TIH 313: David Moody and Chad Lutzke on Self Publishing

Michael David Wilson 0:29
Welcome to This is horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm your host, Michael David Wilson, and today I'm going to be chatting to David moody and Chad lutzky for a self publishing special. Now this is not a fast hacks episode. This is not some kind of quick tips approach to self publishing. But rather, this is a conversation with two authors who have had success with self publishing, talking about what has worked for them, what hasn't worked for them, things they might do differently if they were to start again, and just talking us through their journey and their experience with both self publishing and indeed, hybrid publishing. As David moody has been published by the likes of St Martin's Press and gallants and Chad lutzky has been published by a number of small presses, including, most recently, Crystal Lake publishing. Now we've previously hosted long form conversations with both David and Chad so long term listeners, so this is horror. I am sure will be familiar with both writers. But for those of you who are new to the show. May I point you towards the latest books by both David and Chad. So David moody, less than a month ago, released chokehold, which is the latest in the hater series. In fact, it is the final book in the hater series. So for those who haven't read David, start with hater, go through the series, but for those who have been waiting for the final book to come out, it is here. It is chokehold, and you should pick it up right now. As for Chad lutzky, a few months ago, he released the pale white fire Crystal Lake publishing and this horror novella is not going to be comfortable reading. But you know, since when did Chad write about lovely topics where we can all have a mug of hot chocolate and feel better about life. No, this is cutting edge stuff. This is for fans of Robert, Emma Cameron, Stephen King and Jack Ketchum, and I'll give you the one liner to give you an idea as to what you might be getting yourselves into after being held against their will in a house used for trafficking free girls plan their escape. So that is the pale white by cadletsky. Now, before we get in to the conversation, let's have a quick word from our sponsors this

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Michael David Wilson 4:39
Available now, okay, well, with that said, Here it is. It is David moody and Chad lutsky on. This is horror. So today we're talking about self publishing and hybrid pub. Publishing with Chad lutzky and David moody, and I don't to begin with, if we could talk a little bit about the origin story in terms of your self publishing journey. So David, if we begin with you. So why did you first self publish and then looking back, what would you do differently now? And that could either be because you made some mistakes and would rather go about it in a different way, or that could just be because it's now 2019 and the climate has changed quite a lot.

David Moody 5:36
That's a big question to start things off. Michael, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 5:39
you know me. I mean, it's maybe not quite as deep as life lessons, but it's certainly not an easy one. So

David Moody 5:48
I kind of started self publishing by accident. And I have to say at the outset that even now, after How long has it been, it's like 20, about 20 years, I still feel really uncomfortable with the term self publishing, because to me it kind of it conjures up images of somebody who can't get published any other way, somebody who's taking the easy way out and just thinking, Oh, I'll do it myself. It's like selling books out of the back of your car. And I think what we do now as Self Publishers, if you like, is more independent publishing. So that, for me, is certainly what how I've grown to think about it over the years. It is, it is quite a long origin story. And as I said, I did start doing it by accident. So I wrote a book in 1994 called straight to you, sent it to a few publishers. Unfortunately, managed to get a commission deal out of it. And naively, back then, I thought that that was it, that was sorted, that I didn't have to do anything else. I just sit back and wait for the checks to come rolling in. And then kind of reality hit. It was published in in the middle of 1996 500 copies were printed, and I've genuinely still got about 100 of them in garage here. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be, but I kept writing through all that time, and I'd written another book called autumn, so I was ready to release that. And I was kind of at a crossroads. I thought, Do I just go down that route again? Do I try and find a publisher, hope that somebody will take a punt on it and then maybe sell a handful of copies. Or do I just kind of sacrifice any profits that I might have made out of this and just really use it as a promotional tool? And that was the decision, really, that got me into this independent this self publishing. I thought the one thing I need as an author is an audience. I need that more than money. I've got a job, I've got the income. I just need to get this out to as many people as possible. So I think it was maybe late, 2001 by then. So five years later, I just started giving autumn away online. I serialized it on a very basic website. Everything was very basic about them. So this is, this is, these are the days of pre Kindle, pre any kind of ebook technology. In fact, ebooks had only just been starting to be mentioned. I was literally emailing word copies and PDFs to people who showed any interest at all. And I think I just caught a couple of waves at the right time. I caught the ebook wave just as it was starting off, and people started to be interested in that kind of technology. And I also caught the zombie sub genre at the point that it was about to explode with 28 days later, and Brian Keene survives it, and David Wellington's monster planet and so on, and so those that's that combination of things really made autumn take off more than I expected it would do. And it was been downloaded in for the time, really quite substantial numbers. I think it wrapped up about half a million copies in a very short period of time. And I started thinking, great, I've got the audience now. So what do I do in terms of trying to expand that and trying to make some money out of it? And if I end up, if I if, during the course of this, I start sounding like a businessman. I kind of am as well. And I apologize, because sometimes I start talking about price for the product and things like that. But little disclaimer, obviously, the art is more important than anything, but, but you do need to make money out if you want to do it as a living.

Michael David Wilson 9:18
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, I think maybe it's a very British thing, but I feel that we shouldn't apologize. I mean, as independent authors and publishers, I think there is a business side to it, and I think that is something that we'll discuss, and we'll be pretty candid with because I think that's something, again, that people can be a little bit secretive about, or there's almost a little bit of shame, sometimes definitely misguided shame, in terms of the fact that you're doing this as a business. And I don't know if that's because, you know, we actually quite enjoy writing these stories as well. And perhaps we've got this weird notion that we can't enjoy our job. But actually, I mean, we, yeah, we should that that's like

David Moody 10:07
your job. I naturally feel apologetic about it a business background as well, and it kind of doesn't always feel great when the two worlds towards them kind of collide, right? I remember just, just a little aside, when, when hater took off, and that was published in the UK by GaNS. I went out to dinner with the publishers and the editor, and they were talking, I said, took along some copies of my independently published books, and they were having a look, and the question just came up, well, why did you choose that particular font to do these in? And I just said, because it's a penny a page, and I needed to keep the page account down. You know, it's, it's, it's difficult. You have to strike a balance, I think, between getting it right from a financial perspective and getting it right from an artistic perspective. Yeah, anyway, sorry, I kind of deviated there. Go back to what happened with me after the success of autumn, the unexpected success of autumn, I started writing sequels to it initially, and I found that there were various websites you could use where you could sell your ebooks. They've long since disappeared now, and they're very independent. Because there was no Kindle, there was no Amazon. Amazon was there, but only for print books. And so I started releasing books and using these small sites to actually make money for the first time, and I was amazed that that people who downloaded autumn did actually go on and buy the sequels. And then from there, I kind of expanded into print on demand using the company called Lightning Source, I'm sure we'll talk about later, who have been around for a long time now, and was able to produce produce books as print books, but more importantly, to tap into the distribution that the traditional public publishing industry had, and get books out into the kind of places that I never imagined it could be. So really, that was how I how I fell into it, and then things kind of deviated a little bit, because I was making kind of half a living, making half a salary off all of these books. And I just thought, well, if I want to do this full time, I just have to write twice as many books, and then I'll be able to make some a decent income from it. And then I wrote hater, and then that kind of it just took off in a different direction, which deep, which pulled me away from independent publishing for a long time, but now I'm back to it happy for about five years, and really enjoying it as a hybrid author trying to get cream the best of both worlds, if that's possible,

Michael David Wilson 12:30
yeah, yeah. And I think more and more people are doing that, and I think I mean, Chuck Wendig is one who springs to mind, and I think that's something that we'll talk about definitely in depth a little bit later. I wonder, I mean, you said that you don't like the term self publishing, and I think certainly early on, it had a lot of baggage and misconceptions. And basically, people would assume that the worst of self publishing was basically self publishing in its entirety. I'm not convinced that there's as much baggage now, but I do think there is some that's lingering. But do you think it's important that people try and reclaim the term or distinguish between it. Or do you think these labels like author, entrepreneur and independent publishing are better? You definitely don't think or for entrepreneur from that reaction. No, I

David Moody 13:33
don't, because, to my mind, you don't need to be that big an entrepreneur. You just need to know the ways to get your work down or the appropriate channels. And the reason I think about it as independent publishing is because, to my mind, the one stumbling block is bookstore distribution. That's the one thing that I've not been able to crack as an independent publisher. But in terms of foreign language editions, audio books, print editions, limited editions. That's all within the remit of somebody who's doing it for themselves. But to my mind, I'm still maybe it's because I was there kind of at the beginning, but I still feel that self publishing does have a lot of baggage to it, and I just see, as soon as somebody says that to me, I just see really crappy PDFs with the titles in Comic Sans. And it's just it makes me go cold a little bit, and I think it devalues, to my mind, what we do because we're publishing. There's no two ways about it. We're publishing. And I think if you book a lot of traditionally published books alongside a lot of today's independently published books and asked the general public to distinguish between them. There's not a lot to tell in terms of quality, and not really so much talking about content here, but in terms of the visual quality, terms of the way eBooks are formulated, formatted, there's not a lot to distinguish between them. And I think that in. Independent publishing as opposed to traditional publishing, is the distinction that I prefer? Yeah, it's just me being pedantic.

Michael David Wilson 15:07
No, I mean, it makes sense what you said. And I mean, I remember when we spoke about independent publishing before that, you said, one of the tests that you like to have when you have a book that you've published is you want to make sure that if you were to put it next to a traditionally published book, that you couldn't really tell the difference. So if you walked in to a Waterstones and you saw something from your own line from infected books, it would be basically the same as if you saw something from gallants or St Martin's Press. Yeah, no,

David Moody 15:42
you're absolutely right. And one of the biggest compliments I ever had was when, when galants published the autumn books, they because it was a series, and naturally, sales drop off as you go through a series. And they'd released all the titles in hardback, got to the fifth one, and they decided it wasn't cost effective for them to produce a hardback of that so I did it myself through infected books, with their permission, and we signed contracts, and they sent me all the files. But during the courses, course of that conversation, I sent them some of the hardbacks that I'd done in the meantime with infected books, and the editor came back at the time and said, to be fair, the quality of these is better than sort of the hardbacks that we've put out. And to me, that that was my justification, that's it right. You've got it right. Just keep that's the right angle to take.

Michael David Wilson 16:32
And was that using Lightning Source as well, or did you use a different one for the hardbacks

David Moody 16:38
I used? I did use Lightning Source. I still do use Lightning Source for hardbacks. The the autumn aftermath release was an exception, because I used the exact same printers that gallant had used so that I could match the paper exactly in the trim size, because they they've got quite a distinctive approach, and I wanted to make sure that the book that I produced for the 100 and whatever, people who were asking for it, it was a very small audience. Yeah, I needed, I needed it to match exactly what gallant has done previously. But to my Lightning Source is an absolutely great resource. Yeah, I think even more so these days, it's just the quality is absolutely spot on. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 17:21
I've certainly second that. And I've been using Lightning Source and Engram for all of this is horror stuff, and when I put out my own work, I'll certainly do it via Lightning Source as well. The only thing that, if I could change one thing, it would be that they have to have that printed by Lightning Source on one of the back pages. I just wish that legally, they said, Okay, you've got to put that somewhere. But then if I could put that in the front matter with the copyright, I just think it was so much better. But, you know,

David Moody 17:56
I agree. And the biggest frustration about that for me, I think, is that a lot of publishers use Lightning Source. Big publishers now keep a lot of that catalog in print on demand, and I don't suppose for a second that they've got printed with by Lightning Source in there. You know, it's one rule for one, one rule for

Michael David Wilson 18:14
the other. Yeah, maybe one of us needs to contact our Lightning Source rep and ask, you know, what do we have to do to get that removed? You know,

David Moody 18:23
it's the thought in the scheme of things, though. I think for what they do, I'm happy with that little, that little compromise, I guess.

Michael David Wilson 18:34
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not really a big one or considered.

David Moody 18:38
And anyway, by the time people have got to the last page of our book. Yeah, totally blown away by the climax of our story. They just shut it after that page. They're not interested in the printed with Lightning Source little notes on the next page.

Michael David Wilson 18:49
Yeah? So just basically, I've ruined it for everyone, because now they're all going to turn to that page and they never would have seen it. So yeah, and

David Moody 18:57
never mind these climax when I turn this last page. Now, am I going to see that printed with Lightning Source logo? Yeah, thanks. Michael, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 19:04
Well, Chad, do you use Lightning Source as well? No,

Chad Lutzke 19:09
no, I don't use that. No, I, I don't. I don't do any hardbacks other than some of the hybrid stuff that I've done. Everything else has been paperback or ebook. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 19:25
So, I mean, let's go back to the original question, because I probably jumped a little bit ahead by asking you, you know, I asked David his origin story, and then I asked you, how do you use lightning? So that's not really a great way to go about it. So what was the start for you? What was the impetus to self publishing? And, I mean, where did you go from there?

