Our guest this week is Michael R. Underwood, publishing professional, fellow podcaster, and author of the found family space opera Annihilation Aria, out now from Parvus Press. In addition to his years of writing scifi, he's also a former bookseller, sales representative who sold to bookstores across the midwest, and North American Sales & Marketing Manager for Angry Robot Books.

We talk about how bookselling can bolster your career as both an author and a book marketer, what it's like to write a collaborative series for the app Serial Box, how privilege plays into publishing, and how his experience with digital-first publishing is helping him market his book in a pandemic. He also tells us about how his relationship with tabletop roleplaying games has gone from a hobby as a teen, to a subject of academic study, to regular live storytelling performance for more players than ever as part of his authorial life.

If you're interested in reading about rebelling against space fascism, Guardians of the Galaxy-style camaraderie, and weaponized singing, you can pick up Annihilation Aria here: https://bookshop.org/a/1023/9781733811958

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So many science fiction readers, because there is that

conversation aspect a lot of people are looking for. What's

the next beat in that conversation? What can someone

add to what has already come you? Foreign

Welcome to the hybrid pub Scout podcast with

me. Emily einerlander, we're mapping the frontier between

traditional and indie publishing, and today I'm joined

by Michael R Underwood. Michael R Underwood is an author,

podcaster and publishing professional. His series include

the RE Reyes geek omanci books, the stabby Award finalist genre,

not series, and the forthcoming annihilation Aria. He's been a

bookseller, a sales representative, and was the

North American sales and marketing manager for angry

robot books. He is also a co host of the actual play show

speculate, and a guest host on the Hugo Award finalist the

Skippy and fancy show. Mike lives in Baltimore with his wife

their dog and an ever growing library. He also loves geeking

out with games and making pizza scratch. Welcome Mike. Thanks so

much for having me. All right, so I have to admit, like I do

like sci fi, but I am, I am a dabbler in many genres, and

never had the chance to get into it, so my experience has been

pretty basic. So my icebreaker question is Star Wars or Star

Trek? So this is funny for me, because it's been really

intensely one or the other at different times in my life. When

I was very small, I watched Star Wars all the time. So that's the

original trilogy, four, five and six, for folks who came later.

And, you know, it made a huge impression on me. Then there was

this big gap of kind of Star Wars stuff, and I was listening

to books on tape of the kind of the expanded universe stuff, New

Jedi Order, or new Jedi Academy and the New Jedi Order, but I

got really into Star Trek. So next generation was really

foundational for me in terms of TV. And that series taught me a

lot of the kind of structural tools that science fiction has

for interrogating the world. So episodes with like the

crystalline entity, where you have a truly alien intelligence

and how do you understand it, and a lot of the other kind of

sub genre elements in the suite of tools that science fiction

has I learned through Star Trek. So they really both mean a lot

to me.

I was reading the Broken Earth trilogy by Andy

Jemison. At the same time I was watching the next generation,

and I remember just sitting there going, there was an

episode of Star Trek that was just like this. And I'm like, of

course you probably saw that too. How that would impact your

writing a lot,

yeah. And I think one of the opportunities in science

fiction is to build on what other people are doing, and

there's a strong tradition within the genre to the point

where you get things like the Ansible becomes kind of a

commonly used technology across a bunch of different properties

when it originated in one specific science fiction story.

And that great conversation aspect, I think, is to the

genre's credit. So you get something like Star Trek where,

oh yeah, here's a one off episode interrogating an

interesting premise. And then someone might come along and

adapt it to their own interest, in their own background. And you

can kind of build back and forth on top of what has come before.

I love that. I love what, like a deep culture

sci fi has not to be too academic about it. So let's talk

about your book a little bit specifically. What's it been

like having a book come out during a pandemic?

Yeah. So my book is called annihilation Aria. It's a

found family space opera, and it's very much kind of kind of

more action adventure, end of the science fiction genre. And

so it had been scheduled for February of this year, and there

were some challenges getting promotional stuff going, so we

decided to push it back to May. But of course, this was before

the pandemic, and we didn't know that those three months would

make a gigantic difference. Now, even by February, I knew that I

was going to be happier putting it out in May than if we had

tried to rush it in February. And so when the pandemic

happened pretty quickly, I was expecting that a may release

would basically just be all digital, and so we decided to

push it back into July, and I think it's still going to be

almost entirely digital promotion. But a lot of my list

up until this point have been digital first or digital

focused. So my my debut urban fantasy series was all ebook

only, and then audio came out second. And then I had a book

with 47 north, which is an Amazon imprint, which is very

much ebook and audio focused. So a lot of the books that I have

released, I've already been used to promoting them with a

digital. Guess, trying to move ebook and audio copies more so

than physical ones. So it wasn't as much of a difference. It's

just more a difference from what I was expecting going into this

book, I was thinking, Okay, it's going to have full distribution.

The publisher goes through Baker and Taylor publishing services,

so there's going to be reps taking it out into the world.

