What's the English word you like least?

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!

Thank you for doing the AMA. I have two questions.

1. When you come up with an idea for a story how do you determine if it's been done before? Just Google <idea for my story> and at if anything comes up?

2. What was the hardest part about finding a publisher?

Do you write books from start to finish or sometimes start in the middle and do the backstory later?

How do you navigate sci-fi tropes when constructing a story? Do you lean in to the tried and true setups? Do you attempt to break new ground?

Who are some of your favorite authors?

Thanks for swinging by! In answer to your questions:

1. I actually don't worry myself with "What if someone else has written something similar" because every story is going to be very different in the execution. For example, a story about an orphaned boy being grabbed away from his aunt and uncle to learn magic and discover that he's a VIP ... is that Star Wars or Harry Potter? Or is it both, but each executed very differently?

I've actually written a whole post about this concept on my site, but the crux of it is "Don't worry, just write your story. Now, if you reach the end and you realize you've rewritten your favorite story, then you may need to exercise your creative muscles and imagination a bit and actively work to try and do things that are outside your wheelhouse.

As for me though, one thing my readers have made most clear is that my stuff is quite unique, since I tend to run outside the box looking for fun ideas like "Dragon decides to become a banker instead of kidnapping princesses."

The short of it is not to worry about it. The moment your characters take over, your story will be its own thing.

2. Publishing is a serious gamble. It's literally, unless you have an industry inside contact—and even then that might not help—the equivalent of buying a powerball ticket.

Between that and the rapidly dropping royalties publishers pay these days is why so many authors choose to go indie or adopt the hybrid model. I myself went indie. I like the greater royalty cut and the control to write what I want instead of being stuck under a contract to "Marketing says this book will sell this year, so that's what you're writing."

There are still good publishers out there, but I like the indie side of things.

Start to finish! Sometimes I dream up an ending first, but I don't start writing until I've got the beginning and middle at least mostly figured out.

You can't spell Lieutenant without "lie". At least that's what the fellas like to remind me of once I got promoted, haha.

What’s your favorite book that isn’t Sci-Fi or Fantasy?

I figured if it was going to be a military rank it'd be "colonel". Reading that word in my head always hurts my brain.

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.

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

What is your process or what steps do you take to create well rounded characters?

Oddly enough that one doesn't give my brain pause. It's just "lieutenant" that seems to always trip something up.

What's your go-to soup recipe?

Ooh ... gonna think on this one for a moment. Hmm ... At that point for me it almost becomes "Favorite Non-fiction book" which I'd have to point at a religious text, because I am devoutly Christian.

But I'm fairly sure that's not what you were going for. I'm going to stick with "Non-Fiction" because a lot of what's Sci-Fi and what isn't is kind of nebulous (Jurassic Park for example is definitely Sci-Fi but was not shelved as such by author request).

So I guess I'd have to say something like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, David Willets' The Pinch, or maybe those Horrible Histories books I loved when I was younger.

I will give a special shoutout to Korman's YA books though, since they're technically not fantasy.

That is a deep question. I usually start with a few simple basics, those being their demeanor, why the audience should like them, what their strengths and weaknesses are (flaws are important), and what their quirks are.

The first is pretty self-explanatory. The second is me asking why readers would want to read about the character. Are they funny? Clever? Kind? What draws them in? Something unique? Something strange?

Strengths and weaknesses is pretty straightforward. Quirks though, these are the little idiosyncrasies that everyone has. They can be nervous twitches, a love of a certain food, a dislike of a certain food, a hobby, a habit. Little things that everyone has that are easy to forget about (and many times we don't even recognize them in ourselves).

Wrap that up with some goals, and usually it's enough to start. Above all else, the most important thing is to me is to let the character breathe and be a living-individual. I don't have control over where they go or what they do. They do. I just control the sets. Authors like to joke that their characters are the "voices in their head" and in a way they're not wrong!

EDIT: As you might imagine, there are dozens of posts about this on my site.

Start with some stock. Get it warm, add some frozen veggies and cabbage/potatoes. While those are thawing out and soaking up stock, start cooking up some noodles. Take the cooked noodles and add them to the stock and veggies, season to taste.

A quick, fairly easy lunch if I have all the stuff on hand.

