Introduction (00:01.851)
Thomas: KDP royalty changes and invasion of the AI audiobooks. This is Author Update. I’m Thomas Umstatt, Jr.
Jonathan: I’m Jonathan Shuerger, and we’re just gonna jump right into it today.
Spotify and Patreon Add Buy Buttons (00:09.486)
Jonathan: Following this landmark court ruling, Spotify submits an audiobook buy button and Patreon follows suit. We called it. We were right.
Thomas: The world’s easiest prediction. This thing that was against the rules or financially prohibitive is now no longer financially prohibitive. So more people are going to do it.
If we game this out, every week we’re announcing some new platform that now is featuring some kind of new buy button. I actually am curious if this is going to reduce Amazon’s hegemony over the industry. It’s now a lot easier to create a niche bookstore because previously there was all of this friction. If I wanted to create a bookstore and people want to be able to buy the digital books, the high margin books, Apple would take 30%, which made it impossible for me to compete with Amazon on price from the jump. But now there’s enough room where we might start to see some honest to goodness competition to Amazon, which could be even more good news for authors. This was a good news story from the beginning. Who knows it could get even more gooder.
Jonathan: Thomas, I need you to stop talking because I just made my own prediction: if you don’t have your own bookstore app, you’re wrong. You need to have a podcast, a website, and a bookstore app.
Thomas: Yeah, creating your own app is pretty expensive, but I’m gonna keep predicting that BookFunnel and some of these others are gonna start adding buy buttons straight to the app. And if you’re an app developer, this is a really good opportunity for you to jump in and start to make these kinds of changes.
Amazon Opening Door to AI Audiobooks (02:03.992)
Jonathan: Well, one other way that the market is opening up right now is in audiobooks.
Thomas: [Checking if live] Wait, if you can hear us, let us know in the chat. There’s a chance we’re not live.
Jonathan: Looks like we’re live.
Thomas: Okay. Alright, well, that was boring.
Jonathan: Gosh, momentum destroyed. Anyway, speaking of destroying momentum, I’m proud to be a part of this.
Thomas: This is a high caliber production we’ve got going on over here. Almost every one of these episodes, we’re trying something different from a technological perspective. We’re still finding the right tools for the job when it comes to going live. Every week is a new thumbnail from GPT.
Anyway, I really think this is good news being able to buy directly and we may also see other players like even Barnes & Noble be able to compete more and more with Amazon because they’re no longer having to fight Amazon and Apple.
Jonathan: We’ll see how the power slide shifts. Amazon’s better positioned to take advantage of it. So we’ll see if they’ll wind up crushing them out or not, or if these other ones do wind up having the maneuverability and the agility to take advantage of this pretty important legal ruling.
One thing that Amazon is doing to try to keep hold of the market is they’re opening the door to AI audiobooks. According to the bottom line, Amazon is allowing for a limited number of AI generated audiobooks to be sold through invite only programs. Now it had looked like it was only going to bigger publishers. However, I’ve gotten the email inviting me to submit my books for a complete AI generation.
Right now looks like there’s two ways to do it. You can just give it to audible and they’ll take charge of it from end to end and put out a completely finished AI audiobook. Or you can go in yourself, choose voices and mess around with stuff like that to try to get the product you want through AI generation and then move to sale through Audible’s platform after that.
The warning here is that AI audiobooks are going to start flooding the market once this technology becomes more prevalent and once this practice becomes more prevalent. Amazon is a relative latecomer to this market. Many other companies like DeepSand, Storytel, 11 Labs, they’ve already been providing this technology. But Audible is the big dog when it comes to audiobooks. They control 80-85% of audiobook distribution right now. Trying to find a user who doesn’t use Audible as their first and only audiobook program is going to be really difficult.
We were just talking about this in our Mastermind group earlier this week. I may use three different audio programs but I go to audible first when I’m like “Hey it’s time to listen to my audiobook.” Click audible without even thinking about it.
Thomas: So I’m a big consumer of audiobook content and I don’t care for AI narrated stuff, but I understand why Amazon is having to do this from a competitive perspective because there’s already AI audiobooks on Audible and the AIs have gotten so good where it’s now impossible to differentiate a good AI between a bad narrator.
The good narrators will probably always be better than AI, especially adding emotion. In fact, I’m listening to a Seth Ring book right now and the audiobook narrator’s adding a lot of sounds, like sighs and laughter and extra textual content that really adds to the book, but is also interpreting it a little bit. But it’s superior and as a big time audiobook listener, I’m very happy to pay for that. But the AIs are gonna keep getting better.
