Comparison, Creativity, and the Author Middle Class
Jonathan: Let’s talk about the death of creativity, or at least something I see killing it. There’s an argument raging on social media that keeps making the rounds. A new Simon & Schuster report came out showing that traditional authors only sell about 12 copies per title on average, and that just restarted the war.
Indies are saying, “We’re awesome,” and I’m thinking, “You sold four books last year. What are you talking about?” Then the trads say, “Well, we don’t like those numbers anyway. They’re misleading.”
- What are we even comparing ourselves to?
- Are you writing a book your readers want?
- Are you achieving the definition of success you’re actually looking for?
When I read a book, I don’t care if the author is indie. I care if the author is good.
I’ll pay $16.99 for my Horus Heresy ebook, because that’s the only way I can get it, and it’s trad. I hate the company. They’re woke. But the stories are good, and I really like them. I don’t understand how a company this woke keeps making stories that good. It boggles my mind. They’re going to tank their own franchise.
Bryan: Or they’ll adapt.
Jonathan: They’re actually going through a buyout right now, trying to pivot on their social engagement. But most readers operate the same way. You just want a good book. I want a decent cover, something that doesn’t look like it was mimeographed, and someone who can string words together in a way that makes me feel something.
We authors keep making an apples-to-apples comparison that doesn’t apply to artistic expression. If you go the AI-generation route, you are actually making an apples-to-apples comparison. At that point you’re talking about what kind of director you are instead of what kind of prose writer you are.
I don’t compare my voice to Bryan’s. If I read Bryan’s book, it’s because I want his perspective on logistics. That’s his background, and I need to know more about logistics, so I’ll read his book and take what I learn.
Who are you comparing yourself to?
Jonathan: The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 10:12, “We dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves. But they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”
I’ve operated on that since the military. I don’t have to be a better linguist than the linguist sitting next to me. I need to understand the material I’m listening to well enough to kill a terrorist. That was my job, and that’s how I studied.
They kept telling us to watch our GPA at the military school. Plenty of the other guys were young, 18, 19, 20, and focused on GPA because that’s what school trained them to do. I told them, “I’m just trying to keep Marines alive and keep bad guys not alive.” That’s the goal.
Bryan and I have the same macro mission, in that we’re both trying to change the world for the better. But on a micro level, we don’t have the same mission, and therefore can’t compare ourselves to one another.
We have different sub-goals in our storytelling. When you read both Bryan and Jonathan, you’ll see different perspectives and passions. I want to write a kinetic fight scene where a Marine is ripping demon skulls off and stomping dudes. That’s what I want to read, so that’s what I write. I want overwhelming odds and men who just don’t care.
Bryan: Even if only 20% of the population are readers anymore, there’s still plenty to go around. My readers and Jonathan’s readers probably won’t overlap much because we’re writing to two different audiences.
What’s the first question every writer should answer?
Bryan: I’m a publishing consultant. I guide people through becoming independently published so they’re not learning every rope on their own from scratch. I start every client with one question: What are your goals? It amazes me how many people have considered what their goal as a writer even is.
It is pretty painful. The first book is not going to pay off. It takes six to 10 books on average to become profitable in fiction. Sometimes you discover the cure for cancer, and it goes everywhere. But that’s not the average experience.
If you don’t have a backlist, you don’t have a marketing strategy. You’ve marketed your one book, they bought it, and then they wonder what else you’ve got. The answer is nothing.
Jonathan: You know what sells book one? Book three.
Bryan: So I ask a series of questions:
- What inspired the book?
- What is your goal for the book?
- What is your overall goal?
- Are you launching a second career or a side career?
- Is this just a hobby?
For me, faith is part of it. I’m a Christian, and part of what I write isn’t just to entertain. I’m doing “edutainment,” inspirational entertainment. I want to write a captivating story, but I also want that story to make you think about new ideas in ways you hadn’t before.
Bryan: My measure of success is how many one-star ratings I get. If I’m not ticking anybody off, I’m not challenging anybody.
Jonathan: Books can be good and still not sell. It might also mean you’re advertising to the wrong people.
