Zombies, Traditional Publishing, and Indie Publishing - Creative Futurism

Just after the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead, we had zombies on our mind (and spoilers!) Kevin discusses his brand new novel in his series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. and transitioning those books from a traditional publishing house to his own new-model indie press, a path that many authors are being forced to follow.

Relevant links:

Join the Wordfire Readers Group

Buy Kevin’s latest book “Tastes Like Chicken”

Pre-order John’s book “Breaking Digital Gridlock”

Transcript:

John:

Hello everyone and welcome to Creative Futurism. I’m John Best.

Kevin:

And I’m Kevin J. Anderson.

John:

And we’re here to bring you the future and-

Kevin:

-and creativity and business and all those things together. We’re sort of like the Seinfeld podcast. No, it’s not a podcast about nothing. It’s a podcast about interesting things that are changing and interesting opportunities to look at. And how we as supposedly intelligent people are trying to deal with a rapidly changing world.

John:

Adapting quickly.

Kevin:

I just came home and this is like totally ad lib guys because we aren’t planning this. But we wanted to chat a little bit. I was just in Las Vegas and Arizona this past weekend. I went to visit some friends and visit family members. We had sort of a halfway between Thanksgiving and Christmas thing. And I had two almost identical conversations with utterly different people. And I was kind of doing the things are changing so fast and it’s exhausting to keep up with it. But as a writer and an entrepreneur you can’t sit back on your morals. And then we had this discussion, again this is two completely different people. One in Las Vegas and one in Kingman Arizona. And the discussion was that it’s a different generational expectation. And my parents’ generation they expected that you got out of high school, or college if you went to college, and you got a job. And you worked your way up in the company and you had that job until you retired. You worked in the auto plant. My dad worked as an accountant who then got a job at a bank. Who then worked his way up to a loan officer and a vice president, the president of a bank. And he’s been president of a bunch of banks. So, that’s the way-I mean he’s moved around a little bit. But that’s what his career was. And I’m the next generation. And I became a very successful writer. I’m like in the 90’s-well, I published 145 books. And 56 of them have been best sellers.

John:

It’s amazing.

Kevin:

And 23 million copies in print. And I’m thinking like one of the years in the 1990’s I had like five New York Times best sellers in one year. So, that was my job. I was set. I was like a professor invested in college and everything. And then my whole industry just changed. It’s like everything that I was working on was building up the Blockbuster video franchise and all of a sudden that went away. And so now I’m reinventing and doing all kinds of-I mean we can talk plenty about that. So, I was kind of grousing about I’m 55 and I don’t really want to learn how to do a branded career anymore because I spent all of my time doing that. And then the two people I’m talking with were pointing out that there’s always dramatic upheaval and changes. But they used to happen slower. And the blacksmiths didn’t like the fact that factories could make things bet...