The Wild Year! (peeking into the crystal ball)

 by M. L. Buchman

Last year I wrote two December posts for Romancing the Genres, one looking ahead a year, and one looking at the coming:

DECADE OF THE 2020s

Yes, I got cocky and made my predictions for an entire decade in: How's Your Decade Been? 

I've just reread that post and...I don't think I'll be changing any of those long-term predictions (except a few might be happening sooner than I said). For example, a year ago, AI authorship was kind of a spooky rumor. Now? Numerous news articles and non-fiction books are first-drafted by AI instead of human authors. (If you read the news, especially sports or business [with other sectors coming online daily], you've probably read AI written articles.) What do the editors have to say? "Just like cleaning up a human writer's work, you edit, flip paragraphs, do some cleanup...except its generally faster and easier doing it with the AI's output." 

Mark your calendars. This is the end of 2020, and it's the last time changes in technology will be happening this slowly...ever.

But! I also still stand by my statement that story will trump everything. We may be creating that story with different tools in the future. By 2030, it wouldn't surprise me for a second if I had loaded my complete works into an AI, punched together an outline of plot and characters' emotional curves, and hit generate (maybe 5-10 times). Then I could compare the drafts and edit it together into a finished product that I'd be proud of. (Yeah, totally possible at the rate things are moving.)

If we think about working with the machines (rather than letting ourselves be run over by them), we can do amazing things. (Can't wait!)

Want a peek waaaay under the covers, try Joanna Penn's new book: Artifical Intelligence, Blockchain, and Virtual Worlds. She's a bleeding-edge adopter and I'm a leading-edge adopter, so I'm going to wait and see on some of what she says, but if you're into it, this is a great plain(ish) language view of what she thinks is coming, and I find little to argue with.

LOOKING AT 2020

I also made my predictions about 2020 in Christmas In Review.

1) I said that 2020 was going to be a wild ride varying month-to-month. And that it would drive some writers' businesses upward, some down, and others leave the same. 

I wasn't merely trying to cover all the bases with that statement. Even before it happened, 2020 was going to be a year that was rife with challenges. Who succeeded and who failed could be up to the whim of the market, but also very much affected by how writers approached the year. If you went in expecting not to have 3 months of suck for sales during the election, you haven't ridden out a US national election before--never mind one like this.

Authors who were being nimble had a good chance of thriving. 

Those who saw a mess coming and pulled their heads way in (slashing expenses and building up a stack of new IP for 2021), they're set to survive. Those who thought that there was nothing much worth paying attention to in 2020? Yeah, they're already gone. It's one of those weird things, when an author just fades away and falls off the map, no one really notices. It takes an astute reader (or a superfan) to think, "Huh! I haven't heard of a new book from so-and-so in a while." Typically, they're just gone and the reader has moved on to some other segment of their TBR pile.

2) My main worry was that 2020 was going to have three major factors simultaneously chewing up the news cycles: the election, Brexit, and trade wars with China. Courtesy of our Fearful Leader, the election noise was even higher than I expected, though as predicted, it did drive up ad prices very impressively. And the normal roll-off of the post-election news cycle is being far worse than expected.

I think it's only now, in mid-December, that people are starting to ignore the political news (except for Georgia). And I think that at least through mid-February (until after President-elect Biden's initial flurry of activity) it will still be a factor.

Also, I have to admit that there was one other little news story. But even though I occasionally write apocalyptica, I'm glad I didn't predict the devastation (to date and to come) of Covid-19.  

2021

The global pandemic will begin clearing its throat as the vaccine combines with the warmer spring weather at the end of flu season to start turning toward (not getting there, but turning toward) normalcy. (And if you can define that, you're a better person than I am.)

There's going to be a shockwave as we come out of various lockdowns and other safety measures. It will take several months (much of the summer?) to gear up, but anyone (who isn't busted broke and evicted) is going to celebrate. Not just spring-break-style madness on month-long steroids, but going out to restaurants, sitting with friends, discovering just how out of practice our bodies became with various activities (good time to be a sports physical therapist). I'd wager on an extra multi-month hole in reading consumption come summertime 2021.

Discoverability is still (always?) going to the elephant in the room. With over a thousand new titles being published every day (that's in the US, in English...and that estimate is low), we have to stay focused on keeping our stories visible over the top of that tsunami of content. 

How do the pros do it? Written Word Media answered that in last week's 2020 survey of authors. Go down to the chart and look at how much time the top performers are spending on writing and marketing. (Not outsourced marketing, this is time they're spending themselves focused on marketing.) 

And remember, the very best marketing is releasing your next book, so pay attention to how many hours they spend writing. 

At the top tier, writers are spending 42 hours a week on just those two areas (not counting admin, not counting audio, not counting learning curves, and (if they're like me) not even counting research time). That's 42 hours, on average, every week of the year. It's their full-time professional job. 

First, writing. Second, marketing. Third, everything else. If your numbers don't look like that... (Hmmm. Maybe I should be paying more attention to that. Hmmm....)

Meanwhile, in the background, what do I think is coming?

• Audio is going to explode--finally! Once people are being out and about, they're going to take their Lockdown-honed media consumption habits and head out into the world. Going for a run, a walk, to see a friend on the far side of the state just because you finally can? All that out-and-aboutness will make it time to consume audio. Why in particular? Because we've just come off a year-long lesson in how much we like consuming story. Whether Netflix, Hulu, or eBooks doesn't matter, I think we've rediscovered a love of story. If we're on the move, that means audio.
• Think seriously about getting translations off the ground. eBooks have moved to the fore much faster than planned in many countries. Library closed? Oh, in the US they offered Libby and we got to keep reading. Ran out of things to read? Amazon, Apple, B&N, Kobo...were there to provide. Slow eBook adopting countries leapt aboard in 2020. Translations should see the effect of that going forward from 2021 on.
• Technology itself has moved much faster than planned. Getting slammed into isolation did a three-fold something to the tech industry. 
• Isolated people weren't wasting time socializing.
• Instead they worked any hours they felt like in moving tech forward.
• The demand for accelerated tech was enormous!
• In other words, everything got pushed ahead: translation software, text-to-speech translation, electronic distribution systems. It's all happening and happening fast.

Yeah, about that:

EEEEKKK!

However, I think there are some great things to look forward to in 2021.

• It will be a more stable year (it can't help it, I hope). 
• There will be more pressure on the industry (read as new tools) to drive down the costs of audiobook production because the demand is far higher than the supply right now.
• The news cycle will still be busy, but nothing like the Brexit vote year in the UK or the US election year. Getting discoverability space (with ads, new releases, and so on) will get easier. 
• Technology will be your friend in 2021, if you let it. 
• Thought animating your covers was out of reach? Check out Bookbrush.com's new offers. 
• Thought that getting more than 40% royalty of an audiobook sale wasn't going to happen? You can now get 95%+ thanks to Bookfunnel.com (in open beta).
• My newsletter service (MailerLite) is pushing out innovations faster than I can understand them.
• Need to build trailers... You get the idea.
• There will be new ways to connect, better A/B testing tools, new ways to push that all important key of discoverability.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, will replace a good story well told.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has 60+ action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 100 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. PW says: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” Booklist declared: “3X Top 10 Romance of the Year.” A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.