How does generative AI relate to fair use when it comes to copyright? What are the possibilities for AI licensing? Alicia Wright shares her thoughts on generative AI for authors.

In the intro, Publishing leaders share 9 Bold Predictions for 2025 [BookBub]; OpenAI launches Operator [The Verge]; Bertelsmann (who own Penguin Random House) intends to work with OpenAI to expand and accelerate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the media, services, and education sectors; Death Valley — A Thriller.

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Alicia Wright is an intellectual property lawyer for a technology company, and also writes science fiction and mystery as Alicia Ellis. With two degrees in computer science and an MFA in writing popular fiction, she is expertly placed to comment on AI as it applies to writers.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Using AI as a brainstorming partner and collaborator
• AI as fair use because it creates something transformative
• Using the right prompts to produce quality outputs from AI
• AI is the next technological change in our society
• Licensing your IP for training and AI usage — what to look for in contracts
• Training the AI systems to include your work in generative searches
• Developing your authorial voice and creative confidence
• Uitlizing AI agents in your author business

You can find Alicia at WriterAlicia.com and on social media @WriterAlicia.

Transcript of Interview with Alicia Wright

Joanna: Alicia Wright is an intellectual property lawyer for a technology company, and also writes science fiction and mystery as Alicia Ellis.

With two degrees in computer science and an MFA in writing popular fiction, she is expertly placed to comment on AI as it applies to writers, which we’re talking about today. So welcome to the show, Alicia.

Alicia: Thank you so much, Jo. I’m happy to be here.

Joanna: Oh, I’m excited to talk to you. So first up—

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing, and also into AI and technology.

Alicia: All right. Well, I should say that I got into AI and technology first. I was always one of those science and math people. Math was my favorite subject in school. Not a lot of people say that, but I loved math. I loved the sciences. I always was reading forward in my textbooks.

Then my mother didn’t want us watching TV, so we read a lot of books. I got into writing poetry, writing song lyrics, writing short stories, and the creative side of me came out.

It never occurred to me to write something longer—because I was a math/science person—until I got into law school, and there you have to write all the time. You have to write briefs, you know, these 30 page documents.

Then it occurred to me that, hey, I’d like to write a novel. So I would say the technology interest was always there, and the creative interest, the writing, came later.

In my work as a patent attorney, I have encountered AI-related applications throughout the years, even generative AI technologies as far as 10 years back. So I had an interest in that even before it became relevant to the writing industry.

Joanna: So when did you get into writing fiction? How many years have you been writing fiction, as well as doing your incredible job?

Alicia: I have been writing fiction, specifically long form fiction, for as long as I have been a lawyer. The time is almost exact. I know this because I was in my final year of law school and sort of had this crisis. Like, I’m graduating law school, do I want to be a lawyer?

I spent time thinking about that. Just sat down for really a day and went through what I would do if it wasn’t law. I decided that I did want to do law, but I also wanted to write novels.

So as soon as I graduated law school, I enrolled in some local writing courses. So I’ve been practicing law and writing for the same amount of time.

Joanna: Which is approximately?

Alicia: 17 years. I got into indie publishing in maybe 2013, but I’ve been writing for 17 and a half years.

Joanna: Brilliant. So you mentioned there that you, as a patent attorney, you look at AI applications. You did mention using a bit of generative technology there.

How do you currently use AI tools as part of your creative and business processes?

Alicia: In my business work, well, I see a lot of AI technologies in what I’m writing patent applications for, and that’s what I was referring to before.

In managing a patent portfolio at the cybersecurity firm where I work right now, I definitely use AI technologies to help inventors organize their thoughts when they submit to us to do analyses. Sometimes I’m dealing with a huge patent portfolio, and AI can help organize the analyses and my thoughts on that.

In my writing, I use it mostly at the planning stages as a brainstorming partner. I love AI as a brainstorming partner.

I always tell it that it’s my junior partner because it tends to go off on its own, and I like to reel it in to run the show, if you will.

I give it my ideas. Often I’ll ask it to, say, “Give me five ideas on how to put these things together,” or, “Give me 10 ideas on how to put these things together.” Even if they’re bad ideas, it helps me sort of organize my thoughts. Like, why don’t I like these ideas?

So, together, we walk through what I want to do. We create a Save the Cat outline. Which I usually start it off once we have all the ideas on the table, I ask it to create the Save the Cat outline.

Usually, I have a lot of changes. We make those changes, and then we’ll break it down into a scene list that follows the three act structure.

I often have it generate character sketches and setting sketches — 

because, honestly, I’m no good with thinking about what does this setting look like. What kind of house is this? Bricks? Facade? I don’t care. So the AI is really helpful with that.

There’s a lot of editing, a lot of back and forth. AI is a great partner for brainstorming and plotting.

When we get into the writing, my authorial voice is really important to me, in part, probably because I have diagnosed OCD. I have experimented with using AI in pretty much every aspect of my process, but for me, personally, the writing part I have to do. I would spend more time editing AI output than I would have just writing it myself.

I tend to use dictation and input the dictation output into ChatGPT to clean it up —

— and they’ll catch the dictation error, so I have a much cleaner copy going forward. Then when I’m done writing, I’ll use a little AI for developmental editing.

Joanna: I love that. You sound similar to me in the way you’re using it. You’re using the word ‘partner’, your junior partner, your collaborator. You use the word ‘we’, which I really like as well because I feel that too.

Like with Claude, I feel this is almost my—not so much co-writer—but like you said, collaborator. It really is a backwards and forwards way of doing it.

I can hear the smile in your voice, and I have a smile in my voice as well, because this is fun, right? This makes it more fun for us.

Alicia: It’s so fun, and I feel like my work is better, that this brings out a better side of me. Connections that I hadn’t made, problems that I didn’t foresee. It’s having a partner, so that it’s improved. It’s not just me, it’s me plus some artificial intelligence.

Joanna: Yes. So we could geek out about how amazing it is all day, but I did want to ask you about some of the objections that authors have. You did this great talk at Author Nation, and you were so clear on it.

I don’t think there are many people in our community who have degrees in computer science and law, and an MFA, and are an active indie author. I think you’re the only person, right?

Alicia: Maybe.

Joanna: Maybe.

Let’s start with one of the most common objections from authors, which is, “AI companies stole our work.”

What are your thoughts on this, and how does it relate to fair use?

Alicia: So when I think of the word stolen, I think of an illegal taking. So I think, are we talking about copyright infringement here? I would say, in my opinion, that the work is not stolen.

The reason I phrase it that way, in my opinion, is because I’m sure a lot of folks know, there’s ongoing litigation about whether the use of copyrighted works in training data is copyright infringement.

Until those are actually decided, until those cases are actually decided, I can’t say definitively, but I feel pretty confident that the training of AI using copyrighted works is fair use.

Fair use is an exception to copyright infringement. Basically it says, yes, we copied copyrighted works, except we did it for a use where this exception is cut out.

Fair use exists in order to allow us to grow from existing copyrighted works, to spur creativity so that you can create based on what already exists.

There’s four factors in the US that courts consider for fair use, and one of the key factors is, is your use transformative?

I think that’s really important to what fair use is about. Have you created something new? Have you created something that can be used in a different way?

I feel strongly that the use of copyrighted works to train AI is so transformative, and is what fair use is about.

There’s case law that’s related to using copyrighted works, even for AI in the past, but not for generative AI in the way we’re talking about now. I feel that the case law is pushing US courts towards saying that this is fair use. We will see, probably in a couple years, for sure.

I would say that I don’t feel like AI is theft. I feel like it will be shown at a later date that AI is not theft, but I can’t say 100%. I certainly think that it is premature to say that it is theft.

Joanna: It’s interesting. I mean, I would have thought that the US would be further ahead on this. Maybe with your incoming Trump administration, those cases might get settled more quickly.

Here in the UK, our government has literally, like yesterday, come out with the AI plan, and they are almost pushing for an exception around data training in copyright, which is really interesting. We have a very different rule around this.

The argument here with the British government is that these strict things restrain innovation or restrict innovation. As you mentioned, fair use is so we can have more innovation, and we don’t want to stifle that.

Alicia: Exactly.

Joanna: Another thing that I hear is that ChatGPT and all of this, they’re just “plagiarism machines.”

They can’t create anything original. They can only spit out things that come from other people’s work. What are your thoughts on that?

