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All right. Welcome to another episode of the Creator Wood Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking all with Troy Lambert, and oh, he's an amazing human being. First of all, he is such a good storyteller.
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He just understands the craft really, really well.
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And today, we're gonna be talking all about his new Kickstarter, what he's doing with his new venture, and actually, one of his rewards is an AI movie, so pretty cool how he's, like, basically making the Kickstarter about first his book, but then branching beyond the book into the AI movie and the AI film version of it.
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So I think you're gonna really enjoy this episode. And yeah, I'm really excited for y'all to listen to it. For those who don't know, Creator Wood's launch is coming up really, really soon.
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Me and Troy recorded this in person at AuthorNation at the beginning of November, and we've been prepping December 1st for our open public beta launch where we share the platform with everyone.
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So we're very excited to hopefully have you involved. You can join the waitlist in the link in the description if you're not already a part of it.
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And with all that said, we're gonna dive into this episode of the Creator Wood Podcast. Troy, this is my first podcast in person since Maggie Beeler in February. Actually, no, Dave Rugas.
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He was the last person I did in person- Oh, wow... in his warehouse, so you're in good company. I'm in good company. That is company. Me, but with other people who you've seen. Yes, Maggie. Yeah. You know, yeah, yeah.
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Yes, yeah, it's so exciting. The cocktail powder gal. Mixes- Yeah... mixes gal... it just launched. Oh. And you also have your own Kickstarter. Yes. We have our own Kickstarter- Very excited...
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that's launching Friday morning. Which will be pretty much the couple days before this releases. This will release next week, so it'll be live when you're listening. It'll be live by the time you see this. Yeah, yeah.
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Tell us about it. So essentially what it is, so my friend Vincent Zandri and I have been releasing these shorts, short collections. They're just one story by each of us called Book Blast, and it's just...
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They've been super popular because of the kind of stories. You can read it on your lunch break. You can read it on your- Yeah... before you go to bed, whatever, that type of thing.
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And short fiction, and short fiction just seems to be doing really well in this particular space. It's in the noir mystery type space. You say short fiction, how short are we talking?
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So usually the stories are between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Okay. Yeah. So something you can read in an hour. Some substance, but- Yeah... yeah.
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Some substance, but not really long type thing, almost like really short novella type things. Yeah. So- I love it... but the Kickstarter is so you get...
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It's the only way you can get a subscription, and then next year, like every month, you either get an e-book or a print book or even a limited edition hardcover every single month delivered- Wow... to your house.
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Wow, okay. That's- But-... the Book Blast... then, yeah, that's Book Blast. That's Book Blast, and Kickstarter's the only place you can get hardcovers.
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The paperbacks and e-books will release to the general public about a month after they hit the Kickstarter people, but there's no way to get a subscription other than through Kickstarter. Mm.
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Kickstarter's the only way you can get a subscription, so we're excited about that. Wait, they're subscribing on Kickstarter, like, monthly or they're paying up front on Kickstarter for the year?
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Paying up front on Kickstarter, and then you get one a month for the entire year. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. I love it. So you have the Book Blast- Super fun...
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component, and then there's a rumor that there's also this special tier. Yes. So we have a couple of special tiers. The first special tier is we'll create audio or, you know- Very cool...
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for the Book Blast because people like audio, and short audio does really well too for the same reason. People can listen to it on their commute or whatever the case may be.
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But the h- even higher tier is that we will make AI-generated movies using Creator Wood- Wow... of every single one of the Book Blast. Now, that's a pretty lofty goal.
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We need you guys to, like, really pledge it up to make that happen. Yeah. But yeah, that's our super stretch goal. That'd be incredible.
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So- How long are you thinking, like, for a 5,000 to 10,000-word short story, how long do you think the accompanying film would be? So I'm thinking it'll be about... They'll be between 10,
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10 to 20 minutes probably, something like that- Yeah... I'm guessing. Yeah.
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Just because of the way I've played around with Creator Wood so far with, like, about a 3,000-word, 4,000-word short story and what I think it'll end up being.
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I think it'll also partially depend upon the story and how many visual elements there are to it. Yeah. But it'll be- Yeah...
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it'll be a relatively short film, 10 to 20 minutes, something really easy to watch, but super cool, and especially this type of story. I have, I have some ideas of some ways that we might do it and make it really unique.
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They might be animated instead of photo real. I'm thinking of that. That might be a great way to do it. That's what the old noir- Yeah... pulp, pulp comics and films and stuff were like.
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I feel like black and white could be an interesting style too. Black and white? Yeah. There could even be, like, their own, like, noir style. I wonder if it's, like, kind...
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mostly black and white, but with just a little bit of color, like, maybe emphasizing- Mm-hmm... things.
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Like, I could see a noir, you've got the film with, like, maybe the road's black and white, the buildings are black and white, but then you have that streetlamp with the color- Right... of the lamp itself. Yeah.
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Something like that.
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It's an interesting style, but you can create your own custom style and experiment with it because we've recently been coming out with new styles like claymation and, like, other things on people's requests- Ooh...
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that are just, like, unique. Claymation? Yeah, just fun. Oh. [laughs] But we've gotten it to work pretty well, so I think that you could... Maybe you could invent the noir style, Troy. Yeah.
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Oh, that would actually be really cool. If you think about, you're probably not old enough, but at the old movies where they used to have the cliffhanger little episodes at the end or the beginning of each movie. Yes.
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And then you would come back the next week to see the end of it or whatever the case may be. Wait, this was in the movie theaters? In the movie theaters. Oh, that's cra- Yeah... this is like serialized film essentially.
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Serialised film where you would like... And I would entice you to come back and see another movie the next week 'cause you would see another episode of- Why don't we still have that?
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That would be such a cool community experience. I don't know. You come see the same people every Friday night. You're like, "Here we all are." Yeah. "We were hyped up from the last one."
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We gotta see what happened to the guy, 'cause it's- Yeah... just a short. It's at the beginning or end of the movie. You know, it's a really sweet little-... thing that they used to do.
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Yeah It, uh, people are like, "Why have, like, the movies been in decline?" It just sounds like they were objectively better- Yeah... back in the day. [laughs] But we can still do that now. That's so cool. Wow.
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Okay, so let's then back up. Troy, tell us a bit about your storytelling journey because you are-- this Kickstarter is far from, first of all, your first Kickstarter- [chuckles]...
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and far from your first foray into publishing. Yeah, exactly. So I've been writing and publishing full-time since about 2009, which means there's been- Lots... a few changes in the publishing industry. Just a little bit.
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Just a couple of- Yeah, just a little... a couple little things. So I've written over 30, 35 novels now. Wow. Lots of sh- tons and tons of short fiction, some nonfiction.
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I've ghostwritten a bunch of books with people, stuff like that. But also worked as an editor for a few different publishers. I do freelance editing, book coaching, that type of thing. Wow.
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So I'm pretty much fully immersed in the publishing industry all the time. It's the only thing I really do.
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So other than I love to play around and make, like, short book trailers and films and stuff like that, 'cause really for me it's just all about story. It doesn't matter how you tell- Yeah...
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the story, it's just all about the story. So I narrate audiobooks, I do all, all that kind of stuff. So it's really- Modern day renaissance man... just about story. Yeah, as much as I can be.
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In one lane, publishing, I'm like, I'm not a renaissance man everywhere. Gee, man, that's a lot of work. Yeah, but you're doing the, you're doing the audio now, the film. Yeah. Yeah.
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Uh, publishing in any way, 2009 was, like, very early to be, especially in the indie world, because- Yeah, in the indie world, that was our gold, really.
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So I started-- Really 2009 was my first really successful novel that took off and actually made things happen for me. But, like, I had c- released a collection of short stories before that, stuff like that.
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And at 2007 to about 2011, 2012 even, like, you could pretty much do... It was the Wild West. You could do anything in publishing.
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You could release a book, you let your Facebook Group know, back when Facebook Groups actually got notifications about when you posted. Right. And you would just sell books. You would just, it, that was just...
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And there were only a few places to sell books. There was Apple, Smashwords, and KDP, and that was it. Wow, that was before even Kobo. Yeah. Kobo was not-- Kobo was, came on, came on shortly after that.
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But really the top two for a while, basically it was Apple, Amazon, and then Smashwords. It was Apple and Smashwords, then Apple, Amazon, Smashwords. And then Apple is the ones that increased the royalty rates to 70%.
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A lot of people don't know that, but they're the ones that spearheaded that. And then Amazon said, "Oh, we'll give you 70% too."
