Shining Moon Episode 20: Self-Publishing Empire

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon Episode 20. Today we’ll turn away from genre concerns to get into the nuts and bolts of independent publishing. Joining me today are science fiction writer Abby Goldsmith, and dark erotica author Cassie Alexander.

Abby Goldsmith: https://AbbyGoldsmith.com/majority

Cassie Alexander:  https://cassiealexander.com 

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.deborahldavitt.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:02.702)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 20. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll turn away from genre concerns to get into the nuts and bolts of independent publishing. Joining me today are science fiction writer, Abby Goldsmith and dark erotica author, Cassie Alexander. Cassie Alexander is the author of The Bend Her, Break Her and Make Her, Dark Beauty and the Beast Fantasy Romance Stories and many other dark paranormals. I understand that she lives with her husband, some cats and approximately one million succulents as well. Hi Cassie, welcome to the podcast.

Cassie Alexander (00:36.365)
Hi, awesome, I'm so glad to be here, Deborah, I can't wait.

Deborah L. Davitt (00:39.966)
It's a delight to have you. We've known each other online for a long time, so it's a wonderful time to be able to speak with you directly and get to know you in person, as it were. 

Abby Goldsmith has a subversive, dark sci-fi novel series of six books from Podium, starting with Majority. She has directed games for Nintendo, and her series gained an audience on Wattpad and Royal Road. Goldsmith has lived on all three coasts of the U.S. and currently lives with her favorite reader in the middle of Texas.

Find her at abbygoldsmith.com/majority. Hi Abby, welcome to the podcast.

Abby Goldsmith (01:16.418)
Hi Deborah, thanks for having me on.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:19.094)
It's a pleasure having you. I was very excited when I found somebody who I could match up with Cassie in terms of this particular subject matter because I started off as an basically independent publishing and I didn't do a very good job of it so I wound up doing a lot of short fiction instead to try and engage and increase my audience and that sort of thing. And that hasn't really happened. So I want you to pick your guys' brains and learn from you today. And maybe other people will get to learn something too. It'll be really cool. All right, so finding your niche. We've got people here who do dark paranormal erotica. We have people here who do lit RPG. We've got people out there doing progression fiction, heroic epics, everything like that in terms of the independent publishing industry. How do you find your niche?

How do you find your audience? How do you wind up building your audience away from a couple of dedicated readers to a wider and wider publishing empire? And we're gonna just start with simply finding your niche and identifying your audience. How do you go about doing that? I'll start with Cassie.

Cassie Alexander (02:33.531)
Oh my gosh, that's such a multi-layered question. I feel like really when you're beginning as an author, even if your goal is to eventually self-publish, you should probably write what makes you the happiest to write because no matter what form of publishing you take, self-pub or trad pub, there's gonna be a period of learning in there and that can be a slog. And so rather than sitting down and thinking like, how could I possibly be the next Brandon Sanderson? It might be better for you to figure out what you enjoy doing the most.

so that you will write it the most quickly and get through those hurdles and learning how to write right off the bat. A lot of people though are just drawn to write what they like to read though and so it's a natural progression from like looking at what's on their Kindle to be and all like I would like to write an alien romance, you know, and moving from there. But I think too though, certain types of writers,

Deborah L. Davitt (03:15.721)
Mm-hmm.


Cassie Alexander (03:31.803)
have the kind of brain, like some people can get into something and they will just mine it for forever. And I really envy them. Other times people need to hop around to keep their brains happy. But what I try to do, yeah, me too, unfortunately, like I wrote my fantasy romance series and that's all I got. But I endeavor to keep my brand promise that my books are high angst, high heat and dark, even if I write a contemporary or even if I write.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:43.434)
Yes, I am definitely one of those.

Cassie Alexander (04:02.768)
maybe an alien romance or something one day, you know, because that way at least there's some voicey vibe throughout everything so that people know what they're getting into when they read a Cassie Alexander book. I don't veer from like erotica to Amish romance, you know, because that would just leave people and I would need a different pen name.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:17.451)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (04:22.288)
My brain just broke slightly, so...

Cassie Alexander (04:23.811)
Hahaha

Abby Goldsmith (04:25.088)
I mean, I just assume that the Hamish romances are steamy.

Cassie Alexander (04:29.255)
No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think so. They're very clean. There's a lot of money if you can write clean. I just can't.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:29.488)
Hahaha

Yeah

Abby Goldsmith (04:34.307)
A lot of repression there.

