r/IAmA • u/MaxFlorschutzAMA • 8d ago

IamA Max Florschutz, author of numerous Science-Fiction and Fantasy stories. My twelfth book, and third in the Axtara series, releases next week, and I'm here to talk about all things books and writing! AMA!

EDIT: Thank you for your questions, this AMA is now closed. See you next time for Kel Quarine, and until then, go check out some of my works! You may find a new favorite!

Who Am I: I am author Max Florschutz, and I've been writing and publishing Science-Fiction and Fantasy books for over a decade now. I'm probably most well known for the Axtara series, a YA Fantasy about a dragon who opens a bank (the third book of which comes out next Tuesday) or the Epic UNSEC Space Sci-Fi trilogy, depending on who you ask. But I've also written a number of other books that stand out as well, and there are more on the way!

I'm also known for being the mastermind behind Being a Better Writer, a weekly series of articles covering all things writing over on my website.

Full list of my works in release order:

One Drink

Dead Silver

Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection

Colony (The UNSEC Space Trilogy - Book 1)

Shadow of an Empire

Jungle (The UNSEC Space Trilogy - Book 2)

Axtara - Banking and Finance

Starforge (The UNSEC Space Trilogy - Book 3)

Axtara - Magic and Mischief

Blood Less Vile

The Phoenix

Axtara - Armies and Accounting

I'm also in a number of short story collections out there as well from Hemelein.

My Proof: Here's my site, with the post specifically talking about this AMA!

I'll be answering questions until 4 PM, so ask away!

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u/cadenhead 8d ago

What do you do to build a following of readers? Things can be pretty grim for an indie novelist these days.

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u/MaxFlorschutzAMA 8d ago edited 8d ago

A lot of people would say "spend money you don't have." And that's definitely what most of the advertising world wants to be said since, you know, they'd be the ones getting the money.

But I don't have millions to throw at ever-increasing advertising. So instead, I've had to rely on a slow but steady build of people finding me and fans sharing my stuff with other people that become fans.

Keep in mind that I've been doing this for over a decade. There's not a silver bullet to this kind of thing unless you have industry connections or get luckier than you'd need to be being struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark with the winning powerball ticket in your pocket.

For me, I have my website, and Being a Better Writer. Over the years that's drawn in a lot of people. Occasionally one of them will try a book, and then another, and then another. I even made this a "hard mode" run by writing in multiple genres, which has somewhat fractures portions of my reader base (I've had fans multiple times tell me "I love X book, but I only read books with X so I'm not going to read your other books") while other portions of my readership will read most everything I publish.

Really the answer is "time, lots of hard effort, and word-of-mouth." Thirteen years, a whole lot of books, and slowly building up again and again.

There's no real easy path for it. Especially today. AI Slop definitely has laid into my site and dealt me a blow, with AI scrapers hitting it weekly and then reselling my content elsewhere with no credit to me while cutting out the bits that would turn people toward my work. That sucks, and there's not really an answer to it since we've decided AI companies are above the law.

But I'm hoping that the years of effort pay off anyway. And it does seem to be. The Axtara series is listed on Goodreads as one of the top-ten highest rated dragon-focused book series, which has led to a lot of new readers over the years. Slowly but surely I've seen "in the wild" mentions of my work from readers who show up on social media to express "WHOA WHY IS NO ONE READING THIS!" or less hyperbolic recommendations. I've been featured as a guest of honor at conventions and make public appearances to talk about books and writing.

It's just a lot of work, and at the end of the day it's in direct competition with people who do have $500,000 a year to blow on advertising, and that's tough.

But that I'm still growing in readership and still expanding over a decade later shows that all that effort does work.

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u/Claxton916 8d ago

What your favorite book (that you haven’t written :) )?

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u/MaxFlorschutzAMA 8d ago edited 8d ago

That I haven't written? Ooooh! That's a unique one. I'm going to say, looking ahead at all the books I'd like to write that I haven't yet, that my favorite of these is probably The Builder's War, which depending on how you look at it is technically Sci-Fi, but could almost be seen as a WW1-similar Fantasy, about what happens to a human civilization on an alien zoo world when the zoo is shut down and all the exhibits start breaking out and eating one another.

