Episode 177: How To Write Believable Mistakes

In this week's episode, I discuss how to write characters who can make believable mistakes, and we also take a look at November 2023's ad results. The episode ends with a preview of GHOST IN THE SERPENT as narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

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

DECCOWL

The coupon code is valid through December 20th, 2023, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Christmas travel, we've got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 177 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December the 1st 2023 and today we're going to talk about how to write believable mistakes. We'll also talk about ad results for November 2023 and end the show with an audio book preview. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Cowl, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Cowl for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon: DECCOWL and again, that coupon code is DECCOWL and this coupon code will be valid through December the 20th 2023. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook for Christmas travel, we've got you covered.

So before we get to our main topics, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am almost done with my next book, which will be called Half Elven Thief. I am in fact hoping to finish it after I record this podcast episode and it's on track to be out before Christmas. My next book after it is published will be Shield of Storms, the first book of the new The Shield War series that will be a follow up to Dragonskull. I'm going to start writing that in December and if all goes well that will be out towards the end of January or perhaps February, depends on how the next couple of months go. I am also 41,000 words into Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am hoping to have that come out after Shield of Storms, if everything goes well. We'll see, once again we will see how the years goes. In audiobook news, Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress and Ghost in the Serpent are finished, paid for, and processing. They are working through quality assurance at ACX and Findaway and should be available before too much longer and we will in fact conclude the show with a preview from Ghosts in the Serpent, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

First up, let's have our ad results for November 2023. I had three categories of ads this month: Facebook, Amazon and Bookbub ads. Let's start with Facebook ads. I advertised The Ghosts, Cloak Games, Cloak Mage, Malison/Dragontiarna, and Silent Order. And here is what I got back for every dollar spent. For The Ghosts, I got back $6.10 for every dollar spent, with about 12% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $7.68 for every dollar spent, with about 5.8% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Of course, Cloak of Embers skews that's a bit, but even without Cloak of Embers the total will be $3.05, with 13.9% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Finally, Cloak Mage: Omnibus One and Cloak Mage: Omnibus Two and audio bundles really help move the needle for the audio. For Malison/Dragontiarna, I got back $2.17 for every dollar spent. And for Silent Order, I got back $2.51 for every dollar spent. So overall a pretty good month for Facebook ads.

Next up is Amazon ads. I tried a couple of different things with Amazon ads this month, so let's see how they did. For Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, I got back $2.29 for every dollar spent, with 11.2% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Since I want the sequel to Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation to come out in the first quarter of 2023 like I mentioned earlier in the show, I shifted the first book to Kindle Unlimited and started running ads on it, which one very well. Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation got back $4.20 for every dollar spent. This is a very promising sign for the sequel and honestly makes me wonder if I shouldn't have just put Creation in Kindle Unlimited from the beginning, as much as I did not want to try that. We also tried an experiment with Amazon ads for Cloak Games Omnibus One, even though that is not in Kindle Unlimited. That brought in $2.23 for every dollar spent with 31% of profit coming from the audiobook. It's obviously easier to advertise a Kindle Unlimited book on Amazon ads, but as it turns out a wide book like Sword of the Squire and Cloak Games Omnibus One can also work very well if you have an audiobook, because then you can advertise on the Audible categories on Amazon, which generally cost less per click.

