Podcasts about findaway voices

The audiobook landscape is shifting under the feet of authors, and staying informed is no longer optional—it's essential for your success. In this episode, Becky breaks down the major industry changes hitting platforms like ACX, Spotify, and InAudio, and explains why the old rules of distribution no longer apply. In this episode, we dive into: The ACX Royalty Shift: What the move from "retail price" to "member value" actually means for your bottom line and why the math might be working against you. The Findaway/Spotify Split: Navigating the transition from Findaway Voices to the new landscape of Spotify for Authors and InAudio. The Power of Direct Engagement: Why traditional retailers prioritize transactions while new models prioritize connection. AMPlify Audiobooks: An inside look at how the new version of AMPlify Audiobooks is changing the game by offering up to 4x higher royalties, complete pricing control, and community-building tools designed to turn listeners into fans. Whether you are an indie author trying to earn back your production investment or a narrator looking to understand the market, this episode provides the clarity you need to navigate these massive changes. Coming Up in This Series: ACX Decoded: Why the math still favors direct platforms. Going Wide vs. Going Direct: Weighing your distribution options. Building a Winning Distribution Strategy: A roadmap for your audio career. Resources & Links: Amplify Audiobooks: https://amplifyaudiobooks.com/ Pro Audio Voices: Schedule a call with Becky: proaudiovoices.com Authors Republic: For broad distribution alternatives: https://www.authorsrepublic.com/ View the video of this episode #Audiobooks #IndieAuthor #AudiobookDistribution #ACX #AmplifyAudiobooks #AuthorTips #PublishingNews

EMAIL MARKETING FOR AUTHORS You've heard it a hundred times. Email marketing is the key to selling more books. So why haven't you started? Maybe it feels too technical. Too time-consuming. Too easy to mess up. You've got writing to do, and the idea of building a list, crafting automations, or sending emails just sounds exhausting. You're not alone. Most authors avoid email until it's too late. But the truth is, it doesn't have to be that hard or take up all your time. Whether you're starting from zero or rebuilding the right way, this book shows you how to grow your email list with purpose and keep your audience engaged for the long haul. TOPICS OF CONVERSATION About Email Marketing for Authors, and why Dale gave this topic its own book in the series Knowing exactly who you're writing for, and why "everyone" is the wrong answer Getting started from zero, even if you've never sent a marketing email Big list or good list, and why the number of subscribers isn't the number that matters Writing emails readers actually want to open, and what to say when you don't know what to say Earning from your list without pushing a single book sale Why Dale keeps writing for the authors who are where he once was, and what he'd tell anyone thinking about giving up ABOUT DALE L. ROBERTS Dale L. Roberts is a self-publishing advocate, award-winning author, and trusted voice in the indie publishing community. With over 50 titles and 40 literary awards to his name, Dale has established himself as a cornerstone of self-publishing success. His most recent book, Self-Publishing for New Authors, is an entrant for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. As the founder of two YouTube channels—Dale L. Roberts, with over 103,000 subscribers, and the Self-Publishing with Dale Podcast, with over 16,000 subscribers—Dale reaches hundreds of thousands of aspiring and seasoned authors worldwide. His videos, lauded for their honesty, relatability, and to-the-point delivery, have garnered over 6.8 million views and nearly 500,000 hours of watch time. Dale's deep connections with industry leaders, including Amazon KDP, Draft2Digital, and Findaway Voices, make him a valuable resource for authors navigating the ever-evolving publishing landscape. As a Video Content Advisor for the Alliance of Independent Authors, he's recognized for his innovative approach to content creation and author branding. Beyond his professional success, Dale's journey is rooted in perseverance and passion. From self-publishing his first book on health and wellness in 2013 to overcoming early struggles through mentorship, Dale's story inspires authors to achieve their dreams. A former personal trainer and professional wrestler, Dale now dedicates his time to writing, creating music, and sharing life with his wife and their two rare, all-white rescue cats, Auggie and Allie. “Being an indie author is so much more than writing and publishing books. It's about making real human connections and an impact that'll echo for generations to come.” – Dale L. Roberts CONNECT WITH DALE L. ROBERTS Website – http://selfpublishingwithdale.com YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/selfpublishingwithdale YouTube Podcast – https://www.youtube.com/@selfpubwithdale My Books – https://dalelinks.com/bookshelf Discord – https://dalelinks.com/discord Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/selfpubwithdale Twitter – https://twitter.com/selfpubwithdale TikTok – https://www.tiktok.com/@selfpubwithdale Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/selfpubwithdale/  

In this week's episode, we offer 7 tips indie authors can use to help their audiobooks turn a profit on production costs. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store: JUNENIGHT The coupon code is valid through July 13, 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 309 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 26th, 2026 and today we are sharing seven tips for audiobook profitability for indie authors. Before we get to that, we will have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up is Coupon of the Week and this week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store. That code is JUNENIGHT. And 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 will be valid through July the 13th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook series to read this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I am pleased to report I am on the second editing pass of Blade of Thieves. I am about 13% of the way through that. And so if all goes well, I think the book will be out after the 4th of July weekend/second week in July, if all goes well. I have a few real life things to do that might slow that down, but I am very, very keen to finally have this book out after the 4th of July weekend. After Blade of Thieves is published, my next project will be Cloak of Frost, the 15th book in the Cloak Mage series. I am 17,000 words into that and I am hoping that will be out in August, if all goes well. I have no audiobooks currently in production, but that will change next month because Brad Wills will be recording Blade of Thieves once it's done. Hollis McCarthy will be recording Cloak of Worlds and Leanne Woodward will be recording Dragon-Mage. So we'll go from having no audiobooks being worked on to a bunch being worked on all at once. Funny how things tend to bunch up like that. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. 00:01:59 The Economics of Audiobook Production for Indie Authors [All money amounts mentioned are in USD.] Now today I want to talk about a very advanced level indie author topic, namely audiobook production and the economics of it. Recently there's been some controversy because ACX (which is Amazon's audiobook production platform) has been changing its royalty model and rolling out what they call synthetic voice, which is basically an AI generated voice. Some writers have been using it because it's a lot cheaper than a good human narrator, but the flip side is that not many people like listening to it and won't pay money for it. Admittedly, synthetic voice is not fundamentally a new technology. Text to speech has been around forever. Macs have had it since I believe 1984, back when 120 kilobytes of RAM was a lot. As a brief digression, I wish the term AI hadn't been bandied about so liberally. Before the public backlash began against generative AI and data centers, the term AI was trendy, so it got slapped on a lot of things that are actually wildly different than generative AI. I saw a post where someone was complaining about the locations in Starfield being AI generated, when in fact they're procedurally generated, which is something totally different. Anyway, synthetic voice is just a more advanced version of the text to speech technology that's been around since the early 1980s. The fear is that AI generated audiobooks will swamp the market and dominate most of ACX's payment model. Now, while that is a valid fear, I strongly suspect that it is not going to work out that way, given the hostility I have observed towards synthetic voices, especially in fiction. I think what'll happen is authors who use synthetic voice will save a lot of money by not paying a narrator, but then they won't actually make any money because no one will want to buy these machine voiced audiobooks. I have some basis for that because in the early 2020s, I experimented with making synthetic voice versions of my Silent Order science fiction series and putting them on YouTube. The overwhelming response was that people liked the story but hated the computer generated voice. It might be different for nonfiction. A romance novel with a synthetic voice would obviously be quite flat, but that wouldn't matter as much for a primer on tax law or agriculture or something similar. So there's a lot of uncertainty on whether or not audiobooks can still be profitable for indie authors. However, I suggest this is nothing new. Audiobooks have always been indie publishing on hard mode, partly because they're expensive to produce and partly because they're harder to sell than ebooks and sometimes even paperbacks. That said, I'm on my eighth year of self-publishing audiobooks and some of them have made back their production costs and turned a profit. So I thought it would share seven tips on how to have profitable self-published audiobooks. #1: Think long term. If you want your audiobooks to be profitable, you need to think in the long term. ACX has this program called Royalty Share where rather than pay a narrator, you and the narrator split the royalties on the audiobook for the next seven years and after those seven years are passed, you get all these subsequent royalties. I've never taken this option, but I cite it here because I think seven years is not an unreasonable amount of time for an audiobook to earn back its production cost. People always blanch a bit when I say that, but I've been doing self-published audiobooks for eight years now, so let's see how some of them have done. The Frostborn audiobooks, 100% of them have earned back their production cost. Of the 24 Ghosts books in audio, about the first 10 have earned back their production cost. For Cloak Mage, of the 12 Cloak Mage books currently in audio, about the first three and a half have earned back their production cost. For Dragonskull, of the nine Dragonskull books, the first three and a half have earned back their production cost. For Malison, of the four Malison books, they have 100% earned back their production cost. It helps that they're short. For The Shield War, of the six Shield War books, the first one has earned back its production costs, but I only started the series in 2023. The Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide (my one nonfiction book) has totally earned back its production cost. So I don't think seven years is an unreasonable length of time to earn back the production cost for an audiobook. That means you have to think long term, almost like a small business owner buying a new piece of equipment. Depending on the business, the owner might budget for the equipment making back what he paid for it in four or five years, or if he has to take out a loan to buy the equipment, he'll calculate how long it'll take to pay back that loan. Like for example, I just had to pay a lot of money to have these struts in my car fixed and I expect the garage owner carefully considered how much he would spend on his vehicle hoist since I believe a new vehicle hoist and installation typically costs between $7,000 and $12,000 and how long it would take him to make back that money. All successful small business owners have to think like this. Now this mindset is a bit tricky for indie authors because we often have a strong tendency to think in the short term, especially new indie authors who want their books to make a ton of money right now. But as I said above, audiobooks are self-publishing on hard mode, so you need to decide whether it is worth the investment and if you're comfortable waiting a few years to earn back the production cost over time. The reality is that if you are paying a professional narrator to create an audiobook, you're paying $200 per finished hour or above, which is a small business expense. So for that kind of money, you need to think about the audiobook like a small business owner. #2: Deductions First off, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice and I am not an accountant and this is not investment/financial advice. If you want financial/investment advice, you should talk to an accountant or financial planner properly certified with the tax laws of your state, province, and nation. If you want legal advice, you should talk to a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction. The way my writing business is set up, I can take the production cost of audiobooks as a deduction against my taxes. This initially was one of the reasons I got into self-published audiobooks in the first place way back in 2018. I realized that if I was going to have to pay the money in taxes anyway, I might as well spend some of it on audio production instead, since that way I'll at least get a revenue generating asset out of it. Other small businesses will sometimes do this when they approach the end of their fiscal year and realize they have more tax liability than expected, so it's probably time to invest in some new equipment or upgrades that they would need anyway. Like maybe the garage owner we mentioned earlier has a really good year so he decides it's a good time to spend that $12,000 on a new vehicle hoist so he doesn't have quite so high a tax bill at the end of the year. I once had someone tell me rather self-righteously that this was a tax dodge and therefore immoral, but that's ridiculous. [Transcriptionist's side note: I wish I had that person's level of unearned confidence. I'd use it for cliff diving or starting a library just for puppies and the weirdest, clumsiest orange cats. Literally anything else.] No less of an authority than Jesus Christ himself said that to render under Caesar what is Caesar. If Caesar says that audiobook book production is a deductible business expense, it is a deductible business expense. Business deductions are the government's way of saying, "spend this income on something that benefits the national economy or will take it as taxes." To a more immediate point, the IRS itself says you have the legal obligation to pay exactly the amount of taxes you owe, but there are also legal ways such as business deductions to reduce the amount of taxes you owe. Besides, no matter what you do, the government gets its cut anyway. At the end of the year, I have to file 1099s for the narrators because their payments are taxable income and every time one of the audiobooks sells, the government gets sales tax, the stores owe taxes on that income, and I owe taxes on the payment from the store. Uncle Sam has a lot of practice at getting his cut and he's very good at it. So depending on your business structure and the local tax laws where you live, audiobook production might be a deductible expense, which is very helpful on the financial side of it. #3: Promote the ebook. The easiest way I found to sell an audiobook is to have the audiobook of an ebook that sells well. Admittedly, this is a bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn't it? However, that can help you choose which titles to make into audiobooks. Like I mentioned above that Frostborn has paid back 100% of its production costs, and that's because it's my most popular series. It was easy for the audiobooks to sell well because the ebooks were selling well. By contrast, an ebook that sells more slowly will have a harder time selling audiobooks. One of the reasons I experimented with using synthetic voice on YouTube with the Silent Order series earlier in the 2020s was because I knew I would never make Silent Order into actual audiobooks because the series didn't sell well enough to merit it. So if you want your audiobook to sell, the easiest way to do it is to promote the ebook. If the ebook sells well enough, it will likely generate some audiobook sales as well. This can also help you determine whether or not you should even produce an audiobook of a particular ebook. If the ebook does not have strong sales, it is probably not a good idea to make an audiobook out of it. #4: Diversify We started out by talking about ACX, but ACX is not the only game in town. The other big audiobook distribution platform is INaudio, which is owned by Spotify. It was previously known as Findaway Voices, but then Spotify bought it and changed the name to INaudio. ACX will get your audiobook into Audible, Amazon, and Apple. INaudio will get your audiobook into every other platform: Google Play, Kobo, Storytel, Chirp, the library distributors, and a bunch of others. So if your audiobook is not exclusive to ACX, it's a good idea to use INaudio as well. That said, Google Play and Kobo now have direct upload for audiobooks and if your audiobook is not exclusive to ACX, it's a good idea to use the direct upload for Google Play and Kobo instead of relying on INaudio. There are a few significant advantages to this. First, you make a little bit more money since INaudio is not taking its distribution fee and the cumulative effect of that over time can be significant. Second, your audiobook will be eligible for Kobo Plus, which can generate extra revenue. I've had some of my best months on Kobo in 2026 thanks to Kobo Plus. Third and perhaps most importantly, you won't be completely dependent on INaudio because INaudio is frequently quite glitchy and in my frank and unbiased opinion, has gone downhill noticeably in quality since Spotify took over. Every single problem I've ever had with INaudio has come after Spotify bought Findaway and turned it into INaudio. I'm afraid that Spotify, like many other publicly traded corporations in the US, has the chronic problem of an upper management class who are buzzword prone MBA drones with an unhealthy enthusiasm for generative AI and indulging in self-destructive cost cutting and layoffs right before it's time to file quarterly reports. Very frequently, the QA process on INaudio will go berserk and declare that a book is AI generated and ineligible for distribution even when it's not. So direct upload to Google Play and Kobo avoids that problem. Because of these problems, another distributor called Author's Republic has been growing, but I haven't tried that out yet. Despite these problems, INaudio also gets you access to Chirp, which is our next bullet point. #5: Chirp Deals I said earlier that the best way to promote your audiobook is ebook promotion, but the one exception to that is Chirp. Chirp is run by BookBub, which is an email newsletter service that offers discounted ebooks to its subscribers. BookBub wanted to expand to audiobooks, but Audible very famously does not let indie authors control their prices and definitely doesn't let them do discounts. So to get around that slight problem, BookBub started its own audiobook store in the form of Chirp, which does let indie authors control their prices and therefore offer discounts. I've had some excellent results with Chirp deals over the years, usually with Child of the Ghost and Cloak of Dragons. In May, I had a Chirp deal with Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, but since the dashboard on INaudio only updates every 30 days for Chirp, I'm not sure how it did yet. If you get a Chirp deal and you want to take a big swing with it, you can also set temporary discounts on the subsequent books in the series. For my earlier Chirp deals for Cloak of Dragons and Child of the Ghosts, the price for Cloak of Dragons was at $0.99 and I set the price of the subsequent two audiobooks at $2.99 each. I got good results from that and some of my best months on INaudio. For the recent Dragonskull deal, Sword of the Squire was at $0.99 and I temporarily set every other audiobook in the series at $2.99 on Chirp. It was the biggest swing I've taken with a Chip deal, so I'm curious to see how it plays out. #6: Direct sales It's a good idea to have a direct sales platform of some kind, whether it's Shopify or Payhip or Gumroad or a similar platform and offer direct sales of your audiobooks. There are numerous advantages to this. You can set your own price, which as we mentioned above, ACX does not let you do. You can very easily run sales and discounts. If you're a regular reader at the site, you know I do a different Coupon of the Week for my Payhip store every week and it's often for audiobooks. As I mentioned with the problems with INaudio, it provides a platform to get your audiobook to listeners even if the other stores are having technical problems. Sometimes ACX processing can take weeks and the site's past troubles sometimes stretched [it] into months. The difficulty is getting people to actually use the store. The term vendor lock-in means that the more a customer uses the platform, the less likely they are to switch. If someone has been building up their Kindle library or Audible library since 2009, they're unlikely to switch to a competitor. Most of my direct sales come from a combination of Coupon of the Week and new releases to people who don't like DRM. So having a direct sales platform is a long haul, but still worth doing. Besides, everything in audiobooks is a long haul. #7: Direct reader relationship via Patreon or a similar site. I've never done this myself so I don't have any specific tips, but I have seen some writers do it quite successfully. That said, you should only have a Patreon or a similar site if you're willing to put in the work. Readers are very unforgiving of a writer who does not live up to his or her Patreon obligations. However, if you include audiobooks as one of your patron tiers that can go a long way towards audiobook profitability. A regular Patreon type income can help fund regular audiobook production. Conclusion Audiobooks are indeed indie publishing on hard mode, but hopefully these tips will help increase the chances that your audiobooks will be profitable. Lastly, thanks to everyone who has listened to one of my audiobooks. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

