Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 83

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 124: Listener Opinions On AI-Narrated Audiobooks

The Pulp Writer Show returns from hiatus! In this week’s episode, I discuss listener opinions about the AI-narrated audiobooks I’ve posted on YouTube. I also talk about how to balance writing time with other responsibilities.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music.

-JM

Jonathan Moeller vs Linux

Joachim asks:

-What happened between Linux and you?

He’s referring to the fact that I don’t write about technology nearly as much as I used to a few years ago.

There wasn’t any big falling out or anything. I still use Linux for some things, and I’m still proud of my two bestselling Linux books – THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE and THE UBUNUT BEGINNER’S GUIDE. In fact, THE LINUX COMMAND LINE BEGINNER’S GUIDE is my bestselling individual paperback title by a long shot. None of my other books even come close in paperback sales.

That said, I don’t really write about technology very much anymore for two reasons.

1.) Photoshop. For years, I used The GIMP for graphic design, and GIMP always ran better on Linux instead of Windows. When The Virus ramped up in 2020, I took some classes on Photoshop. As much as it pains me to admit this, as much as I don’t want it to be true, Photoshop is just better. I don’t like Adobe as a company and I think they’ve had some pretty sketchy business practices, but there’s been a lot of time and money spent on refining Photoshop, and it shows. These Photoshop classes have been of immense benefit to me – I can make way better images for ads and my website, and I have vastly more flexibility around cover design than I did three years ago. This isn’t to say that you can’t do a lot of the same stuff in GIMP, but a lot of things are simpler and easier in Photoshop.

Running Photoshop on a Linux system is a pain, so I spend less time on Linux than I used to.

(I should mention I’ve heard good things about a program called Affinity Photo, which isn’t nearly as expensive as Photoshop, but I’ve never personally used it so I can’t vouch for it one way or another.)

2.) Time. There are only so many hours in the day, and I have no shortage of things with which to fill them. Since I’ve published 132 novels in the last eleven years (SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND will be #133) I haven’t exactly been idle. While I enjoy writing about technology, the money turned out to be a lot better in fantasy fiction, and I didn’t have time to do both. So, fantasy fiction it was.

Anyway, that is why I don’t write about technology very much any more – I’m too busy using it to write fantasy novels.

-JM

advertising results for July 2022

It’s the end of the month, so let’s see how my ads did for July 2022.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: For every $1 spent, I got back $13.99.

FROSTBORN: For every $1 spent, I got back $3.24

GHOSTS: For every $1, I got back $4.07

SEVENFOLD SWORD: For every $1, I got back $4.43.

SILENT ORDER: For every $1, I got back $1.43.

I should point out the figures for CLOAK GAMES/MAGE include the results from CLOAK OF SPEARS. However, if I take SPEARS out of the equation, it’s still $6.83 back for every dollar spent. Pretty good! This shows that the best advertising for a series is to write a new book in it.

SILENT ORDER was the weakest of the five, but the new covers with spaceships and planets helped – it used to be in the $1.10 to $1.20 range with the old covers. Hopefully SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND will boost the series when the book comes out in August.

Thanks for reading, everybody!

-JM

Jonathan Moeller vs compost!

I’m pleased to report that I made more progress than I expected on SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND this week – I am now 66 percent through the book.

The reason for that was a tree.

I have quite a few Homeowner Maintenance Mandatory Fun Activities (funtivities!) to do, and I tried to pack a bunch of them into the end of July so I could get through them and get back to working on DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS.

One of my Mandatory Funtivities, however, involves tree trimming. A tree in the yard has gotten overgrown with a lot of branches on ground level, and it was becoming a bit of a hazard. I wanted to call the tree trimmers to deal with it, but I live in a part of the world where the trees outnumber the people exponentially, and the tree trimmers are backed up for months, if they get to you at all.

But then I thought, the tree is healthy, all the branches I need to get down are at ground level, I can buy a chain saw and do it myself.

I was, of course, fully aware that many stories that begin with “I can buy a chain saw and do it myself” end in varying degrees of disaster ranging from comical to ruinous and sometimes both.

So I got an electric pole saw (this is a small electric chainsaw that attaches to the end of a metal pole for tree trimming), thoroughly read all the instructions and safety materials, and then booked off all July 27th for tree trimming since I had never done it before and therefore wanted to proceed slowly and carefully.

Turns out, if you follow all suggested safety precautions and adequately oil the chain saw, using a polesaw is really easy. It just goes WHHHRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! and slices right through the branch, and that’s that.

The tricky part turned out to be what to do with the branches once I got them down. The local compost center is only open twice a week, and I hadn’t realized that freshly cut tree branches don’t compress down very well, even if you chop them up into smaller pieces. I rapidly ran out of places to store the branches, and I couldn’t get rid of them since the compost center wasn’t open for another two days. I realized that tree trimming would be have to be something I would do in small pieces over a week or so, rather than a “one and done” all day job. That meant I had to stop after two and a half hours after I thought it would take all day, so I wrote 5,500 words of SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND instead of tree trimming.