Not everyone can afford to hire an audiobook narrator. And this is one of those things where historically being audiobook only was a great filter because it protected audiobook narrators from authors who were so unsuccessful at attracting readers, they couldn’t afford to make an audiobook. So it was like a threshold of success. And if you hadn’t reached that threshold of success, you just didn’t exist in audiobook format and it was kind of a nice heuristic to tell how well-funded an author is. Didn’t necessarily tell you if a book was good – if a book wasn’t on audiobook, you often could tell, this book is not a successful book because if it was successful in any sort of meaningful way, somebody would have put up the money to make it into an audiobook. That’s a little unfair in some genres, I understand. But now, you can just push a button and Amazon will make audiobooks for your whole back list and you can start making additional money.
So in the short term, I think it’s gonna be more money for the authors to take advantage of it. But as a reader, I still prefer that human version. But I also could see in the long term, multiple tiers. So there’s a cheap audiobook narrated version and then maybe a more expensive human narrated version people can select, right? Not everyone drives a luxury car. Not everyone listens to human narrated audiobooks.
Jonathan: So do you think this is going to set up an expectation then for if AI narrated audiobooks are available? Why don’t you have an audiobook?
Thomas: I’m already almost leaving one-star reviews for authors who don’t have an audiobook. Like I’m this far away. But I don’t leave one-star reviews. I don’t actually leave reviews as a rule, a marketing person in the author world. Leaving reviews for books is the one thing I can’t really do anymore because if I were to ever review a book, somebody would think that it was a paid review, either positive or negative. I have authors ask me all the time, will you please review my book?
Jonathan: And we’ll get me in trouble.
Thomas: It won’t do for you what you think it will. It’s not about trouble, it’s more about credibility, right? It’s like, “well, my marketing guy likes it.” It doesn’t have the same power.
Jonathan: Yeah. “My editor thinks this is the best thing.”
Thomas: That actually has a little more depending on how critical the editor is.
Author Drama on X (09:02.414)
Jonathan: Well, talking about stuff that authors are doing. Yes, we get to talk about my favorite thing ever, is author drama on X. Basically an hour after the show last week, this story came out. A post on X blew up when an author that we’re not going to be naming shared a three star review she received on her new book. Initially, she got a whole bunch of support and everyone dogpiled this reviewer who was just named Kindle customer and it was a really long considered review and it just gave several thoughtful points about it.
But she’s like “this just destroyed my Amazon algorithm and now no one who’s looking at the book on Amazon is gonna want to buy it because it has a three-star average.” Authors were supporting her initially but then some of the more professionals were looking at her going “you shouldn’t be doing this, you can’t highlight a reviewer like that and then start yelling at them or pushing out to your readers to try to get dopamine out of them.”
And this is in conjunction, she was also tweeting at her 37,000 followers, kind of raging at them that not one of her 37,000 followers had reviewed her book yet. And then she also admitted she was drinking at the time, so she’s drunk tweeting her reader base here.
Further information came out. People went enough good storytelling. There’s a problem with amplification and reach. Bad stories on Disney have the Disney engine behind them. You know, Snow White and the seven CGI abominations was amplified by the Disney marketing engine, which has tons of subsidiary engines that also promote it. They have influencers who are going to get engagement from negative promotion, who are going to get engagement from positive promotion, from reactions and all this kinds of crud.
Thomas: But it’s also money. Sure, they’re able to get reactions, but a lot of it is just straight up money. So there is a sense where if you don’t live in the world of people who know about indie books, you wouldn’t know about any of the conservative voices in fiction because there’s really strong discrimination against conservative voices right now. In Christian publishing, in secular publishing, it’s very difficult to get a publisher.
Jonathan: We’re the ham radio of publishing right now.
Thomas: Yeah, but there’s another element here where it just comes down to straight up money and a little secret that a lot of – here’s the secret most publishers don’t want you to know. They’re out of money. Almost all of the publishers are broke. They can’t afford to pay much in the way of advances and they can’t afford to advertise. They are struggling just to keep publishing books and they’re trying to do it as cheaply as possible. They’re very much like the noble family in a Jane Austen film.
Right, they’re the Bennets. They are the inheritors of a great title, but not a great fortune. They’re actually very poor and they don’t have the ability to get the word out. And so there are publishers that are publishing conservative fiction. There’s a handful, but those publishers don’t have a lot of money. Most publishers don’t have a lot of money. There’s a reason why advances are getting smaller and smaller. And it’s because the publishers are really poor in terms of cash.
It’s actually, if you look at history, why were those families poor? Why were the Bennets poor? Because this wasn’t an invention of Jane Austen. It was actually a phenomenon that was happening across English aristocratic society at this time. Because the wealth of the Kingdom of England, or the Kingdom of Great Britain, was shifting from the aristocratic landholding class to the mercantile class. People who were embracing the industrial revolution and were using steam engines to build factories.
And there was this view that, “ugh, merchants, they’re low class. And we don’t want to do factories, that’s not sophisticated.” And so you had these noble families that were not investing in the factories, who were not moving to the cities and were becoming, as a result, impoverished. And what they ended up having to do towards the late 1800s, is the noble families in order to save themselves realized that they had to marry into industrialist families, but they couldn’t bring themselves to marry English industrial families in many cases because they just couldn’t bear to admit that they had made the wrong call culturally in poo-pooing the industrial revolution. So do you know who they married? American industrialists.
