There Are Fewer Soap Boxes Than Ever For Authors

About a year ago I wrote a post titled If A Tree Falls In A Forest (The Reason Authors Are Always Promoting Their Books) which was all about how authors' attempts at promotion can slip through the cracks, and about how so many folks will talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to authors trying to expand our audiences. And while all of that absolutely still stands, I wanted to talk about the fact that the changing landscape is making it more and more impossible for creators to reach an audience on our own.

There just aren't any soap boxes to stand on anymore.

Okay, so this was for AGGRESSIVE soap. My point still stands.

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!

Nothing Works Anymore

I've been a professional author for something like 15 years now. If there's been a marketing gimmick that didn't require a huge budget, I've tried it. I've been on almost every social media platform, I've made half a dozen different kinds of content, and I've used all of the "smart" solutions to getting your work seen. And all of those things would have worked fine about 12 years ago. However, in the age of the Internet we find ourselves in, everything is broken, and nothing fucking works.

The short answer is because corporations broke everything. The longer answer is a little more complicated, but not by much.

Because most of this was deliberate.

The first major issue that we're dealing with is platform decay, which I talked about in my post The Reason Social Media Sucks For Everyone These Days (Not Just Creators). The short version is that social media sites used to offer good functionality, and there was a lot of cross-discovery. Your friends would see what you post on FB, and if you made a popular post on Twitter it could generate millions of views with tens of thousands of fresh audience members. These days the websites have been deliberately hamstrung so that there's no discoverability, and so that people rarely see anything on their feeds at all. And if you try to share a link to something that goes off that platform? That's a good way to have your signal buried, because the sites want to keep people on them as long as possible, and they want to hide any off-ramps someone might come across. You won't even show up to your friends and followers, and they have to go looking for you.

For some of my own numbers, in the past I'd share to FB and on a slow day I'd still get 400-500 views on something, with 1,000 or more on a busy/popular posting day. Now I share to more groups, and I have more followers, but I'm lucky if I get 20 views total. That's not an organic failure; that's a hand choking off air. And those numbers are the same with most other smaller creators I know not just on FB, but on all social media platforms they use.

The second major issue is the spread of websites these days. Think of it like streaming services. Once upon a time you had Netflix, and that was it, so you paid a little money and you got to stream whatever you wanted. Then Hulu wanted a piece. Then Disney. And with every company that yanked their copyrights and put them behind a separate paywall, you ended up with more services that were more scattered, diluting the audience and effect. The same thing happened with social media. Because it used to be you had Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, and maybe Reddit. Now you add in Blue Sky, Instagram, Threads, and apps like TikTok, and you have more platforms, but it's harder to be heard by a sizable audience on any one of them... especially if you work primarily in text.

And that's before we talk about the tsunami of AI slop, and how it's shut down websites like Digg because they refused to amplify that signal, but couldn't find a way to stop it from spreading. So that's even more legitimate options taken off the table.

All of that is bad enough... but on top of all those things, you also have so many platforms that are segregating advertisements and promotional posts. To be clear, not banning them. Segregating them.

Yeah, make your posts here. Folks will absolutely see them!

For added clarity, I am all about deciding in your group's rules that promotional posts are not allowed. Whether you're on Discord, Facebook, Reddit, or any other platform, if you don't want promotion happening in your group, that's your decision. But having a weekly thread where everyone links their promotional posts? Or having a subgroup where all the promotion happens away from the actual main page where people interact with stuff? Come on. We all know that no one is looking into those areas, or reviewing what came out that week. It's not happening. It's the equivalent of giving your younger sibling an unplugged controller while you're trying to play a video game so they feel like they're participating... and this has generally become the norm across most of the remaining social media landscape these days.

So if you post on social media it's very likely that your signal will be throttled if you share a link that leads off-site. If you try to get clever and share it in the comments, you'll have folks screaming at you for promoting in their groups. If you try to run a newsletter you'll have literally 1% of the people who subscribed to it click anything you shared (saw that when recently reviewing numbers). Convention numbers are down, and even the people who do attend aren't actually buying anything, or paying attention to authors and creators they don't already know.