And I had a certain narrative that I built for myself of what

promoting the book was going to look like. It's going to look

like more bookstore events, probably going back home to

Indiana, where I have some connections in the bookstore

world because of my professional background, it's going to look

like going to the origins game fair that has a science fiction

world as well as the nebula Conference, which is a big thing

in science fiction, fantasy, and it was that mix of bookstore

events, bigger conventions, smaller conventions, guests,

posts, podcasts, trying to blanket everything. And instead,

it's a lot more podcasts. It's a lot more focusing on the content

marketing that I threw through my own podcasts. It looks a lot

more like trying to be smart and a bit more flood the zone with

Twitter activity and promoting on Facebook and kind of giving

myself the permission to be really loud there, because for

so many people, everybody's attention is is pulled in 15

million different ways, whether it's because you're An essential

worker and you're doing overtime, or it's because you're

working from home and you have kids, or you have caretaker

duties, or you're stressed because of politics, or just the

kind of pandemic stuff. And I know from my marketing

professional background that however much I talk about

something, almost everybody is only going to hear a tiny slice

of it. And just understanding that digital only and digital

first means that I really have to repeat myself and figure out

how to do so in a way that is tolerable and sustainable for me

and then still interesting for people who are maybe plugged in

a little bit more than other people, while still trying to

reach as many people in my network as I can,

and probably refine those things that are

very short and very repeatable.

Yeah, like I was already used to trying to figure

out three or four different ways of pitching a book, because in

my, my previous professional life, working at angry robot, I

would go to conventions. So that's origins, Gen Con

sometimes, um, bookstore or bookseller conventions and at

the big trade shows, there's 10s of 1000s of people, and I don't

have to sell a book to every one of them, but especially

something like a comic con, people are coming at Geekdom

from so many different directions. I have to learn how

to sell any given book three or more ways. So okay, am I going

to sell this to you because you said that you liked the expanse,

and I'm going to make a comparison there to this TV

property. Or do you talk about liking a particular type of

characters, because every book can be sold in a lot of

different ways, and learning to do that for my day job has been

really good for learning to how to do it for myself. It's still

harder to do for myself, even with a lot of practice doing

it for others. So can you talk a little bit

about, like, how long you've been a part of the Sci Fi

fantasy comics scene in different capacities, and how

you viewed the arena differently in all those capacities?

Yeah. So I think the first time I was really involved

in, like, geek, gamer science fiction, fantasy communities,

was being a local fixture at my hobby slash role playing game

store in my hometown as a kid, and this is from age like 13 and

on. So that was my third place. It's where I hung out with

friends. I played lots of card games, miniatures battle games

like Warhammer or something like that. And then increasingly

tabletop role playing games. The tabletop stuff kind of moved

away from the store, because it's a bigger chunk of time and

it's, it's not as good marketing, at least at the time.

This was way before the era of, like, big, actual play shows,

like critical role or something. So my first community activity

was really in a small, very local community around a store.

So it was game nights, it was magic tournaments, and it was a

lot of getting to know a small number of people fairly well,

but in a narrow fashion, knowing a lot of how someone plays games

and how they comport themselves in competitive situations, but

not necessarily knowing a lot about their story overall. And

from there, I kind of moved into a LARP community. And this was a

changeling, the dreaming LARP, which is one of the White Wolf

games. And it got up to having 70 ish regular players. So got

really big for a LARP. And this is like Rock Paper Scissors

LARP, more than padded armor running around in the woods

LARP. And they're kind of two major schools of LARPing. So

mine was more like cosplay, walking around in a student

union pretending to be changelings and vampires, as

opposed to putting on padded barbarian armor and running

around

and camping in the woods. So it would be like

for a Normie like me, it would be like murder mystery night,

much more like murder. Or mystery night than any of

those other things. So like LARPing, let me kind of

translate my tabletop experience into something that felt even

more like directly applicable in social skills, which was nice

growing up as a nerdy kid. And so like, from there, I went to

grad school. And in grad school, I was really just kind of being

an academic. And then I did, I danced tango. So Tango is my

social life. And then I was doing my graduate work studying

tabletop role playing games. So that was kind of folding my

academic interest and my kind of individual hobby interest in

together. And then after that, I really started entering science

fiction fantasy spaces as a new to the field writing

professional. So I started submitting fiction before I

started working as a bookseller, but then I was doing those

things at the same time, and I moved into being a sales rep. I

was still submitting fiction, and I actually I did my in

person interview for the angry robot job the same week as my

debut novel came out. So those two careers have really been

intertwined the whole time.

I think it's interesting that you went the

marketing route rather than most of the authors I talked to.