Chad Lutzke 19:53
I think I touched a little bit on this a couple weeks ago when we talked, but basically I went in completely blind. Had no idea about any of the self publishing. I was aware of vanity publishing, and because I had, I had looked into it years before I really started taking things seriously, not not really knowing anything, not doing any kind of research. I think I, I made a phone call. They sent me all this, all this literature and flyers or brochures and things. And then they kept calling my house, you know, and it was just, it was just, I could tell right away that this was not a good idea and that they wanted way too much money. And I'm so glad that that, I mean, vanity publishing still exists, but I'm so glad that most people know better by now. And it's like, anyway, I started to the there was, it was an 18 year old kid I was talking to who was writing, and he had just won a writing contest, and I he was, he had mentioned stuff about self publishing and ebooks and things like that so, and this is only, like, five and a half years ago, and so I asked him some questions. He didn't know. He couldn't answer a lot of them, but it was a friend of mine, son that was doing this, and I decided to start looking into it. I started listening to as many podcasts as I could at the time, and I took it in a an approach that maybe I shouldn't have. I was listening to a lot of podcasts like the, I think it was called the rocking self publishing podcast and some other ones where a lot of a lot of this seemed to be centered around series and a funnel book and newsletters, and, you know, offering your first book for free and stuff like that. And it made sense to me, and I was hearing all these like rags to riches stories of people that just started writing that year, and they were, you know, be able to quit their jobs and doing all this stuff. And I mean, there was a real science to it, in the science to try to figure out the algorithms and using on Amazon using keywords. And there were some that were using Amazon exclusively, then there were some that were using every you know platform that they possibly could so at first it was very confusing for me, and because I thought that they had an advantage over what I wanted to do, because there was a niche for whatever that they were doing, like post apocalyptic stuff or shape shifting romance stuff or vampires or zombies, and that just wasn't I didn't have an interest in writing any of that kind of stuff. Had I started earlier, like David did, I probably would fall into that because I do like zombie movies and vampires and stuff. But by the time I started writing, the market seems so saturated that I didn't want to add to something that I didn't know was going to die at any minute or I was just tired of seeing, you know, myself and didn't, wasn't really aware of, you know, the tremendous fan base. I've always found it interesting that that people will often that I would say the majority of readers, they're not necessarily looking for originality as much as they're looking for something that they're familiar with. I think that's why you see a lot of romance stuff sell so much, is because it's like, it's got this it's very formulaic, it's very familiar. And I think that sometimes I just, I find it interesting that people continue to, you know, kind of go back to the same thing that they're familiar with. And I saw it toyed around with the idea of, you know, do I want to present some art here, or do I want to just try and make money and follow these, you know, guidelines? And and I decided to try to do both of them, which didn't really work out, because there was no real niche for the stuff that I wanted to write. And so I, I decided to, you know, I didn't, I didn't have enough to say, as far as, like, having a big series, like a zombie series or a post apocalyptic series. I didn't have enough to say about about one thing, and I don't like to outline when I write at all. So instead, I was doing things like I was sending stories out to try to get my stuff in, published in as many anthologies as I could, and I didn't get paid for, like, the probably the first year, because I submitted to a lot of, you know, for the love markets. I just wanted to line my shelves with trophies, you know. And so I also would take short stories and I put like, two of them in a. A like a either free or 99 cent thing. And call it, I think I called it a double feature collection, like one, book, 1234, the first one was free, and it was just my way of trying to do what I wanted to do, and and use everything that I had been learning on the podcast and the articles and the YouTube videos that I was watching and and it just didn't work like that. I didn't, I didn't realize at the time that that normally people don't. People do like short stories, they do read collections and anthologies, but the it's kind of like the last thing that they'll read, you know, it's there's not a huge audience for that. And I found that out very slowly, and because I was so new, I didn't know if my book was just being hidden amongst the, you know, gazillion books that are already available on Amazon, or just people aren't interested in paying 99 cents for a couple of short stories, or even getting the first one free. And I set up a newsletter. I did all these kind of things that, and I just found, over time for me that wasn't gonna work. I found out that it just wasn't, you know, so I stopped having my this short story stuff for free, and ultimately took it down, and I started to just pursue, I wrote a book. It still wasn't getting, you know, recognition, but it's, it's, and I'm sure David, you know, he can tell you all about all of the I can tell that he's, you know, as far as the algorithms and the newsletter and the funnel book and all that stuff he has probably, if not doing it, has done it, knows all about it. And there's so much to learn. There's such a learning curve with all of that stuff that I don't know if that, if I was prepared, and because I was listening to so many different routes and so many different ways of doing is especially like KDB, KDP, versus, you know, people going wide with their stuff. And so I tried to just, you know, take every, you know, everything and and I knew, after maybe the first half a year or year, I knew I started to understand that a lot of what I was going to be doing was not going to be a waste of time, but was going to be I was going to be able to learn from all of these mistakes that I was making along the way. So I put myself into positions where, like I added an anthology, I pitched anthology to a publisher, and I acted as editor and compiler, and I put that together, knowing that it was probably going to be a headache and maybe too much for me to handle, but I knew that I would learn a lot along the way, so I tried to put myself into a lot of those kind of situations, just to learn what to do, what not to do, even if It's from my own mistakes, and to just, you know, just like, kind of a trial and error type of thing. And I've just, I think, a lot somewhere along the way, after about two, two or three years of Trump, maybe two and a half years of trying to do all of this that way, with the book funnel and all of that, I just, I don't know that I completely given up on it. I still have my newsletter and stuff. It's just that I approach things differently. And it's only been, probably, in particular the last year that had, things have really taken off, as far as, I mean, as far as, like, achieving a goal that I had set, and exceeding that goal and allowing me to have more goals, but there's still a lot to figure out. And after, you know, especially after having really doing this for, you know, five and a half years, it's, there's a there's a lot to do, and I wasn't initially able to commit as much time as I could have because of my day job and kids, family and things like that. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 29:12
and I didn't quite you're saying about funnels and offering the first for free and algorithms. I mean, a lot of it sometimes comes across as people trying to game the system. And then you have, you have two types of people, primarily self publishing. You have people that really care about the art and want to put a good product and a good story out there, and that is the primary concern. And then you have other people that just want to make a quick buck or a quick pound in the UK and Sure. So I think sometimes the way that people talk about these kind of ways to game it can again give self publishing. A bad name. And I think the type of self publishing that I'm more interested in, the ones where you are running it as a business, but you're doing it primarily for the art you're doing it because this is the best way to get your book out there and to get the most readers and to make a decent amount of money, given the other alternatives,

Chad Lutzke 30:26
right? And it is sad, as you guys were talking about earlier, that there's like that guilt attached to listen, you know, I'm, I'm sorry, but I want to make money too. It's like, yeah, I want to be, you know, I want to have this art. I want to be creative, but I I would love to be able to make a living, and I don't think that anybody should feel like they're compromising just because they want to be able to pay their bills with their with their creativity.

Michael David Wilson 30:53
Yeah, and I wonder if sometimes people think too narrowly, and they think in a more binary way, and it's like, Well, are you doing this for the art, or are you doing this for the money? It's like, well, can't I be doing it for both? I'm not going to compromise the art. But equally, you know, the food, the bills and all that aren't going to pay themselves. Yeah,

Chad Lutzke 31:15
and I think that goes with just about any you know, medium, particularly music and film. You know, you've got bands who, you know, corn comes out, and they've got bands like, you know, what we need to sound like this, because this is what's becoming popular, this new metal stuff. And then you have bands that, like black flag or Black Sabbath, that that start, you know, kind of like a whole thing on their own that don't really they're just doing their own thing. And fortunately, you know, people, people dig it. And the film, films are that same way too. You know, if you really want to make money, I guess nowadays you would have to make a superhero film, or, you know, something like that. But then there's the people out there, fortunately for us, who are making films like hereditary and lots of really, really good indie films that nobody's really ever gonna see. And they're doing it, you know, they're not compromising, but yet, hopefully they're still able to make money doing what they truly want to do, rather than it's like, well, I have this talent, but this is what's making money. So this is what I'm going to do. And if I were to do that, I would just feel like, then it would just feel like a job. Yeah, to me, and I might as well just not be doing it at all. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 32:34
I feel exactly the same way. And any time that I've tried to write something or do something artistically more for the money, I just find that I'm creatively unhappy. So if I really just want to make more money, then I might as well go into the financial or legal sector, and I'll make money that way, because it will be as much a job to me and as joyless as it would for me to write a superhero film. So sorry to probably the 50% of people listening who love superhero films. I'm pretty tired of them. Yeah,

David Moody 33:13
can I just jump in a little bit on some of the stuff that you've been saying there? I think the point really interesting you talking about the book funnel and all of those kind of tactics to try and sell books and just, just for the record, I hate all of that just absolutely leaves me cold. I've kind of looked at it and thought, no, thank you. To be frank, it's just don't right for me, that doesn't it. We've talked a lot about the difference between art and product, but I think that if you're going down that route, you are 100% talking about product more than art. Yeah, because I think that's just a way to shift numbers. There are a lot of kind of high profile Facebook groups, and I would say, get this wrong when I say, is it 20 books to 50k something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to me, that's just it's so far to one extreme that it completely leaves me cold. And the way that that I want to sell books is by getting people interested in books. And one thing that's never gone away from the first time I put autumn free online, it's just the fact that word of mouth is absolutely the best way that you can sell a book to somebody else. So to my mind, it's all about cultivating the group of readers that you've got, looking after them, and letting things grow organically. I accept it's difficult to do. It's more difficult to do now because it is such a flooded marketplace. But really for me, that's, that's the focus. I try and look after the people that who are already interested in my work, and kind of ask them to spread the message a little bit. For me, that's, that's far more there's far more satisfaction. Shouldn't have far better results in that than by paying 50 quid to Facebook to run a load of ads to for me, for people who probably are interested anyway. How many times do we click on the sponsored posts that we see coming up on Facebook and Instagram? Not, not very often in my case,

Chad Lutzke 35:17
yeah, so, Ray, go ahead. I'm sorry. No, go on. You can. I'm sorry. I was just gonna say that. Along the way, I learned, you know, I tried that stuff too, just a little bit here and there. You know, Facebook ads and stuff and joining groups, and I found, I found it to be like we're salesmen pitching to other salesmen. You know, you join these groups, and we're all selling the same product, and we're trying to sell it to each other. And it wasn't until I I started to gain a readership and then reach out to actual readers, rather than writers, that that's when things It seems so simple, and, yeah, you know, it's like, wow, why couldn't I think of that before? And I think it's just because so many people are doing that. We're all, you know, just pitching our products to each other when there's a huge, I mean, there's a voracious readers out there who are reading like, you know, a couple of two, three books a week. That's all they do is just read. They love reading. And they're out there, and you wouldn't think that they are, but once you find them, and then they start spreading the word, and then those people start spreading the word, and that that is truly how it happens. It happens. And it does feel much better that way. It feels more authentic their appreciation for because these are readers, you know, so that they they read, you know, they've, they've read 1000s of books, so they know what's good and what's not. And when they read your book and they like it and they spread the word that's that's definitely more satisfactory. Yeah,

David Moody 36:46
I don't 100% agree on that. In fact, I've been looking, trying to find new ways to promote my own work, because I'm the world's worst salesman. I'm absolutely terrible at it. I can write this stuff, but I can't put me in a room and ask to sell it to a load of people that are in there. I just go cold. But there are people who would naturally do that for me, and that's the people who've read my stuff before and enjoyed it and talked about it to their friends. So I'm just trying to find a way at the moment, and I've got kind of a germ of an idea. I didn't see how far I can take it of I guess it's the equivalent of back in the 80s and 90s, when every band had a fan club, and I'm very much. I know it works for a lot of people, but I'm very much and so this is horror, so be careful what I say here, but I'm very much against Patreon and that kind of thing, particularly for writers, because it doesn't cost me anything to write a book. It cost me to publish it, but then I recoup the outlay in in sales. So for me, it's more about a fan club where I can give people the next release for free. Here go beat and read this, see what you think, or if you give me so many Facebook posts, then I'll send you a signed copy of my next book in the post, that kind of thing. So it seems like a more mutually beneficial transaction, rather than check me out talking about transactions and all that shit. But you know what I mean, it's mutually beneficial for me that that they get free books. I get people who want to talk about my books in public, which is, again, what I don't necessarily enjoy doing. So that seems the way to go forward. For me, it's a bit too scattershot with book funnels and and writing out to your mailing list every five minutes, I think there's, there's a fine line to be trod, and I think a lot of people are way over one side or the other.

Michael David Wilson 38:35
Yeah. And I would say with Patreon, there are definitely good, and there are bad ways of using it. And I think when it initially started, it was more like a tip jar. So I guess if you want to be really crude about it, you could say it was more akin to begging and saying, Can you give me some money for this thing that I'm already doing? But I think

David Moody 39:00
go on, I was gonna say I just, just qualified what I said a little bit. And maybe Patreon is the wrong example to use. But when I see somebody doing some somebody doing Indiegogo or Kickstarter for a book, I think, What the hell are you doing? Yeah, because my business model when I'm doing something independently is to write the book, tell people about it. Say, do you want a copy of this book? They'll pay for it in advance. I go off and get it printed, ship it out done. Yeah, there's no there's no need for any financial transaction until the book's done and dusted. Yeah, and it just kind of doesn't sit right. However, I totally accept that when you're doing podcasts. There's a lot of patrons for cosplay, that kind of thing. That's different, yeah, because you need the income to do what it is that people are interested in you for,

Michael David Wilson 39:50
yeah, yeah. Well, I think as well, the way that I've certainly done it with this is horror. And I think the way that the more successful Patriot. Ones are shifting is, rather than have it as a tip jar, it's now more like a membership club. So I'm saying these are all the things that you're going to get. So these are bonuses that you're getting on top of what I'm already providing for free.

David Moody 40:17
And that's kind of where I want to go with this kind of idea that I'm talking about here, that it is a membership club, but there's no financial exchange and stuff. Because if you promote this book for me and tell people that you've enjoyed it, then I'll send you my next book. It's that kind of thing, you know, we both benefit from that,

Michael David Wilson 40:36
yeah, yeah. And I know that a number of authors have done that kind of thing and seen great success with it, so hopefully you will as well. But I mean, I think with both of us, we're always up for experimentation and trying new things. And obviously the more new things you try Well, the more you will have failure and setbacks, but also something called stick. And you know, you've got to fail a lot of times to succeed. Yeah,

David Moody 41:06
we've all done that. I certainly have just make less noise about your failures than your successes.

Michael David Wilson 41:11
Yeah, don't go on about it. I mean, some people do that's not something that I would advocate, though. No, not really. No. I know the Indiegogo thing has been a bit of a bugbear of yours for a long time, because I know over the years, we have mentioned that, and it is something that I was that predictable. No, no, no. I mean, it's something that I've agreed with, because it, I mean, unless we're missing something, and there are going to be exceptions, it's like, well, it really doesn't cost that much in the print on demand age for you to be able to get a book out there. So unless you have such a low amount of confidence in this book, you really don't need to get people to fund it ahead of time. And as you said, I mean, technically, you can kind of get people to fund it ahead of time anyway, if you put pre orders up early enough, you

David Moody 42:09
do, and that's, again, sounding very corporate. That's always my business plan. When I'm when I'm I'm putting I've got a book ready. I usually when it's just about ready to go out, I then start factoring in the editing costs, getting an artist to put a cover together for me. Fortunately, I do a lot of the formatting and things like that myself, but there's that. There are stationary costs, there are all kinds of things that you need to factor in. But then that's where you set your price point, don't you? That's when you say, right, this book is going to retail for such and such an amount, and I know then how many copies I need to get on a pre order, and it's usually only 100 something like that, and that will cover all my costs. And then I know that anything else is a profit, or the ebooks are a profit, the any more of the initial pre orders that I sell above a certain point, that that's profit, and so I just find it difficult to understand why anybody will be asking anyone to pay for a book so far in advance that the book hasn't been written yet. Yeah, I think it's it's very different with a film, and I still look a lot of film, because one day I intend to get into independent filmmaking myself and and I think that's completely different, because there is a huge initial outlay that unless you're prepared to mortgage your house, which I'm not, I can't cover without the contribution of people who want to see the film. So I totally get it from that point of view. But book writing and filmmaking are both. They're all about telling stories, but they're very different from a financial perspective.

