Thomas: This is Author Update and we’ve got a jam packed episode for you today. We have some breaking news. The White House is changing the international shipping rules and they will go into effect today and they may affect you as an author. We’ll break down exactly what it means and what you need to know. Plus the big anthropic class action lawsuit is entering into settlement. Amazon is making a huge update to Kindle Unlimited, allowing indie authors who are exclusive to sell their books to public libraries. We’ll break this down. And we’re gonna talk about why Penguin Random House profits are tanking while most traditional authors are making less than minimum wage and so much more.
Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Scherger. Let’s jump right into the breaking news.
Breaking News: International Shipping Rules Change
Jonathan: Today we’re going to talk about why the new international shipping rules are taking effect today. The White House has ended the $800 duty free de minimis exemption for all countries. That means if you were under the threshold of $800, you weren’t going to get schwacked with the tariffs and the fees and stuff like that. It now requires a formal customs entry and you had to pay any applicable duties or fees. Do books get tariffs then. Well, generally printed books are still duty free. You can still see some brokerage or entry fees. Paperwork didn’t apply under de minimis. So you need to really research your shipping avenues and see where you’re going to be sending books, especially if you’re doing Kickstarter and stuff and you’re fulfilling internationally. You really need to take a look and do your research before you start so that you don’t get blindsided and suddenly your budget is blowing out of proportion on your Kickstarter because if you don’t charge the appropriate shipping, that’s gonna hurt.
Thomas: So the biggest impact of this is actually getting books into the United States from other countries. Let me explain how this de minimis rule works. This is the end of the world for Temu and Wish.com. So if you’ve ever wondered why you can order something from China for $2.99 and it gets delivered, it’s because they’re taking advantage of this de minimis exception where very small items don’t have to pay a duty and don’t have to file any paperwork to speak of because it’s not worth it. Anything under $800 we don’t have to bother with. Well, Temu completely broke the de minimis system, which was meant for sending a birthday present to your friend in another country. It wasn’t meant for running an entire e-commerce empire that doesn’t have to pay any duties or have anything checked.
Thomas: The biggest impact of this is on BookFunnel users. So if you’re a BookFunnel user, you probably got an email from BookFunnel that some of the avenues in which they are shipping you books are currently not available. So right now, if you’re with BookFunnel, you have to use FedEx or Consolidated Services. It will likely expand back to all of the options. We’ll be back on the table in the future because while the de minimis exception no longer applies to authors, the books are duty-free exception does. We don’t actually have to pay additional taxes because of this rule, but we will have to file additional paperwork.
Thomas: If you’re indie published and you’re using print on demand, this doesn’t impact you at all because books are printed in the countries in which they are consumed, almost exclusively. So if somebody buys your book in Canada, the book is actually printed in Canada and shipped from Canada. Same with UK, same with Australia. And so this is actually one area where indie authors have real advantage. But where it gets complicated is, let’s say you’re using Book Vault to fulfill your Kickstarter campaign, and Book Vault is mailing individual books to all of your Kickstarter backers. Suddenly, you may have to pay for FedEx instead of United States Postal Service. So this isn’t a huge deal, but it is for certain people. And I saw at least one person in the chat who is fulfilling Book Vault through Kickstarter. And this may be the most important news story for that particular person.
Thomas: You may find that your wish.com prices went up. It’s interesting, my wife was looking for a book to buy for our kids. She couldn’t find it cheap in the States, but she found a copy for like five bucks in the UK and it had really cheap shipping. And it was last night and I was like, place your order now. It’s gonna be more expensive tomorrow.
Quick Aside: Kilts and Providence
Jonathan: There is a lively discussion in our chat right now about why we’re not wearing kilts and so first of all for all of you like I had a terrible night last night. I was actually going to do makeup for this episode. I was gonna be in full woad shirtless and you know, I’d find like a kilt or something somewhere.
Thomas: This is proof that there is divine providence that saved us from this. God caused John not to sleep.
Jonathan: And the Lord has spoken and stepped in and he’s like, I don’t want to see that. You’re not gonna. So he has taken care of all of you.