Why was Winston Churchill’s mother an American? Because Winston Churchill’s noble family was impoverished because owning the land stopped being a source of vast wealth for the British aristocracy. And what started with the Churchills actually, because it was Churchill’s dad who was the first one to marry a wealthy American heiress, happened like 80 plus times. So many of the British noble houses ended up marrying wealthy Americans.
So what you see in Downton Abbey in the 1920s of this family that’s being propped up by this American – the only American in the house is the mom, was actually very common. Again, not an invention for the story. They were borrowing on real historical trends.
And we see the same thing happening now with publishing houses, where they’re coasting on their title. They’re coasting on their prestige. They’re coasting on people wanting that logo at the spine of the book and hoping that no one notices that they’re having to give tours of their noble ancestral house because they literally can’t afford to maintain the house without doing it. They’re poor. A successful indie often has more money and far more discretionary marketing budget than a medium-sized publishing house in many cases.
Jonathan: And much more proximity to the material itself so you can target it properly. What I do all the time is I’m helping people target their books towards their readers, but a traditional publishing house doesn’t have the bandwidth, the staff, or the brain space to be able to do that. They can’t focus on that many books that closely. And so they can’t actually reach the readers they want to. They’re just releasing it on BookTok and hoping it goes viral and maybe they’ll make some money from that.
I mean, we were discussing this earlier this week. One thing that Tradpub did was sign Matt Deniman, who is an enormously successful lit RPG indie author. And what this publishing house did was sign for the print copies, redoing print copies of his books and getting them placed in Walmart and stuff. Because the one thing Tradpub still has is access to bookstores. Those relationships with the book buyers, if that’s really what you’re looking for, then Trad Pub is good at- now it’s going away!
Thomas: And here’s, I’m making other predictions since we got all heady with our successful predictions at the beginning of the episode. I suspect moving forward over the next 10 years, successful authors like Matt Deniman are going to, with their new deals, start signing deals that include equity. Where they’re really gonna be marrying in just like what happened with the Noble Families. Where they’re not just getting a big advance, they’re not just getting placed in Walmart, but they’re now getting forever ownership in the publishing company itself.
“All right, I get a 25% royalty and a 2% equity stake in the publishing house where I now sit on the board of directors or I can vote for the board of directors.” Like a totally different relationship where the powerful Indies, if you’re struggling to sell 10,000 copies, that’s not gonna be you. But if you’re selling hundreds of thousands of copies of your books, millions of copies of your books particularly, there are publishing houses that would be likely very happy to give you an equity stake in the publishing house if you would marry your fortunes to theirs. And for many indie authors, it’s still not worth it. They would have to get a really big equity stake to justify it.
But going back to the Babylon Bee story, there’s different kinds of readers. And it’s very likely that this author of this article honestly had no idea there was a whole world of conservative publishing. Because if all he knows is what he sees at Barnes & Noble, because of the biases all up and down, right? Publishers Weekly won’t review conservative books, the librarians journal, a lot of these places won’t cover conservative books, the publishers won’t publish the conservative books, the retailers won’t stock them. There’s friction all the way down the line. And some books are able to break through all that fiction.
Social Media Meltdowns and Professional Conduct
Jonathan: Well, talking about stuff that authors are doing. We get to talk about my favorite thing ever, is author drama on X. Basically an hour after the show last week, this story came out. A post on X blew up when an author that we’re not going to be naming shared a three-star review she received on her new book. Initially, she got a whole bunch of support and everyone dogpiled this reviewer who was just named Kindle customer and it was a really long considered review that gave several thoughtful points about it. But she’s like “this just destroyed my Amazon algorithm and now no one who’s looking at the book on Amazon is gonna want to buy it because it has a three-star average.”
Authors were supporting her initially but then some of the more professionals were looking at her going “you shouldn’t be doing this, you can’t highlight a reviewer like that and then start yelling at them or pushing out to your readers to try to get dopamine out of them.” And this is in conjunction, she was also tweeting at her 37,000 followers, kind of raging at them that not one of her 37,000 followers had reviewed her book yet. And then she also admitted she was drinking at the time, so she’s drunk tweeting her reader base here.
Well, then people started digging. This gets better and better and better. I was following this for like two days and I was delighted at how this was going. Further information came out. People went to her Goodreads page for the book and saw that she had reviewed the book herself as a reader, but used her main account. So it still had her name on it. Somebody went to the Amazon page for the book and found the exact same review verbatim under her alt account on Amazon.
So she apologized for the mistake and deleted the Goodreads review. And then someone went through her Goodreads activity because that’s a history log. Turns out she had reviewed another author’s book for three stars for the same issues that the reviewer had reviewed her book for, for three stars. So this led to a large conversation on what is the author’s code of conduct? What constitutes professionality in your public brand? There were so many disagreements on this – some people were like “you should be able to do whatever you want and say whatever you want.” I’m like, you can’t yell at readers.
