Episode 58: Gavin Marcus & Jeremy Esekow on Storywise—AI, Development, and Publishing Innovation

Gavin Marcus is the CEO and co-founder of Storywise. He spent 10 years running an indie book publishing and distribution business before launching Storywise. Jeremy Esekow is Storywise’s Chief Product Officer and co-founder. He has a Doctorate in Behavioral Psychology and an extensive background in business and finance.

They joined us on the Booksmarts Podcast to discuss the creation and importance of Storywise, their platform that helps publishers and authors manage submissions, discover stories, and improve manuscripts for both fiction and nonfiction titles.

Learn more about Storywise on LinkedIn or at storywisepublishers.com.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This month, on the BookSmarts Podcast, I get to talk to two guys who I’ve been chatting with, golly over a year now, back and forth, seeing at conferences. They’ve been making the rounds and making a splash in the industry. So Gavin Marcus and Jeremy Esekow. I’m really excited to talk to you guys. These guys are the co founders of Storywise. Storywise is an AI platform that helps publishers and authors with some things. We’ll talk about what it does in a little bit. But just a little background in the two of them. So Gavin is the CEO of storywise, and has a background in publishing. He’s been running an indie book publishing company and distribution company for over a decade, and he’s really operationally focused. And founding Storywise was a kind of a natural extension to the direction that his life was already going. And then Jeremy is the Chief Product Officer of Storywise, and his background is a little more interesting in some ways, just because he’s got a doctorate in behavioral psychology, in addition to being a science fiction author and and focusing most of his career on the business and finance on that side of things, so the two of them joined together and co founded Storywise. So guys, thanks a lot for joining me on the podcast this month.

Gavin Marcus
Great to be here Joshua. Thanks so much, and I’m very happy to take the mantle of the boring one.

Joshua Tallent
Thanks, Kevin and Jeremy. It’s great to have you too. Jeremy Esekow Yeah, great. So thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be to be here with you.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about what Storywise is, and kind of what was the problem you were trying to solve in creating it, the reason why it exists, and what does it actually do? So who wants to take that? Is that a Gavin question?

Gavin Marcus
Yes, I can. I can take that, or at least part of it. Storywise essentially came out from our experiences, myself as a publisher and Jeremy as an author, as a publisher, I was always stuck with limited resources and not enough money and not enough time. And one of the major issues I focused on, or I had a problem with, was that slash pile. Submissions coming through and having no way to deal with it. So I started looking around, started talking to people on the you know, tech people that I’m connected with, and those that I’m also not connected with. And that’s when I met up with Jeremy. Little did I know that Jeremy, in addition to being a PhD, doctorate tech entrepreneur, he’d also written a book, a science fiction book, during covid, when a lot of when he had a lot of time in his hands. I mean, Jeremy, you can, you can tell your story a little bit, and then we’ll move back.

Jeremy Esekow
Yeah, covid gave me some extra time, and I wrote this book, science fiction book, and I my children were weren’t too shy to tell me that it wasn’t very good. So I had editors, did a course, tried to improve it as much as I could. And then I discovered that it’s much harder to actually get a book published than it is to write one. And after being rejected by more publishers than JK Rowling, I met Gavin, and he also refused to publish my book, but he did acknowledge my pain, and I acknowledged his pain, and from that storywise was born.

Gavin Marcus
We built, essentially, a tool, an ecosystem with authors on one side and publishers on the other, and we can focus on the publishers, for purposes of this story. So we built a submission management platform, a workflow tool, to move publishers and agents away from the dreaded inbox onto a really intuitive, easy to use dashboard where we’ll pull out key elements from the story, give them analysis and writing and pull out interesting metadata, and we built a critique that editors can use to help jump start the process. We built many, many tools kind of around that to assist editors and agents with their decision making process and to assist them with kind of finding books that are most relevant for them, using our kind of proprietary models. But using the input from the kind of editor themselves or the agent who comes in and tells the system the types of stories that they are looking for. A manuscript wish list, essentially, and once they put in their manuscript wish list, we’ll analyze the books and the manuscripts to see how closely those manuscripts align with the wish list of the editor, and we’ll highlight for them and give each book, each manuscript a taste score, four out of five stars. Three out of five stars. You know how relevant that manuscript is to the types of stories or books that that this editor agent wants.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great, and it is obviously a big problem. If you’ve got even just dozens of manuscripts coming in, how much time do you have to read them all to really engage with them, having a kind of a pre check? Now, it’s not doing the work of the editor. It’s not doing the work of the agent. It really is just an assessment tool to help you figure out. Which ones do I put a little bit more time into. Which ones are the most important? Which ones match? I like that idea of matching your taste. If you’re a certain type of editor, you tend towards certain types of books. You don’t want to waste your time looking at stuff that isn’t going to fit what you really are interested in. So how have you built that engine over time? Obviously, AI has been kind of exploding, but when it comes to these engines, you know you’ve developed something in a fairly short amount of time. What did it take to get you from nothing to where you are today?

