Episode 174: Classic Video Games

In this week's episode, I look back at some of my favorite classic video games, and also discuss my book advertising results from October 2023.

This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CLOAK OF BLADES as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CLOAK OF BLADES for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code:

NOVBLADES

The coupon code is valid through November 28th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia's adventures before CLOAK OF EMBERS comes out, why not start with an audiobook?

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 174 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 3rd, 2023, and today we're going to talk about classic video games. We'll also discuss October 2023's ad results and made up words that turn out to be not made up after all. Before we get into all that and then an update about my current writing project, it is time for Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Cloak of Blades as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Cloak of Blades for 75% off in my Payhip store with this coupon code NOVBLADES and that is spelled NOVBLADES and you get that in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through November 28th, 2023, so if you find yourself wanting to get caught up with Nadia's adventures before Cloak of Embers comes out, why not start with an audiobook? You can get the coupon code and the links in the show notes for this episode.

Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am 107,000 words into Cloak of Embers, which puts me on Chapter 21 of 22 so I'm almost done and I'm hoping to get that wrapped up next week if all goes well. At 107,000 words, I'm not sure how long it will be once I'm done editing and by the time the rough draft is done, but it will almost certainly be either the longest or second longest book that had Nadia as a main character. So that will be something to look forward to. I'm also 9,500 words into the book I'm going to write after Cloak of Embers and I will discuss that a bit more and what I intend to do with that after Cloak of Embers is published, hopefully in November. But we'll see.

In audiobook news, Dragon Skull: Wrath of the Warlock is almost done in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills and we just have to finish proof listening to it and hopefully we should have that come out before the end of November if all goes well. Brad is also going to start work on Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress before much longer, and that will probably (given how the holidays are falling this year) come out in either late December or January, with January being the more likely outcome. In other audiobook news, Hollis McCarthy will soon start the recording of Ghost in the Serpent, so hopefully we'll have more updates on that soon.

 

00:02:30 Reader Questions/Comments

Before we get to our topics today, let's have a few questions from readers. Our first question is from Lisa, who writes to ask: Hello, I just started reading your book series with your character Ridmark Arban and I am wondering what is the very first book to start with. Is it the one called the First Quest or is it a different one to start with? Also I have been looking all over the Internet trying to figure out what the book order is for your character Ridmark Arban and I'm having no luck. In answer to your question Lisa, the very first book with Ridmark Arban would be Frostborn: The Gray Knight. That is the first book in the Frostborn series, and Ridmark is also the main character in Sevenfold Sword and then Dragontiarna, though I would recommend starting with Frostborn: The Gray Knight. And you can find the series reading order on either my website or it should be in the metadata on all the different retailers. And I think we have that set up properly now. Frostborn: The First Quest is a prequel to the main Frostborn series that I put out for free to people to read and enjoy as a bit of back story, but it's a prequel and the actual official starting point of the Frostborn series would be Frostborn: The Gray Knight.

Our next question…well, it's more of a comment really is from Juana who writes about the upcoming Cloak of Embers and her opinion of the character of Victoria Carrow. And this is what she thinks Victoria will be A: she's the head of Singularity B: She is a criminal elf. C: She killed Tarlia and took her place or D: She is an anthrophage elder with really good impulse control. In any case, she is bad news and I just don't like her.

Ah, as you might guess from that comment, Juana is a longtime reader who has read many of my books. Thanks for that, Juana. She has been very suspicious of Victoria Carrow from the beginning, when she first appeared, way back in Cloak of Ashes back in 2020. Well, Victoria does have a secret and we are going to find out what it is in Cloak of Embers. And during the process of writing this book, I realized that talking about Victoria's secret had an additional meaning that I did not intend but in this sense we are talking about the secret held by Victoria Carrow and not the apparel company.

And now for a question a couple of different readers have had over the past few months since Silent Order: Pulse Hand came out. A reader emailed to ask of the word materiel, spelled MATERIEL in Silent Order: Pulse Hand was a mistake and asked if it should have been spelled material, MATERIAL. No, that spelling is correct. Materiel is a real word when spelled with an E. It refers to weaponry, supplies and equipment used for war in the military or to quote the Wikipedia definition: “Materiel are supplies, equipment and weapons in a military supply chain management, and typically supplies and equipment in a commercial supply chain context. In a military context, the term materiel refers to either the specific needs, excluding manpower of a force to complete a specific mission, or the general sense of the needs, excluding manpower of a functioning army. An important category of materiel is commonly referred to as ordnance, especially concerning mounted guns, artillery and the shells they consume, along with fuel and munitions in general the steady supply of ordnance is an ongoing logistical challenge in active combat zones.” Or to put it another way, not only is materiel a real word, it is in fact a topic to which many serious minded military officers have devoted much serious minded thought since a failure to address your military's materiel needs means you're going to lose the war before the first shot is fired.

