Podcasts about acx

Hey there, hero!I was just on a call with a potential VO client, and the conversation got around to limiting beliefs in general, and in particular, those excuses we come up with so we don't have to try.This is nothing new. People have been afraid of failure since humans became humans.We look at the potential for failure, and then spend a lot of time creating a story or seven around why we can just take a nap instead.It's risky to try something new.So what stories are you telling yourself so you don't even need to try something new? So you don't have to even come close to risking failure? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/what-fairy-tales-are-you-telling-yourself/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Hey there, hero!Just want to get your opinion on this apparently very controversial issue.I have my own thoughts, but I want to know yours.Let's discuss. Scroll down and fire away.Is listening to an audiobook “cheating?” Is there something wrong with only listening to (or only being willing to read) whichever version of the book you prefer? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/is-listening-to-an-audiobook-less-than-reading-a-book/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Hey there, hero!I know that some VO talent and actors (and even my author peeps who want to narrate their own books) shy away from the prospect, mostly because it looks like a gargantuan undertaking.You might be one of them, imagining a lot of planning, a lot of work…and a lot of stress.I would like to help you reframe that with some much more positive positioning, around learning, proficiency, earnings and satisfaction.You buyin' what I'm sellin'? After you watch or listen to the episode, let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/how-stressful-is-audiobook-narration-really/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

In this week's episode, we take a look at eight reasons to diversify your ebooks sales beyond just Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, Book #7 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: WARLOCKJUNE The coupon code is valid through June 22, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 306 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 5th, 2026 and today we'll discuss eight reasons you should diversify your book sales beyond Amazon. We'll also talk about Coupon of the Week and give a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.   So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, Book #7 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is WARLOCKJUNE. As always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through June 22nd, 2026, So if you need a new audiobook for the summer as you go on a summer road trip, we have got you covered. Now let's talk about my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am 80,000 words into Blade of Thieves, which puts me in Chapter 17 of 25 of my outline. So we're closing in on the end. I think we're going to be about 110-115,000 words or thereabouts in the rough draft. So hopefully a couple more solid pushes and we'll get there to the end. I hope to be at 90,000 words by this point, but there is quite a lot to do in real life so we didn't quite get there, but 80,000 words is still better than nothing. For Cloak of Frost, as of this recording, I am now 9,000 words into it and that will be my main project once Blade of Thieves is done. I was hoping to have Blade of Thieves come out in June, but July is looking more likely at this point. Hopefully Cloak of Frost will come out the month after Blade Thieves comes out, whenever that is.   In audiobook news, I'm pleased to report that Blade of Wraiths (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is now out at all audiobook platforms. Get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Kobo Books, Chirp, my own Payhip store and all the usual audiobook stores. At the moment, I have no other audiobooks in active production, but once Blade of Thieves is done, Brad will also be recording that. Later this month, Hollis McCarthy is scheduled to start on Cloak of Worlds and in July, Leanne Woodward is going to record Dragon-Mage, the most recent Rivah book. So we don't have any audiobooks being produced right now, but we will in the future. So that is where I am at with my current writing, audiobook, and publishing projects.   00:02:32 Main Topic of the Week: Beyond Amazon: Reasons to Diversify Your Sales Platform   Now onto our main topic this week, Beyond Amazon: Reasons to Diversify Your Sales Platform, which is something you know I do quite often given how often I talk about my links to my Payhip store on this very podcast.   For a long time, the conventional wisdom has been that Amazon has 80% of the US book market and putting your ebooks into Kindle Unlimited was the best route of success because of that monopoly and some of the algorithmic benefits Amazon gives to KU authors. While it's true that certain genres (especially LitRPG and romance) are almost exclusively focused on Amazon and KU in the US, going exclusive with Amazon is not necessarily the best course of action for everyone, especially if you're interested in growing your international sales.   Today we'll talk about reasons why putting your books in KU is limiting and in the interest of fairness, in two weeks, we will also be doing an episode later [about] when putting your book in KU is a good idea and some of the benefits of that. But today we're going to start with the benefits of diversification. Here are eight reasons you might want to consider moving beyond just Amazon, which is often called going wide in the Indie Publishing world. #1: Increasing your global reach.   It may surprise you to know that the Kindle store is not available in every country and that other countries have a strong competitor to the Kindle store. For example, in Canada, Kobo is Amazon's main competitor and has traditionally a strong market share there, quite a bit larger than Amazon Canada based on my own sales data. Kobo is also very strong in many European markets. Additionally, because there are many more Android users internationally than there are in the US, Google Play Books is important in non-US countries. It's also an easy platform for users and integrates into the Google ecosystem as well. Data usually finds that while the iPhone [iOS] is dominant in the United States, Android tends to be the majority mobile operating system in the rest of the world. So if you want to access Android users in the Google Play Book Store, then you want to be on Google Play Books. #2: Some people are boycotting Amazon.   There are many readers who boycott Amazon or American-led companies for a number of reasons. It is possible to overstate the strength of these. I've seen many people be alarmed about Amazon boycotts impacting their sales, but it never really seems to materialize. I suspect a lot of the boycotting thing is much louder online than it is in real life. That said, it is undeniable. There are people who will not buy ebooks or anything from Amazon for a variety of reasons. So if you sell your books only through Amazon, you're missing out on that group of readers. Some categories of romance have also been affected by Amazon boycotts, so it's worth investigating other options if you're an author in these categories.   #3: Kobo Plus.   Kobo offers a subscription program called Kobo Plus that unlike KU, does not require exclusivity to participate in it. Over three million ebooks and 100,000 audiobooks (quite a few of which are mine) are available to subscribers for less than the cost of a KU subscription. Kobo has been gaining popularity in the US in part due to their subscription program. I have to admit my own personal experience with Kobo Plus as an indie author has been almost entirely positive. When it first came out, I was a little leery of it, but then I decided to test it out by putting Frostborn into it and that did quite well and I was pleased enough with the results that now I just put everything in Kobo on Kobo Plus and that has paid off because the majority of my month to month Kobo revenue and the majority of my yearly Kobo revenue comes from Kobo Plus now. In March and April, I had two of my best months ever on Kobo in the 14 years I've been publishing with Kobo entirely off the strength of Kobo Plus. So my experience with it has been if you write a really long series like that that generates a strong read through (like Frostborn is 15 books, Sevenfold Sword was 12 books, Cloak Mage as of this point is up to 14 books), then it would be definitely advantageous to you to investigate Kobo Plus.   #4: It gives you the chance to support independent booksellers through bookshop.org.   This past year, bookshop.org made a deal with Draft2Digital that made it possible for indie authors to put their books on the bookshop.org platform. In the past, has not been particularly easy or straightforward for small indie bookstores to sell ebooks, so this is an opportunity for physical indie bookstores based in the US. For American readers who want to shop local but still read ebooks, it's nice to be able to offer them an option that benefits their local communities. It also gives these bookstores a way of supporting local authors without having to find physical space for them within the store itself. Bookshop.org is still in the early stages of accepting indie ebooks and there are some things that need to be worked out with features on their app, especially about user complaints about a lack of flexibility with DRM-free e-books. Still, romance and what the site calls "serious nonfiction" are growing rapidly on the platform, so it's definitely worth exploring, especially for authors in those categories. If they do succeed in their plans to put out their own ereader, that would make the platform even more attractive to many book buyers.   #5: Direct sales equals greater profit, extras, price fixability, et cetera.    Having your own sales platform (typically hosted on sites like Payhip and Shopify) gives you far more control over your sales platform. It also gives you a far greater cut of the profits. To give an example, if I do a coupon code for one of my audiobooks on my Payhip site to make it 50% off like I did earlier in this episode with the Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock coupon, I still earn a similar amount as if someone had bought it for full price on Audible.   A direct sales platform also allows you to create discounts for sales far more easily than on other platforms. Additionally, you don't have to wait for ebooks or audiobooks to get through processing on a direct sales site like you do with ACX and the other sites, which makes when a book or audiobook is ready for sale far more predictable. You can also bundle things with ebooks like such as the book file in multiple formats or bonus items like maps, worksheets, or charts. On the other ebook sites, this isn't typically possible. Direct sales gives you a greater flexibility in terms of selling. You can include bonus items and it's also a good fallback position if one of the main sites isn't working. I first got into direct sales in 2021 because Barnes & Noble had its big ransomware hack then and for a while it was impossible to publish new things to the platform and I believe that was when Ghost in the Vault came out and since I couldn't publish that on Barnes & Noble until the ransomware problem was fixed, I directed people to the Payhip site instead.   #6: Library sales and Kindle Unlimited.   The popularity of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and the Project Hail Mary audiobook made a lot of people aware of the fact that exclusivity agreements with Amazon and Audible have often been structured to leave out options for library ebook platforms or require maneuvering or additional deals in order to make it possible. The popularity of Libby in particular is growing here in the United States, especially as people are having to shift their leisure spending from things like books and entertainment to covering basic necessities like housing, transportation, fuel, and food costs due to the poor state of the economy. If library sales and library readers are important to you, then going wide is your best option for reaching the library market.   Myself, I haven't particularly pursued the library market. I haven't refused it either. I usually, when the option is available, click on the toggle switch to publish it to a library service, but then don't think about it very much after that, but there are many indie authors who are very interested in getting in libraries and have pursued that quite a bit through these programs.   #7: Vendor lock-in/user preference.   There is a concept called vendor lock-in, meaning that ebook buyers have a particular platform that they default to when buying ebooks because that is where the ebook collection is based and they want to keep their books together instead of spread across several different apps. Many Barnes & Noble and Kobo users are not interested in ebooks from Amazon or KU for this reason and won't even follow a favorite author to another platform. It's important to have an option available for these readers.   #8: DRM free. [Digital Rights Management]   Having a DRM free copy of an ebook is extremely important to many readers and that is what makes an ebook purchase a true purchase instead of a highly conditional license. Sites like Kobo allow ebook buyers to limit their searches to only DRM free titles and many will not buy a book that is not available without DRM. My Payhip store, all the files you get from that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook are DRM free as well.   For myself, a large portion of my sales come from outside Amazon, so that's why I've never been fully exclusive with Kindle Unlimited and instead rotate a small selection of my series in and out of KU. Over the years, I've experimented with having various books in KU and starting in 2023, what I settled on doing was that I would write three series ongoing. Two of those series would be available on all ebook platforms and one of those series would be available in Kindle Unlimited, which allowed me to pursue both markets at once. As of right now, the wide series are Blades of Ruin and Cloak Mage and the Kindle Unlimited series is Half-Elven Thief. Once Half-Elven Thief is completed, I will take it out of Kindle Unlimited and take it wide and start a new series for Kindle Unlimited.   Overall, I found it's worthwhile to be wide even when pursuing Kindle Unlimited with some of my books because typically in an average month about 45 to 55% of my revenue comes from Amazon and the rest comes from all the other platforms put together. So while Amazon is typically half, that's not nothing, it's only half and the rest of the revenue comes from all these ebook platforms I've been cultivating over the years. So the conclusion is that the beauty of KU's current agreement is that you only have to commit to being exclusive for a short amount of time, specifically three months, and then can always return to it if you want to try going wide for a while.    It's also important to note that growth on other platforms may be slow and if you're going to try them out, it's important to be patient and have realistic expectations. It's the benefit of being an indie author that we can experiment and make decisions quickly based on data and reader preferences. Going wide may not be the best decision for everyone, but the results may surprise you, especially over time.   The cumulative effect of things is often easy to overlook, but it does add up over time. Part of the reason I think my books do so well with Kobo Plus is because they've been on the Kobo website for the last 14 years, which gives them time to accumulate reviews and additional word of mouth. So when someone is browsing Kobo Plus for something to read and they see this long book series with a bunch of good reviews, it becomes easy for them to try it through Kobo Plus.   So that is it for this week. This week we talked about going wide. Next week I don't have time to record a full-time episode, so we're going to do another audiobook sampler roundup, which will be fun. The week after that, in two weeks from today, we are going to talk about the benefits of going to Kindle Unlimited as a contrast to this episode and I will talk about some of my Kindle Unlimited experiences (both good and bad). So thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the backups at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting and platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.  

