Written Word has launched a new survey and I hope you’ll participate. Data is really cool, many of us would agree. Who doesn’t love the indie perk of being able to refresh their own dashboard? (Well, maybe not when sales are slow, but that’s beside the point.) Because of the nature of our industry, though, a lot of data relies on surveys. I’m aware there’s a danger of survey fatigue, but the recent Draft2Digital survey was so interesting that I hope it has re-enthused people about the value of participating.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
I hope many of our readers will take part in the annual Written Word Media Author Survey. As always, I’ve done the survey myself, and it takes around ten minutes. There are, of course, a couple of questions about the use of AI, but most of it is concerned with how we advertise and distribute our work. I will, of course, keep you updated on the results when they come in.
Speaking of advertising, and very appropriately as one of the survey questions asks whether you would consider using AI in marketing, Amazon has a new tool to help with just that. The company’s new video generator will create video ads for the products you sell on Amazon. It does this from a single image, apparently, and captures the essence of your product in six to nine seconds. There’s also an image generation tool that will do something similar, producing gif-like images.
Also of interest is the rollout of a new feature from Patreon. Autopilot is designed to help creators figure out which free Patreon subscribers are most likely to upgrade to a paid subscription. Once identified, it automatically targets that group with emailed discounts to tempt them. In testing, the feature increased the conversion rate by nineteen percent.