Back finally on to Bookbub ads. I'm concerned about the long term direction of Facebook ads and how they're trying to push more AI targeting type stuff, which is why I'm trying to diversify more to Bookbub and Amazon ads. So for this month I tried Frostborn on Bookbub ads. Let's see how we did. Frostborn: $5.09 for every dollar I spent, with a surprising 35% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. This obviously is a very strong result for Bookbub ads, especially since Frostborn has been finished for like six years at this point. I wasn't expecting the audiobooks to do so robustly well from the Bookbub ads, but obviously I am not complaining. So what conclusions can we draw from this? 1: Amazon ads are a bit complicated to use, but in many ways they're the safest. If you don't know what you're doing, you can easily blow a ton of money on Facebook or Bookbub ads and get jack squat in return. The nice thing about Amazon ads is that if they don't work, they don't spend money. It's much harder to accidentally lose a bunch of money on Amazon ads than it is with Facebook or Bookbub 2: Amazon ads and Bookbub ads offer far more granular targeting options than Facebook. The problem with Facebook ad targeting is that you can only really target big name tradpub authors like George RR Martin or Brandon Sanderson, or broad categories like epic fantasy. Like, there's not a single RPG author in Facebook's audience targeting. By contrast, you get super granular with Amazon and Bookbub targeting. 3: If you have a finished audiobook series, it is bonus profit when you advertise the ebooks. Apparently for Bookbub, it's a lot of bonus profit about which I am not complaining. 4: For Bookbub and Facebook ads, you really need to rotate the ad image a lot to avoid creative fatigue, which is Internet ads-speak for people seeing the same ad image over and over and getting tired of it. So you need to change it out pretty frequently, like once a week, unless you don't. Sometimes you get lucky and get an ad which keeps firing and firing. But that is the exception and most definitely not the rule. And as always, thank you for reading. Given how consistently terrible the economy has been the last several years, I am very grateful for all of you who have bought the ebooks and the audiobooks, and I hope to have new books for you to read and listen to very soon.

00:06:41 Main Topic of the Week: How to Believably Write Serious Mistakes

Now let's transition to our main topic of the week, how to believably write serious mistakes. The inspiration for this week's episode was watching the news, specifically all the news around the corporate drama and shenanigans at Open AI. As I've mentioned before, numerous times, I am not a huge fan of AI technology. So it was perhaps with an inappropriate amount of entertained interest that I watched the meltdown of Open AI at the end of November 2023. To sum up a lengthy and complicated saga, the board of Open AI for unknown reasons fired its CEO, Sam Altman at 3:00 PM on a Friday afternoon, which is the traditional time corporations like to drop bad news. There was an immediate backlash because Mr. Altman is a relatively well respected figure in his field. The backlash intensified because Open AI is essentially a vassal of Microsoft at this point, and Open AI didn't bother to inform their overlords of what was going on, which meant that the great eye of Microsoft suddenly turned upon Open AI's board in wrath, especially since the move might have tanked Microsoft stock before its quarterly report. Meanwhile, many Open AI leaders quit, a majority of the employees signed a letter calling for the board to resign, Microsoft immediately hired Mr. Altman and the other leaders who quit, but then the board panicked and backtracked, and finally the board quit and Mr. Altman returned. Overall, it was definitely a fascinating saga of corporate politics, and since I personally think Open AI is like one of those evil organizations from James Bond movie (I bet they even have an elaborate Spectre style underground base somewhere), it was enjoyable to watch from afar. But this is the blog of a Pulp Fiction Writer or the podcast of a Pulp Fiction Writer, not a technology, business, or AI themed podcast.

Why talk about this? Because there is a lesson for fiction writers in this. The board of Open AI is not stupid or was not stupid. They're all intelligent men and women who are leaders in their fields and yet whatever their goals were in firing Mr. Altman, it’s readily apparent that those goals were not achieved and the results were in fact, the opposite of what they had hoped to accomplish since they quit and Mr. Altman remained as CEO of Open AI. And that provides a good lesson for writers of fiction. How can you have characters make believable mistakes without breaking the suspension of disbelief? Because when a character does something stupid solely to advance the plot, it is annoying, isn't it? Like the intelligent hero who suddenly becomes dumb as a brick, or the cunning villain who suddenly uses loses 50 IQ points at a critical junction in the plot? Probably the most commonly cited example is the heroine who goes into the basement with just a candle to reset the circuit breakers because she knows a serial killer or a vampire, or the Terminator or something is after her or when the hero’s plan only works if the villain suddenly becomes much less clever. That's annoying in fiction because it breaks the verisimilitude. Nevertheless, in real life, intelligent people do dumb things all the time, like constantly. Examples are abundant. No doubt you can think of several dozen off the top of your head without even trying. Just as we would break for verisimilitude and your fiction to have your characters be constantly idiotic, it would be just as strange to have them be infallible, high functioning geniuses. So let's have some tips and tricks on how to have your characters believably make bad decisions.

