An emerging crisis that’s been the talk of education and publishing is children’s loss of interest in books.

If you’ve spent any time moving in those circles, you’re familiar with the usual suspects. Phones, video games, social media are commonly named culprits. Others pin the blame on Gen Alpha’s fruit fly attention span. Or schools indoctrinating kids to project their feelings onto text instead of teaching them to extract meaning from it.

But new reporting suggests we may be casting blame on the wrong generation.

A HarperCollins study found that only 41 percent of British children under age five were frequently read to at home last year.

That’s a significant decline from 64 percent in 2012. And it suggests that millions of kids were robbed of the chance to fall in love with reading over the course of a decade.

But wait, it gets worse.

Only 36 percent of children between the ages of five and seven were regularly read to at home. And among kids aged eight to ten, the figure plunged to 22 percent.

The natural question is why?

And parents are not going to like the answer.

Because just 40 percent of the parents surveyed said they found reading to their children fun. And younger parents were more likely to reduce reading to a practical skill instead of an enjoyable pastime.

It turns out that what everybody missed amid the panic over plummeting literacy is that kids have to be taught books are fun.

The data show that children who are read to daily are almost three times more likely to read independently than children who are read to just once a week.

All of which points the finger at adults relegating reading to homework; not kids spontaneously deciding that books aren’t fun.

Imagine introducing children to movies by only showing them industrial films and making them write reports on each one. That’s what parents have done with books, and it’s why the reading crisis can’t be ascribed to kids innately preferring screens.

Books have always had competition for our attention. The difference is that previous generations of parents made books part of family life. Nielsen research backs up that theory, finding that seeing their parents enjoy books encourages children to read.

Why did everybody miss that point? Because literacy controversy is hyper-focused on institutions. The talk is all about banning phones from classrooms and increasing funding for libraries.

But policy isn’t the main driver of cultural transmission.

The family is.

You’re not born knowing to sing carols at Christmas, paint eggs at Easter, or throw eggs at annoying neighbors’ houses on Halloween.

Those lessons need to be gathered from your immediate surroundings.

And the home is the first school.

We do see some glimmers of hope that the decline may finally be slowing. The National Literacy Trust found that reading enjoyment among British children rose from 32.7 percent last year to 36.1 percent this year, the first increase since 2021. And daily reading inched upward. But the numbers are still below historical levels.

Yet the decline is not irreversible. And the solution may be far simpler than overhauling education or spending billions on national literacy programs.

Pick out good books, and read them with your kids. Let them see you reading other good books.

The West has long labored under the spiritual affliction of subordinating leisure to work. If we want to solve the literacy crisis, we need to stop treating licit pleasure as a distraction.

We’ve been spinning our wheels fretting over why kids stopped loving books.

Maybe we should put some effort into teaching them to love reading again.

Enjoy the post? Unlock the full archive and all future paywalled essays by upgrading to a Substack membership here.

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The campaign funded in 3 hours and unlocked new art on day 1. Don’t miss your last chance to claim early bird rewards.

Back SD10 today on Kickstarter.

If you were an author, film maker, or musician, you needed a publisher, a studio, or a record label to grant access to an audience. Even if you knew exactly what you wanted to create, production and distribution required underwriting from big firms with deep pockets.

Then an unexpected sea change hit the industry. Come the dawn of the twenty-first century, millions of creators started writing their own tickets.

Kickstarter has been at the forefront of the indie revolution. A look at their seventeen-year history offers compelling evidence of how far crowdfunding has come. More than 24 million people have now backed projects on the platform, and roughly a third have supported more than one.

It’s a striking reminder of how art used to get made for centuries: patronage. The Church, the nobility, merchant families, and governments provided resources to artisans in exchange for the works they wanted to foster.

The modern entertainment industry replaced visionary patrons invested in their cultures with corporate culture beholden to investors. Instead of impressing a Medici to get funding, modern artists had to convince talent scouts, agents, and editors that they were fellow travelers. Access to audiences became concentrated in even fewer hands.

Now, the advent of digital distribution and crowdfunding have democratized market access. Instead of courting a billion-dollar megacorp, or one patron with $100,000, a creator can find 1,000 patrons with $100: a new take on a venerable model, which I and others call neopatronage.

And seventeen years in, the old gatekeepers can’t dismiss the new patronage as a passing fad.

Consider last year’s big Kickstarters. Ali Hazelwood and Adriana Herrera’s After the End anthology raised more than $1 million. A Transformers compendium brought in $4.6 million. And 2025’s biggest campaign raised an astronomical $46.7 million.

Kickstarter itself can tell which way the wind is blowing. Last month, they launched a million-dollar Culture Fund that directly pledges to independent creators’ campaigns.

Let’s take a minute to think about the implications.

Crowdfunding arose as a way to finance projects the establishment wouldn’t support. Now the alternative has become its own institution.

