The old method: Submit and pray like mad you get lucky.

Thankfully the market is different now. You can actually "auction" your books if you're a successful indie author these days, getting an agent to contact their people and put forth a starting bid for publishers to compete for. And publishers bite, too, though they hate the cost, because it's one of the ways to keep someone at least "hybrid" publishing instead of going straight indie.

That said if you're brand new and trying to break in, you'll need some sales numbers for them to pay attention, an inside contact (who you know in publishing is far more important that what you write), or just a lot of luck to get your manuscript looked at.

I'm glad to hear word is getting out! Tell your friend thanks from me for spreading the word if you get the chance!

I totally understand the desire to be able to listen to books while driving and working (we used to listen to audio books while working back in my commercial fishing days). Unfortunately I don't have great news in that regard: Despite the boom of audiobooks, producing an audiobook isn't cheap, and I have an unfortunate habit of writing absolute tomes. The last I ran the numbers getting an audiobook of Colony made was a cost that was several times my current annual income, and as such it's still out of reach.

I definitely would like to do audiobooks in the future, make no mistake. Starting with Axtara - Banking and Finance. But for the immediate future, it's just not in the budget. I look forward to that day, however!

How do you get the attention of a publishing house as a genre author?

Hey Max - you were recommended by a friend of mine, he won't stop raving about your books. But I typically can only enjoy books when driving and so it's audio books for me.

Any chance some of your work will be put into audio format? Thanks!

Start with some stock. Get it warm, add some frozen veggies and cabbage/potatoes. While those are thawing out and soaking up stock, start cooking up some noodles. Take the cooked noodles and add them to the stock and veggies, season to taste.

A quick, fairly easy lunch if I have all the stuff on hand.

That is a deep question. I usually start with a few simple basics, those being their demeanor, why the audience should like them, what their strengths and weaknesses are (flaws are important), and what their quirks are.

The first is pretty self-explanatory. The second is me asking why readers would want to read about the character. Are they funny? Clever? Kind? What draws them in? Something unique? Something strange?

Strengths and weaknesses is pretty straightforward. Quirks though, these are the little idiosyncrasies that everyone has. They can be nervous twitches, a love of a certain food, a dislike of a certain food, a hobby, a habit. Little things that everyone has that are easy to forget about (and many times we don't even recognize them in ourselves).

Wrap that up with some goals, and usually it's enough to start. Above all else, the most important thing is to me is to let the character breathe and be a living-individual. I don't have control over where they go or what they do. They do. I just control the sets. Authors like to joke that their characters are the "voices in their head" and in a way they're not wrong!

EDIT: As you might imagine, there are dozens of posts about this on my site.

Ooh ... gonna think on this one for a moment. Hmm ... At that point for me it almost becomes "Favorite Non-fiction book" which I'd have to point at a religious text, because I am devoutly Christian.

But I'm fairly sure that's not what you were going for. I'm going to stick with "Non-Fiction" because a lot of what's Sci-Fi and what isn't is kind of nebulous (Jurassic Park for example is definitely Sci-Fi but was not shelved as such by author request).

So I guess I'd have to say something like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, David Willets' The Pinch, or maybe those Horrible Histories books I loved when I was younger.

I will give a special shoutout to Korman's YA books though, since they're technically not fantasy.

What's your go-to soup recipe?

Oddly enough that one doesn't give my brain pause. It's just "lieutenant" that seems to always trip something up.

What is your process or what steps do you take to create well rounded characters?

Timothy Zahn, Brandon Sanderson, RA Salvatore, Howard Tayler, Larry Correia, and Brian McClellan, to name a few.

The thing to remember with tropes is twofold: They're inevitable and they're just tools. A cliché is really just a trope used poorly, to put things in a very simple context. You can write a thrilling Sci-Fi Epic that is just all the classic tropes we know and love. At the same time, if you want to subvert the tropes with a "But what if—?" (something I like to do) you need to both know them and set them up.

If you attempt to write a story by avoiding all tropes, you'll just end up with a mess. The trick is to understand what the tropes are doing for your story and how to use them as the tools that they are, whether you're playing them straight or subverting them.

No story will be free of tropes, or it won't be a story and instead just a collection of words that don't really make any sense.

But I do enjoy subverting tropes. Sometimes in familiar ways, sometimes not.

I figured if it was going to be a military rank it'd be "colonel". Reading that word in my head always hurts my brain.

What’s your favorite book that isn’t Sci-Fi or Fantasy?

You can't spell Lieutenant without "lie". At least that's what the fellas like to remind me of once I got promoted, haha.

Start to finish! Sometimes I dream up an ending first, but I don't start writing until I've got the beginning and middle at least mostly figured out.

Thanks for swinging by! In answer to your questions:

1. I actually don't worry myself with "What if someone else has written something similar" because every story is going to be very different in the execution. For example, a story about an orphaned boy being grabbed away from his aunt and uncle to learn magic and discover that he's a VIP ... is that Star Wars or Harry Potter? Or is it both, but each executed very differently?

I've actually written a whole post about this concept on my site, but the crux of it is "Don't worry, just write your story. Now, if you reach the end and you realize you've rewritten your favorite story, then you may need to exercise your creative muscles and imagination a bit and actively work to try and do things that are outside your wheelhouse.

As for me though, one thing my readers have made most clear is that my stuff is quite unique, since I tend to run outside the box looking for fun ideas like "Dragon decides to become a banker instead of kidnapping princesses."

The short of it is not to worry about it. The moment your characters take over, your story will be its own thing.

2. Publishing is a serious gamble. It's literally, unless you have an industry inside contact—and even then that might not help—the equivalent of buying a powerball ticket.

Between that and the rapidly dropping royalties publishers pay these days is why so many authors choose to go indie or adopt the hybrid model. I myself went indie. I like the greater royalty cut and the control to write what I want instead of being stuck under a contract to "Marketing says this book will sell this year, so that's what you're writing."

There are still good publishers out there, but I like the indie side of things.

Who are some of your favorite authors?

How do you navigate sci-fi tropes when constructing a story? Do you lean in to the tried and true setups? Do you attempt to break new ground?

Do you write books from start to finish or sometimes start in the middle and do the backstory later?

Thank you for doing the AMA. I have two questions.

1. When you come up with an idea for a story how do you determine if it's been done before? Just Google <idea for my story> and at if anything comes up?

2. What was the hardest part about finding a publisher?

Oh, I like this question.

It is unquestionably "lieutenant" because even after a decade of writing I still manage to misspell it nine times out of ten!

What's the English word you like least?

That is the whole “movement” right there

> I was misappropriated

You should really be more specific with what you're talking about. "Misappropriate" is just a synonym for "steal". So you're saying DC Comics stole...you? Did they kidnap you as part of making the comic?