I’m ramping up my AuthorTube & BookTube channel with more frequent video posts. While I’m at it, here’s a preview of the browser MMO game my husband is solo developing, First Earth, with a lot of the 3D artwork provided by me!
First Earth is a work in progress, not a final product.
Abby dissects the motives behind the popular writing mantra: Write To Market, and speaks in defense of creativity and originality.
Book fans hate the show with good reason. The Wheel of Time TV show could have been SO MUCH BETTER.
Abby walks through each step of the process, from arranging the graphics to easily folding the 8.5×11 paper.
Fold a sheet of paper into a cool little zine, otherwise known as a mini comic booklet! Abby makes her own zines at home with Photoshop (although any graphics program will do), scissors, a stapler, and a black and white LaserJet printer. From template to finished mini comic.
She gives these away for free at her vendor booth table during conventions and book festivals.
It’s embarrassing to listen to a sex scene I wrote, narrated in George Newbern’s irreverent tone. Not sure I will ever write a sex scene again.
That scene is in the audiobook edition of the final Torth book, which just launched today.
These books were a massive undertaking, with the whole series totaling 1,000,000 words after I discarded 2,000,000 words or so. The books were published at a far faster pace than it took to write them.
I began working on the Torth series when I was in my early twenties, expressing my worldview and diving deep into an exploration of freedom versus slavery. It was partly inspired by The Wheel of Time in terms of interpersonal power dynamics, and Star Wars in terms of universe scope and aliens, and lots of other things. I went to film school. I’m a reader.
My goal was mainstream trad pub, otherwise known as the Big Five (MacMillan etc). After two rewrites and years of bending over backwards in a futile effort to please literary agents, I finally realized this isn’t the 1990s, and they just aren’t looking for heroic doorstoppers anytime within the next decade or two.
It was hard to let go of the Big Five dream. If you want the sordid details of how and why it took me so many years to switch gears, feel free to ask. But I did, eventually, seek an audience online. That was what motivated me to pick up where I had stalled (right after Book 2) and finish the whole epic.
Wattpad gave me my first readership. That was the first place a reader asked me, “Where’s your Patreon so I can read ahead?” Hugely motivating. I wrote new chapters and posted one or two per week from 2017 through 2023.
As I was posting the final chapters on Wattpad, I relaunched the whole series on Royal Road. I figured my 500 prewritten chapters would enable me to gain notice quickly with a rapid launch pace. Three chapters per day turned out to be insane, since I was editing as I went. And then I went through cancer and had a hospital stay and chemotherapy. I lost a few readers when I reduced my pace to three chapters per week. It was necessary. Even so, my series went to #1 on the Sci-Fi Rising Stars chart and topped out at #4 on overall Rising Stars. That was partly due to the supportive community of authors and adventurous readers who hang out around the web serial community, particularly in litRPG and progression fantasy.
When my series hit the front page of Royal Road, I got an offer from a publisher and interest from another. I signed a six book contract. That publisher, Podium, put a lot of time and effort into producing my series as high quality audiobooks, ebooks, and print editions. I’m grateful.
There’s some advice floating around implying that a book series with great read-through equals a cash cow. That hasn’t totally been the case for mine. Readers who pick up Book 2 of mine tend to read through all the way to Book 6. The ones who get to the end are some of the best fans anyone can ask for. They get what I was going for, and they were on board every step of the way. I love the reactions. I’ve had some very touching letters from readers. That alone makes everything I wrote worthwhile.
Financially, though? Sales figures-wise? I think I have an intrinsically hard sell on my hands here. It’s not Romantasy, Cozy, litRPG, Isekai, Cyberpunk, or Cultivation (the hot sci-fi and fantasy subgenres that sell well on Amazon). It’s dark. It’s complicated. It’s big. It’s weird. It’s unique. This isn’t something that pops up in a quick search or in also bought lists.
I’m vending at in-person events in and around Texas, such as Comicpalooza. It’s nice to escape the trials of online book marketing and talk with readers face to face. I wish my series had more visibility, but there are thousands of new books published every day on Amazon. It blows my mind that so many people’s hopes and dreams go unread, unnoticed, and buried. We live in strange times.