Thankfully, all the big “all-day jobs” of my Homeowner Funtivities are done, and what’s left are things I’ll have to do in phases, an hour or two every day. That means my writing pace can pick up again, so hopefully it won’t be too much longer until the rough draft of SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND is finished.

Finally, I should mention once again that if you do use a polesaw or any power tool of any sort, you should definitely abide by all the manufacturer’s recommended safety precautions and procedures.

-JM

advertising fail

I have spent a lot of time with Facebook, Amazon, and Bookbub Ads over the years, trying to get better at them and improve my understanding of the platform. My email newsletter is also a form of advertising. So I’ve thought a lot about how to most effectively advertise.

Which means it’s sometimes hilarious when you encounter someone who isn’t trying at all.

I get a lot of unsolicited email from companies that are just starting up – usually book promotion places, Chinese webnovel places that want to serialize my stuff, or various podcast promotion sites. These pitches, as you can imagine, vary widely in quality, and some of them are out-and-out phishing scams designed to steal financial information.

The one I got today offering to promote ELVEN HONOR was pretty good.

In the sense of failing epically:

“Dear Darren Hultberg Jr,” the email began.

This was a surprise, because I have never been addressed as Darren Hultberg Jr, or ever referred to myself as Darren Hultberg Jr, or indeed ever heard the name. A quick search revealed that Darren Hultberg Jr is in fact a fantasy author who appears to focus on Cultivation and LitRPG style stories. So either they 1.) confused me with Darren Hultberg Jr., 2.) intended to email Mr. Hultberg, and emailed me by mistake, 3.) or messed up the mail merge function. None of these inspire confidence.

The next line was even better.

“Open your Book to your specialty crowd with our kind explicit advancements.”

Oh, dear. Is “advancements” something different from “advertisements?” Also, “explicit advancements” sounds like either a content warning for a certain kind of media, or the sort of thing you can get fired for. (“Employee made explicit advancements to a co-worker, specifically offering to ‘open her book to his kind explicit advancements’. Termination of employment recommended.”)

The email also touted that the service had “400k Plus adherents on Twitter.” Not followers. Adherents. Is this a book advertising service or a cult? Or maybe both? A cult that has gone into the book advertising business, maybe to pay off the legal settlements involving the leader’s explicit advancements?

“Your Book will be prescribed to our 1600+ Facebook Fans.”

Not to gloat, but I have 2,200.

“Your Post Will Be Featured on the Leading Facebook bunch.”

I know Facebook is constantly rotating features in and out, but I am reasonably sure that Facebook has never had a feature called “Facebook bunch.”

As a final red flag, the email didn’t actually come from the domain of the service in question – it came from someone’s personal Gmail account.

I know I’ve just spent 400 words amusing myself about this, but it’s pretty obvious what happened – some overseas operators slapped together a book promotion site to turn a quick profit, and probably used Google Translate to help along the process of selling their kind explicit advancements. It’s also possible it’s a more serious scam, one designed to steal credit card details.

So it’s good a reminder that there are a lot of shady operators on the Internet, and it’s always best to investigate everything thoroughly, take things with a grain of salt, and only spend money at businesses with established reputations and good word-of-mouth.

-JM

thanks for reading!

CLOAK OF SPEARS had a very strong first week. Thanks for reading, everyone!

It is amusing to imagine Nadia’s reaction if she actually read one of the CLOAK MAGE books. I imagine it would be loud.

A few people have asked when CLOAK OF MASKS, the next book, will come out. Before the end of 2022 if all goes well!

I had originally planned to name the next book CLOAK OF SHADOWS, but there’s already like a billion different books with that title, so I went with CLOAK OF MASKS instead.

So what will CLOAK OF MASKS be about?

Well, after the last few books, Mr. Hood and Ms. Maestro have realized that Nadia is A Problem, and Maestro’s going to do something about it…

-JM

Progress updates

Still some Homeowner Funtivities to do this week, but if my math is accurate, I am 41% of the way through SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND.

Additionally, I am 1500 words into DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS. Suppose I had better figure out who these barbarians are, and why they are furious.

-JM

Listener Opinion Roundup on Digitial Voices

So it’s been about a month since I posted the AI-narrated audiobook of SILENT ORDER: IRON HAND to YouTube. It’s six hours long, and in that time it has accumulated 12,600 watch hours, which means people have listened to it about 2,100 times, give or take.

That’s also enough time for people to have left comments and sent in emails expressing their opinions, and I thought it would be interesting to go through those opinions. We’re in the realm of taste here, so I want to mention that you can’t have a wrong opinion on the topic. Unless your opinion is nonsensical, like digital voices are bad because you shouldn’t put salt on a steak, that kind of thing. (I should mention that there are YouTube commentors for whom achieving even that level of illogical thought is sadly out of reach.)

First, audiobook narrators can take heart. No one actually likes AI voices!