Novel Marketing Conference: Ticket Update
Thomas: Big news at the Novel Marketing Conference, as we record this, there are two tickets remaining, two super tickets, that is. So if you want to come to the Novel Marketing Conference in January, do come. We wanna have you, but you need to buy your tickets right away. So go to novelmarketingconference.com. There are more standard tickets and more gallery tickets. It’s interesting, the more expensive the ticket, the more popular the ticket. We have plenty of the cheap tickets, but if you want a super ticket, you better jump on it right away. There’s only two left. Novelmarketingconference.com. It’s the only conference I know of that’s dedicated to helping you sell more copies of your books, whether you write fiction or nonfiction. Every year we’ve had a table of, or a writer’s group, just of nonfiction authors. So I’ve had a lot of people emailing me and be like, I write nonfiction, can I come. Yes, you can, but if you write fiction, you’ll be in good company. We have authors at all levels of their careers. It’s really worth coming. And you can learn more at NovelMarketingConference.com. And we have an update on the Anthropic Suit. Jonathan?
Anthropic Class Action Settlement
Jonathan: So, in the giant nothing burger that I knew this was gonna turn out to be, Anthropic is settling the class action. I have five daughters. Anthropic is settling the class action suit because there’s nothing worse for a developing AI company than to be the center of controversy about AI development. They are settling the class action suit. We don’t have any details yet because those details will probably not be available unless they decide that it’s worthy of some press activity.
Thomas: I said this last episode, this anthropic class action suit is not going to end AI. Everyone keeps thinking this is going, you know, they’re gonna be protected from AI by the courts. I was talking with a friend of mine who’s a Harvard lawyer who works for one of the really big law firms. And when I was describing this case to him, he’s like, yeah, the courts are not going to destroy an entire industry. The courts do everything they can to avoid those big winner picking cases when possible. So we’ll have more details. There might be some money for you in the suit, depending on how it shakes out. So we’ll cover it next week. Hey, some of you might make dozens of dollars, dozens.
SEO and Platform Updates Authors Should Know
Thomas: We have an update on some SEO tips. I went to the Yoast SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s important to understand this as an author, both for optimizing for Amazon search engine, but particularly for Google search engine on your author website, go.
Jonathan: I watched the video on Wednesday, they’ve been gone for a couple of months. There was a ton of stuff in the update. There wasn’t much applicable to authors. So I just basically pulled the three top things that might apply to authors. The first story is CloudFlare now blocks AI bots by default and offers paper crawl. So if your website is using CloudFlare, there is now no current clean way though to block AI overviews while keeping rankings. So that’s something that you’re going to have to keep an eye on.
Thomas: It tries to block AI bots by default. Perplexity’s already found a way around it. Just don’t block the bots. Thomas’s official advice is don’t block the bots. Don’t block any bots from your website because you’re going to sell more books the more familiar the bots are with your website because people are asking the bots what to buy.
Jonathan: In big news for those of you who are doing direct sales like in audiobooks, ebooks, or whatever from a Shopify site, Shopify has been listed as a ChatGPT third-party search provider. This isn’t an official announcement, it was actually found in documentation. I think it was on the ChatGPT documentation. Shopify has been shown as a provider. What that means is when you type stuff into ChatGPT, when it spits stuff back out at you, it’ll provide Shopify links. So if you optimize your Shopify store for AI search, ChatGPT is now actively prioritizing Shopify information above other information. I’m gonna keep my eye on that and see as more goes out. I work on Shopify. And so I’ll let you guys know how that plays out and how you will benefit or we’ll see how it works. All this stuff is still really new. If ChatGPT moves to monetization where they go into ads, then this is going to be huge because Shopify will be basically free priority ranking.
Thomas: Or they’ll start charging Shopify to maintain this integration into the future.
Jonathan: And sure, but Shopify will do it to maintain their standing on the online market. So I only see that as benefiting people who are using Shopify. And then the last story from Yoast SEO, Meta will revoke monetization for accounts that are repeatedly reposting others work. This is supposed to target content farms or repetitious mass produced content. So if you are constantly reposting things from other people’s IPs.
