Noir Shorts, Big Swings Troy Lambert on Book Blasts, Kickstarters & AI Movies

All right, welcome to another episode of the Creative 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. He just understands the craft really, really well. 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. So I think you're going to 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. Me and Troy recorded this in person at Author Nation 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. So we're very excited to hopefully have you involved. You can join the wait list in the link in the description if you're not already part of it. And with all that said, we're going to dive into this episode of the Creator Web podcast.

Troy. This is my first podcast in person since Maggie Beeler and Pepper. Actually, no, Dave Vergutts. He was the last person I did in person.

Oh, wow.

He's in his warehouse. So you're in good company.

I'm in good company. That is me.

But with other people.

Who?

Maggie, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes. Yeah. It's so exciting.

The Cocktail Powder gal.

Yeah, it just launched. Oh, and you also have your own Kickstarter.

Yes, we have our own Kickstarter.

Launching will be pretty much the couple days before this releases. This will release next week. So it'll be live.

It'll be live by the time you see this. Yeah.

Tell us about it.

So essentially what it is. So my friend Vincent Zandri and I have been releasing these shorts, short collections. It's just one story by each of us called Book Blasts. And it's just 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. Before you go to bad, whatever, that type of thing. 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?

So usually the stories are between 5 and 10,000 words. Okay, so Something you can read in an hour.

Some substance, but.

Yeah, some substance, but not really long type thing. Almost like really short novella type things.

Yeah.

So. But the Kickstarter is. So you get. It's the only way you can get a subscription. And the next year, like every month you either get an ebook or a print book or even a limited edition hardcover every single month delivered to your house. Wow.

Okay. That's Book Blast.

Yeah, that's Book Blast. That's Book Blast. And Kickstarter is the only place you can get hardcovers. The paperbacks and ebooks 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. Kickstarter is the only way you can get a subscription. So we're excited about that.

They're subscribing on Kickstarter like monthly or they're paying up front on Kickstarter.

Paying up front on Kickstarter and then you get one a month for the entire year.

That makes sense. Okay. I love it. So you have the Book Blast component and then there's a rumor that there's also the special tier.

Yes. So we have a couple of special tiers. The first special tier is we'll create audio or for the Book Blast because people like audio and short audio does really well too. For same reason people can listen to it on their commute or whatever the case may be. But the even higher tier is that we will make AI generated movies using creator wood of every single one of the book blasts. Now that's a pretty lofty goal. We need you guys to like really pledge it up to make that happen. But yeah, that's our super stretch goal.

That'd be incredible. How long are you thinking? Like for a 5 to 10,000 word short story, how long do you think the accompanying film will be?

So I'm thinking it'll be about. They'll be between 10, 10 to 20 minutes. Probably something like that.

Yeah.

I'm guessing just because of the way I've played around with Greater Wood so far with like about a 3,000 word, 4,000 word short short story. And what I think it'll end up being. I think it'll also partially depend upon the story and how many visual elements there are to it. Yeah, but it'll be, 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. 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 pulpit, the pulp comics and films and stuff are like.

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 mostly black and white, but just a little bit of color. Like maybe emphasizing things. Like, I could see a noir. You've got the film with, like, maybe the roads black and white. The buildings are black and white. But then you have that street lamp with the color of the lamp itself. Yeah, something like that. 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 that are just, like, unique. Yeah. Just fun. But we've gotten it to work pretty well. So I think that you could. Maybe you could invent the noir style, Troy.

Yeah. 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. 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. This is like serialized film.

Serialized film where you would like. And I would entice you to come back and see another movie the next week because you would see another episode.

Why don't we still have that? That would be such a cool cuny experience. You come see the same people every Friday night. You're like, here we all are. We were hyped.

We gotta see what happened to the guy. Because it's just a short. It's at the beginning or end of the movie. It was a really sweet little thing that they used to do. Yeah.

People are like, why have the movies been in decline? It just sounds like they were objectively better back in the day. But we can still do that now. That's so cool.

Wow.

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 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 a few Changes in the industry. Just a little, A couple little things. So I've written over 30, 35 novels now. Lots of tons and tons of short fiction, some non fiction. 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. So I'm pretty much fully immersed in the publishing industry all the time. It's the only thing I really do so other than I love to play around and make like short book trailers, films and stuff like that. Because really for me it's just all about story. It doesn't matter how you tell the story, it's just all about the story. So I narrate audiobooks, I do all that kind of stuff. So it's really just about story. As much as I can be in one lane publishing, I'm like, I'm not a renaissance man everywhere man, that's a lot of work.

Yeah, you're doing the, you're doing the audio now the film. Yeah. Publishing in any way. 2009 was very early to be. Especially in the indie world because yeah.