My series is dystopian sci-fi with elements of progression fantasy and a hard magic system. It starts with MAJORITY and is available in Kindle Unlimited and Audible+.
What inspires you? Wow, you must spam a lot of people. You’re so uncreative. Oops, did I fail to match the empty platitudes you opened with?
Anyway, as so many of you book promo “specialists” say in your scripted bot language: Are you open to a few suggestions?
I might be able to boost your spiel to a whole new level.
First of all, if you’re commenting on a post where the author announced their book alongside an image, and you say “Wow, is this your first book?” well, that doesn’t land the right way when the text of the posted cover image says Torth Book 5. You’ve just signaled that you never looked at their book cover. Your disregard for basic due diligence proves that you are either using a script or you lack basic comprehension skills. That’s not a promo specialist that any professional would want to hire.
Also, displaying cluelessness about an author’s genre is not the way to gain their trust. Book trailers, social media graphics, and book promo need to be tailored to specific genres and audiences. Professional authors spend years studying these things. We can’t avoid it. Your generic offers are a huge red flag that you either don’t know the genre of the author you’re spamming, or you don’t care. Either way, you’re a time-wasting nuisance and I will not respond to your low effort message or comment.
You might begin to actually profit from professional authors (as opposed to scam victims) IF you took the time to intimately learn a genre and subgenre in the book world. Engage with the art. Try being a human being. Stop relying on scripts and stop trying to lazily make a quick buck. Otherwise, any author with a brain will clock you.
Typos & idiocy are not the way. Greeting an author by misspelling their name is not the way. Generic, scripted offers full of impossible promises are not the way. When you approach me like a bumbling amateur looking for a victim, I am not going to respond.
There’s a myth going around the online spaces where creatives hang out. That myth is that consumers are all incredibly voracious beasts who just want moar and moar and moar, and that no matter how many thousands of books/films/games are published each day, the consumers can never be satiated. Every reader must be reading 100,000,000,000 words per day. It is therefore every professional creator’s duty to deliver as much content as possible. Anything less and you (as a creator) will be ignored, left behind, and relegated to obscurity forever.
I first began to hear this myth circa 2010. When I pressed one of its propagators for an explanation–“But why? How do you know this is true?”–she responded with insults. If I dared to question her sage advice to rapid release, then I had zero chance to become a bestseller or anyone of note. She didn’t know why. She just knew it was so.
She is mostly right, it turns out.
Most income earning creatives (authors, etc.) stay in the black by hewing to the principle of rapid release. As of 2024, the common professional advice to indie authors who want to earn a full-time living is to produce more than 400,000 words per year. That’s equivalent to four or five novels. Any less than that, and you won’t be able to capitalize frequently enough on Amazon’s new release category. Your brand name will get buried in the nonstop deluge from fellow authors who are also releasing new books. You will not be noticed. (And sure, you can attempt to land a trad pub Big Four sweetheart contract, but everyone knows that’s pie-in-the-sky. Gaining Big Four marketing clout is like winning the Olympics or the lottery.)
The principle of rapid release doesn’t just apply to major retailers like Amazon. It pervades all spaces for creative works, including free fiction hubs like Wattpad and Royal Road. It is not solely a problem created by megacorporations. Indie game developers and indie film makers and indie comics creators and indie musicians are dealing with the same thing, even in their underground free incubators.
And now we have LLMs, aka “generative A.I.” empowering creatives enabling uncreatives to produce even moar content faster. Rapid release is skyrocketing. Rapid release rules all. Rapid release is everywhere, and how dare you question it. Conform or die.
I’m not questioning the fact that rapid release works. Everyone knows that it is, by far, the most effective way for indie creators to gain viable income streams. It clearly is. There is no denying the ever-increasing mountains of proof.
I’m questioning the reasons driving it.
There have always been bookworms who love pulp fiction (I’m one of them), but I don’t believe that’s the key driver in demand here. I think the demand is being artificially inflated by visibility algorithms that favor fresh releases and frequent releases. Consumers would have to dig very deep in order to surface content that’s older than an hour on Amazon, or older than 17 minutes on Royal Road. Consumers are constantly presented with the latest new release. With thousands per day, they can scroll endlessly, so most only see the top ten titles above the fold. Therefore, every author is scrambling to game the visibility algorithm so their work appears on top of the ongoing heap as frequently as possible.