Under the reign of the old gatekeepers, an author could write the exact book readers wanted and still fail because he couldn’t interest an agent, or the agent couldn’t sell it to an editor.

A film maker could have an audience waiting to throw money at a movie and nevertheless get nowhere because studio executives didn’t see a percentage in it.

Neopatronage flips the table by giving the audience a vote. And a direct vote; not an engineered choice between gatekeeper-selected products.

To be sure, crowdfunding has its challenges for creators. But its competitive advantage is letting audiences turn their preference into direct, tangible action.

And after seventeen years of directly funding the books, movies, and music they want, people trained to be customers in the old system have learned to embrace the role of patrons in the new one.

Far from some abstract theory, I got an especially vivid practical demonstration of neopatronage this morning.

Today, we launched the Kickstarter campaign for the 10th Anniversary Edition of my horror adventure novel Souldancer.

Ten years ago, readers helped make Souldancer a Dragon Award winner. Today, they funded the new special edition in less than three hours.

The project didn’t need approval from a frustrated litfic author-turned-editor at a New York publishing house.

It just needs approval from you, the reader.

Patronage has returned, and the patrons no longer lounge in baroque palaces. They’re readers, viewers, and gamers scattered around the world, pooling their resources to help create the entertainment they want.

The experiment is over. Neopatronage is now an institution.

And today, the readers once again reminded us why.

Enjoy the post? Unlock the full archive and all future paywalled essays by upgrading to a Substack membership here.

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The Kickstarter is live and met its initial goal within 3 hours. Don’t miss your chance to claim early bird rewards and the new, crowdfunder-exclusive novella.

Back SD10 on Kickstarter.

The latest development in the digital game ownership controversy shows Sony have yet to learn that lesson.

When a PlayStation customer clicks a button clearly labeled “Buy,” hands Sony money, and downloads a game, does he actually own what he just bought?

Sony’s lawyers argue the answer is obviously not.

A group of California gamers recently filed a proposed class action suit alleging that Sony misleads customers with terms like “Buy Now” and “Confirm Purchase” despite Sony claiming that PlayStation Store transactions just grant revocable licenses.

Sony responded that its disclosures already make the arrangement sufficiently clear and that reasonable customers shouldn’t think they acquire ownership of digital games.

Sony’s Software Product License Agreement is even more blunt: “The Software is licensed to you, not sold.”

Sony’s lawyers argue that this language, along with disclosures presented during checkout, satisfies California’s digital goods transparency requirements.

Now, maybe the court will agree; maybe not.

But regardless of any legal finding, Sony’s real problem will remain. In fact, winning could make it worse.

For months, we’ve watched the growing discontent with Sony’s plan to stop making physical PlayStation games in 2028. And that backlash has a clear reason: Discs provide forms of control that digital licenses don’t. You can lend a disc to a friend, sell it, or buy somebody else’s used copy.

Perhaps more important than what you can do with physical media is what someone else can’t do with it. When you own the Blu-ray of a game, Sony can’t remove your access to it after the fact.

And in trying to defend their client, Sony’s lawyers just made that difference explicit.

What the megacorps and their legal counsel fail to grasp is that when the public’s common understanding is clicking “buy” means they own a product, pointing to a microscopic line of legalese in the EULA that says they’re wrong doesn’t appease them.

Instead, when a customer who thought he shelled out $70 to own a game is told he merely rented a license, he learns he can’t trust the company.

Add in that Sony is about to take away the customer’s only alternative, and you see the hole they’re busily digging themselves into.

Sony says digital downloads were 78 percent of their most recent yearly game sales. So at first glance, stopping disc production might look like the most cost-effective decision.

What they’re missing are the second and third-order consequences.

Sony has already been slapped with litigation claiming monopolistic practices in digital PlayStation sales. Getting rid of physical options while making their platform the only sales channel is just asking for more intense antitrust scrutiny.

But regulators aren’t Sony’s only concern.

They’re entirely overlooking the biggest potential threat to their video game business: the competition.

Let’s say that Microsoft, or even Nintendo, keep supporting physical releases while Sony ditches them. They can capture market share simply by continuing to offer customers what Sony took away.

For context, Sony’s physical game sales last year totaled around $80 million. If MS or the Big N can lure away even a fraction of that business, Sony will feel it. And any losses will effectively be doubled from their perspective: Whatever they lose, the competition gains.

What the current class of megacorp leadership miss is that short-term efficiency can yield long-term loss. Your trimmed inefficiency can be the other guy’s competitive advantage.

Closer to home, that’s why newpub authors still release physical books. Sure, a print edition costs more to make than an eBook. Receiving delivery via snail mail is less efficient than downloading an epub. Yet readers place added value on aesthetically pleasing books they can hold, display, and lend.

And sometimes “inefficiency” is just another word for giving customers what they want.

Any company that decides to stop meeting its customers’ expectations is in for serious trouble.

Sony may win in court. The judge might rule that gamers should have known better than to think they owned what they bought.

Such is the modern legal system.