In the indie world that was our goal really. 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 released a collection of short stories before that, stuff like that. 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. You could release a book. You let your Facebook group know. Back when Facebook groups actually got notifications about when you posted, you would just sell books, you would just. That was just. And there were only a few places to sell books. There was Apple, Smashwords and kdp and that was it.

Wow. It's for even Kobo.

Yeah, Kobo was not. Kobo was. Came on, came on shortly after that. 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 increase the royalty rates to 70%. 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. 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. 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 its dominant as Amazon. 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. And they keep gradually falling and they keep saying, google Playbooks, oh, we're going to do something with it. And you talk to the company reps, they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to do something. We're going to make this great. And they never do. It never changes from year to year. So it's pretty much the same. Okay.

There's definitely some things that have changed. Kickstarter is something that I definitely know you weren't running back in 2009.

Oh, no. We didn't think about any kind of crowdfunding back then. There was no crowdfunding for books. Yeah, 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 thing. Like they could publish on KDP for authors and they could do print on demand and they could do that. So a lot of small presses popped up too, at the same time. So there's 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. 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. But then when Kickstarter came along, initially, it was always for some gadget and we didn't think about it for books. But especially the last several years, it's really turned into. There's a niche of people on Kickstarter looking for books. 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. I was just at a talk today. We're both at Author Nation right now, and I was at a talk with Jennifer Yanez, who had with her husband Jonathan, raised over 70k for their short film Forsaken Mercenary. This was produced using traditional means and was a short film, but 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. So I think there's a. There's a lot of folks listening who are like experiencing AI film are also going to be I think starting to get into crowdfunding because it's just a very good way to actually grow what.

You' way to raise money and grow what you're doing. And there's a. There's another documentary thing that I would like to do as far as this filmmaking is concerned. And it really the same way is we're going to have to raise money through crowdfunding and other non traditional means. Otherwise we can't do this. But the fact that we have these options 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. Like that is not. Has not been happening in the past. 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 do all of. 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 have cost us five years ago to do it with a crew. We would have been talking a couple hundred thousand dollars at least.

Yeah, that's. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. And it's similar to what happened with any publishing when it was like before the birth of being able to shoot your books online. You're going to have to get a huge print run and get into the bookstores and all of a sudden that expense was going to be six figures.

Yeah, you got to have a warehouse, you got to have all that kind of stuff. And now you can do those print runs and do. Fulfilled by Amazon and you're not even. You're not.

No, you don't touch it at all. Pod.

You know, so there, there's all kinds of opportunities there as well. But I think that it's just things we did not have the opportunity to do back then that are just amazing to me.

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. 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. It worked for a few people some of the time, but it didn't really work long term for multiple people. They burned out.

Yeah, you didn't burn out.

Yeah, producing. But, but steady release has always been the watchword. Like you're always. You're going to continually create new stuff and release new stuff because if you're not people's attention span. They forget who you are. 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 COVID Now you're reading on your Kindle and you say, what book are you reading? And I have to look it up because I don't remember the title or author's name. I'm just immersed in the book because every time I open my Kindle, their name doesn't appear, the COVID doesn't appear.

Sure.

So I don't see that every time I open that book. So that part has changed. The things that did work is there were a couple times when I put books with publishers that. And I should not have put with that particular publisher. They folded or they folded.

You get your rights back or the.

Yeah, they fold. You get your rights back. But the book, like the book would disappear into obscurity because they wouldn't monitor the categories and metadata and stuff like that like all the indies were doing. 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 going to see that again. Wow. And so those type of things did not work. And then I had a non. I did some non fiction publishing for a little while and that was a mistake. There was an agent that wanted me to work with that 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. It's a long story. B level celebrities that really didn't have any money that are trying to reignite whatever career they had by doing a book and so they don't know anything about. And when you tell them to. 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.

Show up. And so like we. I wow. 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.

Who wants to listen to me talk about somebody else's crazy now? It was fun.

Yeah, that's actually hilarious. You showed up like, good for you.

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.

Oh, okay.

So you on their podcast. 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. And tons of the podcasters thought I was the author. And so I'd have to clarify. Oh, 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. 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.

That 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, 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.

They're taking more than they're giving. 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 o' clock at night and all that kind of stuff, and we're just texting back and forth all day because we're both working, really working to visit. So it's great to have a partner that's actually fully engaged in and. But this is why, like, for the last probably five to seven years, I've been like, I'm not going to have a partner. I'm not partnering with anybody to do stuff like that ever again. Except now this stuff happens. But it's definitely completely different circumstances than I've ever been operating under before. So that's.

There's a lot of interesting stuff there because as a new author or a new storyteller coming into it, especially because 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 the screenwriters, et cetera, and they're finally trying to break out their own. But it does get scary because 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, 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 gotten burned in the past?

