’If you just want a machine to write all of this stuff and put your name on it and say it’s yours, I don’t know what the motivation is. I don’t know what results you think it could bring.’
What does it look like to use AI in creative activities practically, ethically, and in a human-centred way? One answer to that question might be Cliobooks.ai, the speak-your-book technology developed by publishing entrepreneur and business coach Georgia Kirke.
Starting and ending with humans, and rejecting the quick fix of AI-generated content, this is an attempt to develop workflows that make authorship more accessible and less soul-sucking. But there’s no short cuts to the human expertise behind each book (sorry), both on the part of the author and the publishing team around them.
This is a fascinating exploration of how AI can be used for good, the difference between timeless principles and evolving workflows, and the wisdom of understanding the difference between them. Have a listen…
Cliobooks.ai site: https://cliobooks.ai/
Georgia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgiakirke-clio-writebusinessresults/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Georgia Kirke, who is a publishing entrepreneur, consultant, and the founder of Cliobooks.ai and Write Business Results. That’s W-R-I-T-E Business Results. She spent the last 10 years refining award-winning book production and promotion processes, workflows, frameworks, helping hundreds of non-fiction authors turn their ideas into bestselling business books by speaking their content instead of typing it. I know, I have your attention already, don’t I?
Prior to publishing, Georgia worked in business coaching and she now creates products and services for the publishing industry that merge the principles of business growth with those of book production. So you are so in the right place here, Georgia. This is just great.
Georgia Kirke: Thank you very much indeed and what an introduction as well, I feel very welcome. Thank you.
Alison Jones: So good to have you here, and first of all, let me congratulate you on the launch of Cliobooks.ai.
So, first of all, well, I guess just tell us what it is.
Georgia Kirke: Thank you very much.
So, Clio, do you know actually Clio turns one last week. So, at the time of recording that is,
Yes, yes, I’ve just dated it, but there we go.
But actually it is, Clio is a moonshot of mine. It’s been in the making for a decade.
So I’ve worked in publishing now for 10 years. Prior to that, as Alison said, I was in business coaching and something that I was hearing from entrepreneurs, often, was we know that we are unique. You know, we know that what we do is unique.
A financial advisor, for example. You might think on the face of it that a financial advisor, how much financial planning can be creative, how much could be unique. But actually every single financial planner that I was interacting with had a completely different take on the philosophy behind the services that they provide. And it was deeply personal and deeply meaningful work because of the, you know, the circumstances that we find ourselves needing that kind of advice and support in life. So it was like, how can we package up what makes us so unique and show that to people beyond our referral network? That was the first thing.
Other people had written more direct questions related to books such as, I would love to be able to author that book. You know, I believe that I’m an authority in what I do. I know that I can really help way more people than I currently have access to. But the idea of sitting down to write for such a long period of time feels very unclear or it feels very unappealing. I’m dyslexic. I’m ADHD, I have another form of neurodivergence. How do I go about this? And it was these questions that were coming so often, I just thought, this needs solving.
And I put together a book creation process, specifically for entrepreneurs, that would take away the pain and the difficulty so that they could get the messages out there that really can help more and more people. And that turned out to be a speak-your-book process, and I always wanted that to be automated for them. I wanted it to be something that supported their entrepreneurial motivations and freedoms rather than add in an extra spinning place into their lives.
But the technology to do that just didn’t, it wasn’t even close to existing 10 years ago, it was inconceivable. I told a couple of people about my idea that a platform could help entrepreneurs speak their books and I got laughed at, whereas I just thought, okay, I’m going to wait because I know this will happen, but it’s too early.
A couple of years ago, things changed. I was able to build Clio. And so Clio is the world’s first and to date only speak-your-book platform for nonfiction books.
Alison Jones: I had no idea that you came up with this 10 years ago. That’s amazing. So did you have a sense of exactly where the technology was going and you just had to sort of wait it out? Or did you just, as you saw things emerge, go, oh, I can use that and we can bring this in, and you know, when was the point where you went, oh, it’s here. I can do it.
Georgia Kirke: It was, I mean, when LLMs became household, when the knowledge of LLMs became household pieces of information, but it’s not LLMs, it is not like a wrap around chatGPT. We’ll go into this a bit more about what it is.
Alison Jones: I really want to dive into this.
Georgia Kirke: We can, because it’s really important that that’s known.
But I think what I did know 10 years ago was that the technology to do this would exist because what was clear to me at that point, working with so many different innovative people, was that a lot of what makes projects and businesses and ideas become real and successful, it is not like random events and sequence, you know, like it is not like a sort of random convergence of things. It’s not like pure creativity. It’s… where it starts as an idea. Yes. And then somebody’s given a lot of commitment, a lot of energy, and a lot of investment. Probably of time, money, other resource into making that idea real.