Alicia: Calling AI plagiarism, saying that that’s all it does, reflects a basic misunderstanding of how AI works at a technical level.

These generative AI models at their core are statistical models.

They’ve taken in—read, if you will—millions, billions of pieces of writing or images, in the case of the image generators.

Then based on basically statistics—it’s much more complex than that, but I’m going to simplify it by saying it’s a statistical model—it determines what token—a token could be a word or a symbol, like a period—what token comes after the previous token, and it forms output based on that, one token at a time.

The reason I want to emphasize that it’s one token at a time is that you’re not lifting even phrases from existing work. It’s not at the phrase level. It’s at the word level, just like you and I write.

You can’t take a combination of words taken from millions of other works and say you plagiarized it because you took a word that was over here and a word that was over there.

It’s not a logical reflection of how AI works at the technical level.

Asking, can it only create things that already exist? I would say humans also can only create things that already exist. We all learn from what exists. You’re going to see cliche phrases in AI output because, statistically, you’ll see words together that you often see together in writing.

So you’re going to see things like, “She released the breath that she didn’t know she’d been holding,” because you’ve seen it a lot of other works. In the same way that that’s not plagiarism when you write it, it’s not plagiarism when the AI writes it, either.

Joanna: I keep hearing people say —

“Oh, this is a crap book. It must have been generated by AI,” —

with the assumption that only bad quality writing can be generated. So given that you and I use this a lot, our prompts are very, very different to somebody who is brand new to generative AI.

Do you think that the quality—and I know quality is a tough word—but—Is the quality of writing from generative AI when you use the right prompts?

Alicia: I think — 

Prompts make a huge difference.

Especially if you’re using AI for the writing part, say, for a first draft or for a final draft, however you use it in the actual writing part, I think it’s important to prompt it to write like your authorial voice.

The more you do that, I think it’s going to be closer to you and may even be better writing, assuming that your author voice is well developed. I think if you just ask the AI—well, I’ve seen from experience—that if you just ask the AI to write something, it’s not necessarily going to be a style that’s appropriate for what you’re writing.

The more specific you are about how that writing should look, or even give it samples of your writing, describe your own writing, the writing gets better. By better, I mean closer to what you as an author want it to be.

The more specific you are in your prompt, the more you learn how to talk to the AI in a way that it interprets the way you want it to.

Joanna: Yes, I agree. I mean, sometimes my prompts can be like 100 words. With Claude, I’m prompting with whole sentences and beats and all kinds of things that at the beginning of my use I didn’t necessarily know how to do.

Again, coming back to the co-writer idea, the collaborator idea, it’s like working with another person. You mentioned you’re OCD. I’m not OCD, but I’m certainly into control around my writing.

I found it very hard to work with a human co-writer, but I love working with Claude for this reason.

[My use of the AI tools] developed over time. You don’t just do it from your first interaction.

Alicia: Right. I 100% agree with that. I’ve been using AI in my work, in my planning for my writing, and bits and pieces in my actual writing since it first went mainstream the end of 2022.

My prompts are so much longer now than they were then because I’ve learned how they’re going to respond.

Then my prompts for different AI models are different. My prompts for Claude might be different than my prompts for ChatGPT because I have a sense of how they interpret things.

My prompts have gotten more specific, and I chain my prompts together because that’s something you learn. It’s a skill, using generative AI as a tool.

Joanna: Yes, and that is why I’ve been harping on about this for so long, because every month that goes past that people don’t even try it for little things, they are missing out on time to learn what is essentially, what I think, it kind of underpins the next technological change in our society.

A bit like the internet changed so much, this is going to change so much. Do you feel it’s that significant, as well?

Alicia: That is going to change a lot? Absolutely, and there’s a lot of change that I look forward to. I’m interested in how the writing industry is going to look when these legal cases are decided. Speculate and say that it’s determined that it is okay to train AI models based on copyrighted works.

I’m interested to see how those who are so anti-AI in the writing industry would respond to that. But more than that —

I’m interested in what’s coming next. What’s going to happen with AI next?

I’m hard of hearing, and I’m really looking forward to outside of the writing industry, some sort of captions. You know, they’re making smart glasses. I want smart glasses with captions. I’m just waiting for it. I’m rubbing my hands together. I can’t wait. Some of this stuff is going to be life changing.

Joanna: Wow, okay. So you mean you’re looking at someone while wearing the smart glasses, and as they speak, you’ll see captions of what they’re saying?

Alicia: That’s the dream.

Joanna: That is amazing, and of course, why wouldn’t you have that? That just seems very sensible. So I don’t even think that’s that far away, surely. Let’s hope so.

Well, look, let’s come to those court cases. So in the USA, and there are still these open court cases against various AI companies, but there are also now far more companies that have done intellectual property licensing deals for data training, including some publishers and media companies.

Now, as we record this in the middle of January 2025, a company called CreatedByHumans.ai has just launched, and they’re partnering with the Authors Guild in the US. The aim is to help authors license their IP for training and AI usage.

Now, this is a non-exclusive thing, and authors can choose how the data is used.

What are your thoughts on the opportunities of this kind of licensing for AI and what should authors keep an eye out for in any contracts?

Alicia: I think the main thing I want to say about this is, if you’re being offered a licensing contract for using your work to train AI, that I would jump on that.

It may be that soon courts bring down decisions that this is fair use, and in that case, they can use your work without a license.

So someone’s offering you money for it now, I would say, get into those negotiations and think about getting that locked down.

Specifically with respect to terms, I would say, know the scope and the type of model that your work is going to be used for. If it’s going to be used for a general purpose that could be used to create competing works, then maybe you want to be paid more than if it’s going to be used internally at law firms, for example.

So know what it’s going to be used for because that tells you what the value of this license is. I would say, make sure that your terms don’t include derivative works, or are very specific about what derivative works are included in what you’re giving.

You don’t want someone using AI to generate works that are directly based off your work, like sequels. Just make sure that that’s something that’s out of the scope of the license.

It would exclude anything about sub licenses, unless you’re getting paid for a sub license. Ideally, put a term on it, on the licensing of your work, because this area is developing.

You don’t know what’s going to happen five years from now, 10 years from now. There may be whole new clauses that you want in there because of how technology has developed.

So I would, personally, try to avoid a license that’s 20 years or the term of your copyright because you want to be able to develop that license as the technology develops.

I would also limit how your work is going to appear in outputs, meaning the percentage of your work that can appear in outputs.

It is unlikely that with a general purpose chat bot where millions or billions of works are used to train that a significant portion of your work would appear in the output because it wouldn’t have that large an input on the statistical model that is the AI model.

However, you don’t know how big the model is going to be or how many works are going to be used to train it. So I think it could be worthwhile to have a percentage, say, only 2% of my work at a time can appear in any given outbreak.

That’s something that they can program as a layer above a generative AI model, so that it sort of screens that before any output gets put out to a user. So that’s something that I would have in there as well.

In general, make sure your contract has remedies, so that if there’s a breach, you can cancel the contract, for example. As opposed to just getting paid out, or whatever remedies you prefer, make sure they’re outlined in there.

Ideally, you want a right to audit what’s happening with your work in the training, so that you can take advantage of those remedies. If you can’t see what’s going on, then the remedies aren’t doing you much good.

Joanna: Those are all really useful things. It’s funny because the first thing you said was, get into this because things might change, and we might not get anything if it becomes fair use.

The other thing I thought is we almost have a burning platform on the creation of synthetic data. So I’ve been looking at the OpenAI’s o1 model, and some people are saying that one of the reasons it was created is because it can create really good synthetic data to train the o3 models.

Alicia: Oh, wow.

Joanna: I know. I was like, wow—

If they can do really good synthetic data, they don’t even need to take our data.

Although I guess the original sin, as such, may still stand. I don’t know. I mean, any thoughts on that?

Alicia: Well, I hadn’t heard that about the o1 and the o3 model, but synthetic data, that’s something that I’m excited about because I want these models to improve. I want them to use my work to train the models. Synthetic can write more like me, make my job easier.

I’m excited for more training data. I hope that more folks in the writing industry get on board and allow their works to be licensed if allowance is needed. Even if allowance is not needed, I know that folks in the AI industry are feeling the pushback from the writing industry, and it may slow them down.

I don’t want them to be slowed down. I want to see this stuff develop.

Joanna: It’s interesting that we both want our data in the models. Partly, I also think there’s a big change in generative search, in that I mainly use ChatGPT now to do my searches.