And I question the benefits of rapid release, both to society and to the individual creator.
There is always going to be someone who writes faster and produces more. Is this really the best vector to compete on? Does high volume production make for a healthy lifestyle? Is this how you want to live, long-term? Maybe it is, and that’s fine. But I don’t like the fact that all of the incentives in the publishing industries are aligned towards super high volume rapid content production.
Speaking from the other side, as an avid consumer of fiction … I prefer the epic stories that were decades in the making. There are some pulp fiction rapid release authors I admire and like. But I would hate for that to be all there is. By de-incentivizing in-depth world-building and slow crafting, I think we do a disservice to the future of art in general.
I guess there will always be slow, careful crafters in the writing world and in all other creative industries. Some crazy idiots like me will ignore (or try to ignore) the pressure to write rapidly and to up their word count targets. They’ll plod along and hope someone, anyone, notices their staggering work of creative genius that never shows up in the latest release list on any website.
We’re heading into a dark time in the arts. I don’t want to be a doomer. But.
I’ll keep writing at my own pace. I’ll seek out others who do the same. But I suspect we will all remain underground and we will rarely, if ever, get noticed by mainstream consumers. This is the world we live in.
In honor of the late Vernor Vinge, I read Rainbows End.
What a wonderful visionary. In Vinge’s future (which is now), machine learning and internet search engines have made everyone smarter instead of stupider. Social media has made everyone kinder and more understanding of different cultures. People are living their best lives. The global economy is booming, and rich people sponsor bioengineers to make custom-tailored cures for their diseases, which has led to huge breakthroughs in medicine. They can cure Alzheimer’s and cancer. Also, kids constantly play games and education is fun. Everyone wears AR/VR contact lenses, no visors required, and there are touchy-feely haptics.
Doesn’t it sound nice? I want to live there.
Anyway, the plot is sort of a cross between A Man Called Ove and a 1980s feel-good movie. The main character is a grouch with a boomer attitude, and he needs to get off his high horse and team up with some kids in order to progress as a person. It’s great.
There is some silliness to the story, which might be a Vinge trademark, but my admiration for his work remains strong. Of all the sci-fi authors of that generation, he is my favorite.
Vinge is best known for A Fire Upon the Deep, which I discussed on a podcast with other fans of his work.
Also, I’ve surpassed 1300+ books read on Goodreads. Someday, maybe I’ll receive as many reviews as I’ve written, heh.
Colossus Rising
Available now on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited, Audible, and as a print paperback, this is a sci-fi odyssey you won’t want to miss. In the gripping second volume of this electrifying sci-fi fantasy series, the battle for survival reaches new heights in the unforgiving depths of space.
A ragtag group of escapees hurtles through the vastness of space, pursued by armadas, saboteurs, and kamikaze armies. The Earth they once knew is blocked by the relentless Torth Majority who now threaten all of humanity.
Among the escapees is Ariock, a powerhouse of a gladiator with illegal superpowers, a legacy from his legendary great-grandfather who defied the Torth. Ariock is determined to follow in his footsteps. Then there’s Thomas, a brilliant supergenius, physically challenged but gifted with a mind that’s both awe-inspiring and enigmatic. His resilience is shrouded in mystery, even to his foster sister Vy.
Their common thread is fear of the unknown. Crash-landing on a distant, toxic planet, they discover it’s the ancestral home of the Torth, their galactic enemies. The remnants of the Torth era of origin still haunt this poisoned wasteland.
As they face mutant horrors and relentless galactic foes, Thomas envisions only doom and despair. But for Ariock and the streamship exiles, it’s a do-or-die struggle for survival—a quest to uncover light in a city trapped in eternal night.
With over 750,000 views as a web serial, the Torth series begins with Majority. Superpowered mavericks and supergeniuses vie for galactic dominance against a collective armada composed of 38 trillion personalities. Higher stakes than Red Rising or The Expanse. One of the 100 Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews.
If you read these books, please rate them or leave a review!
Goodreads: Majority | Colossus Rising
Amazon: Majority | Colossus Rising | World of Wreckage
Sign up for infrequent Abby Updates and merchandise giveaways!
Torth series