The fact is, that argument won’t convince the customers who alone justify and maintain Sony’s continued existence.

And if a competitor offers them a better deal, not even the most ironclad Sony TOS can stop them from leaving for publishers that offer them what they want.

Enjoy the post? Unlock the full archive and all future paywalled essays by upgrading to a Substack membership here.

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The Kickstarter launches September 1, featuring early bird rewards and a crowdfunder-exclusive hardcover of the new novella.

Follow the Kickstarter now to be notified the moment limited rewards go live!

The Council of Kairos met once again in July to tackle pressing questions of craft, marketing, and wellbeing for authors.

If you would like a peak through the Council chamber keyhole at the weighty matters discussed inside, you may meditate on the questions posed by our Council members below.

But first, enjoy a sample of the stream:

Now on to the questions!

Read more

During July’s vigorous AMA discussions, the Council of Kairos not only addressed practical matters of craft, we also delved into visual marketing and more personal questions of author wellbeing.

Get the sometimes heavy, always informative, Q&A audio below!

Read more

So authors who love to write short stories were told to stuff them in trunks, use them as newsletter freebies, or stitch them together into novels.

But now, short fiction may be on the cusp of a renaissance nobody saw coming.

The Bookseller reports growing interest in short stories. Readers are getting excited about shorter books and slim fiction. Which raises an important question:

Why did short fiction lose commercial viability to begin with?

It wasn’t that readers always preferred longer novels. Short fiction used to be everywhere. Pulp magazines amassed huge readerships and launched authors who are still household names.

Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Ray Bradbury. All made their bones writing stories you can read in one sitting.

Then the industry killed the magazine market that gave short fiction distribution. Attention went to paperback novels, and authors changed focus accordingly.

So it’s not that readers suddenly started hating short stories. Instead, that form of storytelling lost its main delivery method.

But distribution models aren’t set in stone. And as of this writing, changes are underway that could bring short stories back into favor.

For one, readers don’t discover writers at newsstands or bookstores anymore. They connect with authors through newsletters, blogs, and social media.

And for another, short fiction need no longer compete for page inches or shelf space when eBooks afford practically unlimited storage.

Most importantly, newpub lets authors reach readers without getting a publisher’s permission.

And just like that, authors can stop trying to pad their novelettes into novels. They can publish fiction of whatever length best serves the tale.

Even oldpub has noticed the trend. Take the launch of Uncertain Stories, an Edinburgh house devoted to publishing illustrated short fiction for adults. And activist Juhea Kim just sold her first short story collection to Borough Press, along with her next novel.

Now, do any of these developments mean that short stories are poised to dethrone the novel? To put it mildly, that outcome is unlikely.

But a market condition that most writers regarded as permanent may be passing away with the last vestiges of the twentieth century.

Recall that oldpub once insisted that eBooks were a flash in the pan. The received wisdom held that indie novels couldn’t compete with the Big Five’s offerings. Crowdfunding novels sounded even more ridiculous until authors started raising six, seven, and eight figures directly from patrons.

What each case has in common is that technology changed the economics of writing before the industry caught up.

We might be seeing a similar correction in the short fiction market. And newpub authors are uniquely positioned to benefit. Because our competitive advantages has always been the ability to stop designing books around someone else’s distribution system.

If your story’s natural ending comes at the 25,000-word mark, you can let it end there.

Want to publish several related stories throughout the year before collecting them into a hardcover? No one’s stopping you.

Then there’s Royal Road, where you can serialize stories for your followers, giving readers a low-friction entry point into your world.

And the return of short fiction can benefit authors, too. It may not make sense to invest two years writing a 150,000-word novel in a new genre. But a 15,000-word story is the perfect place to experiment.

Let’s not overlook the opportunity for audience growth, either. A reader who balks at shelling out $20 and ten hours trying a new author can still justify spending a couple of bucks and one evening on you.

Short fiction used to give readers a highly visible door to easily access writers’ works. Let’s hope that the market is finally rediscovering what the pulps understood a century ago: When it comes to storytelling, length doesn’t necessarily bespeak quality.

And you can make your next story exactly as long as it needs to be.

Enjoy the post? Unlock the full archive and all future paywalled essays by upgrading to a Substack membership here.

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The Kickstarter launches September 1, featuring early bird rewards and a crowdfunder-exclusive hardcover of the new novella.

Follow the Kickstarter now to be notified the moment limited rewards go live!

Tell me if this picture is familiar: You send in the manuscript. Your editor sends it back with typos fixed, sentences streamlined, and plot holes filled.

That’s a common misconception. And it explains why many new authors view professional editing as a luxury.

If my prose is already polished, they reason, I can scrimp on editing and increase my budget for covers or ads.

What they miss is that many of professional editing’s greatest benefits have little to do with fixing grammar or even plot structure.

Consider this writing paradox: By the time you finish your first draft, you may have spent hundreds or thousands of hours on it.

