[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to small publishing in a big universe. I am your host, Lisa Jacob. This is part two live from Worldcon 2025.
This month from Water Dragon Publishing, the Eliminator by Alan Dyer Shapiro from Cupid's Arrow Publishing.
Diamonds aren't a girl's best friend. Love Is by Felicia Carparelli Cupid's Wanderlust by Kostatin Georgiev the Sentience by Maurice Temple and Paper Angel Press. Founding Daughter by Wallace Bain Stay tuned for live from Worldcon 2025, part one of a three part episode.
Founding Daughter by Wallace Bain what if the noble words of the Declaration of Independence were not written by Thomas Jefferson, but by an author of a much lower station still aspiring to be free? What if life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was an idea of an especially precoc bookish half black teenaged servant girl with a boundless faith in the ideas of the Enlightenment?
Founding Daughter is available this month from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords and other online booksellers. Or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org for more information, visit their website at paperangelpress.com.
[00:02:08] Speaker C: This is live from worldcon. I am Brian CE Buhl, your guest host.
[00:02:12] Speaker D: I have with me James Lloyd Doolin, author of no Hurt for a Thief in the Malitude trilogy.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: You have your books right here in the dealers room behind us.
[00:02:21] Speaker D: Yes, I do.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: How has that been so far?
[00:02:23] Speaker D: It's been great. So this is my first CON period, not just worldcon and so I haven't done a whole lot of in person sales before. So it's been really cool talking with people and being able to sign books in person. Most of my interaction with my fan base has been online previously, so it's really cool to put some faces in front of me and be able to shake hands and talk about the book books with people in person. I published my first book January 2023 and so I've been very active online through Twitter, through TikTok, Instagram, all the socials and lots of discords connecting with authors, connecting with readers and reviewers. And I've probably met a good 30 to 40 people here that I knew online. We've exchanged messages before.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Okay, so you have a trilogy that's out?
[00:03:14] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:03:16] Speaker C: Tell me about the first book and tell me about the trilogy in general.
[00:03:19] Speaker D: Yeah, so Malitu is a series that starts with no Heart for a Thief and it is the story of this recluse warrior who started a rebellion and later abandoned it. He's pulled back into it when he encounters a young war orphan who is hell bent on revenge.
And in order to keep her from making a lot of the same mistakes that he made, he takes her under his wing and tries to help her learn how to live in this world, their world that has been colonized by a different country. And they're trying to find a sense of self and a sense of culture and community that has been stolen from them.
[00:03:57] Speaker C: The covers are absolutely gorgeous.
Tell me about the process of not only just the writing of the book, but the publishing and how you got all that polished into this trilogy.
[00:04:06] Speaker D: I have made probably every mistake you can make with indie publishing. When I was thinking about my cover at first, I went out on Twitter and asked, where are some artists I can connect with? And that was the first time I ever had a tweet go. Not viral, but big. And I just had my inbox flooding with people soliciting my commission.
[00:04:27] Speaker C: Hungry artists.
[00:04:28] Speaker D: Yes, hungry, hungry artists. And I ended up picking one that I thought I really liked their artwork and then come to find out later that this person, the artwork that they showed me was all other people's artwork stolen. All stolen artwork. I was luckily enough able to work with PayPal to get my deposit back. And then I was very jaded and gun shy. So I went with the only cover artist I knew at the time who had been shouted out by a couple of booktubers, Felix Ortiz.
I had seen his work. It was beautiful. And I didn't know if he would ever take on my project, so I reached out to and it was expensive, but he did a beautiful job with no heart for a thief. Unfortunately, he also blew up after that even more. And so I had to move on to another artist for timeline. And so then I started working with Martin Motat. He is an amazing artist as well. He was able to replicate the feel of the first two books, and they very much feel like they live in the same world. Art can be hard. I would suggest for anybody who's interested in finding, finding an artist. Work on the recommendations of people you know, look at covers you like and look at that copyright page and see who did the COVID art. Do your own research there. Don't try to crowdsource research because it just does not go well. You have a lot of bad actors out there, especially with AI, and you don't want to get caught in a bad trap of spending a lot of money on something that's stolen.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: I especially appreciate you shouting out the artists, yeah, they're my name. They deserve a Lot of credit, especially for our sales, honestly.
[00:06:02] Speaker D: Oh yeah. It's the best thing you can do to try to sell your book. I had no following when I started the publishing process. Then I worked with the proofreader that I ended up connecting with. Also wrote articles on occasion for fanfiadict.com and so I asked her, could you do my cover reveal? Because I have no idea how to do this.
