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.

So how's your decade been?

by M. L. Buchman

Yep, we humans like our round numbers and there's another tenner coming up in just a few days. So, I thought I'd take a moment and look backwards so that I could try to peer forwards.

• 2007 - the first Amazon Kindle came out (about the kajillionth entry into the e-reader market and not the best of them). The main thing that set it apart is that it was backed up by a direct publishing platform (KDP) and a wireless delivery system.
• 2009 - I dropped my first couple KDP books.
• 2011 - "The Kindle Christmas" This was the year when suddenly the Kindle was THE gift under the green boughs. (That would be the Kindle 4, the one after the one that I bought with the clicky keyboard.)
• 2015 - Hugh Howey and Data Guy set out to discover the scale of this new-fangled indie pub industry...and discover that it is over 30% of total e-book unit sales and about 15% of total e-book revenue. (This was the tail end of the $0.99 discounting madness that we still haven't fully recovered from.)
• 2018 - By their last report, the numbers were more like 40% of unit sales and 25% of income--that's of the entire publishing industry! Poke into fiction and most genres are over 75% of unit sales.

So, let's look at this for moment.

In 2009, a small group of friends and I were very early adopters of the indie publishing realm that would reshape publishing in ways that hadn't happened since the pocket-sized paperbacks of the early 1940s, the collapse of the pulps in the late 1950s, and the distribution collapse at the turn of the century. (Remember when your grocery store had big racks labeled: "Local author"? Then Safeway said, "No, we just want to order in a few places, not 400 local distributors." Chain stores jumped on the bandwagon and suddenly every store complied with New York-mandated stocking levels rather than manager or regional preferences.)

But all that aside, I'm trying to go back to our 2009 / 2010 excitement and see how I felt about the next decade. I knew the money was there, but I knew that without an audience, I didn't stand a chance.

Thankfully, 2010 was also the year that the 440 rejections I'd earned over the 1990s (roughly a submission every 8 days for 10 straight years) finally paid off. My publisher, with their (back then) vastly superior distribution system helped my work find an audience. I spent those 13 titles on a traditional publisher from 2012-2016 knowing full well that I'd be making a tenth as much per book sale. I figured that was worth it to find an audience.

Turns out that it was. Laid off late in the recession for the second time in three years, 2013 was the year I made the jump to being a full-time writer.

How? I wrote my ass off. As did so many others.

Now lets peek for just a moment at the fads.

• The $0.99 discounters. Made some money (and a LOT of sales), but they're gone now.
• The madly fast-releasing single authors (any heard from Amanda Hocking lately? Certainly not the way we used to).
• We won't mention the KU scammers (Round 1, 2, or 3)
• The fad chasers (most are in it for a few years then gone).
• Now we have the 20 to 50k folks chasing the hot markets with vast quantities of fast-written work. The few really successful ones have mostly created ghost author publishing collectives, some big enough to generate almost daily sales.

Then there were the career builders, in it for the long haul. That absolutely included me. My desire to go back into the corporate maelstrom is so low that I'd rather live on an Ecuadoran beach...and I don't want to live in Ecuador.

So, what sustained my friends and I through the 2010s? A lot of it was writing good story and releasing steadily.

But that's no longer enough.

By 2017-18 discoverability wasn't just a challenge, it was becoming downright hard! Even the mega-sellers who used to drop 5-10 million copies of a title are now thrilled if they can break 1M. (Their New York advances are plummeting to match.)

Why?

There is so much more choice. In 2007 (the year Kindle launched), there were approximately 43,000 fiction titles published in the US. It's now over a quarter million.

OOPS! It's over a quarter of a million if you only count the books published with ISBNs. Extrapolating from the Data Guy reports, we know that the number of fiction titles published in 2019 is probably at least twice that, maybe 3x. No e-publisher requires an ISBN.

Changing from 43,000 to 1/2-million (3/4M) new titles. Yep! That's some kinda growth. The good news is, more people are reading than ever because it is cheap, convenient, and any particular subgenre they favor is now published (rather than New York curating it out of existence).

2020 and Beyond

Is that slowing down? Dream on. More people with ideas. More first-time authors finding the urge to complete a book.

And finding newer and better tools to complete those ideas:

• Plot builders
• Dictation
• Grammar fixers (Grammarly is just the beginning on that.)
• Vellum may seem like the be-all of formatting and book layout right now, but it will get easier. (Pre-load your metadata and passwords into the file and it will auto-pub for you to the sites of your choice? That's practically what D2D is already doing for you.)
• Anyone tried building a book cover in Bookbrush yet? They're very, very close to being a point-and-click Photoshop killer. They're hoping to pull that off within the next year, btw.