Which means you know all about it. Probably too much.

Because from your perspective deep inside the book, the motives behind every writing decision seem self-evident. Information readers will need to understand the plot may be missing, but you won’t know, because your brain automatically fills in every detail. Even the most confusing paragraph can make perfect sense to you, because you know what it’s supposed to say.

Many authors who recognize this quandary turn to beta readers. And don’t get me wrong; good beta readers can certainly level up your game. But nine times out of ten, new authors enlist their family, friends, and like-minded writers for beta-reading duty. Which just kicks the objectivity problem one step down the road.

And that’s one lingering problem professional editing solves instantly.

Because by the nature of the author-editor relationship, your editor is invested in the book, minus the personal investment in coddling you.

Put it this way: Your editor will approach your book much more like a paying reader will than how your beta readers do.

The term for that is advance market research.

True, your editor can’t foresee every reader’s reaction to the book. But an objective professional offers you the best preview of how paying strangers may receive your writing.

And that’s only one overlooked benefit of professional editing.

Hiring an established editor also brings you into close collaboration with an established publishing professional. And your editor has other connections in turn.

Think about it. Editors know cover artists, formatters, narrators, publishers, reviewers, and veteran authors. More importantly, they learn who reliably delivers and get a sense for whose interest your work might pique.

That’s not to say that hiring an editor gets you access to his industry black book. It is to say that professional relationships naturally develop between successful collaborators.

To put it bluntly, if you produce quality writing, meet deadlines, and are overall easy to work with, chances are you get name-dropped favorably in professional circles.

That’s a marked departure from how most new authors view networking, which they mainly see as posting on X and attending conventions. But never underestimate the simple power of doing good business with established professionals.

Networking has been a perk of professional editing from the beginning, but hiring an editor has acquired new importance in recent years. And the way technology is moving, this emerging benefit will only grow in value.

Hiring an editor gives you evidence.

Pull a book off your shelf, and look at the copyright page. You’ll see the names of editors, illustrators, and other contributors who were instrumental in bringing that title to market.

More than a legal formality or traditional courtesy, those contributors’ names provide the book with human credentials. They tell the reader at a glance that this book is the work of real people doing professional work.

It’s frankly shocking how few newpub authors perceive that advantage. And it’s baffling how seldom those who do know the power of social proof take advantage of it.

Imagine the following scenario: A reader who loves your book’s exact mood, tone, and genre is browsing Amazon. This reader has also heard about the flood of LLM slop cluttering KDP. He comes across your book. You’ve prepared for this moment with killer cover, prompting him to read the blurb, which is likewise precision-engineered to grab his interest.

Yet a sudden doubt nags the reader’s mind: This looks too good to be true. What if [Your Name] is really a pseudonym for a chatbot?

If he scans the paperback preview, or checks the contributor bylines at the top of the page and sees an editor, specifically one whose career started before Claude was a glint in any tech bro’s eye, do you think that doubt keeps nagging or quiets down?

Crediting a real editor assures prospective readers that an objective professional vetted the book before the author asked for the sale.

Especially savvy readers already know that books churned out by slop mills don’t credit real editors. Taking the time to have a human professional do QA would defeat the point of their super high-volume business model.

These three overlooked benefits of hiring a professional editor highlight why authors who judge editing by counting blue pencil marks are only measuring one part of a far more extensive service.

Does professional editing make books better? Yes.

But it also provides you with informed feedback from outside your social circle, fosters professional relationships inside your industry, and gives your book unimpeachable credibility.

Remember that oldpub rose to power by creating an artificial bottleneck between writers and readers, then restricting market access only to books their editors approved. Whatever your opinion of oldpub’s gatekeeping, the perception of quality and authenticity it acquired still persists.

Amazon removed most barriers to entry years ago. And now A.I. is leveling the rest. But newpub also gives independent authors access to many of the same quality and authenticity markers the Big Five publishers made their name on. And the ability to hire a professional editor with a decade of experience, for a one-time fee instead of 85 percent of your royalties forever, gives newpub a major competitive advantage.

Readers face the equal and opposite problem of deciding which books deserve their limited time and hard-earned money. Seeing an editor’s credit in the book or on its Amazon page offers them an instant solution.

Because working with an editor is the most effective way to tell readers that your book is ready for them.

Want to make your book stand out? Find the help you need here.

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The Kickstarter launches September 1, featuring early bird rewards and a crowdfunder-exclusive hardcover of the new novella.

Follow the Kickstarter now to be notified the moment limited rewards go live!

Robots, they told us, would replace all manual laborers. Computers would enable undreamed-of means of communication. And advances in genetic engineering might bring the advent of a whole new humanity.

Every new invention offered writers inspiration to imagine a radically different world.

Then the one change nobody saw coming happened: Technology started outpacing sciffy writers’ predictions of its effects.

Now everybody walks around with more processing power in their pockets than NASA used to guide the moon landing. Yet people remain obstinately human. Our lives still revolver around family religion, and nation.