And she said, yeah. I threw an arc sign up on the COVID reveal as well. And because the COVID was just beautiful, I got a lot of arc sign up. So I gave out over 80e arcs for my first book and then a handful of physical arcs as well. I launched my first book with over 50 reviews.
[00:06:45] Speaker C: That's a great conversion rate.
[00:06:46] Speaker D: It was great. It was a really amazing experience.
Hopefully some of it had to do with the title and the blurb and all that, but it was the art that pulled people in. That's always been my number one contribution to sales, besides word of mouth, of course. And then I'm starting to work on a new series.
I was really inspired by watching the TV show Arcane.
I really love the. The world building and the just the setting of it. And so I wanted to play with aspects of that. No Heart for a Thief and Malitu in general is a much more intimate story and I wanted to tell something a little larger scale. So this next series is going to have some world ending stakes as we get further on in the series and play with some bigger magic. And I'm just interested in exploring all of that. But character work will always be like, central to my writing. That is the thing that brings me to books. And so that's the thing I want to put in my books.
[00:07:42] Speaker C: I think that's the thing that hooks people in stories. I think it's really the characters that connect us.
[00:07:47] Speaker D: I think there's something about completing a trilogy that has made me feel more able to claim the identity of an author.
I felt very hesitant before to do tabling because I just had one book or I just had two books. But now that I have a complete story, it feels like I'm giving myself a little bit more permission to put it out there in a very proud way. And so that's been a barrier for me that I think I'm overcoming. The work of being an author and putting things out there is not just the work of writing, because that for me is the easy part. I love doing that. The hard part is forcing myself to keep on trying to pitch and sell because that can be a very uncomfortable thing.
That is, I think, the hard thing for a lot of people to continue with. But I think those who continue and persevere and don't let the small defeats get in their way, they end up being very successful. Even if it's not that one thing that broke you out, it's going to be the last three, four series that you've been able to complete or the last five standalone books that you've been able to complete that really break you out.
[00:08:52] Speaker C: What would be your favorite writing advice you would give to somebody that maybe they're just looking to start off?
[00:08:58] Speaker D: You have to be comfortable with writing things that are not good on the first go around. A first draft is not supposed to sell, first draft is not complete. It's going to have all these kinds of holes. You need to be comfortable with writing things that are not up to your expectations or else you'll never get anything on the page. But it's just a first draft. Nobody's gonna see it. It's there for you to create a blueprint for the editing, because the editing is a lot of where the work happens.
[00:09:27] Speaker C: Thank you so much for your time. This has been absolutely great. And this has been live from Worldcon.
[00:09:32] Speaker E: Hi, this is Vanessa McLaren Ray live at C Seattle Worldcon in 2025.
And I am thrilled to say that I've got to talk to J. Scott Coatsworth about his most recent books, about his blog, about how he writes and how he does not sleep.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Never sleep. Too many things to do. I mean, how can you sleep? There's stuff to do. You have a new book, it's called Office of the Lost. My friend Kim Fielding, who is a very prolific and very great author that writes gay romance in all genres. And she and I have been wanting to write together for a long time. And so we compared our story ideas, we have these piles of thoughts. And she had this one called Office of the Lost, which was this office that collects things that may be needed at a later time. So we decided to write this together and we took this strategy of each creating a character. Mine is very. He's Crispin, he's desk Fae, so he works in the office, but he's an elf, essentially. And he's very neat and organized and he has a perfectality score of 5. So, you know, perfect score. And then Leopold is the total opposite. He's a human. He lives in Sacramento. He has a total mess and just no control of his life. And Crispin has given his latest assignment to go collect a person this time, Leopold and So things go crazy wrong. Now, the fun part was that we each wrote one character for one chapter, and so we had to learn to write the others. But it was basically, these characters are going through this and this and this, and now they're falling off a cliff. There you go. What do you want to do with that? So it was constant, these cliffhangers, literally, sometimes cliffhangers that we each got to pick up on. And it's also comedies. Kim's a really good comedy writer, and I can do it, and I'm learning to be better at it. But it was just really fun to play off these two goofy characters and as they kind of start to fall in love, because it's a romance, of course, but navigate their way through all the worlds when they get lost to try to get back to the office. I think it's a great summer read. It's light, it's frothy, it's fun. We're gonna start this one next month.
[00:11:20] Speaker E: Is it a sequel sequel or another book you two are gonna partner on?
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a sequel sequel. The first one is a standalone, but at the very end, Crispin is the son of the Queen of the Fae. And so the last part is his brother shows up when the two of them together at his treehouse and says, you know, basically, somebody stole mom.
[00:11:36] Speaker E: So you have a setup for a follow on.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: And we're thinking it's actually going to be about the brother and kind of try to do the redemption arc thing with him and humanize him. So we're going to go from him's point of view this time.