Jeremy Esekow
Yeah, when we actually started planning. This was just before chat GPT 3.5 launched. There’s another platform that if you’re really techie, you still use it, but it was much harder to build the roots of this. And then the LLMs and the frontier models exploded, and they’re not good enough for our purposes. We toyed with them for a long time to see what their capabilities were. We always found them to be very generic and over polite. We’d never tell you that my writing was really good, that’s just lying to me. So we had to fine tune models. We fine tuned many different models around just genre selection, types of writing, the kinds of things that we had editors input that they told us are important for this whole prioritization process, and we built them one by one. These are fine tuned models as we added extra features. And it did take us a number of, I was gonna say years, but 18 months, maybe, to get it all together. And we’re also very market focused. We listen to what our customers want. So we have this R & D workflow. If a publisher says to us this is important; this is not working for me. That’s critical level one, and we try to deal with it first before anything else. And from that, we’ve built features that are relevant, practical and that they use, and not just around prioritizing, but then once you’ve prioritized, also to tell you who the author is, if it’s a non fiction book, was that author like the right person to write it? Everything we generate. We’re not into generative AI; we don’t create content, but we analyze. We tell you exactly what’s in the book. We don’t try and write the book and you can then in a matter of minutes. It matches my taste, it’s exactly what I’m looking for. The authors right. The synopsis reads nicely. I know how much work I need to do on it, and it hopefully takes you all the way from acquisition right at the beginning, all the way to, I guess, where Firebrand would start with. Production.

Gavin Marcus
I can also add, being a kind of customer focused and listening to the customer. We also know that there’s a big element of serendipity in the submission process. We’re dealing with two sides. If you become too kind of workflow focused, you can lose out on that serendipitous nature. So we always take that into account, and we’ve built the platform with these features in place, so you still have the ability to, through our discover feature, for example, go in and kind of write the types of books that you want, and we’ll pull those books out for you. I’m looking for Greek romance at the moment. This is what I’m looking for today. So we can kind of pull that out for you. So in addition to being kind of workflow focused, we still allow that creativity to come through and to be a guide and a helper on that side.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, I think that kind of pokes a little bit at one of the concerns that publishers have about AI is it’s a technical tool and how much are we losing the art of publishing if we go too deep into the technological side of publishing? So that’s really cool that you’re thinking about it from that perspective. Are there other things that you’re seeing your editors, your agents, people who are users of the platform that you’re seeing them do, or seeing how they’re engaging with it that helps them feel like they’re not losing their artistic edge. They have value as an editor, they have value as an agent. They have value as a person who knows publishing. How do they engage the platform in a way that helps them keep that edge, keep that special piece that they themselves have?

Jeremy Esekow
Yeah, when we were starting, we were a little bit naive, and we trained a model. We thought that it could tell you, this is the book you need to publish. This is a good book. And they were very quick to tell us, like, you don’t know what’s a good book. I know what’s a good book. And so we stopped that scoring completely. We tell you, it matches your taste. It’s what you’re looking for. Christmas is around the corner, and you might be looking for a Christmas romance. Yeah, we’ll show you. We’ll show you all the Christmas romances that you have in your stash file from the last year. We focus on that, and you get to choose. We’re just presenting things to you in every aspect of our business, in our bones. We believe that the editors are the ones with the skill set. They can discover what’s good, and what’s not. We also believe the authors are the creators, and they can write great stories. AI, I don’t think is going to write a great story, huge topic. So we’ve retained that element of editor creativity, like throughout the process, we just saved you time. To your point, we got this critique that Gavin mentioned, and we were quite surprised that editors asked for it, for us to put it in the publishers platform. It was actually in our author platform to help authors improve. And then they like it because it just highlights areas where they should go and dig in more. And then they get to fix and decide but they get a very complex and complete picture of the story to save them time more than anything.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s good. So obviously there’s always the question of how AI is affecting writing as well. And so you’re working not just with editors and agents. You’re working with authors as well to help them do better writing. So maybe Jeremy’s book will eventually be published. But when it comes to the writing side, the author side of the platform, how are you helping authors do a better job of writing? And kind of related to this is, how are you keeping them from just using AI to do the writing for them? So what are you doing to help them understand better writing without it becoming just, it’s aI generated, or it’s being run by the AI.