Bryan: That’s true. Or maybe I just wrote a lousy book.
Jonathan: But my one-star reviews, the ones that come with a written review, tell me I made somebody mad. And I think, “Cool. Good. How’d you get here?” Nowhere did I promise to be nice to you if you disagree with me. I’m glad you’re here, and I’m glad it made you mad. I get a lot of joy out of that. It feeds my soul. But why did you choose this book?
Bryan: It’s even better if you can tell they read the whole thing. At that point, it forced them to see the world a little differently. They might hate you now, but two or three years down the road they might think, “That was the first time I was ever confronted with that thought. It challenged me. It made me mad at the time, but there was some wisdom in it.”
Are you competing for dollars or for time?
Jonathan: As an independent author, I don’t care about Bryan’s success. As his friend and colleague, I do care, but my business model doesn’t depend on him failing, and I don’t need to compete with him. We’re indies. We don’t really affect each other.
Everyone says a rising tide raises all ships, but it also sinks some crappy boats. Ask the Navy. Rising tides don’t work the same for everybody. I want Bryan to succeed, I want his books to do well, and his book hitting number one doesn’t matter to me at all. I’ll be there in a few months when my next book is done.
What we’re actually competing for is the time and good favor of a small group of binge readers. We’re rarely competing for dollars.
When you buy a TV, the TV companies compete to sell you theirs. Car companies compete to sell you a car, because you’re not buying another one. It’s $50,000 for a little two-door sedan that runs on chipmunks and hope.
They’re competing for your money. We’re not. I’m selling a $6 ebook, a $20 paperback, maybe a $30 hardcover.
We compete on time, not dollars.
Binge readers already have their hobby and already love it. The only question is how long it takes them to read your book, and they prioritize their time toward whatever interests them most at that moment.
Any number of things affect that choice. What did they eat for lunch? “I had Mexican today; I feel like reading something spicy.” That’s a decision? Yes, it is. Or what movie came out that week, or what book they just finished. You’ve got a chain of reader decisions influencing the next book they pick.
So, make your book as interesting as you can. Accentuate the coolest thing about it and scream that over and over. I have a romance plot in In Darkness Cast so minimal it’s not worth mentioning, and I never market with it. I’m not saying, “Come to In Darkness Cast for the scintillating romance.” There’s a dude stabbing a spider on the cover. Nobody cares about romance here.
Emphasize the cool parts and keep doing it. It’ll strike enough people at the same time to build momentum, because a lot of people buy based on what other people bought and recommend.
Who are you actually competing against?
Bryan: Here’s where a rising tide really does raise all boats. We’re competing together against all the other junk in the entertainment space. You’re competing with Netflix and YouTube.
Jonathan: You’re competing with the latest disappointment out of Hollywood. You’re competing with video games, where people actually interact with the story themselves. If a video game has a strong story, it’s got me. I’ll play it.
Bryan: We’re also challenging each other, and that’s healthy as long as it isn’t, “I’m competing against you to put you down so more people buy my book and fewer buy yours.” When it’s, “Let’s make books as high-quality as we can,” you’re challenging me to up my game, to write with better craft, and to read your books and learn what I can pull out of them. Not to copy your voice, but to learn.
Jonathan: Or I’ll watch an interview you do and think, “He presents himself really well here. He’s well-informed. I wish I was more like that.” Then I’ll train myself to present better, which makes me more effective at promotion.
I’ll see what other authors do better than I do. It doesn’t mean I can’t be good at it. It means I’m not good at it yet. So I can spot the weaknesses to work on, the strengths to shore up, or the places I thought I was strong where the market moved on, or the technology advanced.
It’s not just storytelling. I’ll read Bryan’s book and rip off whatever benefits my reader. I liked this POV switch; that was cool. I like that turn of phrase, those metaphors and similes.
Bryan: We’re little large language models training ourselves off other people’s material.
Jonathan: Exactly. I love the saying, “When you steal 10 authors’ work, it’s plagiarism, but when you steal 100 authors’ work, it’s research.”