Deborah L. Davitt (04:41.554)
Abby, you were talking to me a little bit about LitRP Jeep and progression fiction versus heroic epics and finding your particular niche. How did you find your niche?

Abby Goldsmith (04:53.402)
I mean, much like Cassie said, this is the stuff I love reading. This is the stuff I grew up reading. And I never stopped loving it, you know? So I still write what I love. I mean, to me, finding the niche is the easy part, I guess. The marketing's the hard part. I think most writers would agree. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:09.106)
Okay. Marketing is very hard. Marketing is a job in and of itself, which is why when people are in traditional publishing, it's they have somebody to do it for them and it's wonderful and they get to get away with not having to do much besides show up at a signing or something like that. It must be great. It must be wonderful. It doesn't really help. It doesn't really work that way for the rest of us.

Cassie Alexander (05:10.567)
Yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (05:32.422)
Only if they got like the best deal too.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:35.174)
Yes, exactly. Yeah. One of the things I used to talk about with my students when I was teaching rhetoric was you have to know who your audience is. And that's really difficult in this time because the audience is fractured, the audience is split, the audience is everywhere. They're on Wattpad, they're on Royal Road, they're reading traditional magazines, they're reading online, they're reading an archive of our own.

They're all over the place and you're trying to find your people, your tribe, the people who are going to love your stuff is really, really hard. How do you get to know your audience? How do you, uh, find them and seek them out and say, Hey, I have something that you are going to love. And Cassie, you've been doing a lot of work on marketing, a lot of work on marketing. I've been reading your little blog entries about this and

Cassie Alexander (06:30.117)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (06:31.724)
It's been mind-blowing. How do you find your people?


Cassie Alexander (08:00.931)
In a perfect world, you would have your project finished and you would imagine your perfect reader for it. So I was at 20 books this past week, which is why I have this head cold. I swear to God, it's not COVID. I've tested frequently. But a lot of the people there were talking about like, you know, you write cozy mysteries and so they're like, ideal reader was like a 73 year old woman who knits and has a dog, you know? So you can get pretty granular about who you imagine your ideal reader to be. And then once you've reached that point.

then you would go to places where you think that you would find your ideal reader, like cozy mystery groups on Facebook, maybe knitting groups on Facebook, maybe women who like books about dogs on Facebook. And then also, you do have the ability on Facebook ads if you're willing to spend a little bit of money behind the scenes, and it doesn't even have to be a lot, but you can kind of A-B test your blurbs or your covers. People who have the same interests do like...

Deborah L. Davitt (08:49.42)
Yeah.

Cassie Alexander (08:52.891)
people who like knitting want to see your book or people who like dogs want to see your dog, you know, your book. But then after that, though, I went to this really good talk a while back and I heard in that talk that Anna Hwang, whose romances have been incredibly popular on Amazon, when she was just starting out, she has a background in marketing and she went and got a thousand

And like the traditional thought about getting arc readers is that perhaps you should be stingy with your arcs, you know, or you want to make sure that each of those arc readers is like a super quality reviewy person and stuff, which I get. But then I mentioned that to an Apple rep and she was like, oh, yeah, tread pub people send out a thousand arcs all the time. And so I was like, well, huh, who do I want to be? You know, I want to be Anna Hwang, right? I want that level of success. And I want to be, I want to have the equivalent level of success of somebody who has a big tread push.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:48.001)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (09:51.151)
Pubpush behind them. So I talked, that was when I hired a friend to be my PA solely for that project. And I'll be really upfront about numbers here if you ask, because that's my MO. So I paid her 30 bucks an hour and we created a Google form and put that Google form on every single Facebook group that I thought it would apply. Like I had some hot art of my characters, had my premise and my blurb, I put it up there. And then basically,

Deborah L. Davitt (10:03.822)
Hehehe

Cassie Alexander (10:19.639)
everyone who got to the bottom of the forum, I accepted as an ARC reader. And I know some of them were maybe bummed on the far side because then they realized it wasn't as exclusive as they had hoped. But at the same time, having like a thousand, like I think of that thousand, I got like five or six hundred reviews, but having like five or six hundred people review your book in the first two weeks comes out. The word of mouth that you can get from that, like not all of them were Amazon reviews. Many of them are just good reviews, but like still.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:34.672)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:40.935)
Yes, that's enormous.

