I was lucky to get an interview with Delilah Waan, the author of Petition. And she’s a semifinalist in this year’s #SPFBO9.

Please, tell us a bit about yourself…
Hey, I’m Delilah, a Hong Kong-born, Australian-based, former Chartered accountant. I moved to (and out of) New York City three times. While I was there—and before I hiked Machu Picchu—I spent a year taking evening classes in music composition at Juilliard. Delilah Waan is not actually my real name—I jumped into self-publishing with bilingual children’s picture books first so I had to publish my fantasy novels under a different pen name.

Why should I buy your SPFBO9 entry?
Looking for a fun, fast-paced read? Some political intrigue but set in a single city, without too many POVs? What about an emotion-based hard magic system and a murder mystery? Did you enjoy Daughter of the Empire, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, or Jade City?

If so, I might have written just the book for you.

Petition is about an angry Asian female underdog fighting against privileged rich kids in a ruthless job hunt tournament to save her family—my take on the immigrant story in an East Asian-inspired fantasy setting. Forget magic school and training sequences; Rahelu is done with graduation and ready to show the world what she can do.

If that sounds like your jam, you can grab the book from all major retailers—Amazon, Google Play, Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, etc. It’s also free to read with Kobo Plus!

What got you into writing? And how long have you been doing it?
I’ve been writing—and writing professionally—for a long time, but very little of it has been prose fiction. Most of it was in corporate settings (slide decks, presentations, technical memos, business proposals, etc) or tertiary education (I was published as a non-fiction author of/contributor to post-graduate accounting textbooks before I published my children’s picture books or my fantasy novels).

My first serious creative endeavor was co-writing a Broadway musical. (Spoilers: we worked on it for like seven years and stalled in the second act.) Writing a novel was something I had always wanted to check off my bucket list but had never set aside the time to attempt it. When I got burned out thanks to my corporate career, I finally had my chance.

While Petition is my debut, it’s actually my second prose novel; my first was a ‘fix fic’ I wrote for NaNoWriMo just to see if: a) I could write something that long, and b) get complete strangers on the internet to read it. Turns out the answer to both questions was ‘yes’.

Have you participated in the SPFBO before and where did you hear about the competition?
I haven’t; I didn’t submit for SPFBO8 as I wasn’t quite sure whether I would make the 1 June publication deadline! (I did—by 2 days—but entries had closed in mid-May.) I heard about the contest through r/Fantasy.

Why did you choose to write fantasy?
Two reasons. One, fantasy is THE all-encompassing genre. You can write any other genre/story—romance, geopolitical thriller, literary fiction, etc—as fantasy because of the other, more important reason:

Fantasy allows me to explore the “what-if’s”.

What if the concept of “truth” is a fundamental law of reality, like the laws of physics? What if the reasons behind gender roles in our society didn’t exist?

How would that change society, the way people live, their beliefs, their values? What would it be like? Better? Worse? Or simply different? If we can imagine that, explore that, then can we also take what we learn and apply it to the way we live in our world?

Which other author has had the biggest influence on your writing?
Since I wrote a Broadway musical before I wrote a novel, a lot of how I think about storytelling comes from musical theater; Jonathan Larson, Stephen Sondheim, and Lin Manuel Miranda are particular influences.

In terms of literary influences, I’d say Janny Wurts, Steven Erikson, Seth Dickinson, Fonda Lee, and Brandon Sanderson. Petition is basically Daughter of the Empire meets The Traitor Baru Cormorant in a fantasy Shark Tank/Apprentice cage match; a diaspora story dealing with diaspora themes and experiences written by a diaspora author. It’s got a Sandersonian magic system and my writing process is very similar to Sanderson’s: I outline my world, use his plotting framework to loosely plan the story but discovery write my characters, and draft from beginning to end. And thanks to the eye-opening experience of reading Malazan Book of the Fallen, I am now hyperallergic to exposition.

If you were to win the SPFBO, what impact do you think this would have on your writing career?
I entered the contest because I wanted to get my book in front of some readers who would judge my book by my writing instead of the cover, blurb, or (non-existent) hype.

Thanks to SPFBO, there’s already been far more interest in my book than I could have realistically hoped for, so in that sense I’ve already won.

Being chosen as a semi-finalist on top of that was an incredible honor. I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that the breadth and depth of talent represented in this contest is off the charts high. I’m fully expecting to be cut this month when the rest of the finalists are announced and I’ll be there, cheering them on as I work through the immense backlog of SPFBO books on my TBR!

What challenges did you face during the writing or publishing process, and how did you overcome them?
In my previous corporate life, I audited a lot of traditional publishing houses (including some of the Big 5) so I had an advantage over the average person diving into self-publishing: I knew the industry, the business, the risks, the numbers. Petition was also my third self-published title; prior to my fantasy debut, I had already self-published two picture books under a different imprint.

