This article is part of a series on the leadership behind the companies shaping the independent publishing industry. To find other articles in the series, click here.
Emily Labes-Royce’s first assignment as a chief operating officer was to write her own job description. After seven years at Soundbooth Theater, she had accepted the COO role at Rev-Up Management LLC, the company best-selling LitRPG author Matt Dinniman created to manage the business of his author career.
Although she’s still defining the details of the role, her central task has been settled from the beginning: to help an expanding author business support the relationships that helped it grow in the first place. The Dungeon Crawler Carl fandom wanted more stories and more ways to experience them. Meeting that enthusiasm would require a trusted team, room to learn, and a leader willing to let other people do some of the work she loved doing herself.
“I’ve always been a doer,” Labes-Royce says. “I like to be the person getting my hands dirty. And the bigger this thing gets, the harder it is for me to be the hands-on-keyboard person for X, Y, and Z.”
Her transition captures a problem that can arrive with an author’s success: Each new opportunity creates work around the books. A more elaborate audio adaptation needs collaborators. A memorable tour requires preparation. A personal relationship with readers becomes something a larger organization must understand and support.
But those relationships are also the reason the work is worth doing.
“Really, this is kind of the ultimate service industry, when you think about it, because we’re providing a service, and the second you start thinking about what’s in it for you is the second I think your work stops speaking for itself,” Labes-Royce says.
New Skills Unlocked
Labes-Royce does not describe herself as someone who had always been destined to run a company. With a BFA in fiction writing, she always expected creative work to matter to her. Discovering that she enjoyed helping build a business came later.
Her first job out of college was a postgraduate internship at a public relations firm specializing in book publicity. After several years in that field, she moved to a technology company, where she ran a digital marketing department. She later became a full-time freelancer, taking on ghostwriting, publicity, and marketing work.
A mutual connection brought an email from Soundbooth Theater founder and audio narrator Jeff Hays. He wanted help developing a cohesive brand and positioning individual series for audiences. When Labes-Royce arrived, she found a group whose passion impressed her. She also discovered, to her surprise, that she was among the people most inclined to think in spreadsheets.
“None of that comes naturally to me at all,” she says with a laugh. “I had to trick my brain into becoming the kind of person at work I am today.”
Outside work, Labes-Royce describes herself as being relaxed about plans, happy to go along with friends, and prone to arriving late. At work, however, she is much more structured. She credits her own passion for building relationships and storytelling—over time, the work of helping a company take shape became rewarding in its own right.
Still, she resists the idea that her path has been easy or without hurdles. Failures and challenges have taught her a great deal, she says. “I think that’s actually the most important thing—really reveling in failure and taking every morsel of knowledge and experience you can get from it,” she says. “I know it’s cliched and obvious, but like anyone else, I’m as much defined by my failures as by my successes.”
Leaning on Your Team
Labes-Royce’s discussion of capacity becomes more personal when she describes becoming a mother. The transition was difficult, she says—she experienced postpartum anxiety and postpartum depression and returned to work earlier than expected.
“It was a tough adjustment,” she says. “I got diagnosed either three or five weeks before the first ever LitRPG Con, which Soundbooth Theater co-hosts. So I ended up back at work a little earlier than I anticipated, adjusting to being a working mom, adjusting to feelings that I didn’t understand. And it did take me a while to realize that anything was wrong.”
After her diagnosis and while she waited for an appointment to see a psychiatrist, Labes-Royce leaned heavily on colleagues and the wider community for support. These were people she had known through work, but the sense of community also became something she depended on when her own life became harder to manage.
“We’re all figuring it out. Sometimes when I’m feeling really overwhelmed, I just think, ‘God, I’m so lucky to be this overwhelmed. I’m so lucky that there’s this much happening.’”
—Emily Labes-Royce
Motherhood changed her priorities, as she now had something more important in her life. “And it’s not that work got less important. It’s just that now there was something more important,” she says.
Striking that balance can be a challenge, but she’s setting certain boundaries to help. She tries to avoid being on her phone when spending time with her son, and she does most of her work once he’s gone to bed. She wants him to know he is the priority. She also acknowledges that she’s still learning to juggle both roles and learning to give herself grace while she does.
“It’s so funny because everyone tells you this. Everybody says that you’re always going to feel like you’re letting someone down. You can’t give 100 percent to two things. I heard it all,” Labes-Royce says. “But you still think, ‘Well, that’s not going to be me. I’m going to be the exception.’ And no one is.”
She offers the same candor for her work, too. Behind the success, Labes-Royce describes the emails that go unanswered and a to-do list running across multiple pages—details less visible from outside a successful creative enterprise but familiar to anyone who has stood behind the curtain of their own business. And she feels grateful for it all the same.
“We’re all figuring it out,” she says. “And sometimes when I’m feeling really overwhelmed, I just think, ‘God, I’m so lucky to be this overwhelmed. I’m so lucky that there’s this much happening.’”