Cassie Alexander (10:49.731)
And I think that was really helped ensure the success of that series. So, so, uh, the other thing I did when I did that Google form is I made it just complicated enough that somebody had to invest time in it to fill it out. And I was upfront about my brand promise up at the top. Like I was like, I write hot stuff. I often write hot stuff with queer people. They're not queer people in this book.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:49.986)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:05.623)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (11:16.155)
But I need you to know that because I don't want you to be surprised if you say on my art team going forward, like I had people check boxes that said that I was going to deliver a pornography because I didn't want people to be like, how did this get here? You know, and one star me for something that they signed on board for. But it turned out really good. And I think it's what helped propel that series to be successful. So

Deborah L. Davitt (11:24.196)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (11:29.259)
Yeah!

Deborah L. Davitt (11:39.926)
Yeah. And Abby, same question to you. How do you identify your audience? Because you obviously have found success through Wattpad and Royal Road. And those are two very different venues from traditional publishing. And you were telling me before the podcast that there's a bit of a gender divide between the two of them. And...

I find this very interesting. How do you find your audience in places that are non-traditional spaces?

Abby Goldsmith (12:15.242)
Yeah, I mean, I guess like those are both web serial platforms, especially Royal Road. So they're kind of geared to like posting a chapter on a regular basis, like chapter by chapter and building an audience that way. The audience is interactive, they can comment, they can like talk to each other. So it's kind of like community building. And yes, and you know, like to me, that's a lot of fun, both as a reader and a writer. So

Deborah L. Davitt (12:30.374)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (12:36.554)
Yo, yes.

Abby Goldsmith (12:44.886)
I just wanted to try it out. It was a little bit of a test for me, but it worked out really, really well. So it turns out I actually love doing it. I love web serials. I love the fact that I can just talk to my readers right away and they can talk to each other. They'll get on each other's cases. They'll, I get the instant feedback. So I've been in critique groups before all this and critique groups are other writers. They're very serious other writers and they're not really reading for fun.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:01.321)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:05.399)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:15.052)
Yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (13:15.71)
They're, the vibe is just different. And so, yeah, like, and whereas in, on Waphenton Railroad, a number of the readers are young. Like you'll get full on 11 year olds reading your work. I'd actually will say I don't write for 11 year olds. So when one showed up, I was like, oh boy. But yeah, you know, people that are just from all walks of life, from many different countries.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:35.66)
Yes.

Abby Goldsmith (13:44.458)
A lot of them don't have access to Amazon, or they don't have access to libraries. They're reading because it's a little bit of a forbidden thing for them, and they want. Anyway, so you just get some very interesting people reading your work. And yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:47.188)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:52.756)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (13:59.298)
had a very similar experience when I was working in fanfiction, and I was basically doing a chapter a week. And I had just that enormous gratification of people responding immediately. It's a serotonin hit. When people respond immediately, they have questions, they have comments, and then you're responding back to them and you are building that community. And I was really hoping to leverage some of that community. Some of those people did come with me into the other books.

but a lot of them were sort of wedded to the IP that I was writing about at that point in time. So being able to serialize your own stuff in a space like Wattpad or Royal Road sounds very fulfilling.

Abby Goldsmith (14:42.026)
Yeah, it definitely is. Although I'm definitely going to give Cassie's idea a lot of thought. That's smart.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:49.122)
Hehehehehehe

Cassie Alexander (14:49.775)
Hahaha

Deborah L. Davitt (14:52.95)
All right, so we've talked about audience now, building your work now. Now, something I did with my first three books with Etta Earth was I did write it all upfront, the entire series, I did the Netflix model, and I was going to try to sell this entire thing, traditional publishing, and it went over with a resounding flop, and I said, screw this, I want to be published before I'm 40, I'm going to put this out on Amazon,

I had beautiful covers for them and I released them very close to each other. The sort of the Netflix model as opposed to the traditional TV model, which works better? The Netflix model where you just dump it all on people or traditional TV model where you write it gradually over time and deploy it gradually and you build your audience over time that way? Or is there not a dichotomy between the two?

And I'm going to ask Cassie that first.

Cassie Alexander (15:54.832)
I would say that it kind of depends on what your publishing goals are. And if you are able to sit on a book for that long, having done that, I know it's super hard. But also to, you know, it also depends on whether you are publishing wide or in KU. In KU, you know, everybody talks about Amazon's algorithm and how like you get a nice organic boost from it for the first 30 days and then a little less at 60 days. And then they talk about the 90 day cliff a lot.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:02.59)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (16:22.423)
And so that's why a lot of people who are in KU, which is the version of Amazon where your eBooks are exclusive to them and then you get paid per page read. Those people quick release because they want people to keep going through their books so they can keep occurring this page reads and that money. But on the other vendors though, because I am a wide author, I feel like they respect the length of your pre-order more. Like for some reason, it seems to me like on Apple.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:29.438)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (16:50.875)
or Barnes and Noble, it seems like the longer your pre-order is, the more real their algorithm considers your book to be. I don't know what that's about, but it's nice. And so, but ultimately, I would just do what you can do and what you feel comfortable with. I just really hesitate to say there's one true path to do anything because there's just super not.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:11.394)
There really isn't, no. I was just, I'm looking for opinions here and what has worked for you.

