The WD Interview: Travis Baldree

[This interview first appeared in the November/December 2025 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

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 discuss) was exactly what he needed at the time.  

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, like literary fiction. I think that’s really powerful.” 

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

I had self-published on a whim, so it already felt like a surplus of good fortune to have had Legends & Lattes do well as an indie-published book. And instead of pursuing agents, they pursued me. So, it wasn’t something I initially set out to do. And after three had reached out to me, I decided, “Hey, I have a unique opportunity. I can see what this is like from both sides, potentially. If it doesn’t work out, no harm, no foul.” I’m still the full-time audiobook narrator; that’s ostensibly my actual job. I wasn’t planning to quit it. The main risk was that, potentially, I might have less control over the publication process or the success of my book than I might otherwise have, but I already felt like I had gotten way more than I expected. And if my agent goes out and we get offers and they weren’t attractive, or it felt scary, or I didn’t get along with the publisher, I could always pull the rip record, and it’s no big deal. 

Then Stevie Finegan, who is my agent with Zeno, came back with a preempt offer from Tor. I’ve been a fan of Tor’s publications for a long time. I like the way they treat their books. I like the breadth of genre fiction that they publish. I have a lot of respect for them. I was like, “Well, if I’m going to try this, this is the way I’m going to try.”  

There were not a lot of initial roadblocks at all. Everything was slower. It took longer to do the paperwork than it did to write and publish the book. But that didn’t feel scary. That felt more like, yes, this is how it works when you interact with a larger publisher. I have a background in software development. I made video games for decades. I’ve been through contracts before, so that didn’t feel scary or weird. It just felt like, “Oh, well, we’re back here again.” [Laughs] 

When they republished the book, very little was changed. In the U.S., they used my cover with some new typography. We did a few minor edits, mostly to move it to the copy editing house style for Tor. Those are all pretty straightforward changes.  

The scariest things for me were probably trying to navigate getting my audiobook reviews moved over from the previous version to the new version. Because, unlike the process that they had in place, where you can migrate them on Amazon, when things go from indie to trad, that doesn’t exist on Audible when you’re going from ACX to a more traditionally published audiobook. And I had a lot of reviews, and I wanted to keep ’em! So, I went to great lengths to try and reach out to people I knew at ACX to get that done. And although it was not a normal process and most people don’t get to do it, I was fortunate because I have been a narrator for a while and worked with ACX, and we managed in a bizarre way to get them migrated. 

So, that was like the biggest scary thing. There was a loss of control with the U.K. publication because they did a different cover, and that was a slightly fraught process due to the timeframe. That was a little tricky. But those were the main speed bumps, and none of them made me go, “Gosh, this was a mistake.” So far, I have not regretted going trad. It has been, I think, to the benefit of the book; it gave me access to audiences I would not have otherwise had access to, and my focus as an indie was not to make as much money per copy as I possibly could; it was to get readership. 

I had a fairly narrow profit margin on both print and e-book. The biggest loss for me is probably audio, because as the narrator and the writer, I got the lion’s share of the royalties for audio. But because the book is a shorter book, I don’t think audio is as big a piece of the pie anyway. And then having access to translations is just such a huge deal that I otherwise would never have attempted on my own. Or if I had, it would’ve been, you know, a handful of languages. Maybe I would’ve done French, Italian, and German or something, but it would’ve been a big deal, and I wouldn’t have had a lot of surety that I was getting a good translation, because how am I going to tell? I think it’s a common problem when indies get translations. There’s just not a good way to vet your translation until it’s been released. And two months later, somebody says, “Wow, I’m bilingual, and I read both of these. What happened?” [Laughs] 

Oh, it was the easiest narration job I’ve ever done. The closer you are to being on the same wavelength as the author, the easier the narration you get is. As a narrator, once you work for a long time, you have a really clear interior voice, and if you write, you’re basically translating that interior voice. It’s kind of like just putting it back where it was in the first place. It’s uniquely easy and pleasant to do. 

The cool thing is that because you have such a developed interior voice, you’re hearing it as you’re writing it. I get to shake a lot of that out in the initial writing without having to reread it, which feels like a cheat. [Laughs] But it’s not something you can really advise anybody else to do. “Hey, go be a professional narrator for thousands and thousands of hours, and then you too can hear your voice before you write it down!” In my experience, I can see a difference in the way that I wrote before I narrated and the way that I wrote after. And the way that I wrote after tends to have fewer of those kinds of rhythmic or word repetition issues. They still happen, but it’s less so.  

And then I also have a unique last step that most authors don’t have, which is in the copy-editing phase, the last copy edit, I narrate the book before we lock the copy edit. So, any last issues, I push them back into the copy edit before it’s locked.  

Initially, I wasn’t aware of cozy as a thing. I mean, I can look back now and say, “Oh gosh, it’s everywhere.” I was drawn to it mostly because it’s what I needed at the time. And because—I hate to say this—it was simple. It was the first book I completed, and the thing that let me complete it was that it was ultimately simple. It was about something small enough that I could hold it in my head, which I don’t mean think means it’s worthless or unworthy. I think small things are just fine, but it was small, and it was the middle of COVID, and I just didn’t want anything dire. I narrate dire stuff all the time. It dominates my reading diet, and I needed something else. 

I also didn’t intend for it to be so personal and emotional from the outset. I almost thought it was more of a nod and a wink idea until I started writing and discovered it wasn’t. And that it was a whole lot of me in there. I think cozy is well-suited to talking about basic human experience and emotion, and using the magic of fantasy to remind us that that’s worthy of our time. Because you could write the same story, I think, without it, but I don’t think it elicits the same response in us.  