Honestly, writing and publishing are both the easy parts—the hard part is finding an audience. My bilingual picture books are, essentially, language educational reading materials; they were written to market and are unique in that market, so they basically sell themselves despite my poor marketing efforts. Fantasy novels are a different ballgame. Genre fiction is a much bigger market, yes, but there’s also a lot more competition. It’s an ongoing challenge; one that forces me to constantly experiment and learn.

The hardest part of all, I think, is sticking to a consistent publication schedule while maintaining consistent quality without burning yourself out. Publishing is a portfolio business and when you’re a self-published author, you wear all the hats. When you only have one title out, you’re quite limited in what you can do, and you only have the time that you have. There’s always an infinite number of things you can/should do to find an audience but there is only one thing that nobody else but you can do: write the next book.

So writing is what I always make sure comes first, no matter what else I have going on. Everything else, I do as much as I can when I can, and if it’s not perfect, well, it’s better than nothing.

Do you have any tips or an author app, tool, or resource that you can really recommend we try?
Oh, so many! I actually have a YouTube channel dedicated to the business side of self-publishing, where I share my author journey, my hot takes on publishing, reviews, skits, and also do daily writing livestreams.

Everyone’s path to publication is going to be different; it’s a matter of finding what works for you. But the one thing I would emphasize above all others: know your why—and your budget—and let all other decisions follow from that.

And now it's time to yank out your Palantir! Let’s talk about the future. What new projects are you working on?
I recently sent off the final part of the manuscript for Supplicant, the sequel to Petition, to my beta readers. While I’m waiting for their feedback, I’ve got to finish the illustrations for my third bilingual children’s picture book and get that out to beta readers. Once those two projects are published, I’ll be returning to write more in the world of Petition (either the third book in the series or a prequel novella and then book 3).

Apps that are based on artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGTP and Midjourney, along with apps aimed specifically at authors, have caused quite a stir. Do you expect these new technologies will make your life as a self-published author easier or harder, and do you expect that they’ll mean you’ll earn more or less?
I’ve got so many thoughts on AI, which I’ve talked about at length on my YouTube channel. (I’ve had very heated debates over these issues and I’m sure I’ll have many more in the future.)

Without getting into the technical details and sticking to the short version (and yes, this mini essay I’m going into here is the short version): generative AI is a fundamental technological shift that affects all industries, not just publishing.

Current generative AI models—such as ChatGPT and Midjourney—are not intelligent in any sense of the word. They produce outputs according to probabilistic models constructed based on the datasets they were trained on. These models have no understanding of the data they were trained on; nor is there any authorial or artistic intention behind what they produce. (Prompt engineering is a whole ‘nother discussion that I won’t get into.)

Therefore, all these generative AI models depend on high quality, human inputs to produce outputs at the level of quality that they currently do. The main advantage they have over human authors and artists is the ability to produce outputs of an acceptable quality at volume in a fraction of the time. For AI-written prose, the main current limitation is token size, a.k.a. its ‘working memory’. It can’t output more than several thousand words at a time before it starts losing coherency for setting, plot, characters, etc.

Eventually, though, I think these problems will be solved and we’ll get to a point where, for the vast majority of readers, people will not be able to distinguish between AI and human written books—and they also won’t care. (Mark Lawrence recently ran an experiment on this and the results were interesting, to say the least. I correctly identified human vs. AI writing 100% of the time but the vast majority of people who did the survey did not.)

To use an analogy: the vast majority of people who buy eggs do not care if they’re certified organic, free range, or cage farmed. They just want eggs and they’ll prioritize ubiquity, familiarity, convenience, and low cost. They’re buying the first carton at eye level on the front shelf of their local supermarket chain store, not going to the local farmers’ market to buy the certified organic dozen direct from the chicken farm.

Similarly, the majority of people who buy books—casual readers who make up the bulk of the book buying market, not the passionate readers at the core of the bookish community—won’t really care. They want to read the genre/s they prefer, with the trope/s that they already enjoy, in the style of authors they already read. Authors who have wholeheartedly embraced AI have self-reported via Facebook groups like 20booksto50k that their readers are glad they’re doing so, because it means more books for them to read.

Back in December 2021, I predicted that, one day, readers will go to Amazon and, instead of typing a search query for “epic fantasy with a Chosen One featuring a hard magic system with animal companions, no romance, and a classic Dark Lord, max 400 pages, minimal gore, happy ending”, they’ll type that as a prompt. Amazon will serve them an AI-generated novel fitting that exact prompt. Any time they get to a part of the book that they don’t like, they’ll re-prompt it with “make these two characters work together instead of fight” or whatever.

