In today’s interview, David tells us more about Lake Drive’s mission, publishing practices, and unconventional financial model. David also offers his takes on how to determine what works for you when it comes to choosing a publishing path and gives some platform-building insights for authors.

--

• Publishing Disrupted - Podcast - Apple Podcasts
• Hyponymous Literary
• Free 30-Day Plottr Trial
• Hybrid Pub Scout's Bookshop.org Shop
• Lake Drive Books | Spirituality, Self Help, Wholeness
• IBPA’s Hybrid Publishing Criteria

Hybrid publishing has a bit of a nebulous definition at the moment, but as authors are becoming more disenchanted with traditional publishing and discovering how grueling self publishing can be, they’re becoming more relevant.

Since it’s been the standard for such a long time, people are used to the traditional publishing model. They expect that:

1. Publishers pay for everything
2. Authors get advances and royalties
3. Publishers take care of book promotion and marketing

But here’s a few problems (among others):

1. The “everything” that publishers pay for has a big asterisk attached to it, even in trad
2. Advances and royalties are more underwhelming than ever (or maybe “less whelming”?)
3. Book promotion and marketing mostly falls on the author now (see point 1)

I’ve seen a lot of talk about hybrid publishing being predatory and no different from vanity presses, and in some cases…sure. But when you don’t have a major corporation paying all the up front costs, there are some practicalities to consider. Namely, who’s going to pay for all these professionals to do the work of making a book?

If you listened to the show before, hopefully you’ve gotten the message of how hard ghostwriters, editors, designers, marketers, and other publishing professionals work to create the best book possible. And that work needs to be compensated. But, authors, obviously, should get the best deal possible for their work, too.

So where does that leave us?

How do we bring books into the world while making sure it’s fair to everyone, especially when everyone who isn’t a CEO of a major corporation has such a tight budget? And how do you, as an author, know the money and effort you spend on the publishing side is going to get you to your goal?

The Independent Book Publisher’s Association (or IBPA) has tried to set up some standards for hybrid presses in the last several years. At last look, these are what the IBPA says a good hybrid publisher should do:

1. Define a mission and vision for its publishing program.
2. Vet submissions.
3. Commit to truth and transparency in business practices.
4. Provide a negotiable, easy-to-understand contract for each book published.
5. Publish under its own imprint(s) and ISBNs.
6. Publish to industry standards.
7. Ensure editorial, design, and production quality.
8. Pursue and manage a range of publishing rights.
9. Provide distribution services.
10. Demonstrate respectable sales.
11. Pay authors a higher-than-standard royalty.

As you may have noticed, there’s considerable wiggle room in there for these definitions (for example, you as the author are...

Recent surveys verify what you probably have already guessed, that there are profound divides between writers who use AI and writers who downright refuse. But interestingly, these surveys have also shown that around 60% of writers do use AI tools of some kind.

So, when you’re creating a software program for writers, you have some choices to make. Do you alienate your anti-AI users or your pro-AI users?

Or do you try to find a compromise that works for the greatest number of people?

One of my favorite tools that I use in my fiction writing is Plottr, which I introduced to y’all back in Episode 74. It’s a program that lets you visualize your story from beginning to end and keep your notes on characters, themes, settings, and other plot elements all in one central place.

When I interviewed Plottr’s education outreach lead back in 2023, I had bought the basic program for myself, which is a tool that you download and use offline. I've used it for at least three different writing projects, and it's helped make my process much more streamlined.

So when the folks from Plottr reached out to me to chat about new developments, I was excited. However, when I looked into it and saw that they had a new tool that used AI, I got very uncomfortable. I’m way more on the skeptical side of this issue, and I was scared to see another program I used get gobbled up by AI features.

But then I got curious, because I noticed that it was being implemented in a different way that we see in products like Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot (or, if you listened to my last episode ProWritingAid). The difference is that instead of forcing AI features on Plottr users, they offered a choice where users could stick to the completely AI-free Plottr program, or buy the AI-powered Storysnap either on its own or as an add-on.

Seriously, it’d be nice if more companies would do that instead of making you jump through hoops to opt out.

No matter my own feelings, I can understand how that statistic poses a dilemma for software companies that don’t want to go out of business. Plottr seems to be trying to create a solution that gives both groups what they want, and I wanted to know more about how that choice was made and where those lines were drawn. When I interviewed Plottr’s founder Cameron Sutter about the way they’re trying to employ ethical AI use, I learned that a lot of careful thought was put into how to deploy AI in a way that avoids using stolen works and doesn’t write users’ stories for them.

I’m not here to sell you Storysnap, but I did make space in this interview to talk about it (even though, as you’ll hear, I struggle to pronounce it correctly). To keep it simple: Storysnap helps series writers create a personal story bible, so they can easily maintain continuity throughout each book. Cameron does a good job explaining how they’ve attempted to address issues about privacy and what measures they’ve taken to keep the AI from training on users’ work.

A not-so-brief history of National Novel Writing Month from its beginnings in 1999, its growth as a nonprofit, its scandals, and where November Novel-writers can go from here,

--

It's that time of year again. You may love it, hate it, fear it, or be totally uninterested. I'm talking about...well, what you're calling it now depends on your history with it and your feelings on the way things went down. It used to be National Novel Writing Month, aka., NaNoWriMo, and in some cases it still is. Some are calling it Novel November. Others seem to be not calling it anything and just *describing* what it is.

For the sake of ease, I'll be calling it NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) during the full duration of its existence as a nonprofit.

This is a rabbit hole. I set out to write something about commodifying creativity and the problems of centralizing movements under capitalism. But it ended up being so much more than that.

I'm going to do my best to sum everything up according to my understanding of what happened based on the graveyard of evidence from shut-down forums.

• Jester Dance by Conquest | https://freetouse.com/music/conquest
• Meditation Music by Dana Music from Pixabay
• Typing Sound Effect by DRAGON-STUDIO from Pixabay

• "State of NaNoWriMo" closing announcement
• Thread for NaNo Alternatives, Writing Discords & Resources
• TrackBear
• Ellipsus Preptober Templates
• NaNo 2.0
• Ellipsus's sponsorship retraction
• Daniel José Older's resignation post
• National Novel Writing Month: Inside the A.I. controversy tearing a writing community apart.
• What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? – National Novel Writing Month
• SPEAK OUT
• NaNoWriMo 2023-2025 controversy summary
• NaNoWriMo Moderator accused of child exploitation
• Spam, Spam, Spam Spam: Inkitt