So I’ve been trying to do sort of book discovery, you know, “Give me 10 books that are action adventure thrillers with a female protagonist set in this area.” Then it gives me 10, and I’m like, “Well, what about this book by JF Penn?” I’m like almost trying to train it to think of my books as well.

What do you think about generative search and people using these models for searching?

If we’re not there, we just won’t be found.

Alicia: If we’re not there, they just won’t be found. What do you mean by that?

Joanna: Well, as in, the models have access to certain data and certain data that’s on the internet. So a lot of the time, it can look at Goodreads, or it can look at Amazon.

I want ChatGPT and Claude to know J.F. Penn, so that if someone is searching for something to read—and a lot of the apps that go on top of things now are powered by these tools—

I want the models to know my writing so that it can promote me or recommend me if people go looking for things like I write.

Alicia: Oh, for sure. I know there are anti-AI folks in the writing industry who don’t want AI anywhere near their work. I’m more what you just said. I want AI to be able to find me. I want AI to be able to write more like me.

I believe strongly in my own creativity and my ability to create something that is specifically me, and because of that, I’m not concerned about AI being near my work. I want it to help me.

I’m not scared about how its use is going to impact my marketability because I know what I’ve got.

Joanna: I love that, and I actually think the same thing.

I wonder if this is creative confidence that comes from—like both of us have been 17 years writing, and previously I was in tech as well. Not quite as deep as you, but I’m confident with tech.

So this kind of creative confidence in our own work and in our own worth that some newer writers might not have, I guess.

Is there anything you can say to newer writers who might not have as much creative confidence as you?

Alicia: This may be strange coming from someone who is very fond of AI, I have a lot of fun with it, but I would say that maybe building that creative confidence means not using AI for a while.

It means discovering who you are as an author, what sort of things you like to write before bringing in a partner, be it AI or a human writer of another sort. Really find your uniqueness and your identity as a writer before you start adding tools into the mix.

Joanna: That is actually a really good point.

You and I have both already done enough books and written enough that we’re confident in our voice that we found before AI.

Then I just wonder if maybe people who are younger in the usage of these tools, or people younger in their journey, or just physically younger, are going to do things differently. Like you and I grew up without iPhones, and we grew up without television.

My mum was the same as your mum. We weren’t allowed to watch TV until I was about 12. So I feel like maybe people will develop their voice differently now.

Alicia: That’s a really good point, and I honestly don’t know what that will look like, but I’m excited to see it.

Joanna: Yes, me too. Okay, so let’s just circle back on copyright because another sticking point for authors in using these tools is—

They’re afraid that they won’t have copyright in their finished work if they use AI tools in any way. So where’s the line here?

How is it in the US? Because it’s different in the UK.

Alicia: Right. In the US, first of all, expression that is generated by artificial intelligence, by a machine, is not copyrightable. However, your authorship is copyrightable. Thus, when you combine your authorship with an AI-generated output, then the part of that that is your creative expression is still copyrightable.

So what that means is, if there’s a combination, if you’re using AI as a partner, then whatever expression that you contribute to that final product is copyrightable in the US.

Thus, say someone was to copy a chapter of your book that has you in it, as opposed to telling the AI in a short paragraph to write a chapter, if you’ve been a part of selecting what goes in that chapter, arranging that chapter, editing words that were initially output by the AI, that’s all your expression.

One cannot copy that chapter without copying that expression, which is yours.

There’s still copyright eligibility when you’ve used AI, depending on how you use it.

The Copyright Office has confirmed this. This isn’t all theoretical here. The Copyright Office has handled some cases.

[Note from Jo — here are some excerpts from the US Copyright Office info, and also the UK, as they differ. Please check your jurisdiction. ]

In the UK, Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 around authorship and ownership of copyright states:

In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical, or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.

In the US, copyright is all about ‘human authorship,’ and in March 2023, the United States Copyright Office issued guidance around the definition of human authorship in an age of generative AI. They note:

A human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’

Importantly, they also say,

This policy does not mean that technological tools cannot be part of the creative process. Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship.

For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image, and a musical artist may use effects such as guitar pedals when creating a sound recording.

In each case, what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work’s expression and ‘actually formed’ the traditional elements of authorship.

[Back to the interview]

There was a semi-well known case with a graphic novel where the author had generated each image using AI, but the copyright office determined that the arrangement of those images, the selection of those images and arranging them into a story, was copyright protected.

Thus you can’t just take that graphic novel and copy it and sell it, because the author’s expression is in there. That’s the case with cover art as well as written work.

Audiobooks with AI narration are a little different because your copyrighted expression is already in the input, and the output is just your words spoken. So you don’t even have to edit that output, it already has your expression in it, and is copyright eligible in the US.

I know in the UK, there are even stronger protections for copyright eligibility of AI-generated works. I think if you direct the creation of it, it’s yours.

Joanna: Yes, and I think that’s probably why so many people are putting offices here. OpenAI has an office here. I mean, Runway ML, the video generator, they’ve got an office here, and are partnering with the UK film company. It’s essentially like if a machine generates something, it belongs to the person who who directed it.

I was thinking about this, like I like the word director because, increasingly, if you think about a film director—and you know, people will have their favorite movie directors—

Movie directors direct and have a creative vision, but they are not acting every scene. They’re not doing all the sets. They’re not they’re not doing every piece of work in a movie. They are the director.

So I almost wonder if that’s the direction we’re going is—This much bigger role, where we can do much bigger things, with a lot more help.

Alicia: I think so. I think that there’s a lot that we can do with AI to create and expand our creativity besides just writing. We can direct a little movie now ourselves with AI-generated visuals.

However, I also predict, I don’t know for sure, that we’re going to see copyright eligibility of AI-generated outputs that are unedited in the US. We’re going to see some of that become protectable. Right now, that’s really shaky ground, except with the exception of audiobooks and the like.

It’s really shaky ground, say that an AI-generated image as is, would get any kind of copyright protection. I think we may see that depending on how specific your prompt is, that there may be some copyright protection based on the creativity that you put into that.

Joanna: Yes, I think so. As these models get better and better, you can have a much bigger process. So let’s come to that, because we’re still in these early days, like we’re literally like 2001 in terms of the internet.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, just shared in a new blog post, Reflections, last week,

“We believe that in 2025, we may see the first AI agents join the workforce and materially change the output of companies.”

I’m like, hell yes, give me some agents to do things. I’ll do the stuff I love, and my little AI agents will do the rest. I mean the word ‘agent’ is difficult in the publishing industry, but think about little bots or little employees doing your work.

What do you think about AI agents, and how might we use whatever they might be in the future?

Alicia: I’d personally love a social media agent because I am no good at keeping up with what’s going on my social media accounts. They will go dark for a month and a half, and then I’ll remember that I have them and should use them. So I’d love a social media agent.

I kind of have a custom GPT, a prompt set up to help me plan my social media. I’ve actually tried some products that try to be social media agents that I don’t love.

I feel that the writing industry is going to be reluctant to take on these agents. Just based on what I’ve seen about how protective the writing industry has been—some people in the writing industry—about related industries, like cover artists and voice narrators, how protective they’ve been wanting writers who want to use AI to hire a cover artist.

They’re being very insistent about that, some anti-AI folks. They’re being very insistent about hiring a human narrator for your book. I think that we may see that same protectiveness over virtual assistants.

When we’re talking about these agents, like a marketing agent or a social media agent, these are things that one might hire a virtual assistant for.

I think we may see some pushback from this same segment of the writing industry that’s opposed to using AI-generated cover art.

We’re going to see some pushback saying, hey, you should hire a virtual assistant instead.

Joanna: I totally agree, but I think that people are going to use these things anyway. Especially, coming back to creative confidence again, if you are strong in what you want, then actually using these agents.

You mentioned a chain of prompts earlier, and I just have these amazing ideas about how—

I want a chain of agents doing book marketing for me.

There is absolutely no way it would be affordable to have that where humans do it.

Alicia: Absolutely. Yes, affordability is a huge issue. If you weren’t going to hire someone, I don’t understand the objection to passing along to AI to do it for you so that it gets done, as opposed to not getting done.

I’ve actually used virtual assistants in the past, and it didn’t work so well because I’m so particular. First of all, I felt like a jerk wanting to tweak things all the time. I don’t feel like a jerk when I talk to AI. Then it wasn’t saving me time because of the amount of time I was spending tweaking things.