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And then because they created the Kindle, this device called the Kindle, then people took off and started buying books from Amazon. They became the big gorilla in the room.
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But really Apple was ahead of them for a brief period of time. Wow. So. Yeah, that crazy thing about now looking back 15 plus years later to see that Apple is definitely nowhere near close to as dominant as Amazon. No.
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Not even close. Not even close. They're really, they might be in the top three, but it's probably more like Amazon, Kobo, Nook, Apple, somewhere down there like that.
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And they keep gradually falling, and they keep saying, Google Play Books, "Oh, we're gonna do something with it." Yeah. [chuckles] And the, you talk to the company reps, they're like, "Oh yeah, we're gonna do something.
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We're gonna make this great." And they never do. It never changes from year to year, so pretty much the same. Okay. There's definitely some things that have changed.
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Kickstarter is something that I definitely know you weren't running back in 2009. Oh, no. There- We didn't think about any kind of crowdfunding back then. There was no crowdfunding for books. Yeah, no.
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Really publishing books outside of a traditional publisher or even a small press was, like, brand new. And then all kinds of small presses started popping up because they realized they could do the same things.
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Like, they could publish on KDP for authors, and they could do print on demand- Yeah... and they could do that. So a lot of small presses popped up too at the same time.
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So there was, like, this complete revolution from the Big Five publishers that was the Holy Grail, that you had to make it through those gates to get your books anywhere in the world, to anybody in the world can get their books out there.
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But there are steps you have to take, and so small publishers said, "Hey, we'll take those steps for you," that type of thing. So it inspired that too.
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But then when Kickstarter came along initially, it was always for some gadget or something like that. Sure.
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And we didn't think about it for books, but especially in the last several years, it's really turned into there's a niche of people on Kickstarter looking for books.
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So doing Kickstarters for books is actually just a brilliant way to raise some revenue immediately. Oh, for sure. And now people are doing this too for-- People have already done this for films.
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I was just at a talk today, we're both at AuthorNation right now, and I was at a talk with Jennifer Yanes, who had, with her husband Jonathan, raised over 70K for their short film, Forsaken Mercenary.
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This was produced using traditional means and j- was a short film, was very cool. Novi Callum, they recently raised just over $5,000, I think close to $7,000, to do an AI film made through crowdfunding.
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So I think there's a, there's a lot of folks listening who are, like, experiencing AI film are also gonna be, I think, starting to get into crowdfunding 'cause it's just a very good way- Mm-hmm...
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to actually grow what you're doing. Very good way to raise money and grow what you're doing.
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I mean, there's a, there's another documentary thing that I would like to do as far as this filmmaking's concerned, and it really the same way as we're gonna have to raise money through crowdfunding and other non-traditional means, because otherwise we can't do this.
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But the fact that we have these options... 'Cause, like, for me, the fact that we could even take these pieces of short fiction and turn them into film at all, AI, normal, anything, is actually just a miracle.
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Like, that is not, has not been happening in the past.
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So to create AI films with these is actually-- Really our stretch goal for that is $10,000, and that would give us enough money to do that.To develop because they're short fiction, and $10,000 to create a bunch of short fiction films like that is nothing compared to what it would've cost us five years ago to do it with a crew.
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We would've been talking a couple hundred thousand dollars at least. Yeah. That's...
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Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, and it's similar to what happened with indie publishing when it was, like, before the birth of being able to shoot your books online.
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You were gonna have to get a huge print run and get into the bookstores- Mm-hmm... and all of a sudden that expense was gonna be six figures to- Yeah. You gotta have-... to get-... a warehouse, you gotta have a...
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all that kind of stuff. And now you can do those print runs and do Fulfilled by Amazon, and you're not even ful- you're not even signing out the books yourself. No, you don't touch it at all. POD done. You know?
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So there, there's all kinds of opportunities there as well that I think that it's just things we did not have the opportunity to do back then that are just amazing to me.
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Throughout the arc of your career, what have been some of the things that have gone right, and what have been some of the things that have gone wrong? Oh, man.
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So most of the things that have gone right is just basically continuing to write and produce. Even rapid release, that kind of strategy never...
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It worked for a few people some of the time, but it didn't really work long-term for most people. They burned out. Yeah, but you ha- you do burn out. But- Yeah...
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producing but steady release has always been the watch word. Like, you're- Yeah... always... You're gonna continually create new stuff and release new stuff. Because if you're not, it...
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people's attention span, they forget who you are.
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The other thing that's changed in that is that people used to remember authors' names a lot more, and the reason is you looked at the book every time you opened it on the cover.
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Now you're reading it on your Kindle- Mm... and you say, "What book are you reading?" And I have to look it up 'cause I don't remember the title or author's name. I'm just immersed- Oh, wow...
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in the book because every time I open my Kindle their name doesn't appear, the cover doesn't appear. It's just- Sure. Yeah... so I don't see that every time I open that book. So that part has changed.
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The things that didn't work is there were a couple times when I put books with publishers that [laughs] that I should not have put with the publ- [laughs] with that particular publisher.
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They folded or the book- Oh, if they folded, you get your rights back or...? Or the...
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Yeah, they fold, you get your rights back, but the book, like, the book would disappear into obscurity 'cause they wouldn't monitor the categories and metadata and stuff like that like all the indies were doing.
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So it would just... If they're not marketing it and you can't really get to it to fix those things about marketing, it just disappears, and you're like, "Oh, that's great. Nobody's ever gonna see that again." Wow.
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And so- Yeah... those type of things did not work, and then I had a non... I did some nonfiction publishing for a little while, and that was a mistake. There was an agent that wanted me to work with that- Oh...
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and it was a... There was just... He was... The agent was bringing the wrong people to the press, and it was not working. Oh, no. Yeah. Man. It's a long story.
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B-level celebrities that really didn't have any money that are trying to reignite whatever career they once had- Threw a book... by doing a book, and so they don't know anything about... And when you tell them to...
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We had one author that we set up signings for him and stuff, and he didn't show up. Whoa, that's a big problem. He didn't, wouldn't show up. And so, like, we... I would- Wow...
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schedule, I scheduled a couple podcast appearances for him. He didn't show up, so I showed up as the publisher talking on the podcast about his book. That's wild. Like- Which, who wants to listen to me talk about- Yes...
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somebody else's book? Crazy. Now, it was fun. Yeah, that's actually hilarious you showed up. Like- Well-... good for you, like, you were fine...
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well, it was fun because it was a book about a soccer team in England, which is one of my favorite soccer teams, football teams. Um- Oh, okay, so you could speak to it. And so I was on their podcast- Yeah...
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and I could speak about the team and how I felt about the fandom and stuff like that. But related to the book, it's like, yeah, I didn't write that book, but- Hey... and tons of the podcasters thought I was the author.
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[laughs] And so I'd have to clarify- Oh... "No, I'm the publisher. The author couldn't be bothered to actually show up on your podcast, so sorry." Just, yeah, it was terrible. Wow.
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So it seems like the things that you've done right have boiled down to consistently writing, consistently creating stories, and the things that have gone wrong have been you, when you work with the wrong people.
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That's exactly, sums it up. There's a couple other stories that involve that same thing, but that's it, is you're essentially working with the wrong people, partnering with the wrong people. And when you do that...
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Because what happens is if you're partnering with the wrong people, there's always an unequal type- Oh, yeah. They're taking more than they're giving... push and pull dynamic. That's for sure.
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They're taking more than they're giving.
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And so now I actually have a new publishing partner that I'm working with, and it's beautiful because we're both workaholics, so we call each other at 9:00 at night, and [laughs] all that kind of stuff.
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And we're just texting back and forth all day because we're both working, really working the business. So it's great to have a partner that's actually fully engaged in...
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And but this is why, like, for the last probably five to seven years, I've been like, "I'm not gonna have a partner. I'm not partnering with anybody to do stuff like that ever again," except now this stuff happens.
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But it's definitely completely different circumstances than I've ever been operating under before. So... That's...
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There's a lot of interesting stuff there, 'cause as a new author or a new storyteller coming into it, especially 'cause we have many types of folks listening to the podcast, we have some folks who are like, been trying to go traditional for a while, maybe they're screenwriters, et cetera, and they're finally trying to break out on their own.
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But it does get scary, 'cause you look at all these different partners and people to work with, and everyone's always hungry to work with you. But how do you sniff out the BS from the not BS?
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And like, I guess now that you have a new partner you're working with, like, what made you jump this time around when you'd already- Well-... gotten burned in the past?