And the old stories weather every technological upheaval. Because it turns out you can’t change human nature. So the questions those evergreen myths answer will never be obsolete.

That tension makes for some of the richest science fiction subject matter. Unfortunately, Late Modern sci fi tends to envision the future as Year Zero. As they see it, the advent of the Singularity will sweep away all that came before, obliging civilization to start over from a blank sheet of paper.

And somehow, what’s drawn on it every time is a worldwide Los Angeles with more neon and worse weather.

You call that what it is: A lazy waste of a respected genre’s potential.

Think about what does - and doesn’t - happen when new technologies cause widespread disruptions.

Cars afforded us previously inconceivable mobility, but we still have regional cultures. Television disseminated American entertainment on a global scale, yet individual nations persist. The internet connected everybody, which didn’t put paid to old political and sectarian rivalries; it just moved them online.

New technology doesn’t make society start over from square one after all. Instead, it’s absorbed into ancient human social frameworks. And almost nobody has been able to predict what happens next.

That’s why setting speculative fiction in places with deep cultural roots can provide richer soil for intriguing stories than yet another dystopian mgalopolis.

Imagine augmented reality set loose upon a society where religious iconography already saturates daily life. Picture human consciousness being digitally downloadable in culture whose religious tradition has long pondered reincarnation.

That’s when familiar science fiction concepts take on strange new implications.

What the best sci fi stories have always understood is that technology creates the disruption; human beings decide the consequences.

Which brings us to the new project from my friend and fellow author Nym Coy.

Nym has taken cyberpunk out of its familiar Western and East Asian settings and dropped it into Mumbai, where augmented reality, corporate intrigue, artificial consciousness, and Hindu mythology collide.

She recently launched a Kickstarter to produce an audiobook edition of Mumbai Singularity, and she’s brought us a sample.

How Do You Arrest a Goddess?

Hear the first sample from the Mumbai Singularity audiobook Kickstarter.

Author Nym Coy is bringing her mythic cyberpunk thriller, Mumbai Singularity, to audio. She’s teaming up with award-winning narrator David Sweeney-Bear, and the result is well worth hearing.

Check it out:

Rewards include the finished audiobook, an executive-producer tier with the backer’s name read in the credits, and Kickstarter-exclusive bonus scenes if the campaign reaches its stretch goals.

The Narrator

David Sweeney-Bear is a British voice actor and audio producer with over 50 titles and eight years of audiobook narration behind him. A 2026 Voice Arts Award winner, he’s an Audible Approved Producer with credits at HarperCollins and Audible.

His range is what made him the right fit, but his background sealed it. David grew up familiar with Indian culture and was proficient in Hindi and Urdu as a child. For a novel set entirely in Mumbai, with characters whose speech carries the rhythms of Indian English, it’s what lets him inhabit rather than merely perform them.

The Story

Inspector Krishna Mehta’s mesh antenna is broken. In a Mumbai where augmented reality overlays every surface, his glitching connection strands him in the raw city underneath.

That’s when he sees the marks.

Faint rainbow shimmers on people’s foreheads, invisible to everyone else. When the marked start dying from catastrophic brain haemorrhages, Krishna follows the pattern to a hospital shrine, a corporate conspiracy, and uploaded human consciousness running on living minds.

Someone is hijacking the gods themselves.

And the deeper he investigates, the more he realises the conspiracy isn’t just killing people.

It’s already inside his partner’s head.

Here’s what readers are saying

“The blend of tech, conspiracy, and myth concepts felt ambitious and genuinely different from the usual genre baseline.” — Fantasy-Faction ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“The ending is far more bizarre than anything I could have expected, but satisfying.” — Fandom Pulse ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Back Mumbai Singularity on Kickstarter →

“Why should we publish you?”

So writers devoted untold hours drafting query letters and courting agents. It’s hard to conceive of now, but not too long ago, getting in front of an audience meant signing a book deal with gatekeepers in Manhattan. That meant convincing them your book deserved access to their paper distribution monopoly.

Because as author J.A. Konrath observed, at the end of the day, oldpub was never in the story business. They’re in the lumber trade …

… which has become apparent as oldpub is forced to contend with authors who already have their own readerships.

A Bookseller report on the growing number of successful indie novels describes oldpub houses having to change their longstanding strategy. Now that newpub authors have learned to build audiences of their own, the tables have turned.

Once, big publishers demanded authors explain why oldpub should sign them.

Now, successful newpub authors are demanding to know why they should sign with oldpub.

Anytime in the twentieth century, such a power reversal would have sounded absurd. Back then, everybody knew that getting a book in front of readers required getting it into big publishers’ vertically integrated paper monopoly.

Then, in the second decade of this century, Amazon introduced the Kindle. Few now reflect on how massive the KDP revolution was in terms of social proof. Digital distribution, which had been practically unknown, rose to prominence overnight. Even print-on-demand lost its vanity press stigma. Don’t forget social media enabling direct writer-reader relationships, while crowdfunding replaced book advances.