Abby Goldsmith (17:19.499)
Yeah, I mean...

Deborah L. Davitt (17:20.062)
And Abby, same question. You were nodding and smiling about having written it all up front. And so I feel like we've gone down a similar path.

Abby Goldsmith (17:27.193)
Yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (17:31.43)
Yes, yeah, I call it the insane path or the insanity path. Like, I don't know if I'll do it again, because I feel like you have to leverage a lot of years in your lifetime if you're writing a big epic series and you're not releasing it. So yes, so on the one hand, I really recommend it for a good story, for like building a very cohesive story. Because if you publish as you go, you can end up in like a George R. Martin situation where...

the story kind of teeters, it becomes the leaning tower of Pisa, and then you're constantly trying to shore up the direction it was going in, and it's going to become more and more unwieldy. Whereas if you write it all beforehand, you can retroactively go back and fix all the problems in the first few books again and again. Yeah, and so I did that, and I consider my series a complete work of art. It's six books over a million words.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:03.47)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:13.567)
Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (18:24.402)
And I'm very proud of it. I know that it's a good series. And the readers who get to the end of it certainly agree. Now, the beginning, it's always going to have problems. But I find that most series, some of my favorite series, they all have a little bit of problems in the beginning, especially if you're setting up such a massive world. Yeah, so I think there's a lot to be said for like,

Deborah L. Davitt (18:34.155)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (18:44.331)
Yeah, understood.

Abby Goldsmith (18:50.354)
Yeah, for writing it all before publishing it and focusing solely on that work of art. But as for rapid release, I do think a lot of that is driven by algorithms. I think that there's kind of like a rapid release culture going on right now that's a lot of it is driven by that Amazon algorithm. You know, so unfortunately, you know, that does seem to be as Cassie said that helps with your visibility. People are trying to game the visibility system basically, because they have to.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:53.134)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:07.755)
Yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (19:20.702)
So, yeah, everyone's rapid releasing. And there's a lot of pressure on authors to write faster and more and faster and more. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:25.578)
Yeah, yeah it does, yeah. Faster and more volume and velocity as my boss at HP used to say, volume and velocity. That actually brings me to a question I was going to address later, but that was how often to publish. You often hear that people who make it big in self-publishing are the ones who can turn out multiple books a year and have a back catalog of 15 or 20 titles deep. That was one of the things that I was talking about with another self-published author.

and she actually is in the position where she has 15 or 20 titles and so she has that deep back bench and more power to her. I'm not there yet. Cassie, you obviously have a deep back bench and you're making it deeper progressively every time I turn around.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:16.971)
Is this the goal? Is this the plan? Is it to make the bench so deep that there's always something more for somebody to read once they found you?

Cassie Alexander (20:28.275)
Um, I definitely hope so. Um, but you know, hearkening back to the branding thing earlier, I definitely wrote some books that were like one-offs and larks that made me happy at the time, but aren't really functioning as like a part of the machine. Um, here's this one.

Deborah L. Davitt (20:38.798)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (20:44.215)
romance author, Alana Johnson, and she has this metaphor that she likes in some of her books about writing about like, some books are donkeys, some books are racehorses, you know, and, you know, it's better to put your money behind your racehorse books. You can always like change the cover on a donkey, but chances are you're not going to magically make that a bestselling book. So while I do have a backlist, not all of it is performing as much as I would like it to be. Obviously, though, that's the goal.

to have a deep enough backlist and to be diversified enough. And for you as an author to have the ability to recognize where trends are going and how to keep marketing it now that things keep coming up like TikTok or like discrete covers or like, you know, fancy dust jackets and stuff like that. Keep your books fresh to go with the times. I think like, I think like every author I know has recovered their books like three times in the past like five years.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:38.702)
Oh my God, I feel like now I need to catch up.