Number 1: emotional pressure. A key reason for many bad decisions is emotional pressure, because for most people, emotions almost always trump logic. The most obvious example of this is a high-powered professional who has an affair with someone in his or her office, only to end up resigning in disgrace when it comes out. Once again, examples abound, and you can probably think of numerous cases from the last few years, whether national or local, political figures or people you know personally who work in your organization. We can think of more positive examples of emotional pressure. A man could have pity on a homeless man and give him his lunch, even though this means he might perform badly at an important task at work this afternoon. Or a woman might be trying to save money, only for her love to override her better judgment and convince her to buy a gift for her grandchild. In fiction, you could use this in many, many ways. Both love and hatred are powerful motivators, and so are envy and resentment. A character could take dangerous risks to help someone that he or she loves, or a character could be so gripped by envy that he or she tries to sabotage her rival in a way that turns out to be self-defeating. In romance novels, characters make decisions from emotional pressure all the time. It's one of the staple tropes of the genre.

A good example of characters acting from emotional pressure is the scene at the end of the Lord of the Rings when Saruman tries to stab Frodo and then fails. This is objectively a stupid decision. Even if Saruman kills Frodo, it won't improve his position and if he succeeded in killing Frodo, Saruman will be immediately killed by the enraged hobbits. In fact, Frodo at that point is the only hobbit who doesn't want to kill Saruman for his crimes. So killing Frodo would have been quite possibly the worst decision Saruman could make at that exact moment in time, but it makes sense in the context of the story and Saruman’s character, because at this point Saruman has been devoured by hatred and resentment, and cares mostly about screwing with the hobbits, who, as his twisted mind sees it, have robbed him of the chance to become the new Dark Lord of Middle Earth. So long as the character's emotional reality makes sense to the reader, decisions they make in the context of that emotional reality, even objectively bad ones, will not seem like dumb decisions to advance the plot.

Number two: acting on bad information. In computer science, there is a principle called garbage in garbage out. The idea is that if you enter bad information into a computer program, the program is only going to generate bad results. This is also very true of human decision making. To make good decisions, you need to have good information. For fiction writers, this means if you want to have an intelligent character make a bad decision, you can only have them act on bad information. For example, a group of fantasy heroes could be on a quest to find a magical sword that will slay the dragon terrorizing the kingdom. According to the kingdom's wizards, the sword is in a ruined castle in the wilderness, except the sword isn't actually there. The castle is controlled by an evil sorcerer who magically enthralls anyone who enters it. The heroes have made a bad decision by going to the ruined castle since they gained a new enemy in the form of the evil sorcerer, but they thought they were making a good decision. But it turns out they were acting on bad information. You can easily use this technique in non-fantasy genres as well. A detective could be misled by a witness and waste time going down dead ends in his investigation until he realizes the truth. In a further novel, the hero could realize that the informants have been deliberately feeding his agency bad information about potential threats. Acting on bad information is also a common technique in romance novels. Usually romance novels have a plot twist, where the heroine can't get together with the love interest for some reason, and it's often because the heroine and the love interest misinterpret each other's motives. Pride and Prejudice is maybe the one of the oldest examples of this, since Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett immediately attribute wrong motivations to each other, and it takes most of the book for them to work through it and untangle things.

Number three: unforeseen consequences. This is a big one and one of the major reasons that very smart people make decisions that turn out to be bad, like the example of the Open AI corporate intrigue I mentioned above. The Open AI board members didn't set out to get themselves booted from the company while strengthening Sam Altman's and Microsoft's grip, but that's exactly what happened. My favorite historical example of unintended consequences has to be US Prohibition. The US didn't just randomly decide to wake up and vote to ban alcohol one day in 1920. The Prohibition movement in the US dated back to the early 1870s, which meant that nearly 50 years of work, public relations, persuasion and changing local laws went into what should have been Prohibition’s crowning triumph, the passing of the 18th amendment in 1920. Except it all backfired, didn't it? The Temperance movement wanted to end alcohol consumption in the United States. What they got instead was an explosion of organized crime, increased distract for public authority, the loss of jobs and government tax revenue coming into the Great Depression, and public opinion swiftly turning against Prohibition. The explosion of organized crime was especially ironic, since many Temperance advocates believed, sincerely and firmly, that the majority of all crime was caused by alcohol consumption, and that most of society’s evil could be traced to the consumption of strong liquor. Some local communities actually sold their jails after Prohibition passed, believing that crime would soon drop to near zero. Alas, the causes of societal evil remain multifaceted and cannot solely be hung on alcohol. The 21st amendment passed in 1933, which was the end of national Prohibition in the United States. Prohibition’s legacy continues in the minimum drinking age (another law often ignored), restriction on the time of alcohol sales, and dry counties where you can't legally purchase or consume alcohol, but the concept of national Prohibition in the United States is obsolete.

