SFFMP 128: Kindle Unlimited, Perma 99-Cents, and ACX vs. Traditional Audiobook Publishers with Anthony J. Melchiorri

It’s not every week that we get authors with PhDs in science on the show (though we’ve had a few!), but today Anthony J Melchiorri joined us. By day, he uses his PhD in bioengineering to develop cellular therapies and 3D-printable artificial organs, and by night, he writes medical thrillers, post-apocalyptic fiction, and space opera. So far, he’s best-known for his Tide series.

Here’s some of what we chatted about:

  • How Anthony’s background led him to start writing medical thrillers with a science fiction twist.
  • How those books didn’t sell as well as he’d hoped and he ended up writing post-apocalyptic fiction.
  • PA fiction having a really rabid reader base that wants more books than are out there.
  • How you might be able to find a good subgenre on Amazon to exploit by looking for ones where books with poor covers are selling well.
  • Whether his Kindle Worlds project was worth it as far as time and money invested in it went.
  • If authors with tons of in-depth scientific knowledge can still expect to get “corrected” by well-meaning readers.
  • Concerns about possibly including too much science in the stories when you have that in-depth knowledge.
  • Marketing in the various different genres (space opera, post apocalyptic, and medial thrillers) and why some do well in Kindle Unlimited and others don’t.
  • Trying a perma- or long-term 99 cent price on a Book 1.
  • The differences in producing your own audiobooks through ACX and going with a publisher — Blackstone Audio is doing Anthony’s Eternal Frontier series.
  • Challenges in marketing audiobooks and what works.

You can find Anthony on his website, on Facebook, or check out his books on Amazon. If you want to try his fiction, Book 1 in the Tide series or Book 1 in the Eternal Frontier series would be good starts.

 

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