But what makes those ideas kind of flow and operate on a regular basis is actually workflows and processes and then bringing in the right people to operate such workflows and processes. And so, from that approach, I could see that technology could be capable of pretty much anything. Bar the empathetic part of the equation, although I know there are many people who would argue differently in this day and age, a decade ago it was more like book production. There are many different, and you’ll know this Alison, a lot of book production is process. It is about just simply having the right steps to follow in the right order.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Georgia Kirke: You know, but we don’t need to, as business owners, we don’t want more work on our plates.
We don’t want to have to become publishing experts and writing experts and all the different areas of expertise that go into making a good book. You know, an entrepreneur, they already know what they know. They just need to be able to bring that to the table. And then the other workflows, to a degree, I did see as being made available by technology, but it’s the inner expertise and the inner personal spin on that.
Alison Jones: Yes. And I think that’s the difference, isn’t it? Because in the past, and technology has been enabling production workflows for, you know, decades, I think it’s safe to say, but it hasn’t so much built into editorial. And that’s the really interesting thing.
And in fact, 10 years ago I was working with people to speak their book in the sense that they were getting it, you know, transcribed and we were working together on prompts and so on, and it’s all those different things coming together into one piece, isn’t it?
Georgia Kirke: It is, and it’s really hard to do that. And there are so many moving parts to a book project, you know, and there are people feeling like, sort of guilty. I don’t know if you’ve found this but like, you know, I’d love to have a book, but I can’t, I’m not ready. I’m a terrible writer. And, you know, and actually let’s separate out these roles for a second.
Being an author and being a writer are actually two different roles. It’s just that the publishing industry, we adore the craft of writing and it’s so linked to human expression and human authenticity, and it’s an art form within itself. So for us as publishing professionals, it can be quite a challenge conceptually to distinguish book writing from book authoring.
But for others that don’t have access to the writing part of the equation. That’s already quite obvious. If you ask somebody with dyslexia, if having dyslexia means they can’t interact with books in any way, shape or form, they would call you Victorian. I mean, they would say that’s a very old fashioned point of view.
It’s just that the accessibility part of the equation is still being solved. And that’s something that I know the publishing industry feels very strongly and is a priority for people in the industry.
It’s how do we get more diverse messages out there?
How do we give access to this amazing format to a more diverse range of users?
Alison Jones: And technology, as you say, has been fantastic and assistive technology for reading and also makes complete sense to do it now for writing.
But let’s get to the nub of it, which you and I have talked about before and I think is, you know, is going to be the sort of elephant in the room for everybody. It’s so, well, hang on a minute: is AI writing this book or am I writing this book? So yes, let’s address that head on.
Georgia Kirke: Absolutely with: Clio AI does not write your book for you, and it never will.
Alison Jones: And that’s why we’re talking.
Georgia Kirke: Yes.
I mean, honestly I just don’t even know… if you just want a machine to write all of this stuff and put your name on it and say it’s yours, I don’t, know what that is. Like I, don’t know what the motivation is. I don’t know what results you think it could bring.
I don’t believe anybody who listens to this show would want that because by the very nature of tuning in, so I think let’s kind of, let’s have a look at the AI part of the equation from the perspective we’re all interested in.
I think, which is like, how is our ingenuity protected? How is our IP protected? How are we as authors and creators protected? Even if, whether you are the writer or not, that for a minute that’s irrelevant. You are the originator of the work. And I think that we have to put guardrails in place, you know, there’s a safety element.
And if you’re using an LLM to generate content for you, it’s when people go, oh my God, this is amazing. It’s like exactly what I would say. It is because it’s working on a predictability element where it knows exactly what you want to say and it’s pulling the answers to that, the gaps in your knowledge from somebody else’s knowledge that it’s been trained on. So, it’s really dodgy to do that.
But no, with Clio it’s fully encrypted. No user generated content is shared with LLMs. Clio doesn’t even train itself, it doesn’t even improve itself based on your inputs. What the AI does it, ‘AI – ifies’ the processes and the workflows by helping you generate the ideal table of contents for your topic, reader and goals.
And by coming up with a talking plan that is unique to you, for example, that will help you speak or write. You can still write your book but it just gives you alternative creative methods and it leads you through the steps you need to follow.