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.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at my writing goals for 2025, and see how many of them I met. I also take a loog ahead at my writing goals for 2026. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in my Anthologies series at my Payhip store: STORIES2025 The coupon code is valid through December 29, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 282 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December 19th, 2025 and today I'm taking a look back at my writing goals from the start of 2025 and seeing how many of them I reached. We'll also take a look ahead at my writing goals for 2026. Before we get to that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing projects. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in my anthology series at my Payhip store. And that is STORIES2025. And as always, I will put the coupon code and a link to the store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through December 29th, 2025, so if you need new ebook to read as you travel for this upcoming Christmas week, we have got you covered. A reminder that the anthology series is collections of my short stories, which I tend to release every year. And in fact, next month, if all goes well, we'll have 2025: The Complete Short Stories. Now for an update on my current writing projects. Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Rivah Half-Elven series is now done. By the time this episode goes live, you should be able to get it off Amazon and Kindle Unlimited since it is my series that is in Kindle Unlimited. So I hope if you are looking for something to read, you will give that a shot. Now that Wizard-Assassin is done, my main project is going to be Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. And I believe I'm 12,000 words into that. I'm hoping to have that out in January, but depending on how January goes, it might slip to February, but January would be ideal. And after that, my next main project will be Cloak of Summoning, the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. And I literally just started it this morning before I went to the gym, which puts me at 250 words into it, so there's definitely a ways to go in that. In audiobook news, we are still waiting on Cloak of Embers (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) to get through processing at the various platforms, which always, as you imagine, tend to slow down this time of year. And Brad Wills has just started working on recording for Blade of Shadows. So hopefully we should have Cloak of Embers available for you at all platforms before too much longer. And Blade of Shadows will probably be our first audiobook for 2026. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:28 Main Topic: 2025's Writing Goals and My Writing Goals for 2026 And speaking of 2026, in this week's episode, we're going to take a look back at my writing goals for 2025, see how many of them I met, and then look ahead for my writing goals to 2026, which is in fact just around the corner. So first off, a big thank you to everyone who read one of my books over the year of 2025. 2025 for me was an interesting year, both in a personal and a professional way, and sometimes in both the good and bad senses of the word interesting. Sales were down from 2024, but given all the economic turbulence of the year, I am grateful they were only down a relatively small amount compared to 2024. Facebook ads went from my main advertising platform at the start of 2025 to near uselessness by the end of the year due to all the AI nonsense Meta has injected into them. Spotify converted Findaway Voices to Inaudio and made a total mess of it this summer, which after that got settled is why I now upload my audiobooks directly to Google Play and Kobo rather than through Findaway Voices. It seems like a lot of companies are pursuing AI in the desperate hope that it will somehow magically become profitable even as the expense of running AI services devours them from the inside out and renders them incompetent at their primary missions. I was so annoyed at all the half-baked AI stuff Microsoft shoved into Windows 11, I did all my writing on a Mac Mini this year and have been pretty happy with it as a writing platform. Apple, of course, has AI stuff as well, but what Apple has that Microsoft doesn't is a switch that flips it all off at the system level and doesn't do any "install later" passive aggressive crap that Microsoft does. On the plus side, my Super Summer Of Finishing Things let me finish The Shield War, Stealth & Spells Online, and Ghost Armor one after another. Five unfinished series at once was too many. Three has been more manageable. And after five years, I finally got my weight down to what it was before COVID in 2025. Watching some relatives go on Ozempic and the side effects they experienced was very inspirational in the sense of wanting to avoid that experience myself. I thought I would take a lot of exercise and vegetables to do lose weight. It turns out instead it takes a whole freaking lot of exercise and a truly staggering quantity of vegetables. I tell myself the carrot sticks are really just like potato chips when I eat them, and I can almost convince myself of it. They're crunchy, right? Just like potato chips. I told myself that often enough that I very, nearly almost believe it. So let's start with a look back at my writing goals for 2025 and see how many of them I reached. #1: Write as many new words as possible, hopefully hitting one million new words of fiction in 2025. And I'm pleased to report that I hit this one. 2025 was the second year in a row where I reached a million words of new fiction and will come in at 1.12 million words with Wizard-Assassin. It did get a bit tight, but I passed the million word mark with Blade of Shadows in November, so is a nice milestone to reach. Two years of a million words in a row! #2: Finish The Shield War. I did that one! Shield of Power, the final book in The Shield War series, came out in July. It's even available in audiobook (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills). #3: Finish Ghost Armor. I did this one as well. Ghost in the Siege, the final book in the Ghost Armor series, came out in August. It's also available in audiobook (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy). #4: Continue Cloak Mage. There was a year gap after Cloak of Illusion, but I'm pleased to report I finally got back to Cloak Mage with Cloak of Worlds in October. As I mentioned earlier, in 2024, I had five unfinished series, which is way too many. So my goal was to finish some and then limit myself to only three unfinished series at any one time. By the end of summer 2025, I successfully achieved that. So going forward (barring any illness or Unexpected Events), there shouldn't be another year-long gap between Cloak Mage books. In fact, I'm hoping to write the outline for Cloak of Summoning this weekend, if all goes well. And in fact, I started this morning. #5: Continue Half-Elven Thief. It went down to the wire with only 12 days left in the month, but I was able to publish Wizard-Assassin and meet my goal. Like with Cloak Mage, there's a yearlong gap between the books, but that should be much shorter going forward. I'm hoping to start work on Rivah #6 in March or February, if all goes well. #6: Conclude Stealth & Spells Online. I did this as well. I'm not going to lie, it really was quite challenging. I originally thought of Stealth & Spells Online as a seven or eight book series, but it sold weakly enough that I didn't want to put six books' worth of effort into it. So I thought about it and figured out how to wrap up the story in one volume, and I wrote most of it at 500 words a day from like October 2024 to July 2025, squeezing it between other things as time allowed. Then in July, I was far enough along from all that cumulative work that I finished it in like one quick burst. I think I had only like one full-time day working on it. So I'm very glad that people liked the ending for the trilogy and thought that it worked. I'm hoping to release a single volume edition of the audiobook sometime in 2026, if all goes well. Fun fact: the book was 116,000 words long, and since I published 1.12 million new words in 2025, it was in fact Stealth & Spells Online: Final Quest that got me over the million word mark. #7: New epic fantasy series in the Andomhaim/Frostborn world. I did that as well with Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows. As I mentioned before, I'm about 12,000 words in Blade of Storms, and hopefully that will be the first book I publish in 2026, ideally in January, but it might slip to February. #8: New audiobooks as time, budget, and narrator availability allow. This worked out as well. Like I said, in 2024, I've brought as many of my old series into audio as I'm going to, so instead we're going to focus on recording the books in the new series. We have books from The Shield War and Blades of Ruin narrated by Brad Wills, new books from Ghost Armor and Cloak Mage [narrated] by Hollis McCarthy, and a new Half-Elven Thief audiobook [narrated by] Leanne Woodward. So I am pleased to say that I met all my 2025 writing goals. Now with that in mind, let's take a look at what I would like to do in 2026. I'm not planning on starting anything new in 2026, but I don't think I'll reach the end of any ongoing series in that year. So basically 2026 will be The Year of Continuing. #1: Publish a million words of new fiction. I'm going to try and hit a million words again, but there's a chance ... I'm going to say right up front, there's a chance it might not work out in 2026. I'm going to have to spend at least a couple of weeks on travel, and I know for sure there are a couple of mandatory Real Life Activities that will take up an unknown amount of time. The older I get, the more I can emphasize with former UK Prime Minister, Harold McMillan when he said his biggest problems were "events, dear boy, events." But assuming we can avoid too many "events," I will aim to publish a million new words of fiction in 2026. #2: Continue Blades of Ruin. I also want to continue with Blades of Ruin, which will be my main series for a while. I'm planning for 12 books in this series, so we should hopefully make some good progress with it in 2026. #3: Continue Cloak Mage. I would also like to continue Cloak Mage in 2026. Cloak of Worlds was number 13 in the series and I'm planning for 18. Since I'm only working on three series at a time now, like I said before, we shouldn't have those yearlong gaps between books like I've had in the past for Cloak Mage. #4: Continue Half-Elven Thief. I'm also continuing Half Elven Thief in 2026. I had planned for six books originally, but there was just too much story to fit into six, so we're going to end up with nine. So I'm planning to continue that in 2026 as well. There was a year's gap between Orc-Hoard and Wizard-Assassin like there was with Cloak Mage but hopefully won't have as big a gap for Half-Elven Thief now that I'm only writing three series at the same time. #5: New audiobooks as time, budget, and narrator availability allow. I did this in 2025 and it worked pretty well. I don't want to bring any more of my old backlist books into audio, but instead I'll focus on Blades of Ruin, Cloak Mage, and Half-Elven Thief as time, budget, and narrator availability permit. #6: Other opportunities as available. I think it is fair to say we live in turbulent times, which is often unsettling. The flip side is that sometimes this can bring unexpected opportunities your way, so it's wise to remain alert and flexible. So we will see what 2026 brings. So those are my six writing goals for 2026. Once again, thanks for reading and listening. I hope I have new books for you to read in 2026. And as ever, when I make plans for the new year, it seems like a good idea to reflect on this quote from the book of James: "Go to now, ye that say, Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that." So that is it for this week. 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 back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

In this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi Member Q&A podcast, hosts Michael La Ronn and Sacha Black discuss whether media liability insurance is worth the cost for memoir authors and explain how it differs from errors and omissions coverage. Other questions include: What printers offer special features like sprayed edges and foil for print books? How can authors effectively run a presale campaign from their own website? What should I do if Amazon terminates my KDP account? How do Genius Link and Books2Read compare for universal book links? Is it time to reevaluate Findaway Voices now that it's part of Spotify? When do audiobooks become a worthwhile investment of time and money? And More! Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-Publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. Sponsor The Member Q&A podcast is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote. About the Hosts Michael La Ronn is ALLi's Outreach Manager. He is the author of over 80 science fiction & fantasy books and self-help books for writers. He writes from the great plains of Iowa and has managed to write while raising a family, working a full-time job, and even attending law school classes in the evenings (now graduated!). You can find his fiction at www.michaellaronn.com and his videos and books for writers at www.authorlevelup.com. Sacha Black is a bestselling and competition winning author, rebel podcaster, speaker and casual rule breaker. She writes fiction under a secret pen name and other books about the art of writing. When Sacha isn't writing, she runs ALLi's blog. She lives in England, with her wife and genius, giant of a son. You can find her on her website, her podcast, and on Instagram.  