Thomas: Well, let’s be clear here what we mean by “you’re legally able to.” You have freedom of speech and if you want to yell at readers, you can, but there’s something you need to realize about readers is that they’re your customers. And if you treat customers poorly, then they will leave. And there is a kind of stuck up snooty author who doesn’t see readers as customers. They see themselves as artists and readers as like beneficiaries of their genius. And that insufferable author only gets away with that attitude when they keep that attitude to themselves.
And so if you have that attitude, if you see yourself as this like tortured genius, don’t have a Twitter account. And definitely don’t tweet while drunk, right? That way you can whine to your friends about how terrible your readers are and how unsophisticated the market is and how stupid the other authors in your genre are. That’s the most common version of this I see as authors will make themselves feel better by talking about how terrible the other authors in their genre are. It’s kind of like Vincini in Princess Bride. He’s like, “Have you heard of Socrates, Plato? Morons!” It’s like, that only makes you sound smart to someone who is not smart, right? Because most people see Socrates and Plato as very intelligent people.
Author Burnout and Retirement
Jonathan: It’s kind of a huge indicator of whether I’m gonna enjoy an author’s work by the way that they talk on X. There are guys that I’ve just flat out been like “well I’m not gonna pick up your books even though people are saying it’s interesting” because of the way you talk. I’m just not appreciating the source that this is coming from.
Running along with this is the end of that road. So also on X there are authors who are giving up. There were several people who announced their retirement, you know, they’ve only written two or three books, and they’re like, “there’s no sales, the reviews are going down, no one’s appreciating my work.” And that just tells me what Thomas was saying is that they were likely writing to be appreciated. They wanted people to regard them, they wanted to be able to stroke their egos or to appreciate them as contributors to a great cultural zeitgeist, and they weren’t getting that, so now they’re saying, “it’s not worth it anymore, I’m quitting.” There are ways to protect yourself from this kind of burnout just by having the correct approach in the first place.
Thomas: Yeah, so I have a couple of thoughts on this. One, and this is something I talk about a lot when I’m giving speeches, and in some of my courses, is this question: are you here because you want to be somebody or because you want to do something? And that question, your answer to that will really determine how mentally healthy you are in publishing. But also, it will determine how successful you are. Because if you’re here to do something, that gives you a greater degree of clarity. And that thing you want to do can be make money.
In fact, making money is actually a really useful thing to want to do because it forces you to care about your readers because that’s where your money comes from. And so it’s this clarifying thing of like, it’s not about me. It doesn’t matter if I like my book cover. It doesn’t matter if I like my book. It matters if my readers like my book, if my goal is to make money. Not everyone wants to make money. Some people want to leave a legacy or advance some sort of cause or something like that. But that core question, are you here because you want to be somebody or because you want to do something, is really important.
But another part of that is are you trying to write to fill a void in your life that writing cannot fill? And the one place where writing absolutely cannot fill the void in your life is the void for family. If you don’t have family members to have and to hold, to hug and to fight with and to reconcile with and to go through life together, and you think that you can replace that relationship with a bunch of faceless fans, you are going to flame out as a person.
We see this a lot on YouTube, we see this a lot in other places. The people who are married and are doing it are way healthier mentally. PewDiePie is winning, right? He was the number one YouTuber for a long time, he’s still a really big YouTuber. He made some sacrifices in order to spend time with his family. He’s really prioritizing his wife and his child, and the result is that he’s a much wholier, healthier person. And if you don’t have that, I actually wrote a whole book on dating relationships that I promised myself I’m not gonna be promoting.
But this is really important. It’s not just important for your own flourishing, it’s important for societal flourishing and writing isn’t gonna fix that. And it does help if you’ve been online, you’ve had a lot of people telling you what a wonderful person you are or what a terrible person you are and then you have to go change a diaper. It resets, and for a kid who totally does not care how famous you are, it resets everything for you. It’s like, that’s right, I suddenly take the trash out. These diapers still need to get changed. My kids don’t care that I just got a bunch of likes on social media platform XYZ.
Babylon Bee’s Call for Conservative Storytelling
Jonathan: Yeah, so going back to the social media platform, there was an article released this past week by Babylon Bee where they made an impassioned plea for conservatives to write new stories and man, did they get slammed in the comments. So before I commented immediately based off of the headline, which is what I wanted to do, I didn’t do that. And I went and I clicked on the article and read the article, which is the first time Babylon Bee has ever had anyone click on a headline and read an article.
The article was basically saying there’s so much trash coming out, many remakes, so much rework, so much trying to retread the same ground that storytelling is being lost and readers are just getting used to having their faces spit in. So, you know, it’s creating this kind of culture and what we need is to reset storytelling. We need to reset everything and get people to where they’re just telling good stories again.
