In this week’s episode, I ran out of time to prepare notes for a show, so instead I’m going to answer many reader questions and talk about topics of interest to indie authors.
I ran out of time to prepare a Coupon of the Week for this week, but if all goes well it should return next week.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 144 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January 19th, 2023 and today we are winging it. I didn’t have time to prepare anything for the show this week and I have to record it a day early, which also gives me a lack of time to prepare things. So instead of prepared notes, I’m going to take a look at a couple of different topics of interest to indie authors and then attempt to extemporize upon them. So this should be an interesting show, though maybe not in the way I would hope.
Before we get into whatever topics I will make up on the spot, let’s have a look at my current writing projects. I am now 31,000 words into the LitRPG book I’ve mentioned before, and I’m hoping to have it out towards the end of February. Writing in LitRPG, which is a new genre to me, has been an interesting experience. I’ve written before that I wanted Frostborn to feel like a massive tabletop RPG campaign, one where the characters start out finding the local farmer’s missing pig and end up deciding the fate of kingdoms and empires by the end of the series. I think I achieved that with Frostborn. However, Frostborn was epic fantasy, not LitRPG and I don’t think LitRPG even properly existed as a genre back in 2013 when I started writing Frostborn. So I suppressed any game type language in favor of making it more realistic in Frostborn. I didn’t want any of the characters sound like they were playing a game.
Like last year, I read Dragons of Autumn Twilight for the first time, and while it’s a classic within the genre, it was very clearly written to follow a Dungeons and Dragons module, and that was the feeling that I wanted to avoid with Frostborn. I definitely couldn’t have any sentences like “Ridmark rolled a 19 on his blunt weapons attack roll and his staff impacted the Mhorite orc’s head for two D 8 + 2 points of bludgeoning damage.” But after ten years of suppressing any hint of game language, I can finally indulge that impulse for this book. I’m hoping to have the rough draft done in early February. Once that happens, I’ll share the title, cover, and book description which will give a better idea of what the book is about. I’ll also post the first chapter once it’s edited to give a little preview. In fact, as I said that maybe I’ll post the first two chapters since I think that would work better (unless of course I rearrange the order of the chapters, which I tend to do from time to time).
Will this be a standalone book or part of the series? It depends. I have a specific sales figure in mind for the book’s first thirty days. If it hits that target, I’ll write sequels. If not, I will just chalk it up to a learning experience, which is of course always valuable for life. But if all goes well, before the end of February we’ll be able to see if I can write a LitRPG book successfully or not. I have actually also started working on Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand. I don’t know when those will come out, because after the LitRPG book is done, I want to write Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock right away. The Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand will probably come out in the spring and the summer of this year, if all goes well.
For Coupon of the Week, this week I’m afraid due to time constraints I have once again run out of time to do Coupon of the Week, but hopefully that will return next week.
00:03:26 Reader Questions and Comments
We have a bunch of questions from readers that we are going to answer right now. So our first question and comment is from TR, who says: some appreciation/thought for you on narrators. For the last 10 to 12 years, I’ve read mostly certain sorcery and independent authors, with the exception of Eragon from Christopher Paolini, so that reading has now transitioned to 80% audio due to commutes and time. Recently I watched the Bosch series on Amazon and thought I would listen to Connelly’s Bosch series that I read years ago, just like I have with your work. So my point, Connelly rotates narrators frequently. Some are good and some really suck, not just subtle differences, but one sounds like a Harvard professor and one sounds like Nick Nolte in 48 hours, but added in a drunken bender version of Nolte. It’s still been enjoyable, but it leads to the fault of zero continuity even though the stories progress and have some overlap and you feel as if the protagonist has multiple personalities that you have to relearn every narrator change.
That is an excellent point, and it’s why, whenever possible, I try to have the same narrator across the series. I’ve done that pretty consistently, with the exception of Frostborn. The first five books were produced through Tantor and they selected Stephen Crossley as the narrator. I did the last ten books of the series myself, and I recruited Brad Wills as the narrator. Now, in my opinion, Steven Crossley and Brad Wills both did an excellent job narrating the books, but Brad’s narrative style is very different than Stephen, so it is a bit jarring for people when they go from Frostborn: Iron Tower to Frostborn: The Dark Warden. But that’s inevitable. It’s a structural thing that’s built into the series, and as I might talk about later in the show, the Frostborn series are my best-selling individual audiobook titles by far. Out of all my audiobooks like, I think half my audiobook revenue in 2022 came from the Frostborn series. So clearly, very many people agree with me that Brad Wills does a good job narrating the series.