Michael David Wilson 43:40
Yeah, I guess the only exception that I have a little bit more sympathy for, even though I'm somewhat uncomfortable, even though publishers that I like have done it with great success, are people who kickstart or Indiegogo an anthology. Because I understand that if you want to pay people a professional rate, okay, you might not actually have that upfront, but yeah, I I don't know it's still, it still makes me feel a little bit uneasy, but, you know, people have done it successfully, so fair play to them. Yeah,

David Moody 44:19
I agree, but I still think there are, there are ways around that. Yeah, with year of the zombie that I did with infected books a few years ago, that was an attempt to kind of do an anthology, but to do that in a completely different way, and if just for the benefit of anybody who hasn't come across year of the zombie. So what we did was Wayne Simmons, my partner in crime, with infected books for a long time, we identified a number of different authors who we wanted to work with, and we asked them all to come up with a, again, zombie themed, obviously you're the zombie, a zombie themed novella of about 15,000 words, and then we released one of those each month for. Over the course of a year through Amazon, 99 cent that kind of thing, and then at the end of that year, we put it all together in an anthology and sold the combined version, but that that did amazingly well for us. I'm not talking 1000s of pounds or 1000s of dollars, but we're talking a decent amount. And even now, three years on, every author who was involved in that is still seeing a regular income from it and no initial out, like, to the point where I'd like to, in a couple of years time, do it again, now that we've got the track record, but maybe do something different. I'm thinking just, you're the monster, just a completely different monster every month, yeah, different set of authors, because it works. It's a way of doing it. And there was no need there to pay those. Some of them quite well known authors in advance, because I could say to them, right, your book will be going out this month, and you will immediately see an income from that. And they have, yeah, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 46:02
yeah. And I think, I mean, what you've just said can be a great way of going about it. If you want to pay people good rates, but you don't have that initial outlay, maybe do a royalty model. I mean, you could argue, oh, that's going to be more difficult for me to calculate it. But it's like, Well, come on, this is

David Moody 46:24
Michael. You should see some of the spreadsheets I've got set up for that monster. Yeah. But it works. You're absolutely right. And the bottom line was, basically, whatever we get, whatever the net income is, the author gets 60% and infected books gets the other 40% Yeah, and say everybody has done really well from that,

Michael David Wilson 46:44
yeah. And that's the really generous rate as well for, you know, a small press. I mean, I think that might be the best rate that I've seen. I think before, it was 5050, so congratulations for what that was worth. Probably worth less money to you,

David Moody 47:03
yeah, but, but, but also, I had one novella in the series, you know, so I didn't, I wasn't being disadvantaged hugely, yeah, and still, 40% of what the the authors were making is still a decent amount. And we did, we got a lot of sales from that. And it's about, I think, yeah, it's not been greedy. And this is why, again, going back to the original conversation we had about self publishing and independent publishing, this, to me, is true independent publishing, because it's just, it was just offering a publishing service, you know, it was just a way to get these things to market, and it worked. Yeah,

Chad Lutzke 47:49
going back a little bit, back to the Indiegogo and the Kickstarter stuff, I don't know enough about that to truly hate it. I don't like the idea of a tip jar as you, you know, kind I mean, you're just a writer. It's not like you're doing something, you know, curing cancer and, you know, there's a million books out there, and you're, you're just a writer. I don't see the sense in establishing a Patreon page for to accept money so that you can, you know, make money with your writing. However, to give a different kind of perspective and different side of the patron thing, I do have a patreon page that I started a little over a year ago that I sorry, Chad, oh no, that's fine. That's fine. But I like to think that from the get go, I had seen some of my peers have Patreon pages, and I was leery of even starting one. First of all, I didn't want to embarrass myself and and to set one up, and take the time to set up, and then nobody is is interested. And but I decided to go ahead and do it anyway, and right from the get go, it was very important to me that it would have exclusive, a lot of exclusive content, which would mean, you know, short stories. And also, it was important to me that when I did put up, uh, short stories, that they weren't trunk stories, that they were, you know, that I never, like, dialed it in. And so over the course of the year, I put a story up every month, and I have, like, some videos up there, and like readings and announcements and things like that, and I tried to incorporate all my patrons with even, like decision making things like, for example, once I had a year's worth of stories up there. I my whole intention was to put out a collection, but the collection would be exclusive to my patrons, and these are all unpublished stories, and they're all some of the best stories that I had written to date. So the book would be available as Kindle to everybody else, but the paperback would. Be available, signed and personalized to them, and then, and oftentimes, you know, part of the perks, also that I set up as benefit of being a patron would be things like, you know, incorporating them into the stories, if it can be done organically. So, you know what? I just didn't, you know, squeeze everybody in, you know, into these stories, and they just read, you know, they would be silly. But once that was done, I created two, had two covers and posted them, and had a poll to see which one people liked best, and then asked again, which, you know, do you think matte or glossy? Because sometimes I particularly, you know, depending on the cover or the content, I'll go with glossy. Sometimes Matt. And then I asked, Who wants like author notes? You know, sometimes, most of the time, people like author notes. They like to hear the origin behind the story and the idea and just the whole genesis of it. And then some people don't like that at all. And then, you know, so I tried to make this collection as personal to the patron patrons as I could. And by the time I got it all done and I was shipping it out, I had so much interest in it, I almost kind of regretted having it be exclusive, because I knew I couldn't sell it anywhere else. But I saw the excuse me. I saw the appreciation of my patrons. And I mean, I only have, like, close to 50 right now, but I saw my appreciation, the appreciation that my patrons had in it. It made it really worthwhile. And it's important to me to make sure that if they are going to give money, that it's very that they do get it's more of like a, I guess, maybe a membership fee, but they're getting exclusive content, including free books. I mean, a $20 patron. They don't ever have to pay for anything I put out, with the exception of sign limited stuff that's that's out of my hands. But, yeah, so. But I have seen patron pages where it's set up, where it basically is a tip jar, and every once in a while, they'll pop in and they'll post something I don't necessarily agree with that. Yeah, I just wanted to mention the other side of you know, since I happen to have a page, I might as well, you know, play the devil's advocate, I

Michael David Wilson 52:30
guess. Yeah. And funnily enough, even though we've all said slightly different things, I think we're all in agreement. And so we're just approaching it from a slightly different angle, but it sounds like all of us are in favor of membership sites, and then me and Chad are happening to use Patreon as that membership site.

David Moody 52:52
Yeah. And I think that sounds like a really accessible way of doing it. Chad a really, yeah, a logical way of doing it. I think, like you, I've looked at a number of different author Patreon sites where it it just seems like money for nothing, really. And yeah, and essentially, what we're talking about is the same thing that I'm but from from my point of view, I'm just asking them, instead of giving me money each month, just to go out and talk about my stuff each month. How I measure that is a different matter entirely. I really don't know, but it's just something interesting that I want to explore.

Michael David Wilson 53:29
Yeah, and just from a technical point of view, cab, so you said that you're not using Lightning Source or Ingram. So who are you using to print the physical books

Chad Lutzke 53:42
with this thing that I just did for the patrons, I had to, I do it through Amazon. And the way that I had to do that, to keep exclusive, was to I set the paperback. I only had the paperback live for a short while, and I bought, you know, like, I think around 70 copies, not very many. Because, like I said, I only have, like, close to 50 patrons, but I think I bought around 70 copies, and I set the paperback price at, like, $249 right? So, yeah, so no one would, so no one would purchase it. And then, of course, I just, I just ordered author copies, yeah, and then, you know, signed them and shipped them out to patrons.

Michael David Wilson 54:30
Yeah, I guess since you had to put it live very quickly, you had to also be very quiet about the fact that that had happened and hope that no one noticed.

Chad Lutzke 54:40
Yeah, and I, and I, and I've tried that before doing a quiet release. It doesn't work very well, because somebody will see it and they'll post it on Twitter and it, you know, all of a sudden it's all over. So I just set the price to a ridiculous amount that no one would ever pay that much for a paperback book.

Michael David Wilson 54:58
Yeah.

Chad Lutzke 54:59
Yeah. Least

David Moody 55:01
gonna say I think that Amazon is increasingly a really good alternative to Lightning Source, and it's something that I've used a couple of times last couple of weeks. I am one of the German publishers that I worked with. They went out of business a while back, and we agreed on a reversion of rights. So it was the old autumn books, the Hertz books in Germany, and they did really well. So I didn't want them to go out of print. When the publisher stopped working, they they assigned rights back to me, and we reached an agreement. Kind of flipped things on their head again. So whereas they used the guy behind the press used to pay me a royalty for copies sold. I'm now putting them out through effective books and paying him royalty for kind of leasing his translations. But I've used Amazon for paperbacks for all of those, and it's just such a straightforward, easy process to get things set up. And the amount of different trim sizes, paper sizes, the different options that you can have kind of matches Lightning Source. So I think it's a really, really good, viable option.

Michael David Wilson 56:08
Yeah, because I know in the early days that what is now Amazon was create space and yeah, back when it started, there was a real difference in quality between a Create Space book and a Lightning Source Book. But I think, I think now we'll go on, David, you were gonna,

David Moody 56:29
I was just gonna say that. I think if you put copies of a Lightning Source Book alongside an Amazon one, the differences are very hard to discern. I think it's come on hugely, and it's the ease of it and the obvious integration with Amazon that just makes it for certain projects. For me, it's a real plus point. I'm really pleased with what I've seen of it so far. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 56:51
and the big question is, do Amazon have a little printed by Amazon thing on the final page?

David Moody 56:58
Oh, do you know that isn't a question that I'd asked, but you mentioned something about taking a break in a minute. So if we do that, I'll check it out. Yeah, just to put your mind at rest, not mine, of course. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 57:12
But, but yeah. I mean, I've seen things that have been printed by Amazon very recently, and I think it's almost like now the argument that Lightning Source is clearly superior is almost out the window. That's not really reason enough to go with Lightning Source.

David Moody 57:31
The argument, for me, the argument always used to be about distribution, because Lightning Source would get you everywhere. But from what I can see now, if you, if you tick the box that says you want expanded distribution with Amazon, then you're going to be very, very in a very similar marketplace. And ultimately, I guess most authors, most of our books, get sold through Amazon anyway,

Michael David Wilson 57:55
yeah, yeah, and that's interesting, and I know that perpetual motion machine publishing print, both via Lightning Source and Amazon. So often the Amazon ones, they can do that just so people can get the book straight away, and then the Lightning Source, as far as I understand, their order in so that if people buy it from their web store, then they can ship those. So, I mean, I guess that if you have both Amazon and Lightning Source, maybe the only annoying thing is you'll then have to have two separate ISBNs. But again, in terms of problems to have, that's not exactly a major one,

David Moody 58:40
sorry. Sorry, sorry, Chad,

Chad Lutzke 58:43
I was just gonna say, you get the you get the Amazon one for free. So I guess you would only just be buying one.

David Moody 58:52
You can use your own. ISBN, I think with Amazon, can't you Yes, yes, and then, and then it will list as your publishing imprint. But if you don't, you go with the Amazon free one. It just says independently published and yeah. But for my purposes, I don't know about you, Chad, but nine times out of 10 that's absolutely fine. Yeah, exclusive. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 59:15
yeah, wow. I mean, I think probably the reason that I've stuck with Lightning Source, and it's the reason that people stick with so many things is just familiarity. You know, that's what I've been using. It's it's served me well. But yeah, if people are listening and they're wondering which one to go with, it certainly sounds in terms of ease of use and learning curve that probably Amazon is the one if you just want the absolute simplest one,

David Moody 59:48
I think, in terms of file types that you need and file quality that you need to send up to the printer with Lightning Source, they were always quite specific. Yeah, the technical specifications on. The file that you have to send, whereas with Amazon, it's pretty much, I'll just chuck us a PDF. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:00:05
yeah. I will say, though, with Lightning Source, that their representatives, and if ever you have a problem, are very, very good and very, very quick to respond. And absolutely, it's really personalized as well. I mean, I was quite taken aback when I was speaking to one of them, and they were like, Oh, I really enjoyed they don't come home anymore by tea. And I know Bloody hell, you've like, you've read one how many people monkey work with and you've actually read one of the books that I've put Yeah,

David Moody 1:00:39
and I agree. I've done things with Lightning Source in the past, and wanted to order a few 100 copies of something, and so I've gone to the account representatives and said, Look, I want to do this. This is the discount that you say you're giving online. Can we do anything better? And I've got a better deal out of it. So there is that that that is more like an independent business, whereas I know that if I'd gone to Amazon and said, Look, I'm gonna order a lot of these, will you give me a discount? A discount that'd just sit here, here, right? Okay, yeah, but just ask Jeff, no,

Michael David Wilson 1:01:07
right, yeah, yeah. I'd say as well. Along similar lines, that I had a big order to ship out to the US, and I was asking Lightning Source, is it actually going to be cheaper for me to get this printed in the US and then get it shipped direct to the person from there? Or is it going to be cheaper to get it done in the UK and then have to pay some sort of customs charge? And they like properly looked into everything and spoke me through all the options. So they're very good in that regard, too. Yeah, I

David Moody 1:01:44
remember a long time ago, when I first started shipping internationally, had exactly the same issue. And you did send a big, a big order to a bookstore in America, and Lightning Source then went to the trouble of setting me up on it, on the Lightning source.com rather than.co.uk system, and copying across all my files and everything, just so I could put a specific order through the through the American printers, so that it did make it a lot cheaper. So, yeah, there is that personalization that I guess you lose with Amazon. Yeah, yeah. But then Amazon now is because now that it's not create space, now that it is part of of the it's alongside the Kindle publishing side of things. It's just so simple, so integrated, so straightforward. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 1:02:28
So when you go to publish your book these days, when you finish your story, how do you determine whether to independently publish it or to go with a traditional publisher or a small press. And so, I mean, with David, let's assume that you've finished a story and it's not locked into a contract, because obviously, then you're gonna have to go with St Martin's and galans. But I mean, if, if you've just got a book, and you can either publish it yourself, or you can, you know, give it to your agent to see if you can land it with a publisher. What are the factors that determine which you do?

David Moody 1:03:12
It's interesting, and I'll try not to answer this. To make it sound like stuff that I do independently. Is second best, because a lot of the time I have an idea that I think that independent publishing will be the best route for a particular book. But what I still might do is send it to my agent and get him to have a look. And if he because, if he was to come back and say, Do you know what I think this will be big, then obviously I'd be inclined to take his advice. In my experience, he doesn't come back and say that. He goes back usually and says, yeah. His usual line is, I had a good time with insert title of story here, but I don't think there's a market for it at this time, which usually means right time to do it myself. Yeah, and that's not, that's not a bad thing. I don't see that as a failure, because I know that some of the stuff that I write does have a larger audience than some of the other stuff, and if I want to write a niche story, then I know that I've still got a way of getting that out there.

Michael David Wilson 1:04:12
Yeah, and you said that if the agent thinks it will be a book that would have a wide audience you'd be inclined to then shop it around. Is that just going back to what you said earlier in the sense that a bigger publisher just has more distribution than you do, and they can get in front of booksellers? Is that purely the reason that you go down that route, or are there other factors?

