Hear Me on Woodbury Writes

Recently I had the honor of being interviewed by Sandy Carlson, host of the Woodbury Writes podcast. We talked about Samuel Smedley, transcendentalist utopias, and the real-life inspiration behind my gothic (or is it eco-gothic?) novel, A Season of Whispers.

I’ve been interviewed before but this was the first time for a podcast. Sandy asked great questions and, being a history enthusiast herself, clearly enjoyed discussing the particulars of privateering during the American Revolution and the tenets of the transcendentalist movement. It wound up being a recorded conversation rather than an examination, which to my ear always makes for the best podcasts.

Around the same time when I recorded the podcast, I was interviewed separately by another person for a different venue. That interview didn’t go as well. The interviewer was disinterested in my work and instead asked me a number of personal questions which made me uncomfortable, questions about my wife and sons and other census tabulations — I was surprised she didn’t ask me for my social-security number and mother’s maiden name. I stayed polite but it was irritating at best, icky at worst. I don’t think the interview has run publicly and fingers crossed it never does.

Yet the contrast of the two experiences gave me insight. I’ve conducted hundreds of interviews throughout my career and I’d never before realized what constitutes a good interview. It’s simply this: professionals — artists and creatives in particular — will wax rhapsodic for hours about their work, but they hate to talk about themselves. They want to talk about what they do, not about who they are.

I had, unknowingly, been practicing this methodology for years. It never occurred to me while interviewing any of the dozens of archaeologists I’ve spoken to, to ask them about their home lives or frankly anything not germane to their research. What business is it of mine to nose around, asking questions about their spouses or partners or how they spend their downtime? Nobody cares, or at least they shouldn’t. What matters is what they’ve discovered or learned, what their theories and ideas are.

Being on the other end of the microphone made me realize that, as an author, I crave to be asked questions about the stories and inspirations, both historical and personal, that go into my books. That’s what excites me and that’s what made the Woodbury Writes podcast so great. What I don’t want is to be interrogated about how old my kids are or what time I wake up in the morning.

Suddenly I feel sympathy toward celebrities who always seem a bit disgruntled or surly in interviews. Now I understand how eagerly they want to discuss their latest performance yet instead they’re bombarded with questions about who they’re schtupping and what kind of sandwich they ate after the schtupping. I get it.

My half-hour interview with Sandy about my work and what goes into it is available on Spotify, Anchor.fm, and Google Podcasts.

Audible and Its Detractors

Prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, who wrote five novels during the pandemic while some of us were watching Schitt’s Creek and loading frozen turkeys into car trunks, has announced the audiobook editions of those novels “will not be on Audible for the foreseeable future.”

The reason? “Audible has grown to a place where it’s very bad for authors.”

If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.)

Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of reference, most brick-and-mortar stores take around 50% on a retail product. Audible pays indie authors less than a bookstore does, when a bookstore has storefronts, sales staff, and warehousing to deal with. 

I knew things were bad, which is why I wanted to explore other options with the Kickstarter.  But I didn’t know HOW bad. Indeed, if indie authors don’t agree to be exclusive to Audible, they get dropped from 40% to a measly 25%. Buying an audiobook through Audible instead of from another site literally costs the author money.

It’s particularly galling when you realize the royalty on an audiobook is based upon the price at point of purchase, and because Audible (and other audiobook retailers) constantly offers a smorgasbord of discounts, sales, and free trials, the percentage paid to the creators can be based on prices as low as $0. The publisher or indie author can discount the title themselves but they have no choice if Audible decides to discount it for them.

And yet audiobooks have never been more popular. For the year of June 2021 to June 2022, audiobooks accounted for more than 11 percent of all trade book sales, up from 10 percent in 2021 and 8 percent in 2020. These sales seem to be at the expense of hardbacks and — surprisingly to me — e-books, sales of which have been steadily falling: for that same period, e-books sales accounted for 12.7 percent of book sales. Audiobooks will probably displace e-books as the digital version of choice in the next year or two.

This very much jibes with my royalty statements for A Season of Whispers. I’ve literally sold hundreds of audiobooks for it and yet my royalties are pennies. As my publisher at Aurelia Leo said to me, the catch-22 of audiobooks’ popularity versus the poor royalty scheme and the high cost of producing them is, in her words, “a head-scratching conundrum.”

I can’t fault people for preferring audiobooks. I don’t listen to them myself but I do enjoy listening to podcasts while multi-tasking, like when I’m making dinner or on a long drive. I prefer the quiet solace of reading a book the old-fashioned way but I understand not everyone has the free time to do so.

So if I may make one request, it’s this: buy your audiobooks anywhere except Audible.

For years, Audible has offered an overly generous policy of allowing buyers to return an audiobook within one year of purchase, which means listeners could essentially check out a title, listen to it, and return it at no cost as if Audible was a library. Audible bore this cost as a loss leader to accrue market share, squeezing as many competitors as possible out of the marketplace. Amazon’s capital allowed them to sustain the losses.

Which is how we arrived at this point.

So if you like audiobooks and you want to support indie and small-press authors, Chirp and Spotify are the best options to listen to A Season of Whispers and other titles. Somebody will make money from my audiobooks and it would be a lot cooler if that somebody was me and my publisher rather than Jeff Bezos.

Now You Can Listen to A Season of Whispers

The audiobook edition of A Season of Whispers is now available at Amazon, on Audible, and at Kobo.

Last summer I had the new-to-me pleasure of listening through audition files of potential narrators in which candidates read a few minutes of the text.

The audition I kept returning to was that of Darrin and Kristy Johnson, who took a clever approach to the gig. A Season of Whispers is divided into four acts, two told from a man’s perspective and two told from the perspective of Minerva Grosvenor, the heroine. Darrin narrated the two male acts and Kristy the two Minerva acts, which underscored the switches in POV for the listener.

The pair also threw some voice acting into the mix, with Darrin performing the dialogue of men and Kristy the women regardless of which act they were narrating. As the author I was a little worried how the book’s dialogue would translate to audio because not every line of speech is differentiated by “he said” or “she said” and so on, but by performing the dialogue as if the book was a play, they made the dialogue very easy to follow along.

I knew I’d found my narrators as soon as I heard the Johnsons’ audition. They made the audiobook into something unique, not just a voice reading the text.

So glad Aurelia Leo and I can now share it with listeners.

Blog Tour 2021

To promote the forthcoming release of the audiobook edition of A Season of Whispers, I’m currently in the midst of a six-week blog tour around the internet, which kicked off last Friday with a glowing review by Kirkus Reviews.

Some of the stops are spotlights or brief excerpts but the rest feature original content like interviews and reviews. Some of the highlights:

  • May 7: Read an interview with me at A Life Through Books.
  • May 10: Read a short review at Texas Book Nook: “My main takeaway from this novel is that you get a lot more than you are expecting.”
  • May 14: Read a review at Novel News Network: “Jackson Kuhl has done an amazing job of developing multi dimensional characters.”
  • May 17: Read an interview with me at My Reading Addiction.
  • May 19: Read a review at On a Reading Bender: “a great read that kept me as the reader engrossed.”
  • May 26: Read a review at The Indie Express: “keeps the reader looking around corners and trying to figure out what comes next.”
  • June 7: Read a review at Jazzy Book Reviews: “fascinating, slightly disturbing, and definitely something different from what I was expecting.”
  • June 10: Read an interview with me at The Avid Reader.