I listened to an interview with Derek Slaton on The Creative Penn podcast.

There’s also an episode on Brave New Bookshelf that I have queued up:

I may be mistaken but it seems Derek is using AI to crank out tons of zombie stories, one per week, and is doing very well out of it.

I love this.

The discussion was mainly on using AI for audiobooks and putting the audiobooks on YouTube for free and making money with ads. Not something I would have thought had an audience, but I guess so.

If he is releasing something novella size per week (100-150 pages), then I suspect he is using claude or similar for writing as well.

The flagship series or name of his universe is called “Dead America”. Nice. The other stories appear to be spin-offs from this main series, I believe.

What I really like is that he has picked/developed a world where he can keep telling stories. There are many stories to tell in the zombie apocalypse.

Here are some of his content channels I’ve found:

And on…

No main homepage for him and all this, a mistake I think. I found “www.DeadAmericaBooks.com” but it redirects to the youtube playlist for the “Dead America” series.

No wait, I found an old linktree:

He says he got traction without ads. This means SEO. YouTube SEO is clear from the difference in the name of his channels vs the URL. Probably much more like keywords, titles and covers across platforms. The general goal seems to push people to pay for early content releases either on youtube directly or patreon.

When listening to the podcast with Derek, I was thinking that the youtube videos for each novella must have the novella text to go along with the audio. Nope. Spot-checking some videos, the visual is just an image and some background effects. Wow.

The kindle collections he offers are really something, many tens of books:

Check out this stack:

Dead America

I like this. I think I’d like to do this.

As long as the world is interesting enough and the resulting novellas are compelling enough.

If I were to explore this approach, I’d probably minimize the platforms to reduce the maintenance burden. Such as:

  • Kindle for ebooks (with collections / boxed sets)
  • YouTube for the audiobooks (with playlists)

I would probably develop a world something like the scifi tv series I loved so much 30 years ago, like a star trek, babylon 5, or a stargate. A world where we can have many fun episodic adventures. Maybe with a darker flavour like stargate universe and battlestar galactica.

Cool.