Trying Out Rumble as a Platform For My Audio Dramas (Join Me, Won't You?)

Folks who've been following my work for the past year have probably come across some of the audio dramas I've been making. Most of them are smaller things that only last a few minutes, such as Shining Armor, my story about mech pilots fighting genetically-engineered dragons, or Russian Roulette, a dark little drama about a former hitman taking a deal with a devil to avoid dying, and to get revenge on his former boss. Those appear on the Azukail Games YouTube channel (which you should definitely go follow), but I've wanted to do something bigger, and more involved for a while.

And while I've had a few false starts, I figured that I'd try it over on Rumble. So if what I'm saying in today's post sounds interesting, consider following me at The Literary Mercenary, or signing up using my referral code.

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!

Seeking Alternatives To YouTube

This isn't the first time I've talked about this issue, but I'll sum it up for those who haven't seen me touch on this before. In short, while YouTube is the biggest, most dominant platform on the market, it has a pretty high bar for a lot of folks to actually make money. Until you have 1,000 subscribers, and 4,000 hours of watched content in the past year (or roughly 11.5 hours of watched content every, single day for 365 days), you're not going to see a single cent of the money your content makes. And make no mistake, it is making money, because there's still ads on it... it's just that YouTube puts that money right in their pocket.

Now, making a living off of YouTube even after you're monetized ain't easy either. With so many people using ad blockers, you basically need to drag down hundreds of thousands of views a month just to pay your rent if you're depending on ad revenue. But that steep cliff on top of working for months (or years) just to be allowed to start getting paid is like running a race, but starting several laps behind just to get to the starting line.

However, on top of all of that, YouTube uses Google AdSense to pay its creators. I am not allowed on Google AdSense, so even if I managed to jump through all of those hoops, I'd get nowhere because I couldn't be paid.

And that's... not great.

I've been looking for an alternative platform for a while, and while they do exist, most of them came with other challenges that were deal breakers for me. Some only allowed you to get tipped by viewers, or to sell access to your content, rather than letting you get paid by ad views, meaning that if your audience was broke they couldn't help you pay your bills so you could keep making stuff. Others promised to pay you, but only in cryptocurrency. Last Fall I gave DailyMotion a try, and while it had a much gentler bar of entry, the site turned off a lot of folks due to glitches, format, inability to turn off autoplay, and so on.

It was thanks to A Vox in The Void (who has dramatized several of my Warhammer 40K stories) that I found out about Rumble at all.

In short, YouTube was labeling some of the channel's work as for mature audiences only, but there seemed to be no real rhyme or reason for this decision. Particularly the short story Fangs Out, which is basically Top Gun but with orks, which didn't have any objectionable content... particularly when compared to some of the other, more grotesque stories on the channel that were left alone. Frustrated by the situation, Paul decided to put some of his work over on Rumble to try it out, and I figured I'd do the same just to see what sort of results I'd get. Also, while you're there, follow A Vox in The Void's Rumble page!

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

So, what does Rumble have going for it as a platform for creators?

First off, there's no monetization hoops to jump through. Right out of the gate, your work can start paying you. Once it's reviewed, it gets a Monetization stamp (this can take a few hours or a few days, depending on), and then your traffic starts generating you income. No hoops to jump through, no subscriber count you need to hit, no "proving" you're a real creator, just hit the ground running. Secondly, Rumble is not an exclusive platform. So if you already have a YouTube account, or even a DailyMotion one, you can keep your content on multiple platforms without too much issue. This was an issue for DailyMotion, as YouTube is not an option if your content is hosted on DM, or vice versa.

There is another side to this equation, though.

Chances are that if you're reading this you probably haven't heard of Rumble. YouTube is the biggest game in town, and a lot of folks don't seek out other platforms, assuming that if you're worth watching/listening to that you'll be on the big stage. So you're drawing from a smaller pool of people, and you aren't going to have those algorithms working for you to shuffle people onto your page, holding them face down in your content. For newer and smaller creators, you probably won't be able to tell the difference. However, Rumble is also tougher to market in a lot of places, as some sites have it banned, and even where it is allowed there aren't the large, heavily-populated groups like you'll find for YouTube creators.