Hey there, hero!I created this podcast episode moments after jumping off being a guest on Chris Barry's podcast, Coaching Uncovered.(You can find my episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOpiI02rjNI )He asked a very common question: how do you build your business?It's something my personal business coaches have been hounding me about for years, and it prompted me to share with you what I think should be the overarching approach to building a business: comfort. My go to phrase? “Whatever works for you.” And I think it probably applies to you as well.Once you've watched the episode, let me know: are you happy and at peace with how big your performance practice is? Would you desperately like it to be bigger, or are you good with where it is now? Maybe you'd like to throttle back some and make it a bit more manageable? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/whatever-works-yes/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Spring 2026, and rate them from least to most favorite. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: DRAGONJUNE The coupon code is valid through June 15, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 305 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 29th, 2026 and today we'll be discussing my Spring Movie Review Roundup for 2026, where I discuss the movies and streaming shows I watched over the last few months. We will also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is DRAGONJUNE. And as always, you get the coupon code and the links in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through June the 15th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's move on to my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As I mentioned last week, Dragon-Mage is out and you can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited and it's doing well, so thank you for that. My next main project is Blade of Thieves and as of this recording, I am on chapter 11 of 25, though that'll probably expand in the final draft, which puts me at 56,000 words in. So I'm almost halfway through. I think probably it's going to be the length of Blade of Wraiths or a little longer, but we'll see. I'm hoping to have it out towards the end of June, but depending on how June goes, that might slip till July. Hopefully we can avoid that. I'm also 5,000 words into Cloak of Frost and that will be my main project once Blade of Thieves is done. I'm hoping to have Cloak of Frost out towards the end of July, but depending on how June goes, it might slip to August. For audiobook projects, Blade of Wraiths is still processing at ACX, though I believe as of right now, you can get it at Google Play, Kobo, Spotify, and my own Payhip store. The other stores should be available within a few weeks. As of right now, I don't actually have any current audiobooks in production, though we have some scheduled for the future. Once Blade of Thieves is finally done, Brad Wills will record that for us. Hollis McCarthy is scheduled to record Cloak of Worlds in June, if all goes well. Leanne Woodward will be recording Dragon-Mage sometime in July, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Hopefully we'll have new things for you to read and listen to before much longer. 00:02:32 Main Topic: Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup Now without any further ado, let's move on to our main topic, my Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup. It's time for the Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup, where I review the movies and streaming shows I watched over the last few months. As always, they're listed from least favorite to most favorite. The grades are wholly subjective and based on nothing more than my own opinions and thoughts. With that disclaimer out of the way, let's go to the movies. First up is Kicking and Screaming, which came out in 2005. This is a family comedy with Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall. Pharrell plays Phil Weston, a mild mannered vitamin store owner and Duvall plays his father, Buck Weston, owner of a successful chain of sports equipment stores. Buck is one of those hyper competitive guys who has to win at everything and Phil has always rolled with it. But when Phil's son is a benchwarmer on the youth soccer team that Buck coaches, Phil's had enough and starts coaching a rival team to get his son into the game and to defeat his father. Along the way, of course, he descends into Will Ferrell style comedic lunacy, but the PG version since this is a PG movie. Mike Ditka was also hilarious as Phil's sidekick and assistant coach. It seemed like an '80s family movie. It was a sort of movie where you could have taken the entire family to the theater in 2005 and everyone would have been at least moderately entertained. Overall Grade: C Next up is the animated Lord of the Rings, which came out in 1978. As I mentioned, this was the animated version of Lord of the Rings from 1978. Extremely ambitious, but I think it's fair to say this landed in ambitious failure territory, but they tried the best they could given the constraints of the technology at the time and the actual available budget. They tried to pack the entirety of the Fellowship of the Ring and the first half of The Two Towers into about two hours and 20 minutes. I'm sorry to say it just didn't work. Like Dune, the Lord of the Rings is one of those books that requires like 10 hours of very expensive filmmaking to pull off properly. That said, I think it is fair to say that this stumbled so that the Peter Jackson live action trilogy could run. Adapting a book (especially a big book) into a movie is a challenge and I don't think this quite got there. Too much was cut out and if you hadn't read the book, you would probably have no idea what was happening or just been confused the entire time. Additionally, the movie relied heavily on rotoscoping and it didn't always quite work. Like the rotoscope Nazgul looked creepy and unsettling, so that worked for them. However, the rotoscoped orcs just looked bad. You know how in live theater stagehands will dress all in black? The orcs kind of looked like that, albeit they're wearing yellow ponchos over their black stagehand outfits, almost like the stagehands were expecting inclement weather backstage. That said, the vocal performances and the music were very good. So an ambitious and admirable failure. As I said, I think the filmmaker's vision exceeded the grasp of their budget and the available technology of the 1970s. Overall Grade: C Next up is Airplane!, which came out in 1980. It was interesting to watch this as a cultural artifact. It had the leisurely pace of an '80s movie, with far more absurdist humor. It was a parody of various airplane disaster movies from the 1970s. It's also interesting that this is remembered as a Leslie Nielsen movie nowadays, though Leslie Nielsen 's character is only a supporting character. For all that he's known for his absurdist humor these days from later movies, Nielsen plays his character stone cold dead straight, which makes him all the funnier, amazingly enough. Some of the jokes in this movie have aged very badly, but it's still worth watching as an interesting and amusing cultural artifact, given how it influenced the entire genre of comedy movies afterwards. There's also the obligatory three seconds of nudity that can get cut on cable TV broadcast. Overall Grade: B- Next up is the Thomas Crown Affair, which came out in 1999. This is an interesting remake of a movie from the 1960s. Pierce Brosnan plays Thomas Crown, a billionaire who has grown bored with his life, so he orchestrates the theft of a priceless Monet painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The heist goes off flawlessly and the museum's insurance company sends out investigator Catherine Banning (played by Renee Russo) to retrieve the painting and avoid a hundred million dollar insurance payout. Banning immediately intuits that Crown is the thief and sets about to find the painting. This investigation is complicated by the fact that Crown and Banning immediately develop a strong attraction and start an affair. It was interesting to watch since neither Crown nor Banning are particularly sympathetic characters. In 2026, the phrase "bored New York billionaire" has much more sinister connotations than it did in 1999 and Banning breaks all kinds of laws and sleeping with her target is not a particularly bright idea. That said, the opening heist was interesting and Crown's final gambit to return the painting was extremely clever and enjoyable to watch. So overall, I like the movie, but there's still way too much nudity. Cable broadcasts are probably like 10 minutes shorter than the actual runtime from cutting it all out. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Whiskey Galore, which came out in 2017 and this is a remake of the original Whiskey Galore from 1949. Honestly, this is exactly the same movie from 1949 that I watched in the Movie Review Roundup for Summer 2025, just updated with modern filmmaking techniques. If the movie makers in the '40s could have done it this way, they would have. Though I would recommend watching the 1949 one first and then the one from 2017. Overall Grade: B Next up is Super Mario Galaxy, which came out in 2026. And I have to admit, it felt a little strange to be the oldest person at the theater watching Super Mario Galaxy, but I've been playing Mario games since before any of these kids were born, so I think I had a right to be there. Anyway, I would say this movie is about 75% as good as the first one. It was a little overpacked and the plot wasn't quite as tight, but it's still fun to watch. The animation was excellent and I enjoyed all the callbacks to the various Mario games and since I haven't actually played all the Mario games (as a reminder, I played no console games of any kind between 1998 and 2019), I'm sure there were quite a few I missed. The plot is that Bowser Jr is coming to rescue his father, Bowser, who's been held captive since the end of the last movie. To power his doomsday weapon, Junior kidnaps Princess Rosalina and Princess Peach goes to rescue her while Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi stay to protect the Mushroom Kingdom. Their separate subplots will end up crossing when Bowser Jr. invades the Mushroom Kingdom to get Bowser. Glen Powell was an excellent choice to voice Fox McCloud. I'd say if you could imagine a movie that the audience would enjoy and the critics would hate, you'd end up with Super Mario Galaxy. Since that appears to be what happened to the tune of $970 million, it appears that metaphor was accurate. Also, to be less glib, "movies you can take your kids to" do serve a valuable social function (in my opinion). Overall Grade: B Next up is the Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins, which came out in 2026. This was a comedy with a fun premise. Reggie Dinkins (played by Tracy Morgan) was an elite NFL player who got bounced out of the league for placing bets on himself. Years later, he teams up with an indie filmmaker named Arthur Tobin (played by Daniel Radcliffe), to make a documentary to rehabilitate his image. However, Tobin has his own issues. He has an Oscar, but after the Oscar, he got hired to direct a Marvel movie and cracked under the pressure. He and Reggie have to go on a journey to recover their reputations. I thought this was a pretty funny sitcom. Tracy Morgan is a comedic natural, but Daniel Radcliffe turned out to be an excellent comedic actor as well. He was great in that Weird Al biopic a few years ago and he's very funny in this. Craig Robinson was also great as Jerry Basmati, Reggie's sleazy nemesis. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in 2026. I enjoyed this. It was like three pretty good episodes of The Mandalorian show put together. The end result was an adventure movie that kind of reminded me of the best of 1980s fantasy and sci-fi movies with a lot of creature work and a lot of action scenes. For an extended stretch of the movie, Grogu takes over as the primary protagonist, and given that Grogu is a very expensive puppet, that's an impressive feat. The plot picks up from the end of The Mandalorian show. The Mandalorian and his adopted son Grogu are now working for the New Republic, helping to hunt down Imperial warlords. Mando gets assigned to hunt down in a mysterious Imperial warlord named Commander Coin, but the only people who have information on Coin's location are the Twins, a pair of Hutt crime lords and relatives of Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi. The Twins are willing to give up Coin's location if Mando does a job for them, but as Han Solo could have warned Mando, working for the Hutts is not a good idea. I was surprised that the reviews for this movie were as mixed as they were, but I suspect that's a combination of three social factors: Number one, cumulative ill will towards Disney as a corporation, which has done numerous sketchy things in the 2020s. I think something similar happened with Microsoft and Starfield. Number two, the lingering bad aftertaste of the sequel trilogy and number three, the tendency of the hardcore Star Wars fandom to chronically overthink things. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is the animated Hobbit, which came out in 1977. Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy from the 2010 famously stretched The Hobbit across three movies, which really didn't work and added a bunch of epic battle scenes, which was totally off for what was essentially a children's book. The animated 1977 version of The Hobbit, by contrast, went in a different direction, neatly adapting it down to 70 minutes or so, presumably because animation is very expensive. At the time, this got mixed reviews, but looking back nearly 50 years later, I think we can appreciate it more because of the sheer amount of work that goes into hand-drawn animation. Like computer-based animation is unquestionably a lot of work as well, but hand-drawn animation is on something of a higher level in terms of difficulty, in my opinion. That said, I think this adaptation did a better job of compressing the story down than the animated Lord of the Rings movie I mentioned earlier in this episode. There's also a lot of 1970s style folk singing-like a LOT. I suspect J.R.R. Tolkien would have hated every single adaptation ever made of any of his works (with perhaps the exception of the audiobooks), but he would have approved of the number of songs and poetry in this. Though it was amusing that the high elves in this movie sing in a '70s folk music style. It would be humorous if in the Silmarillion, Earnedil the Mariner had finally crossed the Sundering Seas to reach Valinor and appeal the aid of the Valar against Morgoth and his hordes, only to hear '70 style folk music echoing across the shining hills of the Undying Lands. Anyway, it's definitely worth watching this if you like The Hobbit or old style animation. Overall Grade: A- Next up is House of David Season 2, which came out in 2026. I wrestled with what grade to give this because it used a lot of AI for the big battle scene in episode one and as long time readers and listeners know, I do not generally approve of LLM generated slop. Ironically, I think episode one, the big battle sequence with all the AI, was definitely the weakest point of the entire second season. Everything else was better. That said, all the character drama and interactions and acting were really good, which amusingly shows that while LLM stuff can generate blurry scenes of mounted soldiers charging at night, the real human emotion comes from, well, real human emotion. Anyway, this picks right up from the end of Season 1, right after David kills Goliath, which means it takes place during most of the events with the third quarter of the book of 1 Samuel from the Bible. David becomes one of the chief commanders of King Saul, but David is secretly the anointed king of Israel. Saul's deteriorating mental state becomes threatening to David while Saul's children scheme for position (with the exception of Jonathan, who has accepted that God has chosen David as the next king of Israel) and the Philistines prepare for war against Israel. It is interesting how the show alternates between leaning into the Grimdark aspects of life in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age and avoiding them. Like, constant warfare was a fact of life for a Mesopotamian king around 1000 BC. But the show also shows David as having passionate romantic love for Saul's daughter Michal and in the Bible, David ended up with at least eight wives that we know about (there were likely others) and an unnamed number of concubines. So late Bronze Age/early Iron Age monarchs were not likely to have been in the grips of fervent romantic love. Though based on the Psalms he wrote, David seems to have been a man who definitely was in touch with his emotions and quite possibly he would have passionately loved multiple women at the same time. Anyway, I enjoyed the show. While I am not an expert, I probably have a higher than average level of Old Testament knowledge. So when the show expanded on something from 1 Samuel (such as the role of Doeg, the murderous Edomite shepherd), I could see where they were coming from. Or the subplot where Jonathan falls in love with an Israelite woman since in the Bible, David took care of Jonathan's son, Mephibosheth, logically, Jonathan had a wife at some point. Related to that as Saul continues his descent, in a moment of rage in 1 Samuel, he calls Jonathan "the son of a perverse and rebellious woman" and the show has a subplot explaining how Saul came to see Queen Ahinoam as a "perverse and rebellious woman". So I enjoyed this and will definitely watch Season 3 when it comes along. That said, the opening battle with the AI generated battle scenes is still definitely the weakest part of the series, though. Overall Grade: A- Next up is Maul: Shadow Lord, which came out in 2026. And in my opinion, this was pretty good. I think he could call the plot Sith Noir. Maul, desiring vengeance against the Emperor for all the pain he has endured, has decided to rebuild his criminal syndicate (previously destroyed in the Clone Wars) and use it to bring down the Empire. Meanwhile, Captain Lawson, a detective on a minor world, is trying to rebuild his relationship with his teenage son and keep his career afloat. This becomes tricky when a pair of fugitive Jedi fleeing from the Inquisitors turn up on their world. But in the younger of the two Jedi, Maul sees a potential apprentice for himself, one he could corrupt to the dark side. The animation has improved by quantum leaps and bounds since the days of the Clone War show. The lighting and the shadows are excellent. Maul looks spooky and a little uncanny. The lightsaber fights are quick and fluid. No spoilers, but the final episode is absolutely excellent. I also think one of the best things about the Star Wars animation shows is how Maul's character has evolved from simply the cool swordsmen at the end of The Phantom Menace to a sympathetic yet still evil warrior-philosopher, a tragic figure whose every effort always contains the seeds of its own downfall. Overall Grade: A Next up is Emma, which came out in 2020. This is an excellent adaptation of the Jane Austen's novel. Good performances, good cinematography, and it captures the essence of the novel quite well and it's probably a must for Austen fans to see. I don't really have anything negative to say about it, say that it has the three seconds of unnecessary nudity that can be cut in cable broadcasts. Ironically, and quite amusingly, that three seconds of nudity is quite literally the only thing this movie has in common with Airplane!. Overall Grade: A Next up is No Packers, No Life, which came out in 2025. This was a fun documentary about a group of Japanese Green Bay Packers fans. Obviously, there are fairly large cultural and linguistic divides between the United States and Japan, so American football is not hugely popular in Japan. However, the Green Bay Packers are the only community owned team in the NFL to this day and so they're quite a bit more sympathetic than one that's owned by a faceless billionaire. Anyway, an American businessman goes to Japan and stumbles across a Japanese man wearing a Packers jersey at a bar. From there, he learns of a small club called the Japanese Packers Cheering Team that gathered to watch Packers games. This businessman in question happened to be from Wisconsin, so he befriended the Japanese Packers Cheering Team and invited them to Green Bay for a game. The invitation snowballed and so the entire club and their families arrived to watch the game. Sports fandom really isn't one of my interests, so it's always interesting to look at it from the outside. That said, this was an enjoyable documentary about cross-cultural communication at its best. Overall Grade: A Let's close out this episode with my favorite thing I saw in spring 2026, which was Project Hail Mary, which came out in 2026. This is another "science man solves space problem that saves the day with math and science", type science fiction adventure like The Martian, though some new twists on the formula. Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship with all the other crew dead and no memory of how he got there. Gradually, he partially remembers and works out that he is part of Project Hail Mary, a last ditch effort to stop Earth's sun from dimming due to an extremophile organism called the Astrophage. Only one other star in Earth's stellar neighborhood was showing no signs of Astrophage infection, so Grace's ship was sent there on a suicide mission to try and recover some means of defeating the Astrophage. While there, he encounters an alien ship with a sole survivor and he slowly works out how to communicate with the alien, who he dubs Rocky. It turns out Rocky's people sent him there on a mission to solve the Astrophage problem as well and together Grace and Rocky try to work out how to save their respective home worlds. Quite enjoyable and worth seeing. At the time I typed this in March of 2026, it was the highest-grossing movie of 2026 and I think it deserved that, though it did eventually get overtaken by Super Mario Galaxy. Overall Grade: A I suppose that was an eclectic range of movies, wasn't it? Interestingly, I actually saw three of them in theaters: Project Hail Mary, Super Mario Galaxy, and The Mandalorian and Grogu, so I went to the theater three times in three months. I think that's the most I've been to the movie theater in a single year in the entirety of the 2020s. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show interesting. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.  

Are you relying on ACX for all your audiobook opportunities — and wondering where the rest of the industry is hiding? In this livestream, we'll explore how to find audiobook narration work beyond ACX, including publishers, production houses, independent authors, online marketplaces, and direct-to-client strategies that successful narrators use every day.Whether you're a new narrator trying to break in or an experienced audiobook talent ready to expand your client list, this session will show you where the real opportunities are in 2025 and how to position yourself professionally to land consistent audiobook projects.

This week, two things in one episode.I sit down with Andrew Najberg, novelist, poet, editor at Symposium Magazine, co-owner and co-editor-in-chief of Aethon Books: Wicked House, college teacher, husband, father, and my Chattanooga neighbor. Andrew has five novels out, including The Mobius Door, Golotok, The Neverborn Thief, and Eat the Light, which dropped last month from Wicked House. He has two poetry collections out, with Paradise Falls forthcoming.What I wanted from this conversation was to understand how Andrew actually does the work. Day to day. Hour to hour. We talk about:* The book Andrew is writing right now, a horror comedy about a cottage and a Bugaboo, with themes about AI and user-generated material running underneath* The day he scrapped 125 to 150 pages of The Mobius Door because the structure wasn't working* The voice memos he records while driving his kids to school, then refines into prose in his office between teaching and editing* The daily wordcount rhythm that gets him 2,000 words a day while running a press publishing 40 titles a year* His reading recommendations for horror sci-fi* And his clear-eyed read of Amazon's algorithm, including the 25-review threshold, the two-week launch window, and the 90-day placement decision that determines a book's three-year lifeFirst, the news: The Working Publisher news digest. Five stories from the past week in publishing that share a single shape. Authors organized at a 91.3 percent claims rate in the Bartz settlement against Anthropic. Scott Turow and five major publishers filed a class action against Meta. Audible flipped ACX into a Spotify-style royalty pool. Draft2Digital introduced fees for the first time in the platform's history. And Independent Bookstore Day quietly celebrated its fourteenth year, with the indie bookstore count continuing its slow recovery.The pattern: the platform middlemen are tightening their grip on writers, and writers are starting to push back.Find Andrew's books on Amazon. Reviews are how Andrew's press depends on hitting the 25-review threshold that gets his next book in front of new readers.* Andrew Najberg on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Najberg/e/[author-page]* Symposium Magazine: https://symposiummagazine.com* Crossroads Publishing Group: https://crossroadspublishing.group* The Founding Voice cohort, for the first three writers signing a publishing engagement, is open through August 31, 2026. Get full access to The Descent at chadprevost.substack.com/subscribe

Hey there, hero!Simon Sinek recently reminded me of a story I'd heard for years: two, not three.Ben Prober, a successful shoe salesman, found that fewer choices made the decision about which shoes to buy easier.In the 1950s, he limited customers to two pairs of shoes at a time, taking away a pair if the customer wanted a third. This idea connects to a psychological principle: more choices can overwhelm us, making decisions slower and less satisfying.As a performer or writer, when you're building a character, think about this. Instead of layering on every possible choice or detail, focus first on just a few key traits or decisions.(As noted in the episode, this can also work for hamburger joints.)In this episode, we discuss narrowing down your options can help you connect with the role more quickly and easily. Too many choices can delay the crafting of the character, while fewer, stronger choices can make it feel sharper and more real.Have you heard a version of this story? Do you overwhelm your contacts sometimes with too many choices? Do you feel that way sometimes yourself? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/two-not-three/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

As a blogger, I hear about lots of projects to "solve debate", or "disagree better", or "map arguments". Often these are ACX grant applications. I always turn them down. They're well-intentioned, sophisticated, and doomed. I appreciate that Internet arguments usually don't go well, that there are lots of ways to improve them, and that this is a worthy cause. But I've also seen a dozen projects of this sort fail. Here's why I think yours will too: "Debate" almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest "solve debate" proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. But almost no real argument works that way. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-attempt-to-solve-debate-will

Hey there, hero!The question comes up often, and it shows up in various forms. This time, a client wrote this:“David…I cannot believe that in today's cultural environment, that there are authors who expect me to say the n-word. I can't understand why they'd even write it! How do I make it clear to this rights holder that they need to edit that word out of their book? Do you have a message in your message template that lets them know that I won't narrate their book unless they change that? Amazing.”Um…no, I don't and, more importantly, this is the wrong approach to take. It's not anyone's place to take an artist to task for creating art that may be uncomfortable to you.Let's answer the question, and let's discuss why my answer is what it is.How do you handle potentially triggering language in the books you narrate or the shows you appear in? If you're one of my author peeps, how do you handle writing language that is racist, violent, sexual or other uncomfortable categories? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/qa-should-you-actually-say-the-n-word-when-narrating/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

