Episode 287: Five Lessons Learned From My Ten Bestselling Books Of 2025

In this week's episode, I take a look back at my ten bestselling books of 2025, and consider five lessons learned from them.

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, Book #1 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store:

DRAGONSKULL50

The coupon code is valid through February 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we’ve got you covered!

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 287 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 23rd, 2025, and today we are discussing five lessons learned from my 10 bestselling books of 2026. We'll also have Coupon of the Week and an update at my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is DRAGONSKULL50. And as always, links to my Payhip store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we have got you covered.

Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I am very nearly done with Blade of Storms, the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I am probably just going to stay inside and finish it this weekend because it is very cold. It is winter, but it looks like this week we are having super winter and I'm in the part of the US where we're not getting any snow thankfully, but it is in fact -20 degrees [Fahrenheit] outside, which makes it a good time to stay inside and work on Blade of Storms. So hopefully it will start going live by the time this episode goes live or shortly thereafter.

I'm also 16,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. And if all goes well, that should be my main project soon. It might come out before the end of February, but it will probably slip to March, the way things are looking.

In audiobook news, we're very nearly done with the audiobook of Blade of Shadows (as excellently recorded by Brad Wills) and hopefully that should start getting through quality assurance on the various audiobook platforms before too much longer. Hollis McCarthy has started working on Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage urban fantasy series. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

00:02:09 Main Topic of the Week: 5 Lessons Learned from My 10 Bestselling Books from 2025

And now let's move on to our main topic this week, five lessons learned from the top 10 of my bestselling books from 2025. I have this growing pile of tax paperwork on my desk and that got me to thinking about what were my 10 bestselling books of 2025 because all the sales data is now in so I can parse it and look back and see which books of mine sold the best in 2025.

I thought it'd be interesting to look at my 10 bestselling ebooks, audiobooks, and paper books for 2025 and see what percentage of them or what rather what percentage of book revenue came from new stuff published in 2025 and old stuff that I had published previously and then I would take a look at five lessons learned from that. So with all that in mind, let's take a first look at my ten bestselling ebooks of 2025 and what percentage of my book revenue for 2025 came from new books and from my backlist. So first up, my 10 bestselling ebooks of 2025:

1. Shield of Deception
2. Shield of Battle
3. Shield of Power
4. Ghost in the Assembly
5. Ghost in the Corruption
6. Cloak of Worlds
7. Blade of Flames
8. Ghost in the Siege
9. Blade of Shadows
10. Cloak of Illusion

 

And for my total ebook revenue for 2025, 29.3% came from new books and 70.7% came from things I published prior to 2025.

So let's look at the 10 bestselling audiobooks of 2025:

1. The Ghosts: Omnibus One
2. Cloak Mage Omnibus One
3. Ghost Armor Omnibus One
4. Dragonskull Omnibus One
5. The Ghosts Omnibus Two
6. The Ghosts Omnibus Three
7. Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One
8. Ghost Exile Omnibus One
9. Cloak Mage Omnibus Three
10. Frostborn: The Shadow Prison: Frostborn, Book 15

 

So for audio, for my total revenue, 11.92% of it came from things that were newly published in 2025 and 88.08% came from things that had been published prior to 2025.

Now my top 10 selling print books:

1. The Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide - Second Edition
2. The Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide
3. The Ubuntu Beginner's Guide
4. Frostborn: The Gray Knight
5. Shield of Storms
6. Frostborn: The Master Thief
7. Shield of Darkness
8. Shield of Deception
9. Frostborn: The Shadow Prison
10. Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife

In terms of the percentages of my total print revenue, 5.57% came from things that have been published in 2025, but a whopping 94.43% came from stuff I published prior to 2025.

So those are the numbers and the sales percentages. Let's see what lessons we can learn from looking at this data. And so I thought of five lessons.

#1: My efforts in 2025 to focus up and focus on finishing series and then shift to just working on three series at a time really paid off.

For instance, my three bestselling ebooks for 2025 came from the Shield War Series (Shield of Deception, Shield of Battle, and Shield of Power). So very clearly it was a good idea to focus on that and it was also a good idea to focus on doing a new epic fantasy series like Blades of Ruin because Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows were number, let's see, number seven and nine on that list respectively, and that was after they were published only in the last quarter of 2025. For that matter, I think people were very excited that I finally managed to get back to the Cloak Mage series because Cloak of Worlds was the sixth bestselling book of the year, even though it came out in I believe October and Cloak of Illusion was a year old and it was still one of the 10 bestselling books of 2025 just because people were that eager for me to get back to the Cloak Mage Series.

Wizard Assassin, the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, didn't make the list, but the reason for that is very obvious. It only came out on December 23rd and if it had become one of the 10 bestselling books of 2025 in the remaining, what was it, eight days of 2025 at that point, that would've been nothing short of astonishing, but it sold very well. And I think when I do podcast episode for this at the end of 2026, then some of the Half-Elven Thief books will definitely be on the list. So my strategy of focusing on just three series at a time and having the big epic fantasy series like Blades of Ruin be the main series, and then I alternate between Cloak Mage and Half-Elven Thief every other month does seem to be the right strategy.

#2: The second lesson I think I learned is that it's good to have all your books in print if possible, but if you have nonfiction books, it's especially good for them to be in print because as you remember from the top 10, my top three bestselling print books of 2025 were The Windows Command Line, The Linux Command Line, and The Ubuntu Beginner’s Guides, which are all nonfiction books I wrote a very long time ago and put into print. If I remember right, Linux Command Line and Windows Command Line, both were from 2012, which is a disturbingly long time ago at this point, but they remain my two of my top three bestselling print books of 2025.