David Moody 1:04:42
Well, again, we're going back to economics again, I think. And in my experience with with the hater and Autumn books, they were both. They were doing okay when I was selling them myself, when I was publishing them myself, but the difference was quite substantial, particularly when hater took off. And there was a lot of interest from various markets around the world, and I know that if I hadn't gone through the traditional publishing route for that, then there's a lot of markets that I would have missed out on. And those sales did net quite a lot of money for me. There's a lot of money in foreign rights. So so really, yeah, I'd be inclined if, if the publishers, if my agent, says, I think I can sell this, then I'd be definitely inclined to give him a go. Because the worst that could happen, I guess, would be that he wouldn't get a sale, and it would still be down to me to do independently, right? But the best that could happen is that he'd get it to a publisher. You'd get an advance. And it does make a difference. When a book goes into bookstores, and the book gets brought up by libraries around the world, it again, it's about, it's not so much about the financial implications of it. I think, for me, again, it's just distribution to a far broader audience and a wider audience than I would have been able to previously. I know that when when I've published books independently, if I've tried to get publicity for them, it generally involves me contacting website after website after website, and I usually do one or two a day with a press release. This is what's coming out. Are you interested in sometimes they'll bite and sometimes they won't, but when you've got a book coming out through a more mainstream publisher, immediately you're getting bombarded with stuff, regardless of whether they've got the full weight of their marketing department behind it, or you're just, you know, in the mid list, or the lower ends of the mid list, or whatever you'll you'll get. They'll just send copies out. They'll send proof copies out to a huge number of different places. And so immediately it's more visible. So it does. It does make a lot of sense to go with the mainstream when the mainstream is an option. Yeah. And the other side of it for me is that I've always thought that if I've got these releases going through the mainstream, if they take off, if they do, well, then they're naturally going to drag up the stuff that I've published independently in the meantime, right? Because it's there, you know, because it's people will search, I think I enjoyed that book by Dave moody, or whatever, and they'll look for other stuff that I've published. So for me, if you can get down the traditional route, then do take it, yeah, but again, but, but again, I will say that for me, it's not second best to publish independently. Got a potentially interesting situation next year, because I want, I'm in the process of planning some more autumn books. So the autumn series was published in America by Thomas dunbc, in in the UK, by Gallant. But I have a feeling that they're not going to be interested in them this time around. I definitely don't think gallant will be because their focus seems to have moved well away from horror. It may be that somebody else is, but it might be then that no other publisher would want to get involved, because this is a series that was published by somebody else beforehand. So as to what will happen with that, I really don't know. And I kind of like the idea of doing that independently, because there's an audience for it already. And I won't be giving away a lot of the profits to a publisher, you know, I'll be, I'll be, the money will be coming directly to me. So I guess, I guess it's a long winded way of saying, it depends on the project, right? Normally, but normally I'd be inclined, if there is a mainstream option to take that, yeah?

Michael David Wilson 1:08:28
And, I mean, it will be interesting if autumn does, then go back to you in terms of publishing, because in many ways, things will have gone full circle. Yeah? So, I mean, I don't know if you give a shit about that, but there's a certain poetry to it. And there

David Moody 1:08:46
is, and I do, I absolutely love the series. It was the thing that pointed made me and made me realize that I could do this for a living. Yeah, and, and, yeah, you write, there's a certain poetry in it. Coming back that said as well, my ultimate dream, my if somebody said, Write your top 10 ambitions for your writing career. I mean, forget the hater film and all that. To have an autumn TV series would be number one still, because it was there before the Walking Dead. And to my mind, and it sounds really arrogant, but it outdoes the walking dead in terms of being a quite a contained and unique story,

Michael David Wilson 1:09:22
yeah? And well, I mean, now the Walking Dead has finally came to an end. So it did, yeah, could be, could be a market for it. I mean, I should, I should also say, when I say finally, it's not like I was waiting for it to come to an end. That's been going on for a long, long time. So I mean, a zombie shaped gap. Could it be filled by Autumn? If you're a network and you can make that happen, then get in touch.

David Moody 1:09:53
If you are the CEO of Netflix, and you happen to be listening to the this is horror podcast this afternoon. If

Michael David Wilson 1:09:59
I. Can love it. Always listening well, I mean, you were speaking about the kind of sales for a traditional publication doing better for you than independently. So, I mean, is that something you'd be prepared to quantify in terms of, like, book sales for a year for a title, if you have a successful one independently, and then if you have a successful one in terms of a traditional publisher, I wonder just how big that difference is.

David Moody 1:10:39
Well, I'd say it is difficult to quantify because there are so many other variables as well. Yeah, the second Haiti trilogy hasn't sold as well as we'd expected it to, as we'd hoped it would have done. So I've only got sales figures that are a couple of years out of date now for the first book in the series, and that shifted about 5000 copies in the first 12 months, which is not fantastic for the publishers point of view. However, that to put it into context, is probably twice what an independently published title would do twice, at a minimum, of what an independently published title of mine would do in the same kind of time scale,

Michael David Wilson 1:11:22
yeah. And I'd imagine, because of the profit margins, that you might even do better with the independently published one, if you looked at it from a purely financial point of view, I

David Moody 1:11:35
think so, because there's no, there's no stock being held there, you know, I've, I'll print as many copies that as are needed for an independently published one. But with Thomas dunbooks and St Martin's Press, you're talking 20,000 or 50,000 initial print run. So yeah, so it was a bit that was very it was disappointing. But I also think that publishing is a long term thing, and I know there are, there are lots of that books are very much of the moment, and that some might have a particular surge in popularity at one time or another, but that that moment, I believe, can come at any point in the life cycle of the book. So it might be that it's not that those books haven't sold particularly well now, but if we ever get the hater film made, or if we go down the TV series route, whatever happens there, they'll drag those up. And I think that's where some of the investment from the publisher comes as well. But as an independent publisher, you don't have those risks, but you can still have the benefits if something does take off,

Michael David Wilson 1:12:39
yeah, yeah. I mean, and if you sell some ink and it's then on Netflix, then you're gonna see sales increase across the board. Because when Josh maliman's bird box was out on Netflix, this is horror kind of benefited, in a way, because a house at the bottom of a lake, the novella we put out by him absolutely skyrocketed in terms of sales. And I mean bird box itself, I believe the week that it came out, and subsequent weeks as well, both the paperback and hardback were in the New York Times bestseller list. So it's an absolute game changer. It

David Moody 1:13:22
is. You can't under underestimate it. I remember talking to Adam Neville, yeah, just after the film of the ritual had been in cinemas. And I think maybe, maybe misquoting him here, but I'm sure that he said to me that it had sold, that the ritual had sold as many copies since the film have been as it had in four years proceeding, wow.

Michael David Wilson 1:13:43
I mean, on one hand, it's remarkable. On the other, I can absolutely believe it, because as phenomenal as a novel, The ritual is, and for me, it's his best book, which is not to take away from any of the others. And I think within horror circles, it is becoming a modern day classic, but to get that reach and to be again on Netflix and to have a cinema release, although, I mean, they should have had it released for a lot longer, it seemed to be on at the cinema and then it was off at the cinema within a matter of weeks. But yeah, I can imagine that what that will do for your profile and your sales is again, a game changer. And if

David Moody 1:14:30
I'm completely honest, I guess that's part of the reason why the my publisher took a punt on more hater novels, just the fact that there is still the ongoing possibility of the film, yeah, and, and they're kind of hedging their bets, thinking, you know, if we if this, if we take these books on, we may not make a huge amount initially, but if the film comes out, yeah, it's all going to go up. Everybody wins. I

Michael David Wilson 1:14:56
mean, I wonder if one of the reasons why the sales weren't as good. As you'd have hoped, is because there was quite a gap between the first and the second trilogy. Yeah.

David Moody 1:15:07
I mean, it didn't surprise me completely the second trilogy came about because we were talking the current producer and I, we were talking, we were in very advanced discussions, actually, with with a major studio about making a TV series, and the second trilogy was my attempt to kind of fill in the blanks and to expand, because the first three books are very much one man's story about through the apocalypse. Yeah, it was an attempt to try and expand that story and show what was going on in the outskirts. And so it would make the whole six book series easier to split up into episodic chunks and make as a TV series. Yeah. So yeah. Discussions were when, when that was happening. Discussions were very advanced, but that's one of the it's one of the frustrations of having anything to do with the film industry. Literally, we were on the verge of signing before Christmas, and then over the Christmas holiday, the person who'd been championing, championing it for us at the the production company, got promoted. And with that person out of the equation, there was no support for the project anymore. And that was it. Nothing we could have done. But very frustrating,

Michael David Wilson 1:16:16
yeah, yeah. I've heard similar stories like that before, although I guess, since they're not my stories to tell, I probably shouldn't start naming them and telling you. But it happens. It

David Moody 1:16:28
happens with so much regularity. You know this this time last year, I can say it now, because it's all over, but I had Guillermo del Toro's representatives back in touch again. Oh yeah. No, get Guillermo is very disappointed. He calls hated the one that got away, and he wondered if we could talk again. And then almost as quickly as it started, the conversation died. It's just, it's just, you just have to get used to it. Unfortunately,

Michael David Wilson 1:16:51
yeah, yeah. Should have just been like, Well, don't let it fucking get away. I want you to make it. What do you mean? It's the one that got away? Yeah,

David Moody 1:17:00
well, it's all right. Things are happening that I can't talk about at the moment, not with him, but but elsewhere.

Michael David Wilson 1:17:06
Yeah, well, I look forward to hearing more as and when we've

David Moody 1:17:11
only been talking about it for a decade and a half now, I think,

Michael David Wilson 1:17:15
yeah, I think the first interview that you know I did with you, which must have been about a decade or so ago now. I mean, just it's coming out for

David Moody 1:17:26
that in a pub in Warwick when it felt like they were just about to start filming it with them, yeah, Toro producing, and ja Bayona was directing, and then it just all fell apart, as it does. Yeah, somebody did like something, and that's my life on hold for a decade.

Michael David Wilson 1:17:44
Yeah, well, I think we need to go over to Chad before it, you know, gets too depressing. And just like, life on hold is a metabolic generally, it's good. So I mean, for you, Chad, what considerations and factors are there when you're deciding whether to Self Publish or traditionally publish, what do you take into account and ultimately, what determines where each story goes?

Chad Lutzke 1:18:15
Sometimes it's timing, and sometimes it's the subject of the book, the book itself, because I don't have an agent to reach out to, like larger I mean, I had an agent for a year. Very soon after I signed on, I found out that it's probably not a good idea to trust this agent. And that's a whole other story that I don't want to get into, but I just kind of waited that out. And, you know, the contract is up, and I just haven't pursued an agent at this point. But if we're talking like smaller presses versus me putting it out independently after, after having a I don't there are some you can tell now, or I can tell now from just from some experience, who is maybe not a good idea, because it seems like, I mean, we've all seen like some of the smaller presses shut down and just out of nowhere, you know, money gets tight, or whatever. Yeah, and they lose all their books and things like that, and you can kind of tell who's maybe doing too much, spending too much money or not doing enough, and and who to kind of stay away from. So there's, there's actually only a small handful of small presses that at this point I would trust to with my book to reach people that I can't do myself. I did have a book. I don't regret handing the book over, but I did the cover myself, and so far, nothing has been done that I had wasn't able to do. Myself, and yet 50% of my royalties are taken. And so when you know enough about formatting and doing a cover, or able to or able to pay for a cover yourself, and just do all these things and still reach basically the same audience, if, if I see that, then there's no sense in me pursuing anything but putting it out myself and but again, it depends on the book too, and sometimes it comes down to for example, I just sold a book to Crystal Lake publishing, and one of the reasons why I decided to go with them was they always have a you see their books around a lot, and I was allowed creative control. And they often find themselves every year at least one, one to three of their titles are nominated for a Stoker award. And so that kind of speaks, speaks to me, that consistency. And so in as far as timing, sometimes it's just about, you know, if I didn't necessarily have plans, and someone has an open call, and it's, it's a publisher that I think is going to get stuff done that I can't get done myself, because at this point it there really seriously is no, there's no reason for me to hand my book over. And again, we're talking about, it sounds like David is, you know, like his his books in his agent, the work that his agent is doing is reaching a far wider audience than, say, one of the small presses that I would be talking about, and a lot of it is time to with, with as far as, Like, sometimes these small presses, they're taking as long as a traditional publisher, and I don't really understand some of that, because there's not as much as involved. And yes, they're putting, you know, more than just one book out a year to focus on, but they're not putting out, you know, hundreds or 1000s of books. And so some of these presses, I noticed, can take too long, and at that point I figure I could be doing this myself. And you know, it basically just boils down to, what can they offer me that I can't do myself, and if it's not a lot more than I think that I can do, then I will just put it out myself independently. But there's also something to be said too about you know, there's, there are different circles in the horror community, and you can be unnoticeable in one and like Elvis in another and so to be able to, you know, branch out to this other one, and get a wider audience that that small press can give you, that is another consideration that I that I think about. But other than that, at this point, because I'm not actively using using an agent. That's really the only thing is that what they're going to do is I can basically just do myself. And it'd be like being a car mechanic and taking my car to the garage where they can do it, because I don't feel like doing it when I could have just, you know, and then paying them on top of it. And I just rather, you know, do it myself. But I definitely plan on, you know, eventually looking into getting an agent and and delving into that area, which I haven't really spent much time in at all yet, and see what, what kind of stuff they could, you know, do. It would be great to be like mailerman and or Neville and get, you know, these movie deals, and I know that they, they fall through all of the time. I've been approached a little bit and nothing, you know, I was prepared from the get go that nothing, some oftentimes, nothing comes of it. You know, not even, not even a check. So just a lot of talk first. But yeah, that's, that's pretty much what I look for. I probably, I might have a different answer a year or two from now, when I've actually, you know, got my feet wet with trying to get in with some of the big five, but it's hard for me to head over something when I know that it might not see the light of day for two years, and in the meantime, I could be having a huge readership with that book. So,

Michael David Wilson 1:24:50
yeah,

David Moody 1:24:51
I think that such an important point that you make there, Chad, really, is there anything that the publisher can do for me that I. Couldn't do for myself, and that that's got to be the benchmark that that's that's so important, because I love the car mechanic analogy you've just used. It's absolutely bang on. There is so much now that as an independent author, that you can do for yourself, so many different areas and avenues that you can explore that were for so long, off limits to anybody but the big five. And it's yet it's a very different environment that we're working in now, I think, just to go back to the point about agents, I've really and this is this is not trying to do my agent a disservice at all, but I have not had a huge amount of business from my agent. He's not found a lot. He's not made a lot of sales for me, but where he has really come into his own has been where I found something, and I've been able to and he's done the negotiations for me, rather than me going in there and making an absolute hash of things when, when the hater film rights originally got sold because of the people that were involved. I'd have probably sold it just for an empty envelope, you know, I'd have just given it but, and I did have a really poor deal, but when it came up for renegotiation, and my agent was there, because he'd got a much broader appreciation of the industry, he was able to steer me in the right direction. But again, he he's been great for getting the best deal for a situation that I've found. He hasn't necessarily been the one who's gone out and found things for me, if that makes sense, right? Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:26:31
yeah. And I think what Chad has said is similar to the position that I find myself in, because I've got a number of novellas and a short novel that I'll be looking to publish in the next year or so, and with the experience from publishing with this is horror and then the audience that I've got, it's actually quite difficult to find small presses that can offer me a lot more than I could do on my own with this is horror, and so, I mean, I've got a novella coming out with perpetual motion machine publishing. And I think the factors for me there, first of all, and maybe it's a bit of an ego thing, but there is a little bit of prestige, and there is that stamp of approval for someone else to say, you know, you're worth publishing. This is something that I want to put out. I want to invest my money in. And so I think, particularly as I'm so early on in terms of professional sales, that is an important thing that I want to do to begin with. And then obviously, there's the the editing as well. Now, I mean, funnily enough, I've actually spoke with Max spoof, the editor, about if he'd be interested in editing some of my things if I wanted to put it out as this is horror and as an independently published thing. And he said that he would. So I mean that that's great, and I guess in a way, that removes one of the benefits that I've got with PM, MP, but again, they've got a slightly different audience. Even though there's certainly a lot of crossover between perpetual motion and this is horror, it is gonna appeal to slightly different people. It's not like everything is gonna cross over and then the other factor, which I don't even know if a small press could do this for me. It might have to be traditional publishing, but to go back to David's business sense, it would be if they could make me more money than I could make. Then obviously that would be a factor. But if I look at small press, I'm pretty sure that I could make more money just taking or let out profit for myself rather than taking a cut of it. What was that, David, I agree completely,