Cassie Alexander (21:42.107)
Well, I feel like you kind of have to, and a lot of people just do that because then it makes your book seem like it's a new book project, especially when you are doing like Amazon ads to it, then people feel like they haven't seen it before and maybe use a different blurb or a different hook and all of a sudden they're interested in clicking it and this is the cover that draws them in. So yeah, so having a backlist is wonderful. Having a backlist that makes you money is wonderful, but you do have to tend to your backlist. You can't just let it lie follow.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:00.47)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (22:11.279)
or else your cover trends will get off. Maybe even your title trends will get off and your blurb might get old. Maybe you have something that's in dual person POV and you don't mention that in your blurb, but that's hot right now, so you should, that sort of thing. And nothing ever said it, but forget it.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:16.002)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:26.898)
Okay. Interesting. So there's a lot of trend and there's lots of trend analysis that you do. And I find it fascinating. And I don't have the background to be able to get into it with you, unfortunately. I would love to hear more. But I'm going to bop over to Abby and ask her, you have a six title deep series that has

Is this the one that lets you move into traditional publishing off of WattAd and Royal Road, or is it a different series that lets you move into the traditional space?

Abby Goldsmith (23:05.786)
Well, this is it. Yeah, I got an offer from Podium. So Podium is a kind of midsize newer publisher. They call themselves an indie publisher. They are not big five, although I think they're seeking big five distribution and so forth. They're really a nifty publisher. I like them a lot. And they're taking risks, unlike a lot of the big five. So yeah, and I like that about them. So it's great to be with them.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:28.736)
Yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (23:35.854)
But yeah, you know, it's a little bit of a, people call it a hybrid model where they kind of give the author a little more freedom in leeway than a traditional big five publisher would do. You know, yes, they're indie-ish.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:47.084)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:52.002)
That's it, that's not a bad thing at all. I'm going to ask you a specific follow-up question, which is, my previous experience with indie publishers has been that they expect you to do a lot of the marketing footwork yourself. Do you find that Podium supports you a little bit better than other independent publishers, or are you finding yourself doing some of the legwork yourself?

Abby Goldsmith (23:54.883)
Yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (24:17.238)
Honestly, no, they're very supportive that way. They are running ads for me. They are doing, you know, they funded the covers, the audio books. And they're, yes, you know, so yeah, I could always like give you some gripes. Part of it is that my books are not the usual fare that they're used to. So they mostly specialize in lit RPG. And.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:27.529)
Nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:38.045)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:41.426)
Okay.

Abby Goldsmith (24:42.378)
Yeah, and also progression fantasy, which mine is, but mine's offbeat. Mine is not your typical progression fantasy. It's dark, and a lot of them are kind of more lighthearted. In mine, sci-fi, a lot of them are fantasy. So it's something where I think that they're just not used to marketing that particular weird thing.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:03.65)
that's fair and a lot of marketing comes down to being able to have that experience and have that knowledge of where the trends are and where the audience is. And yeah, if they don't have that necessarily, then it is a harder road for them to go along. So yeah. This is something, going wide versus going narrow. This is something that Cassie talks about a lot on her blog.

Cassie Alexander (25:37.719)
It's okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:48.326)
I'm going wide has advantages and going narrow has other advantages. Uh, going narrow is very easy. It's very easy to put a book on Amazon and just push the button and you're done. And you can, it's a one venue for distribution and that's all your eggs in one basket. And it's easy. It's simple, but, and.

Going wide requires a lot of mental investment, a lot of keeping track of multiple eggs and multiple baskets in places that you didn't even know that baskets could even exist. So talk to me a little bit about going wide because I know this is what you've been doing for the past year to year and a half. And it is been just again, mind blowing to read about.

Cassie Alexander (26:39.807)
Yeah, so first off, for anybody listening, the blog that Deborah's talking about is totally private, so you guys can't watch it. Sorry. But but Deborah has seen the sausage get made. Um, yeah, basically in 2021, I decided to nuke my old career, which had been some tried published some halfheartedly self published stuff. In November 2021, I like nuked it from orbit and restarted everything.

I decided to be white at that time because I still have a day job. So I still have normal money coming in. So I didn't need to put all my eggs into Amazon's basket in the hope that if I pulled the lever, they'll give me a lot of money. I have a little FOMO about that because I know that certain romances in certain genres that I saw do quite well in KU. But at the same time, I don't.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:17.013)
Ha ha.

