Bo Bennett on Bookgist AI for Authors and Readers

HOST: It's good to have you back, Bo. You know, last time we talked, you mentioned how difficult it is to publish a *profitable* book, not just to publish one. And today I want to dig into BookGist.ai. You've positioned it as a discovery tool, but I'm curious, walk me through the actual mechanism: a reader finds a 15-minute summary, loves it, then what happens? Is there any data yet, even anecdotal, that the summary-to-purchase conversion is real? GUEST: Well, thanks for having me on again. Uh, yes, this is a discovery tool and it's about the 15-minute summaries. Uh, the goal is to give somebody more than just your typical first page, or like Google does with the books, they'll give you some random pages along the entire book. And it's not for like a full evaluation. It's for a very basic, uh, just checking the quality, making sure it's the kind of book you want to buy. A book just is a little bit different. It really is geared towards allowing people to have the full book experience in 15 minutes. With the hope that they're going to like it so much that they will do the conversion, or they will talk about it and write about it, and then people will ultimately buy the book because not everybody is going to find book just. So, um, so that's the goal. You ask about any real conversion data data right now. It's a brand new site, so we don't have anything, uh, more than anecdotal saying sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. HOST: Got it. So, no data yet. It's definitely a novel approach, but I'm curious about the quality aspect. Your position is that AI writes better than most humans, but a summary is a marketing tool. If the AI gets it wrong, what's the recourse? Is that one audio regeneration credit really enough of a safety valve? GUEST: Uh yes, it is, but typically it doesn't get it wrong. It does an incredible job. Again, maybe AI a year ago, two years ago would have would struggle with this and and not really do a good job. But with all of the books that I put through there so far, it's been meticulous in its summary and I've been very impressed with with how it created the summary. HOST: Okay, so you've seen firsthand consistently high quality. Now, on the reader side, you've built AuthorMailingLists.com specifically on the argument that a direct reader relationship is the most valuable marketing asset. But BookGist explicitly collects no reader accounts, no emails. You're sending readers into a free library with no way for the author to follow up. Is that a deliberate trade-off for frictionless discovery, or is there a reader-side data layer you're planning to add? GUEST: No, it's about the frictionless part of it. However, there is that mailing list widget that authors can add to their BookBub profile. So if the author or if the reader is interested in learning more about the author and other books, and they do want to sign up for their list, they could do that. So this is a way for authors to connect directly to their readers through that mailing list widget. Which is part of author author mailing lists.com. HOST: Ah, okay, so there's a direct connection there. It reminds me a bit of what you mentioned in our previous conversation about AuthorOnAir, where podcast SEO compounds over time. How does BookGist's SEO play connect with that? Is it about getting Google traffic to a summary that then redirects to Amazon, or is there something else? GUEST: No, that's part of the plan as well. Uh the more pages out there, the more information about the book, it captures more of the key words, the more search intent, and therefore, the book is going to be much more available to wider a wider reader base through this listing alone. HOST: So it's about driving traffic to the summary page and then hoping for that conversion. That brings me to another point, the pricing architecture. Most discovery platforms take a royalty cut, like Amazon or Audible. BookGist charges authors once, no royalties, no ongoing cut. What's the business logic there? Is this a volume play to grow the library, or is there another strategic reason? GUEST: Well, unlike Amazon or other retailers, we are not actually doing the transaction. We're just passing it off to the retailers. So, we don't have any cost associated with that transaction. Whereas, Amazon or Audible or whomever, they have to process credit cards, they have the risk of returns and uh the whole support system and so forth. We're not doing that. BookSliced is all about showing the summary and uh for the paid options, giving the user all of the different links where they could actually go out and buy the book themselves. So, uh there's no reason for us to take a cut in this case. HOST: That makes sense. You're focusing on being the funnel, not the marketplace. So, BookGist is live, there are books in the library, and the pipeline from upload to published summary is measured in minutes. But the whole bet here is that a reader who loves a 15-minute summary becomes a book buyer. When will you know if that bet is paying off? What's the specific signal — a number, a behavior, something you'll see in the data — that tells you BookGist is actually moving books and not just building a nice free library? GUEST: Well, that's actually not the only point of BookBub. If, let's say the worst case scenario, and nobody ever converted, like readers would read the 15-minute summaries and they would never buy the book. It's still a very valuable platform for the authors because again, we've got the uh we we've got the SEO um exposure. We've got the direct links, like if they just want to uh they don't want to read the summary, for example, they just want to buy the book. Uh we've got um the exposure of like the if uh somebody wants to write about the book and talk about the book, like uh again, it's just more exposure for the book itself. So, there's a lot of other benefits besides direct purchases. So, uh the authors have plenty of reason to list their book regardless of whether readers actually will read the summary and then buy the book. Having said that, we can't necessarily monitor which users buy the book because we don't have access to those statistics on Amazon or whatever, the click-through. Um we can monitor how many people click on the links to the different stores. And that's something that we will monitor. Uh so, just to clarify this little bit more, a reader could go to BookBub, they could read the 15-minute summary, and they could say, "Huh, I wonder how much the book, the full book is, or I want to see where I could buy it." They click on the Amazon link. We could capture that click and we could record that, but we don't know if they bought the book or not on Amazon just because we don't have access to that data. Amazon doesn't share it. HOST: Okay, so you're providing exposure and tracking clicks, but you can't directly see the sales. That's fair. It definitely paints a clearer picture of the value proposition for authors. Before we go, for listeners who want to follow up on what we covered, where can they find you and the work you're doing? GUEST: Well, you can go to archieboy.com. And that's where we have all of our websites or this specific site, bookgistgist.ai. HOST: Got it. Bo, thanks again for coming back on. I loved hearing about how you're framing BookGist as an SEO play and weren't relying on direct purchase conversions. And thank you for spending part of your day with us. Let's get you back on soon; there's plenty more to explore. Until next time — that's a wrap.