4 - Exploring the Evolution of AI with Melle Amade Melkumian

[00:00:00] Welcome to Brave New Bookshelf, a podcast that explores the fascinating intersection of AI and authorship. Join hosts, Steph Pajonas and Danica Favorite, as they dive into thought provoking discussions, debunk myths, and highlight the transformative role of AI in the publishing industry. **Steph Pajonas:** Hi everybody. This is the Brave New Bookshelf and we're here to talk about more AI in publishing. Once again, I'm Steph Pajonas. I am the COO, CTO of Future Fiction Academy and I am also an author of Science Fiction Romance and Space Opera Romance. I have my lovely co host here with me today and we also have a guest but I'm going to introduce Danica. Danica! **Danica Favorite:** I'm Danica favorite and I'm the community manager at Publish Drive. And I am like Steph also an author. And so we are very excited today to be here with our fourth episode and [00:01:00] finally starting some guest insights and hopefully something that you can all take away something really valuable. **Steph Pajonas:** Yeah, we're so excited to finally be having some guests on here instead of just me and Danica talking all the time. But I wanted to mention a few housekeeping issues. I wanted to mention first of all that we are on YouTube. You can find us at youtube. com slash at. Brave New Bookshelf. It's just like the title of the podcast. So you can find us there if you want to watch us on video instead. We're also on all the major podcast apps by this time. Took a couple of weeks for them to all propagate and get us on there, but we should be on there by this episode at the very least, and we have the website. It's all up and running. That's also at brave new bookshelf. com. And each one of the episodes that we publish, we have on the website with some major points pulled out of the episode and then a full transcript too. So if we say something in this episode where you're like, Oh, [00:02:00] that sounded really interesting. I can't remember, what it was, but Steph was talking about such and such. You can go to the website and you can go to the transcript and search it and find whatever it was we were talking about. So we have a guest here today. Her name is Melle Amade and she is here to talk to us. I'm going to let her introduce herself and tell us how she came into AI and publishing and all that good stuff, because we've been in this business for a little bit together and I'm excited for you guys to hear from her. **Melle Amade Melkumian:** Thanks, Steph. first of all, Steph and Danica, thank you so much for inviting me to talk on Brave New Bookshelf. I'm really excited. I think that there have been a lot of transitions in our industry, and as indie publishers and indie authors, we're seeing the old guard of the last, let's say, five to eight years are starting to transition away supporting authors and away helping them to really move into the AI era, which is [00:03:00] absolutely what we're on. So seeing your organizations come together to create Brave New Bookshelf is fantastic. So I'm really excited to watch the growth of your podcast. My name is Melle Amade. I publish under the name Melle Amade. I have been publishing since 2016. I write fantasy romance and within fantasy romance, I skip around a little bit, which is not a good marketing tactic. Just want to be clear about that. I also have been a technology marketing director. For about 25 years working at like Hewlett Packard, Northrop Grumman and NASA. It's been an amazing career. I love it. When generative AI came out, I was always already working with companies that used machine learning and you, you use that when you're flying things to Mars and the when generative AI became public and I was, I remember on, I was on a business trip to Miami, which was awesome. And one of my colleagues leaned ov