The Temperance advocates didn't actually foresee the consequences of their triumph, and you can use the same principle in writing fiction. A character could achieve what they set out to do, only to find that unanticipated consequences of their success are more severe than the original problem. In a thriller novel, the heroes could take out the leader of the bad guys, only for the leader’s more confident and dangerous Lieutenant to take over. In a romance novel, the heroine could win a lawsuit or a big business deal only to discover that this damages her love interest’s family business. In a detective novel, the protagonist could finally track down the key witness to the murder, or for the murderer’s lethal attention to be drawn to that witness.

Number four: Victory Disease. In military history, there is a concept called the Victory Disease. It happens when an army or commander has won so many times that they have become overconfident, lazy, and start making avoidable mistakes. Sooner or later they run into a more serious opponent and an army subject to Victory Disease will make errors that a less complacent opponent will not. You sometimes see this in professional athletics as well. A superstar athlete or winning team gets overconfident, stops training as hard or gets complacent, and then gets their clock cleaned by a hungrier opponent.

So Victory Disease is a combination of overconfidence and complacency, and you can definitely make use of this concept to have a character make an understandable bad decision. In fiction, villains tend to be more prone to Victory Disease than protagonists. Nevertheless, having a protagonist with Victory Disease can force them into internal conflicts and character growth. A good example of Victory Disease is in a protagonist is Batman/Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises film from 2012. When Batman comes out of retirement to fight Bane’s organization, he's so used to winning against criminals and outwitting the police that he doesn't take Bane seriously enough despite Alfred's warnings. This bites Batman hard when he confronts Bane for the first time, and he's forced to undergo character development to get ready to save Gotham City from Bane. You can apply a similar plot arc to your characters. An overconfident character makes a serious mistake and has to recover from it, learning and undergoing character growth in the process.

Number five: Fields of expertise. There's a certain kind of public intellectual. They usually have a PhD and all their social media handles, that likes to pronounce upon the issues of the day. They will often say things like “as a scientist, I think” or “as an academic, I think” when commenting upon various issues. What's amusing is that their pronouncements are often wrong or wildly impractical because they've strayed out of their fields of expertise. Like the scientist in question might be, have a PhD in cellular biology and be a world-renowned expert in that field. But knowledge and expertise in one field does not necessarily translate to competence in another. This can result in basic errors that could otherwise be avoided. Academics run into this a lot. Two examples from real life might suffice. A reporter was covering some protests and was alarmed to discover rubber bullets lying on the ground and posted a picture of those rubber bullets to social media. He ended up widely mocked because the objects in question were not rubber bullets, but ear plugs. A minor celebrity went to a city and was horrified to see racist graffiti on the sidewalk and complained about it on social media, only for many commenters to point out that the symbols were not graffiti at all, but markings from utility workers indicating where electrical and gas lines ran underneath the sidewalk. This makes for a very believable way for your characters to make bad decisions. Force them to make decisions in an area where they don't really know what they're doing.

Number six: Conclusion. To maintain verisimilitude in fiction, you need to walk a fine line. If your character has suddenly become stupid to advance the plot, that will annoy the readers, but neither can your characters be infallible reasoning machines. Hopefully these tips and tricks will help your characters make mistakes in a believable way that will make your books more enjoyable.

So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. 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. And now, please enjoy a preview of Ghost in the Serpent as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy.