Guest: Julie Jones is an award winning author who came to SoonerCon with us!

Shoutout to the wonderful people who put on SoonerCon year after year!

Shoutout to all of our friends who attended!

Panels, programming, costumes, and all the shenanigans we got up to at the con!

News:

- Writer Beware of... Writer Beware imposters?

- SFWA Market Report reminder.

- Let's help out Clarkesworld.

- TikTok Publishing books?

- An author has a magical windfall!

- AI updates

Tools: Mythulu

Creatives On Fire: Be Leonard, conventions, and networking

The best outtake ever.

Special Episode - Every week we do a segment called Creatives on F.I.R.E. where we focus on interweaving the concepts of financial independence with what we know about building our author business. In this special episode, we've broken out Phill's Authors on F.I.R.E. presentation and focused an entire episode on the 2nd path to achieving our dreams. We're going to talk about saving, investing, reducing expenses, eradicating debt, succeeding in our day jobs, as well as our author careers, and much much more.

This week we've got not ONE, but TWO, best selling authors on the podcast! We are joined by Gerald Brandt, author of the Quantum Empirica and the San Angeles trilogy. And Bryan Thomas Schmidt, an author and renowned anthology editor who has worked on IP's such as Aliens Vs Predator, Jonthan Maberry's Joe Ledger series, and the upcoming Robots Through the Ages. Buy their books!

- Pitching, editing, and managing anthologies.

- Author Rule #1: Don't be an @$$hole.

- Gerald's villain origin story - How he acquired representation and sold his first novel.

- Advice for new authors.

- Pantsing Vs Plotting.

NEWS:

- Bryan sings to us.

- Audio Books sales hit records in the U.K..

- Draft2Digital announces expanded distribution with Gardners.

- Review Bombing is back. Yay...

- Black Lawrence Press picks up Nomadic Press authors who don't have a home after Nomadic Press had to shut the doors.

- The Grammys lay out their rules about A.I..

TOOLS:

- Bryan tells us about a tool he uses call TypeItIn to make editing more efficient.

- Gerald shares what he uses to manage his writing process.

CREATIVES ON FIRE:

- Working a full time job while writing.

- Credit Card Debt.

-Author David J Pedersen joins us this week!

-Soonercon is this weekend!

-An absurd voicemail. Can you guess which parts the translator got wrong?

-The best part of the concert.

-David J Pedersen: Watson's World, Writing with Parkinson's, gotAngst on Youtube, David's writing & early reader process.

-News: Book sales are back down, Harper Collins is trying to buy Simon & Schuster, audiobook narrators concerned about AI (duh), fanfic writers screw with the robot overlords, virtual reality but for reading, an update on the writer strike, and pirates! Arrrggg!

- Tools: On this week we talk about David's favorite writing tools from his video The Best Writing and Publishing Software for Writers - Things, Evernote, Plottr, Scrivener, and Vellum.

- Creatives on Fire: We share our tips for selling books at conventions.