And then I went and commented under the thing. And there are probably about 60 comments under there of well-known authors going, “been doing that. Here it is.” Like, and so my thought on this is the problem isn’t that there’s not enough good storytelling. There’s a problem with amplification and reach. Bad stories on Disney have the Disney engine behind them. You know, Snow White and the seven CGI abominations was amplified by the Disney marketing engine, which has tons of subsidiary engines that also promote it, have influencers who are going to get engagement from negative promotion, who are going to get engagement from positive promotion, you know, from reactions and all this kinds of crud.
Thomas: But it’s also money. Sure, they’re able to get reactions, but a lot of it is just straight up money. So there is a sense where if you don’t live in the world of people who know about indie books, you wouldn’t know about any of the conservative voices in fiction because there’s really strong discrimination against conservative voices right now. In Christian publishing, in secular publishing, it’s very difficult to get a publisher.
Jonathan: We’re the ham radio of publishing right now.
Thomas: Yeah, but there’s another element here where it just comes down to straight up money and a little secret that a lot of publishers don’t want you to know. They’re out of money. Almost all of the publishers are broke. They can’t afford to pay much in the way of advances and they can’t afford to advertise. They are struggling just to keep publishing books and they’re trying to do it as cheaply as possible. They’re very much like the noble family in a Jane Austen film.
Right, they’re the Bennets. They are the inheritors of a great title, but not a great fortune. They’re actually very poor and they don’t have the ability to get the word out. And so there are publishers that are publishing conservative fiction. There’s a handful, but those publishers don’t have a lot of money. Most publishers don’t have a lot of money. There’s a reason why advances are getting smaller and smaller. And it’s because the publishers are really poor in terms of cash.
And one of my predictions, I don’t know if I talked about this last week, but I’m thinking about this a lot. It’s actually, if you look at history, why were those families poor? Why were the Bennets poor? Because this wasn’t an invention of Jane Austen. It was actually a phenomenon that was happening across English aristocratic society at this time. Because the wealth of the Kingdom of England, or the Kingdom of Great Britain, was shifting from the aristocratic landholding class to the mercantile class. People who were embracing the industrial revolution and were using steam engines to build factories. And there was this view that, “ugh, merchants, they’re low class. And we don’t want to do factories, that’s not sophisticated.” And so you had these noble families that were not investing in the factories, who were not moving to the cities and were becoming, as a result, impoverished.
And what they ended up having to do towards the late 1800s is the noble families in order to save themselves realized that they had to marry into industrialist families, but they couldn’t bring themselves to marry English industrial families in many cases because they just couldn’t bear it to admit that they had made the wrong call culturally in poo-pooing the industrial revolution. So do you know who they married? American industrialists.
Why was Winston Churchill’s mother an American? Because Winston Churchill’s noble family was impoverished because owning the land stopped being a source of vast wealth for the British aristocracy. And what started with the Churchills actually, because it was Churchill’s dad who was the first one to marry a wealthy American heiress, happened like 80 plus times. So many of the British noble houses ended up marrying wealthy Americans. So what you see in Downton Abbey, in the 1920s of this family that’s being propped up by this American – the only American in the house is the mom – was actually very common. Again, not an invention for the story. They were borrowing on real historical trends.
And we see the same thing happening now with publishing houses, where they’re coasting on their Tradpub did was sign Matt Deniman, who is an enormously successful lit RPG indie author. And what this publishing house did, I forget who it was, they signed for the print copies, redoing print copies of his books and getting them placed in Walmart and stuff. Because the one thing Tradpub still has is access to bookstores. Those relationships with the book buyers, if that’s really what you’re looking for, then Trad Pub is good at that – though it’s going away!
Thomas: And here’s another prediction I’m making since we got all heady with our successful predictions at the beginning of the episode. I suspect moving forward over the next 10 years, successful authors like Matt Deniman are going to, with their new deals, start signing deals that include equity. Where they’re really gonna be marrying in just like what happened with the Noble Families. Where they’re not just getting a big advance, they’re not just getting placed in Walmart, but they’re now getting forever ownership in the publishing company itself.
Like, “All right, I get a 25% royalty and a 2% equity stake in the publishing house where I now sit on the board of directors or I can vote for the board of directors.” A totally different relationship where the powerful Indies, if you’re struggling to sell 10,000 copies, that’s not gonna be you. But if you’re selling hundreds of thousands of copies of your books, millions of copies of your books particularly, there are publishing houses that would be likely very happy to give you an equity stake in the publishing house if you would marry your fortunes to theirs. And for many indie authors, it’s still not worth it. They would have to get a really big equity stake to justify it.