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So it was that we had already been working together, just not formally. Like, we had worked on projects together. Got it. So you knew each other. It was like a relationship already.
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So yeah, so there was a relationship there already. The time before, the one agent that approached me about the nonfiction publisher, like, I met him through LinkedIn. Oh.
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You know, one of those things, and, like, he was really interested in what I was doing, said, "I think we can work together and do these things."
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And I thought, "Oh, that's great," 'cause he's got an in with these people. Nobody had an in with these people, because they were just a bunch of lazy-...
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people who wanted to, basically wanted us to do stuff for them for free and make their books go and do magic without any help or input from them, which doesn't really work.
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And then I did a project with a co-writer once, and it just turned out that, like, he had written a number of books, but he did not have the writing chops for this series. And I'm like- Yeah...
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"We can't continue to write this series with you, because you can't produce the kind of books that we need to produce, the quality of books we need to produce to make fans happy." Yeah. "And so I can't do it anymore."
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So I had to take over that series and stuff like that. So there's all kinds of little things like that, like you just get involved with people that, like, on the surface it appears that they're
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legit and good people, but they just don't have the drive... And part of that is because I'm so driven, like, for you to work with me, you also have to be driven. Otherwise I'm like, "Come on, let's go."
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Kinda like we were talking about before we started this podcast of, like, where you're driven because this is the only thing I do, this is my passion.
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So if you're not that driven, then it's hard for me to go, "Oh, that's okay, you just go sleep it off while I work for another four hours," or whatever. So yeah, it's just, that's tough.
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But what's kept the passion alive for so long? 'Cause I talk to so many authors who, they're five years in, and this job that they thought was their dream and this life they, that they dreamed of
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ends up not feeling so much like a dream when it's their reality. Yeah. So how have you managed to keep that passion alive? 'Cause I know it's not easy. So sometimes it has come close to dying, like it's been- Whoa...
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hard. There have been times when I've went through burnout because- Come close to dying? As far as the passion. Oh, I unders- Oh, sorry. I forgot what I'm thinking. No, no. You're like, "Troy's almost dying."
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No, no, no, no. I'm like, "This is crazy." But, like, where I'm like, "I'm just gonna go get a regular job and have a paycheck and shit." You have- "And benefits." Yeah. Because you get burned out if you do too much.
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It's just too hard to do. And it's kinda like... So we had a speaker at the beginning of this that talked about the creativity cube and, like, limiting your possibilities intentionally so that your creativity can thrive.
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And there have been times when you're just like, "Oh, I wanna do this. I wanna do this, I wanna do this." I'm doing six different things, and I can't... I'm not doing any of them well. Yeah.
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I'm not concentrating on anyone, any of them, doing any of them well. And so then I get that burnout where I'm like, "Oh, man, I just wanna, I just want some rest."
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But primarily what's keeping me driving is I just love story. Two years ago, I took two master's level story structure classes at the same time. Don't do that, by the way. At the same time? And so- Don't do that...
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were there conflicting messages in the classes? No, actually, because they were two... It was two different aspects of story structure- Okay... so it was fine. But it, it was just a lot to do at one time. For sure.
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But that's my passion for story, was I'm like, I started taking this one class and they talked about semiotics and symbolism and stuff. I'm like, "Ooh, that sounds like an interesting class.
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I might as well take that, too." And thinking, "I got time. It's no problem." Which [laughs] it's a problem, actually. Don't take those kind of classes at the same time.
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But it worked out great, but that's my passion for story means I'm gonna chase that forever.
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So, like, whenever I get to that, like, burnout point, I'm just like remind myself of the why I started this in the first place. 'Cause I love story. I've loved story since I was a kid.
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This is what I wanted to do my whole life, and here I am doing it. So I can't really complain about it, 'cause I put myself in this position. Yeah. But I love story, so I keep coming back to that.
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Like, I love story and I love helping other people tell their stories. So when you edit something and somebody goes, "Oh, that's just amazing.
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I can't believe how you helped me and my story come alive," then I'm like, "Okay, that's worth it." That makes every moment worth it. So it... You just have to keep...
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You do have to keep reigniting your passion, but just reminding yourself of why you're doing this in the first place. Like, why did you start writing in the first place, and stick to that. That why is really important.
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Oof. Yeah. And the why for you is? It's story. It's just a love of story. Yeah. I wanna tell my stories. I wanna help other people tell their stories, and that's- Have you-... that's really all it comes down to...
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found that you, throughout the last 18 years, have stuck to a specific kind of story, or have you hopped genres?
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What's been your- So I hopped genres when I was younger, but as I matured, I learned that I kept coming back to the same genre. And sometimes I'd write sci-fi, and it would be a mystery thriller set in space. Okay.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I wrote a dragon story, and it was a suspense thriller story with dragons. Okay, that's not really a fantasy.
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It's really just a thriller adjacent with a dragon instead of a person, that type of thing. That's kinda fun. So- Well, I- But, like, I have genre hopped a little bit, 'cause I love to do comedy.
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I've done some stand-up comedy, and I love to do comedy. So I've written some funny books. The Indie Author comic. Yeah.
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[laughs] First one I wrote on a dare called The Call of Karen, and it's about Internet Karen and Cthulhu meeting and falling in love. Oh, wow.
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[laughs] And they go on an adventure together, and they fall in love over their equal hatred for humanity, and they go on an adventure, talk to managers, and stuff like that.
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And then I did a retelling o- of Don Quixote called Tilting at Windmills, and the windmills- Oh... are actually monsters, so Don Quixote isn't crazy. Oh, wow. And that type of thing.
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It's super fun, and they're really just one long junior high joke. But I just wrote them because they were fun and I wanted to do it. But, so as you... As I've gotten...
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I have more catalog and stuff like that, I do have the freedom to, like, play around sometimes and just write something funny one-off 'cause I want to, and then just toss it out there in the world.
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And most of the time people like it well enough that they... I sell some copies of it. Huh. There's this Alfred Hitchcock quote that it's three things you need to make a great film, script.
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Those are the three things you need to make a great film, in his eyes, if you only had three things. It's obvious the story is, like, everything, but your process for making story is really important. Mm-hmm.
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And I'm curious, like, how has that evolved? And I know that, like, you're now-You mean you're using Creator Wid, you're using now AI filmmaking tools. Has AI affected or shaped, uh, your storytelling process in any way?
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In some ways. So I see AI as like a tool and almost like a partner, because AI on its own doesn't, in my mind, doesn't create great stories because they- Yeah...
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don't have the feeling that you need from the humanity, the humanity element of it, and those little nuances and stuff that we put into stories that are a part of, really a part of who we are.
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So if you're 100% writing stories with AI, to me, that creates a non-feeling story. But you can create stories with AI and insert that humanity in the rewriting process, maybe, if you're that type of...
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depending on if you're that type of person. But for me, it's more of, okay, I'm stuck here. What's some possible ideas that could happen next? Sure. Or what's a...
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Give me a name, a list of 10 names for a character in this type of novel, and then I have a list of names I can pick from or different things like that so- The naming is important.
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I-- Oh, I've spent so much of my time trying to- [laughs]... figure out unique names. It's- Yeah. It's hard... it's tough when you're on like the third James in your last three series and you're like, "Oh my God."
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Oh, yeah, I had one series where there were like three Pauls, and I'm like, "Okay, there's enough Pauls in this series. We don't need any more Pauls or Marys in this series. It's enough." But it's...
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The other thing that AI has shaped my process is in developing series bibles. Ugh. So you develop your own LLM with your material from your series, and you can query that.
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So when you're in the revision process, you can say, "Did these two people actually meet in the book? I don't remember exactly." And AI will scan the book and tell you. So how are you doing that?
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Are you, like, using- NotebookLM is- Notebook... Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. NotebookLM is probably the simplest right now. NotebookLM and Airtable. So because Airtable, I use that to develop marketing materials as well.
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So you have all the information from your series, so it can help you in the writing process, but it can also help you in the marketing process, developing social media posts, email blasts, things like that, because you have all the information about your different books in one place.
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So you can query on that and then have AI help create you email drafts, social media drafts, images. So Airtable works like a spreadsheet that works with AI?
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Because you can inte- I can integrate it with other automation tools- Got it... to bring that information into AI. Although Airtable does have its own AI built in, but sorry, Airtable, it's not great.
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I usually generally bring it out into either Chat or Claude or something like that to do something with. That brings me to then how has your marketing evolved over time? Because you mentioned...