Well, I mean, I've talked to a couple of authors who's who have

been booksellers, but, like a lot of them, are editors, and

usually those two things run parallel for a lot of the people

I've experienced in the industry. So I think it's

interesting you went that other way. Is there a reason for that,

or did it just kind of happen? Kind of happen

that way? I think the split probably split from kind

of the more common route, I think, came from the sales rep

job. So I had finished my master's degree. Was applying to

PhD programs. I was teaching one course a semester at a local

community college and working retail. And my dad also works in

publishing, so he knew somebody at the company that had a

posting open and arranged an introduction. So I, like

absolutely, had a major in through a family connection,

which made a big deal. And a lot of my professional career is

built on that. And it would be silly for me to to erase that.

So I want to be really clear that I've had that advantage as

well as other advantages. But this job was for commission

sales representative. So like Penguin Random House, like the

Big Five, they have their sales staff is all in house. They work

for a shot Penguin Random House, whatever. So these are full time

employees, a lot of publishers that are a little bit smaller to

a lot smaller, will instead hire a commission sales team. And

what that means is like, Okay, you're a publisher that puts out

20 books a year, but you really want to be sold into the retail

field and with wholesalers you want that reach. Rather than

hiring your own team, you make an arrangement with a commission

team. So I was one of, initially four reps, and then later on

three reps. And when I started, my territory was Indiana, Ohio,

Kentucky and Michigan. And then when the team condensed, I added

Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and the Dakotas. I only went to South

Dakota for two seasons, and then I moved it to phone. So I spent

three years doing two full selling seasons a year, and a

lot of follow up on the off seasons, which was hand selling,

it was going to bookstores, figuring out what they needed,

trying to figure out how to best present the list that I had and

match what it had to offer with what any given bookstore or

wholesaler or museum needed. And that really made me kind of

round out my understanding of the industry and learn to think

on my feet about the different ways that a book can matter. And

I really liked that part of engaging with publishing. I've

done critiquing and editing and kind of a little bit of

consulting on editing, but the most popular thing that I do on

the editorial side is editorial input within the framework of,

how can you sell this thing? So it's let's look at your query

letter, your synopsis and the first 50 pages, and then let's

talk about the story that these materials are whole telling,

because a query, a synopsis and the manuscript itself are each

telling the story in a different way to a different purpose for a

different audience, and those audiences overlap frequently. An

agent, you need to do well by all three once you're into a

publishing house, maybe the synopsis matters more than the

query and things like that. So that was bringing the experience

of being on an editorial team, but mostly not as the acquiring

editor, to an author, and trying to help them figure out how to

do that. And I think that's been a lot of why I do the kind of

marketing and career consultation rather than direct

editorial development. The other big thing is that I think my

editorial inclinations are mostly on the very high level.

And so if someone wants to come to me for a structure edit, it's

going to take me a long time to do that, and I've decided to not

pursue that type of work because I think it will take more time

than I want to put into it. And if I'm going to charge a decent

rate for my time, it's going to be really

expensive and probably SAP some of your

creative energy. That you would rather put toward your own

projects. I would

think I like I was the acquiring editor on a few books

at anger robot, where I was the one that presented the book to

the team in the editorial meeting, and then frequently

somebody else would be the actual acquiring editor and

either do the negotiation with the agent or author and or be

the one to do the structure edit. I did acquire one pair of

books and do the structure edit on the first that was skyfarer

by Joseph brassy, because it was a very American book, and I was

the only American on the team at the time, and I had a really

strong investment and connection with the work, and I wanted to

try to expand my my skill set. So I pitched this to my boss,

and he said, Yes, so I was able to develop that a little bit,

but it did really clarify to me just how much work it really

takes to do the thorough, very hands on editorial development

that I think traditional publishing should offer the

authors that they partner with, and I wanted to do a better job

in being hands on than I sometimes hear from my

colleagues who work on traditional titles where the

editorial development that they get is very hands off or doesn't

challenge them as much as they would like

to be, and authors who feel ignored or no

one's like it's been taken out of their hands, that kind of

thing, I think that it was good of you to bring up the fact that

you did have an in into a publishing house, because I

think that since there's so much talk right now of how the

industry needs to change, that we all need to kind of be aware

of and admitting our own privilege. Like me, for

instance, I was able to work in unpaid internship with someone

who introduced me to my future bosses. And if I, if that hadn't

happened, I never would have gotten a job at a traditional

publishing house. And not everyone can afford to do that,

so that it's important to be like, not saying that we can. We

just did everything ourselves, and we're self made people or

whatever. And so taking that, that discussion about

homogeneity and outright hostility toward bipoc, LGBTQ

folks, and even you know, a lot of other people in certain

houses who maybe didn't go to an Ivy League, stuff like that. How

have you seen these dynamics play in the Sci Fi fantasy

genre? And what do you think can be done better to make the genre

and industry more inclusive?