To be fair, as a science fiction and fantasy writer, I make up a lot of words. Grammarly is always so impressed that I use so many unique words but it really isn't fair because I do make a lot of them up. That said, I was a history major, which was not helpful to finding a real job, but turned out to be useful for concept and terms for fantasy novels. Like in Frostborn, I use the terms dux and comes for noblemen instead of duke and count because Latin was the primary language of Andomhaim and the terms duke and count were derived from the Latin words dux and comes. However, given how confused some people were by the terms dux and comes, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably default to duke and count, just to reduce reader confusion. Though urvaalg was one of my better made-up words. No one ever gets confused about what an urvaalg is. So those are the comments and questions for the week. If you have a comment or question you'd like addressed on the show, leave it as a comment on one of my websites and we will see if we can get to it.

 

00:07:09 Ad Results for October 2023

Our next topic for today is ad results from October 2023. Since it's past the 1st of November, it's good time to look back and see how my ads did for October 2023. I have to admit that October was a pretty weak month for sales for a variety of reasons beyond my control or honestly anyone's control. For one thing, the economy remains bad and inflation is high, especially in the US. For another, the international news in October was very bad, which always puts a damper on discretionary entertainment spending like books. Amazon US was consistently glitchy throughout all of October and still isn't working right as of the time of this recording. I can't prove this, but I think the books category faced strong competition from video games in October, especially Spiderman 2 for PlayStation and Super Mario Wonder for the Switch. Full disclosure, I did buy Super Mario Wonder and I'm playing it and it's excellent. On the plus side, Ghost in the Serpent had a strong start and Silent Order did very well in October on the strength of the Bookbub feature deal back in the first week of September and the lingering halo effect from Pulse Hand coming out soon afterwards. People are generally more willing to start a finished series than an unfinished one, especially in the science fiction and fantasy space. All my ads for October turned a profit, which I am very grateful for.

So here's how the Facebook ads did. For Frostborn, I got back $5.44 for every dollar I spent, with 44% of my profit coming from the audiobooks. For the Ghosts. I got back $7.46 for every dollar spent, with 8% of the profit coming from audiobooks. If you take out Ghost in the Serpent, my profit comes to $2.95 with 20% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $3.19 for every dollar spent and for Silent Order, I got back $4.45 for every dollar spent.

For Amazon ads, the only thing I advertised myself was Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, which did pretty well. For every dollar spent, I got back $3.41, with 27% of the profit coming from the audiobook. So we see once again, that audiobooks, once you have them, are usually a good additional profit for a long series. For some reason I could never really get the Cloak Games or Cloak Mage audiobooks to sell, which is why I said usually instead of certainly.

I think in November I'm going to do things a little bit differently. I'm going to try advertising Frostborn entirely on Bookbub ads, which I haven't used in a while. Facebook has been making some changes to the way targeting works on its ad platform, and I can see those changes making it less useful to advertise books there. Additionally, Facebook has also begun testing a subscription service for an ad free experience, which obviously would make Facebook way less useful for book advertising. The advantage for Bookbub ads is that some of the targeting has already been done for you. Like with Facebook ads, one of the keys to success is to make sure you've targeted your audience correctly. With Bookbub ads, everyone looking at the Bookbub e-mail is already looking for discount books anyway, so some of the targeting work has been done for you already. Anyway, if Facebook is considering pivoting away from ads in favor of paid subscriptions, it will be good to have backup options ready. And as always, thanks for reading. There would be no point in advertising these books if people didn't read them.

 

00:10:29 Main Topic of the Week: Classic Video Games

 

So, let's go on to our main topic this week: something fun because it's my podcast and I wanted to talk about something fun. That topic is classic video games. The main way I have played classic video games for the last four years is the Nintendo Switch, which I bought in September 2019. I've mentioned before that I didn't play any console games from about 1998 to 2019. There were several good reasons for this. First, I was really busy. Second, consoles are expensive and I definitely didn't have the money to drop on many games for the 2000s and most of the 2010s. Third, while I did play games, I played on the PC. I remember in 2007 not going out to eat for a while to save up to buy a better video card so I could play Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion on something other than the very lowest video settings. But 2019 marked a major personal milestone, my 100th book. Dragontiarna: Knights was about to come out and a few people asked what I wanted to do to mark this milestone. Maybe take a trip, go on vacation, that kind of thing. Instead, I decided that I wanted a Nintendo Switch. But why a Nintendo Switch?