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I'm actually like, I wanna double-click on this. You mentioned that between the years of tw- 2007, 2012, it was like you just post a story and it gets sales, which is- Yeah... the gold rush. But
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you mentioned that your first collection of short stories wasn't really your breakout. Yeah. It was that first book. Yeah. Why? So part of it was there was this weird thing. There were no rules in the indie world, right?
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But there were like- There still are no rules...
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there were recommended play- recommended playbooks, and everybody said you should release a collection of short stories and showcase your writing and then release your novel. I see. Okay.
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There was a ton of us authors that released these collections of short stories all at the same time. That's so awesome. So great. Yay.
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So it sold some copies, but, like, it didn't sell a lot because it was in a relatively crowded field, you know? At the time.
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Yeah, sure, there was- At the time because the indie book world was small, and everybody was do- following this exact same formula 'cause everybody told them that's what you're supposed to do.
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And so we're like, "Okay, that's what we're supposed to do." And so we did it. Whoa. Yeah. So it was wild. But- Yeah, I didn't realize that at all... but...
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And then the first book, I think it was just a matter of the timing was good, the subject was good at the time, whatever the case may be. So that one took off, and then I thought, "Oh, man, I've made it.
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Everybody loves Troy Lamberth books. They're just waiting for book two." So I dropped book two without doing nearly the marketing that I did to prep for book one, not nearly the launch plan or marketing or anything.
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Sure. Sure. And then I relaunched book two later with marketing so that I actually could sell some of it, because it turned out the world was not waiting for book two [laughs] Troy Lamberth. It was a...
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They, they weren't doing that. That wasn't the way things were going to- You also didn't have a way to contact your readers as well though. Yeah. No, we did not have- Right...
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that was the other thing is, like, with all, every platform that we had at that time, there was no way to sell direct to your readers, to contact your readers, and nobody was building email lists.
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Building email lists started probably, oh, gosh, probably mid-2010s, early 2010s, where anybody even started thinking about collecting any kind of an email address list. Because we came from...
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A lot of us grew up in the era where, like, the email list for the country fit in a phone book, you know? Wow. Yeah. And nobody had an email address. And so when- Sure...
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we started to move into this time when everybody had an email address, you're like, "You're not giving me your email address to anybody." And there weren't any rules like GDPR or anything either.
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So if you got somebody's email address, you just emailed as many people as you wanted, as much as you wanted out of your AOL account or whatever. Wow. Wow. [laughs] It was completely different.
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And then as privacy rules started to come in, we had to go, "Oh, okay, we probably need to do this a more efficient and better way than just copying, pasting a bunch of email addresses into my- Yeah.
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That's when you had, like, MailChimp-... address bar, into, into my BCC, and you know. It was very popular and then- Yeah, all that kind of stuff... there's been many, many more software developed since then. That is...
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What a history. It makes me think now that we're moving into this new world of film, I'm curious, one, like, how do you think about it?
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Like, you're doing this exper- it's really experiment to see if you can fund these AI short films through Kickstarter.
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But do you s- how do you view this new world of AI film?And what do you see happening with the future of storytelling? Where are we going with all this?
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Man, so a part of it is one of the analogies we often use is that it follows the way the music industry-- We're about five years behind the music industry, and I think now film is probably about
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seven or eight years behind the music industry as far- Interesting... in some ways in that- So you're saying they're even behind books to a certain extent?
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Yeah, it's a little bit behind books because the, the accessibility of making AI films, especially at length, is just now emerging. Yeah.
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No Making short AI films and short AI trailers- Yeah, if you wanna go viral on TikTok, sure... have, have been around a little bit. You wanna make a 30-second video and go viral, sweet, you can do that.
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But making a 90-minute film, that's an entirely different process. Not until recently things are advancing really quick in this space have you even been able to conceptualize making something like that using AI.
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Otherwise, you were gonna make it four seconds at a time for- Yeah, yeah, yeah... and just keep building. It's gonna be crazy. So- It's who uses it...
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um, I think that we see that the era of when e-books first burst on the scene, it was everybody's buying e-books and stuff like that, and it went to more of a subscription model with audiobooks too, Kindle Unlimited and Kobo Plus and things like that, where there are a lot of people consuming things through subscriptions.
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They still bought e-books, but there's the subscription model. Same thing with music, some people buy albums on... but it's all streaming. A lot of music is streaming now. Sure. Yeah, streaming over those majority. Sure.
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So and same thing with film. It's moved into streaming, but I think AI film at first will come out as like people are gonna buy films or buy the access to watch a film or whatever.
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But at some point they'll just want a subscription. I want a subscription to Creator Wood so I can watch all the movies- Yeah. Yeah... and then, it'll move into that type of a model.
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So the payment model for authors or filmma- and filmmakers and stuff will evolve with that as well. And then we'll come into the era where we actually figure out what's gonna happen.
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Like with music, things are coming back like vinyl and CDs and stuff like that because people realized I don't own the music when I'm streaming it. Yeah. There you go. I just own the licensing to it.
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I don't own the e- the book when I have an e-book, I just own the license to read it on my Kindle. So people are buying more paperbacks.
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Younger people are buying more paperbacks, more vinyl, even CDs, stuff like that is making a comeback. And I think we'll see that happen with film as well.
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Maybe it'll be thumb drives, maybe it'll be some kind of other video device, but people actually buy the film because they want to own it. They don't wanna just...
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They don't want the rights to watch it on Creator Wood or whatever, they wanna own that- Wow... film. Yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. So, so I think there's an evolution that's gonna happen there.
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How fast that happens, it may happen way faster than it has with mu- music and books because we have the models that already exist- Yeah... and we're just gonna follow those a little faster. Maybe. I don't know.
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We'll see. Wow. It's hard to predict things, especially when it comes to the future. Yeah. It is, but I see what you're thinking. Yeah. It's a cool vision. Yeah. It's a cool vision. How...
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If you were to-- if we fast-forward to the future, and you have your film coming out, your first short film, knowing everything you know about book marketing, how would you launch the film? Oh, man.
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So the first place I'd start with is with our existing audience. Okay. We have an existing audience of readers, and we're gonna assume that some of them want to watch movies as well- Sure...
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and are interested in AI movies. And we have to assume that, otherwise it's just not worth pursuing the AI movies. We have to assume that some of our audience is gonna watch it.
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But then the principle beyond that would be to do exactly the same kind of marketing we would do with a brand-new series or brand-new book in a brand-new genre, and that'd involve probably doing some paid ads, doing some organic traffic of,
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and creating some trailers and things like that to bring people to the actual video and have them watch it.
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And then we would quickly determine, is this a viable method of storytelling that we can actually sell, or what is that gonna look like?
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And I think that's really just gonna depend on, as we see, the hunger of audiences, which we've already seen through some apps and stuff like that- Yeah... for, for short AI-generated film.
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It's just a different form of storytelling. Yeah. I think I'm definitely with you.
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I've definitely seen a lot of similar things to you in a good way, uh, meaning I've not been in the indie space quite as long as you, but since 2017, so I was a little late, but- [laughs]...
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I've gotten to see it change a lot though. You're a tad bit younger than me, though. Just barely. No, y- I'm sure- You just look good for your age. Yeah, exactly.
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I look good-- I look, I look good for my age, and you also look good for your age, so it, it equals out. [laughs] It equals out. Troy, where can we find you and your Kickstarter?
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So the Kickstarter, I'm sure we can put the link in the show notes, is- Of course... it's on Kickstarter, search Book Blasts. It'll be launching, like I say- That's great... Friday morning. I love it.
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And then you can find all of our other stuff on troylambertstories.com right now, and then relatively soon, watch this space for the release of a new press.
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So we'll have to come back on and tell you more about that when it happens. Let's do it. Yeah.
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When you're re- when you're able to s- when you're able to speak publicly on it, we'd love to have you on to share all about it. Sounds fantastic, man. Thanks. No, this was great. Thank you so much, Troy. Yep.
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Have a good one. Yeah. Bye, everybody. Bye. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
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I love Troy, and I think it's so cool to learn about what he's doing in crowdfunding, how he views his journey as a storyteller, and there's just so much great insights we can get from Troy.
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I hope you subscribe to the podcast if you're enjoying it. Follow. It would mean a lot. And I hope you follow us during our launch at Creator Wood, which is happening December 1st, coming up super, super soon.
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In the meantime, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day, and as always, don't forget, don't forget,
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first, you can join our mailing list at the link in the description below and get a free book all about Creator Wood, and second, storytellers rule the world.
