The Pulp Writer Show
Hosted by Jonathan Moeller (author of the FROSTBORN and SEVENFOLD SWORD fantasy series and the SILENT ORDER scifi series), the Pulp Writer Show discusses how to write, format, publish, and sell your novel. Sometimes there are jokes.
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Episode 295: Five Bookbub Tips For Indie Authors
03/23/2026
Episode 295: Five Bookbub Tips For Indie Authors
In this week's episode, I share five tips for getting the most out of Bookbub Ads. This coupon code will get you 50% off the : THIEF50 The coupon code is valid through March 30, 2026. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 295 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 19th, 2026, and today we're looking at five tips for setting up BookBub ads for indie authors. We will also take a look at my current writing projects and do Coupon of the Week. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard-Thief, Book Two in the Half-Elven Thief series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That code is THIEF50. As always, you'll be able to see the coupon code and link to the Payhip store in my show notes. This coupon code will be valid until March 30th, 2026 so if you need a new audiobook this winter, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Progress has not been as fast on Blade of Wraiths as I would have liked just because I've had so much stuff in real life that has taken priority lately. I'm still at 73,000 words, which puts me on Chapter 12 of 21 in my outline, so I'm over halfway through the rough draft. As has often been the case recently, the final draft will have more chapters than the rough draft because I tend to write longer chapters but the readers prefer shorter chapters, so I will split the longer chapters into shorter chapters. The final draft will probably have around 30, maybe 35 chapters, depending on how I split things up. But based on my outline, I am over the halfway point, so that is a good feeling. I am also 8,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book of the Half-Elven Thief series with Rivah. I'm hoping I can get, despite delays, I'm hoping I can get Blade of Wraiths out in April and Dragon-Mage out in May, but we will see how the rest of this month goes. In audiobook news, Blade of Storms has finished recording (by Brad Wills), and it's a great audiobook. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you all. Currently, as of this recording, it is on Payhip, Google Play, and Kobo, but it should be showing up on the other audiobook stores before too much longer. Since Coupon of the Week was for Wizard-Thief, it's a good time to mention that Leanne Woodward is currently recording the fifth book in the series as an audiobook, Wizard-Assassin. We hope to have that out sometime in April, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:33 Main Topic of the Week: BookBub Ads For Indie Authors Now let's move on to our main topic this week, five tips for setting up BookBub ads for indie authors. Lately, I have been doing a lot more with BookBub ads than I have in the past because as I've mentioned before on the show, Facebook ads have declined in effectiveness and quality a great deal because there's so much AI slop on the platform and because Meta insists on putting the AI slop into the targeting of the ads, which makes them much, much less effective. Despite all the testing I've done since I stopped using Facebook ads in October, I have not gotten good results. I stopped using Facebook ads most of the time in October. I still occasionally do boosted posts for things like book announcements and maybe audiobook announcements, but the traditional targeted ad campaigns have become so much less effective with the Advantage Plus targeting that Meta uses. The idea behind that is that it bases the targeting off the ad off the text you put in the ad as opposed to letting you manually select targets. In theory, this sounds good. In practice, the targeting is just not good and doesn't work. So I've mostly stopped using Facebook ads and have switched more efforts to BookBub ads and Amazon ads, which is why we are talking about this now. So to start off, what are BookBub ads? BookBub is a book newsletter service that people sign up to receive in their email inbox. They can pick which categories they receive in the newsletter, such as romance, fantasy, science fiction, nonfiction, and so forth. The newsletter itself focuses on book deals or new releases and the bottom of each one has a small ad space that people can make a bid to be featured on. Unlike Facebook ads, for example, you're directly reaching an audience that wants ads about discounted books and are eager to learn about new releases and good deals, but let's be honest, mostly good deals. BookBub ads are a separate entity from BookBub Featured Deals. Anyone can make regular BookBub ads without being accepted like you have to for a Featured Deal. I'm not going to talk about the process of getting a Featured Deal in this episode, although I have been able to get them several times. Many people feel like BookBub ads aren't as effective as they once were, but I found that a good creative, the right targeting, and the right price can really make a big difference in how well an ad campaign does. For example, January when I set up this episode was the last month I had complete data for and for January, my four BookBub campaigns averaged a 2.89% click-through rate (with the highest one actually having a 4.2% click-through rate). For reference, BookBub has said that they consider 1.5 to 2% to be a good click-through rates on their platform. So with that in mind, here are a few things I've learned from my time doing BookBub ads. #1: Try Amazon ads first. I would recommend getting familiar with Amazon ads first before starting to use BookBub