So if YouTube isn't an option for you, Rumble might be worth checking out. If you're on YouTube, but either are having trouble getting monetized, or you are monetized and want to double dip, it might be worth trying.

What about the big, dangerous shape in the room?

There is something of an elephant in the room... literally, in this case.

In the interest of full disclosure, Rumble is a platform that lots of people have come to because YouTube was censoring them. Some of those creators, like A Vox in The Void, were just dealing with the difficulties of what words can be said, what topics can be discussed, etc., and those things being inconsistent in a way that hurts their bottom line. However, there are no few creators on Rumble who appear to have been actively kicked off of YouTube, and they were looking for somewhere else to go. Many of these folks are very right wing, and a lot of them wind up on the front page of the site.

You can't always choose the company you keep, and YouTube certainly has its own problems with right wing figures, conspiracies, etc. But when the pond is smaller, the sharks are more visible.

I felt that was worth mentioning, particularly knowing my audience.

Again, if you're looking for an alternative to YouTube, my experiment with the platform has yielded positive results so far. If you want to check out my content, follow me at The Literary Mercenary. And if you want to give it a try yourself, sign up through my referral link so we can both keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Why This Twitter Fiasco is a Problem For Authors

Anyone who's been paying attention has likely noticed the absolute trash fire that is Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. If you aren't paying attention, a guy with an obscene fortune paid billions of dollars for a website that wasn't worth the price tag, proceeded to take a sledgehammer to the machinery that made it run at all, and now that users, staff, and advertisers are abandoning him he pitches daily temper tantrums about why no one is praising his very good business brain.

Thought Slime did a breakdown of the timeline, for folks who want more details, and I recommend checking it out.

But what does that have to do with creators in general, and authors specifically? Well, I'm glad you asked, Internet, because thanks to this one obscenely wealthy jerk, a lot of us have taken a colossal hit regarding how we earn our livelihoods.

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!

When Rich People Flap Their Wings, Creators Get Screwed

There's a lot of folks out there who probably think Twitter is stupid. That it's a useless platform they see no value in, and that the idea of some rich guy tanking huge parts of his fortune just to buy the blue bird site before ruining it and losing his investment is pretty funny. And on the one hand, I can see that perspective. However, there is another perspective that I think more people should understand. One that, if this affected you or someone you love, you would be profoundly angry about. The sort of angry they write coal miner protests songs about, where the strikers pass around ammunition and picket lines become firing lines.

We could use some more songs like that for the digital age. Just saying.

Now, Twitter has never been one of the top dogs in social media. It's been one of the top 10 sites out there, but it doesn't have the reach of Facebook, LinkedIn, or even Reddit despite all the times it shows up on the news. However, for all the negatives and hurdles it presented, Twitter was a reliable place for people to find and build communities. This is particularly true for authors, RPG creators, and other types of creative professionals. There are some people who had tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, and who used it as the preferred way to interact with fellow professionals, or to get word out about their latest releases. In some cases people had put years of careful effort into building up their following there. I've personally spent the past year and a half trying to build my following there, and I was just about to hit the 2k mark. Some of the folks I know who are more active there have audiences in the 10k and 25k range of followers.

And now all of that time and energy has been kicked in the teeth just because some guy with more money than sense bought the website as a flex, and has proceeded to piledrive it straight into the ground.

So all of that investment put in by hundreds (if not thousands) of creators? A lot of it is bleeding out as Twitter hemorrhages users. In the short-term this means that they're losing the ability to reach people, which means they are losing the ability to sell books, and pay their bills. Long-term, these same creators now have to dedicate whole swaths of new energy to completely rebuilding and retooling their market approach to try to get on a new platform. Which can be extra hard, given that the strategies that worked on Twitter aren't likely to work on Facebook, Discord, Hive, Mastodon, or any of the other places folks are being forced to go.

This Wasn't a Wildfire. This Was Arson.