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All right. Welcome to another episode of the Creator Wood Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking all with Troy Lambert, and oh, he's an amazing human being. First of all, he is such a good storyteller.
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He just understands the craft really, really well.
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And today, we're gonna be talking all about his new Kickstarter, what he's doing with his new venture, and actually, one of his rewards is an AI movie, so pretty cool how he's, like, basically making the Kickstarter about first his book, but then branching beyond the book into the AI movie and the AI film version of it.
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So I think you're gonna really enjoy this episode. And yeah, I'm really excited for y'all to listen to it. For those who don't know, Creator Wood's launch is coming up really, really soon.
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Me and Troy recorded this in person at AuthorNation at the beginning of November, and we've been prepping December 1st for our open public beta launch where we share the platform with everyone.
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So we're very excited to hopefully have you involved. You can join the waitlist in the link in the description if you're not already a part of it.
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And with all that said, we're gonna dive into this episode of the Creator Wood Podcast. Troy, this is my first podcast in person since Maggie Beeler in February. Actually, no, Dave Rugas.
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He was the last person I did in person- Oh, wow... in his warehouse, so you're in good company. I'm in good company. That is company. Me, but with other people who you've seen. Yes, Maggie. Yeah. You know, yeah, yeah.
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Yes, yeah, it's so exciting. The cocktail powder gal. Mixes- Yeah... mixes gal... it just launched. Oh. And you also have your own Kickstarter. Yes. We have our own Kickstarter- Very excited...
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that's launching Friday morning. Which will be pretty much the couple days before this releases. This will release next week, so it'll be live when you're listening. It'll be live by the time you see this. Yeah, yeah.
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Tell us about it. So essentially what it is, so my friend Vincent Zandri and I have been releasing these shorts, short collections. They're just one story by each of us called Book Blast, and it's just...
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They've been super popular because of the kind of stories. You can read it on your lunch break. You can read it on your- Yeah... before you go to bed, whatever, that type of thing.
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And short fiction, and short fiction just seems to be doing really well in this particular space. It's in the noir mystery type space. You say short fiction, how short are we talking?
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So usually the stories are between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Okay. Yeah. So something you can read in an hour. Some substance, but- Yeah... yeah.
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Some substance, but not really long type thing, almost like really short novella type things. Yeah. So- I love it... but the Kickstarter is so you get...
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It's the only way you can get a subscription, and then next year, like every month, you either get an e-book or a print book or even a limited edition hardcover every single month delivered- Wow... to your house.
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Wow, okay. That's- But-... the Book Blast... then, yeah, that's Book Blast. That's Book Blast, and Kickstarter's the only place you can get hardcovers.
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The paperbacks and e-books will release to the general public about a month after they hit the Kickstarter people, but there's no way to get a subscription other than through Kickstarter. Mm.
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Kickstarter's the only way you can get a subscription, so we're excited about that. Wait, they're subscribing on Kickstarter, like, monthly or they're paying up front on Kickstarter for the year?
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Paying up front on Kickstarter, and then you get one a month for the entire year. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. I love it. So you have the Book Blast- Super fun...
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component, and then there's a rumor that there's also this special tier. Yes. So we have a couple of special tiers. The first special tier is we'll create audio or, you know- Very cool...
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for the Book Blast because people like audio, and short audio does really well too for the same reason. People can listen to it on their commute or whatever the case may be.
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But the h- even higher tier is that we will make AI-generated movies using Creator Wood- Wow... of every single one of the Book Blast. Now, that's a pretty lofty goal.
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We need you guys to, like, really pledge it up to make that happen. Yeah. But yeah, that's our super stretch goal. That'd be incredible.
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So- How long are you thinking, like, for a 5,000 to 10,000-word short story, how long do you think the accompanying film would be? So I'm thinking it'll be about... They'll be between 10,
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10 to 20 minutes probably, something like that- Yeah... I'm guessing. Yeah.
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Just because of the way I've played around with Creator Wood so far with, like, about a 3,000-word, 4,000-word short story and what I think it'll end up being.
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I think it'll also partially depend upon the story and how many visual elements there are to it. Yeah. But it'll be- Yeah...
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it'll be a relatively short film, 10 to 20 minutes, something really easy to watch, but super cool, and especially this type of story. I have, I have some ideas of some ways that we might do it and make it really unique.
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They might be animated instead of photo real. I'm thinking of that. That might be a great way to do it. That's what the old noir- Yeah... pulp, pulp comics and films and stuff were like.
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I feel like black and white could be an interesting style too. Black and white? Yeah. There could even be, like, their own, like, noir style. I wonder if it's, like, kind...
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mostly black and white, but with just a little bit of color, like, maybe emphasizing- Mm-hmm... things.
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Like, I could see a noir, you've got the film with, like, maybe the road's black and white, the buildings are black and white, but then you have that streetlamp with the color- Right... of the lamp itself. Yeah.
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Something like that.
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It's an interesting style, but you can create your own custom style and experiment with it because we've recently been coming out with new styles like claymation and, like, other things on people's requests- Ooh...
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that are just, like, unique. Claymation? Yeah, just fun. Oh. [laughs] But we've gotten it to work pretty well, so I think that you could... Maybe you could invent the noir style, Troy. Yeah.
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Oh, that would actually be really cool. If you think about, you're probably not old enough, but at the old movies where they used to have the cliffhanger little episodes at the end or the beginning of each movie. Yes.
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And then you would come back the next week to see the end of it or whatever the case may be. Wait, this was in the movie theaters? In the movie theaters. Oh, that's cra- Yeah... this is like serialized film essentially.
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Serialised film where you would like... And I would entice you to come back and see another movie the next week 'cause you would see another episode of- Why don't we still have that?
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That would be such a cool community experience. I don't know. You come see the same people every Friday night. You're like, "Here we all are." Yeah. "We were hyped up from the last one."
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We gotta see what happened to the guy, 'cause it's- Yeah... just a short. It's at the beginning or end of the movie. You know, it's a really sweet little-... thing that they used to do.
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Yeah It, uh, people are like, "Why have, like, the movies been in decline?" It just sounds like they were objectively better- Yeah... back in the day. [laughs] But we can still do that now. That's so cool. Wow.
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Okay, so let's then back up. Troy, tell us a bit about your storytelling journey because you are-- this Kickstarter is far from, first of all, your first Kickstarter- [chuckles]...
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and far from your first foray into publishing. Yeah, exactly. So I've been writing and publishing full-time since about 2009, which means there's been- Lots... a few changes in the publishing industry. Just a little bit.
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Just a couple of- Yeah, just a little... a couple little things. So I've written over 30, 35 novels now. Wow. Lots of sh- tons and tons of short fiction, some nonfiction.
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I've ghostwritten a bunch of books with people, stuff like that. But also worked as an editor for a few different publishers. I do freelance editing, book coaching, that type of thing. Wow.
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So I'm pretty much fully immersed in the publishing industry all the time. It's the only thing I really do.
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So other than I love to play around and make, like, short book trailers and films and stuff like that, 'cause really for me it's just all about story. It doesn't matter how you tell- Yeah...
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the story, it's just all about the story. So I narrate audiobooks, I do all, all that kind of stuff. So it's really- Modern day renaissance man... just about story. Yeah, as much as I can be.
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In one lane, publishing, I'm like, I'm not a renaissance man everywhere. Gee, man, that's a lot of work. Yeah, but you're doing the, you're doing the audio now, the film. Yeah. Yeah.
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Uh, publishing in any way, 2009 was, like, very early to be, especially in the indie world, because- Yeah, in the indie world, that was our gold, really.
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So I started-- Really 2009 was my first really successful novel that took off and actually made things happen for me. But, like, I had c- released a collection of short stories before that, stuff like that.
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And at 2007 to about 2011, 2012 even, like, you could pretty much do... It was the Wild West. You could do anything in publishing.
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You could release a book, you let your Facebook Group know, back when Facebook Groups actually got notifications about when you posted. Right. And you would just sell books. You would just, it, that was just...
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And there were only a few places to sell books. There was Apple, Smashwords, and KDP, and that was it. Wow, that was before even Kobo. Yeah. Kobo was not-- Kobo was, came on, came on shortly after that.
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But really the top two for a while, basically it was Apple, Amazon, and then Smashwords. It was Apple and Smashwords, then Apple, Amazon, Smashwords. And then Apple is the ones that increased the royalty rates to 70%.
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A lot of people don't know that, but they're the ones that spearheaded that. And then Amazon said, "Oh, we'll give you 70% too."