And let's look further ahead:

• By the end of 2020 (maybe mid-2021), the massive price threshold on translations is going to crack. Instead of human translation, we're going to have AI translation in seconds followed up by a week of work for a clean-up editor. We're talking about idiomatic translation, not simple literal translation. Not so fanciful. If I had a spare ten grand lying about, I could have this up and running within a week...now! The tools are here, they'll just be common and significantly more mature by end of year. Right now, you need a really good cleanup editor and a proofreader (but that's a book in 2 weeks rather than 3-6 months). Within a year to 18 months, a proofreader should do. I know several people who've already switched over to AI-assisted translation. At present, the cleanup editor is still a critical role.
• Oh yeah, by later in the decade, translation probably won't be an issue at all. I'll publish an English-language book. On your Kindle 2030 you just select the language you want to read it in and idiomatic translation (or close enough for 99% of folks) will show up on the screen. The translator will download just as easily as the Google Translate dictionaries now pop onto your phone. Think of all the new readers you can find for your older work then!
• Auto-generation of new books that match the style of an author's written works? That's already being debated in copyright circles. If I upload all of Stephen King's works into an AI, then generate a new story in his voice, who owns that? Me, Stephen, or the AI? Seriously, the 2020s are going to have copyright issues that make the 2010s and ebook rights look timid. This will definitely be in the courts by 2025. And probably running reasonably well by end of decade at the latest. Clean up the auto-gen and publish.
• You can already create a perfectly acceptable audiobook with a digital voice in minutes. I was a beta-tester on one over a year ago and they've come a long way since. Emotions will be harder (2022?) and real dynamic expression (2025?). For now? Consider doing two: a cheap read-by-machine and a spendier read-by-human version. Great for the 2x listening speed crowd anyway. (I'm not there yet, but I'm definitely looking into it.) Did I mention that you can do this right now at https://www.descript.com/lyrebird-ai for $10/month. Think of the $2.99 "Machine read" version...except you can teach the machine your voice. It will be a flat but acceptable reading. I'd price a novel something like this: $2.99 machine-generated audio in my voice, $4.99-6.99 e-novel, $9.99-12.99 human-narrated audiobook, print at whatever price matches the pages. Here now!, not 2025.
• Will we see auto-export of scripts into film with realistic electronic characters by the end of the decade and point-and-click stage direction? Maybe... You think that one's crazy? Did you see all of the characters that Disney brought back from the dead in Star Wars? Consider what effectively turned days of QuarkXpress layout into minutes of Vellum over the last decade. 
• Oh, and did I mention that several of the Big 5 publishers are going down. A couple will be swept up by media giants seeking massive libraries of previously contracted content. (Oh, wait, Viacom/CBS already owns Simon and Schuster). Big 4. One may just collapse (and won't that be a mess). Perhaps one will shatter into a number of medium-size pubs or just shrink until they are one? I'm betting on a Chinese billionaire buying one just to get his money out of China.

So, a wild ride is coming. But that's not the whole picture.

A friend observed, "Cultural changes take decades no matter what cool tech arises."

People have been seeking story for millennia. They've been reading books for centuries. Yes, audiobooks are on the rise in our busy society, but the vast majority of readers are still readers and will continue to seek story. The format we're consumed in may change, but the world still needs storytellers.

So, while I'm seeking to position myself for the future (a third of my novels are already in audio with more every month, and I'm hoping to get into translations in 2020), technology isn't my guide for the 2020s.

My watchword for the 2020s is "Discoverability." That's what I test all new non-writing ideas against. This kind of ad. That kind of interview. This new tool.

Will it increase my discoverability? If yes, I pursue it. Unsure? I may test it. Not so much? I don't bother.

I think that writers who consciously ask that question, will have the greatest success no matter what changes are headed our way.

M.L. "Matt" Buchman has 60+ thriller and romance novels, 100 short stories, and lotsa audiobooks. Booklist says: 3x “Top-10 Romance of the Year” and among “The 20 Best Romantic Suspense Novels: Modern Masterpieces.” NPR and B&N say “Best 5 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.

Christmas in Review

by M. L. Buchman

I'd give Christmas 3-stars. It opens fast and hot with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The middle drags as the excitement is dragged over the hot coals of:

• "Not yet school recess" for little kids.
• "Semester finals" for high school and college.
• "Corporate...

Okay, I think I've killed that joke. Not what this is about anyway. So, I'll start again:

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

For reasons having to do completely with the randomness of the calendar, my regular monthly post falls on Christmas Day proper. So, Santa and I are launching at the same moment.

Hope he brings lots of cool stuff. I'm Jewish, so I'll call it a Hanukkah Bush, but I enjoy our little tree and look forward to Christmas morning's treats.

Now...

Looking Back to Look Ahead.

I thought I'd take a peek at the year (especially the year to come), as it seems to be that time of year. (Tune back in on Saturday when I'll do a special edition of looking at the Decade!)

