Give The Gift Of Books (And Help Authors End The Year On A High Note)

Well, it's that time again. We're prepping turkeys, eyeing Christmas shopping lists, and plotting how we're going to survive the rest of the year with our combined sanity and waistlines intact. And that means it's also time for me to take a moment to gently remind folks that authors are trying to close out the year in the black rather than the red.

So if you've got folks on your list who like books (or that you just wish read a little more than they do), I have a couple of recommendations for you this year! So please take a moment to go down the list, and see if there's something for the special someones you're hoping to get memorable gifts for.

Or if you're making a list of books to get with your incoming gift cards. That is also acceptable!

Help us help you!

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

Shout Outs For Authors I'd Recommend This Holiday Season!

All right, first and foremost, I want folks to buy my books. So whether you want to get a copy of Old Soldiers for someone who's a fan of dystopian sci fi thrillers featuring alien/human hybrid shock troops, or you want to check out the Hardboiled Cat series where Leo sticks his whiskers into the darker doings of New York City in Marked Territory or Painted Cats, I would absolutely recommend you give those books to as many folks on your list as possible!

There's even a great audio preview for that first title, courtesy of Altered State Adventures, which you should check out over on YouTube!

With that said, though, I know there are regular readers here who have already read all of my work. You may even have gotten copies of my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic, and subscribed to the Azukail Games YouTube channel where I regularly share free audio drama fiction. But if you've already gone through my catalog (or it's just not quite right for the people on your list), I would recommend checking out the following authors for your gift-giving needs!

Author #1: Alice Liddell

Does this not tell you everything you need to know?

Alice Liddell, also known as Lauren Masterson, is a talented author who has made her mark in a number of different genres. If you have anyone on your list who loves period dramas and gothic romances with vampires, get a copy of Succumb To Darkness. If you have someone who loves Japanese history, handmade art, and a well-researched story, consider checking out Geisha Hands instead! Fantastical mermaid romance? Yep, you can find that in her book Love of The Sea.

It's actually easier to check out her author pages Lauren Masterson and Little Alice than it is to list all her titles here. And just as an additional plug, if you are interested in learning the ins and outs of being an author, or if you enjoy cozy gaming streams, check out her YouTube channels Alice The Author and KHR Arts respectively. She can absolutely use all the subscribers (and views) you can give, if you want to make her holiday season that much better!

Author #2: Clinton Boomer

If you haven't checked this out, I'd highly recommend it!

Most folks who are familiar with Clinton Boomer's work know him as a TTRPG writer. He's contributed to the Pathfinder setting of Golarion, and he's published a lot of World of Darkness supplements (including 100 of the NPCs in the 200 Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk supplement I wrote with him for Werewolf: The Apocalypse). However, in addition to all the gaming content he's put out, he also has a handful of other books I'd recommend folks check out!

The most popular are Team Murder Hobo: Assemble, and its sequel Team Murder Hobo: Flaming Love Icosohedron, which are essentially collections of hilarious moments between various members of an adventuring party. If you read between the lines you can find some kind of emerging plot, but mostly the books are just there for the lulz, and they make solid gifts for any fantasy or D&D lover in your life. For those who want something a little more serious, though, I'd recommend checking out his modern fantasy novel The Hole Behind Midnight. A tale of murder, detective work, and the things that happen in that nowhere-time just after the end of one day and the start of another, it's a compelling read! You can find these books, and more, on Clinton Boomer's author page.

Who Would You Recommend?

Full disclosure, I generally try to use this space to big up folks in my community whose work I think deserves a wider audience. But since Alice is my partner, and Clinton a friend of mine, I can see how this might seem a bit biased to readers out there. So let me ask you, who would you recommend for a holiday shout out? If you have an indie author whose work you think should be seen by folks, tell us about them in the comments below! What do they write, why are they good, and where can we find their books?

Let's get as many folks as we can into the hands of fresh readers!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.

A Backhand From YouTube, Just In Time For The Holidays

I recently had a confluence of events happen that got me really excited as a creator! You see, I've been working with the Azukail Games YouTube channel for several years now, trying to get them monetized. I even went into overdrive last year when YouTube announced they were changing their standards for monetization, requiring channels to have 500 subscribers instead of 1,000, and only 3,000 hours of watched content instead of 4,000 to get monetized.

Well, we crossed that line a couple of days ago. I was in the midst of celebrating when I looked around, and saw the goddamn goalposts had moved. So I wanted to share my experience this week, and hopefully ask all the folks in my audience to help me pull off something of a Christmas miracle before we see the end of 2024.

It's not a great situation, and I could use all the help I can get...

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

So... What The Hell Happened?