So for me, having an AI social media agent would be something that I wouldn’t hire someone for anyway. I don’t think that’s a requirement for using AI, but it expands what we can do, having these agents, having AI in general. I love that.

Joanna: I mean, I think — 

Marketing is probably the biggest thing that people want to use these tools for.

I see that one could almost have an agent per book even, who’s responsible for making sure that book gets marketed.

I mean, we’ve got multiple books, and I find myself marketing whichever one that catches my eye, but there’s so much of a backlist I just completely ignore. So I’d really love to have things surfaced from my backlist of work. Also things like having an AI—

I’ve just started using the ChatGPT Tasks. Have you done that?

They only just started it like yesterday, the ChatGPT Tasks.

Alicia: Tasks? Oh, I have not. I noticed it a couple days ago, and instead, I started using Projects. I recently restarted my ChatGPT Pro or Plus account. I sort of switch which AI I want to use at any given time.

So right now I’m digging into the ChatGPT projects, but digging into the Tasks is definitely on my to-do list. I’m hoping I can get it to remind me of stuff that we’ve generated that I need to do.

Joanna: So for people listening, this is brand new. It’s very, very small, as in you ask it to do a task, and it will do something for you at a certain time. So I’ve just set my ChatGPT so that —

Every morning it will bring me five headlines across the boundaries of archeology, religion, architecture, and genetic engineering.

Basically, I gave it a list of things I’m interested in writing for my fiction, and then it’ll bring me five headlines that I can click through to that will just give me ideas. So every morning, I get this really cool message, and then I go and just have a look. It just helps me think about stuff. So that’s my first task, that’s what I did.

Alicia: I love that. I’m totally going to steal that.

Since I’m into near future science fiction, I make a point to read technology magazines and subscribe to them, but then I have to actively go to those sources and read them. I love the idea of having them come to me like that. So I’ve just stolen your idea, Jo.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, I wanted to mention it because this is an example of something where it will do some work for you and it helps you, but it’s certainly not writing your book. So for people listening, please do steal that idea. That is a ChatGPT task. So we are out of time.

Where can people find you and your books online?

Alicia: As we said at the beginning, I write under the name Alicia Ellis. My website is WriterAlicia.com. My social media handle across the board, across everywhere, is @WriterAlicia.

I use Instagram the most, and BlueSky I’m just getting into. Like I said, I go dark for an extended period of time, and then remember that social media exists. So WriterAlicia.com is the main place you can find me.

Joanna: Great. Well, thanks so much for your time, Alicia. That was amazing.

Alicia: Thank you, Jo. I really appreciate you. This has been fun.

The post Fair Use, Copyright, And Licensing. AI And The Author Business With Alicia Wright first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Note From KMW: I’m often asked to create more resources about self-editing your fiction. The thing about good editing is that really it’s just good writing. All the same principles apply. The only difference is whether you’re better at applying those principles (plot, character arc, theme, engaging narrative, dialogue, etc.) off the cuff in the first draft—or (like most of us) after a bit of time and perspective in the second draft.

So really, the answer to “How do I edit my story?” is “Learn good storytelling principles and figure out where your story isn’t fulfilling them.

But, of course, editing tends to feel a little more overwhelming than that. At the end of writing a first draft, most of us tend to either feel a general sense of “this is good!” or the unease of “something‘s wrong.” Either way, where do you start that all-important second draft?

Today, I’m pleased to share with you a guest post from Ali Luke of the popular writing site Aliventures. In it, she guides you through the foundational elements of moving through the big-picture edits of the second draft into the more minute and specific concerns of the third draft.

***

When you think about “writing a novel”, chances are you’re picturing the drafting part of the process: getting words down onto a blank page. While that’s a huge (and exciting!) part of the writing process, there’s a lot more that goes into a complete novel. For many writers, self-editing your fiction takes as long as—or longer—than producing the first rough draft.

Self-editing your fiction is when you go back through your own writing, making changes to improve it.

This is your chance to truly see your story come together. Perhaps it felt like your first draft didn’t quite live up to your vision for the story. As you edit, you’ll see that story come together and fully take shape.

It can be tricky to know how best to approach the self-editing process. So here’s a straightforward, systematic eight-step process you can use to work through your novel.

First Draft to Second Draft: 4 Steps of Rewriting

It’s tempting to start editing by opening up your first draft and looking for little, obvious things—like typos and grammatical errors. But while those will need fixing eventually, you want to focus on the bigger picture first. You don’t want to perfect a scene … only to find it later makes sense to cut it altogether.

Here are four big steps to follow as you work through rewriting your first draft.

Step 1: Take Some Time Off … Then Re-Read the Whole Thing

Take a break between finishing Draft One and starting Draft Two. There’s no magic formula for how long a break to take, but I like to have at least a couple of weeks off, ideally a month. That way, when you come back to your work, you’ll be able to see it with fresh eyes.

After your break, sit down and read through your whole first draft, making brief notes or annotations if that’s helpful. You don’t have to do this in a single session, but I find it helps to keep it to no more than a few days. That way, you can get an accurate sense of the current state of your story.

Step 2: Get Your Story’s Timeline Firmly Nailed Down

Once you’ve done an initial quick read-through, you’ll want to work through your manuscript more closely. My first step is usually to fix the mess that I’ve made of my timeline!

When you’re drafting, you might not have a clear sense of when something is happening in your story’s timeline. If you’ve got a linear narrative, it might clearly take place between Event A and Event C, but are those a week or a month apart? And if you’ve got dual timelines going on, it’s even more important to keep everything straight.

I like to create a timeline spreadsheet where I track each chapter or scene; the point of view character; and the day, date, and time the chapter or scene takes place. This helps me figure out if I need to make changes.

Step 3: Look at the Balance of Action, Dialogue, and Description

Does your first draft feel like it’s a little out of balance? That could be because you’re leaning too heavily on one element of story—while having too light a touch with others.

Personally, I struggle with writing descriptions, so that’s what I generally need to add in. I’ll have plenty of dialogue and some moments of action, but my characters can come across as talking heads in a featureless room.

The “right” balance of these elements will depend in part on your genre and your personal writing style. Some genres are naturally action-packed (think thrillers and adventure stories). Others may lean more heavily on description and world-building (like fantasy and science-fiction novels).

Step 4. Check Whether Your Pacing is Too Fast, Too Slow (Or Both!)

In your first draft, it can be really tricky to get the pacing right. You might spend several days writing a 3,000 word chapter, which takes perhaps 10 minutes to read. Action that seemed painstakingly slow as you wrote it may now seem to whip by too fast.

Or you might have the opposite problem. When you drafted your chapter, perhaps with some long breaks in the process, it wasn’t obvious to you that you’d spent 50% of it describing your character’s thoughts. As you re-read, it’s painfully slow.

The rewriting stage is a great chance to refine your pacing, slowing up, speeding down, and tweaking as needed.

Second Draft to Third Draft: 4 Steps for Detailed Editing

Once you’ve addressed the big-picture issues and you’ve got a solid second draft, it’s time to move on to more detailed self-editing, line by line.

Tip: Not quite at that stage yet? You can go back to Step 1 and do a full pass through your novel again.

There are loads of things you can look out for during detailed editing (I cover a total of 20 in my short ebook Editing Essentials). Here, I’ve chosen the four that can make the biggest difference to how your work is perceived.

Step 1: Master Dialogue Formatting and Punctuation

I don’t think any writer finds formatting and punctuating dialogue an exciting task, but getting this right is so important.

Dialogue has some unique rules and conventions, and if you break these, you’ll either confuse readers (who may not know which character is speaking) or look a bit amateur. 

Punctuation in general can be tricky for fiction writers, but when it comes to dialogue, there are some unique rules, like:

• Always start a new line for a new speaker.
• Use a comma before a dialogue tag. (“I agree,” John said.)
• Use a period before an action beat. (“I agree.” John set his book down.)

If you’re not 100% sure you’re setting out your dialogue correctly, take a look through the Author Learning Center’s 8 Essential Rules for Punctuating Dialogue.

Step 2: Watch Out for Unintentional Repetition

Repetition is a powerful (and pleasing) tool, but unintentional repetition will jar readers out of your story. 

Here are a couple of examples of unintentional repetition, with the repeated words highlighted:

“I’m just glad we made it back,” Joanna said, sharply, and turned her back on Tom.