As for reasons why narrators can change, there are a couple different ones. The most serious are of course the narrator dies or get sick or injured and can no longer narrate. Sometimes there are contractual disputes, sometimes the rights move from one publisher to another, so there can be a whole bunch of different reasons the same narrator does not narrate the entire audiobook series, but if you have the option and you’re an indie publisher, whenever possible, it’s good to stick with the same narrator for the entire series.
Our next question is from Jeff, who says about Dragonskull: Talon of the Sorcerer: Love how you dropped these books with no advance notice makes for an excellent surprise that day. By the way, how do you actually pronounce Xothalaxiar? I just answered that question by reading it aloud, didn’t I? I say it does Xothalaxiar and if there is ever an audiobook version of the series (and I think going to decide on that one way or the other at the end of February), then Xothalaxiar is how I will instruct the narrator to pronounce that particular name. But it is interesting that he says there’s no advanced notice of the book because I talked about how it’s coming on my website and Facebook and Twitter and this podcast too, but just goes to show that not everyone checks all the information sources, which again speaks to the value of advertising.
Our next question is from SK, who says concerning Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer: How many books will it be in this series? It’s also ten years since you introduced the world of Frostborn. Congratulations. Thanks. I think let’s see, when did Frostborn: The Gray Knight come out? I think that was August or September 2013. I should look that up quick. Yeah, August 2013 is when it came out. So this will be the 10 year anniversary of Frostborn this year. It has been a wild ride. In answer to the question, I decided during the writing of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer that the Dragonskull series will have nine books. I’m hoping to start on the seventh one Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock after the LitRPG book is done, and then the final two will hopefully be out yet this year in 2023.
Our next question is from CA, who says in response to me saying that Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer was by 137th book, CA says: I’m guessing you’re not 137 years old. So would you let us into your writing schedule? It sounds as though it’s insanely fast. I have had insanely fast days. In 2020, I did have like 22 ten thousand word days, but however that was during peak COVID and so there was nothing else to do, so I wrote a lot. Generally I’d say I do write faster than most people, but I do write more consistently than I write fast. Like today, I was hoping to get 6,000 words written, but I had to spend a large portion of the day on snow removal, so that’s not going to happen. But I am going to try instead to get 3,000 or maybe even 4,000 words, if things go well. And I think that is the key consistency and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the possible. Like, if you imagine your writing time as like a pie and then someday you show up and like, oh hey, you’re only gonna be able to get like one slice of the pie instead the whole pie. Quite a few writers have the bad habit of stomping off and not doing anything, but it’s better to have a single piece of pie than no pie at all, and that’s my approach. So even on really busy days or busy weeks like this one, I’ll still try and squeeze in as much writing as possible, and that adds up over the long term.
Our next comment is from MI who says: A bit late, but Happy New Year. May your ideas flow like the monsoon in my country. I believe based on his Facebook profile MI is from Indonesia, though it could be mistaken. After Wreck Hand came out, I decided to do a marathon from Iron Hand until Wreck Hand. Problem was it gave me spaceship fever. Since my Freelancer installer was gone and Elite: Dangerous is on sale now I’m hooked. I blame you and thank you.
You are welcome. If you are looking for other good space opera books to read while waiting for a Silent Order: Thunder Hand, there’s a couple I could recommend. The Icarus Hunt and The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn are both excellent, and in fact the Icarus Hunt is my favorite science fiction novel of all time. The Galaxy’s Edge series by Nick Cole and Jason Anspach just wrapped up with its last book, so the series is complete and it’s a pretty good space adventure opera with their own versions of like the Force and the Empire, and so forth. Another series that is complete is the Expanse by James S.A. Corey that is excellent and very thoughtful space opera, and they did end the series on a satisfactory note, which is something that many science fiction and fantasy writers struggle with, so I can recommend that and also if you want to really good space opera that happens to be Star Wars, I recommend the original Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the subsequent Thrawn books he’s written. They’re well worth reading and frankly more intelligent than many Star Wars tie in novels or media tie in novels in general.