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And then because they created the Kindle, this device called the Kindle, then people took off and started buying books from Amazon. They became the big gorilla in the room.
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But really Apple was ahead of them for a brief period of time. Wow. So. Yeah, that crazy thing about now looking back 15 plus years later to see that Apple is definitely nowhere near close to as dominant as Amazon. No.
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Not even close. Not even close. They're really, they might be in the top three, but it's probably more like Amazon, Kobo, Nook, Apple, somewhere down there like that.
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And they keep gradually falling, and they keep saying, Google Play Books, "Oh, we're gonna do something with it." Yeah. [chuckles] And the, you talk to the company reps, they're like, "Oh yeah, we're gonna do something.
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We're gonna make this great." And they never do. It never changes from year to year, so pretty much the same. Okay. There's definitely some things that have changed.
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Kickstarter is something that I definitely know you weren't running back in 2009. Oh, no. There- We didn't think about any kind of crowdfunding back then. There was no crowdfunding for books. Yeah, no.
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Really publishing books outside of a traditional publisher or even a small press was, like, brand new. And then all kinds of small presses started popping up because they realized they could do the same things.
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Like, they could publish on KDP for authors, and they could do print on demand- Yeah... and they could do that. So a lot of small presses popped up too at the same time.
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So there was, like, this complete revolution from the Big Five publishers that was the Holy Grail, that you had to make it through those gates to get your books anywhere in the world, to anybody in the world can get their books out there.
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But there are steps you have to take, and so small publishers said, "Hey, we'll take those steps for you," that type of thing. So it inspired that too.
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But then when Kickstarter came along initially, it was always for some gadget or something like that. Sure.
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And we didn't think about it for books, but especially in the last several years, it's really turned into there's a niche of people on Kickstarter looking for books.
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So doing Kickstarters for books is actually just a brilliant way to raise some revenue immediately. Oh, for sure. And now people are doing this too for-- People have already done this for films.
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I was just at a talk today, we're both at AuthorNation right now, and I was at a talk with Jennifer Yanes, who had, with her husband Jonathan, raised over 70K for their short film, Forsaken Mercenary.
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This was produced using traditional means and j- was a short film, was very cool. Novi Callum, they recently raised just over $5,000, I think close to $7,000, to do an AI film made through crowdfunding.
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So I think there's a, there's a lot of folks listening who are, like, experiencing AI film are also gonna be, I think, starting to get into crowdfunding 'cause it's just a very good way- Mm-hmm...
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to actually grow what you're doing. Very good way to raise money and grow what you're doing.
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I mean, there's a, there's another documentary thing that I would like to do as far as this filmmaking's concerned, and it really the same way as we're gonna have to raise money through crowdfunding and other non-traditional means, because otherwise we can't do this.
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But the fact that we have these options... 'Cause, like, for me, the fact that we could even take these pieces of short fiction and turn them into film at all, AI, normal, anything, is actually just a miracle.
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Like, that is not, has not been happening in the past.
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So to create AI films with these is actually-- Really our stretch goal for that is $10,000, and that would give us enough money to do that.To develop because they're short fiction, and $10,000 to create a bunch of short fiction films like that is nothing compared to what it would've cost us five years ago to do it with a crew.
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We would've been talking a couple hundred thousand dollars at least. Yeah. That's...
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Yeah, it's pretty remarkable, and it's similar to what happened with indie publishing when it was, like, before the birth of being able to shoot your books online.
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You were gonna have to get a huge print run and get into the bookstores- Mm-hmm... and all of a sudden that expense was gonna be six figures to- Yeah. You gotta have-... to get-... a warehouse, you gotta have a...
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all that kind of stuff. And now you can do those print runs and do Fulfilled by Amazon, and you're not even ful- you're not even signing out the books yourself. No, you don't touch it at all. POD done. You know?
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So there, there's all kinds of opportunities there as well that I think that it's just things we did not have the opportunity to do back then that are just amazing to me.
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Throughout the arc of your career, what have been some of the things that have gone right, and what have been some of the things that have gone wrong? Oh, man.
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So most of the things that have gone right is just basically continuing to write and produce. Even rapid release, that kind of strategy never...
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It worked for a few people some of the time, but it didn't really work long-term for most people. They burned out. Yeah, but you ha- you do burn out. But- Yeah...
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producing but steady release has always been the watch word. Like, you're- Yeah... always... You're gonna continually create new stuff and release new stuff. Because if you're not, it...
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people's attention span, they forget who you are.
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The other thing that's changed in that is that people used to remember authors' names a lot more, and the reason is you looked at the book every time you opened it on the cover.
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Now you're reading it on your Kindle- Mm... and you say, "What book are you reading?" And I have to look it up 'cause I don't remember the title or author's name. I'm just immersed- Oh, wow...
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in the book because every time I open my Kindle their name doesn't appear, the cover doesn't appear. It's just- Sure. Yeah... so I don't see that every time I open that book. So that part has changed.
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The things that didn't work is there were a couple times when I put books with publishers that [laughs] that I should not have put with the publ- [laughs] with that particular publisher.
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They folded or the book- Oh, if they folded, you get your rights back or...? Or the...
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Yeah, they fold, you get your rights back, but the book, like, the book would disappear into obscurity 'cause they wouldn't monitor the categories and metadata and stuff like that like all the indies were doing.
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So it would just... If they're not marketing it and you can't really get to it to fix those things about marketing, it just disappears, and you're like, "Oh, that's great. Nobody's ever gonna see that again." Wow.
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And so- Yeah... those type of things did not work, and then I had a non... I did some nonfiction publishing for a little while, and that was a mistake. There was an agent that wanted me to work with that- Oh...
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and it was a... There was just... He was... The agent was bringing the wrong people to the press, and it was not working. Oh, no. Yeah. Man. It's a long story.
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B-level celebrities that really didn't have any money that are trying to reignite whatever career they once had- Threw a book... by doing a book, and so they don't know anything about... And when you tell them to...
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We had one author that we set up signings for him and stuff, and he didn't show up. Whoa, that's a big problem. He didn't, wouldn't show up. And so, like, we... I would- Wow...
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schedule, I scheduled a couple podcast appearances for him. He didn't show up, so I showed up as the publisher talking on the podcast about his book. That's wild. Like- Which, who wants to listen to me talk about- Yes...
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somebody else's book? Crazy. Now, it was fun. Yeah, that's actually hilarious you showed up. Like- Well-... good for you, like, you were fine...
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well, it was fun because it was a book about a soccer team in England, which is one of my favorite soccer teams, football teams. Um- Oh, okay, so you could speak to it. And so I was on their podcast- Yeah...
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and I could speak about the team and how I felt about the fandom and stuff like that. But related to the book, it's like, yeah, I didn't write that book, but- Hey... and tons of the podcasters thought I was the author.
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[laughs] And so I'd have to clarify- Oh... "No, I'm the publisher. The author couldn't be bothered to actually show up on your podcast, so sorry." Just, yeah, it was terrible. Wow.
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So it seems like the things that you've done right have boiled down to consistently writing, consistently creating stories, and the things that have gone wrong have been you, when you work with the wrong people.
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That's exactly, sums it up. There's a couple other stories that involve that same thing, but that's it, is you're essentially working with the wrong people, partnering with the wrong people. And when you do that...
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Because what happens is if you're partnering with the wrong people, there's always an unequal type- Oh, yeah. They're taking more than they're giving... push and pull dynamic. That's for sure.
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They're taking more than they're giving.
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And so now I actually have a new publishing partner that I'm working with, and it's beautiful because we're both workaholics, so we call each other at 9:00 at night, and [laughs] all that kind of stuff.
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And we're just texting back and forth all day because we're both working, really working the business. So it's great to have a partner that's actually fully engaged in...
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And but this is why, like, for the last probably five to seven years, I've been like, "I'm not gonna have a partner. I'm not partnering with anybody to do stuff like that ever again," except now this stuff happens.
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But it's definitely completely different circumstances than I've ever been operating under before. So... That's...
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There's a lot of interesting stuff there, 'cause as a new author or a new storyteller coming into it, especially 'cause we have many types of folks listening to the podcast, we have some folks who are like, been trying to go traditional for a while, maybe they're screenwriters, et cetera, and they're finally trying to break out on their own.
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But it does get scary, 'cause you look at all these different partners and people to work with, and everyone's always hungry to work with you. But how do you sniff out the BS from the not BS?
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And like, I guess now that you have a new partner you're working with, like, what made you jump this time around when you'd already- Well-... gotten burned in the past?