Thomas: On Facebook or Instagram, you’ll lose Facebook or Instagram monetization, which I don’t think applies to any of our audience. So it’s not that you get banned, it’s just.
Jonathan: It’s following a trend because YouTube is doing the same thing. Last time we talked about this, it was YouTube that was doing that. And that is something that authors are doing. We made a recommendation that if you’re going to do a reading of your audiobook, you put on a video of Red Dead Redemption. OK, but now you’re reposting someone else’s work and now you can’t monetize that.
Thomas: Not if you get a, well, what I was recommending was hiring somebody to give you unique Red Dead Redemption footage. I don’t think they’re cutting down on video game videos.
Jonathan: It’s still Red Dead Redemption. You’re reposting their content. You’ll see YouTube influencers, like, I follow a guy who does breakdowns of cutscenes and videos and stuff, and he’s now actually been forced to break it up to keep the majority of it focused on his face. Because if he doesn’t do that, he’s gonna be demonetized. And it actually makes his videos so much less interesting because I want to get his commentary on the video.
Thomas: That’s different though. That’s a video. What I’m talking about is your own video game footage. This is a huge part of YouTube. They are not demonetizing Ninja. Me sharing my own footage, my own unique footage of a video game, I would be shocked if they actually move forward with demonetizing that because there’s so much money in it and it’s really easy content and really easy engagement.
Thomas: If you would like to be notified when we go live, for those of you watching in the future, don’t forget to ring the bell. You have to like and subscribe first. You don’t have to like, but you do have to subscribe to this channel. And if you do, you’ll be notified when we go live and you’ll get all of our new episodes, including our how-to episodes, which go out on Wednesdays.
Jonathan: This is not banning the reposting of memes and reels. That would frickin’ execute Facebook. It’s just the idea of taking someone else’s creation and then you trying to monetize someone else’s creation.
Thomas: It’s a specific tactic called content farming that I’ve never actually seen an author use. So I don’t think you need to worry about this.
KU Authors Can Now Sell eBooks to Libraries
Jonathan: In other piece of big news, KU authors can now sell their eBooks to libraries, which this is a seismic shift in the landscape because previously it’s been KDP or Kindle Direct Publishing versus traditional publishing. And on this side is all the bookstores and the libraries and all that stuff over here and all the award lists and the best seller lists and all that stuff. And over here is Amazon. And indies have only been able to play on the Amazon because you can’t get in over here unless you have like a real specific Ingram relationship or something like that.
Thomas: You can with your physical book, but the e-book had to be exclusive to the Kindle store.
Jonathan: Right, exactly. But that was the war, right. Because this side of the traditional publishing hates the Amazon side. And that’s why you see ebooks on the traditional side are priced at $16.99. They’re actually trying to de-incentivize ebooks being bought on Amazon. They’re willing to take a loss to do it because they see this preserving their standing. Here’s the issue. If KU authors can now sell their eBooks to libraries, which is the piece of news now, Amazon has updated its KDP Select program to allow eBooks enrolled in KU for page reads to be distributed to libraries. The bigger piece here to me is that libraries might actually take KU books.
Thomas: Just because you have the ability to sell it doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy, but we’re already seeing some books like Dungeon Crawler Carl entering the various library systems rental pools. And this is definitely something that you should pursue. I have an entire episode of Novel Marketing about how to use Overdrive to get into libraries. And now you can ignore the part of that episode that talked about the pros and cons of whether you should be exclusive to Amazon or try to go with the library strategy. Now you can have your cake and eat it too. This is really big. The most common way that this is done is with an app called Overdrive, which is a part of Libby. But you can also do it with Draft2Digital, Publish Drive, Smashwords, and there’s one other I’m forgetting the name of. So if you’re using one of those tools, you can also make your book available to libraries that way.
Thomas: I will give you one tip now on how to get into libraries that’s very straightforward, and that is ask your readers to request your book at their local library. This is the most powerful technique that all indies can do. A lot of libraries pay a lot of attention to what books their card holders are requesting. And if you can get even one card holder in a library system to request your book, that makes your book much more likely to be accepted. And if five or six card holders are requesting your book in the library system, you’re almost guaranteed to start selling copies of your book into that library system.
