Star Trek: Strange New Worlds gave us two wildly unconventional episodes in the same season: one turned the Enterprise crew into puppets, while another dropped them into a full-blown soap opera. Both essentially play with an alternate reality where the events can ultimately be undone—but one worked for me, and the other absolutely didn’t.

This week on Indie Author Showcase, I break down the three big reasons I think the soap opera episode succeeds where the puppet episode fails: the premise, the stakes, and—most importantly—the lasting impact on the characters. It’s also a useful lesson for writers about how to make dream sequences and alternate realities actually matter to an audience.

Then, a change of pace for the Showcase. After having to DNF this week’s planned indie book, I take a look at ElevenLabs Reader, an AI text-to-speech app I’ve been using to turn ebooks and other documents into something I can listen to on the road. How good is it? Can it compete with a professionally narrated audiobook? And is the subscription price worth it?

Plus: why AI narration still struggles with pronunciation, inflection, sarcasm, and performance—and why I don’t think human audiobook narrators need to start looking for another job just yet.

Indie Author Showcase — the podcast by indie authors, for indie authors.