This looks like the author hasn’t noticed “back” was used twice. Even though the word means different things each time, it’s will stick out awkwardly to the reader.

Tom sighed. “You don’t have to be like that.”

“Like what?”

“You know exactly what.” He sighed.

Tom repeats the same action twice (sighing). While most examples aren’t quite this close together, it’s easy to accidentally write a character who defaults to a particular action or dialogue phrase.

Step 3: Cut Down Wordy Sentences

When you’re busy drafting or rewriting a big chunk of your novel, it’s perfectly normal for your sentences to come out a little convoluted. Perhaps you’ve packed an awful lot into a single sentence, or you were going for a particular tone that didn’t quite work.

As you make detailed edits, watch out for overly long sentences. If they feel wordy or overladen, see if you can trim them down. Is every word essential? Could you split a complicated sentence into two or three shorter ones?

Step 4: Avoid Outlandish Alternatives to “Said”

Another mistake that tends to make writers seem inexperienced is reaching for the thesaurus to come up with alternatives to the (perfectly good) dialogue tag “said.”

If you’ve noticed a character opine, aver, proclaim, utter, or exclaim, you’ll know these “said-bookisms” can be distracting. Instead of focusing on the dialogue itself, you start wondering what outlandish tag the author is going to reach for next.

To avoid using “said” an excessive number of times, use dialogue beats some of the time instead. You can also let some lines of dialogue stand alone, as long as it’s clear who’s speaking.

***

Editing your manuscript can feel daunting, but by approaching it systematically, you’ll get to see your story truly come together. Whether you’re self-publishing or seeking a traditional publishing deal, it’s crucial to get your story into the best shape you can before it goes out to your editor or beta readers.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Have you got a great tip for self-editing your fiction? Or is there a particular aspect of editing you struggle with? Tell me in the comments!

The post How to Get Better at Self-Editing Your Fiction: 8 Vital Steps to Follow appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.

How can you build a long-term author career with multiple streams of income? How can you use technology for the grunt work and not the fun part of writing? Kevin J Anderson gives his tips.

In the intro, has TikTok gone dark? [AP]; BookVault is expanding printing to Australia; GPSR, the EU’s new General Product Safety Regulation [Self-Publishing Advice]; CreatedByHumans.ai launches in partnership with The Authors Guild for AI data licensing [Publishing Perspectives]; Simon & Schuster launches audio-first imprint featuring content from self-published authors [Publishers Weekly].

Plus, 7 Steps for How to Write Non-Fiction [Reedsy Live replay]; Publishing predictions for 2025 [Draft2Digital’s Self-Publishing Insiders]; Creative and life challenges with me and Orna Ross [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; Death Valley – A Thriller, coming in March!

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Kevin J. Anderson is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages. He’s also the director of publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor and rock album lyricist, and he’s co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Adapting throughout a 40-year author career
• The importance of having a Plan B when the industry changes
• Incorporating AI into your dictation process
• Utilizing AI to do the grunt work, not the fun work
• Publishing timeline restrictions with traditional publishers
• Tips for running a Kickstarter in 2025
• Finding a market for short stories
• Meeting reader expectations and delivering on promises

You can find Kevin at WordFire.com and buy his books direct at WordFireShop.com.

Transcript of Interview with Kevin J. Anderson

Joanna: Kevin J. Anderson is the multi-award-winning and internationally bestselling author of over 190 books across different genres, with over 24 million copies in print across 34 languages.

He’s also the director of publishing at Western Colorado University, as well as a publisher at WordFire Press, an editor and rock album lyricist, and he’s co-written Dune books and worked on the recent Dune movies and TV show. So welcome back to the show, Kevin.

Kevin: It’s been too long, Joanna. We should do this more often.

Joanna: Oh, yes. Well, you’ve got so much going on. So we’ve gone into your background before, so we’re going to jump straight in. This, being in the author business a long time, is incredible. Tell us. You just told me about a big milestone.

Kevin: It was the new year, so I was just kind of doing my year round up and everything, and I realized that my very first professional publication was in January 1985, Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. So that means —

40 years I’ve been a professional author.

Joanna: Wow.

Kevin: So I look back, and it was 1995 when I quit my day job, and I have been a full-time ‘earning all my living by writing stuff’ for 30 years. Which, I don’t know if I live frugally. No you’ve met my wife, I don’t live frugally. I’ve just been at it for a long time.

My gosh, it’s not like doing the same thing every day, like working on a factory assembly line for 30 years —

This has required just keeping a lookout, and being adaptive, and reinventing myself over and over and over again.

The publishing world does not stay the same, and if you just keep doing the same thing, you’ll be left by the wayside.

Joanna: Well, let’s just focus on that then.

You mentioned being adaptive and reinventing yourself, but I mean, this really takes a different kind of mindset, I think. I haven’t been in it as long as you, but I’ve seen many authors disappear from the industry, perhaps because they couldn’t adapt.

So how do you keep that sort of ever learning process, even when you’re already so successful?

Kevin: Well, here’s the thing, I am not interested in just one thing or one type of writing.

I’ve always got like five or six completely unrelated things going at a time.

What happens is that something will be really hot one year, and then nobody wants it the next year, but I’ve got five other things going, so then we hope something else gets really hot.

If you are only writing steampunk vampire romances, great. They might be super hot this year, but 10 years from now, maybe people don’t want to read steampunk vampire romances. I’m just making that up, just as an example.

For instance, let me go back. My big claim to fame, I had my first giant career boost was about 1992. So my first novel was published in 1988, and yes, listeners, I know it sounds like I’m really old, but I’m in good shape.

So 1988, my first novel was published. I published, I think, six or seven novels. This is trad days, there was no option for indie. Then I got a phone call from Lucasfilm saying, “Kevin, would you write Star Wars books for us?”

So, suddenly, instead of just being this author who wrote some books that maybe got some reviews, and you got advances in those days, and I maybe earned $4,000 on a book for working on it for six, eight months.

Then suddenly I was writing Star Wars books, and I was a New York Times bestselling author, and I was selling millions of copies. That was huge for me. So I did all these Star Wars books, and through Star Wars, I did Star Wars comics, and then I learned how to write comics.

That was a huge comics boom, so I was writing monthly comic books and doing all kinds of successful things like that. And because of Star Wars, they asked me to write X Files. I wrote all these movie tie-in books. I wrote the novels for like these science fiction movies that came out.

I was pulling up the drawbridge because people kept throwing books at me as fast as I could write them.

Then around maybe 10 or 11 years later, all of that media tie-in work just dried up.

People might remember, every time a movie came out, you could walk into the grocery store or the airport and there would be a paperback novel of that movie. I mean, that was steady work.

I could pick up the phone saying, “I’ve got a month free. Give me a movie novelization.” Those things paid like $15,000 or so, and it took three or four weeks’ worth of work, but they just stopped doing that. It wasn’t that I gave up on it, or I stopped being good at it or anything, it’s just that entire part of the career dried up.

Then I’m not sure exactly the years, but like 2005 or 2006, the entire comic book industry imploded. My comic that used to sell maybe 500,000 copies an issue suddenly sold 50,000 copies an issue, just because people stopped buying comics. That’s not anything that’s in my control.

There’s a whole lot of reasons why authors screw up their own careers.

I mean, we can talk about that for a while, but —

There are so many things that are out of your control so you have to have a Plan B and a Plan C, and as many plans as you have.

I had all these things going, but I kept spinning other plates up. I would write mysteries and horror because then the science fiction dried up. Or I would write young adults with my wife, and then young adults suddenly became hot. I just kept trying all of the above.

You’ve noticed, in fact, I’ve given you a cup of my coffee, which is like five times stronger than what you ever would drink. I am fairly energetic, and I like to work all the time, and I keep going.

You can’t put all your eggs in one basket because this industry is a roller coaster, and it just changes all the time.

Now, there’s a couple of other things. Well, first we mentioned, I’m the director of the Master’s Degree Program in Publishing at Western Colorado University, and I started that about seven years ago. In fact, I had to go back to university myself and get an MFA after I had already published 150 books and had 57 bestsellers.

I had to get the degree because you can’t teach creative writing unless you have a degree. So I got a master’s degree. Now, in fact, we’re taking applications for our seventh cohort now. So seven years, I’ve had this group of students.

I teach them grad-level publishing, both traditional and indie. I put them through the paces. They do their own books, they edit an anthology, they read the slush pile. I mean, it’s all hands-on stuff.