Jonathan: When CJ Milacci was running her first Recruited Taliyanas launch, I worked with her on gamifying her launch sequence, which was part of it was you could get points in this game that we put together for requesting the book at your local library and then people could get icons and stuff for having done this. There was a lot of social proof. It was really fun. People really enjoyed doing it. If you do that and you can gamify your launch and then get them to request the book in your local library just as part of this game, that’s a huge deal. Now the fact that libraries can list a KU book, now you don’t even have to make the decision as to whether you’re gonna be exclusive or not.
Thomas: On the other hand, look at this from the perspective of a librarian who has historically been protected from 90 percent of authors because 90 percent of indie authors are exclusive to KU. And now they’re getting thousands of pitches. So this may not have the impact you think it will because you’re gonna be in a crowded space. My advice is to move on this quickly. Most indie authors don’t know that they can do this now. The next month is your golden window. As soon as this episode is over, go sign up for Overdrive, start the process of getting your book available for the libraries to order, both in paper and in ebook. Then ask your email newsletter to start requesting your book, maybe even make it a competition and be like, hey, I’ll have a drawing to do an exclusive call with me or get a signed copy of my book, and you can enter the drawing by requesting the book and sending me proof. Gamify this, brainstorm ways of making this work. We may do another episode on this. Right now, it’s Gold Rush. Just go find some good land and grab the flag. This could be a really easy way to boost your sales.
Jonathan: Keep in mind also that libraries aren’t just repositories of books that are open to everything. They are actually fairly like strongholds of conscience. The acquisitions editor in the library is going to use their morality to decide what kind of books get put into the library system. One thing libraries are very susceptible to is social pressure. If you get a hundred people come in and requesting a book, at that point it’s like, it doesn’t even matter what the book is. We need funding. There are ways to overcome certain intransigence in the library system.
Thomas: One thing to keep in mind, I heard a stat somewhere, it looks like 91 percent of librarians are registered Democrats, according to this one claim. When we’re talking about morality, we’re talking about a Democrat morality here, so do keep that in mind. We’ve covered in this show instances of bias against right-leaning authors trying to get into library systems and trying to stay in library systems. You really have to use that reader pull tactic because while they are left-leaning in their ideology, there’s also a strong belief of every reader a book. It is interesting. We’ll have a left leaning book where there’s 400 copies available and then a right leaning book on that same topic where there’s one or two copies and they’re both backordered with a long wait list. So it depends on the library.
Jonathan: Do your targeting because every library system is localized and every acquisitions editor is different. They acquire books differently. It’s not even a standardized process. Do your targeting research and do your study and then you’ll know the best way to go.
Pricing eBooks for Libraries
Thomas: Can we talk about pricing for e-books. How this works is you sell them a copy of your e-book and then they’ll lend out that copy over and over and over again. You don’t want to sell them the e-book at the same price that you would sell an e-book to a reader. I think Overdrive has some suggested pricing. I would follow that. I don’t know how price-sensitive libraries are. You would think, well, if I charge 40 bucks, they’ll be more likely to buy my book. That may not actually be the case. Librarians aren’t spending their own money. People don’t really care about taxpayer money. But it is a signal of quality. If your book’s only 40 bucks, maybe this book isn’t so good. We’ll have more on this later, but right now, move on it quickly.
Jonathan: I think it’s like 50 bucks for an ebook license.
New AI Image Model to Watch
Thomas: We don’t actually have a lot of AI news today, but we have one piece of AI news. There’s a new bestest best AI model, not in text, but in images. Gemini slash Google rolled out a new image model called Nano Banana, which is what we used for our Scottish themed image today. In my initial tests, it didn’t deliver on its promises, so you’ll notice me and Jonathan don’t look at all like ourselves. But it was crazy fast, and it was able to work with the image as I presented it, the way it was cropped. It still can’t do the one thing I want an AI image generator to do, which is make a 16 by 9 image. It couldn’t crop the image to 16 by 9 and it couldn’t make the image 16 by 9, but gpt image 1 can’t do it either. Where it’s supposed to excel is in persistence where you can take the same character and replace them over and over again. It’s also supposed to be really good at editing where you can just describe how you want the photo to look and it will do all of the Photoshop type work from a single prompt. Very cheap from a tokens perspective, very fast. This is the new image engine to watch. Some of the tests I saw somebody else do, not super good with text. GPT image one is probably still the best overall if you’re to work with text and images together.