Be sure to visit https://dwtbpodcast.com for more information and add your name to start receiving their newsletter. If you'd like to support this show, rate, subscribe and leave a review on your podcast app.Books/Resources Mentioned:Sustainability Simplified, by Josh SpodekBookshop.orgDraft2Digital (eBook sales)Findaway Voices (audio books)Dave Chesson at Kindleprenuer, direct sales articleConnect with AJ & Mike:AJ Harper, website Write A Must-Read  Free resourcesAJ's Socials:FacebookLinkedInMike Michalowicz, websiteAll books Mike's Socials: IGFBLinkedIn

In this week's episode, we look at five ways writers can avoid the self-destructive mindset trap of "comparisonitis", and five ways that comparing oneself to other writers can be useful. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: WOLVES50 The coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. 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 259 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 11th, 2025, and today we are looking at why comparing yourself to other writers is a bad idea. Before that, we will do Coupon of the Week and have an update on my current writing progress. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store, and that is WOLVES50. This coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to listen to during your travels this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Shield of Power is 100% done, completing the Shield War series. You can get Shield of Power at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords and my own Payhip store. It's been selling briskly and it's gotten good reviews so far, so thank you very much to everyone who has bought and enjoyed the book. Now that Shield of Power is done, the first third of my Super Summer of Finishing Things is complete. So what's next? My next main project is Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest. It was originally going to be named Reactant, but I changed the title to Final Quest to emphasize really and truly and definitively that this is the final book in the trilogy. In fact, I'm already done with the rough draft and I am done with the first phase of editing it as of this recording. If you've been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know how I frequently say that if you keep chipping away the novel over a long enough time, sooner or later you'll finish it. That is exactly what happened here. Since October of 2024, I've been writing 500 words a day on Final Quest, and this piled up over time enough so that after Shield of Power came out, I only had 3,000 more words to write to finish Final Quest, and I did that in an afternoon. One more phase of editing on that and then I would like to have Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest out before July 22nd, if all goes well. I'm also 21,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which will be my main project once Final Quest is finished. Ghost in the Siege will be the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series and will hopefully cap off my Super Summer of Finishing Things. In audiobook news, Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is now out. You can get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple, and Google Play as of this recording. Because of some difficulties with Findaway Voices, it's going to take a little bit longer to get into the other stores, but I'm working on a way to do that and as I mentioned before, Ghost in the Corruption (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy ) is done and just has to finish processing on the various stores, and so hopefully that should be out before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:02:52 Main Topic: Comparison Now let's move right on to our main topic, The Dangers of Comparison. In Episode 257, we started a series on mindset for writers. In some of the previous series I've talked about some of the practical ways to help with distractions, procrastination, and managing time wasters. In this series, we're going to focus on things that derail writers from a mindset perspective because as we know with any endeavor in life, mindset is something like three quarters of the battle where if you convince yourself that you're going to fail before you start, you're probably going to fail. So that's why it's important to have an appropriate mindset to the task at hand. Today we're going to focus on comparing yourself to others, and I will share five reasons it's not a great idea to compare yourself to others aimlessly and how to shift your focus to five more constructive ways to compare your work to other authors. Comparisons are a constant of the reading world. Librarians and Goodreads reviewers talk constantly about “readalikes” or finding books that have similar themes or settings. Book displays and shops and libraries love to group similar books or authors together. People look at the bestseller lists like they're sports scores. Dollar amounts in publishing deals are a constant source of gossip and jealousy. Sometimes comparison is useful, especially when creating ads or finding the right demographics to market to. Other times, it can lead to limiting or self-destructive thoughts. So let's start off with five reasons not to compare yourself to others. #1: It can limit you creatively. It can be easy to look at the bestseller list and try to think of ways to write a similar book. Following publishing trends keeps you from your most creative work and frankly isn't as enjoyable to write and most likely for your readers to read. Also, unless you're a fast writer, the publishing world might have moved on by the time you finished that book. In fact, I just saw a thread on social media about that where the commenter was bemoaning the fact that she used to enjoy what's now called cozy fantasy, but that as the genre has evolved, it's developed established tropes and the writers of it are not willing to variate from those tropes. So you have what she said in her words were dozens of clones of Lattes and Legends and Bookshops and Bone Dusts floating around, which is a tricky thread to balance, I do admit, because you want something that'll appeal to the reader, but then the readers like familiarity. What they really seem to like is familiarity presented to them in a way they've never seen before, which can be a challenge when you are trying to look at the bestseller list and limit yourself creatively. #2: What other people are doing is out of your control. You can't control if a book you think isn't as good as yours is suddenly the runaway hit of the year or an author who isn't experienced as you suddenly gets a movie deal. You can't control their success, so don't worry about it or get upset by it. You can control if you're wasting time online mocking those people or complaining about it, for example. That's a waste of your time and energy and doesn't actually make you feel better in the long run (and possibly in the short run as well). I believe in psychology and in military theory for that matter, there's something called the locus of control where you identify the things that you can control and then you drill in and focus in on the things you can control rather than worrying about the things you can't control. As we said, if an author who wrote a book you don't think is very good or you don't personally like has had a massive amount of success, there's nothing you can do about that and worrying about it is a waste of time and comparing yourself to that writer is also a waste of time. So that's why it's a better idea to focus in on what you can control. #3: You're not being fair to yourself. Comparing yourself to other authors, especially as an aspiring or new author, isn't being fair to yourself. They have years (if not decades) of experience that you don't have. It's like comparing yourself to an ultra-marathoner when you're someone who's just starting to jog and struggling to get all the way around the block, which is some of the tricky parts of someone like me giving advice to new writers because Shield of Power was my 163rd book and Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest will be my 164th. I've been doing this for a long time, which means I probably know what I'm talking about, but that not everything I do is immediately reproducible by someone who hasn't been doing it as long as I have. If you're writing something that's not as marketable or in a smaller genre, it's not fair to compare yourself to people in the biggest genre or even your own previous work. For example, I can't compare the amount one of my technical books earns to one of my fantasy books. If I did that, it'd be a disappointment. But in reality, my technical books have had steady success and have even been used as textbooks at times (which is always surprising when I discovered that's happened because my Windows Command Line book and my Linux Command Line book have both been used as textbooks at various times, which was a surprise to me because that's not what I expected when I set out to write them, but I'm glad that they've been able to be useful for people). #4: And point number four, which I think is a really important one, someone's online life is only the highlight reel of someone's actual life. Looking at someone's social media accounts isn't a great way to know what they're actually doing or how they're actually doing. Just because they're posting pictures of tropical vacations, speaking at conferences, or showing off shiny new stuff doesn't mean you're seeing the full picture of how they're actually doing. As I said in a recent episode that when I was applying for disability insurance (just in case I need it someday), I learned that writers are actually one of the hardest professions to insure due to their high rates of mental illness and substance abuse. You might see the good stuff, but they might not be posting the challenges that come with their success: increased stress and anxiety, more criticism, the need to hire people and how much time it takes to manage them, more complicated taxes, increased business expenses, and relationship problems from the demands of success. These are all things that can accompany success. You're not getting the whole picture. You need to keep that in mind when you compare yourself to people online. The best fictional example out of this that applies to so many situations is Lord Denethor and the Palantir from Return of the King. If you read the book, Denethor has been using the Palantir for years to spy on Sauron and give advantages to his forces and the soldiers of Gondor. But Sauron is able to manipulate what Denethor sees in the Palantir and has been gradually using this to create an edited version of what Denethor sees in the Palantir, and that drives Denethor to despair and eventual suicide. People talk about the increased rates of mental illness related to social media. Sauron did that deliberately to Denethor through the Palantir. It's a sign of how good J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer that he managed to anticipate the effects that Facebook would have on some people by like 60 years. So always bear that in mind when you're looking at someone online and feeling jealous of them. You are not getting the whole picture and there are more than likely things going on that are difficulties in their life that they just don't talk about. #5: Your time is better spent writing than comparing yourself to other writers. And this is back to our old friend, the locus of control. Looking at other authors' sales ranks and reviews is not a productive use of your time. As I mentioned in the writing adjacent activities series, you need to be purposeful in non-writing tasks that take up your time and make sure you're not pretending they're writing related. If you need to compare sales ranks or some other data point with other authors or something you're actively working on like ad targeting, schedule that time and don't let it turn into an Internet spiral of time wasting. And now to avoid those Internet spirals of time wasting, here are five ways to use comparisons positively and constructively. #1: Number one, getting keywords or demographics for marketing purposes. For sites like BookBub or when creating keyword ads, knowing authors who are similar to you is incredibly helpful and can help you structure your ads. And this doesn't even necessarily require you to read the other author's books to see if they actually compare. There are tools that let you expedite this process. For example, if you look on Amazon at the Also Boughts, you can scroll through some of that and see which other authors and which other books people have bought in addition to your own and then you can test using those for keyword targeting. On Goodreads, people put books in lists or compare books. You can use that data to generate keywords for ad targeting. You can test them very easily. With BookBub ads in particular, if you build a campaign around just a single author and keywords and test the results. You can quickly see whether a specific author generates an appropriate click-through rate for you to use or not. #2: A second way is to find authors you might want to do a promo with. Some authors, especially in the romance genre, do really well with group promotions. Finding other authors that write similar books and are at a similar level of success may be a way to take advantage of that. I've never actually set up a group promo, but I have participated in several of them from time to time with pretty good results. #3: A third way is to better understand reader preferences in a genre. My best story for this is I've gone through six different variations of cover design for the Silent Order series. When I started out, I was using GIMP and stock photo images. GIMP is the free Linux version of Photoshop essentially. After I learned Photoshop, I upgraded to characters on the covers, but they never quite sold quite as well until finally I saw a Penny Arcade comic where they were commenting how they just want to buy books where they have spaceships in close proximity to planets on the covers. And I thought, huh, that makes a lot of sense. So I redesigned all the covers to have a spaceship in close proximity to a planet, and the series immediately started selling a fair bit better with those covers. I would say that was not so much a comparison thing, just a genre preference I stumbled across and then had sort of the moment of enlightenment that I did. But if I had looked at the bestseller list for various science fiction categories, I would have realized that most of the bestsellers had spaceships and planets in close proximity to each other on the cover. So I redesigned all the covers. It was just that I was too fond of the character based covers to give them up until I had that moment of revelation. So all the main books in the series were redesigned to have the spaceship covers, though for the free short stories, I did keep the character covers just because I was giving away the free short stories and I did like the character covers, so I got to have my cake and eat it too, which was nice. #4: Learn from the successes and failures of others. You can learn from what another author does well. For example, Brandon Sanderson is very good at communicating his writing progress and other updates to his fans through weekly video messages on YouTube. Other authors are good at collaborating with other authors, while others make engaging and funny videos that make people more interested in their work. Knowing your own strengths is an important first step. If you're just trying to follow everyone who is a success without first reflecting on that, you'll chase too many options and then can't excel at any of them. You can also learn from when an author responds poorly and how the Internet reacts to it. Understandably, I'm not going to give specific examples here. For myself, I tend to focus on what I do best, which is writing really fast and doing social media updates. I never got into video because I kind of have a face for radio and I just don't enjoy doing video. I don't enjoy editing them. It's a lot of work that I don't really enjoy, so I don't do it. #5: Being informed makes comparisons less emotional. Knowing, for example, that an author was hired to write a book based on an existing outline created by the publisher, and then promised a future book deal with a big marketing budget in a preferred genre as part of the contract makes their cross-genre success seem less surprising and makes you feel less guilty for not being able to do the same on your own as an indie author. It's not a fair comparison because they have advantages that you can't understand without some industry knowledge. For people that compare themselves to me, for example, they should know that I've been writing since I was a teenager a very long time ago. I was an early adopter of self-publishing when it was less competitive and I usually work more than eight hours a day and I generally keep to a very rigid writing schedule. Some authors like me were able to get the rights back to their earlier published works and then self-publish them early on in order to finish a series, which is much less likely to be an option in a contract for a traditionally published author now. If you're just starting out, travel frequently for work, and only have an hour a day to write (and even that is dicey because your partner would rather you spend that time on some other activity because they don't support your writing), you can't possibly compare your writing output to mine. Knowing all this about me explains why it might be harder for you and why you shouldn't feel bad about having a harder time with writing. Comparison has been called “The Thief of Joy” all over social media for many years. That can definitely be true, but like so many things in life, how you respond to something and find ways to help it make you stronger is what really matters. Comparison has its place in the writing world, but it's important to keep it in perspective and not to let it overwhelm you emotionally or keep you from your writing goals or plans. So that is it for talking about comparison. I hope that was helpful and offered some useful tips on how to avoid the trap of comparison-itis. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. 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 see you all next week.