So it was that we had already been working together just not formally. Like, we had worked on.

Got it. You knew each other. It was like, 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, 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. And I thought, oh, that's great, because he's got an in with these people. Nobody had it in with these people because they were just a bunch of lazy 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. 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, we can't continue to write this series 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. And so I can't do it anymore. So I had to take over that series. 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 legit and good people, but they just don't have the dry. 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. Kind of like we were talking about before we started this podcast, like, where you're driven, because this is the only thing I do. This is my passion. 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.

But what's kept the passion alive for so long? Because I talked 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 ends up not feeling so much like a dream when it's their reality. So how have you managed to keep that passion alive? Because I know it's not easy.

So sometimes it has come close to dying. Like, it's been hard. There have been times when I've went through burnout as far as the passion.

Oh, I understand. I'm sorry. I'm thinking, like, Troy is almost dying. No, no, no, no.

Like, this is crazy, but, like, where I'm like, I'm just gonna get a regular job and have a paycheck. And you found benefits. Yeah, because you get burned out if you do too much. It's just too hard to do. And it's kind of. 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. And there have been times when you're just like, oh, I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this. I'm doing six different things, and I can't. I'm not doing any of them well. 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, I just want to. I just want some rest. 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 were there conflicting messages in the classes?

No, actually, because they were two. It was two different aspects of story structure. So it was fine, but it was just a lot to do at one time. But that's my passion for story was. I'm like, I started taking this one class. They talked about semiotics and symbolism and stuff. I'm like, oh, that sounds like an interesting class. I might as well take that, too. And thinking, I got time. It's no problem. Which, it's a problem, actually. Don't take those kind of classes at the same time. But it worked out great. But that's my passion for story means I'm going to chase that forever. 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. Because I love story. I've loved stories since I was a kid. This is what I wanted to do my whole life, and here I am doing it. So I can't really complain about it because I put myself in this position, but I love stories. So I keep coming back to that. 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. I can't believe how you helped me, my story to come alive. Then I'm like, okay, that's worth it. That makes every moment worth it. So it. You just have to keep. 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.

Oof.

Yeah.

And the why for you is it's story.

It's just a love of story.

Yeah.

I want to tell my stories. I want to help other people tell their stories. And that's. Have you really all that comes down.

That you throughout the last 10 years have stuck to a specific kind of story or have you hopped genres? 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.

And then I wrote a dragon story and it was a suspense thriller story with dragons. Okay. That's not really a fantasy. It's really just a thriller adjacent with the dragon instead of a person, that type of thing. But like, I have genre hopped a little bit because I love to do comedy. I've done some stand up comedy and I love to do comedy. So I've written some funny books.

The author comic.

Yeah, the 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.

And they go on an adventure together. They fall in love with their equal hatred for humanity and they go on an adventure, talk to managers and stuff like that. And then I did a retelling of Don Quixote called Tilting at Windmills. And windmills are actually monsters. So Don Que is crazy and that type of thing. 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. So as you as I've gotten, 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 because I want to and then just toss it out there in the world. And most time people like it well enough that they. I sell some copies of it.

There's this Alfred Hitchcock quote that it's three things you need to make a great film script. 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. I'm curious, like how has that evolved? And I know that like you were now you mean you're using craterwood you're using now AI filmmaking tools. Has AI affected or shaped your storytelling process in any way?

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 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. 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. 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? Or what's a. 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.

The naming is important. I. Oh, I spent so much of my time trying to figure out unique names. It's. Yeah, it's, it's tough when you're on like the third James and your last three series and you're like, oh my.

God, oh yeah, I had one series where there were like three Pauls. I'm like, okay, there's enough Paul's in this series. We don't need any more Pauls or Mary's in this series. That's enough. But it's the other thing that AI has shaped my processes in developing series bibles. So you develop your own LLM with your material from your series and you can query that. 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?

Are you like using Notebook lm. Notebook, okay, Notebook LM is probably the simplest right now. Notebook LM and Airtable. So because Airtable, I use that to develop marketing materials as well. So you have all the information from your series. So it can help you in the writing process but 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. 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 because You can. I can integrate it with other automation tools that bring that information into AI. Although airtable does have its own AI built in. But sorry, airtable, it's not great. I usually generally bring it out into either chat or cloud or something like that to do something with.

That brings me to then. How has your marketing evolved over time? Because you mentioned I'm actually like, I want to double click on this. You mentioned that between the years of 2007, 2012, it was like you just post a story and it gets sales, which is the gold rush. But you mentioned that your first collection of short stories wasn't really your breakout. 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. But there were.

There still are now.

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. Authors that release these collections of short stories all at the same time.

That's so awesome. So great.

