I'm Brad Vance, gay romance author, blockchain enthusiast, and I’m stoked about Steemit and its potential for creatives!

Hi, I’m Brad Vance, author of gay romance and erotica, professional editor, audiobook narrator, ebook publisher and new Steemit buff. As it gets harder for indie content producers to monetize their output, I’m thrilled to see Steemit making that possible! I’ve loved this idea ever since I read Jaron Lanier’s book You are Not a Gadget, where he proposes that we all get paid for the info and content that we now give away. In fact, I’ve never filled out a “your opinion is important but we won’t pay you for it” survey since then!  

My latest novel, Strength in Numbers, is a cyberthriller about the quest for the Satoshi Hoard, in which “The mysterious Satoshi, creator of the cybercurrency Bitcoin, has been hiding millions of dollars worth of the currency for years. But now, he has chosen to start a quest for the keys to the Hoard, and he who controls the keys controls the fortune. And this will be a quest that will test the strength, the will, and the character of those who pursue it.”  

This was really fun stuff to research and write, as I learned about the world of cybercurrencies, blockchains and smart contracts. Yep, erotic gay romance novels that are thoroughly researched! In addition to cryptocurrency, I’ve written novels that have taken me into the worlds of veterans with PTSD, Special Forces training and techniques, counterinsurgency, college football and pro baseball, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, Vikings, the music business, and the history of the occult. 

As Adam Vance, I’m writing “progressive military science fiction,” breaking the conventional space opera/war porn/bug hunt bonds of the genre, and working with ideas about colonialism, counterinsurgency, artificial intelligence, imperial sclerosis, and more…all of course with lots of badass action scenes and space battles. 

I’m very interested in cryptocurrency and blockchains, and the potential of smart contracts. Later I’ll post some ideas about how self-published authors, indie musicians and others may be able to use the blockchain to help manage piracy, such as self-publishing media with digital watermarks like those used by Hollywood in "screener" copies, making it easier to track down pirated versions and trace their origins. I’ll discuss indie authors’ long and tortuous relationship to Amazon, and how smart contracts might cut out the middleman, creating a “farm to table” type relationship between writers and readers. And I’ll be sharing How I Did It: Creating Your Audiobook Empire for Under $500 – a step by step guide to narrating, editing and producing your own audiobooks, with free software and without high end equipment or a fancy studio (you can – warning adult content! – check out samples of my homemade content here on SoundCloud).  

You can read more about me in my first Steemit post (misguidedly tagged as Memoir and posted way too early in the morning to be seen!), at my blog, and check out my books on Amazon here! Looking forward to an engaging relationship with all of you here on Steemit!