At Easter 2018, my younger brother unexpectedly gave me a Super Nintendo Classic as a present. For a while, at the end of the 2010s, Nintendo intermittently sold two mini consoles, the Nintendo Classic and the Super Nintendo Classic, each one accompanied with recreations of the old style controllers and some of the greatest hits for the respective console. Playing around with the Super Nintendo Classic got me interested in the Switch since the Switch online subscription service also came with emulators for the NES and the Super Nintendo. I have played a lot of NES and Super Nintendo games back in the 1990s, but I only rarely had the chance to finish them. Partly it was because I was busy and partly because the technology to save games back then really didn't exist for either the Nintendo or the Super Nintendo, with a few exceptions. If you ran out of lives and died, or you had to go do something and turn off the console, that was it. Your game was gone and you had to start over from scratch.

But after Dragontiarna: Knights was published, I made up my mind about what I wanted to do to celebrate, and I got a Switch. As it turned out, getting the Nintendo Switch 8 months before the great COVID freak out turned out to be a really, really good idea. It gave me the opportunity to beat several games, actually numerous games that I had run out of time to play. The first one was The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, which I had gotten for the PC back in 2011 and played intermittently ever since, but never found the time to finish. I beat it for the first time on Switch and then I finished Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which was a spiritual successor to the various Castlevania games of the 1990s. With a combination of Switch Online, save states, and some of the anthology collections available for the console, I managed to finish some of the classic games from the ‘80s and early ‘90s that I never had the chance to finish earlier, like the original Super Mario Games, Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario 3 for the NES, and Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo. I never really got into Super Mario 2 for the NES and never really tried to play it. The Castlevania series: the three Castlevania games for NES, Castlevania 2 for the Game Boy (the first Castlevania for Game Boy really isn't worth playing) and Castlevania 4 and Castlevania Dracula X for the Super Nintendo and I finally got to beat all those. The Zelda series: the original Legend of Zelda for NES (which I never finished) and Link to the Past for Super Nintendo, which is in fact one of the few Super Nintendo games I actually finished back when it originally came out, but I enjoyed being able to play it on the Switch with saved states. Super Metroid, which I never got a chance to play at all in the ‘90s and is deservedly a classic. You frequently see its mechanics turn up in many other modern games.

Lest you think I spent all my time replaying the classics, I did finish some newer games as well. The remake of Link’s Awakening was excellent, a good updating of the Gameboy Classic. Metroid Dread was absolutely superb, even though it took me a while to finish some of the boss fights. I also finished Elder Scrolls Blades, which I'm not going to say was a great game, but I still enjoyed it and I am proud to say I beat the final boss without paying for a single micro transaction, though I did buy the soundtrack, which makes for good background listening while writing epic fantasy. I keep meaning to play the remake of Metroid Prime, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. The multiplayer games also turned out to be great fun. I started bringing Mario Kart 8 and some controllers to family gatherings. Turns out nearly everyone likes Mario Kart. They say alcohol is a social lubricant, but Mario Kart is almost as effective and results in a lot fewer hangovers, though I do lose at Mario Kart a lot. Additionally, playing the old multiplayer classics like the original Super Mario with someone who appreciates them is always fun. So I think it's safe to say that I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of that Nintendo Switch I bought back in 2019.

What's interesting is that the Switch is about 7 years old now as of this recording, which is the eternity in technology terms, yet it's still going strong. Microsoft, Sony, and the PC game market have been locked in an arms race for even more powerful hardware and more detailed graphics. By contrast, the Switch was fairly underpowered even for 2017, when it came out. And while it's been updated a few times in the year since, it's still essentially the same device. Pretty much every phone manufactured in the 2020s is more powerful than the Switch, but Nintendo doesn't seem super interested in rushing into their next console, though the rumor mill has been talking about the Switch Two or the Switch Pro for years. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago they released a Super Mario Wonder for the Nintendo Switch, and it was a huge hit and received universal acclaim on Metacritic. This approach makes sense once you know of Nintendo's philosophy of withered technology. This was a strategy articulated by Nintendo game designer Gunpei Yokoi (and I apologize if I pronounce his name wrong), who called it lateral thinking of withered technology. This philosophy described using mature technology that was well understood and cheaply obtained rather than cutting edge stuff to create unique game experiences different than anything else available.

I suspect this is a variant of a philosophy you see among successful people in every field. They rely on the boring but practical methods and combine them in ways to create something unique. Or if you dig into the many successes, you will find that the people behind them stuck to the well established fundamentals but did them really well, and that's what the Switch does, isn't it? It's a unique experience. You can plug it into the dock and play it on your TV or unplug it and use it like a handhole console like a super powered Game Boy. I can play on my couch or take it with me to those family gatherings and plug into the TV for Mario Kart 8. It's an idea that seems incredibly obvious in hindsight, but it really wasn't at the time. Dragontiarna: Knights was my hundredth book in 2019, and my most recent book, Ghost in the Serpent, was 145. Maybe when I hit 150 I should get a Switch OLED model, or the mythical Switch 2, if it is come out by then.

So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on thepulpwritershow.com. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.