Those who are pro-generative AI put forward the argument that ‘generative AI democratizes creativity’ through removing the skill barrier. And that is true. For people who want the output without the hours and years that go into learning the craft and honing it over a lifetime, generative AI lets them shortcut things to a ‘good enough’ point.

But those people and those readers are not the entire market.

Human authored books and human created art will still be in demand—they’ll just have a human premium price tag attached. And the authors and artists who will succeed in that new paradigm will be those who know how to double down on the human aspects that generative AI can’t compete on—individuality, community, and physical experiences.

I think Sienna Frost, another fellow SPFBO author said it best when she described AI as our competition: “I’ve been writing for 30 years aiming for the #1 goal of being irreplaceable, of being that writer who can get her plot and all ideas stolen and readers will say, ‘it doesn’t mean shit if it’s not written by Sienna-fucking-Frost.’”

AI might be able to mimic my prose style. It might be able to instantly churn out a million words that hit all the trending tropes. But AI can’t be more me than me.

What doing YouTube has taught me is that when you’re very clear on what you’re about, people are drawn to you because of that. People who watch and subscribe to my YouTube channel can get the same information from a lot of other YouTube channels, but they watch my videos because they want to hear from me, specifically. And I think that’s true for books as well.

Every book I write has something very personal to me in it. Readers might initially be drawn in by the cover, the blurb, or the promise of certain trope/s and/or kind of story, but the ones who truly fall in love with my writing do so because of what I have to say and how I say it.

Eventually, all of us—not just authors and artists—will be in the business of selling and marketing ourselves. I do worry that we’re headed towards a future where the performative aspect of “being human” will overshadow other things. But we’ve been headed there for a while now, so it’s not really surprising to me.

At the end of the day, AI is a tool, one that can be incredibly useful.

Take audiobooks.

The cost of producing a human-narrated audiobook is simply not commercial for most self-published authors. Yet many readers prefer to read via audiobooks—one SPFBO judge has even gone on record to say that they use text-to-speech to read indie books when no audiobook exists. I’ve had readers tell me, “I want to read your book,” but then passed because, “you don’t have an audiobook and I don’t read print or ebooks.”

Most of us have to decide whether we would rather cut off access to a large proportion of our potential readership or take the financial hit upfront and hope (pray) that (somehow) we’ll eventually be able to claw back (some) of the loss. Some of us aren’t in the financial position to even take the hit in the first place.

But there are AI narration offerings out there which have been ethically developed using properly licensed voices, like Google Play, that allow indie authors to produce a machine-narrated audiobook that’s going to result in a measurably better listening experience compared to text-to-speech and be subject to your quality control for a fraction of the cost. It opens your book up to discovery by a whole new audience who wouldn’t otherwise give you a second thought. It allows you to apply ebook pricing strategies to an audiobook.

That’s a pretty big deal.

No, the AI narration is not (currently) as good as a good human narrator. Similar to AI written books and AI generated art, AI narration doesn’t understand what it is reading. It can read the words but it can’t give a performance—you can listen to Travis Baldree demonstrate the difference on his YouTube channel. I don’t think for a moment auto-narrated audiobooks replaces the demand for human narration; I personally believe the auto-narrated audiobook is more analogous to the ebook, with human narration being analogous to the hardcover, and graphic audio analogous to special editions.

As this ‘short’ answer is getting rather long, for anyone who’s interested in my stance on the use of AI in publishing and wants to know the specifics of my publishing process, I have a clear AI statement on my website.

Thank you for a very thorough answer, Delilah. I love that you have your own take on this and really think things through.

Do you have any dreams you’d like to share?
I do! Coming back to that bucket list: I’d like to finish that Broadway musical, get it produced, and see it come alive on stage. The working title is The Dreams Beneath Our Feet, and it’s a new musical that explores identity, family, and love in this modern age.

One of the characters, Mina, is a Japanese-American cellist with Carnegie Hall-sized ambitions who finds breakout success with her neo-classical pop/rock viral videos. I’ll share a piece I wrote for the opening of the second act: Mina, on tour, on stage, performing live on electric cello. This particular recording is an arrangement for two violas, performed by the amazing Folie à Deux.

Anything else you would like to say before we close?
Thank you so much for the interview! I’m very grateful to be a part of the wonderful SPFBO community. Everybody has been incredibly supportive—Mark Lawrence, the judges, the bloggers and bookstagrammers and vloggers and booktubers, all the readers who are willing to give books by total unknowns a chance, and of course, my fellow authors. It’s been an amazing experience that’s brought a lot of new friendships that I know I’ll treasure forever.

I wish you the very best in the SPFBO. I hope a lot of readers discover your writing.
Thanks for doing the interview.