[00:11:45] Speaker E: You will also write about writing novels and other writing, and you have written a guide to doing so.
[00:11:53] Speaker A: So I have been an indie author and a small publishing trad author since 2014, 2015. I started a blog and I started just kind of chronicling the stuff I was going through as an author, kind of mixed in with other stuff on my blog. And at one point, I wrote this column, and it was called Suck a little Happy Juice. And it was called that because you will have good things happen to you as an author. You'll get an award, you'll win a nice review. You'll have good things. And so my idea is that you put those things in a bottle and you stick them up on a shelf. And then when the bad things happen to you, then you take that bottle down and you suck a little happy juice to kind of make yourself feel better about who you are as a writer.
[00:12:27] Speaker E: Thanks, Scott, so much.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: Thanks, Vanessa.
[00:12:29] Speaker E: I appreciate it this is Vanessa McLaren Ray live at Seattle Worldcon in 2025.
Here I am with Shanice Pacilo of Spudpub Publishing. Have I got the name of the company right?
[00:12:44] Speaker F: So SpudPub is what we affectionately call ourselves. Spud Publishing, Inc. Is our actual register.
[00:12:49] Speaker E: Spud Publishing, Inc. And Spud Publishing is not about printing books on potatoes.
[00:12:55] Speaker F: No. Though you're not the first person to have asked us that. I think when we get to the point where we can afford to, we're gonna have to look into the technology to print our stuff on potato paper because we have been asked multiple times for that.
[00:13:08] Speaker E: So what's your role in the company?
[00:13:11] Speaker F: We put the book first and we had all of that done. It was going to be a one shot thing and then my friend and I decided to go legit as a publishing company.
So my role is both the creator and kind of the president and part owner of the company. It started with an anthology that we had put together. So it was a small group of us and it has five stories, all by different writers and five artists also jumped on board. So we did contribute to the first one and we did contribute and publish it, which I will never do again.
And then we are currently in production for our second book. So the first one's called Debut.
[00:13:46] Speaker E: There we go.
[00:13:47] Speaker F: Our second book will be coming out in February 2026 and it is aptly named Sequel. All new artists, all new authors.
[00:13:55] Speaker E: So we were talking before about the unique way that you're structuring the development of this new anthology.
So lead us on.
[00:14:05] Speaker F: Yes, so we've been receiving a few comments that we do do things a bit differently. We do not take finished stories for our anthology. That is not our goal with it. We actually, when we open for submissions, take applications to join the anthology. So what we're looking for from our writers is essentially a letter of introduction, an outline of what they would like to write, and then a sample of their writing so we can get a feel and get a vibe of what working with them is going to be like. And if they suit what we want to do with them anthology, then the next step of the process is if they are selected, they get about two to two and a half months to write their first draft. And then we put everybody through a peer review workshop process. So I lead the workshop and kind of lead the ground on developmental editing. But we give everyone an opportunity to both give and receive feedback to all the other participants. So especially because we work with a lot of authors who have never formally been published published before. It gives them that opportunity to kind of dip their toes into the feedback process to both learn how to give and receive feedback, because that is a learned skill. That is a skill I definitely had to learn the first time we did it. And it's great to open that up to other writers. And then alongside our printed version we will also have ebook available. And then we are currently working with an audiobook narrator so we can also have it available and accessible to others.
[00:15:26] Speaker E: So next time you will also have to recruit voice actors.
[00:15:29] Speaker F: Right now for this one around, we didn't quite plan ahead as much as we had liked for it, so we are just getting one narrator for all of it. But definitely as we proceed and as we can afford to increase our budget and as we learn more ourselves, we do want to bring on a different narrator for each story. If you have audiobook advice or if you just want to reach out and ask questions, we are still small enough. We love giving advice. We love telling people about our experiences. In the hopes that you can learn from us. I can be
[email protected] you can find us our merchandise and our
[email protected].
[00:16:05] Speaker E: thank you so much, Shanice. I'm glad that you were able to come down in this little tiny spot of time we had this afternoon, for sure.
[00:16:12] Speaker F: Thank you so much for the invitation. This is such a treat.
[00:16:15] Speaker E: This is Vanessa McLaren Rae live at Seattle Worldcon in 2025, and I'm sitting here with AJ Calvin. Tell us a little bit about what everybody has missed out on and everybody who's listening can run to their bookstore
[00:16:31] Speaker G: and buy so my 11th novel released in June, it's called Wraith and the Revolution. It's a standalone science fiction space opera. The main character is a cyborg, and. And it's a lot of fun.
[00:16:45] Speaker E: Well, I'm sure it is if a novelist thinks that their book is fun by the time they've done drafting, revising, revising, editing, layout and getting it out. Yeah, if it's still fun, it's fun.