All right, let me set the scene for you. I started making videos for Azukail Games roughly three years ago at this point. They're one of my primary publishers, and they figured that video content would be a good way to promote the supplements we were making, and to diversify the content options our audience had. The goal was eventual monetization, but we had a long way to grow before we got there. We saw some steady growth over the first two years, and then last year YouTube announced their shifts in monetization policy. This lit a fire under me and Adrian (the fellow who runs the company and the channel), and we started working harder than ever to diversify the sorts of content we were making, to promote it in more places, and to try to get over that finish line. Even when the algorithm change hit in Fall 2023 and cratered our views, we built back, dusted ourselves off, and kept climbing.

Earlier last week we were at 2,980 hours, or thereabouts... roughly 20 hours away from that golden 3,000 hour mark we'd been told to shoot for by YouTube. Then my second World of Darkness video essay, The Problem With Pentex dropped, and had the closest thing we've managed to a viral success on the channel! In less than a week it racked up over 3,800 views, several hundred upvotes, nearly triple-digit comments, and it added close to 90 subscribers to our channel, which is a big damn deal for a channel our size.

So, in short, we blew past that 3,000 hour mark like a sprinter putting on a final burst of speed before they crossed that finish line!

So what's the problem? Shouldn't we be celebrating, and doing a victory lap after working for years to get to this point? Well yes, and we would be... if we'd actually achieved the goal we set out to achieve.

Because, you see, YouTube didn't actually change the requirements for getting ad revenue from your videos. In order to get a cut of that ad revenue, you still need to get 4,000 hours, and 1,000 subscribers. What they changed was that when you hit that 3K hours and 500 subs mark is that your viewers can now leave you tips, and choose to fund you via YT's version of Patreon. Things that are really helpful when you have tens of thousands of subs, but which are basically useless for a small channel, which we very definitely still are.

And that's the situation we're put in. We thought we'd finally achieved the goal we'd been working toward for years, only to find out that now we could accept tips straight through YT itself... something that's basically useless to us since Azukail Games already has a Patreon to fund the channel. And since we don't really do live broadcasts (it's just not the sort of content we make) none of those tools are any use to us either.

And while the above video did really well, blowing basically every video on the channel out of the water in terms of metrics, it hasn't blown up so big that it can single-handedly make up the extra 1,000 hours of watch time we need to hit that 4,000 hour mark and actually get our piece of the ad revenue... which is what we need in order to fund all the future endeavors we've been planning on.

What We Need From You!

While the latest World of Darkness video essay did really well, it really only added a few hundred extra view hours past the 3,000 hour mark. Realistically, we still need between 400 and 700 hours of additional watch time in order to get us over that hump, and to get our channel a cut of the ad revenue we generate. Revenue that Azukail Games can reinvest back into making new, better videos, as well as projects like the Chronicles of Darkness audio drama podcast Windy City Shadows, which is something I've been plotting out and trying to get ready for the day we finally get our piece of the pie (since big projects like that don't just appear out of thin air).

So, in short, we need everyone reading this to go to the Azukail Games YouTube channel, and watch some of our content! If you just have time for a single video, watch The Problem With Pentex, or my earlier video essay The Liminal Horror of Changeling: The Lost. But if you're willing to dedicate a little additional time to helping boost our signal, you could put on one of the following playlists instead!

- Spoken Word: This playlist contains all 50 of my audio dramas, and it's the second longest-running playlist on the entire channel! If you want a preview of what Windy City Shadows will be like, check this one out.

- Speaking of Sundara: This video series is where I talk about my fantasy RPG setting Sundara: Dawn of a New Age for both Pathfinder Classic and DND 5E. So if you're looking for a new setting to try out this holiday season, come and take a tour of my world!

- Discussions of Darkness: A series where I talk about the World and Chronicles of Darkness settings, and how to avoid so many of the pitfalls and bad decisions that can leave serious black marks on your chronicle.

- Tabletop Mercenary: In this series I pull back the curtain, and show folks how you can make a living writing tabletop RPGs. If you've been thinking about doing this as a full-time job, or just as a side hustle, this is definitely a show you should check out!

- Tactical Plastic Report: This is a collection of videos I'm making about my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic. So if you've wanted to get a tour of this game, and to listen to me talk about it as a creator, check this series out! It's the newest playlist on the channel, and you can currently get through all the videos on this list in a little under and hour.

There are only so many hours in a day, however, and YouTube tends to "revise" watch hours down if there are other videos playing on the same account, if too many videos are watching in too rapid a period of time, and so on, and so forth. So while I would definitely encourage folks to watch my videos as the primary means of helping, please consider doing the following as well:

- Sharing Videos On Your Social Media: You never know what is going to be the shout out that starts a genuine avalanche.

- Comment On Vides: Comments of at least 7 words shake the algorithm awake, and inform it that people are paying attention.

- Subscribe To The Channel: Subscribing makes a big difference to how the algorithm treats you as a creator. The more subs you have (and the more folks who hit the bell to get updates), the more the algorithm weights things in your favor.