For me 2019 was a very chaotic year. The aftershocks of a major move, associated ultra-major downsizing, finally dropping me into a new community have rippled through my year. To add to that, I went back and wrote about a 25-year-ago bicycle trip around the world. A quarter-century ago I was a very, very, very different person. And revisiting that put me back into that headspace in a very strange way. Once it was done, I was glad I had. 1) Because I got to feel really good about who I've become, and 2) because I got a really cool travelogue/adventure story out of it. But the journey was a hard climb even in a low gear.

The other thing I did, that will have perhaps equally drastic ripples into the future as that journey did to my past, was that I jumped genres. My military romantic suspense writing was still doing well, but I found many indicators that said my true voice was perhaps in the suspense/thriller side of writing more than the romance side.

Reviewers and fans seem to agree:

"Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more." - Publishers Weekly

"M.L. Buchman has created the most unique, fascinating character in any genre since the Monk television series." - Ernest Dempsey, author of the Sean Wyatt thrillers

"If Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan was more than a little bit like Temperance Brennan in Bones." - Reading Reality, five stars

Drone (Nov 2019)        Thunderbolt (Dec 2019)      Condor (Mar 2020)

So, for me, it was a year of becoming "truer" to myself.

For many, it was a hard year of falling sales, or a great year of climbing sales, or a mad year of trying to write 1,2,3...6(!) novels a month to cash in. We each have had our own challenges and trials.

But not all that much changed in 2020 as far as the industry is concerned. 

• Some new markets opened up
• Vellum, Bookfunnel, and D2D got even better (no surprise on any of them)
• BookBrush jumped into the fray of awesomely useful tools
• Audiobook promotions came online with Chirp
• and Kobo finally brought their audiobook direct service online

But it wasn't nearly the massive and exciting changes we saw in 2017 and 2018. Overall, it was a relatively quiet year in the indie publishing industry.

LOOKING AHEAD

My best guess is that most of 2020 will be much the same. Toward the end of the year is when we'll probably start seeing the first really interesting changes...but I'll talk about those on Saturday as they're really multi-year. (As a teaser I'll just say that the first real ramifications of AI are coming and they're going to create amazing opportunities for authors.)

So, if changes to the industry itself aren't likely to be a big factor...what is? I expect that the bulk of 2020 will be framed by three events: 

• the American presidential election
• the British Brexit
• and the ongoing trade wars.

These will not directly effect publishing. But they will create very, very busy news cycles. I've heard two very distinct arguments about the effects of these:

1. Book sales are going to plummet as readers become addicted to news media madness.
2. Book sales are going to soar as readers seek an escape from news media madness.

Just to add to the fun, most bets have Brexit heading the UK into recession. Japan, France, Germany, and Italy may not be far behind. China's in the mix as well, though not as imminently. For the US, experts are calling it a, "potential economic slowing." Generally, though, that's good news for book sales. There is no cheaper escape (especially not per hour of enjoyment), than books.

MATT'S TWO CENTS

My bet is that 2020 will be a very lumpy year for book sales. Overall stability, but with month-to-month chaos (up, down, stable, sideways, and then maybe a brief slippage through the 8th dimension, before...).

So, what can we do? 

The cost of ad space will rise as we compete with political campaign dollars. After the Democrats spend kajillions on sorting out who the players are, the President will begin dropping his $80M warchest. Not the kind of arena I can play in anyway.

My choice for myself is three-fold.

• Judicious, focused marketing. For example, there is going to be very low political competitions in libraries and book-specific marketing platforms. I'll focus on those.
• Write steady, consistent quality material in solid series.
• And (in large, friendly letters): Don't Panic.

I expect to see a lot of author burnout/dropout in 2020 just over the stress of unpredictable sales swings and variable ad effectiveness. Some will heave dollars (dollars they possibly can't afford) into advertising, or perhaps heaving manuscripts at the wall or into the bin.

But I think those who Don't Panic, will ride through 2020 with few bad surprises and maybe a few really good ones to put under next year's tree/Hanukkah bush.

---

Think I'm on the mark or completely nuts? What's your plan?

(and come back Saturday for my look at the decade to come, too.)

M.L. “Matt” Buchman started the first of over 60 novels, 100 short stories, and a fast-growing pile of audiobooks while flying from South Korea to ride his bicycle across the Australian Outback. Part of a solo around the world trip that ultimately launched his writing career in: thrillers, SF/F, and romance.

His titles have been named Barnes & Noble and NPR “Top 5 of the year” and 3-time Booklist “Top 10 of the Year” as well as being a “Top 20 Modern Masterpiece” in romantic suspense. As a 30-year project manager with a geophysics degree who has: designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, and solo-sailed a 50’ ketch, he is awed by what's possible. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.