Dr. Alexandra Rogers is a clinical psychologist from California. She recently published Your Journey to Successful Parenting, a project that took her two years to complete. In this conversation, she shares how she did it--what tools and services she used, how much she spent, what she learned along the way, and what she'd do differently next time.If you're planning to self-publish a book, hearing from someone who's been through the process might be well worth your time.Enjoy!***Resources, tools, and services Alexandra used to self-publish her book***Book cover design: 100 Covers https://100covers.com/Editors - Christine Grail - https://www.thescriptconsultant.com/- Kirkus Editing - https://www.kirkusreviews.com/editing-services/Professional reviewers - Kirkus Reviews, for independent publishers- Publishers Weekly, the arm for independent publishers is BookLife ReviewISBNs- BowkerLibrary of Congresshttps://www.loc.gov/programs/preassigned-control-number/about-this-program/Paid Book promotion companies- Fussy Librarian- Hello Books- EreaderIQ- FreebooksyVoice over actor for audiobooks- https://www.voices.com/Audiobook published through: Findaway Voices - https://my.findawayvoices.comAlexandra's website - https://arogersbooks.com/Your Journey to Successful Parenting - https://www.amazon.com/YOUR-JOURNEY-SUCCESSFUL-PARENTING-STRESS-FREE/dp/B0DZQRH5N1Alexandra also mentioned "How to Get Paid for What You Know" by Graham Cochrane ***Join Better Writers - https://fabiocerpelloni.com/private

Big changes are coming fast for indie authors. KDP is slashing royalties for print books under $9.99 starting next week. Meanwhile, Publisher Rocket is ending its lifetime license—soon, it'll be monthly only. Plus, Spotify for Authors is moving features over from Findaway Voices and confirming promo code honors. Here's what you need to know. Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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. Sources: How to Get Amazon Book Reviews Without Breaking the Rules - https://bookawardpro.com/blog/how-to-get-amazon-book-reviews-without-breaking-the-rules/ Publisher Rocket SALE - https://rocket.thrivecart.com/special-publisher-rocket/?affiliate=selfpubwithdale (affiliate link) KDP: Print Royalty Rate and Paperback Printing Cost Changes FAQ - https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GXFPA52P6ZJD2U3N?ref_=pe_93986420_1235824880 Spotify for Authors - https://authors.spotify.com/ Apple Books accepts accessibility metadata tags - https://itunespartner.apple.com/books/support/12-metadata Written Word Media presents: The YouTube Author Blueprint: From Zero to Growing Reader Community - https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/speaker-series/ ARC: YouTube for Authors - https://DaleLinks.com/ARCTeam  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

An annoying tussle with Findaway Voices flagging my very human narrator as digital for STRANGE FAMILIAR, with no recourse to object. It is live on Audible and Kobo though! Also, I may be reversing my insistence on writing with discipline and instead embracing the creative urge and writing what you want to! Buy LoveLitCon tickets here https://lovelit.com/ Be sure to use my author-specific code for a $10 discount! LOVE8368STRANGE FAMILIAR is live! https://www.jeffekennedy.com/strange-familiar You can preorder MAGIC REBORN at https://www.jeffekennedy.com/magic-rebornRELUCTANT WIZARD is out now and the audiobook is live!! https://www.jeffekennedy.com/reluctant-wizardThe posture-correcting sports bra I love almost more than life itself is here https://forme.therave.co/37FY6Z5MTJAUKQGAJoin my Patreon and Discord for mentoring, coaching, and conversation with me! Find it at https://www.patreon.com/JeffesClosetYou can always buy print copies of my books from my local indie, Beastly Books! https://www.beastlybooks.com/If you want to support me and the podcast, click on the little heart or follow this link (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/jeffekennedy).Sign up for my newsletter here! (https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/r2y4b9)You can watch this podcast on video via YouTube https://youtu.be/YHdUVDqD4rESupport the showContact Jeffe!Find me on Threads Visit my website https://jeffekennedy.comFollow me on Amazon or BookBubSign up for my Newsletter!Find me on Instagram and TikTok!Thanks for listening!

On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway explains major changes to Findaway Voices, which is splitting into two platforms: Spotify for Authors, focused on Spotify distribution, and a new platform called In Audio for all other outlets. He also highlights a new £75,000 novel prize open to unpublished writers, and reports on a HarperCollins survey showing a decline in parents reading to their children, with homework—not screen time—cited as the main barrier. Sponsors Self-Publishing News is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote. Self-Publishing News is also sponsored by book cover design company Miblart. They offer unlimited revisions, take no deposit to start work and you pay only when you love the final result. Get a book cover that will become your number-one marketing tool. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. About the Host Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.

Something big is happening in the audiobook world—Spotify just changed how indie authors distribute their audiobooks, and it could impact your publishing future. In this week's Self-Publishing News, I'll break down what's happening with Findaway Voices and the brand-new company INAudio. Plus, updates from Laterpress, PublishDrive, and a new feature inside Dibbly Create that could change how you write your next book. All that and more in the self-publishing news this week! Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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. Sources: Spotify Transitions Select Audiobook Distribution Services to INaudio - https://blog.findawayvoices.com/inaudio/ INAudio: A Message from our Founders - https://www.inaudio.com/article/a-message-from-our-founders  Laterpress - https://www.laterpress.com/ Laterpress: Monthly and Annual Subscriptions - https://www.laterpress.com/blog/monthly-and-annual-subscriptions  Get Authentic Book Reviews - https://getauthenticbookreviews.com/ Dibbly Create: Guided Book Flow - https://mailchi.mp/dibbly/new-feature-lets-you-build-your-book-in-under-an-hour-6743002  Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) PublishDrive: General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR): What Authors and Publishers Need to Know - https://help.publishdrive.com/general-product-safety-regulation-gpsr-what-authors-and-publishers-need-to-know PublishDrive - https://publishdrive.com/pricing.html?fpr=dale10 (affiliate link) * 50% off special ends Wednesday Book Brush: The ABCs of Amazon A+ Content - https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/YGCclpusSFWtHOJ8lC0uxQ#/registration Beyond the Blast: Book Marketing Tactics for Long-Term Success - https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/mjtluDCqRlGFR6N_y-hgPg#/registration 30 Books in 30 Days Giveaway - https://DaleLinks.com/30Books  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

To set your books and audiobooks up for the best chance at success, you need to make your titles available to purchase in as many retail outlets as possible. Author and book publishing consultant Erin Wright joins “Inside Independent Publishing (with IBPA)” to share her expertise about the most effective methods to distribute books and audiobooks to as many retail sites as possible, including details about how to best use IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, Author's Republic, Bookvault, and more for your publishing goals.PARTICIPANTSErin Wright is a full-time contemporary western romance author, but unless you're a fan of sexy cowboys, you've probably heard of her instead because of her work in the Wide for the Win Facebook group. She conned Suzie O'Connell (close writing friend and fellow cowboy romance author) into co-founding the Facebook group back in March of 2019, and has been avoiding writing books by posting in the group ever since. If you're thinking about going Wide, or if you're already Wide and just want to connect with other Widelings, be sure to come join Erin in the largest group on the internet for Wide authors. She'd be thrilled to have you!Independent Book Publishers Association is the largest trade association for independent publishers in the United States. As the IBPA Director of Membership & Member Services, Christopher Locke assists the 3,600 members as they travel along their publishing journeys. Major projects include managing the member benefits to curate the most advantageous services for independent publishers and author publishers; managing the Innovative Voices Program that supports publishers from marginalized communities; and hosting the IBPA podcast, “Inside Independent Publishing (with IBPA).” He's also passionate about indie publishing, because he's an author publisher himself, having published two novels so far in his YA trilogy, The Enlightenment Adventures.LINKSLearn more about the many benefits of becoming a member of Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) here: https://www.ibpa-online.org/page/membershipMake sure to connect with Erin for her consulting at work https://erinwright.net/consulting and https://erinwright.net/authors, as well as in the Wide for the Win Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wideforthewinFollow IBPA on:Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/IBPAonlineX – https://twitter.com/ibpaInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/ibpalovesindies/Follow Erin on:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@erinwrightLVFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/pg/AuthorErinWrightPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/erinwrightbooksTwitter: https://twitter.com/erinwrightlvBookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/erin-wrightInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorerinwrightGoodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/erinwright

Amazon is removing the ability to download and backup Kindle ebooks. And on the same day they roll out that change, Amazon will be closing down Kindle Vella. IngramSpark has a few marketing opportunities this month, as well as a giveaway for five free books. Findaway Voices by Spotify announced an agreement to distribute digitally-narrated audiobooks by Elevenlabs. And so much more in the self-publishing news this week! Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro  (affiliate link) Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com  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  Sources: Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books - https://www.theverge.com/news/612898/amazon-removing-kindle-book-download-transfer-usb Kindle Vella Announcement - https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/article/Kindle-Vella-Announcement?language=en_US Amazon: We are winding down Kindle Vella - https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/a/faq Spotify Welcomes Digital Voice Narrated Audiobooks from ElevenLabs via Findaway Voices - https://blog.findawayvoices.com/spotify-welcomes-elevenlabs-audiobooks/ Amazon Ads - https://advertising.amazon.com Apple Books for Authors - https://authors.apple.com IngramSpark: Nominate Your Book Today - https://www.ingramspark.com/editorial-calendar IngramSpark: Mastering Metadata: Are Your a Book Marketing Pro? - https://ingramcontent.jotform.com/250495414855160 Get Authentic Book Reviews - https://GetAuthenticBookReviews.com ProWritingAid: Manuscript Analysis - https://DaleLinks.com/Analysis (affiliate link) PublishDrive: Audiobooks - technical requirements, easy fixes and FAQs - https://streamyard.com/watch/HNgSJGxZHf44 Why Cheap Promo is No Bargain: One Unusually Prolific Example - https://writerbeware.blog/2025/02/21/why-cheap-promo-is-no-bargain-one-unusually-prolific-example/ The Power of Reviews: What Every Author Needs to Know - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-reviews-what-every-author-needs-know-ross-brand-ho7ne Get More Book Reviews—Faster & Easier! (Book Bounty interview) - https://www.youtube.com/live/WFyyMPjJDXk?si=kwmWznhD8vrKz34T Join my ARC Team - https://DaleLinks.com/ARCTeam  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

2025년, 드디어 AI 보이스 내레이션 될 것 같다! 임박이다! 관련 링크: 일레븐랩스 (ElevenLabs) “Shelf Lives” “생애의 장” Findaway Voices “우유” 녹취록: ⁠https://aimdreaming.imaginariumkim.com/일레븐랩스-shelf-lives-생애의-장-에이아이-보이스-맛보기/ - - - 한아임한테 ☕️ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠커피 사주기⁠⁠⁠⁠

The audiobook direct sales platform, StoryFair is available to buy. IngramSpark sent out a service alert to account holders. And, Dibbly Create just launched a new keyword research tool for Amazon called KIP Scout. Find out more details in this week's self-publishing news. Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Wide Publishing for Authors - https://DaleLinks.com/WideBook Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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  Source: StoryFair Audiobooks - https://storyfair.net/. Contact: storyfairllc@gmail.com. IngramSpark - https://IngramSpark.com Apple Books for Authors - https://authors.apple.com/ Findaway Voices by Spotify - https://findawayvoices.com KIP Scout - https://DaleLinks.com/Scout (affiliate link)  Miblart: Email Marketing for Authors: How to Build an Author Email List - https://miblart.com/blog/how-to-build-author-email-list/?ref=daleroberts5 Miblart: Advent Calendar - https://miblart.com/advent-calendar-sign-up/?ref=daleroberts5  Mastering Author Branding with Andrea Jo DeWerd: The Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast Featuring Dale L. Roberts - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/podcast-mastering-author-branding/  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