What the fuck are we supposed to do? Well, the same thing I've been saying this whole time, because there is only one thing that seems to work anymore, and it's the one thing we, as creators, have zero control over.

Word Of Mouth Is All We Have

I've said it before, but I feel that I need to keep saying it because people don't seem to grasp how truly dire the situation is for creators. Because we literally cannot do anything to make the broken machinery all around us work. There is no magical keyword we can use to hoodwink the algorithm to make sure we get more views. There is no organic interaction we can perform that will magically cause our posts to be seen. There is no other social media site out there that's just waiting to give us views, reads, listens, and sales. Our hands have literally been tied, and unless we have hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to budget for ads on platforms, we can't really do much with the systems as they exist.

All we have is you. Our audience. People who want us to actually be seen, be heard, and to keep making more stuff. Because without your shoulders pushing the wheel right alongside us, we aren't going anywhere.

You are the wellspring from which we flow.

If there's a creator you care about, whether its me or someone else, make sure you do the following for them:

- Follow/Subscribe to Their Socials - Algorithms give preference to those with the most bodies behind them.

- Interact With Their Posts - Whether it's sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook, upvoting on Reddit, or liking and commenting on YouTube, that interaction pushes creator's content up in the algorithm rankings

- Leave Ratings and Reviews - Positive reviews on books, on podcasts, etc. add up, and help creators get seen more

- Tell Your Friends and Family - We can talk until we're blue in the face, but no one is going to care. If you have friends or family you think would like what we make, tell them because we can't.

And after you've done all that, it helps to buy books, leave tips, become a Patreon patron, and all that... but even if you just lend your voice to helping make that wheel turn, that's still doing something that authors are unable to do for themselves these days. So until we figure out some other solution, I hate to say it, but you all really are our only hope!

As A Final Call To Action

In order to help focus the energy of your readers, you're supposed to give a call to action by giving them something specific to do. Well, if you've read this far, and you really want to help me get the word out about something, then head over to the YouTube channel The A.L.I.C.E. Files, subscribe, and give our episodes a watch! It's a sci fi reimagining of Alice in Wonderland with a couple of odd little twists and turns that I think most people who enjoy my stories will get a kick out of!

Most importantly, we need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watched hours before YouTube lets us actually keep ad revenue... so please, help us get there!

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)

- The A.L.I.C.E. Files (an audio drama channel I launched with Alice Liddell)

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 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.

It Is Exhausting To Always Be Hustling

"I respect the hustle, but why are you posting in so many places? I swear all I can see in my timeline is the stuff you're sharing."

This is a question I have been asked dozens of times over the years on nearly every social media platform I utilize. I've been messaged it on Facebook, Reddit, and once or twice I've even had people call me out on MeWe, and every time they start it with the same sentiment. They respect the amount of work I'm putting in, but why am I promoting my work in so many places?

I should think the answer is obvious, but just in case folks don't know, it's because I want people to see it, read/watch it, buy copies, and perhaps follow me to get more updates.

That's it. That's the whole reason. And let me tell you right now that it... is... exhausting that not only do creators have to be constantly on the grind like this, but that people will look at what we're doing and then deadass ask us why we're grinding so hard.

Because we have bills to pay, and not enough fans. We are poor. It's not that deep.

I don't know why this is so confusing to so many people.

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!

If I Didn't Have To Do This, I Wouldn't Be!

Again, to answer the obvious, the only reason creators post so much about their work is because we need to. No one, and I mean no one, is making self-promotion posts for the fun of it. For a majority of us, if we could just hole up in our studios and work on our projects, collect a check, and never have to engage with the public except for occasional interviews and cryptic forum posts once a year, that's what we would do.