That said, I don’t know if you require cozy to do that. I don’t know that coziness itself is required to do that. … 

I’ve taken to finding the emotional engine for the book. I look back and I find some point in my life where I was at a crossroads. I chose one direction or another, and I thought really hard about it, and I agonized over it because I invested a lot of thought into the way I didn’t go. I’ve imagined how that was, and I know intimately how things did go right. And if I can take one or both of those and find a way to transmute them and transplant them into a character, then I have all the things I need to tell a story, because I know what happened to this character. I know how they changed, or I know how I thought they might have changed if they had made a different decision. And that’s really useful for having parallel journeys and other characters that can interact with them, that let you explore a little bit more of what’s going on.  

I appreciate that. I worry about this book for a lot of reasons. Not because I don’t think I did what I set out to do, but because we’re talking about writing against expectations and worrying about whether something is commercially viable and how it’ll be received. It’s weird to write a cozy book about disappointing your friends and learning to say no, because those aren’t really cozy ideas. [Laughs] 

Well, the people are similar. The characters are the same kind of characters; they are still ultimately mostly good people. They’re flawed, but they have empathy and care about other people. Even the bad guys are a little bit understandable. And the vibe of the world is very similar. But I think it’s the line between wish fulfillment and whatever is not that, because in a lot of ways, Legends & Lattes is wish fulfillment. It’s like, Gosh, I would like to settle down and find my partner and open a cozy coffee shop. That in itself is a real wish fulfillment. For a lot of people, having a hangover and wrestling with something challenging is not wish fulfillment. Maybe there’s a little bit toward the end as [Fern] finds a way forward that she hadn’t expected and is trying something new, but it’s just not wish fulfillment. I think that’s where it will divide people.  

Again, I think that will be divisive because even for somebody who’s living in that, they’re like, “This is my life. What I really wanted was to get away from my life right now.”  

I feel like I did what I set out to do. I just don’t think that there’s a percentage of people who will want that. Ultimately, I have to be OK with that because I don’t want to only write the same thing. And I think it’s impossible to grow and try out different stuff and write [the] kinds of stories that I’ll feel good for having written while serving the same audience. 

Viv is basically me, so it’s different to write someone else. Viv is very straightforward to write. Fern is a little messier, but I relate very specifically to her problem. One of the nice things about being a narrator is that I have a really good interior voice for my characters too. I know what they sound like, which is very helpful for inhabiting them. I didn’t have trouble slipping into her. I mostly just worried that people would be upset that it wasn’t Viv! [Laughs] 

But again, it’s like, I gotta head somewhere else. Because I, what am I going to do with Viv now immediately after Legends? I don’t want to uproot her happily ever after the moment she got it—it feels mean! I may eventually come up with something, but it may be further in the future for her or involve something really different.  

I didn’t think of it as cozy at the time, but a major part of cozy is accessibility. Like, I want to feel OK while I’m reading this, so I need to not have to constantly do work to figure out what the heck is going on. … I didn’t feel like I really struggled with that as far as deciding what to pick and choose, but also, this is from the standpoint of not assuming anybody would read it. I didn’t worry about it because I wasn’t concerned about someone’s response to it. That was maybe just a fortunate thing.  

For [the] Legends & Lattes [series], I’ve consciously been very spare about world-building. While there is stuff that’s really unique about the world, I’ve had a rule that I can’t talk about it unless a character would care about it, which has limited how much I can drip-feed in.  

… I call it the covered furniture rule. I know all this stuff, but I know it in a vague way. It’s like having a sheet draped over a bunch of furniture. I know that’s probably a couch right there, and that’s a recliner, and that’s a wooden chair. But until it becomes relevant, I don’t twitch back the sheet and see what’s under it. I leave myself a lot of outs to finalize bits of the world-building when they become relevant.  

I get most of my work done in my draft. My edits are more about tucking in the corners and finding little errors. I have to outline in general because otherwise, I get lost. I write like an engineer. It all needs to stay functional. And if it’s ever not functional, if the “build is broken,” then I screwed up. So, my first draft tends to be really clean and very closely resembles the final.  

Now I’m writing a different kind of book, and I may discover that is not the case anymore. Because if there’s one thing I found out, it’s that I am always wrong about how I assume things will go, that I know what I’m doing. That’s just been the case so far. 

It absolutely has. 

It's largely because I don’t like characters [who] feel like a collection of racial clichés. I narrate a lot of books, and there are a lot of characters that don’t feel like characters. They feel like they’re a character trait. That can often be pulled from the race that they are, as a stereotypical character trait. Then that’s all they are, and I just don’t like it. I want all the characters to feel like people first.  

A lot of the point of Legends & Lattes is that, ultimately, these are all characters that are more than what people would assume based on who they are. The rattkin is a baker, the succubus is a thoughtful artist who’s kind of asexual, and the orc is not stupid. While she is big and has been a mercenary and has done things using the strength that’s available to her, that’s not her personality. That’s not who she is.  

I do that in the drafting process. I like a close perspective, and I care a lot about my mental movie. Like, what do I see? … from the height they’re looking at things to how hard this is to physically do because you’re shorter or taller or having to duck all the time—just this awareness of physicality is just important to character.  

I like hearing that things are plausible. What is it like to get onto the saddle of a draft horse if you’re a rattkin? And I don’t want to hand-wave it away because, to me, it’s important. Those are the kinds of questions I ask all the time when I’mreading. How do you sit in a chair if you’ve got a tail? Where does it go? [Laughs] 

A simple idea can still be a good idea. It doesn’t have to be complicated to be worthy of your time at all. That takes a lot of the pressure off in deciding what you’re going to write for any given book. Simple is just fine.