Alison Jones: And the point about the prompts, which I think is absolute genius, you know, I’m a big fan of exploratory writing. What you do is you give yourself a prompt and you write into that. And this sits beautifully alongside it actually. I’m a big fan of using your own writing and then you turn to a tool like this, but there’s something about having a question put to you, even if you’re putting it to yourself, that unlocks things, isn’t it?
It it gets you started in a way that a blank sheet of paper doesn’t.
Georgia Kirke: Absolutely. And that’s often what we need. You know, we need a thinking partner or we need a soundboard, or we need someone to say, that’s a terrible idea, or someone to say, that’s a brilliant idea, expand on that some more.
But you know, when you think about what’s, and this is why being a writer is such an art form. So many different thought processes have to happen at once. You’ve got the introspection needed to examine the thinking that you have in the first place, to see where it comes from or what could be of interest, to actually quite an extroverted piece of the puzzle, which is then turning that round into something other people can relate to and understand and putting it back out there in the right package.
And actually, even then, you are still operating that thought process to a plan. You’ve had to come up with a structure, you’ve had to come up with the questions yourself that you then need to answer. That’s part of why it’s so difficult. And actually as experts in your field, as an entrepreneur, as a business book author, as a, I don’t know, whatever it might be, a researcher, a historical expert in a particular niche. You know, whether you’re a business coach, whether you’re a financial planner. Whatever it is you do, you already possess the only expertise you need, which is your content expertise.
But what you probably need is somebody or something to be able to take that information, understand what you’re trying to do with it, A, give you a structure to work within, and B just guide you down the right path with what to say and when to say it.
With those bits done, you already have the knowledge you need. You’re just filling in. You’re just filling in these kind of gaps in chapters with what you already know and you don’t need that making up for you.
Alison Jones: And that having the framework, having the prompts is what makes it doable, isn’t it? Because, yes, absolutely.
Georgia Kirke: This is what you help people with Alison so much as well in your work, isn’t it? It’s like, you are this incredible thinking partner, collaborator, you know, that I think, you know, you have this kind of like innate coaching ability that goes way beyond publishing expertise where you know how to unlock the best of somebody and you have this amazing community and loyal followers.
When I look at you, I’m just like, you’re someone who just I think intuitively just understands people.
Alison Jones: For me the best job in the world is sort of hearing someone express an idea and not be able to express it fully, and helping them sort of see what the distinctive, you know, I absolutely love that. But that is, I mean, you and I both have got that kind of publishing plus coaching background.
I think it is quite, I was going to say it’s quite unusual. I actually know a few people, but it’s not that common, is it? Publishers tend to traditionally have sort of taken the output and made it commercially available and that space in between, and particularly with business authors who have great expertise but aren’t writers and just need that support, they’re also cursed with knowledge.
You know, it’s sometimes things are so obvious to them that they don’t even understand that they need to explain the basics.
Georgia Kirke: Well this, and this is the other thing, by the time you are the expert, you’ve done 10,000 hours, 50,000 hours, you know, 25 years expertise, then actually you are so far away from the starting point, which is where your prospective customers are, your brand new clients are, you know, that actually can be quite hard to relate.
And you end up saying the same things because you’re used to saying the same things. But when was the last time you felt that way? When was the last time you felt that confusion, that fear that they feel? And what can you really say that’s going to have that cross border, international, feel that you’ve kind of reached out through the book itself and taken them by the hands and led them from point A to point B.
And so I do think that that’s the gap, you know, that there’s the publishing industry and there’s the author. And then this bit in between is like this coaching piece, but even for you or I, where we kind of build that into our publishing offerings. You know, actually there’s still only so much human that can go around in an eight hour working day, right?
And so I think having some technology that’s ethical, legal, and used in the right way, that can be that real kind of support partner into the equation is useful.
Alison Jones: It’s hugely useful and I think this is what I’m really trying to encourage listeners, our authors and so on, it’s like, do be you, do your best you, do your thinking, bring your unique Venn diagram of experience and expertise and approach and you know, all of that stuff.
And, there are now incredibly powerful tools that can help you do that more effectively and more quickly and with less grief. And that’s really important. And don’t, it isn’t human or ai, is it? It starts with human, it ends with human because it starts with the author and ends with the reader. But in between those processes to get it out into a form that can be consumed, and I think this is where the publisher acts as an ambassador for the reader as well, isn’t it? because you’re bringing the reader into the equation before the reader has got the chance to be there themselves. There’s so much you can do with that.
So, what I’d love to ask you actually is when you were doing this, when you were building it and testing it, what did you learn? What did you notice? How do people react?