So it sold some copies, but, like, it didn't sell a lot because it was in a relatively crowded field at the time. Yeah, sure, at the time. Because the indie book world was small and everybody was following this exact same formula because everybody told that's what you're supposed to do. 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.

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. Everybody loves Troy Lambert 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 planner, marketing. 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 books. It was. They weren't doing that. That wasn't.

You also didn't have a way to contact your readers?

Yeah, no, we did not have. 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. Building email lists started probably, gosh, probably mid 2010s, early 2010s, where anybody even started thinking about collecting any kind of an Email address list because we came from. 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.

And yeah, nobody had an email address. And so when we started to move into this time when everybody had an email address, you're like, you're not giving your email address to anybody. And there weren't any rules like GDPR or anything either. So if you got somebody's email address, you just emailed as many people as you want, as much as you want it out of your AOL account or whatever. Wow. It was completely different. 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.

Into my bcc.

It's very popular.

Yeah.

Many more software developed since then. That is. 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? Like you're doing this? It's really experiment to see if you can fund these AI short films through your Kickstarter. But 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, man?

So a part of it is, one of the analogies we often use is that it follows to play the music industry. We're about five years behind the music industry and I think now film is probably about seven or eight years behind the music industry. Interesting in some ways in that.

So you're saying they're even behind books?

Yeah, it's a little bit behind books because the. The accessibility of making AI films, especially at length, is just now emerging.

Yeah.

Making short AI films and short AI trailers.

If you want to go viral on.

TikTok, it's been around a little bit. You want to make a 30 second video and go viral. Sweet. You can do that. But making a 90 minute film, that's an entirely different process. Not until recently, things advancing really quick in this space, have you even been able to conceptualize making something like that using AI. Otherwise you were going to make it four seconds at a time and just keep building. It's going to be crazy. So I think that we see that the era of when ebooks first burst on the scene, it was everybody's buying ebooks 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. They still bought ebooks, but there's the subscription model. Same with music. Some people buy albums on, but it's all streaming. A lot of.

Sure, yeah. Streaming over news majority.

So. And same thing with film has moved into streaming. But I think AI film at first will come out as like, people are going to buy films or buy the access to watch a film or whatever, but at some point they'll just want a subscription. I want a subscription to Creative Wood so I can watch all the movies, and then it'll move into that type of a model. So the payment model for authors or film 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 going to happen. Like with music, things are coming back like vinyl and CDs and stuff like that, because people realize I don't own the music when I'm streaming it. Yeah, Just own the licensing to it. I don't own the. The book when I have an ebook. I just own the license to read it on my Kindle. So people are buying more paperbacks, 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. Maybe it'll be thumb drives, maybe it'll be some kind of other video device, but people will actually buy the film because they want to own it. They don't want to just. They don't want the rights to watch it on Creative World or whatever. They want to own that film.

Yeah, I think you're. I think you're right.

So I think there's an evolution that's going to happen there. How fast that happens. It may happen way faster than it has with music and books because we have the models that already exist. And you're just going to follow those a little faster. Maybe. I don't know. 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. It's a cool vision. How 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. So the first place I'd start with is with our existing audience. We have an existing audience of readers and we're going to assume that some of them want to watch movies as well and are interested in AI movies. And we have to assume that otherwise it's just not worth pursuing the AI movies. You have to assume that some of our audience is going to watch it. 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 involved probably doing some paid ads, doing some organic traffic of. And creating some trailers and things like that to bring people to the actual video and have them watch it. And then we would quickly determine, is this a viable method of storytelling that we can actually sell or what is that going to look like? And I think that's really just going to depend on as we see the hunger of audiences, which we've already seen through some apps and stuff like that. For short, AI generated film. It's just a different form of storytelling.

Yeah, I think I'm definitely with you. I've definitely seen a lot of similar things to you in a good way. Meaning I've not been in any space quite as long as you, but since 2017, so I was a little late, but I've gotten to see it change a lot.

You're a tad bit younger than me, though. Just barely.

No, I'm sure you just look good for your age. Exactly. I look good. I look. I look good for my age. And you also look good for your age. So it equals out. It equals out. Troy, where can we find you and your Kickstarter?

So the Kickstarter, I'm sure we can put the link in the show notes is it's on Kickstarter Search Book Blast. It'll be launching, like I say, Friday morning.

I love it.

And then you can find all of our other stuff on TroyLambertStories.com right now. And then relatively soon watch the space for the release of a new press. So we'll have to come back on and tell you more about that when it happens.

Let's do it. Yeah, when you're. When you're able to. 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. Have a good one.

Yeah.

Bye, everybody.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. 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. 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 Craterwood, which is happening December 1st, coming up super, super soon. In the meantime, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. And as always, don't forget, don't forget. First, you can join our mailing list, link in the description below, and get a free book all about Cratered and second Storytellers rule the World.