So I really started moving in science fiction

fantasy professional circles in about 2005 when I went to world

fantasy convention. And then I think I missed a bit of stuff,

and then I did Clarion West in 2007 and after that, I was much

more frequently at conventions. And for a while, that was my

primary point of contact with the intersection of the genre

and the industry, like mostly kind of fan conventions and some

professional conventions. At that time, I was not generally

aware of substantive conversations about inclusion,

diversity, decolonization, whichever frame you put on it,

it was mostly just not in in the spaces that I was in. And these

are, these are spaces that were, especially at the time,

overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly overwhelmingly

straight, overwhelmingly able, or where disability was erased

or made invisible, and people were masking because of the

environment, which understandable. So by the time I

started publishing novels in 2012 I think the kind of

currents in culture overall were a lot more people were paying

attention to the marginalized people that were already talking

about these issues. And one of the things that I think has been

the best gift to the industry and the genre from social media,

is people using social media to understand how much they've been

missing out and using those tools to lift up the voices of

people who had been pushed the margins are kept on the margins.

And so when I was starting my career at the time, the

conversations I was seeing were about like, who's in your book,

who is in your stories, who gets to be a hero. And so like

starting out as a writer, what I wanted to do was to not only

ever just tell stories about cis, straight white men. And so,

like my first series, stars a bisexual, biracial Latina, and I

absolutely did not do everything perfectly well, and I learned

over the course of the series, and I tried to take criticism

with as much humility as I could. If I were writing those

books now, I would definitely do things different. But that's

kind of part of having a longer career, is I hope that at a

given point in time in my career, if I look five or more

years back in my work, I'm going to see a lot of things that I

would want to do differently now, and I want to keep doing

that, because that means that I'm continuing to do better.

Working in guru robot gave me a lot more of a platform to be

able to make any kind of difference in the field, because

I was able to call in manuscripts. I spent a lot of

time looking at tweets in like pitch contests. So. Dv, pit, SFF

pit, calling in manuscripts, meeting people at conventions,

going out of my way to make sure that I wasn't just talking to

people whose backgrounds more directly matched mine, and

trying to go, Okay, I'm going to actively put my thumb on the

scale to try to counterbalance the systemic issues that I've

seen and learning more from people in marginalized

backgrounds and lived experiences, all the different

ways that barriers are put up toward them, and then trying to

bust down those barriers, or at least create cracks in them

where I could and at this point, you know, I try to continue

that, but most of what I can do is in terms of the consulting,

or it's in mentoring. So I've been doing mentoring with the

Science Fiction Fantasy Writers of America organization, and

that's been really rewarding, because I'm not in a position

where I can put a manuscript on an editor's desk in the same way

that I did at angry robot. Something that came up in the

pre show was the idea of the difference between an ally and

an accomplice, and this is something that I learned in the

last few years that, specifically in terms of racial

justice work, hearing from from black activists and just black

people living in the US, they would love to have more

accomplices than allies. And for me, what that means is sticking

your neck out. It means getting your having your skin in the

game, and so that's sticking your reputation on something. It

means stepping back from opportunities in order to

protest something that is perpetuating an injustice. And

for me, it means treating it like it's a problem that matters

to me, not a thing that I'm going to fix because I'm a white

savior, but something that impacts me because I refuse to

set myself apart from it, that the struggles of my marginalized

colleagues are my struggles, and that I can be a part of the

solution because I am enmeshed in the context that is the

problem for them.

Thank you for bringing up that framework. I

think that we need as many as we can possibly get, because, you

know, our brains all work differently. If there's

something that helps you be an accomplice, better than run with

it. So we're introducing as many of those as possible. Yeah, so

I'm actually curious about you said that your first series was

only in ebooks audio and through an Amazon imprint. Did you see

any cultural differences in the way that publishing worked in

that different form?