The reason I’m mentioning all that, other than telling everybody to check out the program, but that is a completely different plan. Plan Z. I mean teaching at the university and teaching publishing, actually, it pays a monthly salary, which isn’t bad.

I get health benefits. You’re in the UK, so you don’t know how desperate that is over here in the US that you need to have health insurance. So all of that is a completely different track. Like, okay, I’ll spend a lot of time teaching graduate students Just try different things.

It’s all writing adjacent.

It’s not like I’m working as an automobile mechanic in my day job. Everything is related to writing or publishing, but there’s different aspects of it.

It’s almost like playing Whack-a-Mole. One thing will pop up and be really successful, but then that will go away, and then something else will pop up. You need to make sure you have a lot of moles to pop up in the Whack-a-Mole room.

Joanna: That’s fantastic. I mean, it is amazing. Also, yes, I still remember your coffee. I felt fantastic. I haven’t been able to replicate that ever since, so I’m going to have to see you in Vegas for more coffee!

Kevin: One more thing I want to throw into that. I was at 20Books and Author Nation, and I was talking to lots of fabulously successful indie authors. They’re fabulously successful this year, but they weren’t last year.

The attitude that some people get is if they have a really, really good year, it’s always going to be that way, and it isn’t. So if you have a really, really good year, don’t go out and buy a private jet like.

Sock your money away, build a nest egg, pay off your house, or whatever you can do. Build financial stability.

People might remember MC Hammer, the guy who had some really big hits and that didn’t have hits, and he spent all of his money. You don’t want to be like that. If you’re super successful right now, it doesn’t mean you will always be super successful.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely. I always talk about investing and how I don’t expect writing to pay my pension. I’m building a pension to pay my pension, and writing can be extra. [Check out my list of money books here.]

I do want to get into your writing process because, as you mentioned, you’re energetic, you’re in good shape, and you hike a lot. You dictate as you walk, and you’ve been on the show before talking about dictation.

Now, I noticed that you have a new edition out of On Being a Dictator with two co-writers, which is a book on dictation.

I wondered how your dictation process works now, and how it’s changed with AI tools for speech to text.

Kevin: Well, there’s one other cautionary tale I want to throw in there. It’s probably been 30, maybe even 40 years, that I’ve just dictated my writing. That’s how my process works. I love just walking and dictating.

You know this, Joanna. It just gets your creative process going, it gets your thoughts going. I love hiking, and I’m outside. I’ve got myself so trained that I can’t sit there and stare at the screen and be very creative. I have to be out walking and moving around. I go hiking and mountain climbing, and everything’s wonderful.

A slight problem happened last August as I was climbing down a mountain pass in the rain on the rocks, and the mud was like Vaseline. I slipped and fell, and I broke my ankle. I had to limp a mile back to my car on this rocky trail on a broken ankle, and I was 12 weeks in a boot and then in an ankle brace.

No tears or anything, it healed just fine, but for those 12 weeks, I was unable to do writing the way I wanted to write. I couldn’t really walk. I wasn’t supposed to move around very much. So I had to just sit on the back porch with my digital recorder and stare off into the distance and dictate.

Man, that cut my productivity in half. It’s not the same just sitting there as it is walking. So I guess my downside was that I was so dependent on being able to write while I walk, that when I suddenly couldn’t walk for 12 weeks, I didn’t have my own Plan B very well in in action.

I mean, I got my book done. I was a little late on it, but it was not as much fun to sit there and write.

So anyway, to your question, the dictation process hasn’t really changed. I’m an outliner. I go through and I have my 90 chapters outlined, or whatever, for my big books. I know exactly what happens in chapter one and chapter two. Now, they might change. I might modify the outline, so it’s not like I’m completely locked in.

So I’ll take my notes for usually two chapters, sometimes three if I go out on a really long hike, and I just get into the zone. I know what’s going to happen, and I just tell my story, and I dictate it.

I’ve gotten it so that if you just play my raw dictation tapes, they’re pretty much like an audiobook.

I’m pretty good at being consistent, not stumbling. So that’s what I’ve done all along.

I would take those audio files and I download them, and I had a typing service. So I would upload them to my typing service. They loved working with me because the typing service usually works on like legal documents and medical reports and things like that, which are very boring.

They liked my zombie detective chapters, or they liked my epic fantasy chapters. So they would always fight over my stuff, and I’d get it turned around fairly quickly.

So it wasn’t causing much problems. I would get their dictation back in Word files in two days maybe. So it’s not really a problem, but it’s not cheap. It was like a penny a word to get it done. So 100,000 word book was $1,000.

As of last February, one of my other dictators at Superstars Writing Seminar last February, she was so excited and came up saying, “Oh, you’ve got to try this AI transcription.”

She showed me how to do it and I played with it a little bit. What I use is called MacWrite, but there are other transcription things out there. Suddenly I just feed my audio file into it, and it transcribes it. It takes a little while to teach the damn thing not to rewrite my words—

Joanna: Particularly with fantasy.

Kevin: All I use it for is to transcribe what I wrote, but I’ve got my AI trained right now, so that it pops out and it does all the drudgery work. So I don’t have to put the paragraphs and the quote marks. It’s kind of mind boggling to me how well it does.

For a while, you know me well, I’m not an anti-AI person, but I don’t want to get people put out of their jobs. So I thought, “But my typing service, then I don’t use the typing service. Those people depended on me.”

My friend said, “Kevin, if they’re a decent typing service, don’t you think they’re already using this to do the first cut on your transcriptions?” And I went, “Oh, probably.”

Why should I pay somebody else to run the AI thing that I can just run myself?

I come home, I get my dictation things, I load the files up, I go off and eat lunch, and I come back, and they’re transcribed.

It has taken an entire chunk of the pain in the butt, time consuming work that has nothing to do with being creative. It, to me, has made things much more streamlined.

The book I wrote, probably 10 years ago, called On Being a Dictator, because I was really one of the first early adopters of walking and dictating. Everybody’s always asking, “Well, how can you do that?” Well, I got tired of answering them, so I wrote it up. Now they have to pay five bucks to get my answer.

Joanna: It is a really useful book. I love the fact that, again, you’re being adaptive, and you’re changing the bits of the process you don’t enjoy, or the drudgery side, or the overly expensive side for what it is, and you’ve changed that process. Your creative process remains the same.

It’s not like the AI has changed your bit of the process, and I think that’s really important.

I love that you’re adopting these different things.

Kevin: Well, the walking and dictating, that’s the fun part. Why would I want AI to do that for me? That’s the fun part.

Look, I’m one of these writers that really does enjoy writing. I mean, I love going out and doing my chapter and seeing the adventures unfold.

I have a humorous mystery horror series called Dan Shamble Zombie P. I. and we just did a Kickstarter for Book 11 on it. It’s a bunch of dad jokes. It’s like the Naked Gun meets the Addams Family. Those stories are so much fun to write, and I find myself like laughing out loud when I go out dictating those things.

My wife will say, “Kevin, you’re writing a Dan Shamble book right now because you’re always in a good mood.” I love going out and doing that. Why would I want an AI to do all the fun part? AI and computers are supposed to take the grunt work away, not the fun work away.

Joanna: Absolutely. Now, I also wanted to ask you about Kickstarter. So you’ve done seven, as we record this, Kickstarter projects across various genres.

What part does Kickstarter play in your author business?

What are any of your tips for authors who want to use it in 2025?

Kevin: Well, it has entirely changed how I do things. Remember, I came out through trad, and in trad, you have to convince some other publisher that they should publish this project that I want to do.

That would always involve writing proposals up and trying to convince an editor or publisher that, yes, they should take a chance on this project or that project. Then they would pay you in advance, and that’s what I would live on while I wrote the book.

Indie is entirely different. You don’t get paid anything until you publish it and you start earning sales and royalties.

Well, Dan Shambles is a good example because I love this series. It was with a traditional publisher, and they did the first four books in the series. Let’s just say that we didn’t really see eye to eye.

I do my own marketing. As you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I kind of know what works and what doesn’t. So this is a fast and funny series. You read one in a couple of sittings, and then you want the next one.

I’m a fast writer, so they bought the first three books, and I said, “Great, let’s bring them out like every six months.” Then they went, “Oh, no, we can’t do that. It has to be a year and a half apart.”

Well, but this is a fast series, you don’t want a year and a half. So we didn’t see eye to eye on that.