Jonathan: Keep your mind open. Gemini tends to be super censored. If you’re going to go for something like Marines shooting at zombies, and if there’s a censor filter on violence, you might see Marines pointing broomsticks at zombies. There might be limited use cases. It really depends on what you’re going for.
Libraries If You Are Traditionally Published or Running a Micro-Press
Thomas: We had another question about the libraries. If you’re traditionally published, nothing we talked about applies to you because your traditional publisher is probably already pursuing libraries. If you are running a publisher as an indie, you just do it as the publisher. Technically you’re not a self-publisher. You’re an independent publisher. You’re a publishing house that has only one author that you work with. For libraries that are biased against indies, creating a publishing company that’s like Acme Publishing LLC sometimes works. There are filters that try to filter out indies. Having a publishing house that’s branded separately from you, which means it can’t be thematically tied to your books, helps. If it’s Acme Publishing and then it’s Hope For Tomorrow, that looks more like a published book.
Jonathan: On the subject of one author publishers, what about an author imprint that is with multiple publishers. When it comes to going through libraries, your publisher owns your book. They choose where it distributes. If they control on Amazon, they’re going to be controlling it going to the library. If you have multiple presses that are putting your books out, that’s multiple people owning your work.
Thomas: It’s not uncommon for successful traditional authors to have multiple publishers that they work with. If you’re wanting to go after libraries, do listen to my metadata episode. Librarians love metadata. They basically invented metadata. Dewey created his decimal system, which is like the first metadata system, like a hundred years before the term metadata was even coined. Make sure your metadata ducks are in order if you want librarians to like your book. If half the fields are empty, your amateurish metadata is gonna make you look indie.
Traditional Publishing Layoffs and a Marketing Audit: Bloomsbury Children’s
Jonathan: Bloomsbury U.S. has eliminated five positions within its children’s division. They’re describing it as a strategic shift toward publishing a more curated list. According to a spokesperson, Bloomsbury U.S. is a strong and thriving business, and these changes were limited solely to the children’s division.
Thomas: My children eat books, so if you make a book that’s popular enough, we’ll buy multiple copies. I’m starting to do my own research, checking out the publisher. I did that for Bloomsbury. Specifically looking at their children’s books. Bloomsbury is the company that publishes Sarah J. Moss. If you go to their discover books section, there’s literally an entire column just for Sarah J. Moss. A Court of Thorns and Roses is one of the hottest selling books of last year. Basically this one book, and this one author, is the source of most of their revenue.
Thomas: I looked at their children’s books. The first book on their website had one review on Amazon. It had been out for over a month. Next one, zero reviews. Next one, two reviews. I could not find a book that had double digit reviews in the children’s book section. Many of these books didn’t even exist in print, which is an indication the publisher knew that they were dogs. And they were all, without exception, super woke. They were the kind of covers that me as a parent buying books for my children would not even look at. Part of what’s happened here is that they are just out of sync with the zeitgeist. They’re UK publishers and the UK leans left of the United States. This is in the US division of the UK publisher though. The United States elected Donald Trump by the popular vote. If you want to understand American readers, you need to understand that Trump is still very popular here. I’m not saying it’s a golden age, but I am saying that maybe it’s an orange age. The new orange age of America.
Thomas: You have employees running a division that’s publishing books that are underperforming your typical indie book. Very classic. They get into a decadent spiral, where they are publishing a book not out of economic incentive, but out of a moral religious imperative. They don’t care about whether or not anyone actually wants to buy this book or not.
Jonathan: This is running parallel to the news we’ve already talked about. Because of the way that things are changing in the way consumers are buying books and there’s less money to be had, these companies are now cutting fat that’s not actually doing anything. If you’re telling me that a children’s book doesn’t have a physical copy, they’re fulfilling a contractual obligation. They can just kill your book by making it ebook only.