Yeah, so my the geekomancy books. So that was

three novels and a novella from 2012 through the end of 2014 and

that was with pocket star, which was a digital only Simon

Schuster imprint. Looking back, Simon Schuster did not have a

great grasp on how to publish ebooks well overall at that

time. So the first book did really well. They moved it up

and launched it during San Diego Comic Con at $1.99 and put ads

behind it. So that book shot up once we got to the sequels. And

as the kind of landscape of the types of like price promos that

worked and how you could support them. As that shifted, the

series kind of dropped off. And it didn't seem like the teams

that were working on my my books were able to keep up as much

working on a 47 North book. You know, the Amazon team has access

to all the Amazon information, and there is kind of a firewall

between the editorial and the kind of back end algorithm

people, but there is not literally a firewall, like they

the folks in the office. You can go down the hall. And so there's

such a fluency and familiarity with those tools, and they're

selling very much inside the silo. But already, by that time,

I was noticing that 47 North was shifting kind of focus and

methods away from, we're a science fiction imprint that

just happens to be at home at Amazon, toward something that

felt a lot more like KDP Select, plus, where, if you've got a

book that's going that's likely to be able to do well in the

Kindle ecosystem, and for the Kindle Unlimited reader, then it

will do even better, because the team is able to push a couple

extra of extra buttons, or maybe get some priority, getting books

on Kindle first, or something like that. And my book was a

new, weird superhero action adventure, where it was drawing

as much on China Mieville as like the authority comics. So it

was a strange genre mash, and I think not a great match for what

the Kindle ecosystem looked like at the time. You know right now

we talk about, we talk about in terms of subcategories and

hitting your ideal reader. And the focused on Kindle readership

for new beard plus superheroes is that's just not much of an

audience. There is Supers, a supers audience, but it tends to

be within a narrow framework. And so each step of the way I've

learned about how different companies kind of handle the

ebook side of the industry, because so much of my list has

been digital first, and in audio and so like the current book

that's coming out later in July, it's print and ebook with parvis

press and then audio with dreamscape media and dreamscape

media. I. Came in with an advance that's larger than the

smaller press advance from Purvis, and so I have this

situation where more money is coming in from here, but also,

who knows what's up with audio right now? Because with the

pandemic, a lot of people aren't commuting, and so many things

are just totally up in the air right now that even 10 ish years

of industry knowledge, I don't really feel like I have a strong

sense of exactly what to do in as much as I had a clear sense

of anything, because the stuff that I've learned is about

approaches that are likely to increase your chances. Because

the closest you get to a best selling guarantee is that the

house or the author behind the title dumps a bunch of money

into it like that's the closest you can get to a guarantee is be

a major priority and get a lot of money behind it. So for right

now, with this book, I'm trying to apply everything that I've

learned, and I'm trying to not repeat the mistakes that I made

or that I felt my partners made, or the things that they didn't

know at the time. And, you know, do the best that I can with this

title.

I also was interested in seeing that you

had worked for cereal box, box or with cereal box. Can you? Can

you talk about that? I've been I've had my eye like on it, but

haven't really looked into it at all in a way that made sense to

me.

So sure. So for for listeners that aren't familiar.

Cereal box is a digital, focused publisher that started probably

five or six years ago now, because what is time and like

the kind of elevator pitch ideas behind cereal box is HBO for

fiction. So it is, you know, developing a stable of works

that they have exclusively, or almost exclusively, on their own

platform. So cereal box has an app, and then you can also get

stuff through their website. It is ebook and audio focused. They

do a lot of enhanced audio now. So the audiobook for born of the

blade, the series that I did, had like sounds for magic and

like clashing blades, and so it was like, really value add in on

the audio side. Another thing that's special about cereal box

is all the serials that they commission and buy, kind of the

IP for are collaboratively written, and the style of

collaboration that they use is very much drawn from the

American television model. So the first series that they did

was called Book burners, and one of the writers in that team is

Margaret Dunlap, who is mostly a writer for TV, and so she kind

of shared her experience working in a writer's room and zero

bucks, then refined that into their model. So the series that

I pitched, born of the blade, was actually a like a remix of a

world that I had written a trunk novel in many, many many years

ago, and I wasn't really doing anything with this world, and I

had to talk to some cereal box people. And I was really mostly

interested in the collaboration part. So I pitched this world. I

talked with them. I wrote a World Bible, which is about 40

something pages. There's a lot of here's some key characters,

here's the setting. It was kind of an epic fantasy, political

Martial Arts Series, Allah avatar, The Last Airbender,

meets Babylon five, or the west wing with duelist diplomats who

do magic fencing.

Really good at that, combining different

stories in the pitch. It sounds like if you're going to do the

kind of like crossover TV, HBO for books

thing, yeah. And I think a lot of what they've done

has been able has had that high concept aspect where you can go,

oh, okay, it's x meets y with z, so that they can pitch to people

who aren't necessarily the more expected ebook or paperback

reader. They're targeting a lot of middle class working

professionals with commutes, and they're building in an app. So

they're mostly looking at smartphone oriented users, and

they have a very specific model. The thing that was really most

interesting to me was the collaboration. So I created this

world, and I have the credit as the series creator, but the

parts that are what people read and listen to, the parts that

are really good, are done collaboratively. And so I worked

with Cassandra, caw, Malka, older and Marie Brennan to write

the series, and we wrote the episodes all together, so but

divided by episode. So I wrote episodes one, four and 11, and

then Marie wrote, I think, two and seven and 10, or something

like that. So we used the writer's room approach. We

critiqued one another's episodes, trying to keep things

consistent. But then they also had an editor, and we had a

producer who for our series, was the co founder, so, you know,

very tied into everything of what they were doing overall.

