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Mark interviews author Eric T. Knight about his writing and about the origin of StoryFair. net a platform that seeks to pay authors the highest royalty of any other third party platform for their audiobook sales.
Prior to the interview, Mark reads comments from recent episodes, welcomes new patron Rob Johnson, and shares a word about this episode’s sponsor.
This episode is sponsored by ScribeCount (affiliate link). Spend less time logging in to multiple platforms and crunching numbers, and more time writing and marketing your books thanks to ScribeCount’s handy all-in-one interface.
In the interview, Mark and Eric talk about:
- Eric’s youth being way off the grid and in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, which made reading an important aspect
- How reading became a gateway for access and connection to the rest of the world
- Understanding that if he were to keep working at it, that he really could make it in writing some day
- The long and arduous road of submissions of writing to publishers, finding an agent, and pursuing traditional publishing
- The fantasy series that Erik had worked on starting back in the 80s
- Deciding to put one of his fantasy novels up on Kindle just for fun and how that led to a colleague’s wife discovering the book and loving it
- Eric’s mindset not changing until the year he decided to submit to a total of 50 agents
- The power of being able to write the series exactly the way he wanted to
- A bit about The Chaos Legacy universe and the various different linked series that take place within those books
- The experience of getting his books into audio and beginning to understand some of the barriers that existed within that realm for authors
- Beta launching StoryFair in the summer of 2023 and then making the site live in November 2023
- How the payment to authors process at StoryFair works
- Plans for an affiliate program for authors to send readers to this platform
- The challenge of having to scale up their infrastructure so early in the process due to huge interest from some major players
- How the StoryFair app is currently only available in the United States (at least for now until some of the legal stuff can be sorted out)
- How to set up an account, load your book, and when the monthly payments to authors come in
- The way that a good narrator can bring characters and stories to life in ways that you might not be able to imagine
- And more…
After the interview Mark reflects on that pioneering indie author spirit that leads to providing the market with elements that were previously missing but needed, as well as the value that a library brings to a community.
Links of Interest:
- StoryFair.net
- EricTKnight.com
- Eric’s books at Amazon
- ScribeCount (Mark’s Affiliate Link)
- The Author Wheel Podcast – Season 5 Episode 3 – Overcoming Self-Doubt and Mastering Book Marketing with Mark Leslie Lefebvre
- Feisty Familiars Anthology
- Draft2Digital Self-Publishing Insiders with Jeaniene Frost (Jan 25, 2024)
- Matty Dalrymple (Episode Links)
- Episode that mentions license plate and skeleton thief:
- How to Write a Howling Good Story
- Mark’s YouTube Channel
- Buy Mark a Coffee
- Patreon for Stark Reflections
- Best Book Ever Podcast
- Lovers Moon Podcast
- The Relaxed Author
- Publishing Pitfalls for Authors
- An Author’s Guide to Working with Libraries & Bookstores
- Wide for the Win
- Mark’s Canadian Werewolf Books
- The Canadian Mounted: A Trivia Guide to Planes, Trains and Automobiles
- Yippee Ki-Yay Motherf*cker: A Trivia Guide to Die Hard
Eric T. Knight grew up on a working cattle ranch in the desert thirty miles from Wickenburg, Arizona, which at that time was exactly the middle of nowhere. Work, cactus and heat were plentiful, forms of recreation were not. The TV got two channels when it wanted to, and only in the evening after someone hand cranked the balky diesel generator to life. All of which meant that his primary form of escape was reading.
At 18 he escaped to Tucson where he attended the University of Arizona. A number of fruitless attempts at productive majors followed, none of which stuck. Discovering he liked writing, the author tried journalism two separate times, but had to drop it when he realized that he had no intention of conducting interviews with actual people but preferred simply making them up.
StoryFair is a platform with a mission: Put an end to author exploitation in the audiobook industry
There’s a problem in the audiobook business. A MAJOR problem. Did you know that when you purchase an audiobook on Audible, Amazon keeps as much as 75% of the cover price of the book? The average price of a major publisher/new release audiobook is in the $24 range. That means Amazon keeps at least $18.00… after fees, it’s actually a little bit more.
That leaves very little for the publisher, authors, and narrators to divvy up, and ultimately, it means that readers are by and large paying exorbitant audiobook prices to do one thing above all else… pad Amazon’s pockets.
The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Your reflection on libraries got me reflecting on my library experience. In particular, it breaks down in two ways:
Access to both my sister’s private library and the local elementary library gave me my first big feel for reading. Admittedly, my sister’s library had a bigger impact on me at this point since it wasn’t monitored for maturity allowing me to read wider than the school librarian would allow.
Later, when I moved onto Junior High (back then we didn’t have these things called middle schools), the library took on another dimension. By this time I had firmly positioned myself as the shy nerdy boy, which tended to attract the attention of the wrong type of jock. Suddenly, the library (at school and at the public library after school) became a sanctuary from the latest crop of tormentors.
Oh, and there’s a third dynamic that came into play. The public library has a reference section. One of those places containing books so valuable they were kept in a separate room from which they couldn’t be removed for any reason. Who knows how much tidbits I picked up looking through those still impact the way I think all these decades later.
Your comments about the importance of libraries brought back memories. I’ve made part or, at times, all of my living from writing for over 50 years, and in a very real way it started in the little public library in my hometown of Trenton, Tennessee. At the time, the Gibson County Public Library was housed in a hole-in-the-wall space in the downtown area. I was in sixth grade, having had little positive experience with reading up to that point.
I can’t remember why I was even in there, since reading represented something that someone else made me do. But I stumbled across a yellow hardback novel with the dust jacket missing, a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein called “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.” I devoured that book in two days and went back for another, “Podkayne of Mars,” another Heinlein book. Then “The Door Into Summer,” and “Red Planet,” and “Starship Troopers,” then every other Heinlein book I could get my hands on.
That led to Isaac Asimov and countless others. I had discovered that reading stuff nobody forced you to read was fun, and I went back and read Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, all the material I had had to study earlier but now read “just because,” a whole different experience. Somewhere in there I started writing my own stories, pale attempts at science fiction in which I would get my characters into situations I couldn’t get them out of, so I would write, “And then the ship blew up. The End.” Not an auspicious start, but a start.
While I was in high school, they moved into a (to me) huge new building, much to my delight, a building they still occupy, now at the Gibson County Memorial Library. I haven’t been back there in probably 30 years, but it shines in my memory as brightly as anything from that time period.
Robert Schuller once said, “Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the number of apples in a seed.” I don’t know how many lives were changed because of the influence of that little library, but as my books go out into the world, it’s at least partly because of it.