While I can't give details for other creators, I can tell folks that I spend hours every day making promotional posts. Every day I go through Reddit, Facebook, MeWe, Bluesky, and I try to go through the comment section on YouTube, attempting to share, boost engagement, and get opinions from my audience. I make probably between 50 and 100+ posts a day, and that's just enough to get noticed by a handful of people. And while that eats up a lot of time, it also devours a lot of my energy for the day, because even a relatively mindless activity still takes time and effort to get through.

But "the hustle" as so many folks refer to trying to blast my signal across social media loudly enough to overcome the algorithm, is the backbone of my earnings. I could write dozens of books and hundreds of TTRPG guides, but if I don't tell anyone, no one is going to find them and buy them.

For example, did you see this one drop last weekend?

On those days where either a particular social media site is down, or when my Internet connection isn't working, I get so much more work done because it gives me back 3-4 hours a day I can use to write short stories, expand adventure modules, work on scripts for my podcast, record and edit videos and audio dramas, or any of the dozen other things I have deadlines for.

This is where the reality of being a professional creative, and the perception people have of the profession, deviate. Because it does not matter at the end of the day how much stuff I (or anyone else) creates. It matters what we sell. So if no one is watching, reading, or buying, we don't get paid, and that can very quickly turn into a death spiral for our careers.

I talked about this very thing a while back on Tabletop Mercenary over on the Azukail Games YouTube channel, and it was a truth that a lot of people didn't want to hear.

Active Audience Members Reduce The Need For The Hustle

As I said back in You Can't Make A Living Doing That? Says Who!?, an active audience makes a world of difference to any creator. Because even a relatively small number of active supports can be what makes or breaks a creator's career. And just so we're all on the same page, an active supporter is someone who interacts with a creator's content, and who does their best to deliberately support said creator. That might mean they leave them a tip every now and again, it might mean they support them on Patreon, or it could mean they buy that creator's merch whether it be tee shirts and hoodies, or books and TTRPG supplements. Alternatively, it could be people who read free articles which still pay the creator, who watch YouTube videos, and who follow on social media, share posts around, and leave comments of at least 7 words (since the algorithm has decided that's the big number).

Just to throw some numbers at you, let's say I had 500 people who wanted to actively support me. What kind of benefit would that be?

- $500 a month in Patreon/Ko-Fi earnings ($1 per supporter) would mean I could easily and reliably pay my portion of the rent with no sweating (and it would be an increase of nearly $300 in what I pull in every month). And if those supporters wanted to do $2 a month? Holy damn would I have a massive weight off my shoulders!

- 500 novel sales per month would be roughly $1,000 in royalties. And given that I have 4 novels and 2 short story collections on the market, those 500 supporters could easily earn me $6,000 or more over the course of half a year just buying 1 book a month... something that, for a lot of folks, isn't that big of a cost.

- 500 people reading 1 article per day on my Vocal.media archive would net me 15,000 additional reads... and at $6 per 1K reads, would net me a bonus $90 a month. Not as life-changing, but it would be a nice little bonus, and it would take most of a year for those supporters to read my entire archive only going through 1 article a day!

- 500 people watching 1 YouTube video a day over at the Azukail Games YouTube channel would be a bonus 15,000 additional views at the end of the month. While numbers vary for ad revenue, that would earn somewhere between $30 and $50 on average. Not a huge impact, but sharing those videos, and leaving comments on them, would massively help, and it would likely give the channel the huge visibility boost it would need to grow large enough to become semi-self sustaining. And if we just grew 500 additional subscribers, that would both put us over 2,000 subs, while also sending a message to the algorithm to pay more attention to us.

Now, 500 people sounds like a lot of folks... but there are FB groups and subreddits with tens of thousands of members. Getting 500 people is a fraction of the people who populate those places. The problem is that most people take a very passive role when it comes to how they consume art. They look casually, and then they move on, rather than interacting and supporting, which is what creators need in order to survive. It is, after all, the reason we spend so much damn time making posts and promoting our work.

