The life of a full-time independent author involves wearing many hats. You have to balance your time between learning your craft and pleasing readers with great books, as well as publishing, book marketing, and building a business that will support you for the long-term. In today's interview, Nick Thacker talks about the key aspects of action-adventure thrillers as well as how he runs his publishing company and thoughts on pricing, email list building, and creating systems to avoid overwhelm. In the intro, The Hotsheet reports on the All about Audio conference, publishers start Storyglass, a new podcasting business [The Bookseller], The New York Times acquires a podcast production company [The Verge]; and Amazon Ad reports now incorporate page reads. In the futurist segment, GPT3 takes natural language generation to a new level — what does this mean for writers? [Towards Data Science; Wired; machine-learning-light-speed-artificial-intelligence-a9629976.html">The Independent] and more at TheCreativePenn.com/future. I also recommend The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly and his blog post, 1000 True Fans, and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. Today's show is sponsored by IngramSpark, who I use to print and distribute my print-on-demand books to 39,000 retailers including independent bookstores, schools and universities, libraries and more. It's your content – do more with it through IngramSpark.com. Nick Thacker is the USA Today bestselling author of action-adventure thrillers. His non-fiction books for authors include Platform Mastery and BookBub Mastery. 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 * What draws readers to action-adventure novels? * The renaissance of action-adventure * Nick’s current indie publishing model and how it has changed over time * Co-writing with other authors * On different pricing models and why testing matters * Signing a trad publishing deal and what that means for Nick’s career * Building a large email list * Systems that underpin success