Our next question is from Rob who asks: What’s happened in the Nighmarian Empire (that is the setting for the Caina books)? Is there another book in the offing? The definitive answer to that is maybe. I do have several ideas for subsequent Caina books that I think I could write pretty straightforwardly. The trouble is, I already have a lot of other things in progress. The Dragonskull series, the Nadia series/Cloak Mage, Silent Order, and I would like to, you know, have some things wrapped up before I start writing something new. Then again, on any given month, The Ghosts books are like 10 to 15% of my monthly revenue, so it makes sense to write another one, but I have so many other things in progress. So at some point I might do a poll on my website asking whether people would prefer if I write a another kind of book or focus on getting more books out faster in my current unfinished series. It might be an interesting question to my readers.
Our next question is from Doug who asks: Are you interested in writing RPG source books since Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro has alienated everyone with its new Open Game License? We talked about the whole Open Game License thing in previous episode of the show, so no need to recap that here. The situation remains ongoing and developing. In response to that, I would have no objection to an RPG book in the setting of Frostborn or Caina or Nadia’s world, or whatever. I just don’t have time to write it, so that is not something we will see anytime soon.
00:12:30 Main Topics
So let’s pick some topics at random to talk about for this episode, and one of them might be sales percentages for 2022 last year. I thought would be interesting to see what percentage of ebook sales came from which platform for me. Overall, 55% of my ebook sales came from Amazon and the other 45% came from the other stores, which we’re going to break down now. After Amazon, the next biggest one was the Google Play Store, which did 15.5% of my ebook sales, then followed by Apple, which did about 12.6% of my ebook sales. This was followed by Kobo, which was 10.4%, and then that was followed by Barnes and Noble’s Nook platform, which was 3.8% and then finally the various small stores that are distributed to through Smashwords and that came to about 2.6%, give or take. So that is how ebook sales break down for 2022 for me.
A common question I get asked is if I have a Patreon, and if since I don’t have one, what would cause me to get one? I don’t have a Patreon because I don’t really need one, but circumstances can change. And I’ve said before, it would cause me to get a Patreon is a massive change in the current self-publishing landscape. Like for example, if Google decides to stop selling ebooks through Google Play. I don’t think they would. That’s a pretty easy profit center for them. But Google is notorious for canceling products and services that are fairly popular, such as Google Reader for example, and so if Google decides tomorrow to wake up and say, hey, we’re not going to sell ebooks anymore, that would make me start a Patreon. If Apple stopped selling ebooks or Amazon decided to fiddle with the royalty percentages it pays on ebooks, that could change my mind too. For right now, in the current self-publishing landscape, I don’t see the need for me to have a Patreon, though I reserve the right to change my mind about that if something drastic changes in the self-publishing landscape.
Let’s see, we need another topic. So let’s take a look at my best selling ACX audiobooks of 2022, both individual titles and bundles. I say ACX because I distribute my audiobooks both for ACX for Amazon, Audible, and Apple and Findaway Voices for everywhere else. And it’s generally easier to work out best-selling titles and various figures on ACX because the interface is simpler and this isn’t a knock on Findaway Voices. It’s just that ACX only distributes to three stores (Amazon, Apple, and Audible), whereas Findaway does something like 40 so just due to the nature of that it’s easier to parse out best-selling audiobooks on ACX as opposed to Findaway Voices.
Also to be fair to ACX as well, I made about four times as much from ACX audiobooks than I did from Findaway Voices in 2022, though that’s not nearly as big of a gap as it was in years past. It used to be something like, you know, 10 times as much on ACX, or 12 times as much, but my best-selling titles at ACX and we should distinguish between individual titles and bundles, because I do three book bundles of like the Ghost Series audiobooks and those are much easier to sell than individual titles, I’ve found because there’s so much longer. The Ghosts Omnibus One is I think like 39 hours long. When I do Ghost Exile Omnibus Three sometime this spring, that’s going to be over 40 hours long, so it’s a lot easier to sell a long audiobook than it is a regular title. My best-selling individual title on ACX was Frostborn: The Shadow Prison, the long-awaited final audiobook in the Frostborn series, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. My best-selling bundle title was once again, The Ghosts Omnibus One, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy and that contains Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Flames, Ghost in the Blood, and the short story Ghost Aria.
Another common concern with authors and Audible is the high return rate, because for a while Audible was letting people use their credit to listen to a book, listen to the entire book, and then return it and get the full credit back and the author doesn’t get paid. They’ve tried to clamp down on that sense, and they also include more detailed return data, but I think the return rate for audiobooks was pretty good. For all of 2022, my return rate for ACX audiobooks was 1.2%, which is pretty good in comparison to the overall return rate for many products. I should mention that due to a Chirp deal I had November for Child of the Ghosts where it was temporarily $0.99, Child of the Ghosts was probably the title with the most individual sales overall across all my audiobooks for 2022. I don’t have time to dig through the spreadsheets and work out exactly by how much it’s sold, but I’m pretty sure that Child of the Ghosts was my highest individual quantity selling title for 2022.