What made you want to write a book about a cyborg having a space adventure?
[00:17:02] Speaker G: So the story behind Wraith is kind of a long one. It was basically the culmination of stories I wrote over the span of probably 25 years, and I never finished any of those. And then all of a sudden all these pieces came together from various stories and Wraith happened. It's one of those lifetime books for me. So I was really excited to finally have something that was set in this world with these characters that I've been living with forever.
[00:17:36] Speaker E: But this is a standalone.
What came before this one?
[00:17:41] Speaker G: Before this one, I have two different epic fantasy series.
One is the Relics of War, which is more your classic type epic fantasy. Magic, big battles.
There are no dragons in that series, but there are Scorpion men. And then my other series is the K and Legacy and that's the one that most people know me for.
And it does have dragons. The Kayan Legacy. The first book is Exile.
[00:18:08] Speaker E: Exile. So look for Exile. The wonderful thing about talking to an author who has already gotten out a lot of books is that the moment you fall in love, you have plenty to mine while they work on the next one.
[00:18:20] Speaker G: Yes.
[00:18:21] Speaker E: Are you working on a next one?
[00:18:23] Speaker G: Yeah, I'm actually working on two different series. One of them I've been working on for for about five and a half years now. I don't know when I'm going to start publishing it because it's not done yet. The other one is a duology and I am working on book two right now.
[00:18:39] Speaker E: Okay. I hope for that one. Is that going to be in the epic fantasy realm or.
[00:18:44] Speaker G: So the series I've been working on for a long time is called the Mageboard Chronicles. That is another epic fantasy. It's set in the same world as the K and Legacy, but a different point in time.
The duology is different. For me. It's a cozy fantasy sort of rom com.
[00:19:02] Speaker E: From writing so many books up to this point, you've had all the experience you need to write characters who can. Cozy is hard because it's mostly about relationships and coming together.
And it has different challenges than writing an epic battle.
[00:19:21] Speaker G: It definitely does. It is more focused on the relationships for sure. And that one.
There's a ghost hunters theme.
One of the characters is a necromancer. The narrator of the story is a ghost who ends up with the necromancer as their paranormal expert for the Ghost Hunter team.
[00:19:43] Speaker E: So do the places you go inform your settings or are you drawing wholly on the imagination?
[00:19:51] Speaker G: Sometimes they do help me build my settings.
I have one book not published yet that is written mostly underwater and I'm a scuba diver. I love that. I love being underwater. So that did help me build a lot of that book that is set mostly underwater.
[00:20:10] Speaker E: Yeah, because you know the physical sensations and you've seen what things really look like. The rest of us are just relying on books and movies and it's different.
[00:20:19] Speaker G: It is very different.
[00:20:20] Speaker E: It's different. So. So this is a thoroughly researched novel that will be coming out sometime in the future, but she has two other series to finish. First.
[00:20:30] Speaker G: Yes, I want to thank you for having me on. This is. I love doing stuff like this.
[00:20:35] Speaker E: Yeah, isn't it fun?
[00:20:37] Speaker G: Ye.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Cupid's Wanderlust by Kostadin Georgieff Poppy Lane thinks she has her life mapped out. The talented London art photographer lives with her aristocratic boyfriend Lawrence Atherton, and expects a marriage proposal. While traveling Europe in preparation for her first exhibition, she meets Damiano Monteiro, an enigmatic Portuguese archaeologist who recovers stolen artifacts. Although the attraction is instant, she doesn't expect to see him again.
Damiano has recently retrieved an ancient Cupid figurine rumored to bring luck and love. As Poppy seeks creative inspiration, she keeps encountering Damiano across Europe. Guided by mysterious clues and coincidences, he sweeps her off her feet and unleashes his romantic imagination on her. Poppy's carefully planned future begins to unravel.
Cupid's Wanderlust is available in hardcover, paperback and digital editions or go to Cupid's arrow publishing.com.
[00:22:05] Speaker D: Foreign.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Thanks again to our guest hosts Brian C.E. buhl and Vanessa McLaurin Ray if you want to know more about small publishing in a big universe, visit our
[email protected] and subscribe to our newsletter.
Send us your feedback by using the Contact Us link like Us on Facebook @SPBUpodcast.
To find out more about the books and other products featured during this episode, please visit the Small Publishing in a Big Universe
[email protected] this podcast was edited by Lisa Jacob. Executive Producer is Steven Radecki. Theme and ad music is provided by Melodyloop. This month's episode was sponsored by Paper Angel Press, Cupid's Arrow Publishing and Water Dragon Publishing. You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services.
Thank you very much for listening.