Ecclesiastes says there’s nothing new under the sun. There’s nothing original. There are basically 10 storylines, and we’re all writing combinations of those through different filters. I write through my view and experiences. Somebody else writing In Darkness Cast would probably emphasize the romance, and there might be a strong story there. I’m not going to write it.
Should you write what the market wants, or what matters?
Bryan: Along the same lines, here’s something that kills creativity. At one of the first writers conferences I ever attended, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, which hosts Colorado Gold every year, I ended up in the wrong workshop. They’d canceled the one I signed up for, so I walked into another one led by a literary agent.
She walked in and asked, “Who’s here to write the book you always wanted to write, your passion project?” I raised my hand. She looked around and said, “You’re in the wrong room. We’re here to make money.”
Then she outlined their process. They go to Target, Walmart, everywhere, to find the next up-and-coming thing. And if she decided it was Amish cowboys, she’d design the cover, write the title and the back-cover blurb, then go to her cadre of authors and ask, “Who wants to write this book?” They were chasing whatever the audience wanted.
There are two terms in mission work: contextualization and syncretism. Contextualization means taking the pure gospel and communicating it in culturally relevant terms. The principles don’t change, but I use the language of the culture instead of, “You’ve got to learn Latin before I can teach you.” I teach it in their language, with metaphors and customs that make it relevant.
Syncretism is changing the message itself to fit the culture so that the audience likes it more.
Apply that to your writing. You can give people whatever they want, and you might sell $50,000 of books a month doing it, but I don’t think you’ll change anybody’s life. If you want an impact that persists after they put the book down, you take a meaningful message and contextualize it.
The best compliment I ever got on Daughter of the Gods came from a beta reader who called me afterward and said, “I put it down and couldn’t get it out of my mind for days. Things in there just bugged me.” It made him think, and that kind of reflection is what changes people’s lives.
So, ask yourself, “Am I giving the market exactly what it wants, or am I taking a meaningful message and contextualizing it so they enjoy the story but get confronted with ideas they hadn’t considered?”
How do you move your readers emotionally?
Jonathan: In my Royal Road story Devil Dog, people ask if I’m trying to be Frank Peretti, trying to portray spiritual warfare behind the scenes, because that’s the closest thing they have to compare it to.
When I sit down, I’m not trying to be Frank Peretti. I’m trying to write an awesome story about a Marine who can punch demons in the face, shoot them, blow them up, and just does not care that he’s in hell.
I’m working on a chapter right now where the depth of the story really comes out, because he hits his first redemption frenzy. He’s hijacked a soul train and just found out there are souls on it that haven’t been claimed yet. They’re not condemned, and one is what the game calls a redemption event. The game tags it, sends up a beacon, and that summons a despair swarm, demons afflicted with the burning of despair, all charging toward this redemption event. It’s a nine-year-old little girl, and I made the mistake of naming her after one of my daughters.
As I was writing it, I thought, “If this were my daughter in her redemption event, how hard would I be fighting?” This is easily one of the most intense and violent chapters I’ve ever written, and that’s saying a lot. It’s draining me. To keep the protagonist from being overpowered, I keep amping the stakes on the other side.
I’m not writing Frank Peretti. He’s actually not that intense with kinetics. He does a great job with suspense and tension, but he’s not writing kinetics like this. I think he’s good. I’m not bashing him, but I’m not trying to be him. If I had to describe it, I’d say Doom mixed with C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. That’s the blend. So I’m not comparing myself to Frank Peretti, and I’m not writing to a market I think exists.
I’m actually expecting to lose readers with this chapter, because it’s where the stakes really land, and they’re very much Christian stakes.
Bryan: I don’t think you’ll lose readers. If you’re writing something that affects you that deeply, that emotion is coming out on the page. It has to, and it’s going to grab them. I have no doubt that when readers hit that scene, it’ll hit them hard.
Jonathan: I hope so. Looking at the readers I have on Royal Road so far, we’ll find out whether the atheists and agnostics are okay with this suddenly, overtly religious story they’re in.
What is the author middle class?
Jonathan: We’ve covered how the author middle class is forming because of the opportunities available through KU and these indie publishing platforms.