The result? We watched the dominant; the only, publishing model become obsolete in a couple of years.

Oldpub was dead, they just didn’t know it yet. And for a little while longer, they could dismiss newpub as an amateurish fad.

Then several indie authors started producing genuine hits and making real money.

And we’re not just talking Andy Weir or Hugh Howey. For a recent example, consider H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth. Wolfe originally self-published the dystopian romance in December of 2025.

Fast-forward nine months: Simon & Schuster has just signed Wolfe to a two-book deal worth seven figures.

The first book of which hit #1 on the hardcover fiction list at Publishers Weekly.

Let’s review the sequence of events.

1. Author publishes a book

2. readers discover the book

3. oldpub comes courting the author.

What everybody’s missing about the Daggermouth deal is what S&S gave up in the bargain.

If you signed a book deal even twenty years ago, it was a given that the publisher would demand all rights to your work, including and especially the right of first publication.

But what S&S has just done is effectively bought Wolfe’s ancillary hardcover rights for seven figures.

Now do you have a better picture of just how much bargaining power newpub can generate?

Admittedly, Wolfe’s case is an outlier. It makes for a striking illustration of how the industry has changed, but we don’t need to rely on it as a representative newpub example.

Let’s say you’ve written a book. You hired an editor and a cover designer. Your social media following and newsletter subscriber base are both a few thousand strong. Maybe you’ve raised a couple grand from a crowdfunder or two.

You’ve already beaten the terms of a standard book deal, probably without knowing it.

So what do you need oldpub for?

The Big Five New York publishers just realized that authors have been asking that question for over a decade now.

And they’re scrambling for answers.

Because authors now know they face a stark choice:

1. Surrendering control over content, cover design, pricing, and publication schedules. Along with all rights to their work forever. In return, they get an average advance of $2500 which must be paid back, at 15 percent of each sale, before ever seeing a dime in royalties … which will be that same 15 percent of the cover price. All to borrow someone else’s audience.

2. Releasing the story they want in the cover they choose, setting the price and the launch date. Keeping all rights to every aspect of the book forever. Earning 65 to 90 percent royalties on every sale starting from day one. And forging a relationship with an audience no one can take away.

See why newpub has changed who’s pitching to whom?

The old model required authors to prove their worth before publishers deigned to grant them access to the market.

Today, newpub authors can show their books’ value directly to readers. Any publisher that comes calling later has to explain the value-add it offers to an already thriving business.

Because the fundamental dynamic has changed from an individual author dealing with a big corporation to one business that has measurable value negotiating with another.

Now, the goal of newpub isn’t a game of “notice me sempai!” to make yourself unignorable to oldpub. That way turns independence into a drawn-out audition for the gatekeepers.

What authors should take away instead is that newpub means becoming a publisher with a clientele of one: you; then growing that publisher into a business with real worth.

Build that engine, and you’ll have a tool with the intrinsic potential to accomplish any publishing goal you set. The rest will just be a matter of scaling it up.

So foster direct relationships with readers. Keep control of your rights. Then evaluate prospective partners by what they bring to the table.

For the whole of the twentieth century, writers performed for oldpub.

Now, newpub can let authors call the tune.

Enjoy the post? Unlock the full archive and all future paywalled essays by upgrading to a Substack membership here.

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The Kickstarter launches September 1, featuring early bird rewards and a crowdfunder-exclusive hardcover of the new novella.

Follow the Kickstarter now to be notified the moment limited rewards go live!

After all, Disney’s name graces movies, television networks, cruise ships, theme parks, streaming services, and enough merchandise to fill all the empty storefronts in your town’s dead mall.

Surely, MBAs would say, that empire sprang from brilliant brand management.

Yet history tells a different story. Instead of setting out to build a brand, Walt Disney resolved to create characters people would gladly spend hours with. Their stories came first, Walt’s empire followed.

These days, studios and publishers ignore that lesson. They’re far more apt to begin with grandiose plans for a cinematic universe nobody asked for. Somewhere, probably near the end of the planning meeting, somebody remembers that a story should probably accompany the product.

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For decades, Dark Sun fans awaited their grimy, gory setting’s return. Wizards of the Coast technically made an attempt in 2010, but that was Fourth Edition, so it didn’t count.

Now, WotC has finally answered longstanding demand. The postapocalyptic wasteland of Athas is coming back in 2027.

Wizards even took the extra step of billing Dark Sun 3.0 as mature content. The prelaunch marketing campaign featuring shrink-wrapped books positions Dark Sun as the hardcore setting for grown-ups who can handle dark themes.

And it was working. Early buzz spread through the gaming scene like wildfire.

Then the game’s executive producer opened his mouth.

Greg Bilsland told TTRPG Insider that the new Dark Sun is being run through even more sensitivity readers than usual. It is ostensibly their input that led him to say that the setting will not need to “focus on elements such as slavery” to feel oppressive. “There are other forms of oppression out there,” he said.

