, but if it ends up costing us a bit, that doesn't matter as a company because it'll be a really fun thing to do. So that will be the boat. So look out for that. We haven't announced the ticket sales yet. We've got a few things as you can hear me talking it through the firm up. Once we've done that, the first people who get an option of buying a ticket for the party boat in the evening will be those who are registered for the conference. So those will go out first and then after that, it'll go out to other people who can't make the conference but would like to come and network in the evening on the boat. We are going to see a lot of amazing London. You're going to pass House as a parliament are going to pass MI five and MI six. I should be pointing out to people in the evening on a June evening. So hopefully, fingers crossed, weather is good. It usually is for our conference.

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Okay, how long have I been talking? I dunno. Oh, 35 minutes. Wow. Joe Penn does this. She does these talks just by herself without a guest for a long time. I dunno how she does it. It's quite hard work. My last thing to say is that next week I will be revealing my co-host. So my co-host is somebody I've known for several years, somebody I hugely admire for the way they operate. There's somebody very plugged into the industry. They usually first to tell me about a new craft book or a new way of doing things. They also are very good at asking the questions that we all ask and somebody who I am very comfortable laughing with and enjoying life with. And so I think it's going to be a good fit for the show and that person will be revealed next week in the episode.

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You have to stay tuned for episode 4, 3, 5, now 4, 3, 4, 4, 3, 4 next week for that. So that's it. This is the Self-Publishing Show. We are back, baby, we're back in the room. Hopefully this has landed on your devices because you were previously subscribed. Go and check out the Indie Writers Club. I'm going to talk about the Indie Writers Club in more detail next week because the Indie Writers Club is not going away. On top of the Indie Writers Club podcast, we had a Patreon, so you could join the Patreon and I think it probably starts at something like $5 a month. I have to check that and has tears going up. And that is for people who want the next level of podcast listening. So instead of just getting the podcast on a Friday, you also get a live chat with me q and a and with my co-host at least once a month.

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You are likely going to get things if we have a guest on. We'll also put them live in the evening just for those people who subscribe. And that's a more serious discussion, a chance to ask more detailed questions about your work and what you are working on. It's also a chance to meet other authors and get to know them. It's been a brilliant little community. I absolutely love it. We had a live q and a just a few nights ago that also mainly the people who, well, we give out the retreat information, so we do writing retreats now. That goes to the Paton group first, and it's sold out this year. So we've got 32 people coming, which is a huge number for a retreat. We'll have to manage that, but that is just Paton group people. So there's an opportunity for that. I'm going to talk about that in more detail next week and exactly how that's going to work alongside the Self-Publishing show. But it's a very important community for me. It's the one I built from scratch from the beginning. And if you want to join us, I will give out that information next week. But go and check out the Indie Writers Club, go and check out those podcasts. There'll be a few to listen to between now and next week, and I will see you next week. Publishing
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