And we got notes from the producer that were like, Oh,

this is what our users like. From this, we really want you to

open with as much of a bang as you can, to try to pull the

readers in and like, you know, doing editorial along those

lines. And it was a ton of work. It was probably as much work

even though I was only writing about 30 something 1000 Words of

the like 110 20 for the season. It was as much work as a whole

novel because it was developing the world. It was writing my own

episodes for. Those, but also giving notes on other people's

episodes and the developmental meetings and, okay, well, if

this moves from Episode Seven to Episode Five, then how do we set

it up here? And where do we put the subplot back in? And we were

doing epic fantasy. So there were a half dozen or more major

civilizations, a big cast, and it was a really ambitious

project. I put a ton into it. I had a great time. I learned so

much working with my collaborators, who are all

stunning, brilliant storytellers in their own right, and it's fun

getting to see each of their careers take off even more so

though Marie, who was actually an old friend, we were in a

critique group together when I was in undergrad and she was in

grad school, Marie already had more of a career than any of us

by that time, because she'd been published. Publishing for quite

some time, and her natural history of Dragon series was

already really taking off. And Malka had just gotten started as

a as an author with infomocracy that made a big splash. And

Cassandra has written a bunch of different stuff in horror, and

now she's doing a lot in video games. So each of them brought

something to the project that was really different than what I

could have done. And again, speaking to positionality, the

world and the human the rounded humanness of the various

characters, was the result of everybody having input. And the

whole thing was definitely something that, for me,

transcends the sum of the parts. And that was the huge takeaway

for me, because zero box is a really specific model. Their

expectations are also very specific, and they focus on

their app and on digital rather than physical. So in some ways,

it was similar to other things that I done, but the rubric they

were using to judge whether something was a success was very

much their own thing. So I felt like, editorially and

critically, the project was success, and creatively, it was

a success. And I would have loved to do more with that team,

from zero boxes, kind of internal metrics, what the

season had done in terms of sales and subscriptions didn't

justify more. So again, like TV, we were not picked up for a

second season. Nice thing is, because it's fiction, 10 years

down the road, HBO could pick it up to become a series, and then

it has a new life, and maybe we reassemble a writer's team. You

know, fiction, it's easier to come back to something later on

than even, I think, in TV, just because, you know, you can be an

85 year old writer and still kicking butt. And so that door

is, like, mostly closed, but certainly not locked, and I

learned a lot about collaboration and kind of how to

share a creative space in a way that is really productive. And I

hope that that will mean that sometime in the future, when I

am able to do some other collaborative project, I'll be

able to bring these great tools and experiences to it and make

something else really

fun. It sounds like a really rare life changing

experience for an author.

Frankly, yeah, and it was pretty all consuming. From

writing the series Bible to release was probably two, two

and a half years, maybe even a little bit longer, because there

was a bit of a delay between selling the series and

assembling the writer's room, just because they had a lot of

things going on. This was enough earlier, enough in cereal boxes

history, that they were doing like seed funding and really

doing like customer acquisition, because they were as much like a

tech startup as a small publisher.

Do you spend any time in that app still? Do

you read and listen to stories on there that much?

Or I've kept an eye on things I got to or I read at an

event the New York Review of science fiction reading series.

And I saw as hell, Huang read from the Vela, which is a space

opera series that she did with a few other people. I can't

remember everyone's name, so I'm not going to try. So I read some

of that, and really liked it. I'm excited to dip into some of

those Marvel series that they're doing, because they have

actually moved into doing a lot of IP partnerships, because

Marvel had already done like a Wolverine audio drama, and then

I think maybe they picked up that partnership. I saw

some doctor who on there when I went and

checked it out. Oh yeah, I hadn't seen that, but yeah, they

really kind of expanded their mandates. They brought in some

other short fiction that they didn't originate, but they're

like licensing, I think, as well as the IP work, like they did a

season continuing Orphan Black and, you know, they're kind of

finding their way. And I try to keep my my eye on on what

they're doing overall, because I think the model itself is very

cool, because they are not just trying to beat Amazon at

Amazon's game. They're not trying to beat Penguin, Random

House at prhs game. They're trying to make a space for

themselves. And I think that's really

commendable. It does seem really different.

And I guess you know, if they've been around for more than five

years, they're probably doing

okay, yeah. I think the the IP stuff is probably opening

even more doors for them, so we'll see.