Ebook sales are projected to hit $29.9 billion by 2033. Authors Guild announces new partnership with an AI licensing company called Created by Humans. And, Findaway Voices by Spotify announces expansion of audiobook distribution for Spotify. All that and more in the self-publishing news. Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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  Sources: Ebooks Market Revenue Surges to $29.9 billion by 2033 - https://scoop.market.us/ebooks-market-news/ Authors Guild Partners with Created by Humans to Empower Authors in the AI Era - https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-partners-with-created-by-humans-to-empower-authors-in-ai-era/ Findaway Voices by Spotify - https://findawayvoices.com/dale Bookvault: How to Use the Bookvault Bulk Title Upload - https://20439106.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/20439106/Bulk%20Title%20Import%20Guide.pdf PublishDrive - https://DaleLinks.com/PublishDrive (affiliate link) Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link). Get 10% off with coupon code: MINUSTEN (good only in October 2024) Dibbly - https://DaleLinks.com/Dibbly (affiliate link). Get 10% off with coupon code: MINUSTEN (good only in October 2024) Self-Publishing Advice Conference 2024 - https://selfpublishingadviceconference.com/  StoryOrigin presents: Writing with AI: What's going on here? - https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcuc-6sqT0rH9LwN_uV1ACBRDYXb5AJsOE-#/registration Get Book Reviews on Amazon Without Violating Guidelines - https://www.youtube.com/live/w0KxkSf6CMs?si=HC4BFWDj9zolnwA- Book Launchers presents: From Invisible to Influential: Dale L. Roberts Unleashes Author Networking Hacks - https://www.youtube.com/live/O3vGtispDTQ?si=Bcot0ulKuP4kVQAZ Networking for Authors - https://DaleLinks.com/Networking  Credit:  Laterpress - https://Laterpress.com  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

Are you looking for an alternative to Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) or Findaway Voices by Spotify? Would you like to get your audiobooks listed on Amazon, Audible, and beyond? Then, let's consider Lantern Audio, a business that helps with audiobook production and publishing. Lantern Audio - https://lanternaudio.com/independent-publishing-services/ ALLi's Watchdog List - https://DaleLinks.com/Watchdog Bestseller Book Launch Checklist - https://DaleLinks.com/Checklist Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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  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

Are you looking for alternatives to Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) or Findaway Voices by Spotify? Then, discover how Audiobooks Unleashed is a viable alternative. Audiobooks Unleased publish your audiobooks on Amazon, Audible, and beyond, but is audiobook publishing worth it on the website in 2024? Audiobooks Unleashed - https://distribution.audiobooksunleashed.com/ Subscribe to my email newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/Signup Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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  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

Are you looking for an alternative to Audiobook Creation Exchange or Findaway Voices? Would you like to publish your audiobooks through numerous retailers including Amazon, Audible, Spotify and more? Then, let's talk about the audiobook publishing business, Author's Republic, and discuss if it's worth it! Author's Republic - https://www.authorsrepublic.com/ FAQ - https://www.authorsrepublic.com/learn/faqs ALLi's Watchdog List - https://DaleLinks.com/Watchdog Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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  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

Are you publishing your audiobook through ACX yet still looking for other alternatives? Would you like to know an alternate way to publish your audiobooks to Amazon and Audible? Then, discover how Findaway Voices by Spotify might be the ideal place to distribute your audio content for free. Find out if Findaway Voices is worth it in 2024! Findaway Voices by Spotify - https://findawayvoices.com/ Payment Terms - https://my.findawayvoices.com/payment-terms My Email Newsletter - https://DaleLinks.com/SignUp Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com  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  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

Episode 1: Join us for our first Six Figure Author Experiment: launching Russell's fantasy series, the Godsverse Chronicles. The series is written and complete, with covers and audio done and ready to go. Russell had great success launching this series on Kickstarter and now it's time to publish them wide on book retailers. Lee and Russell discuss pre-order strategy with Monica Leonelle, including: * The best way to juice the algorithm for success over on Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo and other book retailers * How to maximize your launch week on Amazon by publishing audio, paperback, hardback and ebook formats together to get an algorithmic boost*  What ‘merchandising' on wide retailers is and why it can give your book the best chance of success* How PublishDrive, Draft to Digital and Findaway Voices by Spotify can save you time and sanity * Pricing strategies including whether to launch full price or at a discountResources:* Free Book Launch ChecklistWe want to hear from you! Let us know what you're launching now and what was your favorite part of this episode.  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.sixfigureauthorexperiment.com

Since the acquisition of Findaway Voices by Spotify, some significant changes have taken place—changes you as an author of an audiobook should be aware of. Learn more about the red flags that are going up, the concerns about authors' intellectual property rights, and more. What's happening with royalties now that Spotify is offering subscribers 15 free hours of audiobook listening each month? Can that really be good for authors? Or is it just good for Spotify? Is Spotify showing any better policies than the abuses by Amazon? Let's dig in! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amazon KDP announced MASSIVE changes to the Kindle Vella program. Draft2Digital rolls out affordable proof ordering options. Findaway Voices by Spotify continue to receive backlash from changes in the terms of use from two weeks ago. And, so much more in the self-publishing news! Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord  News sources: Kindle Vella's New Terms - https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/question/0D58V00008XaqwlSAB/is-it-time-to-bail-on-vella-with-the-new-token-terms?language=en_US&topicId=0TO2T000000MFRiWAO&count=10 Draft2Digital Introducing New Print Proof. Shipping Options! - https://authoremail.com/email/campaigns/sd962hjqvq473/web-version/lg0604x35fb97  Findaway And Corporate Rights Grabs - https://www.patreon.com/posts/findaway-and-98622568 Spotify and Independent Audiobook Authors Face Off - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-22/spotify-and-independent-audiobook-authors-face-off Rakuten Kobo Launches Kobo Plus in Hong Kong and Taiwan - https://kobowritinglife.com/2024/02/23/rakuten-kobo-launches-kobo-plus-in-hong-kong-and-taiwan/ KOBO's Easter Long Weekend Sale! Deadline: March 8th - https://community.streetlib.com/c/retail-promotions-hub/kobo-s-easter-long-weekend-sale-deadline-march-8th Planning a Book Launch by BookBaby - https://www.bookbaby.com/pages/pdf/planning-a-book-launch.pdf Storygarden Summit - https://plottr.com/story-garden-summit Direct Sales Made Easy: Q & A with Evan Gow - https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwvdO2qqDwrH9fjmVUNw54DCCm0jt75X9rF#/registration Before Social Media: ​​​​​​​The Marketing Elements You Need Before You Post - https://event.webinarjam.com/register/71/w7mvna45 7th Annual Women In Publishing Summit - https://womeninpublishingsummit.com/ Are Book Promotion Sites Right for Me? Reaching More Readers Podcast - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/podcast-book-promotion-sites/ Smashwords Read an Ebook Week - https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos  My Smashwords Author Profile - https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/dalelroberts  Credit: Scribando - https://Scribando.com 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

Katee Robert joins me to talk about her many releases this year, about marketing through Kickstarter and direct-to-reader options like Patreon, and about the foundational books in fantasy and romance that got her started.We also talk about current issues, like Findaway Voices and Spotify's changes to the terms of service for authors.You can find Katee Robert on her website, KateeRobert.com. You can also check out her Patreon.We also mentionedModern PostcardBonkers RomanceThe Bonkers Romance KickstarterNK Jemisin's PatreonUrsula Vernon/T Kingfisher's PatreonChanges in the Findaway Voices ToSAnd former PRH CEO Markus Dohle's comments under oath:“The trial put the inner workings of the company on public display in sometimes unflattering ways. In his testimony, Dohle argued that success in publishing is driven by instinct and random luck, not necessarily a company's size — an argument that the judge found unconvincing. And he revealed his dissatisfaction with the company's performance since the 2013 merger.” Join our Patreon for complete mayhem, shenanigans, and more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Katee Robert joins me to talk about her many releases this year, about marketing through Kickstarter and direct-to-reader options like Patreon, and about the foundational books in fantasy and romance that got her started.We also talk about current issues, like Findaway Voices and Spotify's changes to the terms of service for authors.You can find Katee Robert on her website, KateeRobert.com. You can also check out her Patreon.We also mentionedModern PostcardBonkers RomanceThe Bonkers Romance KickstarterNK Jemisin's PatreonUrsula Vernon/T Kingfisher's PatreonChanges in the Findaway Voices ToSAnd former PRH CEO Markus Dohle's comments under oath:“The trial put the inner workings of the company on public display in sometimes unflattering ways. In his testimony, Dohle argued that success in publishing is driven by instinct and random luck, not necessarily a company's size — an argument that the judge found unconvincing. And he revealed his dissatisfaction with the company's performance since the 2013 merger.” Join our Patreon for complete mayhem, shenanigans, and more! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our Guest Tonight: A.F. Stewart Website: https://afstewart.ca/ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/AFStewart BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/a-f-stewart Our Picks For Best Author Websites and Tools mentioned in the show. We are not sponsored by any of the following sites or aps, we just like them or use them.  AUTHOR PORTALS  (some cost money. only sign up and pay for what you will use for sharing, newsletter swaps, ARC, etc…) Amazon/Kindle author account - https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ StoryOrigin - https://storyoriginapp.com/ Book Funnel - https://bookfunnel.com/ Bookshop - https://bookshop.org/ Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/ Library thing - https://www.librarything.com/ Bookbub - https://www.bookbub.com/ MAILING LIST PLATFORMS  (some cost money. only sign up and pay for what you will use) MailerLite - https://www.mailerlite.com/ MailChimp - https://mailchimp.com/ SendFox - https://sendfox.com/ AUTHOR TOOLS (some cost money. only sign up and pay for what you will use) Book Formatting tools Calibre - https://calibre-ebook.com/ Sigil ebook - https://sigil-ebook.com/ Papyrus Author - https://www.papyrusauthor.com/ Editing Tools Pro Writing Aid - https://prowritingaid.com/ Photo and Video Editing tools Cap cut  - https://www.capcut.com/ Adobe express - https://www.adobe.com/express/ Canva - https://www.canva.com/ Book Brush - https://bookbrush.com/ Marketing and Advertising classes and tools Bryan Cohen Free Ad Class - https://learn.bestpageforward.net/apr24/?ref_=a20m_us_lbr_cs_byachn Fiction Atlas CL Cannon - https://fiction-atlas.com/ Kindlepreneur - https://kindlepreneur.com/ Kindlepreneur tools - https://kindlepreneur.com/tools/ PublisherRocket - https://publisherrocket.com/ AUTHOR/PUBLISHER ACCOUNTS  Amazon KDP - https://kdp.amazon.com/ Ingram Spark - https://www.ingramspark.com/ Draft2Digital - https://www.draft2digital.com/ Kobo - https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/writinglife Apple - https://authors.apple.com/epub-upload Barnes & Noble - https://press.barnesandnoble.com/ Publish Drive - https://publishdrive.com/ Google Play - https://play.google.com/books/publish/u/0/ ACX - https://www.acx.com/ Findaway Voices - https://findawayvoices.com/ Authors Republic - https://www.authorsrepublic.com/ Want to create live streams like this? Check out StreamYard: https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5670617437175808

On the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway takes a critical look at Spotify's recent update to the terms of use for audiobook creators, a move that has stirred significant debate within the indie author community. As Spotify's Findaway Voices faces scrutiny over its revised policies, Dan explores the implications of these changes and the broader concerns they raise about rights and transparency in the digital publishing landscape.  “In the opinion of the Watchdog Desk, the update to the Terms of Use showed a shocking carelessness around issues crucial to the indie author community,” said John Doppler, who runs ALLi's Watchdog Desk. “Waiving moral rights, granting a staggeringly broad array of rights. These conditions may have escaped notice in the Artist's Terms of Use from which they were copied, but in the context of independent publishing, they would have allowed unconscionable exploitation. Any expert familiar with the industry should have immediately flagged these issues.” To the credit of Spotify and Findaway Voices, the correction was swift and addressed the key areas of concern with clarity. However, there are lingering questions, particularly around the use of user content for AI training, which have not been adequately addressed. Spotify did not respond to our inquiry before press time. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. About the Host Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.