Gavin Marcus
Yeah, so the author platform is first and foremost, the network. So authors sign up, there’s a freemium model. So they sign up, they can load their manuscript up. And then what we’ll do is, based on our taste profiles, and we understand what editors and agents are looking for, if we see a good quality manuscript in the network of authors that has a very high taste match to one of our editors or agents, we’ll alert the agent; he has a high quality manuscript. It wasn’t submitted to you exactly, but we feel this could be a good match, and we kind of try to kind of augment the the author’s voice over there and assist the authors, even if they’re not fantastic marketers or don’t know how to write a fantastic query letter. It’s not about that. It’s about are they great storytellers, and if they’ve written a great story, our belief is that that story should be discovered, and we kind of working through the network to help fantastic stories get discovered. We offer tools that we also offer publishers on the author side, we will create. Eight metadata for them will create a kind of a clean synopsis, log line, comp titles. We built a whole model around the comp title, which is really, really difficult to do as an as an author, as an agent or editor as well, but as an author next to impossible to do. We’ll create kind of 30 comp titles that are most relevant to you. And then, of course, we’ve got that critique that we built up for authors originally. And again, it’s, we’re not touching the manuscript. It’s kind of like a helper to the manuscript that you can open up on one side, and using that critique to assist you with. It’s more like a developmental editing report. Essentially use that critique to assist you with kind of improving that manuscript and getting it to a better level, and then hopefully re-upload it and you’ll get rediscovered. That’s great.

Jeremy Esekow
I’ll just add to that. So I think by the time this airs, we will have just completed our the Storywise ‘upright the machine’ creative writing competition. So we ran a competition, hopefully wildly successful, and it’s the first of its kind, because we so passionately believe that authors are creators and AI is a tool. So we wanted to prove that by saying authors can write a great story, and AI without an author cannot write as good a story. And so our writing competition really highlighted that. We are passionate in that belief. We’ve spent years training AI or I definitely have for business many purposes, and I’ve seen it, it’s been trained to be hyper logical and hyper rational. And it’s not serendipitous, and it’s not going to surprise and delight you. If you’re looking for a great story, that’s what I’ve created. That’s what an author with a lived experience can do, and our writing competition highlighted that. And that’s our belief, and we’re hoping to to just improve and help authors perfect their stories and get them better and better, using AI to help them where it’s needed. But definitely, I think through the Storywise network and the discovery, we’re bringing better stories to the market than previously, and that’s our goal. If we succeed, that’s exactly what we set out to do.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So in a lot of our conversation, I’m hearing the word story a lot, obviously storywise. This seems to be a very focused on fiction writing. So what about non fiction? Are you guys seeing non fiction be submitted into the platform? What kind of differences are you seeing and how that works versus how fiction works?

Gavin Marcus
Um, you know, Jeremy, you take this, you’ve, you’ve essentially built that out. So you know better than me, yeah.

Jeremy Esekow
So we definitely, yeah, we just probably get fixated on the story because of the competition, which is specifically for fiction and memoirs. Memoirs are non fiction. We definitely see a lot of non fiction on the platform. Not so much academic, but, you know, Popular Science and games and arts and crafts and all of that sort of stuff. We see a lot of it self help. And we definitely have models as well to help you improve those. And in fact, our research has shown us that AI is actually even more effective over there. I think they’re seeing the same sort of thing also in audio, that people react to audiobooks better when it’s non fiction than fiction interesting, probably another topic. So we definitely focus on both. And yeah, we’re seeing a lot of volume from both,

Joshua Tallent
So okay, so obviously, everybody’s talking about AI. I’ve had multiple podcasts with guests talking about AI. This is a common concern in publishing is that AI is going to take over. It’s going to, you know, it’s going to ruin publishing, or it’s going to, it’s going to have a detrimental impact on how publishing works and how the whole process is engaged, what is published, all of this stuff. There’s so many of these things. In an earlier conversation, Gavin, we were talking about this is like a new industrial revolution. We’re reframing the work that’s happening around the world. AI is not going away. We have to engage with it somehow. And if we can’t engage with it effectively, then we might be left behind. We might have some problems being able to to make forward progress, and that’s the same in publishing as it is in every industry. So how do you mitigate the concerns that publishing professionals have about AI, what kinds of answers do you think? I mean, obviously we don’t know what the future holds, but what kinds of answers do you think are effective in helping publishers kind of think through the use of AI in publishing?

Jeremy Esekow
Yeah, good question.

Gavin Marcus
I know you pointed to me when you asked the question, I’m no philosopher. I’m the pragmatist of the pairing. Jeremy is actually the deep thinker over here, so maybe I’ll pass this one on to him.