Georgia Kirke: That’s a really good question actually. There was intrigue and there was a lot of moral support and there was a lot of disbelief, but in a positive way, like in a, you are saying what, you are building what, like it was, it didn’t exist, you know? So it was like, it wasn’t just a new piece of software, it was a new concept that you could speak your book.
You know, I mean actually there are people finishing books in two days within Clio, excuse me, that it is all their own content and they haven’t had anybody else create that narrative content. Their thinking has been so freed up and expedited by the way that it works, that they’ve been able to just speak, and obviously you can speak faster than you can type and that kind of a thing. And it gets a first draft out.
So, I think that was the first thing that we were saying to people was, first of all, of course it was, why do I want AI to write my book for me? It’s like, it doesn’t. And then it was like, how does it speed it up though, if I’ve still got to do the thinking and I’ve still got to provide the content? And it was like, because the workflow’s there. But then it was like people didn’t know what the workflows were, because that’s part of the confusion. So it was like really showing and really educating.
And then of course there was confusion and fear within the publishing industry itself. Not just amongst authors, but with publishers saying, well, hang on a minute. Who is this replacing exactly? And what are you doing with that content? How will this affect the author’s copyrights and our distribution rights and our IP ownership? And, you know, so there was every single fear and objection and question I think you might imagine.
But what I’ve found is that as soon as people see this tool, they’re just like, oh, I see, none of that applies. And we’ve built it that way on purpose. It is ethical. It is a fair use of ai. It is a great example of how AI and humans can and I believe, should collaborate. It’s the creative meets the, you know, the art meets the science.
And it isn’t designed to replace, only collaborate.
Alison Jones: And we should say, and I know listening to you talk and you had a development editor sitting alongside you saying, you know, this is it, this is the first manuscript. It’s not what we publish. You know, that goes into the whole kind of development and then into copy editing and so on.
Just getting it out is the barrier that just proves too hard for so many people, so much of the time.
Georgia Kirke: Oh, it does. This is exactly right. You know, and for the author, for a publishing professional, we see the whole chain from start to finish. We see the concept, you know, I know you do these amazing concept reviews. You know, even just the submission documents in the first place, like helping somebody analyze their initial idea, to build the concept of what the book should be based on. Then we see the drafting process. For the author they produce, really we only want them producing sort of one draft and collaborating through the editing process where needed in a way, right? It’s like their main responsibility is getting draft one out of their head and into an editable document.
Alison Jones: Then you’ve got something to work with.
Georgia Kirke: Then you got, and so for them that’s this massive piece of work, for us it’s part one of like maybe 200 different steps that go into producing. And so…
Alison Jones: They say books aren’t written, they’re rewritten.
Georgia Kirke: I haven’t heard that and that is absolute gold. It’s true.
And so we are kind of like, how do we help authors do this faster and easier? Because they need it and we need it.
But for the author, it’s kind of like, it’s really hard to imagine this big creative process being any easier because it’s so visceral and so personal. And so I think, you know, as you reiterate it is that collaborative element and it is, but there is a degree of trust from the author’s part.
Because one thing I can say about the fears I’ve heard people voice and the educating and awareness I have had to do around Clio, what I would say is that they are the same fears that I had around speak-your-book process 10 years ago when it was all human led.
It’s just a different, the fear has a different name, you know, so it’s kind of like, okay, now it’s ai, before it was automation, before it was eBooks, are they’re going to replace print books? Before it was, you know, there’s always something and it’s just the unknown.
Yes, so I think as long as you are interacting with technology in a way that when it comes to books, you know that you are producing your own content. You’re not just pulling it from somewhere else and chucking it into a draft. And as long as you are working with a team of professionals to do the bits you can’t do, the concept reviewing, the editorial, the proofreading, the design, as long as you’re staying in your lane and delivering your expertise into that first draft, your book’s going to be wonderful.
Yes, I think it’s when people let the fear get to them so much that they feel they need to stay in control of everything and try and do loads themselves, and then it can end up being a little messy.
Alison Jones: Or they let their enthusiasm go beyond what actually is appropriate for the tool. Yes. Brilliant.
Georgia, I always ask my guests for their best tip. So, the listeners to this podcast, as you know, are business book readers, but also people who aspire to be writing business books. So if somebody’s newish to the process and they’re listening to this and they’re thinking, huh, what’s the one tip you would give them?
Apart from using Clio ai, obviously,
Georgia Kirke: And Practical Inspiration…
Alison Jones: …thank you. Yes. Well.
Georgia Kirke: My biggest tip is get some external…. so two part, a two part tip.
Get some external feedback on, just make sure that you’re actually creating for one ideal reader, not delivering a universal message to everyone possible. It feels unintuitive, but it’s not. You don’t want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.