Platforms die, and empires crumble, that is the way of the Internet. However, Twitter didn't die due to changes in environment, or some organic evolution of the digital space around it. It is actively being killed by the buffoon in charge who seems bound and determined to cause as many problems for everyone as he possibly can. From firing important members of the staff, to refusing work-at-home policies for disabled employees, to not paying rent as a cost-cutting measure, the ever-lengthening list is getting cartoonish at this point.

Will Twitter continues to exist in some form? Maybe. If it doesn't, will other websites rise to take its place? Sure, eventually. However, if you're just trying to run a business, and the new landlord drives a truck through your shopfront before setting everything on fire, and then turning around to take a leak on the ashes, you're well within your rights to be pissed off about these circumstances. Especially because after doing all that, the jerk has the audacity to demand that you start paying rent for the digital real estate he's actively destroying.

Now that I've ripped out those support beams there's so much ROOM in here!

There was no reason for this to happen. But it has. And people who are stuck in this one-man-made disaster need what anyone caught in a serious catastrophe needs... help.

So if you hear creators struggling to get back on their feet, and you like what they do, help them out as best you can. If you have the budget to support, pledge to Patreon or buy them a Ko-Fi. If you don't have a budget, follow them on the social media platforms they've migrated to. Share their posts to help spread the word, leave comments, and do what you can to get them noticed again.

This isn't a matter of, "You just need to work harder!" That's what Musk said to the remaining programmers after he fired half the staff as overhead. These creators already did the work... now they need help rebuilding. Otherwise it's very possible their stores, projects, channels, and more are simply going to cease to be.

Something to keep in mind.

If You'd Like To Start With Me...

For folks who've stumbled across this post, and would like to help me haul myself up a rung or two, here's a handy list of the places you can go where your efforts would be much appreciated!

- My Facebook

- My LinkTree

- My Weekly Newsletter

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

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

And if you happen to have some spare dosh lying around, consider become a Patreon patron, or leaving a tip by Buying Me a Ko-Fi!

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Short Stories, Werewolves, And Rolling The Dice on a Book

There are a few things I've learned over the years as an author. Perhaps the biggest thing, and a lesson I learned early on in my career, was that selling the reading public on short stories (much less on short story anthologies) is really damn hard to do. Additionally, while there are a lot of folks who might read an ebook, convincing people to buy something that's ebook exclusive is also one hell of a marketing feat to pull off.

So, of course, my dumb ass proposed a project that was both a short story anthology and an ebook exclusive. And while I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew, I don't regret rolling the dice in the slightest. I might, however, need a little bit of help from all my regular readers out there to really pull out a decisive win on this one.

Seriously, check it out if you haven't yet!

Before I get into talking about this week's topic, remember to subscribe to my weekly newsletter to get all of my latest releases fresh in your inbox! And if you have a bit of loose change you'd like to contribute to help keep the blog going, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Every little bit really does help.

Lastly, be sure you're following all of my followables by checking out my Linktree.

The Seed of The Idea

For folks who don't know me, I spent a lot of my teenage years as an avid reader of RPG tie-in fiction. If you're not familiar with the term, it refers to stories that take place in the same world as a roleplaying game, and they're meant to act both as supplemental reading for folks who enjoy the game, but also as a funnel to pull in people who aren't players, but who might consider trying out the game after reading a story they really liked. From Battletech to Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms to Bloodshadows, these stories were my introduction to so many worlds it's easy to lose track all these years later.

These books were extremely common in the 1980s and 1990s, and even up until a few years ago there were several companies putting out regular novels and short stories meant to keep their existing audience happy while luring in a new audience with tales of adventure and horror alike. I even managed to land one of my own short stories, The Irregulars, with Paizo during the Pathfinder Tales era. It's still available, for those who'd like to check it out!

Come on... you know you want to.

While there are still plenty of these books for sale, they aren't produced with anything near the regularity they once were. Which makes sense, because as many companies shift budgets and adopt different marketing strategies, this method of engaging the public likely wasn't as effective as others. Especially when you consider how much time, energy, and sheer sweat goes into publishing a book, and how easy it is for them to lose money rather than make it.