How can you supercharge your creativity in an age when AI is reshaping everything — including how we write, edit, and market our books? What does it look like to use AI as a genuine creative partner rather than a shortcut? And could professional speaking become an income stream that complements your writing career? With James Taylor. In the intro, Audible's new royalty model; New royalty model details [ACX; Kindlepreneur]; Public Speaking for Authors, Creatives and other Introverts; Why Indie Authors Should Ignore the Market's Mood and Focus on their Mission [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Lichfield Cathedral; This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How to define creativity and why it's becoming the most valuable skill in the age of AI The five stages of the creative process — and the stage most people skip Three types of creative purpose: play, self-expression, and legacy How James used multiple AI tools alongside human collaborators to write, edit, and market SuperCreativity Bulk book sales, industry-specific editions, and revenue models for nonfiction author-speakers Practical tips for authors who want to break into professional keynote speaking You can find James at JamesTaylor.me. Transcript of the interview with James Taylor Jo: James Taylor is a nonfiction author, professional speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who helps people unlock their creative potential. He hosts the SuperCreativity Podcast and his latest book is SuperCreativity: Augmenting Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Welcome to the show, James. James: Well, thank you for having me as a guest. I'm looking forward to this conversation today. Jo: It's going to be really good. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. James: Well, today I'm a professional keynote speaker, so I deliver about fifty to a hundred keynotes per year in twenty-five-plus countries. Primarily I speak on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Go back into my deepest, darkest history—I actually used to manage rock stars. That was my old job. I used to be in the music industry for many, many years. I worked with members of The Rolling Stones, and for our listeners in the UK, I managed bands like Deacon Blue. Then I went to the dark side. In 2010, I moved to California to work in Silicon Valley, to work in the world of tech. That got me involved in artificial intelligence. Right about 2017, I was speaking at an event in San Francisco and someone came up to me and said, “You realise you could probably speak for a living, you could do this for a living.” So I thought, well, how does that work? And he told me. Then I embarked on the career that I have today, which is primarily as a speaker, with writing now coming a bit more to the fore. Jo: Wow, I remember Deacon Blue. James: Yes. Jo: “Dignity.” That's crazy. Very, very cool backstory there, but we'll come back to the career side of things. Let's get into super creativity, because my listeners are certainly creatives. Most of the listeners will have a book either on the way or they might even have lots of books. So we all do want to be super creative. How do you define creativity, and why is it important to keep focusing on this even if we do identify that way? James: For me, creativity is about bringing new ideas to the mind. Innovation is about bringing new ideas to the world, but without creativity, there is no innovation. So creativity is really the engine of innovation. Whether that is designing new products, new services, or creating new works of art and new books. The reason that creativity is becoming more important is because of what we're seeing right now in terms of artificial intelligence. AI is going to replace a lot of the non-creative tasks that we currently do in our jobs. If you look at things like the World Economic Forum, there was recently a study with a thousand global business leaders, and work from companies like LinkedIn—they all highlight that creativity is going to be one of the foremost important soft skills for this new future. So creativity, strangely, will actually become more important, not less important, as we go ahead. That's the creativity side. Probably for many of the listeners here, they'll consider themselves to be creative. That is not the norm. As I mentioned, I speak in about twenty-five countries a year, and if I ask the audiences—primarily corporate audiences—to put their hands up if they consider themselves to be creative, only between ten to forty per cent of the audience will raise their hands. So part of my job is to show them why they are more creative than they think they are and why we're all born with this creative potential. Then moving into the super creativity side, it's really to show them how they can augment that creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or machines—things like artificial intelligence. So SuperCreativity, the book that I've written and the speeches I give on it, is really about how we can augment our individual creativity by collaborating more deeply with other people or artificial intelligence. For me, that's been the thing I've been fascinated by for the past few years, and probably for many of our listeners who are now using AI in their writing, their researching, and their marketing of their books, they're probably getting into this space as well. I really wanted to dive into that—both the collaboration with other people and with machines and AI. Jo: In terms of the super creativity then, do you have any practices or ideas? Before we get into collaboration, many of us authors work alone—and of course we can come back to the AI stuff in a minute—but in terms of super creativity, are there ways that we can even supercharge what we do already? Then, of course there are people listening who might not feel creative. So give us a few tips on how we can potentially change our mindset or become even more creative. James: In the book I talk about what I call the eight Ps of super creativity, which are purpose, personality, practice, people, process, place, product, and persuasion. Persuasion is really the marketing piece at the end. Probably the one that could be most useful to many listeners today is the practice piece—the practice or the process side of things. For many of us, what that usually consists of is just having some type of daily creative practice. Different people do it in different ways. Many of your listeners will know the works of people like Julia Cameron—the morning pages style of having some type of daily practice. Other people do it in slightly different ways. The process bit is really interesting. I talk about this creative process that we all have, and I talk about these five stages of the creative process. The first stage, let's say if we're writing a book, is really that preparation stage. That is usually the stage where we are trying to absorb as much information as possible about the thing that we're going to be writing about. The topic, if it's nonfiction, or going to the places, visiting the scenes that we're going to set certain things within for the book. So that preparation stage is really about absorbing as much information as possible from the outside. It's not going to look very creative. We're just absorbing at that stage. Now the mistake that a lot of people tend to make is they immediately try to jump from that preparation stage to looking to generate ideas. But what all the studies show us is we should spend a little bit of time in what we call the incubation stage. This is where it's often very useful if we've done some research, that we put things to one side for a little while, maybe a few weeks, move on to another project, think about something completely different. Your brain will continue to work in the background. Your unconscious brain will work on that content you've been absorbing. Then what often happens as a result of that is we come to this third stage, which is that insight stage—that aha moment. That happens for various different reasons and you can seed that in slightly different ways so you're more likely to get inspiration in your day-to-day work. Then as we know—as you are a writer of many, many books—many people think, “Well, that's it. I've done it. The idea for that book or that chapter has come to me.” That is really just the first five per cent of the process. The next stage is where we look at all the different ideas we have and decide which ones we want to pursue, which ones are going to make the grade. This is what we call the evaluation stage. Once we've done that, we move to that final stage, which is the elaboration stage. If it's a startup, this is when you're building your minimum viable product. As a writer, this is where you're actually doing the work, putting those words out onto the page. It's a very iterative process, so it's not necessarily linear. You'll go back and forth. Even as you're getting input from readers and audiences in that last stage, that is then giving you the material to move back to the preparation stage and think, “Oh, I wonder if this next book in this series, maybe I go in a slightly different direction with this character.” So each of those different stages, you can do different things to increase your levels of creativity. Jo: I love all of that, but can we go back to purpose? Because you mentioned that as one of the Ps and I think this is something that a lot of us need. As we are recording this in April 2026, the world is an interesting place. There are lots of things going on that have people worried. Well, we are not talking about politics, but I think one of the things that people struggle with is, what's the point in writing this story, for example, or what's the point in trying to get my words out there when things are difficult? I feel like coming back to purpose is perhaps the thing that helps people even take it into the process as you were talking about. And then of course, just from a practical angle— Is purpose about making money or reaching people? So maybe you could talk about the purpose side of things. James: Yes. So I talk about three different purposes, and it's not that there's just one that predominates, but usually there's one that maybe predominates on different projects. The first one is creativity as play. It's what we're basically, as humans, hardwired to do—this instinctive joy that we get just for creating for its own sake. There's nothing that really sits beyond that. We just have fun. We find pleasure in creating something. That could be a musician creating a piece of music, a sculptor creating a sculpture, an entrepreneur creating a new business or product or service. There's just this sense of play. One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of being childlike, not childish. If you look at children, you see this very instinctively. If you see a three-year-old or a five-year-old, you give them some crayons and they will just naturally create. That's part of who they are and it's pretty abstract. Then what happens is they go to school and they're taught useful conventions—”this is how you should do it.” You even see their work start to change. You start to see them move from abstract paintings to more formal structures. Then you get your peer group, then you go to college or university and the world of work, and you're taught all these useful conventions. That's fine, but as adults, it is our responsibility to become what we call post-conventional, where we see these conventions as a useful signpost but we're willing to challenge them. We're willing to have a playfulness in what we do. So the first one is just this hardwired thing—creativity as play. The second one, and this is maybe for a lot of your listeners the reason that they are writers, is self-expression. It's a way of placing something out into the world. I was actually just in France recently, and I was talking to a young visual artist, a painter from Hungary, and she had to go up and give a speech. She really hated doing it. She was having to talk about her work and she was really uncomfortable. I could see the discomfort and my heart went out for her, because that is not the way she primarily expresses herself. She expresses herself through her art form, which is painting. For many of us, we might struggle to get on a stage, but we can express ourselves in the written word. We have something we want to say, a position we want to have, and we want to express that and get that out into the world. The final one is just this idea of legacy. That is not going to be for everyone. I can tell you, for me personally, legacy is not the reason that I write and do a lot of the stuff that I do. Maybe that changes—maybe as we get a bit older, we want to leave a body of work. So those are the three main purposes that we tend to see. Then you mentioned the financial side of what we do as well. This starts to come into that self-expression, because we need to be able to get people to buy our books or download our books and read our books in order to give us the ability to write new works and create new things. The financial side is an important component of it, but it is not the only one. I think there's a great question any writer should ask themselves. One of the first questions that I asked myself as a relatively new nonfiction writer is: why am I writing this book? What is the purpose of this book? For me, primarily it is a form of self-expression, and then you have to go, “Well, that's fine, but I also need it to have some type of financial basis for it.” It doesn't need to be the main driver of my income, but I need to have some type of revenue model. I'm happy to talk about revenue models, because probably the type of revenue model that I have as a writer is going to be different from other listeners. I tend to focus more on bulk selling of books rather than individual selling of books. Jo: Yes, I definitely want to come back to revenue models and business, but a few other things first. I want to circle back to collaboration, because I've certainly co-written with some humans, and I know a lot of listeners either have co-written or collaborated with other humans—and some of it works and some of it doesn't. You have some great information on human-plus-human creativity and collaboration. So maybe you could give us some tips on how we can be more effective collaborators with other humans. James: So there's a whole section about this idea of creative pairs. Often if you look at great creative work or innovative companies, very often when you strip it all back, you'll find at the core lots and lots of creative pairings. That is usually two different but complementary personalities who are willing to develop and challenge and improve each other's ideas. We think of Jobs and Wozniak in the world of business, or Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. For authors, often that relationship is the work with their editor. There was a documentary I saw—I think it was a New Yorker documentary that came out a while ago—talking with a writer of history books about his relationship with his editor. It was a really beautiful relationship. These were two very different personalities, but what worked was the fact that they were different. A core component of having these creative pairings is a sense of trust—or what some people today would call psychological safety—that you are willing to challenge someone's ideas, but in a space of trust. The Germans have a great phrase for it. In English it translates as “someone to steal horses with,” which I love. Hopefully our listeners have that person where you can go to them and say, “I had this idea for a book or a chapter or a character,” and that person is a “yes, and.” Like, “Yes, and have you thought about doing it this way?” or “What would happen if you did this?” They stress test your ideas. They make your ideas better. For many of us, maybe it's our husbands or wives, our partners. Some of us are lucky enough to have editors. When I started rewriting this latest book, I actually had someone like that—a human, not an AI—that I worked with, especially on taking all these random thoughts and ideas I've been expressing in keynotes and putting them into more of a book form. The format and the structures that we use for telling stories in a speech are quite different from the structure that we would use for a nonfiction book. I didn't have as much experience there, so I wanted someone who could say, “Have you thought about structuring it this way?” or “This is a great story arc you might want to think about.” So I don't know, for you, who is your creative pairing? Who is your “someone to steal horses with”? Jo: Well, it's funny. I really think since the arrival of Claude Opus 4.6, it is absolutely Claude. James: Yes, yes. Jo: All the way. I mean, so we could come onto that next in terms of how AI has changed, because I do still work with a professional editor for both fiction and nonfiction, but it is very much in the “make my finished work better” stage. It is not in the exploratory phase. I find particularly the latest reasoning models to just be fantastic at this. And my Claude is not sycophantic. The Opus 4.6—I'm sure you've been using it too—it just doesn't behave in the way that a lot of people think these AIs did. They did behave like that, and now it's changed. So let's talk about that. What are your thoughts on collaborating more effectively with AI tools, especially as they become more and more powerful? As we record this, Claude Mythos has not come out, but it's certainly rumoured to arrive. I'm pretty excited. James: So because I've been doing this AI thing for a little while, it's given me the ability to experiment with things—the early versions of what many people are using today. I'll give you an example. Even before I started writing the book, I decided to write a book proposal. Even though I could pretty much sense I wanted to independently publish this book through my own publishing company, I thought it's a good practice to put it down into a proposal form, even though I don't go to a traditional publisher or a hybrid publisher. One of the things I did within that was get a sense of who my ideal readers are. I used a very early version—this was a few years ago—of an IBM AI tool, creating what we call a psychometric map of my ideal reader. This basically tells me, over about seventy-two different factors, how this person thinks, how they feel, what their value system is, very broadly for my ideal reader. I pulled in different sources. I knew the kind of magazines and books they were reading and what their general worldview was. So I created this—going one step beyond just creating your ideal reader to really understanding their psychometrics. I do this in my keynotes too. Before I ever give a keynote or an important pitch or a presentation, I use AI to analyse the psychometrics of the audience I'm going to be speaking to. This might tell me, for example, this audience values humour a little bit more, or this audience values a bit more practicality so they want actionable next steps, or this audience is going to be a little bit authority-challenging so they're going to push back. So even in those very early stages, just starting to think about the book—who was I writing this book for, what was the purpose of the book—I was using AI to understand the psychometrics of my absolutely perfect, ideal reader. I gave her a name. It was a female reader. There was someone similar to her that I already knew. Probably for some of your listeners, they do this instinctively anyway. They maybe have a person or a few different people they think of in their head. Then from that stage, because I've been delivering lots and lots of keynotes—and this may be an important distinction in the way that I have decided to write books as opposed to how other people write books—my family were all jazz musicians. The difference between a rock musician or a pop musician and a jazz musician is this: a rock or pop musician will go into the studio, create this opus, this work, and then tour that for the next two years. A jazz musician, on the other hand, goes out and performs the songs and the things from the album that they're eventually going to create hundreds of times, thousands of times, to find out what works with audiences, and then they go into the studio and record the stuff that works best. So I created a book more like a jazz musician. I'd delivered keynote versions of the book hundreds of times before I ever decided to actually write the book. So it had been stress-tested with real people to a certain extent. Then, getting into it, I thought—well, what works as a keynote is not necessarily going to work as a structure for a book. So what I did was start using ChatGPT models at that point to think about the structural edit of the book. What was the structure going to be? What was great is you can basically feed it every single keynote you've given over the years, all the notes, everything you've done, and it could start to give me something to riff with and really get into thinking about how I was going to create this. I was using it a little like that creative pairing we spoke about earlier. Then once I'd done that—so I've now got an idea of a structural edit essentially—I then go back and speak to some humans about it. “What do you think about this?” “What do you think about that?” And try some things out over dinner conversations. “I'm thinking about doing this—what do you think?” Then once I did that, I just did the thing that I really didn't want to do, but I guess you absolutely have to do: sit in a seat for multiple weeks and just get that crappy first draft done. That was just me writing, from my voice, in my way of doing things. Every so often I would use an AI to research a particular thing, but I didn't want to slow down the pace too much. I was focused on getting that word count done. Once I had the first draft, I then brought the AI back in. In this case, I was still using OpenAI at this stage, to act more like an editor. To tell me what was weak about the book. At this point I was starting to give it the overall framing. What was weak, what chapters needed to be improved. I then went back, started reworking each of the chapters, and worked chapter by chapter using that AI as a sparring partner. But once again, the AI is not really writing my words for me. It's maybe saying, “This part could be said better. You might want to think about doing it this way,” or “You are missing a really powerful case study or example here,” or at the very end of each chapter, I have actionable next steps, and “You're missing some things here.” So I've gone through that entire process of writing, and now I'm essentially at the second draft. At this point, what I'm doing is using another AI tool—Claude, in this case—to have a different perspective on it. I gave it the work. I mentioned a couple of editors that I really respect and different writers I respect and said, “I'm going to create a virtual beta readers group. Give me feedback on this now.” For someone that's listening to this, and we're recording this in April 2026, here's some good news for you. There are now a bunch of tools out there that use AI swarms, as we call them. You can basically feed it your book and it will create synthetic readers—thousands and thousands of synthetic readers that read your kind of style of book—and it will then give you feedback from these synthetic readers. Essentially, I was just doing an early version of that. So I got the feedback from the synthetic readers, the AI readers, and then reworked a little bit. Some of the stuff I just decided not to do because it didn't align with what I was trying to say in the book. Then the next stage was I had a beta reader group of about thirty human beta readers—my ideal readers. I sent the book to them, they gave me feedback. I then used AI to give me an overview report of all their feedback, and then I was able to go back into reworking the book. That's still really just draft three of the book, not the final book at this stage. But just to give everyone a sense of opening up the process: you could see how the human and machine were working together. Jo: Yes, I love that. I also often say to people who are speakers first that you can, if you have recordings of your talks or if you use your slide decks to record them as MP3s and then just use that transcript as the basis of a draft. Obviously it's not the book or a chapter, but it can actually preserve your voice—your speaking voice—which I think can be really effective for speakers. I like your multi-step process there. And then of course, if you have audience avatars in AI, that can help you design your book marketing. So take this into book marketing and how you're doing that. James: So I still decided to go old school with a human editor—a book editor that someone had recommended to me. I used that human book editor just to go through the book. At that point we're talking about style, some stylistic things that we wanted to do, and they can pick up other things as well. So I've got that book, and then I'm obviously starting to use AI to understand what tags, what kind of copy do I want to have in terms of putting it onto Amazon, putting it onto IngramSpark, and all these other platforms I want to put it out into. I'm using Claude here in particular—and with Claude, you have something called Cowork. It wasn't quite fully happening at that point, but there were early versions of it and Claude Code—to almost start working with and creating a virtual marketing team. I give it the book and then they could start thinking about: what is the marketing strategy for this book? What does the campaign look like? What are the things that we need to do? That was then starting to break it down. We're now three months out or so before the book is due to get released, and I'm starting to deploy that particular campaign. So for example, I'm on a podcast right now, and we try different versions. We have a human going out and reaching out to potential shows for me to be a guest on, but I also have an agent. There's also one going out and finding and researching podcasts and reaching out to those podcast hosts to have me as a potential guest. So they're doing some of the tactical work there at the same time. One mistake I made—and I don't know if you've experienced this as well—if I was to go back, one thing I would do differently is this: I decided to record the audiobook version after the physical book was already committed and ready to go out. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: And I noticed so many small errors or things I would change after having spent two days in a studio recording the voice for the entire book—changes I would have made. This is something other people did ask me: why are you not using ElevenLabs or an AI clone of your voice to read the script? There are some things I feel quite personal about, and my voice is one of those things. As a professional keynote speaker, I decided I wanted to keep that and have it in there. So it's going to be different for everyone which things they decide to offload to AI, which things they decide to give to a human member of their team, and what they decide to keep to themselves. Jo: Yes, I mean, I human-record my nonfiction, but I have an AI voice clone with ElevenLabs for my fiction now. But obviously, for people listening, you can't put an ElevenLabs voice-cloned audiobook on Audible, and a lot of your sales will be on Audible, especially for a book like this. So I think that's also important. I agree with you on doing the audio edit. There's always things you want to change. But as you mentioned, you're self-publishing this, so you can just go in and change your files. James: Yes, and that was the other reason, and this was part of the marketing—now we're moving into the marketing and the business model behind the book. For me, the book doesn't have to be a financial driver in its own sense. The way that I sell books, and usually people like myself—professional speakers—is we bulk sell books to our clients. Let's say I'm speaking at four different events this month. Each has about a thousand people at them. Those organisers will buy, say, a thousand copies of the book. So at the end of that month, you might have sold four thousand copies—not individual copies. Anything that sells on Amazon or in other places is almost like a positioning piece. Obviously you want people to buy the book and learn things from the book, but in terms of the distribution model, it's slightly different because I'm primarily selling through bulk sales. Now, here's a little twist you can do on this, and this is a decision I made even before we released this version of the book. I speak to lots of different industries. There was a speaker and author—I've forgotten his name now, I think he was from Florida—and what he decided to do was to write a slightly different version of his main book every year, but for a different industry. So what this allows him to do is, let's say in my case, I'm doing a version of the SuperCreativity book just for legal professionals because I speak to a lot of law firms and legal groups. I've already started working on a version of the book which is a little bit more attuned to that audience. As a speaker, it allows me to go to all these law firms and legal associations and bar associations and say, “Hey, I've just written the book on creativity and artificial intelligence for the legal industry.” That makes you a very bookable proposition for a client. And then obviously you can sell books from that as well. And that's before we get into the foreign language versions. That's just a model that happens to work pretty well for my part of the industry, but obviously it's going to be very different for other types of authors. Jo: No, I think that's great. For nonfiction authors, as you say, there are different revenue models. Your income, I guess, would be what, eighty, ninety per cent speaking revenue? Or do you have other things as well? James: Yes, primarily it's the keynote speaking, and anything that comes from the back of that. Sometimes it's boardroom advisory work that I do as well. But primarily it's the speaking side. So really the book is just the simplest form to get my ideas out and the most affordable form. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: Because the other thing is, you want as many people getting your ideas as possible, and there is no better, more affordable way of getting someone's ideas out there than in the form of a book. I think it's just the most unbelievable transmitter of knowledge—a book. That's why I love to write the book as well. A lot of my friends say, “Listen, books are old hat. You don't need to do a book any more. You can do these other things, other forms, online courses.” I've done lots of online courses in the past and membership sites and all those things, but there's just something that is great about a book—to be able to summarise your ideas at a particular point in time. It's also a great transmitter of value to other people. And it is affordable. Any book, someone can download a book on Audible or wherever they want—that's just an affordable way of absorbing that content. Jo: Yes. Well, of course we are all fans of books here. I do speak—I don't tend to do keynote speaking. I do more content speaking at conferences. For people listening, keynote speaking is where you tend to get the higher revenue. So if people listening have books already—let's say they have nonfiction books or even fiction books that could be turned somehow into different topics—if people want to get booked for speaking gigs, preferably ones that pay— How would you recommend authors think about moving into speaking if that's something they want to do? James: So obviously it's much easier for nonfiction authors to do that. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was speaking at an event last week in New York for L'Oréal, the hair care and cosmetics company. They had six different speakers. One of them was a speaker on macroeconomics and geopolitics. Another was an expert on communications. Another was an expert on AI. Another was an expert on storytelling. So you have to think: does my topic have value for that type of audience—that corporate audience? An easy way of finding that is if you just go onto any of the speaker bureau websites, type in “speaker bureaus,” look for the speaker bureaus, and then type in your topic area—emotional intelligence or whatever the topic area is—and look at the other speakers. See if there is obviously a number of speakers talking on this area. Importantly, look at how busy they are and look at their fee levels as well. I did an online summit a few years ago called the International Speakers Summit, where I interviewed a hundred and fifty of the world's best professional keynote speakers. I interviewed Sally Hogshead, who's an author and a speaker, and she said to me, “James, you're going out speaking about creativity, but if you just twisted it a little bit and spoke more in terms of innovation rather than creativity, you would earn an extra five thousand dollars per keynote.” So creativity and innovation—an extra five thousand dollars. That's just a simple thing that, as you get to understand the industry, you learn. Then once you do that, it's like any business—you have to treat it like a business, obviously. What makes someone a great storyteller on stages is not the same as what makes a great storyteller on the written word. So depending on where you're at, you might need certain training and skills development. If you are listening to this from America, there are things like the National Speakers Association, the NSA. If you're living in the UK, the Professional Speakers Association. These are great ways just to develop your skill set and learn from other professional speakers. Here's the good news, I didn't know anything about professional speaking until 2017–18, and it was only from having a conversation with someone who said, “Listen, you have some original thoughts. You can get paid to speak about this on stage.” Then I spent the next year really researching and understanding and looking at how to do it and creating a minimum viable product—a speech—that was a very short period of time, a year. Most of the listeners here have gone through that process of writing a book, which takes many, many months. So you have the stamina to do this type of work. You just need to find out where you fit. I thought I was going to be a speaker in marketing. I thought that was going to be my thing. And it turns out that's not what the market wanted from me. They wanted me to talk about creativity and artificial intelligence. So you have to listen to the market, like you have to listen to your readers. Jo: Yes, I think that's really interesting. I was also a member of the PSA here, and I learned in Australia with the NSAA as it was. James: Yes. Jo: And that thing about who you speak to—I mainly speak to author conferences, who, I just want to be frank, don't pay very well, if at all. So exactly what you said there— If you want to be a highly paid speaker, you have to pick the audience who's going to pay, as well as a topic that works with them. It is a very different thing to writing a book, I think. James: It is a different model. This is what was interesting when I interviewed those hundred and fifty professional speakers—the thing that came back loud and clear is there is a model to suit everyone. Jo: Mm. James: So the model that works for me—getting paid high fees to go and travel around the world, speaking on stages to primarily corporate audiences—that is not the only model. There is another model, which is called the “sell from the stage” model, where you maybe don't get paid anything to go and speak on the stage, or very little, but what you're doing is you're selling your consulting, your online course, your books, your other products from the back of the stage. That's another model as well. I have friends who have young families and they are writers and they don't want to schlep on planes like I do. I know one speaker in particular who never leaves his own city. He is a very successful professional speaker. He happens to live in Orlando, Florida, which is one of the busiest cities for conferences. So literally, he's home with his kids every night. He gets to do all this cool stuff he wants. He never has to step on a plane if he doesn't want to. That just shows you the range. I remember I once interviewed a person whose title was a Buddhist monk, French speaker, and author. He figured out he could live very affordably by living in Thailand. So he lives in Thailand for part of the year and he's very into meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and writing. He figured out he only had to give two keynotes per year to pay for his entire lifestyle. That was it. So that gives him a lot of freedom. He does those two corporate keynotes a year and for the rest of the year he's doing his yoga, his meditation, his writing, and surfboarding, whatever he's into as well. So you can see there's a whole range of different ways you can design that life. Jo: Yes, we talk a lot about definition of success and it's great to hear those different examples. So before we finish up, I just want to come back to your journey into the writing side, into books and self-publishing. We all understand, me and the listeners, how hard it is to write a book and also to market a book, but we've got the bug. So we wonder: how much have you got the bug? Do you plan on doing more writing, more books, or do you still want to lean more heavily into speaking? James: Primarily the income for me will still come from speaking. I remember listening to Elizabeth Gilbert once when she talked about her writing. She said she always wanted to have other things, so she never had to push onto her writing that it had to be the income stream for her. If it was successful, great, that's fantastic. So I have a little bit of a similar view to that. In terms of my own writing, I've got about five different nonfiction book ideas I'm now looking at. Some of them relate to speeches that I already do. Some don't. I'm looking at different versions of the SuperCreativity book, so there'll be other versions coming out—different industries, different languages. That gives you a few years of work. The other side that I want to develop is the fiction writing side. I'm already starting to work on a fiction book at the moment—a little bit like this idea of one for them, one for me. Jo: Mm-hmm. James: So one for them is for the corporate audience, that world that I live in, and the other one is for me, for my own creativity. My hope—and I don't know, maybe we need to speak in a year's time when I've written and published it—is that by doing the fiction side, it will make me a better storyteller on stages as well for my corporate audience. It will help me understand story arcs, slightly different ways of expressing stories, building emotion, building the anti-hero characters within a book, for example. So I'm hoping that they both feed off each other. But we will see. Jo: Yes, we will. All the best with that. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? James: The easiest place to go is JamesTaylor.me, and you can find the book, which is called SuperCreativity, there. Or just go to wherever you buy your books—your local independent bookstore—and get a copy of SuperCreativity. The audiobook may already be out by the time you're listening to this as well. If you want to learn a little bit more, we also have a podcast called the SuperCreativity Podcast, where I interview lots of wonderful guests talking about this area of super creativity. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, James. That was brilliant. James: Thank you, Joanna. Thanks for having me as a guest on the show.The post SuperCreativity And KeyNote Speaking With A Non-Fiction Book With James Taylor first appeared on The Creative Penn.