Everyone prefers a human narrator and will listen to one if given the choice. However, in that vein, no one likes going to the doctor, either, but obviously you can have a good experience or a bad experience going to the doctor. Since it is not feasible for every book ever written by the hand of mankind to have a human-narrated audiobook due to the limitations of cost and time, I think people recognize the AI voices as a potential usefully tool to cover some of the gap. To return to the medical metaphor, it’s like blood pressure medication. The ideal would be not to need blood pressure medication at all, just as the ideal would be for every book to have a human narrator, but if you do have high blood pressure, it’s better to have the medication than to go without.

Within the “general dislike” of AI-narrated audiobooks, there were five distinct flavors of opinion, some of which overlapped with one another.

1.) People who liked the story (thanks, everyone!) and found the AI voice an adequate instrument for delivering the story to their ears and brain. I think these are people like long-haul truckers or outdoor workers who can work while wearing headphones, people who listen to a ton of content going about their work and are always looking out for more. They usually check out a lot of audiobooks from their local library service, since buying two or three new audiobooks a week would be prohibitively expensive.

2.) People who liked the story (thanks, everyone!) enough to overcome their intense dislike of the artificial voice. These are people who strongly prefer human narrators, but since that’s not available, might as well listen to the artificial one.

3.) People who hated the AI voice, and I thought I was evil for even trying to experiment with it. They were personally offended that I used an artificial voice, but this opinion was generally a very small minority. Usually it came from fear of displacing human narrators, or of the increasing insidious effect of technology upon human life. As to the first point, SILENT ORDER doesn’t sell well enough to justify an audiobook, so no human narrator would have been screwed out of work because there never would have been a human-narrated version even if AI-voice technology had never come along. As for the second point, whatever effects technology has upon human life, whether positive or negative (or insidious!), will happen regardless of what I decide to do.

4.) Accessibility issues. This is a significant minority of comments. People with vision difficulties, or who have trouble holding a book or ereader for long periods of time, did not mind the artificial voice. In fact, text-to-speech technology has been around for a while, and the AI voice is a significant improvement over earlier versions of the technology. Someone who has been using text-to-speech for years would appreciate the upgrade in the voice.

5.) Finally, you can’t beat free, and the book is free on YouTube. I had emails and comments from a few people who were flat broke (one guy was living in his van) and were glad to have free entertainment of any kind.

One note about ads. I managed to get into the YouTube Partners Program this time around, so I could put ads on the audiobooks. Some people really hated the ads, but 1.) it didn’t cost me anything to make the audiobooks, and 2.) it doesn’t cost anything to listen to them, so I have no problem putting ads on them. My two main sources of revenue for audiobooks are ACX and Findaway Voices, which ACX typically pulling in about five times as much as Findaway on an average month. For July, it looks like YouTube will bring in about 40% more than Findaway Voices, which was a nice surprise. Given how YouTube heavily puts its thumb on the scales for newly uploaded content, I doubt that will last, but it will be an enjoyable bonus of the experiment.

So that is how people have reacted to the artificially narrated audiobooks. Ultimately, I think that Joanna Penn is right, and we’ll see the bifurcation of audio rights, with “machine-narrated” and “human-narrated” audiobook rights being distinct categories. Some epic lawsuit is going to decide all of that at some point, and I really don’t want to be involved with it.

Finally, I do think opinion #4 is the most important one, and that for accessibility reasons the technology will eventually be integrated into ereaders and web browsers, allowing you to choose to have the computer read the book or web page to you in a voice and accent of your choosing. In the Gospels, Jesus was pretty clear on the importance of “caring for the ill”, and most major religions tend to put that fairly high on their roster of duties for the faithful. What is accessibility technology if not doing that on a large scale?

-JM

Author reading of CLOAK OF SPEARS

Time to try something a bit different.

Back in the old days, authors used to do book tours and read an excerpt. That wasn’t very economical back then, and it’s even less economical now that the Internet has come along.

But the Internet also makes it easier to to this kind of thing, so here is an excerpt from CLOAK OF SPEARS, as read by me!

You can get the book at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip.

-JM

 

SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND underway

Now that CLOAK OF SPEARS is out, next up is SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND.

This summer has been massively busy, and one of the chief causes of that is the number of Mandatory Homeowner Repair Fun Activities (Funtivities!) that I need to do, like, soon.

Once CLOAK OF SPEARS was done, I had originally planned to take the rest of July off from writing to focus on those Homeowner Repair Funtivities full-time, and then to start on DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS in August. However, a brief glance at the stack of bills on my desk suggested that this may not be the best idea anyone has ever had in the history of ideas.

So, to make the best use of the available time, I decided instead to finish something I had already started, and that is SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND. I am 25% of the way through it, and if all goes well it should be out towards the end of August. By then hopefully I will have finished all my Homeowner Repair Funtivities (or at least gotten to the “eh, good enough” point) and then I will start on DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS.

The SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND cover image will feature a spaceship near a planet. Back in May I saw this Penny Arcade comic that I thought made a salient point about SF covers, so I switched all the SILENT ORDER covers to feature planets and spaceships in close proximity. They do see to convert better than the ones with character images.

-JM