So if you want to see the creators you love make fewer social media posts about their books, videos, supplements, etc.? Become an active supporter, and try to recruit some of your circle into doing the same. Because every, single one of you is making a real difference in the lives of an artist... whether you feel like it, or not!

Also, if you think an artist has so much support that they don't need you to help, I'd like to remind you that audience size is a reverse iceberg... however big it looks, it's likely not even 10% the size of what you're seeing.

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. 

Why I've Set My Sights On My Podcast "Windy City Shadows" Instead of Another Novel

While most folks know me as a TTRPG creator, a lot of people who read this blog know me as a short story writer and a novelist. However, a few years ago my publisher died, and several of my books were in limbo for a while. And while my dystopian sci fi thriller Old Soldiers, as well as the two entries in my hard-nosed mystery series about the street beasts of New York City Marked Territory and Painted Cats got a re-release a little while back, I wasn't working on any new novels while that shuffle was ongoing. And now that the shuffle is finished, and my books are back on the market... well, I'm still not working on any new novels.

Not because I don't want to. I would love to have the time and freedom to devote to a new novel project right now. It's not because I don't have ideas. At last count I have over 50 viable novel concepts that I could spend the rest of my life working on and just barely get to press if my heart holds out. The reason is, put quite simply, I cannot devote over a year of my time and energy to a project that then earns me maybe a hundred bucks before it runs out of gas.

So this week I wanted to talk about that, and how I'm pivoting my energy as a creator... for the time being, at least.

Sadly, needs be when the devil drives.

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!

What I've Been Doing For The Past Year

To give folks a timeline, summer 2022 was when Ring of Fire closed its doors, and authors were largely let go to find ourselves new homes. I managed to do that, and to get my books slated for re-release. There were some hitches and stumbles, but by Fall of 2023 all of my lost novels were back on the market, and available for purchase. And while I was pushing my books, both in-person and online, I was also dedicating a lot of time and energy to my latest book release, my first ever tabletop RPG, Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic!

A book that you should check out, if you haven't yet!

While Army Men dropped earlier in 2024, I've also been putting a lot of work into various short stories over the past year. In the event you didn't see them, these include:

- The Final Lamentation: A Warhammer 40K story about how the Black Legion finds out the hard way that a Lamenter is not locked on the ship when them... they're trapped in here with him!

- Where The Red Flowers Bloom: A Weird War II tale, this story features a Japanese garrison on an island in the middle of the Pacific where a strange curse overtakes the soldiers who've trespassed on the land during the season of the bloody flowers.

- Gav and Bob, Part 5: Faith and Martyrs: Another Warhammer 40K story, the Imperium's bravest ogryn speaks with a canoness confessor, who weighs both his sanity and his soul after the deeds he's done.

- Black Marks: A Dead Space story that was commissioned by the YouTube channel A Vox in The Void, by the time you're all reading this blog entry, the audio drama for it should be live on the channel! This tale takes place on Earth in the far future, and how one damaged agent uses his broken mind to save all of us from being eaten by things beyond the stars.

While I've been keeping myself busy all this time with a slew of different projects, I was partially waiting to see what the results of my books' re-releases would be. After all, one of them got a new cover and additional internal materials, and the other two were still new enough they hadn't quite found an audience yet. I was eager to see what my own promotional efforts, as well as what the efforts of my new publisher, would yield.

In the end... not much.

Without bringing up the receipts and showing them to you all, I earned enough money that I could treat myself to a fast food lunch this past quarter. Or enough to pay a little more than half of one month's utility bill, if I saved two quarters of payments.

Now, that could change. Something I say, or do, might get a bunch of people interested in my books. I might find an overnight following, or suddenly explode thanks to the efforts of reviewers I've never met... but I've been playing this game for a while. I know none of that is likely to happen, and writing one more book to throw on the pile isn't likely to change my situation in a real, noticeable fashion.

I still have the desire to really sink my teeth into a bigger, meatier project, though. Something where I get to tell a longer story full of intrigue, danger, and a bit of the old ultraviolence. Which is why I'm currently so fixated on the Chronicles of Darkness podcast I want to start titled Windy City Shadows.

