Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur,

bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, publishing options and marketing ideas for your book.

You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots more information at thecreativepen.com.

And that's Penn with a double N. And here's the show.

Hello, creatives. I'm Joanna Penn. And this is episode number 733 of the podcast and it is Saturday the 20th of January

2024 as I record this. In today's show, I'm talking to Alex Carver about why she chooses to

go direct after several decades in the publishing industry, mindset and merchandise.

Alex kindly sent me a box of the merchandise she sells from her store so I could have a look

and we talk about all the different things, how she sourced them and lessons learned,

as well as the challenges of selling direct and why she wouldn't have it any other way.

And she also only publishes one book a year.

So the launch is very important. And we talk

about various aspects of doing merchandise that are more sustainable, which I think is great. So that's

coming up in the interview section. So in publishing things, a crossover with AI again, as these two worlds collide,

the Telegraph reported this week that an award-winning Japanese writer Rie Kudan used ChatGPT to write parts of her prize-winning novel.

She estimates about 5% was taken verbatim from the chatbot.

One of the judges lauded the work as flawless.

Re-added that she often confides in the program with thoughts she can never talk to anyone else about

and some of the responses inspired dialogue in the book.

So I wanted to mention this because I think it's awesome that she has,

it's just completely open about this, that she's won this award. This is a literary award.

So this is very good writing. So there's a few things. First of all, she said she used 5% verbatim,

...