Today is an incredibly amazing goal-fulfilling dream day for me! Today we’re releasing book 8 in The Resonance Cycle, Wrath of a Greater God (Shameless plug here 🙂 ) and today also marks the completion of my first year of publishing consistently!
Thank you to all my Alpha and Betas, my editor (happy birthday, Ash!), my web guru, my audio team, and—wow! We’ve grown the Pivot Press crew considerably in one year. I guess community and consistency really does pay off.
I had some questions come in through my discord (another shameless plug here 🙂 ) and I figured a tiny lil baby AMA was in order.
Question: How do you come up with your next book?
Answer: I plot my books based on two things: First, how would I (or the people I’m friends with) roleplay in a world that I want to make. I’m always running simulations based on “real life” tabletop games that I’ve run.
Second, I look for the big, epic moments that I believe we all want to read in these sorts of stories and work my way backwards.
Question: What fuels your ability to write at such an amazing pace? You published a book a month yet all your content is above 4 stars!
Answer: Thanks for that. I’ve been telling stories with friends, and inside my head, my entire life. Having found an audience is the most motivating and rewarding experience I could imagine. It helps that I have an incredible team of Alphas, Betas, and creatives in the Pivot Press crew – all of who take some of the load off my shoulders, so I can just focus on creating more books.
Question: What’s your favorite part of any of the books you’ve written so far?
Answer: My favorite part? Ouch. Hard to say. This depends on my mood. I have to say: Harvey is who I wish I could be all the time – with my friends, with my family, all of it. And Ty is the sort of hero I hope I’d be with power. Someone willing to sacrifice personal strength to make others great.
Question: What challenges did you face early on as an author?
Answer: Confidence in my prose. I practiced writing, and re-writing, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for 10 years or more before I felt confident enough to consider myself a decent writer.
Question: How do you deal with writer’s block?
Answer: I don’t get writer’s block often, but when I do, I go for long walks or talk things out with my friends and family. I love hearing fan theories and feedback and am not ashamed to adapt their ideas when they are smart.
Question: What is the best way to get into the “zone” when writing?
Answer: Mood music and headphones. Remove all distraction.
Question: What does it take to produce a Resonance (or other) novel in the Aaron-verse?
Answer: Each book more-or-less goes through these steps:
1: Aaron brainstorms and drafts. This process takes approximately 1 hour per 1,000 written words. Most books are roughly done in approximately 20 days, so I’m usually writing around 5-7 hours per day, assuming I don’t take days off.
2: The Discord team tears into it. These are the Alphas. They get the most raw, often broken and confusing text and point out the flaws. This is where the story goes from C+ tier to B+. We usually have 3-4 Alphas reviewing each book, and it takes them between 8-12 hours a piece to do so.
3: Aaron incorporates edits and fixes. This process takes approximately 20 hours.
4: Our in-house editor (Ash) does a deep-dive, looking at the series as a whole, fixing all sorts of logic problems and gaps, along with some line editing. She’s got an amazing brain for detail. This takes approximately 16-30 hours and takes the book from a C+ or B+ to an A- or A, usually.
5: Aaron edits again. This process takes approximately 25 hours.
6: Ash may review a final time taking her another 8-12 hours.
7: A final edit from Aaron, taking around 8-10 hours.
TLDR: producing the story for a single book takes approximately 220-250 hours of labor from a team of 6 people.
This doesn’t count marketing, cover art, or website updates.
Also: Audiobooks take 3 hours to produce per final finished hour. Most Res books take 30-45 hours total for audio.
Question: What does the alpha/beta process look like?
Answer: I’ll drop a link to the document in the discord and tag my alphas telling them what our timeline looks like and things I’m concerned about. It’s the alpha team’s job to read the book and tell me if any of the emotional beats or major story arcs aren’t hitting for them. After the alpha’s finish, we head over to the spoiler’s channel for a chat about what they liked or didn’t. A lot of times I’m asking them if they wanted to stop and put the book down at any point. Did I slow things down in X part or Y part? Did Z make sense? That kind of thing. I might go in and move or remove or rewrite whole sections or chapters at this point.
We move into the Beta stage as soon as I finish any edits from the alphas. These guys will start marking sections that tripped them up on a line-by-line basis. Maybe I said 3 people were holding guns and then suddenly there are only 2. Or I changed the spelling of someone’s name halfway through the book. We find lots of hang nails at this point, and the more sharp edges we can round off before Ash gets to it, the happier she is to line edit. I implement all changes again, make a copy-edit version of the book and then it’s off to Ash.
Ash is incredible at finding when I use too many of the same word in close proximity, bad grammar (hey! I’m not the worst!), or anything that just plain doesn’t make sense. She gets snarky at me, but we’ve worked together for a whole year now and I know it’s coming from a place of love. By the time Ash gets a book, I’m often on to the next book’s ideation or creation. So I miiiiight get a little trigger happy with the “find & replace all”. If I do, Ash may take a second pass. I’m so lucky to have her.
TLDR: My discord is active behind the scenes ALL THE TIME. (Swing by and say ‘hi’ some time!)
Question: What Books have you published in the last year?
Answer: Behold!
| June 2023 | Resonance Cycle, Book 1 | Divine Invasion | Link to Amazon |
| July 2023 | Resonance Cycle, Book 2 | Theater of War | Link to Amazon |
| August 2023 | Resonance Cycle, Book 3 | Past’s Price | Link to Amazon |
| September 2023 | Father of Constructs, Book 1 | Father of Constructs | Link to Amazon |
| October 2023 | Resonance Cycle, Book 5 | This Dark Shore | Link to Amazon |
| November 2023 | Father of Constructs, Book 2 | Master of Steel | Link to Amazon |
| December 2023 | Resonance Cycle, Book 5 | Torn Shroud | Link to Amazon |
| January 2024 | Spite the Dark, Book 1 | Summoner Assassin | Link to Amazon |
| February 2024 | Resonance Cycle, Book 6 | Knight Unleashed | Link to Amazon |
| March 2024 | Spite the Dark, Book 2 | Shadow in Madness | Link to Amazon |
| April 2024 | Father of Constructs, Book 3 | Eldritch Artisan | Link to Amazon |
| May 2024 | Resonance Cycle, Book 7 | Ignite the Dark | Link to Amazon |
| June 2024 | Resonance Cycle, Book 8 | Wrath of a Greater God | Link to Amazon |
Question: When will the next book be out?
Answer: I made a big push this year to publish super consistently so that I would feed the machine that is Amazon. Now that I have made my goal of 1 book a month for a year, I’m going to take a little bit more of a relaxed pace.
I have a new series launching next month called System Activation that’s a sci-fi inspired military horror. We’ve been picking this book up between all our other projects and working on it off and on for almost this entire last whole year as a result. I have no idea how it will land, but it’s been a fun ride and a total labor of love. I would be honored if you’d give it a shot.
Artificer’s Quest, Book 4 of the Master of Steel Series is scheduled for August 2024. I think there is one more book of story to tell after this one, but I’ll be more sure once the manuscript is complete.
The Resonance War (part 1) Book #9 of the Resonance Cycle is scheduled for January of 2025. I want to do this justice so I’m giving myself lots of time to hammer things out.
I may slot some other books between there. I’m sure this more relaxed pace will leave me itching to write since we were so on top of things for so long. But I think it’s good to give us all a moment to celebrate what we’ve accomplished. I’ve had so much fun launching as an author and I’m definitely going to keep at it. I aim to keep you very well fed in the coming years.
If you’ve made it this far in reading this post, I am honored and humbled.
Consider joining us over on the Pivot Press community discord. Who knows? You might just influence the next thing I write.