If you're an indie writer paying attention to what's happening in publishing right now — this week was a tell. Three stories landed inside seven days. Each one pointed at the same answer.Episode 5 of The Difficulty — the first publishing-news episode in the new "How" lane. This week:— Audible's ACX royalty model is being discontinued. Authors must enroll in the new pooled, consumption-based model by year-end. Brandon Sanderson called this out back in 2024; Dave Chesson at Kindlepreneur is openly skeptical. Same playbook Spotify ran for music and KU ran for ebooks. Now it's audiobooks.— Publishing.com hit with a $1.5M FTC settlement — alleged misleading income claims and undisclosed incentivized testimonials. The publishing industry is being told publicly that some of the loudest "publish-your-book-and-get-rich" programs were misleading. Personal aside: I came close to laying out $6K to one of these a few years back. I'm glad I didn't.— Inkers Con runs May 30 – June 12 ($250, fully online). Working authors learning from each other in real time. Worth knowing about even if you don't go.The throughline: in a week where platforms got less predictable AND shady programs got FTC'd, the answer was the same answer indie writers have been circling for a decade. Direct audience. Real community. Owned email list. Less platform dependency.I share what I'm doing about it in real time — including how the Goodreads giveaway for Iris Blackwood pulled nearly 3,000 entrants, and the moment I almost didn't release Iris #1 as an ebook (and what changed my mind).—GO DEEPERFriday's Working Publisher Substack post extends this episode with sources and analysis:→ chadprevost.substack.com — search "The Free Lunch Is Ending"—CHAPTERSThree stories, same answerAudible's royalty pivotPublishing.com's FTC settlementThe $6K I almost spentInkers Con (May 30 – June 12)The throughline — direct audienceIris Blackwood anecdote — the ebook decisionClosing—FREE — THE DIFFICULTY FIELD GUIDEEight difficulties every working writer faces, and what to ask when each one shows up.→ crossroadspublishing.group/assets/pdfs/The_Difficulty_Field_Guide.pdf—WHERE TO FIND MESubstack — The Working Publisher (Fridays) + new essays Wednesdays + weekend essay readings Saturdays→ chadprevost.substack.comThe Difficulty — Monday (the why), Thursday (the how), Saturday (essay readings) — wherever you listen to podcasts→ chadprevost.com/the-difficultyCrossroads Publishing Group — publishing services, IF/THEN Books, Iris Blackwood mystery series→ crossroadspublishing.groupInkers Con:→ inkerscon.com/2026-digital-conference—The difficulty in life is the choice. Get full access to The Descent at chadprevost.substack.com/subscribe

Hey there, hero!Everybody loves baseball. And the language of baseball is part of cultures around the world.And over the course of time, I've settled on one question when I'm trying to serve a client, a peer, an affiliate, a family member or just a friend who needs my support.More often than not, they react with surprise and delight, and proceed to answer the question with depth and detail.They love this baseball-inspired request. Watch or listen to this episode to hear this simple question, and see if some version of it might work for you.(And for those of you in, say, the UK or India or Australia…I'm sure you can create a futbol or cricket equivalent.)What do you use when you want to find out how your help is needed? How do you dig deep into someone's needs when they ask for help? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/the-one-question-you-can-ask-that-just-might-make-someone-love-you/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Audible is rolling out a new ACX royalty model, and indie authors need to understand what's changing. We'll cover the new audiobook royalty rates, concerns around pooled payouts, Spotify for Authors distribution terms, IngramSpark metadata research, AI audiobook tools, and author scams. Stay informed before you make your next publishing move. Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) Audible's New Royalty Model Screws Authors - https://open.substack.com/pub/selfpub/p/audiblegate2?r=1nx44v&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true ACX: Audible's New Royalty Model - https://help.acx.com/s/article/audible-s-new-royalty-model Spotify for Authors Opt-In Audiobook Distribution Terms - https://www.spotify.com/us/legal/spotify-for-authors-opt-in-distribution-terms/  IngramSpark: Study Finds Improved Metadata Could Boost Sales by Up to 9%* - https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/study-finds-improved-metadata-could-boost-sales-by-up-to-9-percent  Rapid-Fire Newsflash Apple Books for Authors - https://authors.apple.com Spoken - https://spoken.press Spoken: Become a Producer - https://www.spoken.press/producers GeniusLink - https://DaleLinks.com/Genius (affiliate link)  StoryVox (beta) - https://storyvox.app/ D2D's Self-Publishing Insiders: Scammers are Coming for You! - https://www.youtube.com/live/2EPOnKdNNDY?si=VLm5hPmpPA1httTl This Scam Could Cost Authors Real Money - https://youtu.be/pEbnC9PRGgw?si=RUNcHKkoekTMvgf-  Electric Lit: Author AI Scams Bingo - https://electricliterature.com/author-ai-scams-bingo/   Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp  Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships  Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord  Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks  Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

Hey there, hero!The title of this podcast episode comes from the words of author Michelle Rozen (not Rozer, as I misspoke at the beginning of the podcast), who wrote The 6%, a book on high achievers.And when I heard it, it struck me that we kinda face this dilemma all. the. time. We can worry that no one wants to see or hear or read what we've created.And that can stop the effort to create…dead in its tracks.How do you approach the act of creation? With an eye toward whether people will pay any attention at all? Or from the learning we experience, good or bad, from simply giving it a go? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/do-not-fear-rejection-instead-fear-regret/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