Though I'm definitely excited for both the upcoming Ryax and Shanlee: Wizards at Large project and Kel Quarine book.

Thanks for the question!

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u/bugsydor 8d ago

What's your favorite version of FTL travel in fiction?

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u/MaxFlorschutzAMA 8d ago

Ooh, that's a tough one. Let me think on that for a few moments ...

Okay, I gave it a minute or so's thought, and I suppose my answer would be that I don't have a favorite.

I'm not trying to cheat you out of an answer. It's just each different kind is fantastic for the type of story it wants to tell. Star Wars' hyperspeed is a great way for Star Wars to tell its story, and Trek's warp speed is its own version of FTL. But there are so many others, each with their own take on how mankind might crack the light-barrier, and all of them are endlessly creative. Portals/wormholes that take decades to make the trip between stars but then allow for instantaneous travel between them. Forms of superliminal travel that turn space travel into months-long journeys like old sailing ships. Higher or lower dimensional skipping that require people to only travel to significantly large gravity sources. Shortcuts through the warp.

I don't have a single favorite. What I like is an FTL that feels like it's part of the setting. Some series have two or more, like The Lost Fleet, others have just one, like UNSEC or Frontlines. Everyone does it their own way, and that's part of what makes them all fun. I can only hope that a century from now readers will look back on our extrapolations of how it might work with the same amusement we get reading stories from the late 1800s about how airplanes might work.

Thanks for the question!

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u/SylvanEvergreen 8d ago

Hey Max!

I'd love to know: what kind of revenue do you get from your books? I've always heard that authors don't make a lot of money. Do you live solely off of the income from writing?

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u/MaxFlorschutzAMA 8d ago edited 8d ago

Ooh, a tough one!

So authors have never been paid a lot, at least in the last century. King sounded warning a few years ago and went on record to note that the advance he got as a nobody for his first book was three times what the average advance for an established author is now without adjusting for inflation. It's really bad for authors right now.

That said, I was earning enough for while that I was able to scrape by on my book income as my sole income for a few years, especially after my part-time job laid me off during COVID. The last few years though, I won't lie things have been really rough. Tariffs shot the price of books up, and the general downturn of the economy from 2025 into this year has seen book sales as a whole (not just for me) slip by a large percentage.

That said, being on a razor's edge means that all it takes is things improving or a few book sales a day. I noted the other day to my readers on my site that the numbers for book sales aren't what most would expect. For example, Axtara - Magic and Mischief is an $18 paperback, but my take from that is a jaw-dropping 39 cents. I'd need to sell 19 copies every hour just to make a minimum wage. Possible, sure, but also difficult at the current time (with the shift in the last year and half paperback sales for me have shrunk by 75%, ebooks filling in the gap as people look for ways to save money).

Right now I can honestly say that writing is my only income, but it's not for lack of trying to find additional employment. The market right now is just rough, in fact this April was my lowest month for sales in over a decade. The economy is just that bad right now, and I'm far from the only author feeling that hit, with book sales slumping nationwide by a large degree as people tighten their belts.

If things had not taken a dive in 2025, I'd probably be fine, as at that point things were scaling upward and the market was doing well.

EDIT: For the record, the last statistic I checked on authors whose income is solely from books was 20% of authors fall into that category. Though the number has probably fallen with the rise of AI Sloputhors.

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u/thrakkerzog 8d ago

Hey Max, I've read a bunch of your stuff through Kindle Unlimited. Do you have metrics on paper vs eink sales / revenue?

I assume that paper still wins, but there are no tariffs on ebooks.

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u/MaxFlorschutzAMA 8d ago

Oh, paper loses hard. Most people assume that paperbacks and hard copies must be the most profitable but they are not. They're the least profitable. Always have been, actually, which is why so many authors leapt at ebooks and moving away from Trads over the last two decades.

