Present: Brandan Roberts, Michaela Butler, Dahlia Thomas, Jennifer Weigel, Jason Willard, Kathleen Locke
Absent: n/a
Others Present: n/a
Prior Meeting’s Minutes: Accepted as written.
Old Business
Nonprofit Compliance: Nat 1 Publishing’s 2024 nonprofit compliance forms to Maine and the Federal government have been completed and accepted, and the 2024 finances have also been finalized. 2024’s numbers were better than anticipated, being $600 in the red primarily due to the nonprofit application fees and extensive advertising for the first Write, Wrong or Otherwise event.
Maerit Event: Roberts had to make the executive decision to cancel the Nat 1 Maerit event because, since the last meeting, there had been no more entries, and when contacting the existing participants, the bulk bounced due to fake emails. Given these factors, he sent an email to the actual addresses explaining the situation and refunded those who had paid for paperback sticker books.
New Business
Motion by Roberts: The renewal for the Faewalk website is approaching and is currently not on autopay. He makes the motion to abandon the website due to its extremely limited use and to integrate the small amount of content on it into the Nat 1 Publishing website, thus saving annual expenses and streamlining Faewalk information with the Nat 1 content. In addition to the Faewalk website, he also wants to do the same for the auxiliary web addresses (e.g., nat1publishing.net, audienceaskew.net, etc.). The motion was passed without dissent.
Motion by Roberts: Amazon has notified Roberts of new policy changes regarding royalties; he explained that paperback books priced under $9.99 will soon give less royalties (from 60% to 50%), which, because of our price points to attract readers, means many of the books Nat 1 sells will generate zero profit. Because of that, he made the motion to raise all paperback books priced below $9.99 to $9.99 and to send out a notice to notice to the newsletter recipients. After some discussion and additional research, it was determined that Amazon has made it so we can see prices for our lesser-priced titles, and for novelettes priced between $4 and $6, we will only need to raise the retail price by $1 to keep the company and the authors receiving the same amount of royalties. These numbers were agreed on and the motion was passed without dissent.
Motion by Roberts: Audible has given Nat 1 Publishing the ability to create auditions to allow book narrators who use “Voice Replica” to audition for our titles. The program enables some narrators to utilize AI to read books in their own voices, and then they fine-tune the output (such as correcting pronunciation mistakes and adjusting pacing). After research, Roberts noted the following pros and cons of the program:
Pros: Books can be narrated quickly; the profit share for the house is greater than using live voice acting; it is utilized directly by the narrator whose voice is being used, and thus not stealing work from them; if a book can’t get a live narrator, this gives an option to have it made into an audiobook.
Cons: Having listened to samples, it can be obvious in spots that AI was used (and he is unsure how much the narrator can change); books published with Voice Replica can be filtered out of Audible and iTunes searches by users; and there’s possible backlash on the principle of using AI even though it is not eliminating the work of narrators.
The board asked for Thomas to share her thoughts on the topic, and she was firmly against it do to the public perception of AI and we would be unable to tell if ACX would utilize the authors’ works in way we were not informed. After some discussion, the board unanimously voted to not utilize Voice Replica.
Meeting Adjourned: The next Board meeting is scheduled for the week of August 18-22, 2025.
Minutes Submitted by Brandan Roberts, 5/24/2025.