How is the German market different to English speaking markets, and why might it be worth looking into translation? What are the best ways to translate, self-publish and market your books in German? With Skye MacKinnon. In the intro, thoughts on feeling empty after a book, and the benefits of SubStack for authors [Stark Reflections; Wish I'd Known Then]; AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinars 16 and 23 May. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why the German-speaking market is much bigger than just Germany, and which genres sell best there Title protection laws, the Impressum, and translator copyright How to find and vet human translators, and what a quality translation actually costs The current state of AI translation for fiction, and why quality assurance passes are essential Distribution decisions: the Tolino Alliance, Skoobe, libraries, and why IngramSpark doesn't work in Germany Marketing in German: BookDeals, LovelyBooks, ads, BookTok, and why pre-orders matter even more You can find Skye SkyeMacKinnon.com and her children's books at IslaWynter.com. Transcript of the interview with Skye MacKinnon Jo: Skye MacKinnon is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of over 70 books across romance and children's books under multiple pen names, most of which are also available in German, which is her bestselling market. Her latest book for authors is Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Publish and Market Your Books. Welcome, Skye. Skye: Hi. Thank you so much for having me. Jo: This is such an interesting topic. But first up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Skye: I've always loved writing, but I was always told, “Well, you can't be an author. Get a proper job.” So I became a journalist and did that for a few years, but there was always that love of creative writing. At some point when I was getting more active on social media, I was following some other indie authors and realised they're just like me. They're not special people. I had always pictured authors as these mythical beings high up above the rest of us. That gave me the courage to put out my own book. I self-published from the start, never even looked into trad publishing, and that was in 2017. I was really lucky because my first series totally hit it off. I was able to quit my job a year later and I have been a full-time author ever since. I started with romance and then, by accident, got into children's books. Which has been great fun. I don't even have children myself, but it's just that palette cleanser in between. Writing about cute animals and unicorns and just bringing some fun into everything. Nowadays I have about five or six pen names, depending on how you count, across genres, although most of it is romance, and that's my bread and butter really. Jo: Yes, I'm certainly one of those people who wish I could write romance. It always just seems to be the most profitable market in any language, I guess. Let's get into the book. It's a fantastic book. I've been through it myself. It's really packed full of everything you need, so we can't cover everything. Let's start by considering the German language in general. Why is German a good language market to consider expanding into? And for anyone who might not realise, why is it more than Germany? Skye: Well, Germans love to read, and depending on the statistic that you look at, they're generally seen as the third largest book market in the world after English and Mandarin Chinese. So it's a huge market, even though you think of Germany as a small little country in Europe. As you said, it's much more than Germany. Yes, you've got about 83 million people in Germany, but then you've also got Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, and even Italy. So if you look at the whole footprint on the map, it is much bigger than just the one country. A lot of young people there still read and go to bookshops. There's a huge bookshop culture. You will find, if you go to a high street there, way more bookshops than you do here in the UK, for example. There's demand for quality and for really gorgeous books. They have been way ahead of the curve when it comes to special editions and sprayed edges, and they also like translations. I found one statistic where about two thirds of all newly released titles in German are actual translations. Readers are used to translations, but until a few years ago it was all trad-published translations. So this transition is coming now. It's coming very, very fast, especially with AI. They generally are very open to translations as long as the quality is there. Jo: So what about specific genres then? Obviously we mentioned romance there, and romance is not just one genre anymore. Whatever they're writing— How can somebody tell if it's worth expanding into German? How do we do this? It takes time and effort and money, potentially. Skye: It can take a lot of money, so it is worth doing research. There's one easy way, which is just looking at your current sales and looking at how many books you're selling in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the moment in English. That can give you an indication of which of your books might be already quite popular there. Sometimes it's quite surprising. A lot of my books sell very differently in German than they do in English. I've got one series that did okay in English, and I almost didn't translate it. The German version is, I think, my second bestselling series in German and has completely surprised me. So sometimes it's worth just experimenting a bit. Otherwise, obviously as you said, romance is doing really well. There are a few surprises though. I had a chat with Draft2Digital and they gave me lots of information from their statistics, and they said about 40% of all the western title sales on Draft2Digital are actually in Germany, which is just a huge percentage. Jo: In English? Skye: Across languages. Jo: Mm-hmm. Skye: Germans, to be fair, they love their westerns. My dad in Germany, he has been watching westerns for I don't know how many decades. It is one of those things that is just really popular there. Another thing is anything that is set in other countries and really has the location as almost like a character. There's lots of Cornwall, Scotland, different islands, but also mountains and cities. So if your book is set in, even in New York City, if it has a clear setting—if it's not just that it could be any city—then that's a good one to think about translating. In general, most genres can do well. There's a few where you have to be a bit careful. Second World War books, for example. If you have a book that portrays every single German as a Nazi and as evil, it might not do as well in Germany. So some common sense when it comes to historical books. Otherwise, just look at German retailers, look at what is selling there—and not just Amazon. Places like Thalia, which is part of the Tolino Alliance, and they have about 40% of the market. So it's really important to look at them too, and not just at Amazon. Jo: We'll come back to the distribution in a minute. There are some important differences between the German market and the US/UK market. Obviously we're talking about a different language, but of course there are a few things that are different that some people might not think about. So give us a few of those things that people definitely need to think about. Skye: Okay, so even before you start publishing, you need to be aware that title protection is a thing in Germany. Your book can't have the same title as an already published book. That is a law that is basically there to avoid readers being confused. So if you had five books with the same title, readers might not realise which book is by which author. You have to do your research and check if anyone else is using your title. There are some exceptions—if it's a completely different category, so if there's a children's book with that title but you write spicy romance, then the chance that the reader gets confused is much lower. Quite often you can then contact either the author or the publisher and ask, “Can I get written permission to use that title?” I did that for one of my series and it was totally fine. Just be sure to get it in writing, because if your book suddenly becomes a huge bestseller, they might reconsider. So title protection is an important one. You need to research that before you publish. One thing that people sometimes get confused about is reusing their English title. That's totally fine because it's your own title. So if your English title hasn't been used and you want to keep that same title, that works. It's just about other people's books where you can't use those titles. Another important legal bit is the Impressum. It's the copyright page. To be fair, websites that are targeting German readers or a German audience have to have that Impressum. It's usually on page two of the book, and it has things like your legal name, your address, and then the usual things like the translator's name, cover design, and other things you would usually put on a copyright page. The problem is that technically you need to put your legal name in there unless you have a limited company, in which case you can also put the business name there, and your address. A lot of people obviously don't want to do that for privacy reasons, especially romance authors where it's sometimes a bit sketchy when it comes to some readers who get a bit too obsessed. There are services where you can pay a monthly or yearly fee and then use their address. It's a bit of a legal grey zone, but a lot of German authors are doing it because—especially as indie authors—we don't always want to put our legal address out there. Jo: Just for people listening, I use my accountant's address. That's quite common. I mean, you have to share your address on your email for anti-spam laws and all that kind of thing. As you say, there are ways to use other addresses. That just needs to happen. What else then do we need to think about? Skye: There are things about the translator. A lot of things that people are sometimes scared about is when they hear that there is a copyright issue with translators and they think, “Oh, my translator has the copyright. I can't do anything.” Actually, the translator is seen as an author—almost like a co-author of the translation in German law—because, to be fair, it's not just putting one word into another. Translation is quite a creative job, especially when it's fiction. It is a very creative job where the translator has to put a lot of their own creativity into it. So in German law, they're recognised as the creator of that translation and therefore have certain rights. But you as the author, as soon as you have a contract with your translator—which is why you always, always, always have to have a contract—you get the usage rights. This means it's exactly the same as with your English books. You can do with them what you want. You can get audiobooks, you can do print books, you can do whatever you want in different formats. It just needs to be clear in a contract that the translator is giving you the usage rights of that translation. That's something that people sometimes find a bit scary, but actually it's really simple. Translations have been done for so long. It's a normal thing. It's just called slightly different. It has to be set out in a contract. Jo: Just on that, that's when the translator themselves is in Germany, because if they are based somewhere else, still doing a German translation, that's not necessary. So that's something else for people to consider. Skye: Yes, definitely. To be fair— I would always try to get a translator based in the country. I mean, I'm a native German speaker, but I've been in Scotland for so long now that I am not confident enough to translate my own books anymore because I'm not surrounded by German 24/7 and my grammar is slightly off and I don't have that up-to-date, modern lingo. So if it's a translator who's only just moved somewhere else or a few years, that's fine. But if it's someone who's been in the US or UK or somewhere else for 20 years, I would be a bit more hesitant. That's just a personal perspective on that. One other thing that's different is Sie and du. There are two different kinds of “you” when you talk to someone. There's the formal Sie, which you use basically amongst adults, in business contexts. But even my German grandma—she had a friend and they used the formal Sie for about 10 years as friends because in German etiquette, the older person has to offer the younger person the informal du, and they never did that for some reason. We found it hilarious as kids that they were still using the formal Sie as really good friends. So there's an entire culture there that people who haven't been to Germany or haven't lived there for a while just find a bit difficult, because there are so many different unwritten rules about when you use Sie and when you use the informal du. It's weakened a bit over the years and nowadays even strangers would sometimes use the informal du depending on the context. It really depends. A good translator will usually handle that themselves. They will find a scene where, for example, especially in romance, you meet as strangers in the beginning, so you use the formal Sie, and then at some point that formality turns to informality. The translator will usually choose that moment and add a little extra scene or a sentence where they either offer it to each other or they just naturally switch into it. But then there might be an internal little monologue of, “Oh, he just used the informal du—I guess we're at that stage,” or, “I really appreciate that.” Just to make it more natural, because that's something I quite often see with AI translation where that doesn't happen, and readers get confused. Why did they just switch from Sie to du without any kind of acknowledgement of that? Jo: This is the same in Spanish and other languages, I imagine. Skye: Yes, French as well. Italian too, I think. A lot of European languages have this. Jo: I think that's something that English speakers just don't get. It is a really interesting moment. I guess that might not happen so much in other genres—that really is a thing in romance. I was just thinking about some of my thrillers. They may never have time to get to du. Skye: But then sometimes using du can also be a rude thing. So if you have an antagonist who really doesn't like your protagonist, they might just use du as a rude sort of address. Again, that's something that English speakers just wouldn't understand or even think of because we just have the one “you.” Jo: We just have the one. Jo: It's the tone. Of course, it's the tone. Skye: Exactly, yes. Jo: Okay, well let's get into the actual translation of the books themselves. Over the years I've worked with lots of humans. I've also licensed my rights. I've used different AI tools. I mean, there are tons, but as we record this— What are the options that are available for translations? Give us some tips on working with humans and finding humans. Because it can be super pricey. And of course most of us will never know about the quality until we publish it. Skye: Oh, yes, definitely a note on that. I found that quite often you will already have German people on your newsletter list or on your social media, and most of them will be super happy to give you some feedback on your translation. That's something I've used a lot. Not for German, because I speak the language, but when I did French and Italian translations. My French is—well, it used to be quite okay. It is passable at best now. So I would never feel confident enough to rate a translation. So I asked my newsletter list, “Are there any French people here who would be happy to read the book? I'll send you a free copy at the end, and some swag.” There were a surprising number of people who got back to me. The same applies to German and other languages, because if you don't speak the language, you sometimes lack the confidence of knowing if this is any good. Getting some reader feedback is super helpful. For finding human translators, the easiest of course is word of mouth, and I'm a big fan of that because you get instant feedback on whether someone is good or not and whether it's easy to work with them. Then there are freelancer platforms. Reedsy is one where everyone is vetted, so that's pretty good. But there are tons of other ones like Upwork and Fiverr, though there you have to do all the vetting yourself, so that takes a lot more time and effort. There are also more and more agencies—translator agencies who specialise in doing indie book translations. There's Literary Queens, there's Valentine Translations, there are tons of them. Then there's also, which I think a lot of authors ignore or don't know about, translation databases. There are two databases for German translators, for example, where you can search and you can usually narrow it down to whether you want literary translators, what kind of fiction or nonfiction you want. An important thing is that a literary translator is very different from a standard translator who translates birth certificates or formal documents. You want someone who has experience with fiction if you write fiction. Someone who knows about adding drama through language. Sometimes, for example, when you have an action scene, you might have shorter sentences. If you have someone who doesn't know about stuff like that, they might just think, “Oh, in German it sounds really nice to have this really long sentence.” Those little nuances are where having an experienced literary translator is a big bonus. There are some platforms that do royalty-split translations that have been quite popular in the past. Most of them I wouldn't really recommend because you just don't get those professional translators there. You usually get people who speak the language but don't really have much experience. So you might end up with a pretty bad translation, or people might just be using AI translations without telling you. If you use a human translator, always, always get a sample, because yes, they might have amazing credentials, but until they've actually translated one of your books or a scene from your book, you don't really know how good they are. I like to always use, if I write romance, a slightly sexy scene, because sex seems to show you if someone can translate or not. It's just what I've found, because if it sounds absolutely awkward or more like mechanical rather than an emotional, spicy thing, then that's a clear point for me to say, “No, thank you. I'll look for someone else.” Action scenes, sexy scenes, really emotional ones, dialogue that has a bit of colloquial language or humour—those are good scenes to choose as a sample because that really shows you if a translator can do their job or not. Then, again, have some German people from your list give you feedback on that. Also, if you work with human translators, always try to make sure that they will be available for your entire series. And not even just a series—if you have lots of books, try to grab that translator, lock them in your basement, and never let them go, because you want their style for all your books. Just like you have a style as an author, translators have a style and that will always shine through, as much as they try to be as close to your original. A bit of their style will always come through. It helps to have the same translator for at least the same series, preferably for as many of your books as possible. You really want to tell them in the beginning, “This series has nine books. I want you to do all of these, even if we only do a few of them at the beginning. Are you available to do the rest later?” Because you don't want to end up having to find a new translator in the middle of the series. That gives you a whole lot of extra work with trying to have a world bible that explains which words get translated and which get left as the original, and stuff like that. When it comes to non-human translation, it's very different because of course you don't need to do all that vetting. Tools have different capabilities and abilities, but in the end, if you put your book into a translation tool, you will always get a slightly different output. So it's not quite the same where you need an entire vetting process. Jo: Just on the human translation, I think I'd be right in saying that every single author in the world would love to have the best human translator translating their book, whatever genre it is. That would just be amazing for all of us. But let's face it, that's extremely expensive. So if I've got, let's say, a 70,000-word thriller, how much money are we talking about? An approximate number, so people know what that might be. Skye: Usually it goes by the word, but by the target language word count. Although it depends on the translator, traditional translators usually go by the target language because that's what they actually produce as their output. The average at the moment is anything from about seven to nine euro cents per word as the medium price. You will find cheaper people. You can go up as high as you want really. I have definitely seen translators who charge 15 cents and above per word, but those will usually be the ones who have worked with a lot of trad publishers who are used to being paid like that. Although even in trad publishing, the rates are going down. With more and more authors wanting translations, I think in general rates are going down. Good for us, not so good for the translators. You're definitely looking at thousands, even if you translate novellas. Then it depends—some translators have editing included, sometimes they don't. A lot of them will have arrangements with other translators where they give the translation to another translator for them to edit it. Sometimes that's included in the price, sometimes it's extra. Always make sure it gets edited, because just like when we write a book, it will never be exactly perfect. I say that as someone who writes very clean because I have a journalism background, so I'm used to writing really fast and clean for deadlines, but there will always be a few typos that just wriggle their way in. Typos are evil like that. It's the same with translations. Jo: So we are probably looking at 2,000 to 10,000 pounds, dollars, euros. We are talking about quite a lot, and this is the main reason I think that now, with AI becoming a lot better, people are looking at this. Originally—and I don't even know, probably eight years now since I did my first, might even be a decade or more—I did at some point do a version in DeepL, which was an early AI translation tool. This was nonfiction, and then paid an editor, a German editor, to then edit that in German. Those books still get good reviews. But now people are looking at options like GlobeScribe and ScribeShadow, or even just using Claude or ChatGPT. I'm actually working at the moment on a Claude Code pipeline through lots of different QA passes. That's been really interesting for me, because I can say, “Okay, now you are a reader who likes these kinds of books. Read it for that.” And because we can now put really big books in, I can actually get a lot of really interesting feedback. So I feel like there's a lot of potential with AI—potential for good stuff, potential for bad stuff too. So talk a bit about that and what to watch out for with AI. Skye: Okay, so I'm very much pro-AI and I use AI in lots of different things in my business, just to preface that. However, with translations, I'm still a bit wary, just because I have seen a lot of bad AI translations. To be fair, I've experimented with it myself for one of my other pen names. It was readable. It was definitely readable. It had sometimes beautiful, gorgeous prose. Really. But there were, occasionally—quite often even—bits where I stumbled as a native speaker. It's readable and, if I just need a little quick book in between, I would be mostly happy with that. I would read it. It's the same as some of the early KU days where you found a lot of bad quality writing, but you just wanted to read it because the story was pretty good or because you were reading it in KU and so it didn't really matter that much. There is that spectrum of quality where you have the, “Yes, it's good enough to read,” but, “Is it good enough to be up to your standards?” That's a decision that everyone has to make for themselves. If they want the same quality that they put into their English book, or if they're fine with just offering that book to a new audience because maybe you wouldn't be able to do it otherwise. I totally see that. Translation is so expensive. I don't even know how much I have spent on translations over the past few years. I'm lucky that most of my books make it back within the first weeks or months. I've never had a book that didn't make its money back, but I have heard a lot of people where that's not the case. It is a lot of investment and I would never tell someone to go into debt or anything to do translations. Do it when you're at a time where you can afford it, or where you can also afford the loss if it doesn't work out. Now, AI has changed that slightly because it now opens it up to almost anyone. Some of the AI translation tools are a few hundred pounds, but if you do it in Claude or ChatGPT or something where you already have a subscription, it can actually be quite cheap. You can do it for a few dollars or pounds. I love, by the way, having someone in the UK. I'm so used to automatically saying everything in dollars, but actually I should be using pounds. I think if you know what you're doing—and you clearly do, with your several passes, you know what you're doing with AI—but if someone just puts their book into Claude or ChatGPT or some random tool, it might just not be good enough. Jo: Let's say it won't be good enough if you just do that. We know that. You have to have QA passes—quality assurance. You have to have rules per genre. There are ways of doing it. It's kind of like you have to get to know how translation works. It's a process. It's not just a translation, like you put something in Google Translate or a menu or something, because we do care. I think that's really important. Skye: Yes. I think if you don't know how AI works—that you need detailed prompts, that you need a style guide, that you need all that extra material and not just your book, all those rules—then please don't do it. If you value your German readers—and I think sometimes when I see people just churn out those translations without doing any quality control, using exactly the same cover or even just putting a German flag on it or something—I really feel bad for German readers because they're not being valued as having the same sort of value to us as authors as our English-speaking readers. Maybe I'm a bit biased there because I read in multiple languages. I want to be able to get the same sort of quality in all languages. I want the author to think of me as being special because I'm their reader and I'm their customer. I think we are on the way where AI translation can be almost autonomous. I would personally always have a human look over it. I know what I'm doing, and I'm almost happy with my translation system that I've built now in AI, but it still needs that human touch for a few things. It still needs me to tell the AI, for example, “This is where we switch from Sie to du.” This is where I need to keep certain words in. For example, I write a lot of Scottish books, and so words like “glen” or “loch”—they are words I want to stay the same in my German translation. I don't want to translate it to the German equivalent of “lake” because that just misses that Scottish context. Things like that need instruction. A human translator will usually know that and chat to you about which words you want to keep and which ones you want translated. AI just needs our guidance, our helping hand, and if we don't know enough about the target language, we just miss knowing that. Now, a lot of tools do it all for you basically, and they set up all these rules. I think many of them are at a very advanced stage now. But AI isn't perfect and it likes to hallucinate, it likes to add random things. So I will always still have a human touch at the end, even if it's just a quick edit. A lot of people think that they just need a proofread after an AI translation, but AI doesn't really make typos—or not to an extent that humans do. So proofreading isn't really what's needed for an AI translation. It is actual editing where you go for the style, the phrasing, and sometimes the context. There's one example I always like to give. I have an alien romance where they go on a honeymoon, and because he's an alien and she's human, he misunderstands and thinks she wants to go to an actual moon. So it's a little pun in the book. It doesn't work in German at all because the word “honeymoon” has nothing to do with moons or planets in German. An AI would probably just try to translate that in a way that's quite close to the original. But my German translator, she had to come up with several different ways of fixing that issue, because humour is hard. It's hard even for humans to get the humour translated in a way that is still funny but also culturally appropriate. If you have a book that is full of puns, it gets harder with AI. I am not saying it's impossible, but it needs a lot of handholding. Jo: Yes, I think humour is hard to translate in general, isn't it? Let's move on to the distribution, because again, having done quite a lot of different languages over the years, I do use Amazon KU for my books in German and Italian and Spanish and some French. So I haven't gone wide in terms of ebook and print or audio, in fact, because I have a lot of books and it is hard to go wide in English, let alone in other languages. But you mentioned earlier that Thalia has 40% of the market or something, and that special editions and print books are important. So what are the decisions we have to make around the actual publishing? Skye: In Germany they did a really cool thing, and I wish they'd done that in other countries. When the bookshops saw that Amazon was growing and posing a threat to them—not just with print books but also with ebooks—a lot of the German bookstores got together and they formed the Tolino Alliance. They have big book chains like Thalia, but also I think it was over 1,500 indie bookshops that all got together. They all support this ecosystem for ebooks, which means they all share the same e-readers. They share the same sort of backend for the shops, which made it really easy for them because they didn't all have to develop an ebook system. It saved them a lot of money. It made it really easy to tell readers, “This is the Tolino system. You can get your books at our bookshops, but you can read them on your Tolino e-reader no matter where you get the books from.” The Tolino e-readers are actually the same as Kobo e-readers, just rebranded. They've got that big advantage there—these independent bookshops and book chains all got together. Now it's hard to find numbers because Amazon doesn't really like to share their numbers, but it's about 40% of the German ebook market, which means it rivals Amazon. They have about the same. Then the rest is split by Apple Books, Google Play, and some of the smaller players. So it is a huge chunk of the market. I'm wide with pretty much all my English books. So for me, I looked into KU, but when I saw that I was going to miss out on 60% of the market—even if Amazon has 45%, that's still a big chunk—I decided to go wide. To be fair, I haven't regretted it, because Tolino are amazing to work with. I like to compare them to Kobo because they have a really lovely human team where you can just email them and tell them, “I've got a new release coming up,” and they will put you into different promos and it's all free. Jo: Do you publish direct to Tolino, or do you use Draft2Digital? Skye: Yes, you can publish direct to Tolino and that's actually the best way of doing it. You don't have access to their marketing opportunities if you use a distributor. The Tolino dashboard is annoyingly all in German, but by now every browser has a translating plugin built in. I know lots of authors who don't speak a single word of German who navigate Tolino very successfully. They started with only ebooks in the beginning, and then about two weeks after the first edition of my book on German translations was published, they introduced print books, which meant my book was immediately out of date. I was fuming. But this time they introduced audiobooks a few weeks before my Kickstarter launch for the second edition, so this time the audiobook part is included. I was very happy about that, because it was a pain to just tell everyone, “Well, this book is out now but it's actually missing a big part of how to do print books in Germany.” So Tolino does print, ebooks, and audiobooks. And just because you're in KU with your ebooks doesn't mean you can't publish your print books via Tolino. I highly recommend that, because IngramSpark—which most of us indies use for distribution for print books—doesn't get you into the German bookstores. They used to. Then German stores have fixed price laws where books have to be the same price in all stores, and IngramSpark kept going against that. They kept sending them the wrong prices. So German bookstores at some point just said, “Nope, we've had enough of this. We no longer take books from IngramSpark.” So now Tolino, in my opinion, is the best way of getting your books listed in German online bookstores, but they can also help you get into brick-and-mortar stores. One of my books was featured by them, I think two years ago, and it was in about 300 of their shops all across Germany. It had its own little pedestal and it was amazing. Tolino love working with their indie authors. They also love romance, which is always a bonus because some stores are more prudish than others. It's really easy to work with them. They speak perfect English, so you can do all your communication outside of the dashboard in English. Their audiobooks feature is very new. Until they did that, it was much harder for German audiobook distribution because places like Findaway Voices and other distributors wouldn't get you into the Tolino Alliance stores for audio. That's a big chunk that we were missing out on. I was always looking for ways to get my German audiobooks into those stores, but the German distributors that I found were really difficult to upload to, to be honest. I'm a very technical person, but it challenged even me. I did not like that experience at all. At some point I really just gave up and wanted to throw my computer out of the window. So when Tolino introduced that, I was celebrating internally. The only problem with their distribution at the moment for audio, because it's so new, is that you can't exclude any shops. So it's all or nothing. They will get you into all the different places, including Audible, Spotify—you name it, lots of different streaming services and retailers—but you can't exclude any. So while they don't actually want exclusivity, if you published it yourself at the same time through ACX or Findaway Voices or something else, you would have duplicates, and of course, we try to avoid those. Jo: Is it human narration only, or do they also accept AI narration? Skye: They accept AI narration. The thing with Tolino is that they want everything made very clear. If you publish any books with them that have an AI production aspect, you need to put that into your Impressum. For audiobooks, there's a box to tick to make it clear. Jo: Hmm. Skye: So they are open to it all. You just need to declare it. Jo: Which I think should be true everywhere, to be fair. Skye: Oh, definitely. And a lot of German distributors—while I was researching for this book, one thing I always looked at is, “Do they need you to declare your AI use?” More and more German distributors and retailers now want you to do that. I think that's the way it's going. It's not a judgement thing. I think it's just making it clear to readers. In Germany, it's all about transparency. That's why there are all those laws with GDPR—everyone will have heard about that one by now. But there are lots of other laws where it's all about consumer rights and transparency, and that's one of them. Jo: Is there anything else on the distribution side we need to think about? Skye: One thing I like to highlight is libraries, because that's quite a big thing in Germany too. They love books and bookstores and they love libraries. Some of the ways we get our English books into libraries—like a distributor like Draft2Digital for OverDrive—OverDrive is growing in Germany. There are other systems like Onleihe, just to name one. You can't get into those through, for example, Draft2Digital or PublishDrive or StreetLib. Tolino gets you into those. There are also subscription platforms that are growing. I think it's the same as in the English-speaking market. People love a subscription, and I love them. I just don't like exclusivity. So I very much support any subscription platform that doesn't require me to be exclusive to them. Skoobe is one of them. They used to be an independent platform, and then the Tolino Alliance bought them. So now they're integrated into the Tolino stores. That means it's really prominent. Basically, any time you go to an ebook on, for example, Thalia, it will have a banner there saying, “You can also get this in our subscription.” So it's taken a while to grow, but actually in December I now made more with their subscription programme than I made in book sales. I think three of my books were in their top 10 in December. To be fair, that was a pretty good month. But it definitely shows that it can take a while to grow these subscription platforms, but when you do, it can be really successful and very much worth it. So I highly suggest looking into those sorts of platforms too, not just the standard retailers and the platforms that you're already used to. Jo: Fantastic. So we've now got translations, they're on the various stores, and then just like in English, one of our next challenges is actually marketing the books. Now this becomes another challenge, because one of the reasons I am in KU for foreign languages is because you get the five free days and you can do Amazon ads. I mean, you can do Amazon ads for wide books too, but it's easier to know that there are some options for marketing at all. I don't do email marketing. I don't do social media, so I'm pretty bad at marketing in foreign languages. So what are your suggestions for those who want to do more active marketing in German especially? Or even if we don't speak German, it can't be all the personal stuff. But are there also advertising things like BookBub? What are our options basically? Skye: There are quite a few things. It's not quite as easy as in English, of course, but I think sometimes you have to remember that you already have most of the material for marketing when you've released a book. You will have made graphics in English, you will have written a newsletter, you will have done some social media posts. All that material is already there, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You can just translate that, and for that, AI translation is really good because it's very quick. You don't have to bother your translator. You can just get that done. That's what I had to remind myself, because in the beginning I did everything from scratch and it took me forever and I was hating it. Then I realised, well, I could just look at the newsletter I wrote three years ago when that book released in English and translate that. That's done within a minute and I can send that out. So remember that you have a lot of content already. There's no BookBub or nothing as big as BookBub. There is a site called BookDeals, which sends out newsletters for both reduced or free books and also for new releases. I use them for pretty much all my new releases, or at least always the first in series. They're nowhere near as big as BookBub, so don't expect miracles, but I generally always break even or a bit more. It's hard to tell, of course, especially if you do several things for a new release. But my instinctive look on this is that it's worth it. BookDeals is the big one. There are a few other promo sites, but to be honest, I've not really found any of them to give me a positive ROI. I experiment with them occasionally and I listed them all in my book just for completeness, but BookDeals is the big one. Then there is LovelyBooks, which is the German Goodreads. Some Germans also use Goodreads, so always make sure to have all your German books listed there. But LovelyBooks is the big one. I love that place because people are so much kinder than on Goodreads. I avoid Goodreads completely. If I need a review, I send my assistant there to look at reviews. I don't go there. It is scary. LovelyBooks—the name is kind of telling. It is a more lovely place. People are generally more friendly. They are probably a bit more critical when they write reviews than they are on retailers, but I have found it really nice to build a community there. You can do these book clubs where you give away a copy of your book, either as print books—or I always do ebooks because I don't want to send books to Germany. Then people discuss the book as a sort of book club and then they review it at the end. I have had great success with that. I've built up a community of readers who will now buy my books too, even if they don't get them for free. I found some beta readers through that. So I love LovelyBooks. The annoying thing again is it's in German. However, their support all speaks English and you can email them with questions. They're really good. Even if you don't plan to run any book clubs or anything like that because you don't speak the language, I would always advise just setting up an author profile there because it makes it easier for your books to be found. You can track reviews, you can track reads, and that just gives you an extra place to get more visibility for free. Ads—there's not much difference compared to what you do for your English-language books. The one thing is with Facebook ads, now because of EU data protection laws, it's much harder to target because people can opt out of ads and targeting. In general, cost-per-click ads are cheaper than in the US or the UK, so that's a bonus. BookTok is big and only growing there. I don't really do social media for my German books because I just don't have the bandwidth. I wish I could, and I know some people who outsource that. In an ideal world, I would have a social media account for every single language, but it's not an ideal world and I just have limited hours in the day. But even just creating an account so that people can tag you, so that people can find you, can already be a good start. One thing that's not maybe a marketing strategy as such, but something I like to highlight, is pre-orders. If you write in series, always, always make sure that the next books in your series are up for pre-order, because— German readers have been burned so many times by authors or even publishers who just translate book one in a series and then stop. They are quite hesitant sometimes to start a new series when they see it's book one of something and they don't see the next book up for pre-order. To be fair, it's similar in English. I always make sure to have a pre-order up for the next book. Because people would just not read the series until it's complete or until they know it will be complete at some point. So always set up a pre-order if you can. Don't set it up when you don't actually know when your translation is being done, or choose a date far in the future. Just make it very clear to your readers that you are intending to translate the entire series, that you're not going to disappoint them, that they're not just wasting their money on a book one only to never find out what happens next. Jo: Fantastic. Well, this is a big decision for people to make, I think, because there's no point in doing one book in German and then not doing anything else, in the same way as doing one book in English or any language. You have to think about investing in an audience. So lots for people to think about. The book is fantastic. It's called Self-Publishing in German. So where can people find you and your books online? Skye: For my author-facing things, just go to SkyeMacKinnon.com/authors, and there you find the book about German translations. You also find more information on what I do. You can book consultations with me. I love doing those one-to-ones, especially about translations, because you can really dive into someone's catalogue and look at what would be a good strategy for someone, rather than just in general. Otherwise, it's SkyeMacKinnon.com for all my romance. If you want adorable children's books, it's IslaWynter.com. That's Wynter with a Y. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Skye. That was great. Skye: Thank you so much for having me.The post Self-Publishing in German: How to Translate, Distribute, and Market Your Books with Skye MacKinnon first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Hey there, hero!Wow. That's dark.A BTS look at my updated audition background, and why I chose to simplify my look.(I'll likely be back to the bricks next episode.)But why the severe change? Because I look for any distraction from my acting and try my best to remove it. And I do it so that all the casting director has to pay attention to…is my acting.That's it.So…what have you been adding to your look or sound or writing that you might want to let go of? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/remove-distractions-so-your-audience-sees-only-you/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Hey there, hero!The perfect server not only gives you great service……they are actually nowhere to be found when they aren't needed.Ever notice that?It's an art and skill to know when you're needed and when you're not - and that applies to us when we're auditioning and pursuing the work.I have some thoughts, and how to make our “level of appropriate service” rival that of our fave bartender, hair cutter or customer service rep.Care to share any experiences you've had with that perfect service worker? Or how you've been able to master that appropriate level of service when auditioning? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/channel-your-inner-superstar-server/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

