Is 2025 Any Different? by M. L. Buchman

M. L. Buchman

I just reread the 2024 prognostication I composed for RTG last December:
https://romancingthegenres.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-quiet-year-behind-but-whats-ahead.html.

I agree with most everything…except for one small detail I forgot to think about.

 The Big Miss

Last year I noted that 2023 was a whacked year for writers because the world decided to splash out and party in the post-COVID era (as much as that will ever again be true). Meaning, folks stopped reading and headed out to have fun after years of lockdown and caution, burning through double-digit trillions of savings in a single, year-long blow-out. That apparent economic boom is now gone by.

Last December I said that I expected 2024 to settle down and be much more rational for the book market.

Ha!

I missed one small detail: The Presidential Election.

Big miss. Huge!

That chewed up the news and ad cycles like never before in history. Even as a staunch anti-doom-scroller, I got sucked into the daily mayhem far too often. And don’t forget that the next-largest English-language market, the UK, had Tory vs. Labour. And Germany and France had the rise of the far right. Canada and Australia have…

You get the idea. Two years in a row that weren’t great for authors. Despite that, the news wasn’t all bad. Books kept selling as savings and economies shrank. Book sales continued to do well, at least better than I expected. Why? Because when economic worries kick in, expensive entertainment (restaurants and travel) tend to go away and inexpensive ones (books and movies) gain ground to fill in that time.

For 2025?

The news cycles are bound to remain chaotic, especially here in the US, but certainly less all-consuming than an election year. I’m hoping for recovery of people’s attention back to the books market.

 Big Conference

I just returned from the inaugural Author Nation conference. When 20BooksTo50K folded, AN picked up the massively expensive hotel contracts (these are set years ahead and there are impossible penalties for canceling them). For the five days of Author Nation, over a thousand indie authors and seventy vendors gathered in Las Vegas.

A Side Observation

Conferences are proliferating even faster than genres are splitting. Lists of conferences, far from definitive, track more than can possibly be attended. Part of this is genre based; people interested in just one narrow niche or another. Broader conferences are rarer and most have histories deeply imbued with traditional press thinking.

True indie-focused conferences are far less common. Why? Because it’s a beast of a job to launch a new conference, especially at any large scale.

Size Matters

A small conference covers a very narrow band of information, or a broad one poorly.

To tackle the wide variability of the indie publishing world in a way appropriate for everyone from newbie hopefuls hoping to craft a first book to career-level professionals—in a single conference—requires a massive scale. Author Nation Year One made a fair stab at achieving that with over two hundred sessions, panels, vendor presentations, meetups, and more.

 Complexity

I bring this up as an illustration of what has happened over the last few years and I expect to keep happening more in the future—wild diversification.

Pre-2011

Traditional publishing had very few options: meet agents and editors at a conference, get an introduction to one through a friend, or brave the slush pile.

The 2010s

Early indie publishing had a narrowish path as well. Get your books on Amazon, then later Apple, B&N, Kobo, and others. Audio and translation had a nearly prohibitive cost of entry during this time. These were built slowly over time as money allowed. Advertising started out as just Amazon and Facebook ads (Twitter ads were never very powerful as a bookselling tool).

The Early 2020s

In the last few years, especially the last two, those options have exploded.

Do you have social media skills? There’s BookTok.

Do you think visually? Pinterest was okay but Instagram became the hammer.

Are you a great community builder? Lean into Slack and Discord.

AI Audio? It’s free! (at least for now)

Kickstarter, always the land of gamers and inventors, has become a major book market (primary for some, supplemental for others).

There’s tons more. And they can all be mixed and matched in different proportions. I’ve hopefully made the point that there are effectively dozens or perhaps hundreds of paths in, rather than the old three ways.

 Complexity (Part II)

The tool explosion has arrived.

In the 2010s, publishing tools were about formatting a book, publishing, recording audio, etc.

In the first years of the 2020s, we were inundated with options for AI covers and acceptable AI audio.

That’s now passé. Sorry, but that’s true. We’re way in the future of the early-mid 2020s (yes, change is moving that fast).

A Few Examples

At the Author Nation conference I consulted extensively with https://spoken.press (just emerging from beta). Load a manuscript, it splits the text into different voices (with no effort and very few misses). You can manually link voices from ElevenLabs (the very best) to the different characters (soon it will auto-suggest voices for you). Then, you can correct it using voice-to-voice. I speak the line the way I want it to sound, and it does so—in the selected voice.

I met with https://authortrack.io (still in beta). Their tool can scrape your Amazon metadata and then suggest proper metadata for loading the book onto other platforms. Managing keywords, categories, descriptions, and more across your whole catalog.

A buddy is developing text-to-video for indies. Literally, load in your book and an editable screenplay and video come out the other end.

AI agents (think really smart bots) can actually run sections of your business.

E-mail automation routines can be generated.

Oh, yeah, and there’s the normal tools for idea brainstorming for your fiction or even full-on generation of the text.

And that’s just in the AI side of the market tools.

Distribution, direct sales, building ads…are all moving ahead too fast to follow. I had thought to spend an hour at the vendor show that was a part of Author Nation. I spent every minute of those six hours talking to different folks about their tools and what they could do for my business. What will I adopt? I still don’t know, but my research front has certainly grown and changed.

Sitting Still

If you do what you’ve always done, the market is shifting out from under your feet. The returns will diminish even as you continue to feed them.

From the Kindle Christmas that marked mainstream adoption of eBook readers in 2011 until perhaps 2022, all these changes have been about evolutionary in nature. Now we’re headed into revolutionary change.

Is that revolution going to replace authors? Nope. Even when you corner the most avid AI proselytizers, the answer is still “Nope.”

Instead, we’re going to see the shifting of the balance between the soul-crushing 80% of time spent on labor and 20% on creativity, to a far higher emphasis on creativity. To achieve this will require flexibility in tool choice and a willingness to innovate our business processes and even our creative workflow.

Much of this is shifting from early adoption into the mainstream over the next few years (next year?). My two cents? Buckle up and lean in.

Will anything beat creating the next piece of IP? Again, Nope.

But the way in which we create it and the way in which we run our businesses definitely need to be innovative.

Will I be using AI to write my books? Probably no more than I presently do as a somewhat intelligent research tool.

Will I be using these new tools to shift my marketing? Yes.

Will I be changing my business to take advantage of these tools? As fast as I can.

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USA Today and Amazon No. 1 bestseller M. L. “Matt” Buchman is the author of 75-plus action-adventure thriller and military romance novels, 200 short stories, and lots of audiobooks. PW says: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” Booklist declared his romances were: “3X Top 10 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-foot sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and he quilts.

His latest release is Wedgetail, a new installment in his highly successful action-adventure thriller series following the challenges of autistic air-crash investigator Miranda Chase. Available from M. L.’s store (https://mlbuchman.com) Dec 1st. Coming to most retailers on Dec 14th (https://books2read.com/wedgetail).