ads. Amazon ads are more forgiving. It's harder to overspend on them, and sometimes it feels like it's hard to get Amazon ads to spend at all. Amazon ads will give you important data on similar books and authors (often called comps) that you can use to build your BookBub ad campaigns when you do start them. It's also easier to get clicks on Amazon ads than BookBub ads. I recommend using both your Amazon ad and “Also Bought” data to make a list of at least 10 authors to use to target your BookBub ads, although you will probably not use all 10 in the same ad campaign. When you're choosing authors to target in your BookBub ads, you should also limit by genre as well, since many of your comp authors will write in multiple genres. Using myself as an example, I write fantasy, science fiction, and nonfiction books. Limiting by genre alone for your ads is too broad of a target, but the combination of similar authors and the right genre should narrow it down enough. BookBub currently provides a little too broad or too narrow feature on the page to help you find the right balance. #2: Get your pricing right. It must be a good deal. Your book needs to be on sale. The BookBub audience are first and foremost deal seekers. The most successful campaigns will feature either free or $0.99 books, but anything under $2.99 is the right price range. Do not advertise regular price books through BookBub ads, especially if the price is something like $9.99 or even above, even if the price at $9.99 is actually a good discount, like it's a cookbook or a technical manual, which tend to be more expensive. BookBub readers aren't very likely to be excited about that. This audience may even be annoyed to see books at those higher prices, even if it is a new release or a discount over the normal price. If your book is regular price but it is available in Kindle Unlimited, it's probably best to leave out the price information in your ad and focus exclusively on putting the Kindle Unlimited logo or language prominently in the creative. Obviously you want to limit your ads for this exclusively to Amazon. Many BookBub subscribers have Kindle Unlimited subscriptions so for those readers, that is even more of a draw to them as a discount would be since they can read the book at no additional cost to them since they already paid for their Kindle Unlimited subscription that month. #3: Try one ebook site for each campaign. Run your first campaign focusing on just one ebook site instead of running all of them at once in a campaign. For most people, that means picking Amazon or their home country's biggest ebook site. Limiting each campaign to just one ebook site will show you what platforms are the most effective for your ads and let you focus on how the clicks impact actual sales. #4: Don't go crazy on your bids. It doesn't make sense to make aggressive bids until you feel like you have your comps dialed in. Ignore the suggested amounts that BookBub provides and start small. Again, limiting to just one ebook site for each campaign is also a way to limit how much of the campaign budget gets spent, although it may still spend the full amount, especially if you've chosen Amazon. #5: Keep your campaigns short. People get tired of seeing the same ads, so it doesn't make sense to run a campaign for months on end. Limit each campaign to a bit less than a week. For myself, it's usually about four days that I'll run a BookBub ad and you'll generally see the best results on the first two days, usually the best results on the second day, and then diminishing returns but still decent on days three and four, and after that, it kind of flatlines. So I've found that generally, at least for my books, four days is about the best. Now we're going to talk about a slightly different topic, creating the creative for the image, which is the biggest part of the BookBub ad. First up, what do we mean by a creative? BookBub uses the term creative to describe the image that the readers will see as the ad. It's 300 by 250 pixels, so space is at a premium. Why is this important? In fact, it is very important because the creative is all that people see in the newsletter for your ad. It's a very small ad and it's important to get the images and information optimized so it looks nice and clear and the call to action (what the person should do to buy or read it) is very clear. So with that in mind, we'll give you five pieces of advice for setting up your creative. #1: The default is boring. BookBub does provide a default template for creating BookBub ads and it's serviceable and it works. It will also keep you from making any big mistakes like pixelated text. However, the default unfortunately is boring. It doesn't catch the eye, especially for longtime BookBub subscribers who have seen dozens, if not hundreds of ads in that style and format. Try using templates on sites like Book Brush or Canva to make your own creative instead. #2: Get the image right. Be sure to test that everything is legible and the image and the text both look sharp in the actual 300 by 250 pixel size of the creative. You should be using the highest resolution image that you can. The image should immediately signify what the genre is as well. Colors help a lot for this. For example, a gritty thriller can use darker colors or a cozy fantasy romance should use gentler colors like sage or lilac. It's not especially interesting to use just the book cover and the shape of a book cover, especially since that takes up at least half of the available space in the creative, if not more. Also, in a space that small, the text on the cover and any details in the image will probably be hard to see. Try experimenting with using other images besides the cover. As long as the creative conveys the genre and price, you can experiment a bit with the images you use. #3: The text matters. Don't