Hey Max - you were recommended by a friend of mine, he won't stop raving about your books. But I typically can only enjoy books when driving and so it's audio books for me.

Any chance some of your work will be put into audio format? Thanks!

How do you get the attention of a publishing house as a genre author?

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!

The old method: Submit and pray like mad you get lucky.

Thankfully the market is different now. You can actually "auction" your books if you're a successful indie author these days, getting an agent to contact their people and put forth a starting bid for publishers to compete for. And publishers bite, too, though they hate the cost, because it's one of the ways to keep someone at least "hybrid" publishing instead of going straight indie.

That said if you're brand new and trying to break in, you'll need some sales numbers for them to pay attention, an inside contact (who you know in publishing is far more important that what you write), or just a lot of luck to get your manuscript looked at.

That's a bummer - here's to hoping your annual income will continue to increase from your work!

Thanks for the AMA!

The mnemonic device I use to remember the spelling is: What did the ant queen say to her army? "Lie, u ten ants!"

I think about it (and ants) every time I need to write it now.

How well does the job of a fiction author pay? do you get enough money on a monthly basis to live, or do you have some side-job beside it?

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.

Sorry to extend this with another question, but how much of the publishing process do you do yourself? I assume not printing, but how much distribution and such do you do?

Whats your favorite sci-fi book? Thanks for the ama

Easy answer: Timothy Zahn's The Icarus Hunt!

Naturally, I do encourage checking out my own books as well. ;)

No worries. Publishing has changed rapidly in the last two decades, so much of the "traditional" publishing methods are being upended right now. Even two decades ago, I'd have needed a garage to store Axtara paperbacks in ... now the bookstore just says "Hey, I want that," and places an order, which is then printed on demand and shipped to them without any involvement from me (at least, in that end of the process).

As far as what I do manage, I handle the writing, editing, and marketing entirely on my own. I oversee the whole editing process, with an extended team of other people, and I manage all the marketing. If I go to a con or a signing, it's on my own dime (though this is now true for "classic" trad-pub authors as well).

The downside is I have to know how to run everything. The upside is I'm not losing 90+% of the profit to a publisher.

But as an immediate example, editing on Starforge started in February of this year and only finished literally last week. It took ten months of work to edit, which was about how long it took to write.

For more AMAs on this topic, subscribe to r/IAmA_Author, and check out our other topic-specific AMA subreddits here.

Hey Max, I don't know your books or anything like that, i just found this post by chance. But, is it out of the realm to cut your costs by simply buying a microphone and a recording software and other such equipment and producing it your self? I mean maybe you have an actor friend or ask someone with a nice listenable talking voice to read your book for you. I am of the mind amateurs can be deceptively valuable and talented. I'm an audio engineer and I work in music but in my experience things like this while not easy, are much easier than many people might believe.

Just saying, could be a fun project for you and the idea of home producing your own audio book could be exciting.

Even buying the equipment and doing a "homebrew" audiobook would still be quite expensive, largely due to the lengths of the works involved.

There have been discussions about using such methods, and I've even run the prices on a few of them, but still found them wildly above my annual budget, sadly.

But the good news is ...

> ... I don't know your books or anything like that ...

You can buy a few, which would increase your familiarity and help toward making audiobooks a reality!

Thanks so much for the detailed answer! My father in law has just self published a novel, but gone about it very old school (garage of books and all). That made me very curious as I've always fancied the idea of finally pushing one of my drafts to completion one day.

Ten months of editing is mad, but your books are huge so I suppose I'm not so surprised. Massive congratulations on the completion of the book and it's trilogy, you must be both proud and relieved!

I've actually just gotten back into reading but I've gotta finish the books I currently have. You're on my list though.

Thanks! It has been a journey. Six years from the reader's perspective, and eight years from mine. 1.3 million words all together. My next projects will be a bit more sensible. But it does feel good to finally have the trilogy be complete.

Good luck to your father in law with his first novel too! I know exactly how good that feels to hold the first one in your hands!

Hey, no shame there. Now that I'm done editing Starforge I'm getting back to my own list (And reading NOT for work. It's amazing!).