Translated from Corporatese, the company that disowned the original setting as “problematic” is now bringing it back after sanding off (pun intended) the unapproved kinds of misery.

The problem is that Slavery was not window dressing in Dark Sun. Athas’ city-states ran on the peculiar institution. The economy, the social hierarchy; the whole texture of daily life was informed by it.

Gladiator pits, slave tribes (and their revolts) formed key parts of the setting’s skeleton. Removing those elements is ideologically based erasure peddled as consumer protection.

The fact that Wizards doesn’t register the contradiction of covering Athas in foam padding while loudly advertising Dark Sun as mature content defines tone-deafness. You can’t ply your paying audience with promises of R-rated brutality while treating them like children who might soil themselves at the sight of historical reality.

That is how you know D&D has joined the growing pile of dead media. Whenever you see a corporate product marketed as edgy, you can bet sensitivity readers have filed it until it’s sharp as an grapefruit.

It’s the same rug-pull every time: Talk a big game about respect for the audience’s maturity while demonstrating zero respect for it.

If your readers are big enough for “mature content,” they are big enough to encounter slavery as a fact of a brutal secondary world. That goes double for one explicitly designed as a cautionary wasteland.

Yet legacy cultural institutions remain trapped in a world of morality plays with training wheels.

WotC’s doubletalk betrays their real hierarchy of concerns. Violence? Dial it up. Gore? Fine. Environmental collapse and tyrannical god-kings? The more the merrier.

But the institution that has defined most of human history until the last few centuries?

Too hot to handle!

The original Dark Sun was indeed gritty. But subtle it was not. Under the tribal warfare and ecological collapse lay a rotted root of institutional evil. The fun came from confronting that evil. Having it pre-chewed into more palatable “forms of oppression” is the opposite of fun.

WotC is not trying to protect players by dictating which kinds of evil are good enough. We’ve seen this song and dance too many times to fall for that corporate pabulum.

They are trying to insulate their irrational worldview from contact with reality and protect themselves from cognitive dissonance.

Fans who wanted Dark Sun back did not ask for a sanitized wasteland with speedbumps and guardrails. What they want is Athas.

The company that once dismissed the setting as radioactive is now proving the point in reverse. It still cannot handle the material on its own terms. So it will deliver a version that flatters the current managerial consensus while stealing the original setting’s valor.

If you want relatable characters struggling against unadulterated brutality informed by an unflinching look at fallen human nature, you already know where to look. The original books are still out there.

And then there’s my Dragon Award-winning horror novel set in a post-cataclysmic wasteland …

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The Kickstarter launches September 1, featuring early bird rewards and a crowdfunder-exclusive hardcover of the new novella.

Follow the Kickstarter now to be notified the moment limited rewards go live!

Enjoy the post? Unlock the full archive and all future paywalled essays by upgrading to a Substack membership here.

The protagonist has a clear goal, and his motive for pursuing it make sense. With each scene, he moves closer to what he wants.

Perhaps a little too close. Because beta readers complain the hero waltzes from victory to victory.

So the author does what comes naturally: He raises the stakes.

The villain gets a power boost. Then he moves on from attacking the the hero’s hometown to threatening the whole kingdom.

Surely, the author assumes, readers will find the story gripping. But for some reason they can’t articulate, they still say the protagonist is coasting.

The real reason is a common yet subtle difference pro editors have learned to spot right away: Higher stakes do not automatically mean higher difficulty.

Think about it. A character can face down catastrophic consequences without ever having to make a hard choice. Sure, readers may grasp the severity of the situation on an intellectual level. But tension is emotional, and they know when they’re not feeling it.

Imagine that a knight is out to rescue his kidnapped son. When he tracks down the brigands responsible, he sneaks into their camp at night, slays them all in their sleep, and rescues his boy.

Let’s set aside how the brigands were holding the idiot ball that night by not setting a watch, and how unchivalrous it was to kill unconscious, unarmed foes. From a conflict standpoint, the resolution was no different than if the night had just walked into the camp, found his son standing there alone, and strolled back out with him.

Now picture a different scenario. The brigands are actually good at their job and spot the knight coming. Their leader holds the boy at swordpoint and offers the father a choice: divulge his unjustly deposed king’s hiding place, or watch his boy die.

For the knight, saving his child now means betraying his liege lord.

Note that the physical danger didn’t necessarily increase, but resolving the conflict got far harder.

New others frequently conflate external and internal threats because it’s easier to visualize escalations of the former. But the difference makes itself known when the rubber meets the road. A villain can be bent on destroying the world, but if the hero lays him out with a single punch, the scene has less tension than a taut conversation charged with veiled but credible threats.

That’s why professional editors don’t look at a conflict’s potential repercussions first. Instead, they scan for places where achieving a desired outcome requires the protagonist to sacrifice another.