Findaway Voices by Spotify rolled out an updated Terms of Use agreement that had everyone up in arms last week. OpenAI is implementing digital watermarks for images. And, Smashwords is running their annual Read an Ebook Week promotion. All that and more in the self-publishing news this week! Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord  News Sources: Findaway Voices by Spotify Terms of Use - https://my.findawayvoices.com/terms-of-use  Outrage Over New Terms of Use at Findaway Voices Forces Change - https://writerbeware.blog/2024/02/19/outrage-over-new-terms-of-use-at-findaway-voices-forces-change/ ALLi Advice Forum - https://selfpubconnect.mn.co/posts/50819754 OpenAI is adding new watermarks to DALL-E 3 - https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/6/24063954/ai-watermarks-dalle3-openai-content-credentials Streetlib: Spring Spectacular on Apple Books - https://community.streetlib.com/c/retail-promotions-hub/spring-spectacular-on-apple-books-mysteries-romance-and-fantasy-deals-deadline-february-23 The Hot Sheet's January 2024 Bestseller Lists - https://hotsheetpub.com/2024/02/january-2024-bestseller-lists/ Smashwords Read an Ebook Week - March 3-9, 2024 - https://www.smashwords.com/ebookweek Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate  (VALENTINE20 - offer ends Feb. 29th)  IngramSpark: Ask the Expert (IG) - https://www.instagram.com/p/C3bE2lJvwKA/ How to Create a Multi-Million-Dollar Business ​​​​​​​From Your Business Book - https://event.webinarjam.com/register/70/kozgpfzo Finish Your Book in 2024! - https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Yxwj-cjWSQK-eCbFpJ5yMw#/registration Crowdfunding Your Book with Kickstarter | Reedsy Live - https://mailparrot.reedsy.com/subscriptions/new?list_id=84ff35ebe3&utm_source=mailparrot_newsletter&utm_campaign=marketplace_live_kickstarter&utm_medium=email Book Ninja Summit - https://bookninjasummit.com  Credit: The Hot Sheet - https://hotsheetpub.com 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

The Kindlepreneur shared an updated strategy for maximizing the seven backend keywords slots on KDP. Streetlib updated their terms and conditions. An author loses his mind over a review. And, so much more this week in the self-publishing news. Subscribe to The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com  Join Channel Memberships - https://DaleLinks.com/Memberships Join Me on Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord  News Sources: BookBrush's Full Service Social Media Management Services - https://bookbrush.com/social-media-management/ | For the job opportunity, contact CEO Josh Wiley at josh@brushmediagroup.com. Streetlib's Updated Conditions and Terms - https://streetlib-agreements.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/StreetLib_Hub_20220824_en.pdf Self-Published Science Fiction Competition Issues Statement After Author Has Meltdown About Judge's Review - https://file770.com/self-published-science-fiction-competition-issues-statement-after-author-has-meltdown-about-judges-review/#comments  IngramSpark: Share & Sell Your Book (US only) - https://www.ingramspark.com/e-commerce  7 Kindle Keywords: Use All 50 Characters or Not? [UPDATED] - https://kindlepreneur.com/7-kindle-keywords/ eBookFairs: Book Cover Grader - https://ebookfairs.com/Home/Book-Cover-Grader Pod Pro Author Coaching - https://www.theindyauthor.com/services---pod-pro-author-coaching.html Lulu: How to Get Started Successfully as an Author - https://event.webinarjam.com/register/68/qrqmosmk Writing & Publishing Master Class with Andy Maslen | Reedsy Learning - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/writing-publishing-master-class-with-andy-maslen-reedsy-learning-tickets-808859890707 How to Get Started with Amazon Ads: Reaching More Readers Podcast - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/podcast-amazon-ads/ Self-Publishing with Dale Podcast Reviews: https://chartable.com/podcasts/selfpublishing-with-dale-l-roberts/reviews/d5Tm26oB Special thanks to these sources: LaterPress - https://LaterPress.com CraveBooks - https://CraveBooks.com Draft2Digital - https://Draft2Digital.com Findaway Voices - https://FindawayVoices.com David Gaughran - https://DavidGaughran.com  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

December 2023 was my best month ever for my audiobooks, so I thought I would take a look at the best places to (legally) get free and low-cost audiobooks. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE HUNT as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE HUNT for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERHUNT The coupon code is valid through February 13th, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 185 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 27th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about how to find low-cost audiobooks. Before we get to our main topic, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Hunt, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Hunt for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERHUNT and that is WINTERHUNT and that will obviously be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through February 13th, 2024. So, if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got one ready for you. So that is Coupon of the Week. Now let's have a current update on my present writing projects. I am pleased to report that Shield of Storms, the first book in the new Shield War saga set in my fantasy realm of Andomhaim, is complete and it is out and published. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. Initial sales and reviews are positive, so thank you all for reading. A few people have asked when the audiobook is coming and recording should start for that on January 29th (Monday). So realistically, probably around March for the audiobook to be available. Now that Shield of Storms is out, let's have a look at my next couple of projects. The next book I publish will be Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, and I am about 2/3 of the way through it. In fact, I think I might be closer to 70% of the way through it and so I am hoping to have that done before too much longer. I've had a year's worth of sales data with the previous book and I think I've pretty definitively established that the LitRPG market is pretty much Kindle Unlimited and audio so Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling will be in Kindle Unlimited and hopefully in audiobook before too much longer, if all goes well. We will see how that goes. After that is done then I will write Ghost in the Veils, the sequel to Ghost in the Serpent and the second book in the New Ghost Armor series. I think that will probably be out towards the end of March or the beginning of April. It's scheduled to be recorded as an audiobook in April. So, I definitely want to have it out before that happens. I am also about 19,000 words into Wizard Thief, the sequel to Half-Elven Thief in December, and that…lately I've been adopting a model for writing where I have a main project that takes up 80% of my time and then do like 10% projects that I work on in the morning when I have my coffee. By the time I get done with Ghost in the Veils, I will probably be like halfway through or maybe even 2/3 of the way through Wizard Thief. So hopefully it should be out before too much longer after Ghost in the Veils is published. So that is where I'm at with all my current writing projects. 00:03:08 Main Topic: Legal and Cheap Ways to Get Low-Cost Audiobooks So let's move on to our main topic this week: legal and cheap ways to get low-cost or free audiobooks. So why talk about that this month or this episode? Well, looking over figures, it looks like December may have been my best month ever for my self-published audiobooks, which I'm very happy about and now very grateful to all of you for. But as we all know, the economy is not good and it is not likely to improve anytime soon. So, budgets are tight for many, many people and so I thought it would be a good way to take a look at the free and legal ways to get free and low-cost audiobooks because obviously it's fairly simple to pirate audio books. I don't endorse that, and there's also always a measure of risk with that, because very often pirates will use fake pirated material to distribute, like, you know, malware and cryptocurrency scams and that kind of thing. I remember a long time ago, back when I was doing tech support, I had a university student come to me very concerned that her computer had gotten a virus, and so I asked, how did do you think this happened? She said, well, I had to watch this movie for class, so I didn't want to pay for it. So I Googled where to watch a pirated copy of this movie online and I clicked on the first link I got and my computer is now filled with viruses. I don't know how this happened. This was not, needless to say, the most mysterious case I ever had to deal with when I was doing tech support back in the old days. So piracy, aside from the moral and ethical implications, can also carry a measure of risk. By contrast, the methods that we're going to talk about today are legal and should have no risk of infecting either your phone or your computer with various forms of malware or cryptocurrency scams. So let's look at the best way to get free audiobook titles and the best way is the one of the most old fashioned ways: your local library system. I should note what I'm about to say applies strongly to the US, since that's obviously where I live, and that I'm most familiar with how things work here, so obviously things will probably work differently in different countries if that is where you live. In the US, there's usually two ways you can get audiobooks from the library. The library will either use a service called Libby, which is sort of a friendly user interface on top of a service called OverDrive, or the library will use something called Hoopla. Not all libraries will have Libby or Hoopla, though many of them will have some sort of service like Libby or Hoopla that provides ebooks or audiobooks. Be sure to check your local library's website to see if your library subscribes to these resources and to learn more about them. One thing, if your library uses Libby/OverDrive is that there will probably be a wait list for newer titles or titles that suddenly get popular (like the the biography of Oppenheimer that inspired the Oppenheimer movie in the summer of 2023). It's not uncommon for a big release or very popular book or audiobook to have a wait list of a couple hundred people, though obviously if you're looking at older or less popular titles, the wait list will sometimes be shorter or no wait at all. Selection will also vary wildly by library. The trouble with a lot of these ebook subscription platforms for libraries is that they're very expensive because the library's essentially a captive market for the vendors. Libraries have to subscribe to the Libby platform and then buy additional titles for their patrons. And if you're familiar with the way the publishing industry works at all, you know that library editions are usually much more expensive than regular consumer editions. For example, a book that might cost a library like $9 in print can cost like $85 on Libby for a copy that expires after 26 checkouts or a similar level of set checkouts. That's often why libraries will only have one or two copies of a very popular title, just because it's so expensive. If they just bought copies for everyone who asks, it would rapidly deplete their budget. The checkout and limits are set by the libraries and not Hoopla or OverDrive, so they vary from library to library. Like one library might have four checkouts per patron per month or another library system might allow ten simultaneous checkouts and ten items you can join the wait list for at the same time. It can vary quite a bit from library to library. So as the saying goes, your mileage may vary, but if you are looking for a low-cost way to listen to audiobooks and read ebooks, then the best place to start is probably your local library system. Now let's move on from free to subscription products. Something new that's come up recently is that Spotify is offering audiobooks. They bought Findaway Voices a couple of years ago and basically imported Findaway Voices' audiobook catalog into their platform, which includes quite a few of my audiobooks. And for a Spotify premium subscription, you get access to a library of audiobook titles included in the cost of an existing Spotify Premium subscription. It comes out to 15 hours a month per individual Premium account or per family account, and depending on your audiobook listening needs, one fifteen hour audiobook might tide you over for the entire month worth of commuting. It is important to note that this does not include all audiobooks available on Spotify. Not all of them are available for this fifteen hour a month subscription and that Spotify does also offer what are called a la carte audiobook sales, where you just buy the audiobook on top of the subscription cost that you're already paying. So, if you're already paying for Spotify for your music listening, as apparently quite a few people do, this could be a fairly cheap way to listen to audiobooks on top of your Spotify subscriptions, as you're paying for that already anyway. Another subscription option is Kobo Plus Listen where you pay about $8 US a month to access a collection of about 100,000 audiobook titles, and for an initial $2.00 a month you can throw in the entire Kobo Plus collection of ebooks. Kobo's audiobook platform is relatively new, so it tends to have fewer frontlist and bestseller titles. Quite a few of my audiobooks are on there and I think the vast majority of my ebooks are in Kobo Plus as well. So, if you're looking for a low-cost way to listen to audiobooks, that could be a good way to do it. Another option is a platform called Everand, which you may also know as Scribd, because that's what it used to be called until a couple months ago. For some reason, they decided to change their name from Scribd to Everand. Whenever companies do this, it's often very confusing and you always suspect that they paid too much money to an MBA consultant for some bad advice, but that is a tangent and let's not dwell on that. Everand has a slightly lower cost than Audible. It's $12.00 a month versus $15 for the lowest tier of the Audible subscription plan and that also includes ebook access. However, it's not a truly unlimited subscription. There seems to be a limit that isn't advertised based on reports, and it's apparently frequently very frustrating to power users. In fact, back when Everand was still Scribd a couple of years ago, there was a bit of a minor kerfuffle where they started limiting romance power users because romance readers are famous for reading so many romance books and listening to so many romance audiobooks. And so they deliberately dialed that back and throttled it and it was a bit of a problem. Audible also has what's called the Audible Plus lowest tier for their Audible subscription. For $8 a month, you can subscribe to Audible Plus and then you can listen to anything that's in the Audible Plus catalog, which does rotate fairly frequently, and things tend to move in and out of it. For a while, the first Dragontiarna Publisher Pack, which would be Dragontiarna Books One and Two, was in Audible Plus, and that did do a good job of driving sales to the rest of the series, but only the first audiobook was in Audible Plus, so it's kind of a loss leader for Podium to do that. Now onto some low-cost a la carte options, where you're just paying for the audiobook rather than subscribing. I have to admit my favorite low-cost option is Chirp. If you're familiar with Bookbub at all, Chirp works basically like Bookbub. Every day you get an email listing the low-cost and discounted audiobooks in genres that you indicated you like when you signed up for Chirp. There's no monthly costs, no recurring fees, anything like that. You just get email every day with a list of audiobooks that are currently on sale for a low cost, ranging from like $0.99 to $4.99 (depending on the title), which is usually a pretty good deal. So, if you're looking to stack up on some low-cost audiobooks, Chirp is a good way to go about it. And if you don't mind a bit of a plug, another good way to get low-cost audiobooks is to listen to this podcast. If you will remember from the start of the show, I have Coupon of the Week for Ghost in the Hunt for 75% off, which comes to about…ah, the audiobook will cost you about $3.00. So listen to this podcast and watching for the coupon code is also a good way to get discount audiobooks, since I do use audiobooks for Coupon of the Week pretty frequently. Finally, if you want to listen to some free public domain audiobooks (this is where the book has been in the public domain, and therefore anyone can make an audiobook of it for any reason), check out a website called LibriVox. That is https://librivox.org and it has a large collection of public domain titles which are all read by volunteers, but the quality may vary depending upon the equipment and technical competence of that particular volunteer, but they are free. If you can't find something you want to listen to at the library for free, this might be a good substitution. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I'd like to once again thank my transcriptionist for pulling together the research for this episode. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Hello to episode 148 and Goodbye to 2023. Here's my brief recap of the podcast, this year's Patrons, and the role of persistence that brought unexpected and much-appreciated surprises. You will learn: Five of this year's favorite podcast episodes are linked below. David Richman Eleanor Andrews Maria Henson Chad Peevy Debbie Russell Thank you to my Patrons for supporting the podcast and my writing this year! And to all of you enjoy stories of persistence as much as I do. Thankful Grounded in Grit: Turn Your Challenges into Superpowers is now available on Audible and wide through other retailers, thanks to Findaway Voices! Happy 2024 (soon) and have a great week. Last year I embraced a motto that I'd celebrate the efforts made in goals, not the outcome. I'm keeping this one moving forward! Happy 2024 and many thanks for being part of my world.

