Expanding Audiobook Revenue Through YouTube And Podcasting With Derek Slaton

How can you shift your writing and publishing process to focus on YouTube and podcasting as a primary audiobook focus? How can you use AI tools to help you create, publish, and translate your books? Derek Slaton goes into his indie author process.

Inspired by Derek, you can now find my audiobooks on YouTube: Books for Authors on YouTube @thecreativepenn; and my fiction, short stories, and memoir on YouTube @jfpennauthor.

In the intro, Spotify has expanded audiobooks into Germany, Austria. Switzerland and Liechtenstein, and Publisher Rocket has introduced more country stores;
Second Edition of The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman;
T. Thorn Coyle on the MidList Indie Author [Wish I’d Known Then Podcast];
What if AI replaces me? [Claire Taylor What If Podcast]; plus, my Successful Self-Publishing Fourth Edition is underway, coming June/July!

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Derek Slaton is the author of the Dead America epic zombie series, with more than 100 books in the main series and many more spin-off stories. I heard Derek on the Brave New Bookshelf Podcast and wanted to ask him some more questions.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Zombie book tropes and settings
• Utilizing AI audio tools to efficiently output audiobooks
• Finding keywords and creating thumbnails for YouTube audiobooks
• Manualling adding ads to monetize your audiobook on YouTube
• YouTube audience vs. Audible audience
• Publishing audiobooks on podcast platforms
• Using AI tools to overcome the cost barrier of production

You can find Derek at his YouTube Channel @DerekSlatonHorrorAuthor.

Transcript of Interview with Derek Slaton

Joanna: Derek Slaton is the author of the Dead America epic zombie series, with more than 100 books in the main series and many more spin-off stories. So welcome to the show, Derek.

Derek: Thank you. It's good to be here.

Joanna: I'm excited to talk to you, but first up—

Tell us a bit more about you, and how you got into writing, and why you love zombies so much.

Derek: So I started writing many, many years ago. When I was in high school, I rented Dawn of the Dead on VHS, and the movie itself didn't really scare me, but it was when I went to bed that night and started thinking about, “Hey, what would I do in a zombie apocalypse?” It was like a light switch was flipped.

So it's like I had to start writing down what I would do, and over the years and decades, it just sort of grew from there.

I used to be a photographer. I was a concert photographer traveling the country with bands, and then I moved over to commercial real estate. When I was on the road, I would have my laptop so I would just write.

Over about four or five years, I built it up enough that I could go full time. I went full time with it in January of '24, so I'm a little more than a year into it.

Joanna: Brilliant. Then I want to come back on the zombie books, the tropes of the zombie books. So I read some zombie, like Jonathan Maberry. I'm sure you've read some of Jonathan Mabery's stuff, but he says, “It's not about the monsters, it's about the people who fight the monsters.”

I wondered if you could talk about the tropes of zombie books and why you just have an unending number of zombie stories in you?!

Derek: The great thing about the zombie apocalypse, is that it's happening to everybody everywhere, and everybody has their own story. So there's a million stories that can be told in the zombie apocalypse.

It's not just the strong military type fighting. It's the waitress having to deal with zombified customers, and the high school students having to deal with classmates, and just on down the line.

There's just so many different scenarios. I'm three and a half million words into my series, and I still have another hundred stories plotted out that aren't really repeats of what I've already done.

Joanna: So you're writing about America, but obviously it's very, very big.

Are you writing about places you've been to or you know yourself?

Or are you putting in different places? Because place makes a difference, doesn't it? Like it's different whether you're in the Florida Everglades versus up in the mountains?

Derek: It's a combination. I have been all over, but a lot of the places I haven't been, Google Maps of all things, has really helped me out. I'll look at the town, and then I'll drop myself into street view and just kind of walk around the area and see what my characters would be seeing and write it from that perspective.

Also it comes directly from places I've been. I had to make the drive from El Paso back to San Antonio, which is about nine straight hours of driving through nothing. That spawned the idea for the “El Paso: Creeping Death” series, just a million zombies marching towards them.

So it's been a nice mixture of both, and just about every single story has been set in America. I have done one story set in London that's only on YouTube at the moment, but it'll eventually be released in print. Something I want to explore more as the series goes on is how it's impacting other countries around the world.

Joanna: Then I guess I have a question about worldbuilding because with that many words, I mean, I barely remember what I was writing last week.

Do you have a world document where you keep all the rules of your world, all the characters, or is it just out of control?

Derek: It's a combination. I have the rules for my zombie universe, how the zombies are formed, what they do, their timeline and all that. Thankfully, I mean, it's very simple. So if I drop in on a story a week into it, I know how the zombies are, so I'm able to just jump right into it.

I have a have a story bible for the main series, but all of these side stories that are mostly one-offs, I don't really worry about as much because half the time nobody lives through them, anyway.

Joanna: The benefits of horror! I think that's really interesting because when I was thinking about your different places—

People in your position sometimes open up their world to other people to write in. Is that something you're thinking about?

Derek: No, just because I have so many stories that are in the pipeline, and just have stories I want to tell. I produce them so fast, I mean, I'm releasing a story of a week.

Even if I had somebody else writing stories, I really wouldn't have a place in the schedule to release them. An hour and a half to three hour story every week is, I think, about as much as my fans can handle.

Joanna: So let's go into your process then. So you said a story a week for an hour and a half, which is funny because most people talk in terms of word count, but you talk in terms of time.

Tell us about your story process for creation and publishing.

Derek: So it really changed about a year and a half ago, when I started focusing more on YouTube. I changed how I write because it used to just be free flowing, the word count's the word count, the chapters are however long they need to be.

With YouTube being ad-based, I had to change to almost a television mindset of, okay, I need a break every 12 to 15 minutes, which turns out to be about 2000 words.

So I started writing 2000-word chapters, which really, really helped with the speed of the writing because I knew the beginning and end of each chapter. So if I was short on the word count, now I can go back and just add a little bit of banter, then bam, we're there.

As far as the week to week process goes, half the time I'll know what I'm writing the next week on Friday, so I'll plot it out. Sometimes I'll have just a great idea for a story on Sunday night and completely change track and wake up Monday and just dive right in and see where it goes.

Generally speaking, I'll spend two to three days writing out the story, refining it a little bit, and then going straight into the audio, which is where I do the final edit. I'll edit it as I'm producing the audio. So at the end of the day, I'll do the video, upload it to YouTube, and move on to the next one.