Travis Baldree

No newbie when it comes to storytelling, Travis Baldree is a highly recognized and beloved audiobook narrator (Audible alone has him connected to more than 400 books), and also an accomplished game developer, perhaps most recognized for the action-RPG “Fate” and “Torchlight 1 and 2,” to name just a few. But during the COVID pandemic, he found himself writing Legends & Lattes, a low-stakes fantasy that (as we'll dis- cuss) was exactly what he needed at the time.

- Moriah Richard

He wrote the first draft in a month. In three, he had self-published through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. Then he documented his entire self- publishing journey and posted it on his website for free to help anyone else looking to go through the process.

Then, after a leap of faith into traditional publishing, the re-released novel became a NYT bestseller, a finalist for Nebula, Locus, Hugo, and Goodreads Choice awards, and an Audie nominee.

Baldree describes the wild success of that first novel as “lightning striking,” but I think it's more to do with how real the characters feel, the way their pain and their joy are echoed in the reader. It becomes our pain and joy. He says, “I do think that genre fiction is, as a whole, uniquely well-suited to do that because you just have so many tools at your disposal to amplify things or to focus on them in a way that it's hard to do if you're trying to do realistic liter- ary fiction. I think that's really powerful.”

We started our conversation discussing the differ- ences between being a self-published and a traditionally published author.

What solidified the choice to move toward traditional publishing?