So then I wrote a standalone story. Like, here’s my original, just an introduction to Dan Shamble. It’s a standalone mystery. So I wrote it, and I was going to publish it myself, upload it before the first novel came out. Like, here’s an appetizer. You can read this free story and then get interested in the series.

So I wrote it, I was going to publish that. They got all bent out of shape, “No, no, no, we have to publish it.”

So I’m like, “Alright. I don’t know that you know anything about ebooks, but okay.” So I gave them the story, but they, of course, couldn’t release the story before the book was published. They released the story a year later, before Book Two was published.

This is audio, so you can hear the sound of me slapping my forehead. Then the book comes out as $15 as a trade paperback. It was $15 for an ebook and $15 for the print book. I said, “That’s insane. You put the ebook at like $5, or something like that.”

They said, “Well, we don’t want to cut into our print sales.” Well, it’s apples and oranges. The ebook readers are going to buy the ebook, and the print book readers are going to buy the print book. So they said that their ebook sales were disappointing. Well, duh.

Joanna: That’s because they’re so expensive!

Kevin: So anyway, after four books of that—and I am going to answer your question about Kickstarters after all this, I promise. So they did four books, and I got the rights back.

I released a short story collection because I’d written a bunch of these other short stories, and that came out, and it did okay, and I reprinted them, and they did okay. But I’m writing Dune novels, and I’m doing these really big projects that, frankly, paid a lot.

My re-issues of the Dan Shamble books were okay, but they weren’t huge hits. I really wanted to continue the series, it’s just there was no real incentive to do so.

Then my friend Dean Wesley Smith, who’s run a lot of Kickstarters, said, “Kevin, you should run a Kickstarter for it.” I had this attitude of, well, Kickstarters are for whiny authors that don’t have any money and they’re begging for money. He said, no, you got it completely wrong.

He’s right. I had it completely wrong.

It’s not for whiny authors begging for money. It’s a way for you to connect with your fans, to give your real fans a chance to get like a backstage club.

I mean, my Kickstarter people get their books three, four months before anybody else can get them.

They might get expanded editions, or they might get separate things. So, okay, I decided to try it. If anybody wants a new Dan Shamble novel, which I wanted to write, and the fans kept asking for.

So I ran a Kickstarter for another Dan Shamble novel, and bam, it funded in like 30 minutes. It ended up like 15 times what we asked for, and it raised more than triple what the trad publisher was paying. I went, oh, okay, this is pretty nice.

I had another series that I had done, the first book of it was called The Dragon Business. 47 North published it. It was sort of like The Princess Bride meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. It was a fun fantasy. It did okay, but not great.

47 North is Amazon’s print imprint for science fiction and fantasy. Surprise, surprise, brick and mortar bookstores don’t want to carry books that are published by Amazon. So the sales for that weren’t as great as they expected.

I got the rights back, and I wanted to do a sequel to it because I wanted to build that into a fun fantasy series. So I thought, oh, well, why don’t we see if the Kickstarter people want a sequel to that?

Again, I ran a Kickstarter for it, and again, more than triple what the trad publisher was paying. Remember, I’m already an indie author and an indie publisher. So I know how to publish a book. It’s not like this is a learning experience for me.

Joanna: Just on that, just to bring you back to Kickstarter for newer authors. I mean, obviously you’re talking about established series, so people might think, well, there’s already readers for that. What is different about Kickstarter?

Are there things that newer authors who don’t have such an extensive career could use it for?

Kevin: Well, actually, it’s almost the opposite answer, because this is really designed for people who do have a platform, who do have a fan base, because you can tap into them.

If you’re brand new and don’t have followers, you have to find some way to get people interested in your project.

Maybe it’s connected to a very interesting subject. In fact, one of my grad students right now is a recovering alcoholic, and she’s got a whole bunch of self-help books on how to overcome addiction.

She’s not famous. Nobody really knows who she is, but she’s plugged into this network of people who are trying to help one another through situations like this. So she’s able to get attention for that particular subject.

I’m going to run a Kickstarter this spring with my grad students because the poetry concentration director also runs this big Writers Workshop in Montana, I think, which is for indigenous writers, and it’s taught by all indigenous instructors.

There are a lot of foundations for the arts supporting them, but they never have enough money to run the workshop. So we’re going to run a Kickstarter for them, and we will be tapping into a lot of people to say help support this indigenous workshop.

I haven’t run it yet, so we don’t know if it’s successful, but I’m pretty confident it’s going to be. My students are going to help promote it. Now, they’re not famous, but when you have this good cause that you’re promoting it for, then you can get attention that way.

If you’re just, “I’m Bill, brand new indie author. Here’s my short story collection. Here’s my Kickstarter,” you may be starting too soon for that.

The steps of doing a successful Kickstarter, you have to have a platform and an outreach and some reason for people to want to do it.

Also, you need to be able to convince your backers that you will actually deliver on what you promise.

I’ve supported probably 50 Kickstarter campaigns, and probably 20 of them I never got the stuff I paid for because they just don’t know how to produce it.

So don’t let that happen to you. Make sure you know what you’re doing.

At 20Books, last year or the year before, I was talking to the head of publishing at Kickstarter. She was kind of rolling her eyes and shaking her head, saying that they’ve had people that ran campaigns for a fantasy book, and the campaign was successful.

Then the person wrote her and said, “Okay, my campaign was successful. Now, how do I publish a book?”

Joanna: Well, we generally say now—

You should have written your book before you do a campaign.

That’s the advice, I think.

Kevin: I mean, even me, everybody knows that I’m going to be reliable. I’ve written 190 books. If I say I’m going to write one, I’m going to do it. But I feel that you want to deliver your stuff fairly soon, while people remember that they’re still waiting for it.

How many people are really still waiting for the next Game of Thrones book? I’ve given up on that.

Also, so I write my book before—either completely done, or at least the draft is done and I’m editing it—before I run the campaign. I want to be able to turn it over and just deliver the books within a month or two. I always under promise and over deliver.

So right now, I’ve got the Dan Shamble campaign that ended in the first week of November. I promised them books by March, we are sending them out this week because I got it done faster.

There are times where there are delays, especially if you’re doing, say, bespoke editions that have to be shipped from China or something. Those are things you can’t count on. I always really want to have everything done and ready.

The other thing is —

I plan maybe two, possibly three Kickstarter campaigns a year.

I don’t want to go to my backers and say, “Hey, support my next one,” if I haven’t delivered the previous stuff yet. You want to be reliable. Make sure you’re not doing it too soon. There are pieces you need to put in place.

Here’s an example. So I’m writing Dune books and things. Those go to the trad publisher because they have a much bigger footprint in brick and mortar stores and things. Kickstarter lets me do the projects that are my passion projects, really big things that I want to do that might not fit with trad publishing.

My biggest campaign ever was last year. I’ve written a lot of short stories over my career, and I thought, well, I just want to collect my short stories.

In fact, I ended up with a whole lot of short stories, like 150 of them or so.

I even found the very first thing that I wrote when I was eight years old. I typed it on my dad’s typewriter. It was this little three-page story about a mad scientist making monsters. I found that one, and so I included that in there.

So that meant that by putting the story when I was eight years old, I could do this short story collection that covered 50 years of my career. For each one of those stories, I wrote a little intro of, here’s how I wrote this one, or here’s how I wrote that one.

So it was three volumes of science fiction, two volumes of fantasy, two volumes of horror/dark fantasy. 750,000 words, all told.

Joanna: Wow.

Kevin: This is a huge job just putting all these stories together. So here’s the point, and yes, I do have one, and I eventually get around to it. So I put all these things together, and I went to my New York literary agent. I knew the answer, I just wanted to do it.

So I went to him, and this is the guy who sold million dollar contracts for me, and I said, “I’m going to do a seven volume collection of my reprint short stories, and I want to do them all in hardcover. Who could you sell that to?”

It was like silence on the phone. He said, “Well, nobody. Nobody would want that.

“Nobody publishes short story collections. Nobody buys them. Nobody wants them.” So I said, “Okay, thanks.” I ran a Kickstarter, and we did $80,000.

So, hello, my fans do want it. With the Kickstarter, it’s between creator and the reader. There aren’t 25 other middlemen between it. There aren’t all these other people telling you, no, you can’t do it. So it’s just a direct me and the readers.

I guess the point of that was, this was a project I wanted to do. Without Kickstarter, I could never, ever have done it.