But going back to the Babylon Bee story, there’s different kinds of readers. And it’s very likely that this author of this article honestly had no idea there was a whole world of conservative publishing. Because if all he knows is what he sees at Barnes & Noble, because of the biases all up and down, right? Publishers Weekly won’t review conservative books, the librarians journal, a lot of these places won’t cover conservative books, the publishers won’t publish the conservative books, the retailers won’t stock them. There’s friction all the way down the line. And some books are able to break through all that friction. So it’s not that there’s none, particularly in non-fiction, there’s always gonna be a handful of conservative books, but conservative worldview fiction, very rare for it to break through all of that friction. So he may honestly have no idea that if he were to go to certain categories on Amazon, that suddenly the worldview shifts dramatically.
Jonathan: It also depends on when he formed his bias, because if he was looking at KDP indie authors at the time when everything was 99 cents, well there was a lot of trash on the market for 99 cents at that time. And so he probably made the decision, “indie fiction is terrible.” You know, “it’s not up to the standard of” – and I get this all the time, I write in fantasy – “well your stuff isn’t the Silmarillion.”
Thomas: But most fans of Lord of the Rings don’t even like the Silmarillion. That’s a deep cut.
Jonathan: But it’s when the guy makes his decision as to whether something is good and it’s just making him look at it again. Knowing where to put it in front of him for him to see it. These are important things and these are things indie authors need to know because it’s not just what you say, it’s when you say it to a person or when a reader makes their decision because when the reader makes a decision it’s generally made. First impressions really matter.
Thomas: It’s kind of like becoming a racist. How many of those people did you interact with to form your view of all of them?
Jonathan: Exactly. You’re not constantly making this decision. You made it once a long time ago.
Thomas: Yeah, you’re an anti-India-ist. You’re racist against indie authors. Because you read one indie book one time and didn’t like it, and so you created a general view.
New Tools and Industry Changes
Book Cover Designer for Authors
Jonathan: I’m gonna make an episode called Cowboys and Indies. All right, well we gotta move on, we’re running out of time here. Thomas, you wanna talk about your latest patron tool?
Thomas: Yes, this is a tool that I’m very excited about. It’s one I have been building towards. The technology finally came along where I can do it. It’s a book cover designer. So you put in your elements, you put in your style. It can do styles of book covers in many different styles, and it can place text right on the book cover. This isn’t meant to replace book cover design for your actual novel or for your actual non-fiction, but it’s really useful if you’re creating reader magnets and can’t afford to hire a designer for $500 or $1,000 for this reader magnet that you’re giving away for free.
So you’re tempted to do it yourself on Canva. Don’t try to do it yourself. Use this tool. This tool is not gonna be better than paying $1,000 for a designer, but it is probably gonna be better than you on Canva with some templates and some stock photos. And it won’t be $1,000.
And somebody commented on authormedia.social like, “this is putting cover designers out of work.” I don’t know if that’s true. The cover designers I know are slammed with work. We have job boards. If you’re a designer and you’re looking for work, come to the authormedia.social job board, hold out your shingle. People are posting all the time looking to hire people and they will hire you. All you have to do is respond. So there’s not some sort of bloodbath amongst designers that I know of. And if it’s hitting you and you’re good, I mean, if you’re terrible, I can’t help you, but if you’re a good designer, reach out to me. I have authors all the time coming to me asking for recommendations and the designers I know are like, “I can slot you in for next year.” They’re really busy.
Jonathan: So this book cover designer is also really good for the design brief. You know, you create something through AI, you don’t want to have an AI cover for political reasons, personal reasons, or whatever. It’s just not what you want. But you can give it to the cover artist and be like, “I want something that looks like this. It has these elements, it looks like this. I didn’t know how to say it in text because I’m a writer, but somehow I don’t know how to express things. This is what I wanted – has this hair color, looks like this, angling this way with this kind of monster over here. This was the AI crap. I want your amazingness. Take this and turn it into gold.”
Thomas: Right. And one of the Patreon tools is a book cover design brief generator where you answer a bunch of questions and it builds a two-page design brief. But it is a lot easier to look at an image and be like, “no, I don’t like that.” So it’s harder in a world of words. People are playing with it already. I’m really excited about this tool. We’re gonna continue making improvements. I already have some improvements I’m planning to make when I get some breathing room. But do give it a shot, give me some feedback what you think. There’s a thread on authormedia.social for you to share the covers that you get and just have fun with it. It’s a fun toy.
KDP Royalty Rate Changes
Jonathan: Alright, next piece of news. KDP has changed the royalty rates for cheaper books. On June 10th, KDP is changing the royalty rate for books priced below $9.99 from 60% to 50%. This is obviously for print books. They’re also reducing the cost of color printing in some places. I’ve been watching the responses to this on X. Everyone has something to say about it. Some people are seeing this as a cash grab by KDP. “Oh, they’re trying to take more money from the author,” whereas it’s more likely their costs are going up because of all the tariff shenanigans right now.
However, this is something I think could be leveraged by indie authors, where it’d be like, “look, KDP is now lowering the royalty rate that I am getting from them. Could you buy from my direct sales website or from this third party bookstore, if you have relationship with the bookstore, you know, whatever is you want to do there.” I think it is an opportunity that can be leveraged. Thomas, what do you think?
