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| 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.
---------
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).
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