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So it was that we had already been working together, just not formally. Like, we had worked on projects together. Got it. So you knew each other. It was like a relationship already.
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So yeah, so there was a relationship there already. The time before, the one agent that approached me about the nonfiction publisher, like, I met him through LinkedIn. Oh.
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You know, one of those things, and, like, he was really interested in what I was doing, said, "I think we can work together and do these things."
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And I thought, "Oh, that's great," 'cause he's got an in with these people. Nobody had an in with these people, because they were just a bunch of lazy-...
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people who wanted to, basically wanted us to do stuff for them for free and make their books go and do magic without any help or input from them, which doesn't really work.
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And then I did a project with a co-writer once, and it just turned out that, like, he had written a number of books, but he did not have the writing chops for this series. And I'm like- Yeah...
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"We can't continue to write this series with you, because you can't produce the kind of books that we need to produce, the quality of books we need to produce to make fans happy." Yeah. "And so I can't do it anymore."
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So I had to take over that series and stuff like that. So there's all kinds of little things like that, like you just get involved with people that, like, on the surface it appears that they're
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legit and good people, but they just don't have the drive... And part of that is because I'm so driven, like, for you to work with me, you also have to be driven. Otherwise I'm like, "Come on, let's go."
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Kinda like we were talking about before we started this podcast of, like, where you're driven because this is the only thing I do, this is my passion.
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So if you're not that driven, then it's hard for me to go, "Oh, that's okay, you just go sleep it off while I work for another four hours," or whatever. So yeah, it's just, that's tough.
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But what's kept the passion alive for so long? 'Cause I talk to so many authors who, they're five years in, and this job that they thought was their dream and this life they, that they dreamed of
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ends up not feeling so much like a dream when it's their reality. Yeah. So how have you managed to keep that passion alive? 'Cause I know it's not easy. So sometimes it has come close to dying, like it's been- Whoa...
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hard. There have been times when I've went through burnout because- Come close to dying? As far as the passion. Oh, I unders- Oh, sorry. I forgot what I'm thinking. No, no. You're like, "Troy's almost dying."
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No, no, no, no. I'm like, "This is crazy." But, like, where I'm like, "I'm just gonna go get a regular job and have a paycheck and shit." You have- "And benefits." Yeah. Because you get burned out if you do too much.
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It's just too hard to do. And it's kinda like... So we had a speaker at the beginning of this that talked about the creativity cube and, like, limiting your possibilities intentionally so that your creativity can thrive.
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And there have been times when you're just like, "Oh, I wanna do this. I wanna do this, I wanna do this." I'm doing six different things, and I can't... I'm not doing any of them well. Yeah.
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I'm not concentrating on anyone, any of them, doing any of them well. And so then I get that burnout where I'm like, "Oh, man, I just wanna, I just want some rest."
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But primarily what's keeping me driving is I just love story. Two years ago, I took two master's level story structure classes at the same time. Don't do that, by the way. At the same time? And so- Don't do that...
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were there conflicting messages in the classes? No, actually, because they were two... It was two different aspects of story structure- Okay... so it was fine. But it, it was just a lot to do at one time. For sure.
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But that's my passion for story, was I'm like, I started taking this one class and they talked about semiotics and symbolism and stuff. I'm like, "Ooh, that sounds like an interesting class.
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I might as well take that, too." And thinking, "I got time. It's no problem." Which [laughs] it's a problem, actually. Don't take those kind of classes at the same time.
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But it worked out great, but that's my passion for story means I'm gonna chase that forever.
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So, like, whenever I get to that, like, burnout point, I'm just like remind myself of the why I started this in the first place. 'Cause I love story. I've loved story since I was a kid.
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This is what I wanted to do my whole life, and here I am doing it. So I can't really complain about it, 'cause I put myself in this position. Yeah. But I love story, so I keep coming back to that.
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Like, I love story and I love helping other people tell their stories. So when you edit something and somebody goes, "Oh, that's just amazing.
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I can't believe how you helped me and my story come alive," then I'm like, "Okay, that's worth it." That makes every moment worth it. So it... You just have to keep...
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You do have to keep reigniting your passion, but just reminding yourself of why you're doing this in the first place. Like, why did you start writing in the first place, and stick to that. That why is really important.
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Oof. Yeah. And the why for you is? It's story. It's just a love of story. Yeah. I wanna tell my stories. I wanna help other people tell their stories, and that's- Have you-... that's really all it comes down to...
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found that you, throughout the last 18 years, have stuck to a specific kind of story, or have you hopped genres?
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What's been your- So I hopped genres when I was younger, but as I matured, I learned that I kept coming back to the same genre. And sometimes I'd write sci-fi, and it would be a mystery thriller set in space. Okay.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I wrote a dragon story, and it was a suspense thriller story with dragons. Okay, that's not really a fantasy.
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It's really just a thriller adjacent with a dragon instead of a person, that type of thing. That's kinda fun. So- Well, I- But, like, I have genre hopped a little bit, 'cause I love to do comedy.
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I've done some stand-up comedy, and I love to do comedy. So I've written some funny books. The Indie Author comic. Yeah.
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[laughs] First one I wrote on a dare called The Call of Karen, and it's about Internet Karen and Cthulhu meeting and falling in love. Oh, wow.
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[laughs] And they go on an adventure together, and they fall in love over their equal hatred for humanity, and they go on an adventure, talk to managers, and stuff like that.
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And then I did a retelling o- of Don Quixote called Tilting at Windmills, and the windmills- Oh... are actually monsters, so Don Quixote isn't crazy. Oh, wow. And that type of thing.
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It's super fun, and they're really just one long junior high joke. But I just wrote them because they were fun and I wanted to do it. But, so as you... As I've gotten...
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I have more catalog and stuff like that, I do have the freedom to, like, play around sometimes and just write something funny one-off 'cause I want to, and then just toss it out there in the world.
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And most of the time people like it well enough that they... I sell some copies of it. Huh. There's this Alfred Hitchcock quote that it's three things you need to make a great film, script.
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Those are the three things you need to make a great film, in his eyes, if you only had three things. It's obvious the story is, like, everything, but your process for making story is really important. Mm-hmm.
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And I'm curious, like, how has that evolved? And I know that, like, you're now-You mean you're using Creator Wid, you're using now AI filmmaking tools. Has AI affected or shaped, uh, your storytelling process in any way?
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In some ways. So I see AI as like a tool and almost like a partner, because AI on its own doesn't, in my mind, doesn't create great stories because they- Yeah...
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don't have the feeling that you need from the humanity, the humanity element of it, and those little nuances and stuff that we put into stories that are a part of, really a part of who we are.
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So if you're 100% writing stories with AI, to me, that creates a non-feeling story. But you can create stories with AI and insert that humanity in the rewriting process, maybe, if you're that type of...
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depending on if you're that type of person. But for me, it's more of, okay, I'm stuck here. What's some possible ideas that could happen next? Sure. Or what's a...
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Give me a name, a list of 10 names for a character in this type of novel, and then I have a list of names I can pick from or different things like that so- The naming is important.
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I-- Oh, I've spent so much of my time trying to- [laughs]... figure out unique names. It's- Yeah. It's hard... it's tough when you're on like the third James in your last three series and you're like, "Oh my God."
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Oh, yeah, I had one series where there were like three Pauls, and I'm like, "Okay, there's enough Pauls in this series. We don't need any more Pauls or Marys in this series. It's enough." But it's...
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The other thing that AI has shaped my process is in developing series bibles. Ugh. So you develop your own LLM with your material from your series, and you can query that.
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So when you're in the revision process, you can say, "Did these two people actually meet in the book? I don't remember exactly." And AI will scan the book and tell you. So how are you doing that?
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Are you, like, using- NotebookLM is- Notebook... Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. NotebookLM is probably the simplest right now. NotebookLM and Airtable. So because Airtable, I use that to develop marketing materials as well.
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So you have all the information from your series, so it can help you in the writing process, but it can also help you in the marketing process, developing social media posts, email blasts, things like that, because you have all the information about your different books in one place.
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So you can query on that and then have AI help create you email drafts, social media drafts, images. So Airtable works like a spreadsheet that works with AI?
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Because you can inte- I can integrate it with other automation tools- Got it... to bring that information into AI. Although Airtable does have its own AI built in, but sorry, Airtable, it's not great.
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I usually generally bring it out into either Chat or Claude or something like that to do something with. That brings me to then how has your marketing evolved over time? Because you mentioned...