You’ve got to write for a clear group of people, and then make your content decisions about your reader, not about your personal preference.
Alison Jones: So true.
Georgia Kirke: That’s the first thing. And the second thing is then extending that to the drafting process. It’s really important not to overthink it and not to try and create the publishable book the first time around.
When you’re working with a great editing team, you will get to collaborate and you will get sign off. But what you can’t do is say, I’m going to draft my book, but then actually try to create the finished copy. No first draft was ever published, so just do an eight out of ten and hand it over and it does feel a bit icky.
And it does mean relinquishing control, but it is the only way it’s going to get done.
Alison Jones: And also you can’t, I mean, I honestly, I think eight out ten is pretty aspirational myself. You just need to get it done, don’t you? Because until it’s there, you can’t see the shape of it and what needs to change and how actually, now that you have it down, you can see it.
Until you’re there, was it Solitaire Townsend I was talking to, I think on the podcast, and she said when she gets a bit too, like, oh, this is jolly good, you know, she’ll actually deliberately start misspelling words or putting sweary words in just to remind herself that this is a first draft and it’s raw and it’s messy, and that’s its job.
Georgia Kirke: And as long as you’ve got your clear reader group and a good structure, good table of content to work to, that’s half the battle won, right?
Like, okay, fine, the other end of this is the extreme, isn’t it? Where somebody goes oh, screw it. I’m done. This has just been whirring round in my head for too long. I’m sick of this. I’m just going to voice note the whole thing. And then you end up with like a kind of like Jack Kerouac style, stream of consciousness where then it’s really unstructured.
But if you are working, you’ve got a clear reader and you’re working to, you’ve got some chapters in a good order, honestly, that’s half the battle won, even if you think it’s waffle, as long as you’re putting content into those chapters, I promise you a professional editor will be able to work their magic and help later.
But yes, you’re right. You’ve just got to trust the process. But I guess to do that, you’ve got to have a process, and that’s what tools like Clio provide.
Alison Jones: Yes, and I think I just sort of bookend that with, it starts with a human and it ends with a human, and you know that that’s the important thing as well, isn’t it?
Georgia Kirke: It is exactly. It’s human AI collaboration, not AI taking over.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. I always ask people for a book recommendation as well, what you’ve been reading recently?
Georgia Kirke: Well, this is a good one. Okay, can I do two? I always have three books open in one go, and so I, okay, so the first one I’m reading is a business book called Strategic Co-Pilot by Haig Armaghanian. And it’s Strategic Co-Pilot: A CEO’s guide to changing times. And this book I’m really enjoying because Haig’s been in business for 25 years as a consultant and he’s a board consultant, some really big companies like Toyota.
This book is very applicable to entrepreneurs. What it does is take some of that learning and his point is that we live in a time of black swan events every 18 months.
Alison Jones: It seems like it.
Georgia Kirke: I guess not what it was 10 years ago with, you know, used to be…
Alison Jones: …it’s a once in a generation. Oh, again, yes. Yes.
Georgia Kirke: It’s like just par for the course.
So now we can’t really work to two year, five year plans. Now we’ve got to work to 90 day sprints. And so I think from a business perspective, that’s a really good one.
And from a personal perspective I love Folio Society the Limited Editions.
Alison Jones: So beautiful.
Georgia Kirke: Oh my gosh. And I have several of those at the moment where it’s kind of like, really kind of sort of famous thinkers and writers and they kind of, they collate essays and poems and things like that. So I just think there’s a bit of an indulgence.
Alison Jones: Filling your well with the classics. I love that. Yes. And they still speak, don’t they? So it’s really interesting. There’s that, something about what we put into books that is very different qualitatively to what we put on the interweb. It’s much more like, this is a marker, this is a principle. There’s something timeless about it, the best books. Yes.
Georgia Kirke: Yes, that’s exactly, and this is what I think, you know, when you and I in our creative worlds and putting our publishing hats on, those are the best business books, aren’t they? The ones that share the timeless principles rather than the here and now information.
Alison Jones: Absolutely. Brilliant. So much fun to talk to you, Georgia. Congratulations again on your baby birthday of Clio.
Georgia Kirke: Thank you very much.
Alison Jones: Really excited about it. And if people want to find out more about you, more about Clio.ai, where should they go?
Georgia Kirke: They can go to Cliobooks.ai, we are very active on LinkedIn as well. And know if you have any questions. I’d love to hear, just reach out directly at cliobooks.ai.
I’m always happy to have a chat.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today.
Georgia Kirke: Thanks Alison. You too.
