GPT-4 Just came out, and it’s a major upgrade from GPT 3.5, which powered ChatGPT. With just one update, GPT went from scoring in the bottom 10% of students taking the bar exam to the top 10%. GPT is improving dramatically every year. Microsoft announced that they have started rolling out GPT to Microsoft Word. One day soon, you’ll click “update” in Word and find a “Write” button that has GPT powers. And don’t expect the US copyright office to protect you from competing with authors using GPT to augment their writing. Soon, everyone who wants to write quickly will use it just like everyone uses spell-check. GPT likely scores better than you could on the bar exam or a calculus test, which may not matter much to you. But since you are a writer, how can you ensure that GPT will never write a better book than you?  How does GPT “write” and how can you write better? To understand how to write better than GPT, we must understand its core limitations.  GPT is a mimic. It is like a parrot that repeats words but doesn’t understand them. GPT can write a book similar to the 50 bestselling books in a genre, but it doesn’t understand why those books were successful.  This brings up an important question:  Why do people read books? Why are the bestsellers bestsellers? Why do people read fiction? Why do people read romance? Why do they gravitate to timeless plots like Beauty and the Beast, even after thousands of years of reading similar plots? GPT can never understand why, and frankly, most humans don’t know why either. But once you know why, you will be equipped to always write better than GPT and AI writing machines, even though they are quickly and continually improving.  We won’t have time to talk about why each reader likes each book, but we will hit the most popular genres to get your mental gears turning.  To help us on this journey, I tapped Christy Award winner and bestselling author of more than 150 books in multiple genres, Angela Hunt. Her books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. She is the author of Writing Lessons from the Front and a friend of the Novel Marketing show.  In this episode, Angela and I will discuss some of the most popular genres and talk about the core psychological reason readers read books in that genre. Spoiler alert: we may have different opinions about aspects of various genres. Reader Expectations Rule Thomas: When we write novels, we need to know who we are writing to, but we also need to understand what readers want a story to do for them. When they read a certain genre, what mood do they want to experience during and after reading? Angela: I asked people on my Facebook page about their general reasons for reading and got various answers: * Relaxation * Nothing good on TV * World travel and time travel (curiosity about how people lived in a different time and world) * Escape from reality * To live vicariously through the protagonist