David Moody 1:29:12
again, with what he's saying, but there's something else I'd like to add into this. I think when you publish independently, you know you're you're the author, you're the rights holder. So it doesn't necessarily have to be the end of the story. And what I found in my own experience was that publishing independently allowed these books to find their way into the hands of people who were willing to publish them traditionally. Yeah, so I guess it was for me, it was just a different way. It kind of replaced the old cine letter to the editor, send a few sample chapters, send the manuscript of that kind of thing. It kind of circumvented that, because the books were out there and they got an audience, and a circling editor just happened to find them, and thought we could do something with that. So they took it that way. If you if, if I'd signed with an indie with a. Press, there'd be rights considerations. They'd be after a cut of it. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. I hear you, yeah. It's like, so in some ways, you can think of independent publishing as kind of an audition, yeah, in a weird kind of way, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 1:30:16
And that's why, I mean, if you do go with a small press, and really, when you go with any press, look at the terms, look at how long they have the rights to it. Because, you know, like there are some horror stories of people signing contracts where they effectively have perpetual rights to it. And despite the name perpetual motion machine publishing, I can confirm they do not have perpetual rights to it, and I think that is really important. And also, when you look at your contract, don't be afraid to query. Don't be afraid to question things. If they look a little bit off, and actually, don't be afraid to question it. If you think you know what this is written in such legalese, I don't even understand what the hell you're going on about, because that's one thing that I definitely do. I've done it with perpetual I've done it with short stories that I've sold, because you need to know what the rights are. And actually, in many instances, I've got people to change the wording or to change your term in the contract,

David Moody 1:31:26
yeah. And yeah, again, I agree with that. And I think an acid test for me there would be go back to the to the publisher and saying, Look, can you tell me what this clause means? And if they can't, I'd be saying, See ya, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:31:38
yeah, exactly. I

Chad Lutzke 1:31:39
think it's important, too, for anybody who's deciding whether they want to independently publish or go in like a small press, is not just to ask, you know, other authors that have been published by them before. But don't make a mistake, and I've done this a couple times, don't ask the like every small press seems to have, like the big wig person that, you know, the biggest author name that brings in, you know, sells more of the books. That's the wrong person to ask about. Things like, Will, are you paid promptly? Are you treated? Well, you know, what did they, you know, because their answer is going to be completely different than this, you know, the lower rung on the ladder, yeah. And I found that out the hard way a couple of times. Yeah, ask, ask some of the lower guys, you know, how are you being treated? You know, how is your Are you happy with your experience? Are you, you know, you getting paid promptly, or is the, you know, is the contract being fulfilled on the publisher's end, things like

Michael David Wilson 1:32:36
that? Yeah. And I mean, for you, David, at this point, is there anything that would make you go with a small press? I mean, because I guess you've now got such an audience, and of course, the traditional publisher has a huge audience that, I mean, it's difficult to see how another small press could really compete with what you can do independently.

David Moody 1:33:05
Honestly, I don't think, I think it would be, have to be something pretty special that would make me sign with a small press right now, just for that, for that exact reason, because I've been very fortunate, and I've had quite a long career in writing now, but I've picked up a lot of experiences along the way, and, and I have got kind of a commercial brain for my for my non writing background and, and also being relatively tech savvy, it means that that I can look at these things and think, Well, cannot, as Chad was saying, Is there anything you can do that I can't do for myself, apart from the bookstore distribution, which I don't think any small presses would have, which I mentioned earlier, I really don't think there is anything. The great unknown for me has always been rights deals for on rights deals, but again, I've started looking at that in a different way now, and rather than selling the books to another press to have them released in other markets. I'd rather employ a translator to translate the books for me and then pay them a royalty and still keep much of the money myself, if that makes sense. So so yeah, I struggle to think what it would be, and that's not to say that I would never sign with a small press. I think anthology is a different case in point. There are a lot of great people that I'd like to work with, and an anthology through a small press might be the only possibility of doing that. Yeah, so I definitely, I'm not saying, No, I wouldn't have a look at it. But really, from a business point of view, from a common sense point of view. I don't know what another small press could give me that I couldn't do myself with infected books right now. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:34:48
so with translation at the moment, rather than seeking out like foreign publishers to buy up the rights. You're more likely then to employ a translator and do it that way. Yeah. Is that something you've been doing for a while?

David Moody 1:35:07
It's something that was kind of forced on me about 12 months ago with the German public Germans. Yeah, it's only it's only over the last couple of weeks that I've really seen the benefit of it, because it's only last week that that the German books were re released in sorry, the German autumn books were re released, and they've sold far better than I thought they would have done. So it's been great there to go to the original translators and say, and the original publisher, in this case, and say, Look, can we do this deal? Can I pay you a commission, rather, and have my rights back and the translations from you. So I'd like to explore where I can take this from. For me, Germany's always been the key market. Yeah, haven't made huge inroads elsewhere, other than the hater. Books have been quite well received in Turkey, but there is no Amazon dot whatever the turkey named main is right? So, so that kind of rules that out, and Spain is another one. So if I know, I know a couple of decent Spanish translators, and I'm going to approach them and say, Look, would you be happy to work on this basis? Because it is a big investment for an individual translator, I think, to translate a full novel or a full series, and I'd want to reward that investment with a decent royalty, but doing it the infected books way means that there's enough of an income to divide equitably.

Michael David Wilson 1:36:33
Yeah, and when you're doing that, do you pay them some sort of advance or some sort of one off rate, you know, on on top of that royalty, obviously a lower rate than you would just, you know, pay someone for a bespec translation. I've never

David Moody 1:36:52
paid an advance to anybody through infected books, and I think, I think advances are quite misleading. I think in with a traditional publisher, it's absolutely great to get in advance. It's a big it's big boost your confidence. It's a decent chunk of money, usually. But what I think a lot of people don't get about in advance is the fact that you have to pay it back. Yeah, yeah, you know. So it's not so it's great upfront. And if your books aren't a huge seller, then, then you've probably profited from it. But then there usually comes a period of time where you're earning that advance, and you may have a year, few years, where you're not making money off those books, even though the publisher is,

Michael David Wilson 1:37:33
yeah, well, I, I can't remember who it was that said it, but in many ways, it can be better to get a slightly more modest advance, because then it's going to make it back, it's going to make money for the publisher, and then they're probably going to buy another book off you. But if you're not making your advance back, then you know it's going to be a much harder commercial decision for them to then do another book. I mean, you'd have to have a pretty persuasive reason, and I think, in fact, there have even been authors that have then had a big advance, it didn't make it back, and then they had to write under a pseudonym to have a chance of selling something. Again,

David Moody 1:38:18
you're absolutely right. Yeah, it is a it's a pressure. It's a nice pressure, and it's great when an advance turns out, but it but it is still there kind of on your shoulder. And as I say, I do try to think about it as a loan, rather than a chunk of money. That's mine and and I'd rather be upfront with anybody working with infected books and say, look, there are no advances. Yeah, but we'll get the book out quickly, and as soon as we do, the money's there for you, anything you earn. One thing that I'm really keen to do with infected books as well, because I'm I get so disheartened when I hear stories, particularly about small presses, to be fair, where, and I've experienced it myself, where authors are having to chase for payments. And that should never be the case, because when you when the income comes back, when the money comes in from Amazon or whoever, you should be putting the author's share to one side in an account that you don't touch and leaving it there. And that's definitely what I do, so no matter how short I am of cash for infected books one particular month, there may be a future quid sitting in the author's royalty account, but that future quid stays there because that's not my money. Yeah, right.

Chad Lutzke 1:39:30
I agree 100% and I don't know why. I don't know why that problem exists. I just don't understand

David Moody 1:39:40
it for me? Yeah, it's very, very, very frustrating. Yeah, that's another way that I like to do I like to be very upfront with infected books, if we are, if I am working with anybody else, rather than saying we have a set royalty payment program where I'll pay you every six months or whatever. Instead, each month, I get the. Sales figures together, collate the royalties that have come in that month, produce a PDF, and it gets uploaded to a private web page that every author and every artist and every translator involved in infected books has got access to. They had access to their own sheet, and they can look at that and think, yeah, I'd like that money now click a button and request a payout, and I can't see why, again, why it needs to be any different, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:40:24
and, I mean, I think people talk about different rules for publishing or running a business, but the main thing that it comes down to is transparency, you know, being upfront, being honest. And, you know, like one thing I hate with so many businesses, and this is a much wider comment than publishing, is when people feel the need to put on a facade, or to big something up, or to be a little bit economical with the truth, to try and make themselves look a little bit better. And you know that the more I've been in this game, the more I've just thought transparency, authenticity and honesty is the way to do things. And I mean, one thing that I absolutely hate is letting people down. So actually, if somebody's gonna be published by this is horror. Not only will I tell you what I can do for you, but I'll actually tell you what I probably can't do for you, because the last thing I want is to be publishing someone who I already have a good relationship with, and then they've decided that this is horror is bigger than the reality, or that I can offer them things that I can't offer them. So I'll just lay it out up front. This is what I can do, take it or leave it. Yeah,

David Moody 1:41:48
and that's a good way to be. It's so easy in this business to kind of because it has so many extremes. You have the people who've made a fortune from it, people who've got huge publishing deals, the people who've had the films made, etc, etc, and the assumption, maybe is, or maybe the dream is, that when I sign with this company, I'm going to have the same and there are so many factors that are out of the publishers control, even that means that probably won't be the case. Yeah. So I think it's great to be upfront with people and say, Look, this is the reality of it, and this is where we are,

Michael David Wilson 1:42:21
yeah, for sure, we spoke about how difficult it can be to get your books into book shops. And I mean, I know with Lightning Source and within Graham It was long touted that if you want to have a chance of really getting that in a bookstore, you need to give a discount of at least 55% and I know recently from podcasts that I've listened to on self publishing, there are a number of authors who are thinking, Well, I appreciate that. That is the figure that people have quoted, but I need to make a living, and there seems to be a bit of a pushback, and people just put in the discount at 35 or 40% so I wonder, for both for you, what discount Are you offering for booksellers? I

Chad Lutzke 1:43:16
haven't even, I haven't even done that, and that's part of the, that's part of the, you know, because of I'm doing everything exclusively through Amazon, I that's part of the publishing bit that I have let you know smaller presses deal with if, if, if that's part of what they Do, right? Like I just signed a contract with poltergeist press to release a hardcover version of foster homes and flies, and they do worldwide distribution. They're new, but they seem to know what they're doing, and I trust them that. So that's definitely not a question that I can answer. That's part of the that's part of the car that I know nothing about, right? Yeah, yeah. I

David Moody 1:44:06
am, yeah. When I first started infected books, it was the case that you had to give 55% or you you weren't guaranteed distribution. So I did have everything set at 55% but then factor that into the pricing as well. So I knew that I'd still make an amount off the book, but just, I can't remember when it was, but quite recently, we're only talking in the last year or so. I went back and looked at that and thought, Do I really need to pay out all this amount to line Amazon's pockets? And I kind of adjusted a few and amended the discount in my favor, still giving them a healthy discount, I think maybe 40% now, but I've not noticed any difference in the numbers that I've sold through through Amazon or Barnes and Noble or any channel like that. And I've certainly not had any comeback. Via Lightning Source. So I think it is something that I think maybe people the printers, stay quiet about it because they're benefiting from it, and maybe it makes it easier for them to sell the books. But I think it's something that we should be aware of as independent publishers and maybe try and skew things back into our favor a little bit. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:45:22
yeah. I've found with the 55% discount for some countries, Australia being one, if you're not careful, it's so big, you can end up making a small loss on the damn thing. So I had to change that one, which seems ridiculous, although,

David Moody 1:45:40
again, to be fair to companies like Lightning Source and Amazon, I think they both have pretty clear royalty estimators so you can see the implications of what you're giving before you actually give it. Yeah, I would just say Take, take full advantage of that and just check and double check your figures.

Michael David Wilson 1:46:00
Yeah, yeah, I

David Moody 1:46:02
used to be a bank manager. Chad, sorry about that. It's just old, old habits die hard enough.

Michael David Wilson 1:46:08
Yeah. So we'll have to do a future podcast with you on investing and making sure that you know our finances are in order. Generally. Cried.

David Moody 1:46:19
That would be the most boring. Yeah, listen to that while we were recording it.

Michael David Wilson 1:46:27
Yeah, there'll be no patrons by the end of it.

David Moody 1:46:31
You just watch your Patreon can't go down and down and down, as if I've already done enough damage. Bad man with it.

Michael David Wilson 1:46:36
Yeah, it's just going down. As people read on Twitter that we've got a financial Podcast coming up. They're all just canceled. Well, we've got a number of Patreon questions, and the first one is from Kemp Harrison. He says, if you're following a self publishing route, what is a good way to find an editor, and how do you decide if they're the right editor for you?

David Moody 1:47:08
I kind of like to bail from this one a little bit if I can, because I was fortunate in that Wayne Wayne sibmans, who's a good friend. I've been working with him for a long time any and he always edits for me. And what makes him a good editor is the fact that he'll, he'll pull no punches. He'll tell me things as they are, yeah, and I fully respect him for that.

Michael David Wilson 1:47:31
Yeah. Are you still working with Wayne? Is he still involved with infected books? Not

David Moody 1:47:37
to any great extent at the moment, but he does still edit everything he's I know a lot, a lot of people ask after him. He's still living in Cardiff, so I've been seeing him while my daughter's been studying their university. I've been seeing him quite regularly, every time I've gone down to pick her up or drop her off. I've spent a few hours with him, and he's just, I think it became disillusioned with, with the horror community and with writing as a whole. He's, you know, he's very happy he's dog walking. I think there's a potential that he might get involved in things again in the future, but a lot of the politics kind of turn him off it. I'm speaking for him now. Maybe it's unfair, but, but, yeah, he's, he's happy not being involved at the moment, but from an infected books. Infected book's perspective, he's still happy to read my stuff, which is great, and anything else that we've put out through infected Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 1:48:29
I mean, sometimes you just need a little bit of breathing space from something, or sometimes there are things that serve a purpose or a passion for a period of your life, and then, you know, you You've fulfilled it that's done. You've got your answer. And so, I mean, he's written a number of decent books and really entertaining stories. And you know, if, if you've got no more that you feel compelled to tell at that point for goodness sake. Don't just write them for the sake of it, and don't write them for money. I mean, we've already covered that. If you're looking to do it purely for money, do something else.