California lets interest groups propose measures for the state ballot. Anyone who gathers enough signatures (currently 874,641) can put their hare-brained plans before voters during the next election year. This year, the big story is the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, a 5% wealth tax on California's billionaires. Your views on this will mostly be shaped by whether or not you like taxing the rich, but opponents have argued that it's an especially poorly written proposal: It includes a tax on "unrealized gains", like a founder's share of a private company which hasn't been sold yet. This could be an existential threat to the Silicon Valley model of building startups that are worth billions on paper before their founders see any cash. Since most billionaires keep most of their wealth in stocks, any wealth tax will need some way to reach these (cf. complaints about the "buy, borrow, die" strategy for avoiding taxation). But there are better ways to do this (for example, taxing at liquidation and treating death as a virtual liquidation event), other wealth tax proposals have included these, and the California proposal doesn't. It appears to value company stakes by voting rights rather than ownership, so a typical founder who maintains control of their company despite dilution might see themselves taxed for more than they have. Garry Tan explains the math here with reference to Google. However, Current Affairs has a good article (?!) that pushes back, saying the proposal exempts public companies like Google. Although private companies would still be affected, this would be so obviously unfair that founders would easily win an exemption based on a provision allowing them to appeal nonsensical results. Still, some might counterobject that proposed legislation is generally supposed to be good, rather than so bad that its victims will easily win on appeal. It's retroactive, applying to billionaires who lived in California in January, even though it won't come to a vote until November. Proponents argue that this is necessary to prevent billionaire flight; opponents point out that alternatively, billionaires could flee before the tax even passes (as some have already done). One plausible result is that the tax fails (either at the ballot box or the courts), but only after spurring California's richest taxpayers to flee, leading to a net decrease in revenue. Some people propose that it could decrease state revenues overall even if it passed, if it drove out enough billionaires, though others disagree. Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were "developing an exit plan" and quotes an insider saying that "if this tax actually passes, I think the technology industry kind of has to leave the state". Even Gavin Newsom, hardly known for being an anti-tax conservative, has argued that it "makes no sense" and "would be really damaging". The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings, but agree that the tax is of dubious value and its provisions poorly suited to Silicon Valley. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/seiu-delenda-est

Hey there, hero!A marketing mashup…what the heck is that?It's what I call those quick little phrases that give someone a clear idea of your creative essence: who you are, how you sound, what kind of characters you play…that sort of thing.What's my marketing mashup? “Paul Giamatti meets Uncle Fester.” Simple. Direct. To the point.And maybe, for all the profiles and bios and headlines and signatures you're asked to create in our business, maybe you could use one. Heck, maybe you already have one.Either way, let's arrive at one, and if you would, post it in a comment below, and include your headshot if appropriate.So…what's your marketing mashup?REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/whats-your-marketing-mashup/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Hey there, hero!The concept of open loops has come up so much in the last few weeks for me that I wanted to revisit an episode from 2019 that explained open loops and how powerful they can be for you.Writers use open loops to create cliffhangers.VO talent can use open loops in their profiles and bios.Actors can use open loops in their slates and “tell us more about yourself”s.And on and on it goes.After you watch this episode, can you think of some ways I didn't mention that let you use open loops in your performance practice? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/open-loops-are-everywhere/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Last Friday, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared AI company Anthropic a "supply chain risk", the first time this designation has ever been applied to a US company. The trigger for the move was Anthropic's refusal to allow the Department of War to use their AIs for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. A few hours later, Hegseth and Sam Altman declared an agreement-in-principle for OpenAI's models to be used in the niche vacated by Anthropic. Altman stated that he had received guarantees that OpenAI's models wouldn't be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons either, but given Hegseth's unwillingness to concede these points with Anthropic, observers speculated that the safeguards in Altman's contract must be weaker or, in a worst-case scenario, completely toothless. The debate centers on the Department of War's demand that AIs be permitted for "all lawful use". Anthropic worried that mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry would de facto fall in this category; Hegseth and Altman have tried to reassure the public that they won't, and the parts of their agreement that have leaked to the public cite the statutes that Altman expects to constrain this category. Altman's initial statement seemed to suggest additional prohibitions, but on a closer read, provide little tangible evidence of meaningful further restrictions. Some alert ACX readers1 have done a deep dive into national security law to try to untangle the situation. Their conclusion mirrors that of Anthropic and the majority of Twitter commenters: this is not enough. Current laws against domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons have wide loopholes in practice. Further, many of the rules which do exist can be changed by the Department of War at any time. Although OpenAI's national security lead said that "we intended [the phrase 'all lawful use'] to mean [according to the law] at the time the contract is signed', this is not how contract law usually works, and not how the provision is likely to be enforced2. Therefore, these guarantees are not helpful. To learn more about the details, let's look at the law: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/all-lawful-use-much-more-than-you

Hey there, hero!In another episode, I threaten you with harsh words if I ever catch you minimizing yourself.And it's not just in how you describe yourself, it's specifically about how you set your fees.And, of course, there's a TED talk on this:Casey Brown gave that talk over a decade ago, and it's timeless. And she has two big takeaways that are so on point for performers like you that it's as if she was vacationing in our heads.How do you stack up in the self-worth conversation? How confident are you when setting your rates? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/casey-brown-says-know-your-worth-ask-for-it/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Hey there, hero!I was at a party a couple of years ago, and someone in our group was asked, “What do you do?”In Los Angeles, it's rare that the answer to that question isn't “I'm an actor.”In this case, the woman answered with a bit of a twist:“I'm a bit of an actor."Please don't let me catch you saying this. That would be an issue.And I've heard versions of that: "I dabble in audiobooks." "Occasionally, I write some stuff."In this episode, I want to impress upon you that words do matter. You have every right to be proud. Try not to minimize yourself - be clear and precise. And own your life's work and career choice.How do you describe what you do? Do you find yourself less-than-ing yourself? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/if-i-ever-catch-you-saying-this-we-will-have-words/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one):     https://voheroes.com/start     ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent):     https://acxmasterclass.com/     ...narrate your own book (if you're an author):     https://narrateyourownbook.com/     ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent):     https://mikesock.com/     ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines):     https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac:     https://audiocupcake.com/The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with:BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | Buz...

Across Protocol wants to retire its token in exchange for equity. Is the DAO model structurally broken? Thank you to our sponsor! Adaptive Security With Across Protocol proposing to retire its ACX token in favor of equity, a long-simmering question in crypto governance is finally breaking into the open: do token holders actually have meaningful ownership, or just the illusion of it?  As the regulatory environment under the new U.S. administration shifts dramatically from the Gensler era, the structures that crypto teams were forced to build may now be working against the very communities they were meant to serve.  Ryan Yi, founder of Onchain Group, and Felipe Montealegre, co-founder and CIO of Theia, have studied these incentive structures closely, and what they have found is uncomfortable. From PumpFun's suppressed valuation to the perverse incentives baked into token buyouts, this conversation examines whether the DAO model was ever built to last, and what governance actually needs to look like if crypto is going to compete with global finance. Guests: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Ryan Yi, Founder of Onchain Group ⁠⁠⁠⁠Felipe Montealegre, Co-Founder & Chief Investment Officer at Theia Links: Read our Aave deep dive here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey there, hero!Lagom is not “just OK.” It's not “good enough for government work.”It's actually a cultural concept in Sweden that is really useful in lots of different ways.In a nutshell, it means “not too much, not too little, but just right.”Kinda like Goldilocks and her interaction with those three bears.And we, as performers, can embrace lagom to help us try just a bit harder……and not get wrapped around the axle trying to be perfect.Your thoughts on this? Does the concept of “just right” feel just right to you? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/the-swedish-concept-of-lagom-might-be-just-right-for-you/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

It's that time again. Even numbered years are book reviews, odd-numbered years are non-book reviews, so you're limited to books for now. Write a review of a book. There's no official word count requirement, but previous finalists and winners were often between 2,000 and 10,000 words. There's no official recommended style, but check the style of last time's finalists and winners or my ACX book reviews (1, 2, 3) if you need inspiration. Please limit yourself to one entry per person or team. Then send me your review through this Google Form. The form will ask for your name, email, the title of the book, and a link to a Google Doc. The Google Doc should have your review exactly as you want me to post it if you're a finalist. Don't include your name or any hint about your identity in the Google Doc itself, only in the form. I want to make this contest as blinded as possible, so I'm going to hide that column in the form immediately and try to judge your docs on their merit. (does this mean you can't say something like "This book about war reminded me of my own experiences as a soldier" because that gives a hint about your identity? My rule of thumb is that if I don't know who you are, and the average ACX reader doesn't know who you are, you're fine. I just want to prevent my friends or Internet semi-famous people from getting an advantage. If you're in one of those categories and think your personal experience would give it away, please don't write about your personal experience.) Please make sure the Google Doc is unlocked and I can read it. By default, nobody can read Google Docs except the original author. You'll have to go to Share, then on the bottom of the popup click on "Restricted" and change to "Anyone with the link". If you send me a document I can't read, I will probably disqualify you, sorry. Readers will vote for the ~10 finalists this spring, I'll post one finalist per week through the summer, and then readers will vote for winners in late summer/early fall. First prize will get at least $2,500, second prize at least $1,000, third prize at least $500; I might increase these numbers later on. All winners and finalists will get free publicity (including links to any other works they want me to link to), free ACX subscriptions, and sidebar links to their blog. And all winners will get the right to pitch me new articles if they want (sample posts by Lars, Brandon, Daniel, etc). In past years, most reviews have been nonfiction on technical topics. Depending on whether that's still true, I might do some mild affirmative action for reviews in nontraditional categories - fiction, poetry, and books from before 1900 are the ones I can think of right now, but feel free to try other nontraditional books. I won't be redistributing more than 25% of finalist slots this way. Your due date is May 20th. Good luck! If you have any questions, ask them in the comments. And remember, the form for submitting entries is here. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-contest-rules-2026

In today's episode we discuss a major DeFi trading error involving a $50M Aave swap with extreme slippage, debate responsibility between users and front-end design, analyze Pump.fun's potential multichain expansion and launchpad economics, and examine ACX's plan to convert its token structure into equity to enable partnerships and possible acquisition. Thanks for tuning in! As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice. -- Follow Blockworks Research: https://x.com/blockworksres Follow Danny: https://x.com/defi_kay_ Follow Boccaccio: https://x.com/salveboccaccio -- Join us at DAS (Digital Asset Summit) in New York City this March! Use the link below to learn more, and use code 0X200 to get $200 off your ticket! See you there! Learn more + get your ticket here: https://blockworks.co/event/digital-asset-summit-nyc-2026 -- Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3foDS38 Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3SNhUEt Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3NlP1hA Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- Timestamps: (0:00) Introduction (3:16) Aave Swap (14:31) Pump.fun (31:42) ACX (43:06) Closing Comments -- Check out Blockworks Research today! Research, data, governance, tokenomics, and models – now, all in one place Blockworks Research: https://www.blockworksresearch.com/ Free Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter -- Disclaimer: Nothing said on 0xResearch is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Boccaccio, Danny, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Hart Lambur is the CoFounder of Across.We host a timely new discussion on the reasoning behind the first ever major token buyout in DeFi, a proposal to convert ACX tokenholders into equity shareholders of a traditional private company for Across. Hart explains how the $25M treasury would finance the buyout, and the vision for Across's future as stablecoin infrastructure where "$1 equals $1" and users pay nothing to move money across chains.In this episode, we cover:+ Why the token model isn't working: DAO governance challenges and misaligned incentives+ How the buyout works: token-to-equity conversion, and who can participate+ The new business model: Free stablecoin movement powered by intents, with issuers paying fees instead of users------

Hey there, hero!You've likely heard many times in life the pithy quote, “Winners never quit!”(And sometimes, the additional converse of “Quitters never win!”)Yeah. You can safely ignore that.This episode is all about the truth: winners do sometimes quit.Let's discuss a bit deeper when and how and why.When do you decide to give up? What are your personal standards for abandoning an effort? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/but-sometimes-winners-do-quit/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!If you're at all like me, I've often wondered if I'm the odd man out. A left-brained person in a right-brained body.See, I'm a creative…but I'm also proudly analytical and organized.I hear you. “Freak!” Yep.And guess what? Turns out you are too.My evidence? Two different authoritative videos on YouTube that dispel the left-brain/right-brain myth.From Encyclopedia Britannica:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkJHc5QKc8wAnd from TedX:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSbDwpIyF4Feel better? Still hanging on to your past labels? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/left-brained-right-brained-relax-youre-likely-both/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!What is your reaction when you see someone you know on TV?When a colleague pops up on the screen in a movie?When you hear that familiar voice in a spot?When you see the byline, and it's not you, but someone…just…like…you?And further, what kind of feelz well up when it's for something you submitted an audition?I'm sure there is a whole rainbow of reactions - and I'd love to know what you have as a go-to response.Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/how-do-you-feel-when-a-friend-gets-the-gig/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Today's episode of the Punk CX podcast features three interviews I recorded whilst at Medallia's Experience event in Las Vegas on the 10th, 11th and 12th February. The interviews are with Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia, Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada, and Paloma Paraja, Customer Experience Manager at Santalucia Seguros. We cover the big themes of the conference, the latest developments at Medallia, agentic CX, building an ACX team, the importance of context in empathy and what it takes to deliver an award-winning customer experience. This interview follows on from my recent interview – The dangers of a CCaaS monoculture – Interview with Paul Hughes of Mitel – and is number 574 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Hey there, hero!Actors, voice talent and writers often face the question of whether they should run their creative practice as an individual, being paid as an employee, or as a company, paid via invoicing on a more formal basis.And the answer is……it depends.In this episode, I take a look at the options you have in either case, not as a professional business manager, but from both sides of the equation.What has your experience been when making this decision? As I say in the episode, please don't offer any advice to anyone (even if you are a professional at money management and/or taxes), but let me know in the comments below what you've decided and what led to that decision. If you want to. No pressure.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/should-you-run-your-creative-career-through-a-company-or-as-an-individual/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!I ran across a quote by psychiatrist Thomas Szasz that called out a huge difference in how feedback/criticism/adjustments land with kids…as opposed to how that can land with adults.And it comes down to what he called “...the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.”Adults don't like to be questioned about their choices.Kids? They usually don't give a rat. They're used to being guided by adults, and don't know what they don't know.So…some advice in this episode about how to handle feedback from a coach, and not feel like you've been insulted.And how DO you feel when you get feedback from a trainer/coach/consultant/teacher? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/why-you-might-be-insulted-by-my-coaching/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!Short and sweet: six words that might make your day a bit more impactful, and give you a bit more moxie and courage to do what we do as professional performers.(I ask my students at the end of each of our live workouts if they had anything resonate for them during the session - a #1 takeaway - and as I traversed the web yesterday…Ms. Anjelou, in just those six concise words, handed me what was my #1 takeaway of yesterday.)Thoughts? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/maya-angelou-dropped-a-powerful-1-takeaway/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!So……you didn't get the gig.They went with someone else.You're disappointed, and that's understandable. But what are you missing from the experience?It can be a lot of valuable information and factual results.I share some of the gifts we get when we don't get the job.Were any of them forgotten? Are any of them a bit more valuable than you thought? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/that-job-you-didnt-get-still-has-immense-value/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!As you sit there at the moment of creation...With a blank page...Nothing yet recorded for an audition...A blinking cursor...Not even a countdown to begin recording, or an unclicked record button, not even a cleared throat......how do you handle that moment? Are you frozen? Or do you make a mess and then make it better?That's a phrase I didn't include in the episode, but it's worth having handy: just get something made, even if it's messy (it likely will be first time around) then make it better.What are your feelings at that precise pre-creation point in the process? Are you worried about failing, even before you begin? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/you-cant-edit-a-blank-page/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!The pundits are out with their predictions for this year.I have my predictions as well, and I guarantee you that mine are right and theirs are wrong.And there's joy in what I'm predicting.I think you'll be surprised.And what are your predictions for the new year? What are you looking forward to, hoping for, maybe even prepared to be disappointed over? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/my-guaranteed-100-accurate-predictions-for-the-rest-of-the-year/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

This holiday season, you'll see many charity fundraisers. I've already mentioned three, and I have another lined up for next week's open thread. Many great organizations ask me to signal-boost them, I'm happy to comply, and I'm delighted when any of you donate. Still, I used to hate this sort of thing. I'd be reading a blog I liked, then - wham, "please donate to save the starving children". Now I either have to donate to starving children, or feel bad that I didn't. And if I do donate, how much? Obviously no amount would fully reflect the seriousness of the problem. When I was a poor college student, I usually gave $10, because it was a nice round number; when I had more money, I usually gave $50, for the same reason. But then the next week, a different blog would advertise "please donate to save the starving children with cancer", and I'd feel like a shmuck for wasting my donation on non-cancerous starving children. Do I donate another $10, bringing my total up to the non-round number of $20? If I had a spare $20 for altruistic purposes, why hadn't I donated that the first time? It was all so unpleasant, and no matter what I did, I would feel all three of stingy and gullible and irrational. This is why I was so excited ten-odd years ago when I discovered the Giving What We Can Pledge. It's a commitment to give a certain percent of your income (originally 10%, but now there's also a 1-10% "trial" pledge) to the most effective charity you know. If you can't figure out which charity is most effective, you can just donate to Against Malaria Foundation, like all the other indecisive people. It's not that 10% is obviously the correct number in some deep sense. The people who picked it, picked it because it was big enough to matter, but not so big that nobody would do it. But having been picked, it's become a Schelling point. Take it, and you're one of the 10,000 people who's made this impressive commitment. If someone asks why you're not giving more, you can say "That would dilute the value of the Schelling point we've all agreed on and make it harder for other people to cooperate with us". The specific numbers and charities matter less than the way the pledge makes you think about your values and then yoke your behavior to them. In theory we're supposed to do this all the time. Another holiday institution, New Year's Resolutions, also centers around considering your values and yoking your behavior. But they famously don't work: most people don't have the willpower to go to the gym three times a week, or to volunteer at their local animal shelter on Sundays, or whatever else they decide on. That's why GWWC Pledge is so powerful. No willpower involved. Just go to your online banking portal, click click click, and you're done. Over my life, I don't know if I would say I've ever really changed my character or willpower or overall goodness/badness balance by more than a few percent. But I changed the amount I donated by a factor of ~ten, forever, with one very good decision. Unless you're a genius or a saint, your money is the strongest tool you have to change the world. 10% of an ordinary First World income donated to AMF saves dozens of lives over a career; even if you're a policeman or firefighter, you'll have trouble matching that through non-financial means. Unless you're Charlie Kirk or Heather Cox Richardson, no amount of your political activism or voting - let alone arguing on the Internet - will match the effect of donating to a politician or a cause you care about. And no amount of carpooling and eating vegan will help the climate as much as donating to carbon capture charities. Not an effective altruist? Think it's better to contribute to your local community, school, theater, or church? I'll argue with you later - but for now, my advice is the same. Have you thought really hard about how you should be contributing to your local community, school, theater, or church? (The fundraising letters my family used to get from our synagogue left little doubt about what form of contribution they preferred). Have you pledged some specific amount? You won't give beyond the $10-when-you-see-a-blog-fundraiser level unless you take a real pledge, registered by someone besides yourself - trust me, I've tested this. The GWWC website is mostly pitched at EAs. But if you like churches so much, you can probably get the same effect by pledging to God - and He keeps His own list, and offers His own member perks. To the degree that you care about changing the world beyond yourself and your family, in any direction, then the odds are good that this one decision - whether or not to take a binding charitable Pledge - matters more than every other decision you'll ever make combined. Maybe an order of magnitude more. It's something you can do right now, in five minutes. You shouldn't do it in five minutes; you should sit down and think about it hard and talk it over with your loved ones and make sure you're really planning to keep whatever pledge you make. But you could. And then every time you saw a charity fundraiser on a blog, you could think "Oh, sorry, I'm already living my life in accordance with my altruistic values, no thanks!" You wouldn't even have to worry about how much to donate. I don't even donate to half the fundraisers that I signal-boost! So if you have time this holiday season, and you're financially secure enough that it won't be a burden, think about whether there's some way you want the world to be different and better, whether there are charities that work on it, and whether you want to donate. Then, take the pledge. If you decide you want to do something but it's too stressful to figure out what, take a 3% trial pledge here, give it to Against Malaria Foundation, and come back next year to see if you're ready for the 10% version. UPDATE: Bentham's Bulldog also thinks you should take the pledge - here's his post. And I'll match his offer - take the full 10% pledge this month, and comment below so that I know about it, and I'll give you a free lifetime subscription to ACX. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-pledge