For most of history, if you wanted to make a living from writing, you needed a patron. A king, the church, a wealthy nobleman. And if you wanted to run any business at all, remember, this was feudalism. Your options were basically to be a serf working a lord’s land for his benefit so he could pay his taxes, and he could send you to war any time the king told him to.
Serfs weren’t incentivized to produce much, which is why productivity stayed low during feudalism. The individual worker didn’t care. As long as you’re fed, you don’t care whether the lord above you is successful.
Then came the mercantile class. You could have a wagon and travel from town to village to city to castle, selling things you produced or stole. That class wasn’t nobility and wasn’t serfs. They built wealth through trade, commerce, and entrepreneurship, and they had things everyone wanted. Suddenly there were toys, jewelry, beautiful clothes.
There’s a scene in Firefly where the engineer sees a store-made dress, factory-made, and it’s way better than handmade, because nobody around her was a professional at it, and she wants it. Now it’s flipped. Custom-made is the big deal, because you had a master of the craft handcraft your dress or jewelry on Etsy. But back then, store-bought was the big deal.
The same thing happened in American colonialism. It was still a feudalistic society, but we weren’t close enough to the lord anymore. Suddenly it was, “I’ve got to build a community on another continent. I’m good at cutting trees, you’re good at making tools. Let’s work together.”
Bryan: And it wasn’t just the lords who owned the land. You had the chance to own land and start a business. The British coined a term for the Americans. They said we had a “middling sort,” a middle class, the people between the serfs and the lords. Shop owners, blacksmiths, craftsmen who didn’t work a lord’s property but worked for themselves.
Jonathan: My wife made me watch Downton Abbey with her, and there was this great moment in it.
The lord was less competent at business than his Irish chauffeur, who then married his daughter because it’s a soap opera. The chauffeur helped run the estate and was better at it than the lord. Lordship wasn’t based on competency, and this guy could make more money. That was weird for the lord to digest, because a lord is supposed to be in charge, and he wasn’t. He grew to rely on his son-in-law’s advice to keep the estate running and profitable.
That’s what happened in America. The business owners were better than the lords at making money, building wealth, and building a nation. So after doing that as a small businessman, you suddenly hear the king across the ocean, who does nothing for you, say, “I’m going to tax you on everything, because you’re making money and I own you.” That doesn’t sit well.
Why does a middle class matter beyond the economy?
Bryan: A strong middle class isn’t only critical for a strong economy. It’s critical for a democratic society. In England, you were either scratching out a day-to-day living, barely getting by, or you were ultra-wealthy. The wealthy lords cared about policy and taxes and had the time to.
Jonathan: Because they had a stake in it. The king changes his tax policy, and that affects the lord. The serf doesn’t care. The serf’s life is going to keep being miserable either way.
Bryan: But in America the shop owner says, “Wait a minute. Your tax and regulation policies, the sugar, the tea, the stamps, those affect my ability to run my business.” Suddenly I care, and I have means to participate in the process.
What was born was incredible. I love our country. I think it’s the greatest experiment in freedom and democratic principles in the history of the world. We’re a representative republic, not a democracy, but the principles hold, and we became the model many other places tried to emulate. I think that same thing is happening in the author world right now.
Jonathan: Yes. Now we run our own businesses and have a stake in how things go. People watch this show to learn how AI is going to affect their author business. How does KU raising its royalty rate to 70% up to $12.99 affect me? How does all this zeitgeist stuff that John and Thomas keep ranting about affect my business? Because you have a stake in it now. It matters to you.
Are publishers the lords and authors the serfs?
Bryan: My guess is most people who watch this podcast are indie authors. In the other model, where the expert does everything for you, they first decide who’s worthy of being published. The traditional publishers decide who gets published and who doesn’t. They also handle the whole business side, so you’re sheltered from it. They’re the lords, and you’re the serf. Maybe you’re a well-paid serf, maybe not.
Jonathan: There are benefits to being a well-paid serf. But lose your lord, lose your publisher, and you’ve got nothing, unless somebody else poaches you.