Though I would advise grabbing Colony today, while it's still on sale, and will save you a few bucks. I'm frugal, and as much as it's my income I know the importance of saving a buck!

A bit of a silly question, but have you heard of the crowdfunding disaster that was the game "Starforge"? If so, did you happen to get any influence from it?

Looking forward to checking it out, maybe I'll work on it for an audiobook for the company I work for if it gains traction!

What is your favorite Science Fiction Movie - and series?

My tip-of-the-tongue answer is Star Wars. Specifically Return of the Jedi. I know, I know, most people prefer The Empire Strikes Back, but I love fleet engagements, and that final fleet battle in RotJ is one of my favorite cinema moments of all time. I love fleet battles in general—big and small—which is why I also why I was so thrilled to have several ship to ship battles in Starforge.

However, my answer would not be complete without noting two other films that I absolutely have a soft place in my heart for, one which is very much Sci-Fi and one which really isn't but I'll list it anyway. The first is Predator. Yup, with Schwarzenegger. I love the way that movie upends its tropes, and the Predator itself is just an amazing design.

The other movie isn't really a Sci-Fi, but it is the perfect film. I speak, of course, of the Kevin Bacon film Tremors.

Now series ... that's a tough one. There are a lot of Sci-Fi series out there, some of which are very good, and it's hard to pick just one. But I'm going to go for an odd shot and say that while I'll love Star Trek for its approach and Star Wars shows for theirs, and I love Firefly ... I'd have to say that all of those, I feel, owe the original Twilight Zone. It's Sci-Fi—sometimes fantasy—that asked tough questions or posited moral conundrums often without an answer.

Picking a favorite is nigh impossible, but I do have a place in my heart for The Twilight Zone and its approach to making us think about ourselves.

Actually no. I didn't know it was a crowdfunding disaster until you just said it, and the first I knew that there were other properties that had used the name was when I started promoting Starforge on Twitter. And since the book itself is the finale to a series that I've been working on for eight years, I think it's safe to say there would be zero crossover, and the only similarity would be in the name. Starforge's plot, characters, and setup were all laid down back in 2014 when I began writing Colony, and set in stone when Colony came out in 2016. The journey inside its pages is completely linked to the other two books in the series.

I do recommend giving it a look, especially if you're a fan of huge Sci-Fi adventures. Do recommend starting with the first book in the series, Colony, though. Whether or not you do is entirely up to you!

And hey, maybe you will work on it someday. I'd like the whole trilogy to get an audiobook set. That'd be something like 130 hours all said and done, but it'd be amazing to listen to!

Thank you for the great answer! I can see how tropes are a necessary short hand to bring the reader along for the ride.

Has there ever been a story line you had to abandon because you strayed too far from a recognizable setup?

Have you ever considered producing any of your books into audio? Have you considered who you would choose as a narrator?

> Thank you for the great answer! I can see how tropes are a necessary short hand to bring the reader along for the ride.

You're welcome, but note that it's not just that they're necessary shorthand, but that they're fundamental structure. You want a team of characters for any reason? That's a trope. The only way not to have it is to have only one character. But that's also a trope. "Eliminating tropes" is like saying you want to build a bridge but without any atoms. It's just not feasible. Understanding tropes is akin to understanding your building materials and using them properly or in clever ways.

> Has there ever been a story line you had to abandon because you strayed too far from a recognizable setup?

In that regard, no. I've had to abandon a few because plots or characters didn't work the way I'd hoped, or not been as fun as I'd imagined. There's a whole completed manuscript on my drive that never got published because it was just too rough, and I'm not sure it'll ever be (I'll likely just take stuff from it for other stories).

> Looking through your library I can't see if you're working with a publisher. Are you freelance?

I'm Indie, yes. I prefer the freedom.

> Have you ever considered producing any of your books into audio? Have you considered who you would choose as a narrator?

This is a common question, but the answer is always "cost, cost cost." Audiobooks aren't cheap to produce, especially big ones. Someday I hope to, but until I'm selling a few thousand copies a week it's going to remain a pipe dream. As far as who I'd pick for a narrator it'd depend on the book.

What does the business model of being an author look like these days? Traditional you'd expect to get a publisher. How much has self publishing changed that market?