David Moody 1:49:12
Yeah. Don't become a writer. If you want, if you want any money, don't become a writer. Yeah, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 1:49:17
yeah. I'm learning that lesson. Well, how about you, Chad. I mean, what do you look for in a good editor, and how do you know if they're the right one for you? And along those lines, how many editors have you had for your freelance work, for your independent work? I should say,

Chad Lutzke 1:49:39
um, this is going to be a really this is gonna make me really unpopular, but I have not used many editors at all, and which is, which is often very, very looked down upon there. There are a couple of books that I used none at all, and my. My defense, my books, as you know, are they're pretty short with minimal characters, and it's, it's easy for me to keep consistency. I guess there's been a handful of books that I've only used BETA readers. And the beta readers that I chose for those were people that were like, anytime that I gave a book to a beta reader and they said, Oh, this is great. I loved it, and that was it. Or, you know, this is great. Here's one word I caught. I'm probably not going to use them again. Yeah. I need to, I need to hear, you know, where I need to hear about all the bad stuff. You know, I did recently send a Not, not to, like, toot my own horn or anything, but to stop any more hate from not being, not using an editor as much as I should. I did recently submit a bob earlier in the year, submitted a manuscript to a publishing, small press, well respected one, and they asked me. They asked me if I had used, if I had already used, an editor, because it was the cleanest manuscript they'd ever read since they've been publishing and and I said, No, I just, you know, I just go over my day job. That's part of my day job is to edit anyway, and to make sure that everything reads perfectly and stuff. So I already have this eye for it, and I know that I, you know, just like any I don't care who you are, any writer, you're going to miss things, whether it be inconsistencies or grammatical errors or, you know, spelling, any of that. So you need a lot of other sets of eyes on there. But as far as looking for an editor, what I look for and how I know they will work for me, would be the obvious thing. If, if I, if I open up, I think that you should open up your email, look at the manuscript, and probably fall into a bad mood, and because there's just red pen all over it, you know, I think that if you're not getting that to some extent, that you're not you're not Having the they're not doing their job. But one thing I stay away from is anybody telling me anything like, like this won't sell kind of thing, like, because of the topic, because it's not a popular topic, I'm not interested in hearing about that. Because ultimately, I'm, I'm, I'm, yes, I'm, want to make money, but I'm also, I'm doing this for myself, but I need help in other areas, not necessarily, like this theme, you know, like, like, let's face it, nobody is out on Amazon typing stuff like keywords, like books about boys who find their mothers dead and then want to go to a spelling bee, you know, nobody's looking for that book. Yeah, you know, it's never going to be typed in there. And, no, it's not a, you know, there's no, like, real niche for it, but I'm happy with it and, and that's what I want, but, but as far as, uh, yeah, mainly, just like David said, somebody's going to be truthful with you. You don't want to be surrounded by yes men and yes women. You know, you need somebody who's going to tell you this, this doesn't work. Or I would probably change this, or, you know, things like that, someone that's going to really not be afraid to hurt your feelings, really. And if you, if you can't handle that, then I don't know, maybe you should not be writing, I guess, because it's going to happen. Yeah, yeah. I think that's a brilliant

David Moody 1:53:49
point that you make about BETA readers and the selection of them as well. Chad, I think Yeah, as soon as they start saying, Yeah, I love this, the only thing I change is this word here. Forget it. You're not looking at the next one, but somebody comes back and is critical. Yeah, enjoyed it, but then, then, yeah, it's worth listening to their opinion.

Chad Lutzke 1:54:12
Yeah, yes, particularly if, now I don't always listen to them, like, if I, if I've got like, five or six BETA readers, and one person points out something that they didn't like, but no, everybody else liked it, but if more than one person didn't like it, then yeah, you need to take a look at that for sure.

David Moody 1:54:27
Totally. I used to call beta readers editors by committee, right? Yeah, yeah. It really can work for you, because for a long time I didn't for the my independent stuff. I didn't use one.

Chad Lutzke 1:54:41
I don't encourage, I don't encourage it, because when you're writing something, you're standing far too close to see. That's why it's a good idea. I think it was, I think it was maybe Stephen King and on writing, he suggested holding on to your manuscript for at least three months and then going back to it, which is, it's hard to do, but it's. Good idea, because then you are kind of, you're not standing so close, and you are kind of looking at it, you know, with with different eyes, especially if you've, you know, maybe even forgotten much of it because you've been writing so much other stuff.

David Moody 1:55:13
Yeah, that's good advice, yeah. And

Michael David Wilson 1:55:15
what you're saying about, you know, the more people who tell you there might be something worth looking at does remind me a little bit of this Neil game and quote that I'll probably put you because I'm just gonna go for it off the top of my head, but he said something along the lines of, when someone tells you something's wrong, they're almost certainly right, but when they tell you how to fix it, they're almost certainly wrong.

Chad Lutzke 1:55:42
Yeah, for that, but I think,

Michael David Wilson 1:55:44
I mean, I definitely go along with everything you've said in terms of how to find the right editor for you. The only other thing that I look for is whether there's someone who has a similar esthetic to me, or at least gets my ascetic because what I'm writing is typically pretty minimalist and dialog heavy. And so if I'm going for a editor who's primarily looking for literary horror that almost reads like poetry, it's just not gonna work. That's not what I'm doing, so they're probably not going to enjoy my work. They're not going to be able to offer me the type of advice that I want, and it's just going to be a mutually disastrous relationship.

Chad Lutzke 1:56:34
Yeah, that's that's a great point. I'm not big on I'm not big on description, unless it comes in organically. I don't see necessarily a point to describe all hair color and eyes and height and things like that, like I said, unless it's, you know, done organically. But there are, there would be editors that would say, Well, we, we don't know what they look like. And I just, I think, by default. As a reader, we fill in the blanks ourselves. And I think that sometimes people appreciate the fact that they don't have to, you know, they read a book to escape and to kind of shut their mind off. And if they have to sway from something that they're creating themselves using your words, sometimes that can stop the flow and really take them out of the story.

Michael David Wilson 1:57:24
Yeah, and if you describe too much as well, then you might completely kill the picture that the reader has of that character. So you just named too many things and they're thinking, Well, what you've described definitely doesn't marry up to what I was imagining at all. And then probably, I mean, maybe I'm just a stubborn reader, but if I've decided that the lead character has brown hair, and you tell me She has blonde hair, well she's still gonna have fucking brown hair in my reading anyway.

David Moody 1:57:56
Yeah, I agree.

Michael David Wilson 1:58:00
Well, den Schuman has a number of questions this first one might be tricky, but we'll see what you come up with. What are the best channels to get the highest percentage of revenue? I'm not sure that either of you are going to like that question.

Chad Lutzke 1:58:19
Let David do that.

David Moody 1:58:26
To get the highest revenue per copy. The best channel is to set it yourself, is to produce, I find produce paper bar or hardback, and sell it yourself as a signed copy. But that's only individual items and and in terms of getting large sales numbers. That's not going to work. It's not about revenue per copy, is it? It's really about the number of copies that you sell, I think. And I think we'd struggle to find anywhere that's that's, well, ebooks are going to be the best market for that, I think. And it's pretty much much of a muchness. And you do, it depends where you set the price point, isn't it? So Amazon, smash words, all those different services will get you what you need. It's very, very vague question, and I think there's so many different factors that I've just waffled for 30 seconds and not answered it at all.

Michael David Wilson 1:59:15
Well, I mean, maybe a question that's along similar lines, and what do you see as the advantages of going exclusive with Amazon for ebooks, or going a little bit wider and, you know, I guess going with KDP and Kindle Unlimited, or deciding, actually, I want it to be available everywhere, and so I'm not going to do this, and that's something that I'm always battling with myself.

David Moody 1:59:44
Again, I think that's one where it depends on the project. There's no escaping the fact that if you go exclusively with Amazon and you are doing to KDP, then you you sorry, Kindle Unlimited, then you'll make a. A decent amount of money from page reads. Ultimately, though, it all depends on your work being seen, isn't it? So I guess it's about what's going to give you the right exposure for your project. I've got books that are I've got wider distribution than just Amazon, and books that are just Amazon, I think it's hard to call really, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:00:18
and sometimes you see the page reads and there are so many and you think, Well, imagine if I'd sold even a small percentage of those copies, then I'd have probably made far more money, because the per page is so tiny. But then, I mean, I just wonder how many people that decide to read it for free on Kindle Unlimited were even gonna buy it to begin with? And that's something that's almost impossible to answer, because the only way to get that answer would be to put the same title both in Kindle Unlimited and not in Kindle Unlimited. So there's just no way to do a fair test. Although, yeah, I think maybe a mistake that I've made before is, I mean, I can price ebooks relatively highly, because the way that I think about it is, you know, this is a product or a book that I'm very proud of, and I think it deserves a premium price tag, so I don't subscribe to the let's put a load of things at 90 9p mentality. But then I guess the more, the higher that I put it, the more people will say actually, I might as well just join Kindle Unlimited for a month because it's only a couple of quid more. Yeah,

David Moody 2:01:48
there is no right answer, is there? I guess it depends on what it is that you put in. Now, I find that going that series again as we I think we talked about earlier, yeah, it's just common sense with a series, common economic sense to say we put the first, first book in a series as free or very low price, and then charge a more premium rate for all the others. I think that's one of the very few clear cut rules that you can have for ebook pricing. The beauty of it, I guess, as well, is that it's flexible, so you can change it if you want to. So it's oftentimes, it's about, I think, putting a book out there and adjusting the price when it's out in the wild, and just seeing where it clicks.

Michael David Wilson 2:02:28
Yeah, and so much talk of like, you know, funnels, and putting the first in the season the series, even for free, just, unfortunately, doesn't really work for me, because I've never really written series, and I like to write a story and then, okay, we're done. Let's move on to the next one. I

David Moody 2:02:50
mean, that does work because I go back to what I originally did with with autumn, back in the day, and giving the first book of paper for admittedly, that was a decade or so ago, so it was a very different environment, but that did work. And yeah, if I could probably go back and do that again, yeah? But yeah, it's really Yeah. It doesn't work in any other way. I don't think for me. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:03:15
Is there anything you wanted to add in terms of why you went with Amazon chat.

Chad Lutzke 2:03:21
No, no. I think it was just like you were talking about earlier, just familiar, familiarity, and that there's such a learning curve with all of this stuff. Even, like, if I wanted to go wide, there's just so much that you know that I would need to learn smash words. I mean, I toyed around with just a little bit at the beginning, and then decided to do, you know, just the Amazon exclusive, exclusive stuff. So I'm, yeah, I think at this point my hands are just too full and burned out. I think I burned myself out in the first couple years, just trying to learn all this different all these different avenues and what might work best for me. And right now, I'm content, because each month gets better and better for me. And so I guess right now I'm I'm content. I don't want to stay where I'm at, but because I continually see progression, consistently then then, that makes me happy. So I don't want to, I don't want to fix anything that's not broke. I could be missing out on, you know, something major and that I just haven't stumbled across. But again, you know, trial and error, and I'll learn that way eventually. But for now, I'm happy with, you know, the way things are going. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:04:43
I think for me, the reason that so far I've published stuff exclusively with Amazon is purely because I think with Kindle Unlimited, I'm going to get the most readers, and it's all about. In this early stage, having a bigger readership and a bigger audience. And I mean, even though there are some countries that don't actually have Amazon and so you're missing out on those, I think if you look at the percentages that you're still particularly with KU going to get more readers that way. But I think unlike five years ago, more people are questioning it. More people are talking about going wide. More people are going for other alternatives. So it's definitely something to be mindful of and to look out for, just it could change.

Chad Lutzke 2:05:44
Yeah, oh, for sure. And that's kind of a scary thought, because I've only been doing this for so long, but I know that over the last, you know, 15 years or so, Amazon has changed a lot from the way that they used to do things, especially from what I understand, how, like the great, just surge of, you know, when ebooks started to become popular, and not everybody was self publishing, and from what I understand, it was, it was easier to be seen and easier to make, You know, money putting books out through Amazon. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:06:21
yeah. Well, the next question from Dan, I know we've covered to an extent, but he wants to know what's a good checklist to get the word on your book out there? So in terms of adverts and reviews and anything in that area. And I would add in terms of the advertising on the marketing, is there anything that you pay for or you think is worth paying for? I know that we spoke earlier on, and it sounded like you were both against Facebook advertising and possibly Amazon advertising as well. And I mean advertising is something that I'm always very reluctant to do, purely because I'm not convinced there's that much return on investment. I think often you can get much of the Reach through more organic means, and through PR and through being featured on blogs and podcasts and in magazines. But I mean, is there anything that you do pay for in terms of promotion and what is your checklist?