Cassie Alexander (27:30.443)
I'm a grown up and I wouldn't feel comfortable putting all of my ability to earn money into one basket. Amazon is, every once in a while they ban people, you know, you'll be scrolling through TikTok or Instagram and there'll be some pretty author in tears saying, Amazon banned my account, please yell at them so I can get it back, I need the money for rent. And I just never want that to be me. And I'm not making fun of those people. Those things are like tragic, especially too because Amazon does that a lot with like bots, like they've actually banned like really famous authors.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:50.361)
Hehehehehehe

Cassie Alexander (28:00.047)
Those people have much easier recourse though than the people who have to cry on Instagram. So that said, it is a slight pain in the butt to get started with it, especially if you do have a backlist because like I was having to upload like 10 or 15 different titles on five different vendors. So it does take work. But then once things are up there, it's fairly set it and forget it. You know, I don't really have to touch those files all that much.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:05.986)
Yeah.

Cassie Alexander (28:29.991)
I do try to participate in different promotions that assorted vendors offer. You probably know on Amazon, you've got the ability when you're in KU to set your books for free for like a week. That's the push or five days, every 90 days. But Kobo has something similar to that. If you ask to be on the promotions tab, Barnes & Noble does as well. If you ask to be on their promotions tab, Google Play lets you come up with your own coupons in their backend.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:43.086)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (28:59.275)
All of the other vendors make it way more easy to change your price too than Amazon does. Because frequently you have to like write them nice notes about like, can I please, please have my price changed to free to price match all my other things. And then they'll send you an email back that's like, we have discretion for everything, maybe in 72 hours. They always wind up doing it, but they just have to like pull that little like, we're still in charge of you, huh? Type thing. So, right now the majority of my income is still from Amazon, unfortunately.

But I do see myself getting traction on the other vendors. And so, yeah, that's where I would like to go. And also too, I'm doing more stuff with my store and direct sales, which is another way for me to keep all my money and all of the data from the people who buy from me, which is super exciting because even all the vendors across the board keep 30%. Whereas if somebody buys an ebook from me, I get the full value of it, you know?

And then I have the opportunity to, on my store, to offer like a 30% off coupon. And I look like I'm being all generous. And in essence, I'm still making the same money that I would have made if they had bought that book on Amazon, but only now I have their data so that I can email them and say, you know, if you liked that book, you might like this other book too. So there's some forethought that goes into it and some hustle. And that's probably way more information than you wanted Deborah, sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:04.952)
Hehehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (30:23.558)
No, no, this is great. This is wonderful. I recently had somebody who was interested in my books reach out to me and go, Well, I don't want to I don't want to buy the ebook, but your books cost too much money on Amazon. And I'm just saying they're going, I make five cents a book, really, that's all I make. Because these are six, they're paperback, and they're big. So the

Cassie Alexander (30:43.419)
on your paperback.

Cassie Alexander (30:47.078)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (30:49.282)
They're not the nice, neat, little traditional published 300 page novels. They are big honkers. So yeah, I can't set it any lower than it is, other than maybe putting in a push for it to be free, but that's never going to happen with the softback.

Cassie Alexander (30:55.844)
Yeah.

Cassie Alexander (31:01.648)
Yeah.

Cassie Alexander (31:08.695)
The, um, for paperbacks to, that's so tricky. And Ingram is such a dick about math. If you look at their backend, they're the people who you can send your books to. So it'll be represented all over the world theoretically. But then they want, you know, they want you to incorporate their wholesale discount into your price, which is, I find bizarre. Um, yeah, so that's difficult. Um, about the, how was I going to say about the paperback though? Yeah. I try to make it least.

three to four to five dollars on all my paperbacks. Just because I do want to make some money from those. Oh, I know what I was going to say. If you make a collection of stuff and you put it on Amazon, say you bundle up three, four or five of your books, part of the problem is that the biggest Amazon, the highest price that Amazon will give you royalties on is 9.99. So if you put like, let's just say for math's sake.

Deborah L. Davitt (31:44.179)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (32:04.387)
four or five dollar books together, you want to charge twenty dollars for that book bundle, you can do that on Kobo, you can do that on Google Play, you can do that on Apple, and they will give you all the money, so they'll give you seventy percent of that twenty dollars. But Amazon will be all like, no, here's your seventy percent of 9.99, which kind of sucks. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:23.547)
Oof. That's rough.

Cassie Alexander (32:25.264)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:27.094)
Ugh.

We've talked about transitioning from indie to hybrid, although if Abby wants to talk some more about that, we can totally do so, because this is a fascinating subject for me, because you've had experience in both. And what would you say the biggest advantage or the biggest nice surprise you've had out of that experience of changing from being solely indie to being hybrid?