This year's prediction contest is live on Metaculus. They write: This year's contest draws directly from that community, with all questions suggested by ACX readers. Both experienced forecasters and newcomers are invited to participate, making predictions across U.S. politics, AI, international affairs, and culture. To participate, submit your predictions by January 17th at 11:59 PM PT. At that time, we will take a snapshot of all standing forecasts, which will determine the contest rankings and the allocation of the $10,000 prize pool. While you are encouraged to continue updating your predictions throughout the year, forecasts made after January 17th will only affect site leaderboards, not contest rankings. You are welcome to create a bot account to forecast and participate in addition to your regular Metaculus account. Create a bot account and get support building a bot here. And they've also announced this year's winners for best questions submitted. Congratulations to: Gumbledalf ($700) espiritu57 ($500) setasojiro843047 (Substack handle) ($400) sai_39 ($300) nicholaskross ($250) (Anonymous) ($200) (Anonymous) ($200) RMD ($150) (Anonymous) ($150) Hippopotamus_bartholomeus ($150) To participate in the tournament or learn more, go to Metaculus. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acxmetaculus-prediction-contest-2026

Hey there, hero!If you find yourself talking to yourself when you're by yourself......that's not only OK, it's a mark of genius.That's what the Internet says, and I'm going with them on this.I don't want you to feel anything but joy and wisdom if you're an inveterate self-talker. And I'm not limiting my support just to those who murmur or mutter to themselves - I'm a full-volume talking machine when I'm alone, sometimes raising my voice to make a point.And I want to celebrate with you the awesomesauce of working things out for yourself vocally and enthusiastically.Do you talk to yourself when you're alone? Do you worry that you might be a bit off for doing so? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/talking-to-yourself-crazy-or-crazy-smart/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

What does 2026 hold for indie authors and the publishing industry? I give my thoughts on trends and predictions for the year ahead. In the intro, Quitting the right stuff; how to edit your author business in 2026; Is SubStack Good for Indie Authors?; Business for Authors webinars. If you'd like to join my community and support the show every month, you'll get access to my growing list of Patron videos and audio on all aspects of the author business — for the price of a black coffee (or two) a month. Join us at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn. Joanna Penn writes non-fiction for authors and is an award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling thriller author as J.F. Penn. She's also an award-winning podcaster, creative entrepreneur, and international professional speaker. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. (1) More indie authors will sell direct through Shopify, Kickstarter, and local in-person events (2) AI-powered search will start to shift elements of book discoverability (3) The start of Agentic Commerce (4) AI-assisted audiobook narration will go mainstream (5) AI-assisted translation will start to take off beyond the early adopters (6) AI video becomes ubiquitous. ‘Live selling' becomes the next trend in social sales. (7) AI will create, run, and optimise ads without the need for human intervention (8) 1000 True Fans becomes more important than ever You can find all my books as J.F. Penn and Joanna Penn on your favourite online store in all the usual formats, or order from your local library or bookstore. You can also buy direct from me at CreativePennBooks.com and JFPennBooks.com. I'm not really active on social media, but you can always see my photos at Instagram @jfpennauthor. 2026 Trends and Predictions for Indie Authors and Book Publishing (1) More indie authors will sell direct through Shopify, Kickstarter, and local in-person events — and more companies like BookVault will offer even more beautiful physical books and products to support this. This trend will not be a surprise to most of you! Selling direct has been a trend for the last few years, but in 2026, it will continue to grow as a way that independent authors become even more independent. The recent Written Word Media survey from Dec 2025 noted that 30% of authors surveyed are selling direct already and 30% say they plan to start in 2026. Among authors earning over $10,000 per month, roughly half sell direct. In my opinion, selling direct is an advanced author strategy, meaning that you have multiple books and you understand book marketing and have an email list already or some guaranteed way to reach readers. In fact, Kindlepreneur reports that 66% of authors selling direct have more than 5 books, and 46% have more than 10 books. Of course, you can start with the something small, like a table at a local event with a limited number of books for sale, but if you want to consistently sell direct for years to come, you need to consider all the business aspects. Selling direct is not a silver bullet. It's much harder work to sell direct than it is to just upload an ebook to Amazon, whether you choose a Kickstarter campaign, or Shopify/Payhip or other online stores, or regular in-person sales at events/conferences/fairs. You need a business mindset and business practices, for example, you need to pay upfront for setup as well as ongoing management, and bulk printing in some cases. You need to manage taxes and cashflow. You need to be a lot more proactive about marketing, as you won't sell anything if you don't bring readers to your books/products. But selling direct also brings advantages. It sets you apart from the bulk of digital only authors who still only upload ebooks to Amazon, or maybe add a print on demand book, and in an era of AI rapid creation, that number is growing all the time. If you sell direct, you get your customer data and you can reach those customers next time, through your email list. If you don't know who bought your books and don't have a guaranteed way to reach them, you will more easily be disrupted when things change — and they always change eventually. Kindlepreneur notes that “45% of the successful direct selling authors had over 1,000 subscribers on their email lists,” with “a clear, positive correlation between email list size and monthly direct sales income — with authors having an email list of over 15,000 subscribers earning 20X more than authors with email lists under 100 subscribers.” Selling direct means faster money, sometimes the same day or the same week in many cases, or a few weeks after a campaign finishes, as with Kickstarter. And remember, you don't have to sell all your formats directly. You can keep your ebooks in KU, do whatever you like with audiobooks, and just have premium print products direct, or start with a very basic Kickstarter campaign, or a table at a local fair. Lots more tips for Shopify and Kickstarter at https://www.thecreativepenn.com/selldirectresources/ I also recommend the Novel Marketing Podcast on The Shopify Trap: Why authors keep losing money as it is a great counterpoint to my positive endorsement of selling direct on Shopify! Among other things, Thomas notes that a fixed monthly fee for a store doesn't match how most authors make money from books which is more in spikes, the complexity and hassle eats time and can cost more money if you pay for help, and it can reduce sales on Amazon and weaken your ranking. Basically, if you haven't figured out marketing direct to your store, it can hurt you.All true for some authors, for some genres, and for some people's lifestyle. But for authors who don't want to be on the hamster wheel of the Amazon algorithm and who want more diversity and control in income, as well as the incredible creative benefits of what you can do selling direct, then I would say, consider your options in 2025, even if that is trying out a low-financial-goal Kickstarter campaign, or selling some print books at a local fair. Interestingly, traditional publishers are also experimenting with direct sales. Kate Elton, the new CEO of Harper Collins notes in The Bookseller's 2026 trend article, “we are seeing global success with responsive, reader-driven publishing, subscription boxes and TikTok Shop and – crucially – developing strategies that are founded on a comprehensive understanding of the reader.” She also notes, “AI enables us to dramatically change the way we interact with and grow audiences. The opportunities are genuinely exciting – finding new ways to help readers discover books they will love, innovating in the ways we market and reach audiences, building new channels and adapting to new methods of consuming content.” (2) AI-powered search will start to shift elements of book discoverability From LinkedIn's 2026 Big Ideas: “Generative engine optimization (GEO) is set to replace search engine optimization (SEO) as the way brands get discovered in the year ahead. As consumers turn to AI chatbots, agentic workflows and answer engines, appearing prominently in generative outputs will matter more than ranking in search engines.” Google has been rolling out AI Mode with its AI Overviews and is beginning to push it within Google.com itself in some countries, which means the start of a fundamental change in how people discover content online. I first posted about GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) in 2023, and it's going to change how readers find books. For years, we've talked about the long tail of search. Now, with AI-powered search, that tail is getting even longer and more nuanced. AI can understand complex, conversational queries that traditional search engines struggled with. Someone might ask, “What's a good thriller set in a small town with a female protagonist who's a journalist investigating a cold case?” and get highly specific recommendations. This means your book metadata, your website content, and your online presence need to be more detailed and conversational. AI search engines understand context in ways that go far beyond simple keywords. The authors who win in this new landscape will be those who create rich, authentic content about their books and themselves, not just promotional copy. As economist Tyler Cowen has said, “Consider the AIs as part of your audience. Because they are already reading your words and listening to your voice.” We're in the ‘organic' traffic phase right now, where these AI engines are surfacing content for ‘free,' but paid ads are inevitably on the way, and even rumoured to be coming this year to ChatGPT. By the end of 2026, I expect some authors and publishers to be paying for AI traffic, rather than blocking and protesting them. For now, I recommend checking that your author name/s and your books are surfaced when you search on ChatGPT.com as well as Google.com AI Mode (powered by Gemini). You want to make sure your work comes up in some way. I found that Joanna Penn and J.F. Penn searches brought up my Shopify stores, my website, podcast, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even my Patreon page, but did not bring up links to Amazon. If you only have an author presence on Amazon, does it appear in AI search at all? Do you need to improve anything about what the AI search brings up? Traditional publishers are also looking at this, with PublishersWeekly doing webinars on various aspects of AI in early 2026, including sessions on GEO and how book sales are changing, AI agents, and book marketing. In a 2026 predictions article on The Bookseller, the CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing noted, “The boundaries of artificial intelligence will become clearer, enabling publishers to harness its benefits while seeking to safeguard the intellectual property rights of authors, illustrators and publishers.” “AI will be deeply embedded in our workflows, automating tasks such as metadata tagging, freeing teams to focus on creativity and strategy. Challenges will persist. Generative AI threatens traditional web traffic and ad revenue models, making metadata optimisation and SEO critical for visibility as we adjust to this new reality online.” (3) The start of Agentic Commerce AI researches what you want to buy and may even buy on your behalf. Plus, I predict that Amazon does a commerce deal with OpenAI for shopping within ChatGPT by the end of 2026. In September 2025, ChatGPT launched Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, which will enable bots to buy on websites in the background if authorised by the human with the credit card. VISA is getting on board with this, so is PayPal, with no doubt more payment options to come. In the USA, ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users can now buy directly from US Etsy sellers inside the chat interface, with over a million Shopify merchants coming soon. Shopify and OpenAI have also announced a partnership to bring commerce to ChatGPT. I am insanely excited about this as it could represent the first time we have been able to more easily find and surface books in a much more nuanced way than the 7 keywords and 3 categories we have relied on for so long! I've been using ChatGPT for at least the last year to find fiction and non-fiction books as I find the Amazon interface is ‘polluted' by ads. I've discovered fascinating books from authors I've never heard of, most in very long tail areas. For example, Slashed Beauties by A. Rushby, recommended by ChatGPT as I am interested in medical anatomy and anatomical Venuses, and The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson, recommended as I like art history and the supernatural. I don't think I would have found either of these within a nuanced discussion with ChatGPT. Even without these direct purchase integrations, ChatGPT now has Shopping Research, which I have found links directly to my Shopify store when I search for my books specifically. Walmart has partnered with OpenAI to create AI-first shopping experiences, and you have to wonder what Amazon might be doing? In Nov 2025, Amazon signed a “strategic partnership” with OpenAI, and even though it's focused on the technical side of AI, those two companies in a room together might also be working on other plans … I'm calling it for 2026. I think Amazon will sign a commerce agreement with OpenAI sometime before the end of the year. This will enable at least recommendation and shopping links into Amazon stores (presumably using an OpenAI affiliate link), or perhaps even Instant Checkout with ChatGPT for Amazon. It will also enable a new marketing angle, especially if paid ads arrive in ChatGPT, perhaps even integrating with Amazon Ads in some way as part of any possible agreement, since ads are such a good revenue stream for Amazon anyway. The line between discovery, engagement, and purchase is collapsing. Someone could be having a conversation with an AI about what to read next, and within that same conversation, purchase a bookwithout ever leaving the chat interface. This already happens within TikTok and social commerce clearly works for many authors. It's possible that the next development for book discoverability and sales might be within AI chats. This will likely stratify the already fragmented book eco-system even more. Some readers will continue to live only within the Amazon ecosystem and (maybe) use their Rufus chatbot to buy, and others will be much wider in their exploration of how to find and discover books (and other products and services). If you haven't tried it yet, try ChatGPT.com Shopping Research for a book. You can do this on the free tier. Use the drop down in the main chat box and select Shopping Research. It doesn't have to be for your book. It can be any book or product, for example, our microwave died just before Christmas so I used it to find a new one. But do a really nuanced search with multiple requirements. Go far beyond what you would search for on Amazon. In the results, notice that (at the time of writing) it does not generally link to Amazon, but to independent sites and stores. As above, I think this will change by the end of 2026, as some kind of commerce deal with Amazon seems inevitable. (4) AI-assisted audiobook narration will go mainstream I've been talking about AI narration of audiobooks since 2019, and over the years, I've tried various different options. In 2025, the technology reached a level of emotional nuance that made it much easier to create satisfying fiction audio as well as non-fiction. It also super-charges accessibility, making audio available in more languages and more accents than ever before. Of course, human narration remains the gold standard, but the cost makes it prohibitive for many authors, and indeed many small traditional publishers, for all books. If it costs $2000 – $10,000 to create an audiobook, you have to sell a lot to make a profit, and the dominance of subscription models have made it harder to recoup the costs. Famous narrators and voice artists who have an audience may still be worth investing in, as well as premium production, but require an even higher upfront cost and therefore higher sales and streams in return. AI voice/audio models are continuing to improve, and even as this goes out, there are rumours on TechCrunch that OpenAI's new device, designed by Jony Ive who designed the iPhone, will be audio first and OpenAI are improving their voice models even more in preparation for that launch. In 2026, I think AI-narrated audio will go mainstream with far-reaching adoption across publishing and the indie author world in many different languages and accents. This will mean a further stratification of audiobooks, with high quality, high production, high cost human narrated audio for a small percentage of books, and then mass market, affordable AI-narrated audio for the rest. AI-narrated audiobooks will make audio ubiquitous, and just as (almost) every print book has an ebook format, in 2026, they will also have an audio format. I straddle both these worlds, as I am still a human audiobook narrator for my own work. I human-narrated Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition (free audiobook) and The Buried and the Drowned, my short story collection. I also use AI narration for some books. ElevenLabs remains my preferred service and in 2025, I used my J.F. Penn voice clone for Death Valley and also Blood Vintage, while using a male voice for Catacomb. I clearly label my AI-narration in the sales description and also on the cover, which I think is important, although it is not always required by the various services. You can distribute ElevenLabs narrated audiobooks on Spotify, Kobo Writing Life, YouTube, ElevenReader, and of course your own store if you use Shopify with Bookfunnel. There are many other services springing up all the time, so make sure you check the rights you have over the finished audio, as well as where you can sell and distribute the final files. If they are just using ElevenLabs models in the back-end, then why not just do that directly? (Most services will be using someone's model in the back-end, since most companies do not train their own models.) Of course, you can use Amazon's own narration. While Amazon originally launched Audible audiobooks with Virtual Voice (AVV) in November 2023, it was rolled out to more authors and territories in 2025. If your book is eligible, the option to create an audiobook will appear on your KDP dashboard. With just a few clicks, you can create an audiobook from a range of voices and accents, and publish it on Amazon and Audible. However, the files are not yours. They are exclusive to Amazon and you cannot use them on other platforms or sell them direct yourself. But they are also free, so of course, many authors, especially those in KU, will use this option. I have done some for my mum's sweet romance books as Penny Appleton and I will likely use them for my books in translation when the option becomes available. Traditional publishers are experimenting with AI-assisted audiobook narration as well. MacMillan is selling digital audiobooks read by AI directly on their store. PublishersWeekly reports that PRH Audio “has experimented with artificial voice in specific instances, such as entrepreneur Ely Callaway's posthumous memoir The Unconquerable Game,” when an “authorized voice replica” was created for the audiobook. The article also notes that PRH Audio “embrace artificial intelligence across business operations—my entire department [PRH Audio] is using AI for business applications.” And while indie authors can't use AI voices on ACX right now, Audible have over 100 voices available to selected publishing partnerships, as reported by The Guardian with “two options for publishers wishing to make use of the technology: “Audible-managed” production, or “self-service” whereby publishers produce their own audiobooks with the help of Audible's AI technology.” In 2026, it's likely that more traditional publishers — as well as indie authors — will get their backlist into audio with AI narration. (5) AI-assisted translation will start to take off beyond the early adopters Over the years, I've done translation deals with traditional publishers in different languages (German, French, Spanish, Korean, Italian) for some fiction and non-fiction books. But of course, to get these kinds of deals, you have to be proactive about pitching, or work with an agent for foreign rights only, and those are few and far between! There are also lots of languages and territories worldwide, and most deals are for the bigger markets, leaving a LOT of blue water for books in translation, even if you have licensed some of the bigger markets. I did my first partially AI-translated books in 2019 when I used Deepl.com for the first draft and then worked with a German editor to do 3 non-fiction books in German. While the first draft was cheap, the editing was pretty expensive, so I stopped after only doing a couple. I have made the money back now, but it took years. In 2025, AI Translation began to take off with ScribeShadow, GlobeScribe.ai, and more recently, in November 2025, Kindle Translate boosting the number of translated books available. Kindle Translate is (currently) only available to US authors for English into Spanish and also German into English, but in 2026, this will likely roll out to more languages and more authors, making it easier than ever to produce translations for free. Of course, once again, the gold standard is human translation, or at least human-edited translations, but the cost is prohibitive even just for proof-reading, and if there is a cheap or even free option, like Kindle Translate, then of course, authors are going to try it. If the translation gets bad reviews, they can just un-publish. There are many anecdotal stories of indie success in 2025 with AI-translated genre fiction sales (in series) in under-served markets like Italian, French, and Spanish, as well as more mainstream adoption in German. I was around in the Kindle gold-rush days of 2009-2012 and the AI-translation energy right now feels like that. There are hardly any Kindle ebooks in many of these languages compared to how many there are in English, so inevitably, the rush is on to fill the void, especially in genres that are under-served by traditional publishers in those markets. Yes, some of these AI translated books will be ‘AI-slop,' but readers are not stupid. Those books will get bad reviews and thus will sink to the bottom of the store, never to be seen again. The AI translation models are also improving rapidly, and Amazon's Kindle Translate may improve faster than most, for books specifically, since they will be able to get feedback in terms of page reads. Amazon is also a major investor in Anthropic, which makes Claude.ai, widely considered the best quality for creative writing and translation, so it's likely that is used somewhere in the mix. Some traditional publishers are also experimenting with AI-assisted translation, with Harlequin France reportedly using AI translation and human proofreaders, as reported by the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations in December 2025. Academic publisher Taylor and Francis is also using AI for book translation, noting: “Following a program of rigorous testing, Taylor & Francis has announced plans to use AI translation tools to publish books that would otherwise be unavailable to English-language readers, bringing the latest knowledge to a vastly expanded readership.” “Until now, the time and resources required to translate books has meant that the majority remained accessible only to those who could read them in the original language. Books that were translated often only became available after a significant delay. Today, with the development of sophisticated AI translation tools, it has become possible to make these important texts available to a broad readership at speed, without compromising on accuracy.” (6) AI video becomes ubiquitous. ‘Live selling' becomes the next trend in social sales. In 2025, short form AI-generated video became very high quality. OpenAI released Sora 2, and YouTube announced new Shorts creation tools with Veo 3, which you can also use directly within Gemini. There are tons of different AI video apps now, including those within the social media sites themselves. There is more video than ever and it's much easier to create. I am not a fan of short form video! I don't make it and I don't consume it, but I do love making book trailers for my Kickstarter campaigns and for adding to my book pages and using on social media. I made a trailer for The Buried and the Drowned using Midjourney for images and then animation of those images, and Canva to put them together along with ElevenLabs to generate the music. But despite the AI tools getting so much easier to use, you still have to prompt them with exactly what you want. I can't just upload my book and say, “Make a book trailer,” or “Make a short film.” This may change with generative video ads, which are likely to become more common in 2026, as video turns specifically commercial. Video ads may even be generated specifically for the user, with an audience of one, maybe even holding your book in their hands (using something like Cameos on Sora), in the same way that some AI-powered clothing stores do virtual try-ons. This might also up-end the way we discover and buy things, as the AI for eCommerce and Amazon Sellers newsletter says about OpenAI's Sora app, “OpenAI isn't just trying to build a TikTok competitor. They're building a complete reimagining of how we discover and buy things …” “The combination of ChatGPT's research capabilities and Sora's potential for emotional manipulation—I mean, “engagement”—could create something we've never seen before: an AI ecosystem that might eventually guide you through every type of purchase, from the most considered to the most impulsive.” In 2026, there will be A LOT more AI-generated video, but that also leads to the human trend of more live video. While you can use an AI avatar that looks and sounds like you using tools like HeyGen or Synthesia, live video has all the imperfect human elements that make it stand-out, plus the scarcity element which leads to the purchase decision within a countdown period. Live video is nothing new in terms of brand building and content in general, but it seems that live events primarily for direct sales might be a thing in 2026. Kim Kardashian hosted Kimsmas Live in December 2025 with a 45 minute live shopping event with special guests, described as entertainment but designed to be a sales extravaganza. Indie authors are doing a similar thing on TikTok with their books, so this is a trend to watch in 2026, especially if you feel that live selling might fit with your personality and author business goals. It's certainly not for everyone, but I suspect it will suit a different kind of creator to those who prefer ‘no face' video, or no video at all! On other aspects of the human side of social media, Adam Mosseri the CEO of Instagram put a post on Threads called Authenticity after Abundance. He said, “Everything that made creators matter—the ability to be real, to connect, to have a voice that couldn't be faked—is now suddenly accessible to anyone with the right tools.” “Deepfakes are getting better and better. AI is generating photographs and videos indistinguishable from captured media. The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything. And in that world, here's what I think happens.Creators matter more.” It's a long article so just to pick a few things from it: “We like to talk about “AI slop,” but there is a lot of amazing AI content … we are going to start to see more and more realistic AI content.” I've talked to my Patreon Community about this ‘tsunami of excellence' as these tools are just getting better and better and the word ‘slop' can also be applied to purely human output, too. If you think that AI content is ‘worse' than wholly human content, in 2026, you are wrong. It is now very very good, especially in the hands of people who can drive the AI tools. Back to Adam's post: “Authenticity is fast becoming a scarce resource, …The creators who succeed will be those who figure out how to maintain their authenticity [even when it can be simulated] …” “The bar is going to shift from “can you create?” to “can you make something that only you could create?” He talks about how the personal content on Instagram now is: “unpolished; it's blurry photos and shaky videos of people's daily experiences … flattering imagery is cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that feels real… Savvy creators are going to lean into explicitly unproduced and unflattering images of themselves. In a world where everything can be perfected, imperfection becomes a signal. Rawness isn't just aesthetic preference anymore—it's proof. It's defensive. A way of saying: this is real because it's imperfect.” While I partially love this, and I really hope it's true, as in I hope we don't need to look good for the camera anymore I would also challenge Adam on this, because pretty much every woman I know on social media has been sent sexual messages, and/or told they are ugly and/or fat when posting anything unflattering. I've certainly had both even for the same content, but I don't expect Adam has been the target for such posting! But I get his point. He goes on:“Labeling content as authentic or AI-generated is only part of the solution though. We, as an industry, are going to need to surface much more context about not only the media on our platforms, but the accounts that are sharing it in order for people to be able to make informed decisions about what to believe. Where is the account? When was it created? What else have they posted?” This is exactly what I've been saying for a while under my double down on being human focus. I use my Instagram @jfpennauthor as evidence of humanity, not as a sales channel. You can do both of course, but increasingly, you need to make sure your accounts at places have longevity and trust, even by the platforms themselves. Adam finishes: “In a world of infinite abundance and infinite doubt, the creators who can maintain trust and signal authenticity—by being real, transparent, and consistent—will stand out.” For other marketing trends for 2026, I recommend publicist Kathleen Schmidt's SubStack which is mostly focused on traditional publishing but still interesting for indies. In her 2026 article, she notes: “We have reached a social media saturation point where going viral can be meaningless and should not be the goal; authenticity and creativity should. She also says, “In-person events are important again,” and, “Social media marketing takes a nosedive… we have reached a saturation point … What publishers must figure out is how to make their social media campaigns stand out. If they remain somewhat uninspired, the money spent on social ads won't convert into book sales.” I think this is part of the rise of live selling as above, which can stand out above more ‘produced' videos. Kathleen also talks about AI usage. “AI can help lighten the burden of publicity and marketing.” “A lot of AI tools are coming to market to lessen the load: they can write pitches, create media lists for you, send pitches for you, and more. I know the industry is grappling with all things AI, but some of these tools are huge time savers and may help a book more than hurt it.” On that note … (7) AI will create, run, and optimise ads without the need for human intervention Many authors will be very happy about this as marketing is often the bane of our author business lives! As I noted in my 2026 goals, I would love to outsource more marketing tasks to AI. I want an “AI book marketing assistant” where I can upload a book and specify a budget and say, ‘Go market this,' then the AI will action the marketing, without me having to cobble together workflows between systems. Of course, it will present plans for me to approve but it will do the work itself on the various platforms and monitor and optimize things for me. I really hope 2026 is the year this becomes possible, because we are on the edge of it already in some areas. Amazon Ads launched a new agentic AI tool in September 2025 that creates professional-quality ads. I've also been working with Claude in Chrome browser to help me analyse my Amazon Ad data and suggest which keywords/products to turn off and what to put more budget into. I'll do a Patreon video on that soon. Meta announced it will enable AI ad creation by the end of 2026 for Facebook and Instagram. For authors who find ad creation overwhelming or time-consuming, this could be a game-changer. Of course, you will still need a budget! (8) 1000 True Fans becomes more important than ever Lots of authors and publishers are moaning about the difficulty of reaching readers in an era of ‘AI slop' but there is no shortage of excellent content created by humans, or humans using AI tools. As ever, our competition is less about other authors, or even authors using AI-assisted creation, we're competing against everything else that jostles for people's attention, and the volume of that is also growing exponentially. I've never been a fan of rapid release, and have said for years that you can't keep up with the pace of the machines. So play a different game. As Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008, If you have 1000 true fans, (also known as super fans), “you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.” [Kevin Kelly was on this show in 2023 talking about Excellent Advice for Living.] Many authors and the publishing industry are stuck in the old model of aiming to sell huge volumes of books at a low profit margin to a massive number of readers, many of them releasing ever faster to try and keep the algorithms moving. But the maths can work for the smaller audience of more invested readers and fans. If you only make $2 profit on an ebook, you need to sell 500 ebooks to make $1000, and then do it again next month. Or you can have a small community like my patreon.com/thecreativepenn where people pay $2 (or more) a month, so even a small revenue per person results in a better outcome over the year, as it is consistent monthly income with no advertising. But what if you could make $20 profit per book? That is entirely possible if you're producing high quality hardbacks on Kickstarter, or bundle deals of audiobooks, or whole series of ebooks. You would only need to sell to 50 people to make $1000. What about $100 profit per sale, which you can do with a small course or live event? You only need 10 people to make $1000, and this in-person focus also amplifies trust and fosters human connection. I've found the intimacy of my live Patreon Office Hours and also my webinars have been rewarding personally, but also financially, and are far more memorable — and potentially transformative — than a pre-recorded video or even another book. From the LinkedIn 2026 Big Ideas article: “In an AI-optimized world, intentional human connection will become the ultimate luxury.” The 1000 True Fans model is about serving a smaller, more personal audience with higher value products (and maybe services if that's your thing). As ever, its about niche and where you fit in the long long long long long tail. It's also about trust. Because there is definitely a shortage of that in so many areas, and as Adam Mosseri of Instagram has said, trust will be increasingly important. Trust takes time to build, but if you focus on serving your audience consistently, and delivering a high quality, and being authentic, this emerges as part of being human. In an echo of what happened when online commerce first took off, we are back to talking about trust. Back in 2010, I read Trust Agents: by Julien Smith and Chris Brogan, which clearly needs a comeback. There was a 10th anniversary edition published in 2020, so that's worth a read/listen. Chris Brogan was also on this show in 2017 when we talked about finding and serving your niche for the long term. That interview is still relevant, here's a quick excerpt, where I have (lightly edited) his response to my question on this topic back in 2017: Jo: The principle of know, like, and trust, why is that still important or perhaps even more important these days? Chris: There are a few things that at play there, Joanna. One is that the same tools that make it so easy for any of us to start and run a business also allow certain elements to decide whether or not they want to do something dubious. And with all new technologies that come, you know, there's nothing unique about these new technologies. In the 1800s, anyone could put anything in a bottle and sell it to you and say, this is gonna cure everything. Cancer — gone. And the bottle could have nothing in. You know, it could be Kool-Aid. And so, the idea of trying to understand what's behind the business though, one beautiful thing that's come is that we can see in much more dimensions who we're dealing with. We can understand better who's the face behind the brand. I really want people to try their best to be a lot clearer on what they stand for or what they say. And I don't really mean a tagline. I mean, humans don't really talk like that. They don't throw some sentence out as often as they can that you remember them for that phrase. But I would say that, we have so many media available to us — the plural of mediums — where we can be more of ourselves. And I think that there's a great opportunity to share the ‘you' behind the scenes, and some people get immediately terrified about this, ‘Ah, the last thing I want is for people to know more about me,' but I think we have such an opportunity. We have such an opportunity to voice our thoughts on something, to talk about the story that goes behind the product. We were all raised on overly produced material, but I think we don't want that anymore. We really want clarity, brevity, simplicity. We want the ability for what we feel is connection and then access. And so I think it's vital that we connect and show people our accessibility, not so that they can pester us with strange questions, but more so that you can say, this person stands with their product and their service and this person believes these things, and I feel something when I hear them and I wanna be part of that.” That's from Chris Brogan's interview here in 2017, and he is still blogging and speaking at writing at ChrisBrogan.com and I'm going to re-listen to the audiobook of Trust Agents again myself as I think it's more relevant than ever. The original quote comes from Bob Burg in his 1994 book, Endless Referrals, “All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.” That still applies, and absolutely fits with the 1000 True Fans model of aiming to serve a smaller audience. As Kevin Kelly says in 1000 True Fans, “Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for direct connection with a thousand true fans.” “On your way, no matter how many fans you actually succeed in gaining, you'll be surrounded not by faddish infatuation, but by genuine and true appreciation. It's a much saner destiny to hope for. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.” In 2026, I hope that more authors (including me!) let go of ego goals and vanity metrics like ranking, gross sales (income before you take away costs), subscribers, followers, and likes, and consider important business numbers like profit (which is the money you have after costs like marketing are taken out), as well as number of true fans — and also lifestyle elements like number of weekends off, or days spent enjoying life and not just working! OK, that's my list of trends and predictions for 2026. Let me know what you think in the comments. Do you agree? Am I wrong? What have I missed? The post 2026 Trends And Predictions For Indie Authors And The Book Publishing Industry with Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Hey there, hero!This is the final episode of the podcast for the year.And as I recorded this episode, I was wading through my inbox, which is currently filling up with listicles of The Best XXXXXX Of The Year, or Our Predictions For The Best XXXXXX Of The Upcoming Year.I tend to look at those things as fun, maybe interesting, but ultimately not very useful.Want a healthy alternative?Do your grunt work. Update your resume. Review your bios. Re-edit your demo with footage from your last job. Tweak your writing samples.Take the time not to look at the past to try and predict the future, but work your office hours to help people get a current snapshot of who you are as a performer.We almost always forget in some way to do that mundane but critical work. It's so critical that I dedicate two full courses in VOHeroes (Systems Tuneup - Part 1 and 2) to keeping things running smoothly and up to date.Might you have admin work you need to do for yourself? What auditing do you need to accomplish? Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/instead-of-looking-back-or-ahead-do-this-instead/#Acting #Voice #VoiceOver #Performance #Productivity #Tips #Art #Commerce #Science #Mindset #Success #Process #Options #BestPractices #MarketingWant to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Hey there, hero!There's a lot of value in having workable expertise, value in having expertise that's exceptional, and it's something I think most of us strive to acquire.There's also a lot of value in being dependable, being reliable, being a rock to others in your life…to show up, hit your mark and do the work.If you had to choose one or the other (I'm sure we'd all like to strive for both, but…), which would you prefer?I'd like to know your answer to the question posed in the title of this episode, and I'd love to know from two perspectives if you would (in the comments below):1) Which do you value in others? What would you choose in your peers if you had to make a choice?2) Which do you strive for in yourself? What would you choose to be more proficient in (knowledge or reliability) if you had to make a choice?Let me know in the comments below.REQUEST: Please join this video's conversation and see the full episode on VOHeroes, where the comments are moderated and civil, at https://voheroes.com/whats-more-valuable-being-smart-or-being-reliable/Want to be a better VO talent, actor or author? Here's how I can help you......become a VO talent (or a more successful one): https://voheroes.com/start ...become an audiobook narrator on ACX (if you're an actor or VO talent): https://acxmasterclass.com/ ...narrate your own book (if you're an author): https://narrateyourownbook.com/ ...have the most effective pop filter (especially for VO talent): https://mikesock.com/ ...be off-book faster for on-camera auditions and work (memorize your lines): https://rehearsal.pro/...master beautiful audiobook and podcast audio in one drag and drop move on your Mac: https://audiocupcake.com/ The VOHeroes Podcast is heroically built with: BuddyBoss | LearnDash | DreamHost | SamCart | TextExpander | BuzzSprout ...