Bryan: And you don’t have the freedom to express your creativity, which is where we started this whole conversation. Is traditional publishing robbing you of it? They bought your book, so they can tell you, “Our editor knows what makes this book marketable, because our goal is to maximize profit. If it’s fiction, it needs to be 250 to 300 pages, because that’s the sweet spot between production cost, distribution, and what we can charge.” And you need to cut chapter two, or you need to add an LGBTQ character, because if you don’t have one, we won’t buy it.
How is AI flattening the lords and serfs of film?
Jonathan: This joke has been circulating about Netflix for a while, because filmmaking is still very much lords versus serfs. As the writer, you’re a serf. The producers are the lords, and if they decide your character now needs to be Black, or gay, or a woman, or whatever they think will work, they just do it. You have no control over your script or your story. When Netflix does Black Panther, it’s going to be Ryan Gosling. They make bizarre swaps because they think it’ll help the storytelling.
It’s a joke, but the industry really does run on that lords-and-serfs mentality, where the lord decides, and everyone falls in line. What’s interesting is how AI is going to flatten it out, because a lot of filmmaking costs can now be automated. I’m not just talking about CGI. We’ve all seen the slop on X, feeds full of dumb videos. But someone talented, willing to compete and create something good, now has far less of a barrier to pursuing that passion project and still making something people actually want to watch.
Then the big-budget places follow the smaller storytellers. The Darth Maul show on Disney+ happened because of an April Fool’s joke. Somebody made a fake commercial for a Darth Maul show, and it was so popular that Disney thought, “Whoa, you all want this that much?” That whole storytelling trend came from one character, from a joke somebody made independently. No studio, no budget, just a passion project that was funny. People wanted it so badly it confused everyone, and Disney said, “Yeah, we’re doing it, give us a few years.”
Bryan: My brother told me a couple of weeks ago about an independent filmmaker who used only AI to make a feature-length film that’s debuting at a festival, and the festivals are having a fit because they want to disqualify it. The guy has a full-time job elsewhere and said it took him three months in his spare time after work.
Jonathan: That’s insulting to the people still doing it the hard way.
Bryan: But that’s the democratization of media. Some of it will be garbage, just like some of the early self-published books were garbage, but it created the freedom, the competition, and the environment for a lot of entrepreneurs to enter. I think we’re moving away from a Pareto distribution toward a more normalized one, where you really can have a middle class of authors, and we can be part of it. We could also be on the top tail, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. But we can also fulfill our purpose as middle-class authors, shaping the world, changing how people see it, and entertaining them at the same time.
Is it worth writing if you’ll never be a superstar?
Jonathan: I agree, and it’s not all about becoming the superstar. Sometimes it’s just about making a living, or adding to the one you already have. That’s absolutely possible today if you write well, develop your voice, keep working hard, read widely to improve your craft, and learn how to reach readers.
And drop the fear. I’m sick to death of people saying, “I don’t want to talk to people.” Shut up. Is your book important? Do people need to read it? Then tell people about it. I don’t want to hear the whining. Sorry, that came out of nowhere.
Professionalism still matters, and you can get it for free in the Novel Marketing Podcast and other great podcasts. You can get awareness of the battle space through Author Update and other indie news services that bring you news and knowledge without trying to gatekeep you out of it. That’s what we were trying to bring with this zeitgeist.
We don’t need to compare ourselves to trads. There’s battle-space knowledge you need about what techniques and methodologies actually work, but crowing about it on social media doesn’t help anybody, because you still have to focus on your business. Saying, “I’m doing better than that guy,” congratulations, you sold 13 books last year. That’s not a business. That’s advanced journaling. Build your business out and do better than you did yesterday.
The real competition is against the person you were yesterday.
Everyone else, you’re learning from and stealing from. I’m going to read Bryan’s book and steal from him, and he’ll take it as flattery, because I’ll tell him, “I totally stole this for my book.”
Bryan: And I’m going to steal that redemption scene of yours for sure.
Jonathan: So get out there and write your book. Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing. Make it the best it can be, watch Author Update to understand the battle space you’re releasing into, and get your knowledge upgraded.