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I'm actually like, I wanna double-click on this. You mentioned that between the years of tw- 2007, 2012, it was like you just post a story and it gets sales, which is- Yeah... the gold rush. But
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you mentioned that your first collection of short stories wasn't really your breakout. Yeah. It was that first book. Yeah. Why? So part of it was there was this weird thing. There were no rules in the indie world, right?
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But there were like- There still are no rules...
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there were recommended play- recommended playbooks, and everybody said you should release a collection of short stories and showcase your writing and then release your novel. I see. Okay.
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There was a ton of us authors that released these collections of short stories all at the same time. That's so awesome. So great. Yay.
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So it sold some copies, but, like, it didn't sell a lot because it was in a relatively crowded field, you know? At the time.
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Yeah, sure, there was- At the time because the indie book world was small, and everybody was do- following this exact same formula 'cause everybody told them that's what you're supposed to do.
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And so we're like, "Okay, that's what we're supposed to do." And so we did it. Whoa. Yeah. So it was wild. But- Yeah, I didn't realize that at all... but...
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And then the first book, I think it was just a matter of the timing was good, the subject was good at the time, whatever the case may be. So that one took off, and then I thought, "Oh, man, I've made it.
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Everybody loves Troy Lamberth books. They're just waiting for book two." So I dropped book two without doing nearly the marketing that I did to prep for book one, not nearly the launch plan or marketing or anything.
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Sure. Sure. And then I relaunched book two later with marketing so that I actually could sell some of it, because it turned out the world was not waiting for book two [laughs] Troy Lamberth. It was a...
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They, they weren't doing that. That wasn't the way things were going to- You also didn't have a way to contact your readers as well though. Yeah. No, we did not have- Right...
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that was the other thing is, like, with all, every platform that we had at that time, there was no way to sell direct to your readers, to contact your readers, and nobody was building email lists.
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Building email lists started probably, oh, gosh, probably mid-2010s, early 2010s, where anybody even started thinking about collecting any kind of an email address list. Because we came from...
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A lot of us grew up in the era where, like, the email list for the country fit in a phone book, you know? Wow. Yeah. And nobody had an email address. And so when- Sure...
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we started to move into this time when everybody had an email address, you're like, "You're not giving me your email address to anybody." And there weren't any rules like GDPR or anything either.
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So if you got somebody's email address, you just emailed as many people as you wanted, as much as you wanted out of your AOL account or whatever. Wow. Wow. [laughs] It was completely different.
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And then as privacy rules started to come in, we had to go, "Oh, okay, we probably need to do this a more efficient and better way than just copying, pasting a bunch of email addresses into my- Yeah.
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That's when you had, like, MailChimp-... address bar, into, into my BCC, and you know. It was very popular and then- Yeah, all that kind of stuff... there's been many, many more software developed since then. That is...
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What a history. It makes me think now that we're moving into this new world of film, I'm curious, one, like, how do you think about it?
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Like, you're doing this exper- it's really experiment to see if you can fund these AI short films through Kickstarter.
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But do you s- how do you view this new world of AI film?And what do you see happening with the future of storytelling? Where are we going with all this?
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Man, so a part of it is one of the analogies we often use is that it follows the way the music industry-- We're about five years behind the music industry, and I think now film is probably about
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seven or eight years behind the music industry as far- Interesting... in some ways in that- So you're saying they're even behind books to a certain extent?
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Yeah, it's a little bit behind books because the, the accessibility of making AI films, especially at length, is just now emerging. Yeah.
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No Making short AI films and short AI trailers- Yeah, if you wanna go viral on TikTok, sure... have, have been around a little bit. You wanna make a 30-second video and go viral, sweet, you can do that.
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But making a 90-minute film, that's an entirely different process. Not until recently things are advancing really quick in this space have you even been able to conceptualize making something like that using AI.
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Otherwise, you were gonna make it four seconds at a time for- Yeah, yeah, yeah... and just keep building. It's gonna be crazy. So- It's who uses it...
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um, I think that we see that the era of when e-books first burst on the scene, it was everybody's buying e-books and stuff like that, and it went to more of a subscription model with audiobooks too, Kindle Unlimited and Kobo Plus and things like that, where there are a lot of people consuming things through subscriptions.
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They still bought e-books, but there's the subscription model. Same thing with music, some people buy albums on... but it's all streaming. A lot of music is streaming now. Sure. Yeah, streaming over those majority. Sure.
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So and same thing with film. It's moved into streaming, but I think AI film at first will come out as like people are gonna buy films or buy the access to watch a film or whatever.
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But at some point they'll just want a subscription. I want a subscription to Creator Wood so I can watch all the movies- Yeah. Yeah... and then, it'll move into that type of a model.
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So the payment model for authors or filmma- and filmmakers and stuff will evolve with that as well. And then we'll come into the era where we actually figure out what's gonna happen.
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Like with music, things are coming back like vinyl and CDs and stuff like that because people realized I don't own the music when I'm streaming it. Yeah. There you go. I just own the licensing to it.
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I don't own the e- the book when I have an e-book, I just own the license to read it on my Kindle. So people are buying more paperbacks.
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Younger people are buying more paperbacks, more vinyl, even CDs, stuff like that is making a comeback. And I think we'll see that happen with film as well.
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Maybe it'll be thumb drives, maybe it'll be some kind of other video device, but people actually buy the film because they want to own it. They don't wanna just...
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They don't want the rights to watch it on Creator Wood or whatever, they wanna own that- Wow... film. Yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. So, so I think there's an evolution that's gonna happen there.
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How fast that happens, it may happen way faster than it has with mu- music and books because we have the models that already exist- Yeah... and we're just gonna follow those a little faster. Maybe. I don't know.
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We'll see. Wow. It's hard to predict things, especially when it comes to the future. Yeah. It is, but I see what you're thinking. Yeah. It's a cool vision. Yeah. It's a cool vision. How...
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If you were to-- if we fast-forward to the future, and you have your film coming out, your first short film, knowing everything you know about book marketing, how would you launch the film? Oh, man.
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So the first place I'd start with is with our existing audience. Okay. We have an existing audience of readers, and we're gonna assume that some of them want to watch movies as well- Sure...
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and are interested in AI movies. And we have to assume that, otherwise it's just not worth pursuing the AI movies. We have to assume that some of our audience is gonna watch it.
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But then the principle beyond that would be to do exactly the same kind of marketing we would do with a brand-new series or brand-new book in a brand-new genre, and that'd involve probably doing some paid ads, doing some organic traffic of,
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and creating some trailers and things like that to bring people to the actual video and have them watch it.
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And then we would quickly determine, is this a viable method of storytelling that we can actually sell, or what is that gonna look like?
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And I think that's really just gonna depend on, as we see, the hunger of audiences, which we've already seen through some apps and stuff like that- Yeah... for, for short AI-generated film.
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It's just a different form of storytelling. Yeah. I think I'm definitely with you.
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I've definitely seen a lot of similar things to you in a good way, uh, meaning I've not been in the indie space quite as long as you, but since 2017, so I was a little late, but- [laughs]...
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I've gotten to see it change a lot though. You're a tad bit younger than me, though. Just barely. No, y- I'm sure- You just look good for your age. Yeah, exactly.
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I look good-- I look, I look good for my age, and you also look good for your age, so it, it equals out. [laughs] It equals out. Troy, where can we find you and your Kickstarter?
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So the Kickstarter, I'm sure we can put the link in the show notes, is- Of course... it's on Kickstarter, search Book Blasts. It'll be launching, like I say- That's great... Friday morning. I love it.
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And then you can find all of our other stuff on troylambertstories.com right now, and then relatively soon, watch this space for the release of a new press.
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So we'll have to come back on and tell you more about that when it happens. Let's do it. Yeah.
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When you're re- when you're able to s- when you're able to speak publicly on it, we'd love to have you on to share all about it. Sounds fantastic, man. Thanks. No, this was great. Thank you so much, Troy. Yep.
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Have a good one. Yeah. Bye, everybody. Bye. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
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I love Troy, and I think it's so cool to learn about what he's doing in crowdfunding, how he views his journey as a storyteller, and there's just so much great insights we can get from Troy.
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I hope you subscribe to the podcast if you're enjoying it. Follow. It would mean a lot. And I hope you follow us during our launch at Creator Wood, which is happening December 1st, coming up super, super soon.
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In the meantime, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day, and as always, don't forget, don't forget,
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first, you can join our mailing list at the link in the description below and get a free book all about Creator Wood, and second, storytellers rule the world.