However, while reading through the rules and limitations on Storyteller's Vault (the community-use platform for White Wolf/Onyx Path RPG properties like Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, etc.), I noted that it expressly allowed fiction to be set in the approved games provided that it was faithful to the published setting. While these stories had to be published on the Storyteller's Vault platform, and they could only be published in electronic format, it was still an option.

And, as they say, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Why An Anthology?

After examining the options available, I decided to propose Tales From The Moot, an anthology of short stories for Werewolf: The Apocalypse that had the framing device of stories told by the various tribes of werewolves around their fires about the great deeds they'd done, horrors they'd witnessed, and so on. I took the idea to High Level Games because I felt that a book of short stories would pair nicely with the 100 Kinfolk project I'd penned for them previously, and that the two could act kind of like companion pieces.

But why an anthology, though?

After some back and forth on precisely what shape the project should take, and how much time and energy I wanted to sink into it, I eventually proposed it as an anthology for several reasons. The biggest among those included:

- Faster Turnaround Time: If you have half a dozen people writing a book, it gets done faster. That's just math.

- Shared Marketing Efforts: I have no illusions about the size of my audience, and I figured it would be easier to market a book with half a dozen other contributors helping out.

- Effort V. Return on Investment: I was more than capable of contributing 1-2 good short stories, but the more I had to put in, the more it would need to earn to be worth that effort.

There were also drawbacks to using this format, of course. For one thing the earnings would be split between contributors, meaning that each of us only gets about .30 per sale (which is less than my affiliate cut for actually selling a copy of the book through one of my links by about .10 for those who are curious). Additionally the more people who are part of a project, the bigger the chance there is for something to go wrong (someone has to duck out, there's delays caused by family or health crises, etc.). And there was definitely a lot of reshuffling, reaching out, and follow-ups that had to be done to finally get this project out in front of the reading public.

At the end of the day, however, I didn't expect this project to be some viral sensation that paid my bills for the rest of the year. What I was hoping to accomplish was that this book would act as a proof of concept that there was an audience out there for tie-in fiction, and that it was a viable product worth pursuing... in no small part because I'd like to write more stories about some of my favorite games.

So Why Am I Telling You All This?

I told you all that story so you would have context for what I'm asking this week. Because the one truth I've tried to drive home in my Business of Writing posts is that financial success and quality of writing are not really connected at all. Books full of great stories and interesting prose will languish in bargain bins unseen and unread, while poorly-written schlock climbs to the #1 slot and makes its creators rich beyond the dreams of mortal men. What decides a project's success isn't the talent or drive of the writers... it's the voice of the readers who scream for more.

Whether you're someone who enjoys RPG tie-in stories, a person who likes werewolves, or just somebody who wants to see me write more fiction in general, I would like to ask you to please check out Tales From The Moot. My goal is to get it to at least Copper sale status (51 sales), though Silver status (101 sales) would be preferred. If we manage the former goal, creators will make about $15. The latter would net us each $30 or so. More to the point, though, even selling that many (or that few, depending on your perspective) copies would mark this out as a success by RPG product terms.

So even if you're somebody who wouldn't usually pick up an ebook, or anthologies are something that is a once-in-a-while thing for you, consider giving this one your time and energy. Especially if you want to help lay the ground work for future projects that might range across the World of Darkness, into Golarion, and other settings with community use platforms that are ripe for new tales to tell!

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing!

If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Writers on YouTube? Prepare For An Uphill Battle

Regular viewers know that something I like to do during Business weeks is to offer some advice on different platforms you can use to start earning money from the content you produce. One of the oldest recommendations I made was detailed in Make Money Writing (By Joining InfoBarrel), and it was joined by the more recent coverage on Want To Make Money Writing? Check Out Vocal! that I added earlier this year. Both of which are still solid examples for text-based income, by the by.