At time of writing we have a little less than 2 weeks for us to hit this goal by the new year. So if you're someone who wants to help me end the year on a high note, getting the Azukail Games channel over this hump would be amazing. I have so many projects I want to pursue in partnership with my publisher, but it's really hard to justify putting together bigger, more expensive, time-consuming endeavors when the channel doesn't bring in any money to balance out that overhead cost.

Thank you in advance to everyone who takes a few hours of their time to help... your support of smaller publishers and creators is making a difference. Without you, we simply can't do what we do.

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

The 1 Gift Every Author On Your List ACTUALLY Wants

It's the holiday season, and we're all asking that same question we always ask around this time of year; what does that special someone on our list really want this year? Whether we're trying to get a gift for our parents, our siblings, our partners, our children, or even just friends, it can be tough. You want to get them something they'll like, something that's meaningful, but also something that feels personal and shows you took an interest in them. However, if anyone on your list this holiday season is an author, I'm going to save you a lot of time, energy, and effort on this one. Because there is one thing that every author out there wants, and it will make them absolutely beam this Yule time.

Are you listening? All right, here it is...

Support their work. That's it. That's the secret!

There you go! Now start placing orders.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

Lastly, don't forget to check out my Vocal archive for additional fiction, articles, explorations of weird history, and more! And, of course, check me out on Blue Sky, since that's what we're talking about today!

The Kinds Of Support You Can Give

All right, so you want to give the author in your life the kind of support they're going to appreciate, and which is going to make them feel special. I'm going to give you a descending order of impact regarding the kinds of support the authors in your life need.

#1: Become A Patron

Whether the authors in your life have a Patreon, they're still on Only Fans (yeah, some of us use it for writing rather than... other content), or they've got another way for their audience to crowdfund them, just do that. An extra $20 or more a month can make a big difference to a creative professional... and if you can get a few other family members together on this one, it's possible you all could quite literally pay their bills throughout the year so they can work without worry. Or at least make paying those bills a bit easier.

I cannot overstate how much direct assistance helps. And, of course, if you're not as tech savvy or you want to have a physical something to hand over, suspicious envelopes of cash are a great universal gift.

#2: Buy Their Book

It sounds obvious, but authors get paid when people buy our books... so just do that when you can! And sure, it might not be that big of a deal if just one person buys one copy, but ask yourself how many people are in this author's extended community? How big is their family, their friend circle, etc.? Tally up what kind of royalty check they'll have if all of those people bought a copy of their book, as well as getting one for their friends, in-laws, and so on, and so forth. And, while you're at it, imagine the look on their face as everyone in their circle comes up to ask them to sign the copy they got for Christmas. Also, review their books online, because once they break 50 reviews, that's when the Amazon algorithm starts actually giving them attention.

Seriously, I cannot overstate how that feeling never really stops hitting you when you're an author. And for those who don't know, I've got all sorts of books on My Amazon Author Page, so go check it out if you haven't! Or grab yourself a copy of my new RPG, Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic... after all, who doesn't love a new game for the holidays?

#3: Consume Their Free Content (If It Pays Them)

Whether the author in your life puts work on platforms like Vocal.media, they have a podcast, they livestream themselves doing something creative, they have a YouTube channel, etc., support on those platforms is what determines the size of their check. So read their articles, watch their videos, listen to their episodes, and leave upvotes, comments, and share it around as best you can. Even if you don't have money to spend, showing your support like this can help them reach a wider audience through you, which can be encouraging, but also boost their signal enough to help them gain traction so they can earn more.

For folks who don't know, you can find a slew of my content on the Azukail Games YouTube channel, as well as over on My Vocal Archive.

#4: Follow All Their Social Media Pages

You know how when you have an indie band that's playing their first handful of shows how there's nothing more discouraging than looking out and seeing no one but the other bands and their significant others? How there's no fans filling the space, and no one interested in their performance, but they pick themselves up and play anyway? Well, following a writer's social media pages is basically you choosing the be the warm body in the audience cheering them on.

This matters more than just moral support, too. The social media algorithms pay attention, and if there are people following their pages, liking the things they share, leaving comments of at least 7 words, and resharing the content, that will make them more likely to get bigger boosts from the website itself.

There's Something For Every Budget

Some of us have a big, fat budget to buy gifts with. Some of us just have time, energy, and a willingness to try to make our loved ones smile. But if someone in your life is an author, the best thing you can do is help support their work in whatever way you can this holiday season.

And who knows? If you're not already an avid reader of their work, maybe you'll find out you like their books a lot more than you thought you would!

Support The Literary Mercenary

If you want to see me produce more work, consider some of the following options!

- My Facebook

- My Blue Sky

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

- The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, and you want to be sure my supply doesn't run low, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Also, if you're curious about how to write for tabletop RPGs, don't forget to check out my show Tabletop Mercenary, which you can find on both the Azukail Games channel, as well as my Rumble channel listed above!

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list.