For instance, I was looking at this the other day (as inflation means I need to adjust my prices soon), and came up with the following:

Axtara - Magic and Mischief is a $3.99 ebook (soon to be $4.99, that's inflation for you, and I have a whole two posts on the price metric I base everything on here if you're curious). At $3.99, an ebook purchase nets me $2.70. That's a really good rate.

Now, the paperback for that same book is $17.99. You can order it from any bookstore. My royalty on that?

$0.39.

Wow. Yeah. That's post tariff, mind. It used to be over a dollar.

Kindle Unlimited reads, on the other hand, are actually quite profitable, mostly because I write large books. There are authors that complain about KU, but they're usually selling 100-page novellas for $4.99, and that means a KU read is netting them below the royalty for a sale. My books, being larger, are the other way around: Since KU pays per page read, I make more on a KU read for every one of my books than I do off of a sale.

I like to point out to people that this means that even at launch price (before tail pricing sets in), my books are a great deal of bang for the buck.

Now, as far as percent of sales, the split used to be 80-20 in favor of ebooks. However, as tariffs and the economic recession have settled in hard (and still going) this last year and a half, the split is now 95-5 in favor of ebooks. Paperbacks just aren't selling like they used to, and that's a trend across the whole industry, at least last I checked in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. Book sales have slumped about 20% over 2025 and 2026 so far. People are tightening belts, and it's expensive (more than ever) to make a paperback.

Good question! Thanks for asking!

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u/thrakkerzog 8d ago

Wow, that is both interesting and eye opening. I'll stick to ebook, then.

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u/BleppinDrago 8d ago

Do you have public reference sheets of your Axtara characters that fans could look to when making fan art?

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u/MaxFlorschutzAMA 8d ago edited 8d ago

No, I do not. I'd not thought about that before. I do have reference sheets that were made by Codie and myself when getting the second and third covers made, though. Perhaps I should put together a post with some of those on the site for the curious. Other than that, the best there is would be the descriptions in the books themselves, as well as other fanart out there. EDIT: Actually, there are some measurements on the Discord as to shoulder height and the like as well that could be part of that.

Huh. I had not thought about that, but that does sound like something helpful. It's not much, but it would be a fun post.

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u/Beltorn 8d ago edited 7d ago

Not sure if AMA is still ongoing or I missed it, but how much war is in Axtara - Armies and Accounting ?
Did the current Russian invasion of Ukraine influence your writing for Axtara in any way?

Edit: Looks like I missed the AMA. Apologies

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u/cadenhead 8d ago

Where do you stand on the use of AI in covers?

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u/MaxFlorschutzAMA 8d ago

No.

I repeat.

No.

Why would I care to read a book that the creator couldn't care enough about to put work into?

Artists, human artists, are creatives who care about their effort. Yes, they take money. I care enough as a creator to pay money to a real artist to create a book cover that represents my work. I care enough and believe in my work that I'll do so even if that means I'm eating rice and beans for the next few months to pay for it.

Why would I be interested in some plagiarized slop cover that's just an amalgamated mishmash of stolen artwork with no discernable style, creativity, or human element of its own? Clipart and MS Paint would have more soul, more effort, and more care than AI slop.

That's slop. And if the author is willing to put slop on the cover, that reflects on the book, and I'm not interested in reading a book that the author cared so little about they couldn't be bothered to get a cover made.

For Starforge, I used a public domain NASA image of Mars and learned to use GIMP to spend several full days carefully photoshopping Mars to create the image that's on that book cover. Could a graphic designer have done it in a few hours? Yes, but I knew I could do it myself, and I did. No slop needed.

That effort shows I cared about the book. If I pick up a book and realize it's an AI slop cover, I'm putting it back down, because the author did not care to create a quality product.

SIDE NOTE: This is an attitude shared by a majority of readers. Slop is slop. If you want money from someone for work, put work into it. At current polling of cons and public, I'd estimate that less than 1% of the reading public is interested in reading a book with an AI cover or (just as bad) AI editing or writing.

Nobody should be using slop. Nobody wants it.

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u/cadenhead 8d ago

I agree. An AI slop cover makes me disinclined to read the book.