Let’s see…another topic. Let’s talk a little bit about AI art. Longtime reader Brett left a comment on one of my previous posts about AI art where he says: well, you are sort of right about the massive lawsuit. And then he includes a link to a news article about the recent lawsuit launched by Getty Images against an AI image generator. Brett continues to say: the “sort of” part is that they are not going after individual users, just the groups that host the AI art tool, so writers who have generated images for book covers are still safe. My prediction is that the plaintiffs win….lawyers will make fabulous amounts of money….the artists themselves will be relatively worse off because they won’t be able to use the tools either, so their productivity will be much lower.
As you probably know from reading my blog or listening to this show, I’m generally not in favor of AI art in its current form, and I strongly recommend against using anything produced with AI image generation for any commercial reasons for the reasons that Brett just enumerated above. My personal objection to AI art is that I think it is essentially plagiarism, that it’s the salami slicing of plagiarism. If you’re not familiar with that term, salami slicing is a term for a kind of a systematized theft where you see a little bit from each target and that way hopefully the targets don’t notice and the earnings pile up.
A common version of that is like a bank programmer who writes code where every time there’s a transaction amount, half a cent gets redirected to his account, though of course this has been pretty easily detected for many years. This is the plot of the movie Office Space as a matter of fact, where the protagonists write a salami slicing program and accidentally steal way more money than they intend. Though you can see variants of that with like, you know, scams designed to, you know, take a few dollars from a bunch of credit cards or from Zelle accounts and so forth.
Now this is what I think “AI art generation” does that right now. It essentially steals a little bit from a million different pictures and combines them together. Now AI advocates will say no, it’s not stealing, it’s generating interpretations based on the prompt like you type in, you know a prompt like say Boba Fett eating at McDonald’s. The AI art generator will seek out various images of Boba Fett and McDonald’s and generate mathematical hashes based on that, and then create variations of its hashes and the AI advocates will say that this isn’t copying, his is interpreting, but I think the difference is that human beings interpret, human beings can be influenced, machines can’t.
All the AI art generator is doing is essentially doing a very bad photocopy. An AI art generator is, in my opinion, essentially like a billion different photocopiers together slicing off little bits of a million different pieces of pictures and combining them together in something new. So I do think the lawsuit has merit and that there is quite a bit that’s very ethically questionable about AI art in its current incarnation. Now, this isn’t to say that the technology doesn’t have any kind of use altogether.
I’m not very fond of cryptocurrency either, but I can see that there is a legitimate use for it. If you live in a country with a strong central banking authority or a financial regulator you can be pretty confident of putting $10,000 or equally large sum into the bank and getting it back unless the government decides you’re a drug merchant or something. Whereas if you live in a country with a weaker government and a more corrupt public sector, it’s entirely possible that you can put $10,000 into the bank and you’ll never get it again because the bank will steal it or the government will steal it.
Cryptocurrency provides a way to get around that by putting your money in something that the government or a corrupt bank can’t get at, and apparently it’s become quite common for migrant workers in various countries around the world to send their wages back in cryptocurrency because that way their host country can’t steal it and then the various financial authorities back in their home countries can’t steal the cryptocurrency as well. So it’s like things like that where you may not necessarily think of them. Something like cryptocurrency could have legitimate use case, even though mostly what it gets used for in the United States is a variety of scams and failing cryptocurrency exchanges.
So I suspect that the AI art generation technology isn’t going away and it is going to find a legitimate use eventually. I don’t think it’s in a good place in its current form, and I suspect Brett’s comment above was a bit too gloomy. I don’t think the technology is going to be banned. I suspect that the lawsuit will probably be settled rather than go all the way to the Supreme Court, with the Supreme Court banning AI generation or something of that nature. But I do think the lawsuit will eventually be settled in some form and that hopefully AI art can come along in a more ethical and less plagiarism friendly form where if you type a prompt into the AI generator, it spits out an image that still includes the watermark of the image it scraped on some photographer’s website to build its data set.
So I have rambled on various indie author topics for about 24 minutes and that’s enough for a show. Thanks for listening to everyone this week. I hope next week I can have a more coherent show and return to Coupon of the Week. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