Findaway Voices by Spotify makes a MAJOR pivot, allowing Google Play's AI narration to be distributed to more online retailers. An indie author sees a huge payoff to #booktook on TikTok. And, Written Word Media released the results from a recent indie author survey. All that and more in the self-publishing news today! Join Channel Memberships - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9CjdZQtzufqgYx0CidSbA/join  Join my community at: Discord - http://dalelinks.com/discord  Sources: TikTok's #BookTok trend 'literally changed my life' - https://au.news.yahoo.com/tiktoks-booktok-trend-literally-changed-072145517.html Now Distributing Audiobooks with Digital Voice Narration - https://blog.findawayvoices.com/now-distributing-audiobooks-with-digital-voice-narration/  Auto-narrated audiobooks - https://play.google.com/books/publish/autonarrated/  Survey Results: The State of Indie Authorship - https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/survey-results-the-state-of-indie-authorship/ Quick-Ship Products for the Holidays - https://mailchi.mp/vervante/foilstamping-1127468  KWL Live Q&A – Planning, Prepping and Productivity Tips for Self-published Authors with Sarra Cannon - https://www.youtube.com/live/qqa3ezBgHPs?si=ukQac-3IRas58sWL Joe Solari's Author Newsletter - https://courses.joesolari.com/newsletter?r_done=1 The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com 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

“The biggest breakthroughs came from the random side projects that I had no expectation would turn into anything.” Josh Kaufman is a longtime friendtor (13 years and counting!) who I admire for his streamlined approach to running his business in a way that supports family life and creative solitude. In our last conversation we spoke about releasing the ten-year anniversary edition of his bestselling book, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, that has since surpassed the one million books sold milestone. Today we're diving into the systems behind that success. Check out 012: Generating Personal MBA Momentum with Josh Kaufman if you haven't already! More About Josh: Josh Kaufman's research and books focus on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, and practical wisdom. Josh's unique, multidisciplinary approach to business mastery and rapid skill acquisition has helped millions of readers around the world learn essential concepts and skills on their own terms. Josh's TEDx talk on The First 20 Hours is one of the top 25 most-viewed TED talks published to date, with over 37 million views on YouTube.

Explore ten powerful methods to maximize your audiobook revenue. This video covers a range of techniques, including sales funnels, email marketing, leveraging the bounty program, and driving affiliate sales. Whether you're publishing through ACX, Authors Republic, or Amazon, learn how to grow your audiobook business and make the most of your earnings. Uncover the potential of platforms like Audible, Findaway Voices, and more. If you're serious about increasing your audiobook income, this guide is a must-watch. Join Channel Memberships - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9CjdZQtzufqgYx0CidSbA/join  Join my community at: Discord - http://dalelinks.com/discord  Sources: Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) Holiday Ordering Deadlines - https://mail.barnesandnoble.com/H/2/v60000018b41022003a1e7f46e96c660a0/87ce7d25-327d-4d48-9056-715e3f72bb9c/HTML IngramSpark Recommended Order Dates - https://www.ingramspark.com/%F0%9F%93%A6act-fast-recommended-order-dates-and-book-nominations LaterPress - https://www.laterpress.com/ There is No Marketing Magic Bullet: Reaching More Readers Podcast, With Dale L. Roberts and Holly Greenland - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/podcast-marketing-magic-bullet/  GetCovers - https://DaleLinks.com/GetCovers - use code TREAT20 (affiliate link) Kobo Plus Data - https://preview.mailerlite.com/a0s2y7l2v8/2332257606858446275/y8b6/  Can a Professional Book Cover Double Your Sales? - https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/book-design/redesign/ The NEW Findaway Voices by Spotify - https://www.findawayvoices.com/dale Spotify Premium Analytics - https://my.findawayvoices.com/reporting/spotify-premium-analytics Spotify's new audiobook streaming could have ‘devastating effect', says Society of Authors - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/11/spotify-audiobook-streaming-devastating-effect-authors No Fakes Act wants to protect actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas - https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/12/23914915/ai-replicas-likeness-law-no-fakes-copyright Game-Changing Creator Insights for 2024 - https://assets.lulu.com/media/unbounce/lulu-tilt-creator-insights.pdf 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

Spotify is rolling out even more changes to the audiobook distribution service, Findaway Voices. The Marketplace is going away after a short run on Findaway Voices, Spotify Premium might not be what audiobook rights holders want, and more. Also, Reedsy shares the difference a professional cover design can make in your book sales. And, Kobo Writing Life updated their Kobo Plus reports and analytics. All that and more in the self-publishing news! Join Channel Memberships - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9CjdZQtzufqgYx0CidSbA/join Join my community at: Discord - http://dalelinks.com/discord Sources: Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) Holiday Ordering Deadlines - https://mail.barnesandnoble.com/H/2/v60000018b41022003a1e7f46e96c660a0/87ce7d25-327d-4d48-9056-715e3f72bb9c/HTML  IngramSpark Recommended Order Dates - https://www.ingramspark.com/%F0%9F%93%A6act-fast-recommended-order-dates-and-book-nominations LaterPress - https://www.laterpress.com/ There is No Marketing Magic Bullet: Reaching More Readers Podcast, With Dale L. Roberts and Holly Greenland - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/podcast-marketing-magic-bullet/  GetCovers - https://DaleLinks.com/GetCovers - use code TREAT20 (affiliate link) Kobo Plus Data - https://preview.mailerlite.com/a0s2y7l2v8/2332257606858446275/y8b6/  Can a Professional Book Cover Double Your Sales? - https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/book-design/redesign/ The NEW Findaway Voices by Spotify - https://www.findawayvoices.com/dale  Spotify Premium Analytics - https://my.findawayvoices.com/reporting/spotify-premium-analytics  Spotify's new audiobook streaming could have ‘devastating effect', says Society of Authors - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/oct/11/spotify-audiobook-streaming-devastating-effect-authors No Fakes Act wants to protect actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas - https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/12/23914915/ai-replicas-likeness-law-no-fakes-copyright Game-Changing Creator Insights for 2024 - https://assets.lulu.com/media/unbounce/lulu-tilt-creator-insights.pdf 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

Explore the world of audiobook distribution and discover how to reach a wider audience by publishing on various retail and library platforms. This guide provides valuable insights into the benefits of "going wide" with your audiobooks and offers a step-by-step tutorial on publishing to multiple platforms, including Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), Findaway Voices, Author's Republic, and PublishDrive. If you're eager to maximize exposure and revenue potential for your audiobooks, this comprehensive tutorial is a must-watch. Dibbly Create - https://DaleLinks.com/DibblyCreate (affiliate link) Join Channel Memberships - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9CjdZQtzufqgYx0CidSbA/join Join my community at: Discord - http://dalelinks.com/discord 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

Mark interviews the creative daughter/father team of Brigid Collins and Ron Collins about their collaborative writing. Prior to the interview, Mark shares a brief personal update, comments from recent episodes, and word about this episode's sponsor. You can learn more about how you can get your audiobooks distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway. In the interview, Mark, Brigid and Ron talk about: The last time they saw one another (Feb 2020, just prior to the world "shutting down" for the pandemic) Ron's entry into the world of professional speculative fiction writing in the mid 1990s Why Ron feels that non-fiction can be a lot of fun to write Ron's latest book On Creating (And Celebrating!) Characters Brigid growing up and being witness to the dedication her father Ron had for his pursuit of writing Singer, the first book Brigid wrote, which evolved into the four books of The Songbird River Chronicles in response to her father's prompting Brigid's appreciation of having good parents at all the various stages of her youth and adulthood The importance of being able to accept the other person's methods and style of writing as well as their ideas which can be totally different Learning one's own writing styles from engaging with the other person's work The incredible amount of fun that can happen with the right collaborations The logistics of how they co-author together, for both short stories as well as a newco-authored book project Finding the middle-ground between planning and discovery writing Merging the worlds of the fairie realm with the baseball world based on the idea of a baseball diamond being built on top of a fairie ring The fun of merging the tropes of these two types of worlds The way the split of writing has evolved and gotten more complicated as part of writing the next books in the series Leveraging Google doc and folders for the collaborations Using Draft2Digital's payment splitting option for publishing A collaboration that Ron is doing with his brother merging science fiction and the world of music Advice they would offer to writers interested in getting into writing collaborations And more...   After the interview Mark reflects on the "2+2 equally more than 4" awesomeness that can happen in a powerful collaboration. Links of Interest: Brigid's Website The Songbird River Chronicles (and more) Ron's Website On Creating (And Celebrating!) Characters Home Run Enchanted (Faires and Fastballs Book 1) Abridged (half-hour) Keynote on Embracing Technology for AuthorTube Writing Conference Unabridged FULL HOUR Keynote (Patreon link) Wine Country Writer's Festival EP 250 - Typewriters, Nature, and Fatherhood with E S Curry EP 314 - Defeating Writer's Block Using Penspyre EP 317 - Rambling Reflections from the Road - Part 2 EP 318 - Rambling Reflections from the Road - Part 3 Buy Mark a Coffee Patreon for Stark Reflections Best Book Ever Podcast Lovers Moon Podcast The Relaxed Author Buy eBook Direct Buy Audiobook Direct Publishing Pitfalls for Authors An Author's Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores Wide for the Win Mark's Canadian Werewolf Books This Time Around (Short Story) A Canadian Werewolf in New York Stowe Away (Novella) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles Fright Nights, Big City Lover's Moon Hex and the City The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard   Brigid Collins is a fantasy and science fiction writer living in Michigan with her wonderful wife and her irritating cats. (Just kidding, the cats are pretty wonderful, too.) Her fantasy series The Songbird River Chronicles and Winter's Consort, her fun middle grade hijinks series The Sugimori Sisters, and her dark fairy tale novella Thorn and Thimble are available wherever books are sold. Her short stories have appeared in Fiction River, Feyland Tales, and Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar anthologies. Ron Collins is a best-selling Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction. With his daughter, Brigid, he edited the anthology Face the Strange. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize. His short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society's 2016 Derringer Award. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time.   The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

If you're an author with a handful of books published (or you've published nonfiction and have one book with a great program to help clients), AMMO is TRBM is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.unlike any other program on the market. You're going to have to work the program to find success, and bestseller status likely won't hit in weeks of joining the program, but for many authors, AMMO is the beginning of a lucrative career that puts books first. Learn more here.THIS IS THE LINK TO MY SUBSTACK if you're listening elsewhere.Follow this link to checkout Findaway Voices.Use the same process for ebooks with IngramSpark.Map of Participating Hoopla Libraries.You can buy my novels here.Or get a great deal of 5 of my ebooks here.Or get a great deal on 2 of my audiobooks here.Or basically steal 2 paperbacks from me here. Get full access to TRBM at jodyjsperling.substack.com/subscribe

If you're an author with a handful of books published (or you've published nonfiction and have one book with a great program to help clients), AMMO is unlike any other program on the market. You're going to have to work the program to find success, and bestseller status likely won't hit in weeks of joining the program, but for many authors, AMMO is the beginning of a lucrative career that puts books first. Learn more here.THIS IS THE LINK TO MY SUBSTACK if you're listening elsewhere.Follow this link to checkout Findaway Voices.If you don't have an audiobook of your novels, you're missing huge opportunities. Go out and get one started if you can. Figure out how to make it happen if you can't currently afford or coordinate it.Distribute your audiobooks wide to passively get your books in libraries. You'll still have to do a ton of work to get great penetration in libraries, but letting Hoopla and other pay-per-checkout methods passively offer your book is great.You can buy my novels here.Or get a great deal of 5 of my ebooks here.Or get a great deal on 2 of my audiobooks here.Or basically steal 2 paperbacks from me here.TRBM is a listener-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to TRBM at jodyjsperling.substack.com/subscribe