Obviously it's good to have all your books in print because you'll notice that several of my older fiction books and even one of my relatively newer fiction books (Shield of Storms) were all in the top 10 bestselling print list. But nonetheless, if you have nonfiction and you're selling nonfiction, I strongly recommend you get your nonfiction books into print because I think people are more likely to buy a nonfiction book in print than they are a fiction book. For fiction, it's only your absolute favorites that you get in print these days. I think the majority of what used to be the mass market paperback market has switched over to ebooks. But if you are reading nonfiction, trying to learn how to do something (and all three of these books are technical books), it's more likely that you're going to buy the print book but you keep it as a reference. So if you have a nonfiction, it's definitely a good idea to put it into print.

#3: I think the third thing I learned is that audiobook bundles very definitely pay off. You notice that of my top 10 audiobooks for 2025, 9 of the 10 were audiobook bundles, and I think we see the influence of Audible on the audiobook market there. If you're familiar with Audible, you know that most Audible subscription plans give you a credit every month (or more than one credit every month), which means that Audible listeners are very length conscious because they want to get the most audiobook possible for their monthly credit. So they're more likely to spend their monthly credit on the Ghost Omnibus One rather than getting Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Flames, and Ghost in the Blood individually because it's a much better bargain. There's much debate online in the indie author space about how much influence Audible has over the audiobook market, and many people argue that Audible has too much influence over the audiobook market, but the reality remains that Audible has a lot of influence on the audiobook market.

And so consequently, the longer the audiobook, the easier it is to sell. So if you have the opportunity to do audiobook bundles, it might be worth doing them. I think you'll find that selling an audiobook bundle is significantly easier than selling an individual audiobook. The best way to promote the audiobook is to promote the ebook. For example, this past week I had a BookBub feature deal for Cloak Mage Omnibus One that did very well (and thank you everyone for that) and it also boosted the audiobook quite a bit, to the point where that as of this recording January 23rd, 2026, Cloak Mage Omnibus One will be my bestselling audiobook for 2026 so far, we'll see how the rest of the year plays out, but I will continue to do audiobook bundles when feasible. And very clearly, this is an excellent way to market your audiobooks if you have the resources to do that, and you're willing to put the bundles on Audible. Not everyone is.

#4: The fourth lesson is that I basically misread the LitRPG market because if you'll remember Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, the last book in my Stealth and Spells Online trilogy, came out in July and it didn't crack the top 10. I don't think it even cracked the top 20, if I remember right, it was like my 24th, 25th maybe bestselling book of 2025, which means that a lot of older stuff sold quite a bit more than it did. In fact, I think Demonsouled Omnibus One and Demonsouled Omnibus Two both sold more copies and brought in more revenue than Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest did. Now, I think those are good books, the Stealth and Spells books, and I'm very grateful to everyone who enjoyed them.

But as I've said before, I think I fundamentally misread the LitRPG market because it's about a virtual reality game but the LitRPG market these days focuses mostly on isekai style stories or system apocalypse style stories, more things like on the verge of a Dungeon Crawler Carl than people playing a virtual reality game. This isn't to say that the genre of virtual reality online game can't be done well, it's just that I don't think I executed it well in terms of communicating it to potential readers. And as you might remember, it was originally entitled Sevenfold Sword Online, which just confused people because they thought it was connected to my Sevenfold Sword series.

So with all that, if I had to do it over again, I would not do a virtual reality LitRPG, I'd probably do a system one or an isekai one, but for now, I'm not going to think about that. I'm going to focus on my three unfinished series and not start a new unfinished series until I finish one of my three remaining unfinished series because as I learned in ‘23, ‘24, and ‘25, having five unfinished series at the same time is too many for both the writer and the reader. So if I ever return to the LitRPG genre and never say never, it will not be for a virtual reality online LitRPG.

#5: The fifth and final lesson I think I can learn from this is the combination of effort over time because I've been doing this for a long time, and the reason that in 2025, 70% of my ebook sales came from the backlist (and even more for print and audiobooks) is because I've been doing this for such a long time and my efforts have been compounding over that length of time.

For example, when I published Wizard-Assassin last month in December, the previous four books in the series in just the eight days of 2025 that were remaining sold like 600% more in December than they had in November, just from the boost provided by a new book. And again, that's only possible with the effort over time because of those four books hadn’t been there, then they wouldn't have been available to have that significant sales boost. So I think this just reflects that one of the hardest lessons of all is patience, because when we publish a book, we want it to immediately be a bestseller and make us lots of money and all that, but that usually doesn't happen. In fact, it hardly ever happens. What you really need to do is just keep slogging away, putting in the effort every day, writing your book, publishing a new one, and building up gradually over time.

And I think looking at these numbers for the last year, that the combination of effort over time and remaining patient is indeed the most valuable lesson I can learn and that all of us can learn from 2025. And I would like to conclude talking about this by saying a big thank you to everyone who bought an ebook, a print book, or an audiobook over this year. I'm very grateful for all of your readership, listening and reading, and obviously there'd be no point in doing all this if nobody was reading the books. So thank you again for reading and listening over 2025.

So that's 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 backup episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider leaving your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy. Please stay warm, and we will see you all next week.