So speaking of different forms of storytelling,

other than paper, you're a podcaster too. Yes, tell me

about

it. Yeah. So I the first podcast I joined was the

skiffy and fanty show, which is a kind of ensemble fan cast. A

lot of what skiffy and fancy does is like reading and

interviews with authors, but then also kind of fannish and

fannish scholarly reactions to. TV and film. So a lot of what

I've done with skipping and Fantine the last few years is a

Babylon five re watch, because Babylon five is a show that has

meant a lot to me. Some friends of mine recommended it in my

youth leading into college, and I finally watched the whole

thing in college at like, 320 resolution on on my computer. So

like, I couldn't tell that the CG was already dated, and I

didn't care, because I was more interested in the

characterization and the big plot stuff. So b5 is another big

influence on something like born of the blade for me. So a lot it

was a lot of kind of pseudo academic or fannish academic

media criticism. Is a lot of what I did there, and I haven't

done as much in the last couple of years. And more of what I've

been doing is with speculate, which, when speculate started,

it was co hosted by Gregory a Wilson and Brad Bollier. And I

got to know both of them through conventions and stuff. Later on,

I joined as a third cast member, and then Brad left to mostly

more focus on his writing. Greg and I continued and the format

for speculate the old format I think is still really cool. We

would pick a book and then we'd read it. In the first episode

would be our initial impressions, kind of reader,

reader, response to the book overall. In the second episode,

we would, wherever possible, interview the author, and where

it wasn't possible, we would speak with someone in the field

or in the the industry who had a close relationship to it, either

as a fan or some like professional relationship to the

work. And then in the third episode, we would approach the

RE approach the work as authors. So it was like, let's pull out

this amazing display of craft that we see in this novel or in

a story in this collection, and let's talk about how we can

learn from it in a way that improves our own writing. I got

a lot out of it over time. You know, life got really busy for

both Greg and I, and we kind of reassessed and came to the idea

of rebranding speculate as an actual play show. So that's

actual play, tabletop role playing games. Listeners may be

familiar with something like critical role or maybe the

adventure zone or friends of the table is one that I really like

now as well. So for that, we play table talk, role playing

games almost exclusively with our science fiction fantasy

colleagues in the industry. So that's mostly authors. Sometimes

it's literary agents or editors or people who have some kind of

professional or paraprofessional state in the industry, and it's

a lot of people who have, like, multiple hats, because people

wear multiple hats. So I have played in games and GM games

right now, we have two mini series going on. One is blades

in the dark, which is like an industrial fantasy, kind of

heist oriented game, and that campaign is being run by a

writer and editor and Game Designer, Brandon O'Brien. And

then I'm running a game of scum and villainy, which is like a

space opera science fiction game, but I'm doing it in the

Star Wars universe as a fan work. We're just going to do the

first mission of that later this month, and I'm jamming that.

I've jammed a lot off and on throughout my life, but I had a

few years where I was really away from gaming more and

speculate has been part of this renaissance for me, and it's

really fun to approach actual play as another form of

storytelling, because like born of the blades, it's

collaborative, but in a very different fashion. And as I

mentioned earlier, I have an academic relationship with

tabletop as well, and it's so cool and kind of mind blowing to

think how much role playing has become an entertainment form for

an audience, in a way that was almost unfathomable when I was

doing the academic work. One of the things I talked about in

that academic work was the fact that tabletop games are

ephemeral. They are emergent narrative, and the narrative as

a logical, coherent thing is only constructed retroactively,

because the process is writing, directing, acting and all of the

other things, if we're using like a stage or a film metaphor,

because the play itself creates the narrative retroactively.

You're going, Oh, okay, can we go back a scene, or I want to

redo it this way, and you're engaging with randomness via

dice in most cases, though, there are, of course, some

Diceless games. So that type of storytelling and actual play is

a lot more requires a lot more flexibility. It is a lot more

like performance than like fiction writing for me, though I

still love when I can occasionally see a moment and

then do that thing that in fiction would be like having the

perfect paragraph at the perfect time to build on something that

has come before. And, you know, get done with that page and have

chills, and I get so much joy from being able to do that as

like player character or as the GM, but even more so seeing

somebody else make an amazing moment out of what we built

together,

all those aha moments in real time in front of

an audience.

Yeah, and you know, I play some tabletop without a

lot. Audience just a home game, and we've recently moved to

having a live audience on Twitch, and then we record and

release the episodes later as a podcast. And there's definitely

a difference there between playing with a live audience

versus recording on your own and then something going out to an

audience. And both of those are different than having an

audience in the room from something like, you know, my

brief stint as a vocalist for a tango band which lasted at all

about three months, or like, doing theater or choir or

something. So, you know, these are all just different facets

and different manifestations of storytelling, which has been

such an interest of mine since I was really small

and doing that sort of project academically in

such a niche area. I mean, I remember just no one being able

to understand what my degree was, and it was just publishing

so I can, I can see that kind of being gratifying, to be like,

Look, I did make this into something after I graduated,

very big.

Actually, most of the popular media manifestations of

publishing are something like castle or younger, where the

industry is so glamorized and the writers never seem to be

writing. And you know, like, things are easy that should be

hard, and things are hard that probably are also hard. And it's

just, it's strange being in a field that is so inaccurately

represent it. And I'm sure that that's actually very common. You

just have to be inside a field to know how much top three media

gets

it wrong. Just have to watch an action movie

with my dad, who is a former Marine.

I bet

those are the wrong things on his jackets. I don't even know

what's

called, like the epaulets or something stripe.

Anyway, in any case, I would be the person

writing the movie that he was yelling at. I love it. So tell

me more about your book. Just what is it? Where can people

find it? When is it coming out? Et cetera.

Yeah. So annihilation ARIA started as me telling an

editor at a coffee meeting years and years ago. I'd really love

to write something that gives people joy the way that I had

joy when I first watched the movie Guardians of the Galaxy.