Thomas: It’s getting basically no marketing, no reviews, no effort. Imagine being one of these authors with Bloomsbury. Meanwhile, they’re not helping you adapt your book for the zeitgeist. They’re not promoting your book in any way and they’re not even printing your book, which you could do if you were indie. This is worse than nothing.
Penguin Random House Profits and Industry Decadence
Jonathan: Penguin Random House saw revenues climb to about $2.7 billion, about a 2 percent increase, about $53.6 million from the same period last year. That was largely fueled by the acquisition of Hay House in 2024. Their profits took a hit. They dropped about $42 million to about $297.3 million, which is a 12 percent decline, attributed mainly to lower revenues in their core US business, escalating costs, growth-related expenses. Bright spots, their audio publishing segment and their publishing services continued to shine. International arms posted strong revenue and earnings growth. The UK division got market share.
Thomas: This is what an industry in decline looks like. Earnings going down is always bad, but the fact that their only revenue growth is coming from acquisitions is another concerning sign. Their revenue growth isn’t because their books are doing better. Their revenue growth is because they’re buying other companies that are also in distress. Connecting this with the Bloomsbury story earlier, there is a fundamental problem across traditional publishing that is decadence. They would use phrases like cost structures or escalating costs. The lean, mean indies are inheriting the industry.
Thomas: What needs to happen in traditional publishing is that they need to embrace frugality. There needs to be a leanness, a hustle culture. Move out of New York City. If I were put in charge of Penguin Random House, I would move them out of New York City, to move somewhere cheaper and to get rid of the people who don’t want to move, who don’t have that hustle attitude. There is a zeitgeist mismatch. Part of the reason that revenues are down is that the new books are not doing well, with some exceptions. Romanticie is doing really well. Sarah J. Moss is like single-handedly propping up all of traditional publishing right now.
Thomas: There is a cultural shift that traditional publishing is not taking advantage of. They’re out of sync and it’s causing a lot of their books to fail completely. If you go to a traditional publisher, check their new releases on Amazon. You’ll find these new books aren’t doing good at all. Then go to the bestseller list on Amazon and see how far down you have to go before you can find a single traditionally published book. The barbarians are already at the gates. Authors are already making more money as indies. It doesn’t mean that all indies are making money. If you wrote a bad book, it doesn’t matter how you published it.
Are Fan Conventions Dying
Jonathan: There was a recent Fandom Pulse article titled The Death of the Fan Convention. From Star Trek to Worldcon, these events are fading away. Cons have always been vital hubs for connecting with readers, pitching ideas, building community.
Thomas: The fan attendance is way down at the Star Trek conventions. It’s way down at Worldcon. DragonCon still has good numbers of signups. I feel like part of this is a cultural thing because the more right-leaning conventions, like LibertyCon, sell out their tickets in like 24 hours. Realm Makers just did a big announcement that they’re expanding their convention for next year. Some fandoms are dying out. The Marvel fandom is really struggling. The Star Trek fandom is really struggling. The Star Wars fandom is really struggling.
Jonathan: Each con has its own personality. LibertyCon is very much a loyalty-based thing. They keep their tickets available low, then say come back next year and get your ticket right now. It is libertarian in the extreme, which was huge in 2020. Realm Makers is growing. Dragonsteel is very popular, but they are keeping the ticket numbers low so you can say we sold out.
Thomas: It only sells about 7,000 to 7,500 tickets and it is in Utah. It is harder to do a big convention there compared to Vegas or Atlanta. I think that this fandom pulse article is perhaps overstating it. People like to gather over points of common interest. If there was a zeitgeist convention, I would be signing up. Or if you’re really into book marketing, we just happen to have a book marketing conference for you. It is called the Novel Marketing Conference, which you can sign up for at novelmarketingconference.com. Jonathan might be talking about metadata a little bit on his Amazon page optimization talk.
Most Traditional Authors Earn Less Than Minimum Wage
Jonathan: In an industry that’s often been glamorized by blockbuster deals and celebrity authors, new insights are revealing a much harsher financial landscape for most writers. The average novelist, the upfront payments, the advances, are coming in at about $403 for a short story collection to about $100,000 for a multi-book deal depending on the track record of market expectations. Most deals are in the $5,000 to $25,000 range. That’s not great when it takes you multiple years to write the book.