David Moody 2:07:39
Nothing at all is my answer. I just the only people that I marketed to are the people that I know are interested in my book, and that's my mailing list. And I'm very sparing in how to do that. As I said earlier, I just just something is telling me Do not get involved in Facebook ads and Amazon ads, etc. And I think about turning it on its head, and myself as a consumer, as as somebody, as a reader, I don't ever click on those ads. I still go for the authors that I know, all the authors I've enjoyed previously. So I just wonder who they're benefiting, other than Amazon themselves and Facebook themselves. Yeah,

Chad Lutzke 2:08:21
I haven't used, well, I used the Amazon a couple of times before, a number of years ago, but, and I heard that they had worked, I don't think that they work anymore, and I'm not about to use them. I have no interest at all in that. I haven't tried the Amazon I know for Amazon ads, I know for a while, people were using them. They were, you know, praising them highly. I don't know if they're still, you know, if things have changed. I haven't heard much about them anymore, but I'm not really that interested in doing that. Everything that I have done that have actually, that has actually helped. It all has been all organically and just developing a readership through networking and being having a social media presence and getting your my books into the right hands with people who have who like I remember seeking out people who really liked some of the same books that that I thought my book like a foster homes and flies to me was it was like another like, like the influence for that book would be like the Body the steam kings the body, or mccammons Boys, life and so, seeking out people who had, you know, those were some of their favorite books, I would send free copies to print copies on Instagram or BookTube, which is basically just, you know, a whole giant community of people. Who like to do book reviews on YouTube and unboxings. And they have, it's a big community, and you can, I've gotten a lot of recognition from those, and they'll, you know, read the book and maybe do or do unboxing or whatever, and post all their pictures. There's people on Instagram that post these really nice, cool photographs with all of this. I mean, you could, you could tell some of these people spend money at the craft store picking up, like, fake plants and all this kind of stuff. And then your, there's your book in the middle of it all, and then, and then maybe a little review or something like that. And and they have 1000s and 1000s of followers, you know. And eventually, I can't remember the terminology or how often somebody has to see something before they kind of break down and buy it. But we've all seen those, those books that, like, float around. And then finally, you've seen the cover so much that you're like, Okay, I'm gonna buy this book, you know, but you normally don't do that on the first time, and so I think that helps getting the books into hands of people like that. But first and foremost, gosh, make sure that you've written a great book, you know, like a just a good book, not not one that you just are proud of and happy that you wrote a book, but it's got to be good, because the whole thing could backfire on you too. You know, you could send out a book and people start, Oh, this sucks, and then you've got all these bad reviews, and that would be a horrible thing. But yeah, I just do. I try to have a somewhat strong social media presence, yeah, and I try to be, I try to be humble. And sometimes it hurts if you're in like, a a Facebook group and somebody is like, can anybody recommend me coming of age, road trip stories with and I swear they're talking about my book that I just put out. But I can't be that guy, you know. I cannot say Hey, you, you know, check out my book, because nobody likes that guy. And so just hope that man, I hope they stumble across it, or somebody else says something, because I'm not going to say anything. And I've seen too many people do that, and I think it really, really hurts their sales. It's almost like this. Instantly they get this, like, no negative semantic marker attached to their name. So when their name pops up, they're just like, like this. This person can't write. They need it. I don't know not to say that there's something wrong with saying, you know, writing a book and saying, Here's my book, because that's certainly not that doesn't make sense to create something, be proud of it, have other people like it and not share it. But I think that there's a line to be drawn, if that makes any sense. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:12:51
yeah, it definitely does. And I mean, it is just cringe wherever, if you ask for a certain type of book recommendations, and then there's always one person who's like, Oh, I've written something that just happens to be like that. It's like, no, yeah, at this point it should be implicit that you don't recommend your own book. I mean, I guess the only exception would be if the person recommending it is someone who I'm already really good friends with, and so you know, okay, you can let me know. But equally, if I'm good friends with you and I like your work, I probably know of it already. So yeah, I don't know if you see that. Maybe get someone who you're really close to, like John Bowden, and say, can you just reply to that and recommend

Chad Lutzke 2:13:46
my book? Say that it's funny that you say that, because we're at a point where we don't even, we don't even do that. We don't like to tag each other in each other's stuff, because we've written a book together and we're writing another book together. Yeah. And so even that starts to feel kind of, you know, they're like, there's some kind of, what is the word, not favoritism? But

Michael David Wilson 2:14:09
I can't remember the term some sort of bias, I guess.

Chad Lutzke 2:14:13
Yeah. So we try to stay away from that, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:14:17
And I mean, on the subject of Facebook and Amazon adverts. It's something that I'm very aware of, and particularly because on a lot of the big self publishing podcasts, they do go on about them a lot, and it does make me think, you know, is this something I should be doing? Is this something I should look for, but I think probably a lot of people who are doing this kind of thing are either writing things that are way more mainstream than any of us are writing, or they're just a little bit safer and easier to categorize. And so I. Again. I mean, people on Amazon probably aren't going to be searching for random guy in Japan who starts getting progressively weird video messages from an anonymous girl. So I mean, I think as well, a lot of the Amazon advertising from the small amount that I glean from it is that you kind of try and pitch your book based on search terms. And so if you wrote something that was very similar to a Stephen King book, or had those themes, well maybe you want to coincide your advert for that and for some of those terms. But, you know, there's nothing that I'm really doing that is that much like another book, like there might be books that it has a passing resemblance to, but I mean, really like the ring meets peep show is not a particularly, a particular Venn diagram or something that, again, people are searching for.

David Moody 2:16:12
Another thing to bear in mind here, I think, is that, you know, we've joked a bit about economics and looking at things from that perspective, but really, Amazon's a business, and Facebook is a business, and it's like gambling. To me, I don't gamble because I think if it was a good thing to do, then bookmakers wouldn't exist here in the UK. You know, people wouldn't be able to make a profit if I'm gonna make a living from it. So what puts me off more than anything, I think, is the fact that this is obviously a really good thing for Amazon and Facebook, etc, to offer these adverts. And if it's a really good thing for them, then chances are it's not that good a thing for me, because they're making money from it, and they're just keen to take your dollar. And the very limited experience I've had. Of it is, it's it's not at all user friendly. It's not at all intuitive, and it is really, it's like you like you were just saying. It's about mimicking stuff that's already out there. And I remember it's a lot of people think that they need a blurb from Stephen King to validate themselves, and I don't ever want to be called the next Stephen King. I just want to be called the first Dave moody. You know, I don't want to copy what everybody else is doing. So it just, it just rings alarm bells, huge alarm bells for me. Maybe do myself out of sales, but I'd rather earn those sales through, as I said earlier, word of mouth, and people getting to know my books because they've enjoyed them, or other people that they're close to have enjoyed them, yeah?

Michael David Wilson 2:17:44
Yeah. That's

Chad Lutzke 2:17:46
a good attitude to have, yeah. So, I

Michael David Wilson 2:17:48
mean, it sounds like in terms of things for people to do to get their book out, there will be contact reviewers, contact podcasters, you know, get involved with the Instagram and the book cube on YouTube community. Look at ways that you can reach people, but do it in a smart way. Don't don't end up spending hundreds of pounds or even 1000s of pounds on advertising that might not work.

David Moody 2:18:19
And as Chad said earlier, write the absolute best book you can. That's, that's what it's about, yeah, otherwise, just don't bother marketing genius. Then go into marketing. Don't pretend that you're a writer. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:18:32
yeah. I hope to write the best book you can was, you know, just taken for granted. But sometimes you do just Yeah,

David Moody 2:18:44
but it's not, I think if you look earlier, we mentioned some, some of those Facebook groups that I've had pay cap. You know that whatever it is, 20 books to 50k and and it's not about writing the best book part of the time. It's about writing the book that's going to sell. Now, that's very different. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:19:01
And I think Nick mamatas had a Facebook post a number of months ago talking about that 20 books to 50k or whatever it's called. And I think he ran some numbers and worked out well. Instead of doing that, if you just write five books at your own pace that you're really proud of and are the best that you could do, you're probably going to make more money anyway. So why don't you just do that

David Moody 2:19:29
totally another bit that I've looked at my books, my catalog, and I've thought, Well, yeah, if I can get each one of these to sell so many copies a month, then I'm going to make a decent amount of it. But yeah, it's still about writing the best book that you're you're capable of.

Michael David Wilson 2:19:44
Yeah, I think we all do that though. I mean, you know, you look at the success of one thing and think, Well, how many of those would I need to have a decent living? And I think the difference is that you're still gonna write the best. First book that you can it's when you're churning something out and it's soulless and you're not enjoying it, and you're doing it for the sake of the money. Primarily, that's when you have the problem.

David Moody 2:20:11
I'm sorry to name drop here, but years ago, I did a couple of events with James Herbert, his final book taught, and just you saying, There churn things out. It just reminded me he gave me a bollocking because I said that at one point in the conversation, I just said, very flippantly, we churn these things out. And he said, we do not churn these things out. And it really struck me by how I seem to have offended him. And I went away and thought about it, and it wasn't what I genuinely thought. It was just just the word that I chosen to use in that circumstance. But he is absolutely right. We don't churn it out. And that's, again, my problem with some of those Facebook groups and some of those attitudes to publishing that it is about churning stuff out, because if I produce x many number of these books, no matter what the standard of them? Then chances are so many people are going to take a punt on it, and I'll make a reasonable living, whereas it should be. I'm going to put my effort into getting the absolute best book that I can write, written, and then hope that it will find the audience that I believe it deserves. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:21:17
yeah.

David Moody 2:21:18
I'm a grumpy old get on. I I'm sorry, no,

Michael David Wilson 2:21:20
I think it's so relevant. I mean, I was gonna say it will be interesting to find out how many people are listening to this episode, and we're hoping for some quick tips and some hacks to grow their readership. But I suppose people who were have long tuned out at this point. I've been

David Moody 2:21:43
doing this shit for 20 odd years. And if there were any hack, quick hacks, or anything like that, believe me, I'd have found them by now, and I'd be sitting on an island somewhere in the Caribbean, not sitting at my desk, thinking about what I'm writing next and what comes after that, and after that. Yeah, it's just one of those businesses where I think there are no quick wins, yeah, but then you have to question, what's a win? A win for me, and it sounds really cliched, so I apologize, but it's when I write a book, I put it out, somebody contacts me afterwards and say that meant something to me, or that had an impact on me, or I really hated that. It's just elicited some kind of reaction from somebody,

Michael David Wilson 2:22:22
yeah, yeah. To be honest, when I think about my life and what I have wanted to achieve, in many ways, I'm living the dream that I had when I was a kid. You know? I'm self employed, I'm writing, I'm editing, I'm podcasting. So I've actually got what I wanted to do. The difference is that the dream is not quite how I imagined it, and it's a lot of bloody hard work, and it doesn't come with as much money as perhaps I'd envisioned, but it's still great. And I think when you have moments of doubt, or you think you know, what am I doing? It's like, well, actually, you're doing what you wanted to do.

David Moody 2:23:05
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I was just gonna say I could give you, give you a really ranky corporate story, but I'm not going to just that illustrates that exact kind of point. But, yeah, it's not worth it. It really isn't. Yeah, maybe

Michael David Wilson 2:23:19
we can save that for when we talk to you again in October or November.

David Moody 2:23:24
Yeah, maybe not.

Michael David Wilson 2:23:28
Pretend that didn't happen then. So the final question from Dan and again, I don't know how much it is we've covered, but what things should you avoid in the writing and or marketing and or other areas to succeed in self publishing, then you've literally asked, like, what is everything to avoid and to do that in the whole episode, just

David Moody 2:23:55
Go back and listen to the episode. Dan, cheers.

Michael David Wilson 2:23:59
Chad, do you have anything to add?

Chad Lutzke 2:24:02
I don't think so. I don't think so. I think we did cover, you know, just just a minute ago, we talked about not, not suggesting your own stuff. I think that that's really bad, especially if it's inappropriate time. You know, I've seen a lot, somebody will be saying, Hey, I love this book. Everybody should read it. I gave it five stars on Amazon. Here's my review. And then someone's like, well, then you would like my book. Here's the link, yeah, and, you know, but I think that it's important to note that to kind of think of your your your errors and your mistakes and all of the things that go wrong as blessings, because this is writing is is definitely it's going to be full of them. And. Um, you can really, really, you can learn more from those than you can by doing the right thing. And so don't, you know, expect, expect that bad stuff. And just think of it as you know, moving you in the right direction and learning you know what not to do or what to do next time. I really value all of those little bumps that I've hit along the way.

Michael David Wilson 2:25:23
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's really important. And this idea that mistakes of blessings just goes back to the idea of needing to fail to succeed, and then Samuel Beckett with if if you fail, no matter, fail again, fail better, and to go full circle and make it depressing. Isn't that just what life is all about? Failing, but failing a little bit better every time?

Chad Lutzke 2:25:54
Yeah, yeah. And if you're not, if you're not hitting bumps like that, then you're you're probably not trying hard enough or or doing enough to try and succeed.

Michael David Wilson 2:26:05
Yeah, and I should say, even though we went through dense questions really quickly and were maybe a bit dismissive, I mean, they're good questions, it's probably my fault that I decided to ask them after about two and a half hours of talking on pretty much that very topic. So basically, continue your pledge, then don't cancel it. Now, if it

David Moody 2:26:29
did come across as dismissive, I'm sorry. They are all valid, valid questions, but I do think we've covered the bulk of them during the conversation. It's something that you can't give all the answers to, really in however many hours we've been talking it's it's a huge thing. And you're absolutely right what you were just saying, Chad, learning from from mistakes and from failures. And I was listening to you and thinking about the endless numbers of mistakes that I've made along the way. Some of them were 20 years ago, and I'm still making them. Not the same mistakes, new mistakes. But you know what I'm saying? It's not, it's not something that this is an ever evolving game. You can't what works now isn't going to work tomorrow, and you have to be mindful, I think, of the the environment that we're working in, the the industry and the market that we're writing for,

Michael David Wilson 2:27:19
that's actually a reason to cushion against, or just be very mindful of Facebook and Amazon advertising, because I've noticed on some courses that they've said, you know, the algorithms change all the time. So this course that you're paying a few 100 pounds for now, most of it might not be relevant in six months,

David Moody 2:27:42
true, but we'll still have you 200 pounds. Yeah, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:27:45
unfortunately, that is non refundable, yeah.

David Moody 2:27:48
Wouldn't you know?

Michael David Wilson 2:27:51
Well sm fedo says, What are the pros and cons of self publishing versus small indie presses? I think we kind of covered that when we were talking about, you know, Chad going with Crystal Lake publishing, and us all being very mindful of what we can do and what small presses can do. So, I mean, I have a number of small presses that I would go with. But, you know, it's quite a small list. I

Chad Lutzke 2:28:24
think another pro for going with a press is if you don't want to take the time to learn things like formatting and stuff like that, you just want to write. You know, you just want to write a book and then just send it off. Write another book. Send it off, if that's your thing, and you don't mind, you know, paying for that service of basically distribution in PR and stuff like that. Then, you know, do it like that, because it's extremely time consuming. You know, I I'll sit in my office and spend a day thinking I'm going to be writing before hours goes by and I realized haven't written anything, and it's all been spent on preparing for a release or, you know, formatting and working on a cover, you know, cover and stuff like that. I mean, essentially, it's all, you know, like writing. It's all like part of the job or whatever, but the it's not actually writing. And it'd be nice to be able to not have to deal with that, but it's kind of like the price that you have to pay to not have to essentially pay someone else to do it for you. So like I said, would be, you know, losing creative, you know, maybe essentially losing some creative control and some money, but at the benefit of just being able to get onto the next book right away,

Michael David Wilson 2:29:54
yeah, yeah, that's a good point. And I guess as well, if you. Have absolutely no money that you could put into any of it, then it might be better to go with a small press, because obviously, if you're not, there are going to be some upfront costs, like the cover art and like the editing. I mean, we said that you could look at getting around that with pre orders, but I'd imagine that there'd be at least a few things that you would have to pay for beforehand, and I suppose as well, if, like you say it's time consuming, and some people, I guess, just don't really have that kind of business mindset, or they just don't want to be involved. It's just of no interest. They want to write in. And that's that.

Chad Lutzke 2:30:46
And it's funny, funny. We haven't talked about covers at all, but, yeah, that's something super, I mean, super important too. I mean, if you can't afford a good cover, yeah, then, then, yeah, good publisher to do it, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:31:03
And I kind of felt as well. I mean, there are some things in this conversation that I've deliberately omitted because I feel like have a good editor, have good cover art. Is something that in the 300 or so episodes we've put out of this is horror that are just so obvious and are so repeated. But yeah, I suppose it doesn't hurt to just remind people of that at the end. Because I mean, as we've said so many times, that cover that is your calling card. That is what people are gonna see ahead of anything, before they read a single word. Yeah.