Amazon quietly rolled out a new Kindle feature that places AI directly inside books, raising questions authors should understand. This week's Self-Publishing News also covers major audiobook platform updates, new distribution and monetization options, and review compliance shifts tied to Amazon enforcement. These changes affect how authors publish, promote, and protect their work moving into the new year. YouTube Channel Memberships (podcast) – https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Channel Memberships Members-only Video Playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMOl9CjdZQtzufqgYx0CidSbA IngramSpark Changes Every Author Must See | Self-Publishing News (Dec. 9, 2025) - https://youtu.be/tvyINUd0JIU?si=mMpMLgYl1B0Te6t9  Now in Beta: Narrator Voice Replicas on ACX - https://www.acx.com/mp/blog/now-in-beta-narrator-voice-replicas-on-acx Writer Beware: Kindle's New Gen AI-Powered "Ask This Book" Feature Raises Rights Concerns - https://writerbeware.blog/2025/12/12/kindles-new-gen-ai-powered-ask-this-book-feature-raises-rights-concerns/ Spotify for Authors - https://authors.spotify.com • Voices by INAudio - https://www.voicesbyinaudio.com/  Google Play Books Partner Center: Character detection in auto-narrated audiobooks - https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/14183080 Spoken – https://spoken.press Book Bounty – https://DaleLinks.com/BookBounty (affiliate link) The Bottom Line (subscription required) - https://janefriedman.com/the-bottom-line-janes-publishing-industry-newsletter/ YouTube for Authors – https://DaleLinks.com/YouTubeBook Dibbly Create – https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) - Use coupon code DIBBLYHOLIDAY25 for 25% off yearly plans, and DIBBLYHOLIDAY30 for 30% off addon tokens. (ends January 1) Dibbly – https://DaleLinks.com/Dibbly - Use code TUWHOLIDAY7 for 7% off all services. (ends January 1) StoryOrigin – https://DaleLinks.com/StoryOrigin Keith Wheeler Books presents: Short Reads Domination Course - https://shortreaddomination.com/  Matty Dalrymple presents: From Expertise to Authority: Building Your Professional Presence for a Sideline or Second Act - https://www.theindyauthor.com/entrepreneurship Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Check out my main YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@dalelroberts My Books - https://DaleLinks.com/MyBooks Wanna tip me? Visit https://dalelroberts.gumroad.com/coffee. Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. I only endorse programs, products, or services I use and can stand confidently behind. These links do not affect your purchase price and greatly helps to building and growing this channel. Thanks in advance for understanding! - Dale L. Roberts

ACX has been co-running a forecasting contest with Metaculus for the past few years. Lately the "co-running" has drifted towards them doing all the work and giving me credit, but that's how I like it! Last year's contest included more than 4500 forecasters predicting on 33 questions covering US politics, international events, AI, and more. They're preparing for this year's contest, and currently looking for interesting questions. These could be any objective outcome that might or might not happen in 2026, whose answer will be known by the end of the year. Not "Will Congress do a good job?", but "Will Congress' approval rating be above 40% on December 1, 2026?". Or, even better, "Will Congress' approval rating be above 40% according to the first NYT Congressional Approval Tracker update to be published after December 1, 2026?". Please share ideas for 2026 forecast questions here. The top ten question contributors will win prizes from $150 to $700. You can see examples of last year's questions here (click on each one for more details). This year's contest will also include AI bots, who will compete against the humans and one another for prizes of their own. To learn more about building a Metaculus forecasting bot, see here. I'll keep you updated on when the contest begins. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/suggest-questions-for-metaculusacx  

Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the Non-Book Review Contest. The winners are: 1st: Joan of Arc, by William Friedman. William is a history enthusiast and author who lives in California, where he spends his time reading, writing, GMing, playing video games and telling people excitedly about all the horrific stuff he learned in his latest history book. His fiction blog is Palace Fiction (which is currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant) and his nonfiction blog is As Our Days. 2nd: Alpha School, by Edward Nevraumont. Edward also wrote one of last year's finalists (Silver Age Marvel Comics)1. Now that he's no longer anonymous, he's going to write a post on his blog responding to the review comments (712 of them!), as well as a follow-up post on what he has learned about Alpha in the six months since he submitted his review (including the Spring and Fall MAP results for his kids). Here is the landing page with more details for ACX readers who are interested. 3rd: The Russo-Ukrainian War, by Gallow. Gallow is a wayward military consultant based in Ukraine. A long time reader of Slate Star Codex, he enjoys chess and combat sports. Forthcoming details of his experiences, along with miscellaneous thoughts and ideas can be found at his nascent Substack : https://substack.com/@gallowglassglen The other Finalists were: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/non-book-review-contest-2025-winners

Audiobooks have been the fastest-growing segment in publishing for a decade, and for many readers, an audiobook signals a real, human-written book. In fact, audiobook sales have recently outpaced ebook sales!Now is the time to get your book on audio. But where do you even begin?In this week's episode, audiobook consultant Bryan Canter gives us an overview of the entire process of how ACX (Audiobook Creative Exchange) works and how to publish your book on audio without blowing your budget.You'll learnWho should (or shouldn't) narrate your bookHow much it's likely to cost (it might be less than you think!)How to get started (and who can help you!)If you know you need an audiobook, listen in or read the blog version to learn the ACX basics, pick the right narrator, and avoid costly mistakes. Your future listeners are waiting.