MaxFlorschutzAMA

Oh, I like this question.

It is unquestionably "lieutenant" because even after a decade of writing I still manage to misspell it nine times out of ten!

The thing to remember with tropes is twofold: They're inevitable and they're just tools. A cliché is really just a trope used poorly, to put things in a very simple context. You can write a thrilling Sci-Fi Epic that is just all the classic tropes we know and love. At the same time, if you want to subvert the tropes with a "But what if—?" (something I like to do) you need to both know them and set them up.

If you attempt to write a story by avoiding all tropes, you'll just end up with a mess. The trick is to understand what the tropes are doing for your story and how to use them as the tools that they are, whether you're playing them straight or subverting them.

No story will be free of tropes, or it won't be a story and instead just a collection of words that don't really make any sense.

But I do enjoy subverting tropes. Sometimes in familiar ways, sometimes not.

I'm glad to hear word is getting out! Tell your friend thanks from me for spreading the word if you get the chance!

I totally understand the desire to be able to listen to books while driving and working (we used to listen to audio books while working back in my commercial fishing days). Unfortunately I don't have great news in that regard: Despite the boom of audiobooks, producing an audiobook isn't cheap, and I have an unfortunate habit of writing absolute tomes. The last I ran the numbers getting an audiobook of Colony made was a cost that was several times my current annual income, and as such it's still out of reach.

I definitely would like to do audiobooks in the future, make no mistake. Starting with Axtara - Banking and Finance. But for the immediate future, it's just not in the budget. I look forward to that day, however!

Timothy Zahn, Brandon Sanderson, RA Salvatore, Howard Tayler, Larry Correia, and Brian McClellan, to name a few.

It pays ... not a lot, though I'm better off as an Indie Author thanks to the much better royalty rate. 80% of authors have a second job (last I checked the census, anyway), and I've bounced in and out of that over the years. I write full-time, and it pays for a good chunk of my expenses, but I still have had to do some work on the side outside of that for the last two years. There was a brief moment where it was all I needed ... and then the economic death of the last two years hit.

That said, each release I have moves my monthly income up another few notches and brings me to a wider audience. I've got people buying books all over the world now, with sales in Brazil, Germany, and Denmark (Axtara has been a real hit in other countries). It's a slow but steady process, but most authors who "make it" don't make enough to live off of for the first decade or so.

EDIT: I got time, so I'll run some math by you. Starforge, my newest book (the one that comes out tomorrow) is selling at $9.99. Which seems like a lot, but then my rate for the royalty is 70%. Which is really high, because I'm an indie author (a trad pub would be a lot less, in the realm of 15% if you're a rock-star to less than 5% if you're a nobody).

But for ease let's say I make $7 on each copy sold. So in order to make a minimum wage of $15 an hour, I'll need to sell more than three books an hour for eight hours. Let's chop a few sales off at the end of the day to account for rounding with our quick and dirty math, but that's still 18 copies in a day to make a minimum wage.

Now, I do have other books, but being older they're priced lower. Colony will be, once I do my inflation price adjustment (it's been a decade since I changed prices) $4.99. Roughly $3.50 per copy sold. So to make a day's minimum wage that's 36 copies sold in a day.

But printed books take things a step further. The bookstore wants their cut, which is usually about 50% of the cover price. In order to keep Axtara's paperback at $12, there are some markets where a sale of that $12 paperback only nets me about seven cents. Imagine how many copies I'd have to sell then to make a day's minimum wage. Since publishers want their share before the author, this is why that $45 hardback you just bought paid the author a dime (if they were lucky).

Point being, a lot of authors don't get paid a lot, and you need a lot of sales to make things work. I've been clawing my way up for ten years now, to the point that I make more in a month than I used to make in a whole year, but there's still plenty of room to grow.