Chad Lutzke 2:31:40
And not just a good cover, but also a cover that other people that you trust like kind of like those BETA readers that don't mind hurting your feelings, other other people that you trust to tell you whether it's good or not. Because I've seen some I even did it a long time ago. I made this cover for a short story, and I thought it was really cool because it was creative, and it said something about the inside of the story. And looking back, I'm embarrassed to even think about it. It's not, you know, I used a really goofy font, and it was just it was, it was bad. So that cover that you think might be good. And the reason why I bring this up only is because I see them everywhere still. And you would think that that people would, you know, hear about editing and important covers enough, but it seems like that doesn't get, you know, through enough. I don't know. There's just so many. There's a difference between putting a bad cover out that's supposed to be bad, you know, in almost like a tongue in cheek kind of way, and just one that you can tell that the person who released it, they are proud of it, and they they think that it looks good, but nobody has had the balls to say this cover really sucks. Maybe we should, you know, use something else. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:33:01
yeah. And something that I saw, someone mentioned recently, I think it might have been Doug Murano on Facebook, is there's been a number of covers where the art is fantastic, and then they've just paired it with a font or with, like, a color for the text that just didn't work. They didn't comprehend one another, so like, the font and the text on and the cover separately would have been okay, but they didn't go together, so it just kind of looks weird.

Chad Lutzke 2:33:34
Yeah, you've got to have a really good eye for that. I'm that when making covers, that's probably might the hardest part of it all is coming, trying to come up with a font and even a color of the font that would match everything perfectly and not contrast it in such a way that it's just loud and ugly.

Michael David Wilson 2:33:55
Yeah, David, did you have any thoughts on either self publishing and small presses that we haven't covered, or equally, anything on cover art. I mean, how do you choose which artist you're going to go with? Well,

David Moody 2:34:12
yeah, just to pick up on the covers. I know, going back to the early editions of autumn, it was, it was pretty awful. I look back and they were horrendous. I think the bar was set a lot lower back in the day, so I kind of got away with it right. But I really then realized the positive benefits of the right cover as soon as I put that on the book, and it started to shift in a lot better numbers. But what I've done since then is just found artists that that I'm happy with. And so the key chat for me is Craig Patton, who just does some incredible stuff with the infected books covers. And it's good to think when you have a relationship with an artist like that, when I can say to him, this is what I'm thinking, this is what the book's about going to. Your best, and he comes back usually with a with a sheet of ideas, and one of them would just stand out as being pretty much exactly what I'm looking for, often a kind of approach that that I wouldn't have thought about at all. I mean, sometimes I come to him with an idea, but for the last big thing I put out at the start of this year, I said, I want it to look like a poster on a wall that's been that's kind of half scratched off, half half torn away, and just have lots of easter eggs for the stories on there and it and what he came back with was exactly that. But there have been other books when I've not had an idea about what I wanted on the cover in the slightest. And I said, so this is what it's about. As I said, he'll come back with a series of different options. I think it's recognizing that you might be able to do a lot of things as an independent publisher, but you've got to know your boundaries as well, know what you can't do. So if you can't format an ebook, or if you can't design a cover, or if you can't write good copy for the back, then get somebody else to do it for you, instead of just making do, yeah, yeah, it can, as you were just talking down about the the choice of fonts, a little detail like that, can just undo everything. And it goes back to the quality control that we were talking about earlier. And I said that for me, an infected books title has got to look as good as a traditionally published title, and you put those books side by side, and if you've got a one that's got Comic Sans on front cover, you know that that's not going anywhere. So it is about establishing those standards, I think, and sticking to them.

Michael David Wilson 2:36:34
Yeah, definitely. And in terms of people having a budget for their cover art. I mean, what would you set aside? And I'd say for me, I think if you have 100 to 200 pounds, you can get a reasonable cover out of it. It might mean that there are some artists that you can't get, but you can certainly get something that's decent and by someone very good, you can but

David Moody 2:37:03
then it with them, the artist I was just talking about, I know it's going to cost me more than that, so that's factored into the costs that I know I'm going to need to cover through pre sales. Yeah, and it will, and we talked about finances a little bit, it will be a case of me saying, yes, that's the cover I want and commissioning it, and I may need to pay upfront, but really, that's probably about the only upfront payment that that I'd have to do before I started producing the book and taking in pre orders. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:37:34
I mean, did you want to talk about your budget for cover art, or do you feel uncomfortable now because you've named the artist, so it's maybe go

David Moody 2:37:46
on, maybe it is, but I think I'll just say that it's more than than the figure that you've just quoted. But I know as well, I've got a good relationship with with Craig, and I know that I'll get what I wanted out of him, and it's none. That's not just about getting the right cover art. That's about getting the formatting right. He'll put the the titles and the logos and everything in the right place. He's he's an incredible artist, and I'm prepared to pay for that because I know that I'll get the right result. As I say, it's not just a question of him, of me saying, Can you do this cover for me? And then getting a JPEG back in it by email. I'll get a fully formatted cover, and if I need to change it, that will, he'll change that as well. With the examples, the examples of the German covers that I've been doing recently, in the German re releases, I've been able to go back to him and audiobooks as well. I've gone back to him and said, Look, could you send me the layer Photoshop file that you use to create the cover, and so I can amend the elements myself to get it in the right format for an audio book or an ebook or a foreign language release. So it's about paying for that, and I would much rather pay the right price for an artist than, as we were saying a short while ago, spend that money on Facebook

Michael David Wilson 2:39:03
ads. Yeah, yeah. And I think as well, it's a really important point that, I mean, let's say you can get a cover that's 200 pounds, and you think it's okay, but then there's an artist that comes along and they're going to charge 500 or even 1000 but you think that is absolutely the artist for me? I mean, I

David Moody 2:39:25
wouldn't pay that, not even for Patton, to be fair. But

Michael David Wilson 2:39:28
okay, well, well, no,

David Moody 2:39:32
I'm kidding, you're absolutely right. Me, it's, does the artist understand what I want from the cover, and is he going to give me what I want within the right budget. And, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 2:39:43
I mean, I was gonna say kind of approach it like a tattoo. It's like, this is something that you're gonna have. I mean, I guess it's a little bit it's not quite like a tattoo, is it? Because you can change covers, but you should take it with that much seriousness, you know, to see. Is gonna be on your book for a long time. So if the cover that you want is gonna cost a little bit more, then it's probably worth paying for it, if that's the one that's speaking to you. But yeah, I suppose the other caveat is that being said, Don't go bankrupt. I mean, a number of small presses have so you know, don't go bankrupt. Should be a rule that you follow, generally in business and in life.

David Moody 2:40:30
Yeah, I'll agree with you on that, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:40:34
Well, the final question is from JS Morrow, and again, because we've been speaking for two and a half hours, we might have covered this. But he says, what are some good software platforms for self publishing, such as Lulu or Smashwords? As far as usability and exposure is concerned, should I go with one or several

David Moody 2:41:05
interesting I would say I've always had a positive experience with Smashwords. I also used, I did try another company, published drive, but didn't really get, it's very slick interface, but I didn't really get the kind of results I was I was hoping from them. Again, it's just for my to my mind, it's just a question of trying to find that what suits you, that the best options for you. Smash Rose is great. Amazon's great in between them that covers pretty much everything. I have been toying with the idea of going to the major distributors myself, so not distributors, companies involved myself. So taking away the Smashwords Kobo editions and maybe setting things up with Kobo directly myself. But I'm not entirely sure what the benefit of that will be, yet. It's just something that I've got under consideration. I think those aggregators are great for the hard to reach bookstores, the international ones, but then I don't, also don't, tend to get very many sales, if any, through a lot of those stores. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:42:12
So I mean, when you're using smashwords, are they then distributing it to a load of places like Kobo and Nook. I mean, I don't know too much about Smashwords. I just know that they've been about for a very long time, but they've not ever been a company I've particularly investigated, I've used

David Moody 2:42:33
them, and they're okay. They go to just having a look at the list here, Apple the major ones, Apple Barnes and Noble Kobo overdrive, which is a big library one, and various various other ones like Scribd and Tolino, who I don't seem to get very much from, yeah, they don't have any relationship with Google. So Google Books, Google Playbooks is something they don't do, but that's published drive the other company that I mentioned, they do. However, I've not had a huge amount of success through them. So So Google Books, I actually go to directly myself now, same as I do with Amazon. And as I said, I'm considering Barnes and Noble Kobo and Apple just taking the same approach. The good thing about these kind of firms is that you can choose which companies they distribute to, so you have got that flexibility. Yeah, they're also good because most of them, you can just upload a doc, a Word doc, and a JPEG of the cover, and now do all the crunching and all the converting for you. So if you're not particularly savvy with that kind of thing, it can be useful.

Michael David Wilson 2:43:47
Yeah, I know another website and company that people seem to talk about that do a very similar thing to smashwords, is drafted digital. But yeah, that's what I was just going to bring up. Yeah, we'll go on then, because you probably know a lot more about them than I do

Chad Lutzke 2:44:04
not really. I when, in order to have, when you have a book up on Amazon, in order for them to allow to be free on there, you have to have it in other platforms, like, I can't remember how many platforms have to be but it has to be there for free. And then you ask them if they will price match. They don't have to, but if you ask nicely, they'll do that. And then, and I use draft to digital to do that, and it was, it was fairly easy to do, and I know that a lot of people swear by it, but because I don't do that anymore, and I just do Amazon exclusive. Then I don't, I don't know if people are still using draft. I mean, I know they're still using draft to digital, but I don't know if, if it's as popular as a format as it once was, but it, it's fairly quick and easy to use, like it kills a lot of. It reminds me of one of those software things where, when you go in to fill out some application, and you just click the thing, and then it auto fills. It reminds me of something like that, because it just does so many things at once.

Michael David Wilson 2:45:12
Yeah, yeah. I mean, esthetically drafted digital looks a lot more appealing than Smashwords. I mean, I'm not sure that smash words has really updated. It's esthetic much, yeah, no, it began.

David Moody 2:45:28
It does look the same today as it did when I started using it in 2000 and whatever, yeah, but it still does the job, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 2:45:36
And in terms of going wide, I mean, have you noticed many sales in countries such as China, where I don't believe they have an Amazon presence, because I know that recently, people have been talking about the Chinese and the Indian market as markets that do actually have quite a lot of English readers, but they're not really being utilized that much. And I mean, I wonder if the reason they have so many readers is just purely to do with the fact that they're massive countries, and they have huge populations. I mean, the biggest in the world, by far,

David Moody 2:46:17
it could well be I occasionally see readers in India always used to, back before Kindle, they used to be quite a steady flow of people coming from India to buy books. But then you've also got the issue with exchange rates, because I'd only, back then, only price something globally, and though a couple of dollars for an ebook isn't anything much to somebody in the US or the UK, that equates to a lot of rupees. Yeah. So we're talking almost then to sell back back then to sell, effectively, to a country like India, you'd be looking at micro, micro payments. And really, the mechanism has never been there to do that. I'm sure you're right. I'm sure it is a massively untapped market, and the same with China, to an extent. But yeah, China, I think, is such a wildly different country. I don't know whether the same things apply. You know, hater came out in China and didn't do an enormous amount of business.

Michael David Wilson 2:47:21
Yeah, yeah. I can't remember exactly what it was I heard, but I think it was on an episode of the creative pen podcast, and they were talking about some other books that come out in China have to be vetted or something like that, because obviously they're pretty strict on their censorship. So that's taken it to a whole other level. Were the hater books that came out translations, or were they just the English version? No

David Moody 2:47:54
translated. I think it was just the first one, and I'm not sure whether it was a it wasn't translated into Mandarin. I'm not entirely sure what language it was that sounds very glib at me, not even to know, but

Michael David Wilson 2:48:08
maybe that's why it didn't do as well as you thought it was gonna do. They translated it into the wrong language

David Moody 2:48:14
it could be. And I've had a couple couple more approaches over the years from Chinese publishers, but they never really seem to go anywhere. Maybe it's just, again, you're absolutely right. Maybe it's just my books. Maybe it just doesn't appeal to the Chinese audience. Yeah, no, a heck of a market to break into. Oh

Michael David Wilson 2:48:33
yeah. I mean, if you can get even a small slice of their billion plus people, then you run to a winner absolutely

sounds like someone's got some heavy traffic going on. Is that Chad or Dave?

Chad Lutzke 2:48:54
No, sorry about that. I think that is my wife in the basement using a drill on something. Is that is that

Michael David Wilson 2:49:01
her way of saying it's been fucking nearly three hours. Can you end the fucking podcast?

David Moody 2:49:07
Yeah, I think my missus about start on lawn mower in a second. So,

Michael David Wilson 2:49:11
no, I think, I think it is so, yeah, thank you to your wife for that. I think it's a good, a good time to wrap up. So I mean, did you have any final thoughts on self publishing or hybrid publishing, or words of encouragement for our listeners, or words of discouragement? If you want to persuade them not to do it,

Chad Lutzke 2:49:41
just keep at it. I sometimes it takes, sometimes it takes a while to get noticed. I mean, there's a there's a lot of books out there, and just keep at it. Keep, you know, write what you'd like to write, and make the best book that you can. And I. Yeah, don't if it's really a passion yours. Don't, don't give up and try different avenues and experiment.

David Moody 2:50:06
Yeah, and I totally agree with that. I think that if you, if you're destined to write, you, you won't be able to stop writing anyway. I've tried many times, and it keeps coming back. Yeah, yeah. Just, just go with it. And as you said, You've got to write the books that's right for you. If you're writing a book that you're not invested in, how can you expect anybody else to invest in it? So, yeah, it's right. The books that you want to write, and hopefully they'll appeal to an audience. It's a long term thing, believe me, yeah, I'm still working things out after after many years of doing it. It's a if there was, as I said earlier, if there was a straightforward answer, if there was an easy answer, many of us would have taken it a long time ago. It's an ever shifting playing field, I think, but it's a great one to play on.

Michael David Wilson 2:50:55
Thank you so much for listening to this is horror with Jad lutsky and David moody join us again next time when we'll be chatting with Daniel Braum. And if you want to get that conversation ahead of the crowd, if you want to get every conversation ahead of the crowd, then become our patreon@www.patreon.com forward slash, this is horror. And thank you so much to our latest patrons, to Lord Maudie, Austin, Martin, chain, Taylor and Mark Elden. We welcome you to the family. Can't wait to hear how you get on exploring our content. The patrons only Q and A sessions and myself and Bob pastorella, the writers forum on Discord, story unboxed on camera, off record, much more so welcome to the family. And for those on the edge about joining us, Hey, give us a go. Pledge your dollar and see if we're a good fit for you. And if we're not, you can cancel your pledge. In fact, if you pledge now at the start of the month and cancel before the end of December. I believe it won't have cost you anything. So think of it as a this is horror podcast. Patreon, free trial, and hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Www.patreon.com, forward slash, this is horror. To join the hottest horror fiction membership site on the planet. Before I wrap up, quick word from our sponsors,

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Michael David Wilson 2:53:56
always, I would like to wrap up with a quote, and this is from Oscar Wilde, a writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave. I'll see you in the next episode with Daniel Brom. But until then, take care of yourselves. Be good to one another. Read horror, keep on writing and have a great, great day.