Abby Goldsmith (32:58.242)
Oh, man, I don't know. I mean, I love the fact that, so I've never done an audiobook before, and they're taking care of it for me. And just, yeah, being able to hear that, get the files. And I'm just like, oh, wow, you know, hear the performance. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I have to say, for a six book, million word series, that's a lot of money if you're indie to pay for audiobooks for. Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:13.566)
I feel like a real author. I'm a real girl!

Deborah L. Davitt (33:23.194)
Yes, it is. Yeah, it really, really is. I had somebody reach out to me saying, I would love to be the voice of your audiobooks. I will only charge you this amount per hour that I'm working on it. I'm like, yes, that's nice. And you did a wonderful promo for me, but I cannot afford you. So yeah.

Which of your many upcoming or recent projects do you most want to talk about? Obviously, you've got majority and the six books that are out or coming out via this. Do you have anything new coming out after that you would like to talk about or that you can talk about?

Abby Goldsmith (34:07.71)
I mean, I'll just say like I'm busy writing other stuff and I'm working on a new series, but I am planning to serialize it before publication, just like I did with Torth. So yeah, it'll be on Royal Road at some point.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:19.4)
Oh nice.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:24.514)
Can you give us any tidbits about what this might be about? Is it gonna be sci-fi again? Are you gonna go more fantasy?

Abby Goldsmith (34:29.742)
Fantasy this time. Yeah. So I always like to do some kind of crazy, like, I guess, social commentary going on with my books. Like, Torth is very much about kind of collective group think, you know, the dangers of peer pressure online. So Twitter mobs, Reddit mobs, that sort of thing. And that's kind of what I was really drilling into with Torth. And this new one, it's kind of a critique of.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:51.943)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Goldsmith (34:58.99)
the current job market in Western world, sort of like the inshittification of jobs, and as they say, bullshit jobs. So it's kind of like what I've got going on is magic. There's a hard magic system involved. And magic has become bureaucratized and inshittified. So it's very corporate. So I've got a young upstart that just starts like reverse engineering.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:08.384)
Yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (35:27.786)
magic and doing it his own way and causing a lot of problems for the bureaucracy.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:34.198)
this sounds fascinating. This sounds like it's going to be wonderful. And yeah, so are you doing the insane route of writing it all up front and then serializing it, or are you releasing it a little bit at a time as you write it?

Abby Goldsmith (35:37.227)
It's gonna be fun, yeah.

Abby Goldsmith (35:48.426)
Well, sadly, I wish I was such a fast writer that I could do it all up front before releasing it. But I am not the fastest writer. I don't have that speed demon ability, which some of these web serial writers, by the way, really do. There's one guy that has written an 11 million word series. And he writes something like 60,000 words per day or some ludicrous amount.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:03.903)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:15.493)
I have done that. It's been a while since I've been able to do that, but I have done that.

Abby Goldsmith (36:19.37)
This person does it consistently and has been doing it for 10 years. And people theorize that it's two people. But anyway, who knows? But I don't know. But yeah, but for me, I can't do that. I'm not that kind of a speed demon. I'm and I do tend to rewrite sometimes like I'll go back and be like, well, this whole structure isn't working. We scrapped that and start again. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:26.954)
He he he!

Cassie Alexander (36:29.763)
Oh my gosh, it's wild. It's raining.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:43.484)
Mm-hmm.

Abby Goldsmith (36:46.394)
Anyway, so yeah, I will write as much of it as I can before Torth plays out which The final book of Torth will be coming out in 2025 so Yeah, so they're coming out. I do have some time. Yeah, they come out every four months So there'll be three books coming out this coming year and then the last two will come out in 2025 Yep, so hopefully I'll have I hope I'll have a lot of my new series written by them

Deborah L. Davitt (36:57.966)
Oh wow, so you've got some time here.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:10.763)
Outstanding.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:15.594)
Oh yes, this will be awesome. I can't wait to hear more about it. And then you can come back on the podcast and tell me more about it then too. It'll be wonderful. Cassie, you do so much stuff. What of your mini boiling pots on your stove that's overflowing? Would you like to talk about most? Would you like to direct people to read? And I will point out that

Abby Goldsmith (37:24.372)
Thank you.

Cassie Alexander (37:30.832)
Ha ha ha!

Deborah L. Davitt (37:45.258)
Cassie's stuff is very hot. It's very steamy. This is maybe not what Deborah's readers are going to be looking for, but maybe they will. They just don't know it yet.