Thomas: And it boosts the anchor price. So, is $10 a lot of money? Well, it depends on what you’re buying, right? For a cup of coffee, $10 is a lot of money. For a video game, $10 is really cheap if the video game’s on a PlayStation, and it’s really expensive if the video game’s on an iPhone. Why? Well, because the anchor price on a PlayStation game is 70 bucks, or 100 bucks, or whatever, and the anchor price for an iPhone game is free. The cost of making the game is the same on those two platforms, all else being equal. I mean, you can make expensive games on both platforms, but the anchoring, what people expect to pay, can become such a thing where they’re like, “you are immoral if you charge too much for something.” It’s like, I’m not forcing you to buy my thing. If I want to sell a handbag for $10,000, I can sell a handbag for $10,000 and it’s not for you. And there are people who sell handbags for $10,000 and people who buy handbags for $10,000.
So there’s people who spend $100,000 for a car. There’s people who spend $50,000 for a car. And it’s a free country. You’re an adult. You can make these kinds of decisions. But when everybody else is raising their price or when the anchor price is raising around you, it makes your price look lower by comparison or it can. And so most authors are selling their paper books for far more than $9.99. So this is almost not a story because most authors write books that are too long for print on demand.
The sweet spot for print on demand is between 200 and 250 pages, and most authors can’t restrain themselves and write books that short. And so instead of writing two 200 page books, they write one 400 page book and they price it at $17.99. So this is actually good news for you if you’re the kind of author who wrote a 400 page book and it’s priced at $17.99.
Jonathan: Not me. No, that’s not me.
Amazon’s $9.99 Minimum Price for Paperbacks (35:13)
Thomas: Now you’re gonna have fewer books priced at 6.99 or 8.99 that make your book look expensive. Now the cheapest paper books are gonna be 9.99, which is still gonna make 17.99 look expensive, but it’s not gonna look quite as expensive as it did before.
Jonathan: Yeah, and the thing I’ve been doing, I have a direct sales store, is I just raise the price on Amazon anyway so that people will go to and get it at a deal on my bookstore because I want the direct sales higher rate for me. I get to fulfill it, I get to sign it, I get to stamp it, I get to quality control it. I like going to the post office and sending people their books. It makes me feel good. So I only see this as a benefit. I think it’s something to be leveraged.
New U.S. Copyright Office Registration Toolkit (37:06)
Jonathan: The U.S. Copyright Office has released a new registration toolkit, and they’re calling it a toolkit, and it’s just a PDF. You can go to the website, download the PDF, and it’s just an explanation of how to go through the copyright registration process. It explains that you have a copyright just by writing the work. It’s just you proving it. That’s the issue. So if you register the copyright before infringement, that makes your life a whole lot easier.
Thomas: Well, it’s more than that. So first off, I’m not a lawyer, don’t take legal advice from podcasters. Do take legal advice from lawyers. But when people say you have a copyright as soon as you write it, that’s true in the least useful way that something can be true. It is technically true, but not usefully true.
There’s two kinds of copyright damages that you can get from my understanding. There’s statutory damages and actual damages. Statutory damages are like an automatic damage that if you can prove that the copyright was violated, you can earn up to like $100,000, like a lot of money. Actual damages, you have to actually prove that you were actually harmed in an actual way and you can only get however much money you actually proved that you actually lost, which is almost impossible. It’s almost always very low.
If you want a lawyer to take your case on contingency, if you can’t get statutory damages, the lawyer’s not gonna take on your case, which means you basically have no copyright protection in any meaningful way unless you wanna spend tens of thousands of dollars going to court yourself.
If you wanna get statutory damages, you have to register your copyright within three months of the publication date. So it’s actually kind of important to register your copyright if you plan on using the copyright protections that the government offers.
The other advantage of registering your copyright is that you get some paperwork back from the government that you can use in the real court of law, which is Amazon customer support. That’s the actual court that most of this stuff is decided in. Now you don’t even get a human overseas – you get a bot, and if you can say, “Hello bot, here is my registered copyright. I’m the real thing, please kick off the imposter,” the bot will process that.
Jonathan: I’ve done this so many times with letters of reversion, where an author got their rights back from the publisher and now they want to republish indie, the same book. Well, the bot just needs to see the letter of reversion with the title, with the date, with everything on it. That’s all you need. This kind of thing is very important because we’re talking to robots and you need to learn how to talk to robots.
New Scams Targeting Authors (40:17)
Jonathan: Righty Beware has released an article on two new scams that are trying to take advantage of authors. The first one is really insidious – a book order scam where someone will send you an email claiming to be from Barnes and Noble saying, “Hey, we want to purchase 5,000 copies of your book. You need to give us an investment of $17,000 first. This is your projected royalty rate on that.” They will give you real numbers from Barnes and Noble if they were actually offering this to you, but you need to pay for the books first initially so they can make the order and then you’ll get your royalties back.