Put another way, they search for real, substantial costs.

Because a well-crafted conflict gives readers more to worry about than whether or not the hero succeeds. To some degree, it should make them grapple with what success means.

When both choices will leave the hero with scars, visible or otherwise, the conflict is set up as it should be.

In short, stories generate tension by making characters pay for what they want.

That’s why readers tune out when the hero keeps getting exactly what he needs. Even if he endures some hardship along the way, victories that don’t change his priorities come off as mechanical.

Take a look at your current manuscript. Does your hero beat the bad guy while protecting his friends and maintaining his principles? If he attains each objective, then moves on to the next, without losing anything of value, the story tells readers that success comes cheap.

So if the answer isn’t raising the stakes, what’s the real fix?

When it feels like your hero is sleepwalking through a major conflict, resist the urge to buff the opposition.

Instead, ask yourself what the hero must give up to get what he wants.

And the key is that the answer should hurt.

Don’t restrict yourself to the literal and the physical. A swordsman might find losing a hand less costly than admitting his hated rival was right.

The main takeaway is that the price your hero pays for victory she be paid in coin that is dear to him, whether material, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual.

Sacrificing his good name for loyalty, trading a friendship for justice, or abandoning a lifelong belief for salvation; those costs are what gripping conflicts are made of.

So the next time your readers say the hero’s victory felt unearned, don’t inflate the stakes. Instead, raise the cost and make the price clear. You’ll be surprised how the scene seems to write itself. And your readers will hang on every word.

Because instead of waiting to see how the hero surmounts yet another obstacle, they’ll be on the edge of their seats wondering what he’ll choose to save when he can’t save everything.

New writers try to make stories more compelling by emphasizing the cost of failure.

Professional editors maximize tension by showcasing the price of success. Because that’s usually where the real stakes have been hiding all along.

Enjoy the post? Unlock the full archive and all future paywalled essays by upgrading to a Substack membership here.

SOULDANCER RETURNS, THE CYCLE CONTINUES

Ten years after winning the first-ever Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, Souldancer returns with the definitive anniversary edition and an all-new companion novella, The Other Side of Fear.

The Kickstarter launches September 1, featuring early bird rewards and a crowdfunder-exclusive hardcover of the new novella.

Follow the Kickstarter now to be notified the moment limited rewards go live!

But since one word not in big tech’s vocabulary is “enough”, Adobe kept pushing to further leverage their indispensabi…

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And all the while, independent film makers produced videos in their bedrooms, aspiring to break into “real” show business.

Now, after multiple years of surprise flops from Big Franchise X and one season of YouTubers-turned-director blowing up out of le…

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The assembly line.

That’s true, as far as it goes. Ford dramatically increased production while reducing costs. The moving assembly line transformed manufacturing and changed the modern world.

Yet focusing solely on the assembly line misses the larger lesson.

Ford’s real breakthrough was recognizing that automobiles would always be toys for the wealthy unless ordinary people could afford them. And that one conviction guided practically every major decision he made.

Because instead of setting out to build a better luxury car, Ford figured out how to build a car that millions of Americans could own. The Model T may not have been the fastest automobile on the road. Nor was it the prettiest. But, it was dependable, easy to repair, and, most importantly, affordable.

Ford took that approach because he understood a principle that many businesses overlook: Often, success in the market goes not the most impressive product; instead, it’s the one that normies can adopt.

Indie authors should pay heed to that lesson, because it’s one they persistently stumble over. Many put years into building elaborate worlds, crafting intricate magic systems, and devising sprawling mythologies. What they forget is to ask themselves a simple yet essential question:

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Always left unsaid is progress toward what?

Yes, downloading games is faster. And discs do take up shelf space. Most players already buy digitally anyway. So, it’s argued, eliminating obsolete plastic gives consumers what they wan…

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The characters have goals? Check. Brisk dialogue? Check. Major transformative event? Check.

Yet when the scene ends, the reader wonders Why did I just read those ten pages?

The reason why those sce…

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First, Apple gave us instant access to music. Shortly thereafter, Amazon placed a world of books at our fingertips.

Then every t…

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You went down to the big box store, shelled out your money, took the tape or disc home, and watched it at leisure. Nobody at New Line could barge in four years later and confiscate your copy.

Now, Google has done the digital equivalent.

A Google customer recently discovered that the Lord of the R…

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Don’t misunderstand, those tools have their place. But they also distract authors from the key lesson that propelled Amazon from online bookstore to trillion-dollar megacorp.

Jeff Bezos once explained Amazon’s success in a single sentence:

“The number one thing, by far, that has made us successful is obsessive compulsive focus on the customer, as opposed to the competitor.”

Notice what he didn’t say. Bezos did not credit superior advertising. Neither did he praise clever branding or brilliant marketing campaigns. Nor did he attribute Amazon’s rise to chasing every passing trend.

Instead, Bezos argued that Amazon succeeded because it relentlessly asked one question:

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