Reaching Readers
Asked to describe her leadership style, Labes-Royce settled on one that holds community at its center. She likes making connections and working with people. As the business grows, she knows that being the person responsible for managing everything, and for building the team behind it, will become harder—and more important. Those relationships not only make the work behind the scenes flow more smoothly; they help build connections with readers, too.
“I think one of the things that helped Matt connect with us [Soundbooth Theater] so quickly is that transactional is exactly the opposite of what we want to achieve,” she says. “All of us are here at the end of the day because we love telling stories and we want to entertain people.”
“The second you start thinking about what’s in it for you is the second I think your work stops speaking for itself.”
—Emily Labes-Royce
The same was true from the other direction as well, Labes-Royce says. The former chief marketing officer of Soundbooth Theater returned to an early encounter between Dinniman and Hays. Soundbooth Theater was running live broadcasts that included audience requests. Dinniman submitted his book, and Hays read Dungeon Crawler Carl cold on the air.
“I had not, up to that point, seen him connect with material like that before,” she says. “He’s passionate about so much of what he does, but after he read Dungeon Crawler Carl, he immediately knew this is something different.”
In her account, the series found an enthusiastic audience in the LitRPG community before a broader readership caught on. As more people have discovered the series, the support and excitement have fed the creativity of the teams at both Soundbooth Theater and Rev-Up Management, leading to new formats and production opportunities for the series. “One thing I love about the Dungeon Crawler Carl fandom and I feel like is, I don’t want to say completely unique, but something that we certainly haven’t necessarily experienced before—these people are just so ravenous but so supportive at the same time,” Labes-Royce says. “And that juxtaposition is a really beautiful thing that I think has led to a lot of creation in and around that world.”
Amid the series’s rise to fame, Labes-Royce has seen Soundbooth Theater develop an Audio Immersion Tunnel adaptation of the book, an episodic format that brought a more cinematic approach to the story. She’s also watched how Dinniman and Hays connect with fans in person, such as at the Dungeon Crawler Carl Live Tour in the UK earlier this year. At one point, she recalls, they left to spend time with the audience. Twenty minutes later, they were still surrounded by fans.
Both Hays and Dinniman are musicians, which she believes plays into their desire to connect with their audience. The desire for that relationship hasn’t changed as the company has grown. As much as the creators want to feed the fans, their connection with those fans has given them fuel to keep creating.
Coordinating Connections
The UK tour served as an example of how those reader relationships have shaped the work at Rev-Up Management. Dinniman wanted the event to be unlike a conventional book talk. “Next thing I know, we’re commissioning a sing-along video,” Labes-Royce recalls. “We’re having these calls with our tour manager about the exact specifications of this custom sex doll head—without a body—that we need for this tour. It was wild.”
Labes-Royce believes Dinniman and Hays, along with the team who helped organize the event, delivered the distinctive experience they intended. The extended preparation served its purpose: giving fans something they could experience together in the room.
“All of us are here at the end of the day because we love telling stories and we want to entertain people.”
—Emily Labes-Royce
Labes-Royce’s background in traditional book publicity informs what she finds striking about the industry. Recently, she has watched independent and traditional publishing work together in ways she would once have found unlikely. Dinniman’s career is one example she cites, but she also has seen traditional publishers taking an interest in other authors whose work has developed in the independent publishing world.
“It’s been kind of cool to see how those two approaches can actually work together because, you know, back when I did PR for trad, that was not something we ever would’ve considered or really thought possible,” she says.
The common thread in her account remains the people making the work and the readers responding to it. Asked about generative AI, she says it’s not something Soundbooth Theater or Rev-Up Management work with, though she’s watched the impact it’s had in other areas of the industry.
She also shared the question she’s been asked about AI, regarding whether she worries about her own job—either as an executive or as a creative writer—being replaced. But she dismisses the idea quickly.
“I think what it’s missing is the humanity of it, and that’s what people still want,” she says. “I think if you have a story to tell, and you get out there and tell that story, that’s the best thing you can do. If you’re worried about AI, tell your story, and tell it louder.”
A job description with room to learn
When asked about the lessons she’s learned in her career so far, Labes-Royce returns to the value of embracing incomplete knowledge. “I have found more power in saying I don’t know,” she says.
She elaborates that she’s learned to say when she lacks enough information for an opinion. That doesn’t mean she lacks convictions; she jokes that Dinniman and Hays would have no difficulty recognizing her views on certain subjects. But she has learned that it’s okay to not have all the answers all the time.
“I just think the best thing we can do for ourselves is commit to always be learning,” she says. “And in the meantime, there’s a lot you don’t know, and that’s okay. Talk to someone who does.”
As Rev-Up Management’s new COO begins by defining her own assignment, she’s acknowledging the need to look beyond her own experience. Admitting where her knowledge ends makes room for the other people she wants to bring into the business.
Labes-Royce’s job description is still to be written, but its purpose is already taking shape: Help Dinniman’s author business grow around the stories, support the people making them, and preserve the relationship with readers that made the next opportunity worth pursuing.