Another way they’re doing this is a hybrid publishing company will actually publish the book for you, put it up on Amazon and a few other retailers and then start sending you emails pressuring you into buying $5,000 or $10,000 of books, claiming you need this marketing apparatus so they can work for you.
Another scam is fake reviews, where someone will try to send you a fake review in your DMs or email and say, “For the low price of $725, this could go live on your profile. It’ll be shared around to all the marketing channels and my 17,500 person email list.”
Thomas: As a rule of thumb, scammers tend to prey on fear or greed. They threaten you that your Facebook account is in violation, or they try to get you really greedy. One thing that can protect you from the greed thing is to assume that there are no shortcuts and assume that you were made to work and that work is hard. Embrace the suffering of being an author. This protects you from so many scams, because there’s a lot of people who say, “I will teach you the shortcut. I have the magic formula.”
Part of the reason why these scams work is because it’s what authors deep down believe. They really believe “my work is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and I’m just waiting to be discovered.”
There’s a kind of entitlement that authors get that they think because they’re a good writer, this should be easy. It should be an easy journey. And that’s not the case. It’s still a hard journey. And it’s still a hard journey even after you have success. I’ve worked with authors who’ve sold millions of books and it’s still hard work for them. At no point does work stop being work.
Jonathan: Or you can feel like you’re being rewarded for the work that you’re doing. No one minds work as long as they’re being paid. It’s doing the work when you’re not necessarily getting that fruit that’s hard. The worst time of a series is between books two and three. That’s when it feels the most dead. After that, it starts trending upward again, and so most people give up at that point.
Conduit Books Opens Male-Only Literary Fiction Submissions (47:40)
Jonathan: Conduit Books in the UK has now opened submissions for male literary fiction only. Jude Cook, a novelist, has opened a press for literary fiction by male authors in a space that’s usually been dominated by female authors for the past 10-20 years. The internet is on fire. Some people are claiming it’s the return of racism and misogyny, while the other side is making hyperbolic claims that women have been destroying the industry for a decade.
Thomas: From a marketing perspective, creating a publishing house that caters to a narrowly defined demographic is almost always a better strategy than creating one that serves a poorly defined general demographic. You do need to focus.
When I first got started in this industry, my first book on book proposals talked about how it was going to use female pronouns for editors because basically all editors were women. This was a book from the 2000s, and it said there were so few male editors that instead of using “he or she,” they would just use “she.”
Wanting to take advantage of underserved markets and write books for people that not a lot of people are writing for is smart marketing. The challenge is that it’s been 10-20 years since somebody’s written literary fiction for men, which means that most men have come to the conclusion that they don’t like literary fiction, which means you’re going to have to start from scratch building your audience.
Understanding Genre “Otaku” (52:04)
Thomas: I’ve had a realization about the concept of how some genres have an “otaku” and some do not. Otaku is a Japanese phrase for nerd or geek, but it also means fan – someone who knows a lot about something and cares very strongly about it.
Some genres have an otaku, a nerddom around the genre. They gather, they talk, they meet. And some genres do not. There was a recent story about a big Romanticie Conference where 150 authors came from all over the country, but only 80 readers showed up. It was like the Fyre Festival of books.
Part of the problem is that while Romanticie is a very popular genre, because it’s a spicier genre, it doesn’t have that kind of nerddom where readers want to hang out with each other or talk to each other. This affects tactics like conventions.
Compare this with regular fantasy, which has an otaku. There are people who will argue about yield battle tactics and what powers different characters have and whether one character could fight another. You don’t have that in all genres. So conventions are harder to do in some genres. Also launch teams are harder to do because to get a launch team to work, you have to have people who aren’t just excited about your book, but they’re excited to be associated with your book and advocating for your book.
It’s like ketchup versus hot sauce. People really like ketchup, but there’s no ketchup otaku. Most people eat the same kind of ketchup, but they don’t think about ketchup very much. But hot sauce has an otaku – there are YouTube channels, magazines, Scoville levels. If you were to have a ketchup convention, nobody would come, but you could have a hot sauce festival and people would attend.
A question to ask if you’re trying to decide if your fiction has an otaku is: Are my readers willing to go to war for this kind of fiction? Do they debate and argue about it for fun?
Launch teams don’t universally work. They don’t work for rapid release, but they also don’t work for authors writing in a genre that doesn’t have an otaku. This is really clear in nonfiction as well. Sometimes, nonfiction can have huge launch team potential. My book did – I had people literally paying money to be on my launch team. It was controversial, connected with a cause, and had network effects.
But other kinds of nonfiction people may be embarrassed by or have complicated views about. I worked on the book “Not Marked” by Mary Demuth about overcoming sexual abuse. When we crowdfunded it, getting your name mentioned in the back of the book was an optional feature because we knew not everyone would want their name in a book about sexual abuse.
Knowing whether your genre has an otaku can help you determine which marketing tactics will work for you.