Thomas: It’s often pennies per hour. Many traditionally published authors when they do the math find that they’re making 50 to 75 cents an hour writing books. What’s interesting is everyone at the publishers is making money. The editors are making money, the publishing staff are making money. It’s only the authors who are making pennies per hour. It is because authors gave up all of their control and all of their margins with this thing called the advance. Because the publishers give the authors money quickly, they’re the first to get paid, they’re the least to get paid.
Thomas: My heart really goes out to all of the authors with small publishing houses which don’t even get the advance. They get all of the downsides of not making any money and they’re not getting an advance. Why are you going with traditional publishing.
Jonathan: There are so many tools available right now. Literally just take a week, study it out. Thomas has so many episodes and stuff on how to do this. I learned how to do it. I’m a Marine. I’ve published 10 books now and they’re doing fairly all right.
Thomas: He’d choose crayons and he could figure it out. There’s hope for you.
Responsibility, Independence, and Making a Living
Thomas: A hundred years ago, only 20 percent of Americans worked for a government or a company that had over 50 employees. Now, it’s like 90 percent. We have lost our ability to be self-employed or to work for a small business. The bigger of an organization you’re in, the more it crushes your soul. Was that a soul enriching experience, or did it give you trauma that you’re still working through to this very day?
Jonathan: In their words, we didn’t issue you a soul. We will not be paying you disability on that.
Thomas: There is something to be said about paddling your own canoe and running your own business. It gives you responsibility. It is the kind of suffering that builds character.
Jonathan: There’s developing, where you’re like in boot camp and you’re getting stronger. And then there’s oppression, which is you’re just being held down. It’s where they take away the straw you use to make your bricks.
Thomas: Justin said he had a good experience working with Baen. Baen has fewer than 15 employees. It is different when you’re in a small organization. Build up before you quit. There is a lot of money that can be made in this industry. Indie authors are making money. You can also make money selling services to fellow authors. We have a job board at authormedia.social. If you go to conferences like the Novel Marketing Conference, there are opportunities to connect with authors.
Jonathan: Also keep in mind that I don’t write for money. Authors need to understand metadata, numbers, business, so they don’t get taken advantage of. The whole reason we get started is so we can tell stories. The money lets me keep doing it. People who are trying to pursue writing as a money-making business, you have miscalculated.
Thomas: It’s very much like the lottery. There’s not a lot of middle class, particularly in traditional publishing. There’s more of a middle class in indie publishing, particularly with authors who’ve learned how to write quickly and who’ve learned how to find an audience where they just keep writing books for the same group of people. Maybe they only have a thousand fans or 10,000 fans, but they’re giving those fans a book every three or four months and that’s enough to pay the bills. The typical trash collector in New York City makes more money than almost all but like 20 of the authors in New York City. The median author in the UK is making about $7,000 a year.
Jonathan: Be a garbage guy and dictate your novels whilst you are garbageing.
Thomas: As we’re talking about decadence, a lot of people are writing because they’re wanting to change the world, but really they’re seeking status. They want people to respect them, they want esteem and admiration. They don’t realize that they’re bankrupting themselves. If you have the money to do it, writing is a wonderful activity. Retirees are very much not financially motivated. Sometimes by taking the low status path, you actually make more money. The people in the orchestra pit make more money than the singers on stage because they get less status and they make up for the status with being able to pay the bills.
Wrap Up and Conference Invite
Thomas: We will be back next week. If you want to grab a super ticket, now is your chance. There are more regular tickets and gallery tickets. Go to novelmarketingconference.com. The super ticket gives you access to a one day pre-conference workshop. We will be working on our websites all day long. If you get stuck, you can just raise your hand and a nerd will come and help you, or I will come and help you. Don’t forget to click like and subscribe. If you want to chit chat about this episode, authormedia.social. Live long, prosper. I’m Thomas Umstattd, Jr.
Jonathan: And I’m Jonathan Scherger Jr. Thanks for listening.