Cassie Alexander (37:58.267)
Probably the most, the thing that makes the most sense to send people to would be my bend her, break her and make her series, which is a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It's a high heat, but slow burn dual POV romance with a very sheltered princess who wants to learn magic, but her society won't let her. And a beast mage who knows that she is destined to kill him, but who has to teach her how to do magic.

So, yeah. And all three books are out. And so and people seem to like them. So if you go and you cruise a review or two and you're like, oh, that's my GM. That's what I would be into. As for what I'm doing next, I actually wrote an alternate universe version of those books set in the contemporary world, which has no magic with vaguely the same characters, but with a lot of the same tropes.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:29.65)
Okay. Sounds like a, yeah, that sounds like it must be amazing.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:56.453)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (38:57.071)
book of that should be coming out in June and it's called Take Her, but I, it's a contemporary novel, totally different. Age gap contemporary romance, mafia romance type thing, very dark.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:05.301)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:10.87)
Sounds like fun again. I love the fact that you will change perspectives, change settings, change this, change that. It keeps you going and keeps you more alive and more interested in your work.

Cassie Alexander (39:26.135)
Yeah, yeah, this is my first contemporary novel, so I'm really interested in seeing how it goes. I'm going to give a contemporary trilogy a try, and I'm hoping that does go well. I'm hoping to kind of create like an Ouroboros where people who like the contemporary one, that's contemporary romance is just such a vastly huge pond. So maybe they finish that series and they want to relive the vibe, so maybe they come to the fantasy romance version and vice versa is my hope. So we'll see.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:52.862)
Okay, sounds like a plan. I don't have any more questions. Is there anything that anybody would like to talk about that I haven't asked you about? Abby, have I not scratched anything open that needs to be talked about?

Abby Goldsmith (40:09.574)
I guess not. I mean, I will say like if the listeners are writers, you know There's kind of like a pipeline like Royal Road to Amazon where a lot of authors right now are jumping on that I don't know how long that gold rush is gonna last but um, there's definitely I see a kind of a feeding frenzy going on that website right now and they just launched an app and So yeah, I see like podium a fun books and a whole lot of other publishers

kind of are making offers to authors on there that have, you know, 2000 followers or so. So, yeah, I'm definitely seeing that.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:45.013)
Interesting.

And something I completely forgot to ask Cassie about is the fact that I have spotted her work over on story loom, which is an interactive fiction site where so This is another way of engaging with your audience or finding a new audience. How did that go for you.

Cassie Alexander (41:07.387)
So that's been a really interesting experience and I'm sorry I sound weird now, I just stuffed a cough drop in my mouth.

Deborah L. Davitt (41:12.914)
I'm so, you sound great, you sound fine.

Cassie Alexander (41:16.091)
Um, so my current editor at story loom is a old time fan of mine who found me through my newsletter and asked me to come into their beta program. Um, story loom is run by pixel Barry, who are the same people who do the choices app, which is a really popular app. And so story loom lets you create like your own decision point for these characters using their assets. So I turned venture into a graphic novel over there using, um,

Deborah L. Davitt (41:29.961)
Mm-hmm.

Cassie Alexander (41:43.603)
my own art that I had AI generated and my own words, but now I'm actually taking some of my other books and adding choices to them to give to them. For me, I view... One second, sorry.

Cassie Alexander (41:59.999)
I view every different app as kind of like a separate reader bubble. I know a lot of people are afraid if they load their books onto Radish or Wattpad or Royal Road or whatever that you'll be cannibalizing readers from other locations. But I don't actually feel like that's the case. I feel like people who want to read on their apps are going to read on their apps and people want to read on Amazon are going to read on Amazon. So anything you can do to get your IP out as many places as possible is going to make

Deborah L. Davitt (42:06.142)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:21.262)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:27.135)
Yeah.

Cassie Alexander (42:27.619)
easier for you to reach people. So I'm excited to see my new book with them, Dragon's Captive, comes out, I think they're releasing the first two chapters two days from now on Wednesday. And I'm excited to see how it does. As they've been opening up their beta program, we've gotten like more and more readers and playing the games and stuff, so it's been a fun experience.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:52.194)
Fantastic. All right. Thank you both for having been on the show. It was a wonderful conversation. Next week on Shining Moon, we're going to be talking to Katrina Archer, a Clifi and science fiction writer and editor of the magazine, Little Blue Marble. Katrina is gonna kick off our environmental reading series, which is stacked deep with fascinating people and important discussions. Thank you all for your time and we are out.