However, if you're an author who's been thinking about expanding your brand into the multimedia sphere, then you might be considering using YouTube as a way to boost your signal, and increase your earnings. After all, YouTube is free to join, gives you lots of tools, and it is accessible by huge numbers of people, so why wouldn't you want your work on it? While joining up as a content creator is not an inherently bad idea, per se, it is one that comes with a lot of strings attached. Strings that a lot of folks just don't think about.

Testing... testing...

What Does It Take To Make YouTube Work?

If you're taking your work to YouTube, whether you're creating audio books of your own work, writing skits, or doing a kind of full-cast drama, it's important to know what it is you're dealing with when it comes to this platform. Because YouTube is competitive, but even worse, they raised their bar for monetization earlier this year.

I actually help out on a YouTube channel titled Dungeon Keeper Radio, and we made an anniversary post detailing the requirements and changes to the platform that we (and all the other creators out there) now had to cope with. Give it a listen, and you'll understand why so many people are frustrated with YouTube.

Short version, for those who didn't give it a listen, is that until your channel has 1,000 subscribers on it, and a minimum of 4,000 hours of total run time over the previous 12 month period, you can't get your channel monetized. That means no ads, and no money, no matter how much work you put in, until you clear those hurdles. Given that it was only 10,000 views to get monetized (a significantly easier bar to clear) until the beginning of this year, that's a fairly major change.

So, before you get too involved in your project, ask how many videos you're willing to make before you can get ads on your channel so you can start getting paid. Because if you already have a fairly big following, and you know your work is popular, you might be able to get this sort of thing up and running within 6 months to a year. However, if you are starting from scratch and you don't have a catalog of popular work, any real fan base to speak of, etc., then you are going to find it is a lot harder getting people to hit that subscribe button than you think it would be.

That is, perhaps, the most important thing to keep in mind here. Because while a lot of platforms require you to get a big explosion of attention in order to make any real money, YouTube requires that kind of viral boom just to get the site to agree to pay you in the first place.

Better As A Supplement, Than A Main

The unvarnished facts are that if you want to make a living on YouTube then you need to have thousands of supporters, and you need hours upon hours of watched content every day. And unless you're a singing sensation, a do-it-yourself guru, or you stumble upon the next viral creepy pasta, you might find that it's tough to get enough views to even cut a check every month.

However, that doesn't mean you can't use YouTube as a supplementary platform for your work.

Which can reap benefits all its own.

For example, if you're using Patreon, then you could make audio book entries on YouTube as a way to give your audience some extra goodies, and reward those who give at a higher tier. If you're recording samples of a book that's for sale already, then you could use the popularity of the video to get a buy link in front of an audience to increase your sales. The same is true if you use YouTube to make promotional videos for your work; if they're successful enough to earn you ad revenue, then great, but if not they can still get you increased sales and visibility for your books.

Hell, you could even use YouTube as a way to talk directly to your fans, answer questions, and keep them up-to-date on your appearances, upcoming projects, and your life. As long as you're entertaining, it will help spread the word. John Green did this to massive success, for folks who've been by his channel.

If you've been thinking that YouTube is going to be that secret gold mine where your unknown work suddenly blows up and makes you an Internet millionaire, then I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it probably won't. Barring the usual zeitgeist that seems to select people at random, anyway. But if you want to make videos, audio, etc. as a way to supplement and boost your already existing platform, then you will probably see a lot more success. And even if your attempt at leveraging YouTube to your ends doesn't work out, well, you likely haven't lost much other than time and energy. Provided you didn't go overboard getting expensive film, sound, and editing equipment, anyway.

Speaking of YouTube, though, if you're a fan of tabletop games and fantasy, please head over to Dungeon Keeper Radio and check us out. We can use all the help we can get reaching our goals!

That's all for this installment of the Business of Writing! Hopefully some folks found it helpful. If you have questions about YouTube, and how you could use it for your brand, then leave them in the comments below. For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive. To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Lastly, if you want to help support me and my work, then you can Buy Me A Ko-Fi as a one-time tip, or go to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. Every little bit helps, and there's plenty of free stuff in it for you as a thank you!