Join hosts J.D. Barker, Christine Daigle, JP Rindfleisch IX, and Kevin Tumlinson as they discuss the week's publishing topics, including Findaway Voices' big swing to draw indie audiobook authors to Spotify. Then stick around as JP chats with Canadian fantasy author C.L. Polk! C. L. Polk is the author of the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Witchmark, the first novel of the Kingston Cycle. Their most recent novel, Even Though I Knew The End—called a "must-read for those who like their queer fantasy with a little grit and a lot of soul" by Booklist—is available now wherever books are sold. Check It Out! J.D. in Pittsburg - https://www.pittsburghbookfestival.org [Note: This event took place on May 13, 2023] JP on Twitch - https://www.twitch.tv/cheshirepope CopCamp2023 - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.premeditatedfiction.com/copcamp2023⁠⁠⁠[FB Group - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/1280410339558799⁠⁠⁠] Show Links:* Writers, Ink on YouTube! - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@jdbarker_author/podcasts⁠⁠⁠ J.D. Barker - ⁠⁠⁠https://jdbarker.com/⁠⁠⁠ Christine Daigle - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.christinedaiglebooks.com/⁠⁠⁠ JP Rindfleisch IX - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.jprindfleischix.com/⁠⁠⁠ Kevin Tumlinson - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.kevintumlinson.com/⁠⁠⁠ Patrick O'Donnell - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.copsandwriters.com/⁠⁠⁠ C.L. Polk - https://clpolk.com/ TODAY'S SPONSORS: AutoCrit - https://www.autocrit.com/jd (click this link to take advantage of our Writers Ink special offer!!!) MasterWriter - ⁠⁠⁠https://masterwriter.com/⁠⁠⁠ Best of BookTok - ⁠⁠⁠https://bestofbooktok.com/⁠⁠⁠ Booktrib - ⁠⁠https://booktrib.com/author/writers-ink/⁠⁠ Music by Nicorus - ⁠⁠⁠https://cctrax.com/nicorus/dust-to-dust-ep⁠⁠⁠ Voice Over by Rick Ganley - ⁠⁠⁠http://www.nhpr.com⁠⁠⁠ and recorded at Mill Pond Studio - ⁠⁠⁠http://www.millpondstudio.com⁠⁠⁠ Show notes & audio production by Geoff Emberlyn - ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/gmbrlyn⁠⁠⁠ Website Design by Word & Pixel - ⁠⁠⁠http://wordandpixel.com/⁠⁠⁠ Contact - ⁠⁠⁠https://writersinkpodcast.com/contact/⁠⁠⁠ *Full disclosure: Some of the links are affiliate links. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/writersink/support

I messed up with last week's news regarding Spotify. Also, the "Godfather of A.I." quit Google and expresses some regrets over the development of artificial intelligence. And, Amazon Advertising provides even more learning tools and resources for authors. All that and more in this week's self-publishing news. GetCovers - https://DaleLinks.com/GetCovers (affiliate link) GetCovers Giveaway - https://DaleLinks.com/GetCoversGiveaway Sources: Spotify Helps Authors Earn More with Findaway Voices - https://blog.findawayvoices.com/spotify-helps-authors-earn-more-with-findaway-voices/  ‘The Godfather of A.I.' just quit Google - https://fortune.com/2023/05/01/godfather-ai-geoffrey-hinton-quit-google-regrets-lifes-work-bad-actors/ Kobo U.S. Memorial Day Promo (StreetLib) - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduo42zY4apHgKy3o7DIch8XGd4Uzfkh2oubANfFoUw8JDkMw/viewform Advertising books on Amazon: A guide for authors - https://advertising.amazon.com/en-us/library/guides/advertising-books-on-amazon-authors/ How to Increase Amazon Followers [4 Easy Steps] - https://kindlepreneur.com/increase-amazon-followers/ LaterPress - https://www.laterpress.com/ The State of Author Newsletters: Data from 500+ Authors - https://insights.bookbub.com/state-author-newsletters-data/ Fictionary StoryCoach Certification - https://files.constantcontact.com/b5458993601/c8a8cf62-2dda-4534-ae2a-dcef676d35a2.pdf  The 2023 Indie Author Income Survey with ALLi's Orna Ross (D2D) - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-2023-indie-author-income-survey-with-allis-orna-ross-tickets-630455829357 Draft2Digital Live - https://draft2digital.com/live/ eBookFairs - https://DaleLinks.com/eBookFairs (affiliate link) 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

Amazon KDP finally has some competition by way of IngramSpark with their latest updates. Spotify is stepping up BIG time by offering an unheard of royalty for audiobooks that is double the royalty ACX (Audible) offer. Also, find out how ACX made other news, Kindlepreneur rolls out updates to tracking pirated books, and so much more.    Sources: Miblart Cover Design Giveaway - https://DaleLinks.com/Giveaway GetCovers eBook Cover Design Giveaway - https://DaleLinks.com/GetCoversGiveaway  Miblart - https://DaleLinks.com/Miblart (affiliate link) Use coupon code DALE10 to get 10% off at checkout. Promote your ebooks your way - https://authoremail.com/email/campaigns/rw660nd2a5e2c/web-version/lg0604x35fb97  Five Pieces of Book Blurb Advice You Should Avoid - https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/five-pieces-of-book-blurb-advice-you-should-avoid/  The Quiet Ebooks Revolution - https://giak.medium.com/the-quiet-ebooks-revolution-3fff2c6940f9 Fleischmann Media - https://www.fleischmannmedia.com/ Amazon Announces Anti-Counterfeiting Exchange to Help Eliminate Counterfeits Across the Retail Industry - https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/4/amazon-announces-anti-counterfeiting-exchange-to-help-eliminate-counterfeits-across-the-retail-industry ACX - https://www.acx.com/ IngramSpark Celebrates 10 Years - https://help.ingramspark.com/hc/en-us/articles/15276524164749-IngramSpark-Celebrates-10-Years- The Alliance of Independent Authors - https://DaleLinks.com/ALLi (affiliate link)  ReaderScout - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readerscout/ankgmhneialghlebgnocmjjemngllcgd The Top 7 Book Aggregators Compared - https://publishdrive.com/top-book-aggregators.html Spotify Helps Authors Earn More with Findaway Voices - https://blog.findawayvoices.com/spotify-helps-authors-earn-more-with-findaway-voices/  The Self-Publishing Hub - https://theselfpublishinghub.com/ 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

World-famous author James Patterson goes off on the New York Times Bestseller List. Romance author EL James joins a panel of romance authors to chat with other authors. Streetlib offers conceirge services for newbie authors. And, AppSumo is bringing back the popular DepositPhotos deal for a limited time. All that and more in the self-publishing news! Sources:  Live author chat with E L James as we re-read The Mister - https://bingebooks.com/pages/live-author-chat-with-el-james23 The Hot Sheet - https://hotsheetpub.com James Patterson on Twitter - https://twitter.com/JP_Books/status/1641161267476873223  Audiobooks Without Audible: The Hard Lessons I've Learned Routing Around Amazon - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/audio-books/article/91897-audiobooks-without-audible-the-hard-lessons-i-ve-learned-routing-around-amazon.html  Findaway Voices - https://findawayvoices.com Streetlib Concierge Book Services - https://concierge.streetlib.com/ KWL Live Q&A – Kobo Plus US & UK Expansion: an AMA with the KWL Team - https://www.youtube.com/live/LKizumuyPoA?feature=share DepositPhotos AppSumo Deal - https://selfpublishingwithdale.com/dp (affiliate link) Rights vs. Copyright: Untangling the Confusion - https://writerbeware.blog/2023/04/14/rights-vs-copyright-untangling-the-confusion/ KDP Select Global Fund for March 2023 - https://kdp.amazon.com  eBookFairs - https://dalelinks.com/ebookfairs (affiliate link) The Self-Publishing Hub - https://theselfpublishinghub.com/ 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

Kindle Unlimited has had a stranglehold on the reader subscription model for years now while a competitor has slowly been extending its reach. Also, find out what Publishers Weekly suggests for protecting your work on Amazon KDP. Spotify expands its reach. And, Amazon is closing down the Book Depository. Find out all about that and more! Let's discuss the news in self-publishing on Mondays at 6:15pm EST (UTC-5)! Sources: Laterpress - https://laterpress.com Protecting Your Work - https://booklife.com/news/authors/03/27/2023/protecting-your-work.html How to Sell Your Audiobook on Spotify With PublishDrive - https://publishdrive.com/sell-audiobooks-on-spotify.html Spotify Launches Audiobook Sales in Canada - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/91816-spotify-launches-audiobook-sales-in-canada.html  Findaway Voices - https://findawayvoices.com  KDP's Kindle Vella - https://kdp.amazon.com Kobo Plus launches in the US and UK - https://preview.mailerlite.com/f2e2j5p8t7/2186091478147667616/z8t0/ Help your books stand out with Sponsored Brands webinar - https://advertising.amazon.com/resources/library/webinars/register?webinar_key=2631838740472983391&organizer_key=5730221780046494214&ref_=pe_24209330_709653810_email MK Williams - https://youtu.be/KlTckewLQ2c Book Depository will close this month - https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/2023/04/04/amazons-dismantling-of-its-books-operations-continues-book-depository-will-close-this-month-what-will-be-next/ The Self-Publishing Hub - https://theselfpublishinghub.com/ 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

Amazon Author Central finally rolls out an amazing new feature for authors. Draft2Digital launches print out of beta. Publisher Rocket reveals new categories feature that could change the game. And, so much more in this week's self-publishing news. Let's discuss the news in self-publishing on Mondays at 6:15pm EST (UTC-5)! Sources: Draft2Digital Opens D2D Print to Every Author - https://www.draft2digital.com/blog/press-release-draft2digital-opens-d2d-print-to-every-author/ Crime Writers' Week 2023 - https://DaleLinks.com/Crime (affiliate link) Business Basics for keeping your sanity and profits in the fast-paced publishing world - https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/speaker-series/ Publisher Rocket - https://DaleLinks.com/Rocket (affiliate link) Amazon Followers for Author Page - https://author.amazon.com/help/GA4B2P8YR6H9DCA3  Findaway Voices - https://findawayvoices.com/dale KDP Select Global Fund - https://kdp.amazon.com/ SiteGround - https://DaleLinks.com/SiteGround (affiliate link) IngramSpark - https://ingramspark.com/ Blurb - https://blurb.com/ The Self-Publishing Hub - https://theselfpublishinghub.com/  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

More details came out surrounding the agreement through Findaway Voices and Apple AI... Now is a GREAT time to be a romance author... Authors work to address an issue on the Amazon KDP platform... and Barnes & Noble Press starts new live broadcast on Facebook. All that and more in the self-publishing news! Sources: How To Write An Outline For A Nonfiction Book - https://event.webinarjam.com/register/47/w7mvnao5 IngramSpark coupon code: BOOKLOVE (good for 2 free uploads till Feb. 28, 2023) SiteGround - https://DaleLinks.com/SiteGround (affiliate link) Starting Your Next Chapter with B&N Press - https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1198946934084667  How to Write Romance That Stands Out | Reedsy Live - https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-to-write-romance-that-stands-out-reedsy-live-tickets-494927811407  KWL Live Q&A: Romance Roundtable - https://www.youtube.com/live/WGoz9W7m5aM?feature=share The Hot Sheet - https://hotsheetpub.com Stop the unfair removal of titles on Amazon - https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-unfair-removal-of-titles-on-amazon-change-the-kdp-select-policy  KDP Select Global Fund - https://kdp.amazon.com/  Book Award Pro - https://DaleLinks.com/BookAwardPro (affiliate link) Discord - https://DaleLinks.com/Discord Book Award & Contest Ratings - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/author-awards-contests-rated-reviewed/ The Self-Publishing Hub - https://theselfpublishinghub.com/  Where noted, some outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. We only endorse programs, products or services we use and can stand confidently behind. 

Recently, someone read the fine print to an agreement on a distribution platform that volunteers your books for training artificial intelligence on Apple. Amazon finally enacts new ebook return policy. Fiverr rolls out new influencer program. Facebook Ad costs drop. And, much more in this week's self-publishing news! Sources: Best Web Hosting for Authors: The Good, the Bad, and the Heavy-duty - https://kindlepreneur.com/web-hosting-for-authors/ SiteGround - https://DaleLinks.com/SiteGround (affiliate link) Amazon Finally Adds Change to Ebook Returns Policy to Its Terms - https://selfpublishingadvice.org/self-publishing-news-uk-government-cancels-plan-to-allow-copyright-exception-for-text-and-data-mining/  Author Central - https://author.amazon.com/ Announcing Expanded Library Distribution to Palace Marketplace! - https://www.draft2digital.com/blog/announcing-expanded-library-distribution-to-palace-marketplace/ Written Word Media - https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/reader-reach/ Fiverr Influencer Program - https://dalelinks.com/influencer (referral link) Nate Hoffelder on Twitter - https://twitter.com/inkbitspixels/status/1621497237007114240 Findaway Voices' Agreement - https://my.findawayvoices.com/docs/Findaway_Voices_Digital_Distribution_Agreement_(6.10.2020).pdf  Authors Guild Income Survey - https://qualtrics.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3kkZJzXqF9WssAK?referral_org=D2D  She Loves Poems (Derek Murphy) - https://shelovespoems.com/  The Self-Publishing Hub - https://TheSelfPublishingHub.com  Spme outbound links financially benefit the channel through affiliate programs. We only endorse programs, products or services we use and can stand confidently behind.

This week we have a great show in store for you. Leave us a review on Apple Podcast and answer the Question of the Week in the comment section. Author Ad Challenge starts Oct 12th! You can join here: https://AuthorsAdvertise.com Top Tips of the week include why your book isn't for everyone, and that's a good thing, how beta readers can hurt, but also help at the same time, whether authors should be seen marketing their books. The 5 News stories that matter most to indies this week include how D2D is making proofs and author copies easier for non-US authors, how TikTok is changing book covers, how to leap ahead of the Big 5, protecting yourself and your audiobook using Findaway Voices, why genre doesn't matter except to your readers. Question of the Week: What's your process for using beta readers?