So is a starforge a star used as a forge, a forge that makes stars, or a floor wax and a dessert topping?

To discover that, you'll have to read the book!

Very chaotic. I frequently refer to it as an absolute storm of an industry as everything either gets upended or is trying not to be upended. Publishing managed to put off the changes brought about by the internet era for as long as possible, but they couldn't hold it back for every and now everything's crazy.

Trad-pub still exists, the ol' "I'll send a manuscript to every publisher in existence and hope someone bites." But the royalties are a fraction of what they once were, and you give up a lot of control in exchange for less with each passing year (it used to be that if there were signings or promotionals the publisher would pay for them, now it's the author most of the time).

Hybrid-Publishing is rapidly becoming the new force, with authors "double-dipping" into being both indie and traditional. They'll make the trad-pubs bid on upcoming books, or sign a contract that lets the publisher get one book for every 2-3 that the author releases on their own. Publishers don't like this, but it's better than being left out in the cold. Many people would also be surprised how many "big name" authors have switched to this model.

Lastly you've got full indie publishing, like myself. No deals with any traditional publishing house, and selling books either directly or through a traditional middleman without the publisher.

I've written a few pieces about it on my site. Trad pub also spends a lot of money getting pieces written about how the sky isn't falling, ebooks are a fad, or indie publishing will never work for anyone even as they shell out millions of dollars for the rights to publish paperback copies of The Martian, because they don't want the boat rocking.

It's far from over, but seeing as we've gone from the "Big six" traditional publishers down to the 'Big four" and one of the green rooms I've hung out in had a bunch of authors making bets on which would be the next to fall, there's still some shakeup coming.

Do you think sci-fi is harder to write than fantasy?

I had to think about it for a moment, but I'd say no. Both require a lot of research and careful work/planning, and may require that in different areas, but overall I'd say that at least for what I write, neither is easier than the other. Each genre requires its own amount of work, research, study, and careful thought in their own way, but I wouldn't say one is easier or harder than the other. Axtara still had tons of research and study, just like Colony or Jungle did.

Good question.

Haha I agree, my brother and I had a small argument about being able to simply "magic" a problem away vs having to base the solution in science. So you seemed the perfect person to ask, thank you for taking the time.

No worries. Thanks for the question.

"Hand-waving" exists in both genres, to be fair. Plenty of stories have devices magical or scientific that work via "Who knows, we just know that it works" logic.

But even if there is a magic solution to a problem, what sort of ramifications does that have for the setting? Can magicians create food? What's the cost, and would anyone ever starve? At the root, be it magic or science, the same questions about society and the world will be asked, and an author will need to have (or find) those answers.

Wait till you find out about the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Starforge; any inspiration from Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic? Major plot piece in that game

Nope. None. Never played it. As to what the Starforge is, you'll have to read the book to find out!

Brando Sando is one of my favs too.

In your opinion what is the more difficult genre to write for, science-fiction or fantasy?

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Do you have a lathe of heaven in your star forge?

Trying to get into reading. I'll check out your work!

How do you cope with the existential dread that at superposition all life is the same life separated by change in possibility via superposition, and the distance between any two points in space-time are separated by change in possibility via superposition?

I didn't see it answered, but where should one start with your work?

I guess something I always wanted to ask as someone who is inspired to write but how likely is it for your work or book you made to get an adaptation? Is it really hard? And if so, can the author himself pick the studio, director, and cast?

Brian McClellan is so insanely good. I absolutely adore the characters and storylines he writes, specifically how he manages to have a detective/who-dun-it kind of storyline while also juggling the 'main' story itself.

Hmmm wouldn't a star that's used as a forge be a forgestar?

Lewtenant kernel

You're going to like Florschutz then.

I'm late to the party but wanted to ask about ebooks, is it financially better for you if I buy it as an ebook or a physical book (both on Amazon) Or is there a better way to bring you a greater % of the sale? Info : I live in Europe.

Unless you're British, then leftenant kernel.

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Can you help this guy? https://www.reddit.com/r/Wellthatsucks/comments/z710rd/had_a_small_party_and_our_shoes_scratched_my

This implies the existence of an elusive rightenant

Could you give an example?

Will this series go onto Audible ?

This is great advice, thank you for sharing!