A Dark Pack Project On The Horizon!

There is a world beneath the one you know. A world of magic and monsters, full of horrors that will haunt your dreams, and a beautiful madness that will seep into your very soul. If you fall through the cracks of the Windy City, you may find yourself among the broken, and the Lost. These things that were once people were dragged out of the world, and they had to claw their way back kicking, screaming, and changed. They are not now what they were. They are more... and so much less.

Politics among changelings is edged at the best of times, and outright deadly at the worst of times. Shepherd Black left that all behind, along with his position as the Fall Court's enforcer. But when someone from his past calls in a favor he has to honor, and a promise he has to keep, the old wolfhound has to let the beast out one more time so he can settle up, and finally be truly free from his old life.

This simple elevator pitch is what I want to do for season one of Windy City Shadows, whose working title is Grimm Promises. Shepherd Black escaped from a life as the lead hound of the Wild Huntsman, to becoming the attack dog of the Autumn Queen. When he finally left it all behind, an old debt drags him back into a life of blood and shadows... a life he won't be able to leave again without paying a nasty price if he truly wants to walk away.

There are more details about this in the blog entry Windy City Shadows: A Chronicles of Darkness Podcast Proposal, and for those who are interested there's still a little bit of time to leave your input for the upcoming video I talked about in Ask Me Anything About "Windy City Shadows" A Chronicles of Darkness Podcast Proposal.

I've had several people ask me why I'm dedicating my time and energy to a project like this rather than writing another novel. So I wanted to take some time to illustrate the numbers, and dig into this as a business decision, rather than just following my creative desires.

A Novel:

- 70K-90K words for one of my books.

- Takes roughly a year of time to write.

- Can't be released until it's entirely complete.

- Receives no advance.

- Takes several months to a year to be published.

- Cannot be read for free by the audience.

- Is hard as hell to sell, and only yields money from sales.

Contrast that with the podcast:

- 40K-80K words, depending on the final number of episodes for the season.

- Can be written, recorded, and released in stages, allowing it to come out faster.

- Likely a year of time to a year and a half to finish and release a season.

- Can be listened to by the audience for free.

- Will have ad spots to pay revenue.

- Can receive donations from audience members who want more.

- Will have a per-episode fee from at least one backer outside of Patreon.

- May result in sales of tie-in products that already exist (TTRPG supplements for Changeling: The Lost, Geist: The Sin Eaters, etc.).

Now, neither of these projects will be easy to make. They're going to take a lot of time, energy, editorial, and working together with multiple people to ensure it's as professionally perfect as possible. However, a novel only provides me one way to get paid, which is selling the book once it's released. The podcast lets me get paid through Patreon, through ad revenue, and through the backing of my publisher, whose channel I'll also be sharing the production on.

The minimum amount of money I could make from a novel is $0, assuming no one buys copies. Realistically, though, I feel I could make between $100 and $200 in sales for a new book, based on overall numbers from previous new releases. The minimum amount of money I could make for releasing the smallest number of episodes for the podcast is $250, which is just the amount of backing I'd be looking at from the one individual outside of Patreon. That's before any ad revenue, before building a Patreon following, and before any other kind of income allowed under the Dark Pack agreement.

If money was no object, folks would be seeing a lot more books from me. However, I've lived beneath the poverty line for the past decade, and I don't have a lot of cushion in my safety net. So this is the mental math I've been doing, and it's one reason I'm so fixated on getting the Azukail Games YouTube channel monetized, because that is the first step to setting the wheels for this whole thing in motion!

So if you want to help make this show a reality, please check out the channel, subscribe, and help us get the last few hundred watched hours we need for YouTube to give us that official status. And while you're at it, maybe give some of the older audio dramas I made for Changeling: The Lost a listen so you can hear what you're in for, and maybe get a sense of some of the characters you're going to see make return appearances!

Support The Literary Mercenary

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

- My Facebook

- 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. 

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!