I mean, it took a lot of time and a lot of work, and it was expensive to do those books. So if I didn’t have the money from Kickstarter, I could not have seen that project through.

Joanna: Well, I did want to ask you about short stories. Doing short story collections was one of my reasons that I wanted you to come back on the show.

In the indie space, people think, well, why would I bother writing short stories?

I mean, there are obviously still short story markets, and lots of them, if you focus on that. But many indie authors are like, why would I bother? So, thoughts on short stories?

Kevin: Getting back to the long career retrospective. When I started out, every author’s career path was that you wrote a bunch of short stories, you published them in the numerous magazines, and you built up a little bit of a following, and then you graduated to writing novels. Short stories were your training ground.

That’s not the case anymore because there just really aren’t nearly as many short story markets, and even then, you might not get it published.

The big advantage indies have is —

If you write a short story featuring your series character, well, then you use that as a reader magnet.

You put it in your newsletter, or you use it as, “Get a free story when you sign up for my mailing list,” or something like that.

So short stories have a very good purpose right now, as you use them as like carrots to get people to check out your series. Or you can use it to maybe test out a new character if you want to. Always, short stories are a great way to experiment as a writer.

I mean, it takes me a couple of days to do a short story. So if you think, well, maybe I should try dark fantasy and see how it works. Well, write a short story and see if it works, rather than writing a novel, which is going to take you however long it takes you to write a novel. So it’s a training ground, and that’s very good to do.

Today, I would look at short stories as an adjunct or as supplementary things, rather than your main focus. They’re kind of like the garnish on a plate instead of the steak.

There are many ways to use them. You can swap short stories. With other writers that have newsletters, you give them a story and they give you a story, so then you can get their readers to read your character and maybe pick up your series. That’s where I would do it.

The Kevin J. Anderson Short Fiction Library, that came from people who were already interested in my stuff. If you’re brand new and you don’t have a big following already, I’m not exactly sure that that would be my main focus, doing an original story collection.

Joanna: I will come back on that. One of the reasons I’m thinking of doing this on Kickstarter is because I have bought so many on Kickstarter.

I buy a lot of short story collections from people, I don’t know who they are, because I like reading short story collections.

So it’s one of those things that when you find a tiny niche of people who are interested in a certain type of product, then there are people there. So that’s actually why I was thinking of even doing one on Kickstarter, because I am part of that audience. So I guess it’s a different angle.

Kevin: But you do have a following, and you do have a platform.

Joanna: That’s true.

Kevin: Now for you, though, one of the interesting enticements might be to do a short story collection paired with one of your writing books. Like my grad students, we assign them your Your Author Business Plan book, and they read it every spring and build their business plan based on your book.

So you might want to do, here’s my story collection and here’s my—if you have a new book on writing advice or something.

Joanna: Or writing short stories. Yes, absolutely.

Kevin: If you have one on writing short stories, that would be an ideal pairing. Like, here’s my short story collection and here’s my book on how to write short stories. That’s genius. That would work. Brilliant.

Joanna: I think that’s what we think around these Kickstarter projects, is it’s not like on Amazon where if you pair something and your algorithm goes horribly wrong because those readers don’t normally buy that kind of thing. Whereas—

With Kickstarter campaigns, you can put all these things in and it doesn’t mess up some algorithm somewhere.

Kevin: Exactly. So, here’s the other thing. With doing a Kickstarter and raising money that way, that is completely separate from your indie publishing.

So when I get a Dan Shamble Kickstarter, and those books go out—again, they’re going out to all my Kickstarter backers in the next week or two—the official release of this book to the public is like April.

So then we put up preorders on Amazon, and then everybody else buys them.

The Kickstarter effectively gave me my book advance, like I used to get from trad publishers, and then the sales go on sale to the general public because most people don’t buy their books through Kickstarter.

It’s a special audience.

So most people are going to wait for it to come out on Amazon. So then you basically start all over from scratch. But hey, I just got a whole bunch of extra money up front to do this project. I am clearly a convert, as you can tell.

Joanna: Absolutely. Now, we’re almost out of time, but I want to come back to something you said earlier.

You said, “How do authors screw up their own careers?” Then you said, “Well, we could talk about that if you’d like.” So I was thinking that, yes, I would like to talk about that.

How might authors screw up their careers? Or, I guess, how can they avoid that?

Kevin: Well, my biggest piece of advice is, don’t be an asshole. Well, first off, I have a policy of I do not make political postings on any of my social media. That is a great way to get rid of half of your readers is to start spouting something.

I wasn’t joking, don’t be an asshole. Authors talk. Reader’s talk. If you’re like this total jerk, people are like, I like the books, but I can’t stand the person, so I’m not going to buy anymore. So just don’t do that.

Deliver your stuff when you say you’re gonna deliver it.

If you promised everybody your next book is coming out in April, well, don’t make it five years later. I mean, obviously there are extenuating circumstances, you can have a medical issues or some other things.

Prove to be reliable and deliver what you say you’re going to deliver.

I like networking, and networking works the opposite way too. If you screw somebody over, everybody else is going to know about it.

In the indie author community, just look at all the people who come to Superstars, or to Author Nation, or 20Books, or these various things. People will know if you stop being ethical and reliable.

I have a policy of I just don’t ever talk smack about other authors. I was on a panel once where it was about bestselling books or something, and everybody was just bitching and whining about the Twilight books or about Hugh Howey’s books. They didn’t like them, or Dan Brown’s.

I just went, “Guys, tens of millions of people bought them, so there was something done right. Learn from it rather than complain about it.” I think we’re all colleagues. Like, Joanna, you’re successful. It doesn’t make me any less successful.

I like to read books too. So just because somebody’s selling books, doesn’t cost me anything. I believe in the rising tide lifts all boats. I like being supportive and helpful, and I do my best not to be an asshole and help other people. It’s karma points. It comes back at you.

It also works the opposite way. If you’re this very negative person, and you constantly screw things up, you’re alienating your readers, you’re alienating your fans, you’re being a jerk on social media, well, that’s a great career suicide.

Just look at some of the actors who have had careers that have instantly crashed and burned because of some stupid thing they did. So don’t do the stupid thing.

Joanna: Well, that’s really interesting. So you’ve basically gone for the personality as opposed to the craft, which I think is really interesting. I was kind of expecting you to say they stop writing or they stop marketing, or something like that.

Kevin: Well, obviously if you stop writing. If you do a series—and I joked earlier about Game of Thrones—I mean, there’s a contract there. If you started reading this book, you invested lots of time in this series, and I don’t know what it is now, 10 years, 12 years since the last one. I’m not waiting for it anymore.

I loved those books. I’m not waiting for it anymore. If you do a series and you’re producing them regularly, and you just stop, the reader’s attention span is not long because there are so many other things to read. Don’t expect them to be like pining by the telephone, waiting for somebody to ask you out on a date.

Readers will move on if you’re not producing things.

Now, again, we get back to the longevity of a career. It is exhausting to write lots of books a year, and most people can’t keep doing that for 20 years or 30 years.

That’s one of the reasons, especially indie authors, where readers expect you to write several books a year. Some indie authors I know are writing a book a month. I couldn’t do that for any long period. Well, I couldn’t do that probably for a single year.

You start building expectations, and when you fail to meet those expectations, they will leave you very quickly. That’s why you should have Plan Bs.

If you really, really can’t stand writing your steampunk vampire romance series after book number 29, well, make sure that you have some other series you’re starting and building up.

Well, Hugh Howey’s got several series that are going. Michael Anderle has all kinds of series, and Craig Martelle has all kinds of series. You don’t just put all your eggs in one basket. You need to have Plan B and Plan C, to circle around to what I started with.

Joanna: Well, that is fantastic.

Where can authors find you, and your books, and everything you do online?

Kevin: My website is WordFire.com. My store WordFireShop.com. After COVID, I realized I needed to sell books direct, and that’s doing very well for me. Facebook, just look up my name, Kevin J. Anderson. I’ve got a couple of different pages, and you’ll find it.

Also on WordFire.com, there’s a whole section about the graduate program in publishing, if anybody’s interested in becoming a Master of Publishing with the piece of paper to prove it.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Kevin. That was great.

Kevin: Thanks, Joanna. I always love talking to you.

The post Building A Long Term Author Business, Dictation, Kickstarter, and Short Story Collections With Kevin J Anderson first appeared on The Creative Penn.