So that emotional touchstone is really at the heart of the book,

and the way that that is manifested is as a found family

space opera slash space fantasy. The main characters are Max and

Laura. Max is a like a cheery Xeno archeologist from earth who

gets Farscape style, teleported to a distant galaxy, or like

John Carter of Mars and Laura, who is kind of the last of her

line of royal bodyguards of a species called the Janae. And

the Janae have different cases, and they have song magic, and

every case has their own voice register, because I also have a

performance background to inquire, and my family is very

musical, so I like use the stuff that I know for the world

building there. And yeah, Tango does not show up there, but I do

have a My very first published short story is called Last Tango

at Gamma Sector, so I used it there. So Max and Lara kind of

live on the fringes of Galactic Empire, and they have, they live

with and work with, a cyborg pilot named wheel, who kind of

gets elbow deep into her ship and then, like the ship connects

with her, you know, Cyborg cyberpunk style, so that she's a

better pilot. And what they do is they look for artifacts and

lost archeological sites of the Empire before the current

empire. And this, this current Empire is very much like

controlling history. Here is the official narrative of how the

universe was made. And, you know, the sink are the, you

know, Your Glorious Creator rulers. And they are benevolent

when they're just, you know, they're a bunch of space

fascists doing the thing that fascists do, which is redraw

history to position themselves as, you know, unchallengeable

victors. And so it's very kind of little bit of Indiana Jones,

a little bit of Star Wars, a little bit of Star Wars, a

little bit of Guardians of the Galaxy. It's all of these

influences and touchstones that I grew up loving encapsulated

in. Okay, here's a story with a happily married couple at the

core, and they still have adventures, and things are not

perfect for them, but they are really committed to each other,

because in so many action adventure stories, you just get

hot Person A, hot Person B, proximity, smooching. And that

can be really good. I want to do something different. And so it's

also bringing in my martial arts background. So Laura has a great

sword that does space magic, and it's like a bunch of wonderful

space fantasy and space opera bullshit, and like, giant space

turtles. And it's yeah, like, mostly what I want people to

take away from the book is a great time. I think that's

especially useful right now. I started writing it before the

2016 election. After the 2016 election, the political edge of

it got a bit sharper, but I also knew that I still wanted to give

people a way to escape from the world, even if for a few hours,

because I think that type of. Escapism is still incredibly

powerful, and the action adventure type of storytelling

is still where a lot of my heart leads me, and it's where I kind

of find myself going most instinctively, though I'm also

trying to branch out in other other areas so it can start a

series. It's only a one book deal with par risk so far, so

there will only be more books if the sales justify it. I want to

be clear about that up front. I do have the very cheeky series

title of the space operas, because I have space song magic,

and that lets me be kind of funny there. So hypothetical

sequel titles could include, include something like chaos

canto or disaster duet, or, you know, like whatever the book is

called annihilation ARIA like, I know what it is. I'm not trying

to do the thing that some other authors are doing, where Malka,

older infomocracy, has fun and action adventure parts, but it's

really digging into like political science as the field

of science fiction that it's working with. This is much more

an adventure story. You know, I try to do some fun stuff with

world building and with tweaking and twisting tropes, which I

really like doing in a lot of my work. But anyone who's

listening, if you're looking for a fun ride to take yourself away

from the world for a few hours, then check out annihilation

Aria. It's going to be in print and ebook on July 21 in

basically any store that you could ask for. There will be

some representation at Barnes and Noble. From last I've heard,

there's a BNN near you that's open, or if there are bookstores

near you that are open, hopefully they will have some

copies. Otherwise you can order them. And then it looks like it

will be on audio July 31 about a week or so after and I really

like audio, so I'm super excited to hear what the they're gonna

have two narrators for that, which is fun. We'll see what

it's like to launch a book in 2020.

Yeah, we will. And so you should, you should

buy it, because then you can write another one.

I would love to do more. I have, I have started

things that have not been able to continue. So the way that I

can make it square, kind of, with myself and with any

readers, is to just be really clear about what is and isn't

going to happen and what's a

maybe. Well, I'm going to order it from

Jan's, which is my local indie bookstore, because, yeah, she

gives me a 20% discount when I text her my orders. So maybe

your local indie bookstore does something like that too, I don't

know. Yeah, I'd also love to shout out bookshop.org.

Has been doing some great work, especially during the pandemic.

It's kind of a an iteration forward from the indie bound

website, and folks, especially in the US, should check

it out. And we do have, we do have a little

representation of a hybrid pub scout on there. Oh, great. We

have a little store. So we'll add your we add all of our

guests books to our store, so you can find it there, too.

Fantastic. All right. Where else can people find you online?

Sure thing. So folks can find me on Twitter at Mike R

Underwood. That's Mike and then just the letter R Underwood. My

website is Michael R underwood.com. I have a Patreon

with essays about business of publishing and craft of writing

at patreon.com/mike R Underwood, like the Twitter handle. And

then folks can find speculate at speculate sf.com and skiffy and

fancy at skiffy and fanta.com sorry, I do a

lot of things. You do a lot of things. And you

can find us on Facebook at hybrid pub Scout, on Twitter at

hybrid pub scout. Instagram at hybrid pub Scout pod. Please

visit our website, hybridpubscout.com while you're

there, click join our troop, get our new guide, the HBS guide to

picking your publishing path. Thank you so much, Mike,

thanks for having me. It's been great, and thanks for

giving a rip about books. You you.