Jeremy Esekow
I definitely, yeah, I think Gavin is also more than equipped to answer this, but we were talking about it very recently, and I think the whole industry wants clarity on where AI can and cannot go, and I think it’s been quite slow to react to its own detriment. I think if publishers would step up, or had stepped up sooner, they’d be able to dictate a lot more about where AI is going to influence their businesses. And it will be a mistake to just let it kind of creep in and happen, which it will, because the forces are too powerful. And it’s going to change every industry. So I think we’ve already starting to see a little bit of litigation and regulations are starting to be like formed, like the anthropic case and the open AI cases, which both sort of, I think, leaned into, it is fair use to train a model, and it’s not going to cannibalize your revenues if somebody finds some aspect of your writing style in an chat GPT conversation, because they’re not going to put the book there, you can’t buy a John Christian book by just typing in a prompt, which would be cannibalizing the revenues. I think that there’s a long way to go, but hopefully it’s quick, because we really would like clarity. So we’re very cautious in our company. We don’t do anything that would challenge any of the lay of the land as it is at the moment, we’re waiting to see where things fall, but we know it’s coming, and we’ll be prepared for whatever our customers want us to do. We’ll be there, and we’ll be able to do it, and we know we’re very ethical. We hope that authors get the royalties that they deserve, which I think there will be some sort of safe one, but I think the main thing is, don’t be so afraid. I don’t know of any jobs that have been lost to AI in publishing. I mean, maybe you’ve heard stories, but we’ve not, and we’re aware that sometimes, behind closed doors, many publishers are already using AI and experimenting in different aspects of their businesses, and it’s becoming a much easier conversation for us than it was two years ago, when if you said AI, it was like swearing at a guy’s mother, you know. So we just hope for the clarity. We’re not afraid. We’re hopefully we can convince anyone who is afraid that they shouldn’t be and that it will be a very, very good thing that will help save them time and money in their businesses and not take away their creative choices.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, and I think that’s one of the benefits of having publishing professionals like yourselves, people who are who know the industry building the tools right? It’s something that makes a difference. You’re not just coming in from the outside and saying, we’re going to change everything. We saw that a lot back in the eBook days, a lot of outside companies, we’re going to revolutionize publishing. And there’s reasons why the industry is the way it is. I think this is the answer I’ve heard and have given myself even. We just have to be willing to engage it. Have to find ways to engage with the technologies and make sure that we’re not like you said, we’re not just letting it pass us by, and we’re actively engaging with the conversation, the problem. I think that’s a really important step to take. So that’s really good. Yeah, any final thoughts, or anything else that you feel like needs to be said here in our in our last few minutes of the podcast?

Gavin Marcus
I’m a long time listener, Joshua, of the podcast. I’ve always enjoyed listening. In fact, when I first started getting into kind of tech and publishing, I started looking around, and this was the first podcast that I subscribed to. So you’re definitely doing something right, and we look forward as Storywise, to continue to be part of the industry, part of the conversation, and helping in our small part to drive the industry forward in the right way, in an ethical way, using the best tools out there. Tech wise.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that’s awesome. So where can people follow the work that you’re doing online? Where can they learn more about Storywise, or follow the the new things that are coming out? And I should have asked this before. Jeremy, you mentioned the writing competition once. When’s the end of the writing competition is it? Is it over in September?

Jeremy Esekow
Yeah, by the time this airs, it will probably just be over, yeah. And we hope to announce the winners in Frankfurt, which will be coming up soon.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, maybe next time you have a writing competition, they can see it under on your platform.

Gavin Marcus
Yeah, so we mainly on LinkedIn from the publisher side, author side, of course, we’ve got different channels, but on the publisher side, it’s mainly on LinkedIn. So we’ve got a website, storywisepublishers.com and then our LinkedIn channel. I’m often sharing kind of new developments, new product features as they launch come out over there, and you can definitely follow us over there.

Joshua Tallent
Awesome. Very good. We’ll put links in the show notes. Thanks guys. Really appreciate your time. Really appreciate you chatting about what you’re doing and kind of the future of AI and publishing, and looking forward to seeing you again soon.

Jeremy Esekow
Thanks very much. Joshua, it was great to be on the show.

Joshua Tallent
Well that’s it for this episode of the Booksmarts Podcast. If you have suggestions about the show or suggestions about a topic we can cover, please feel free to email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com we really appreciate that, and also really appreciate anytime you like or subscribe or tell your friends to subscribe to the podcast so you can find us on all the podcast platforms. Thanks for joining us today and getting smarter about your books.