waste space with reader reviews as the ads text. They take up too much space and they're not especially persuasive in an ad. Less is more. You have, at most, a very short sentence to describe the book's genre and the plot hook. It might be best to try out a few variations to see what works the best. #4: Clear call to action. As with any other ad, there needs to be a clear call to action. A “Free” or “Read on Kindle Unlimited” button gives people both the price and clear entry point for how to get the book. If the price is a limited time deal, that's a good thing to note in the ad with the word “sale” or “limited time deal”. That gives people a reason to click right away instead of telling themselves they'll click on it later, which to be honest, they will probably forget to do. #5: Change it up. It doesn't make sense to keep running the same creative over and over again. People will get bored of seeing the same thing, just like with any other ad. You can rotate between a set of creatives, but it doesn't work well to run the same one multiple times in a row for a long period of time. Just as a quick rule of thumb, I would say give yourself about three to four months before reusing a creative in an ad since that's usually enough time for people to have forgotten they've seen it before. Just like on YouTube, it might make sense to do A/B testing of images and text on an otherwise identical campaign to figure out if a different approach to the creative makes a difference. For example, you could try the same overall creative with different text or a different call to action. Likewise, if the campaign isn't doing well or is burning through money faster than you would like, you can always pause the campaign in your BookBub dashboard. It's okay to change your plan and to end your campaign early if it isn't working. So now let's talk a little bit what I actually do on BookBub. I advertise my Amazon Books on Amazon, and I use BookBub to advertise things on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple Books, because the competition for clicks for the other stores is much less fierce on BookBub than it is for Amazon. The cost of getting Amazon clicks on BookBub can be prohibitively expensive. The specific books I advertise are usually my permafree first in series ones like Frostborn: The Gray Knight, Child of the Ghosts, Sevenfold Sword: Champion, Cloak of Dragons and so forth, because it is very easy to advertise free books on BookBub because as we mentioned earlier, it is a discount ebook newsletter. What I usually do for the creative is I use Photoshop and Daz Studio to create a genre appropriate image. For example, for the Cloak Mage series, which is urban fantasy, it's usually Nadia wearing a leather jacket and casting a fireball in a dark alley at night. For the Frostborn series, it’s usually an armored warrior or wizard casting a spell. Then the text at the bottom says something like “free epic fantasy”, “free urban fantasy” or so forth. I typically work on these images in Photoshop at 3,000 by 2,500 pixels, so they're easier to see. Then once the image is done or I want to see how it looks, I dial it down to 300 by 250 to see how it looks in the appropriate size and make sure that it works. That approach works pretty well for me, as we mentioned earlier in the show. To sum it up, BookBub can still work for you as part of your overall advertising and marketing strategy, and to learn more about what ebook stores you might want to promote more based on their click-through rates of your ads. If you approach it cautiously and use the data from your ads to make changes on the go, you can still do pretty well on BookBub ads. So that is it for this week, and I hope you know a little bit more about BookBub ads now. Thanks 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 we'll see you all next week.
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Episode 294: Winter 2025/2026 Movie Review Roundup
03/16/2026
Episode 294: Winter 2025/2026 Movie Review Roundup
In this week's episode, I look back at the movies and streaming shows I watched over winter 2025/2026 Instead of Coupon of the Week, you can get SILENT ORDER: OMNIBUS ONE for free at my Payhip store at this link until March 31st: https://payhip.com/b/lhCyU TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 294 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 13th, 2026 and today we are looking at my movie and streaming TV show reviews for Winter 2025 and 2026. We'll also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Before we get into all that, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. Actually, we are not going to have Coupon of the Week this week because originally I scheduled a Coupon of the Week for Silent Order: Omnibus One to get you 25% off it. However, I was able to get a BookBub Featured Deal to give away Silent Order: Omnibus One for free on the 17th. So instead, the episode description will just have a link to where you can get Silent Order Omnibus One for free at my Payhip store. Next week, regular Coupon of the Week will return. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am about 51,000 words into Blade of Wraiths. I had hoped to be a little further at the end of this week, but there was quite a bit of real life stuff to do this week that took up a lot of time. I didn't make quite as much progress as I had hoped, but I did make some progress, so that's good. I'm still hoping to have the book out in April if all goes well, but we will see. I'm also 5,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series (six of nine planned). That hopefully will be out in May if all goes well. In audiobook news, the main recording on Blade of Storms (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is finished. Just have some proofing to do yet and then get through processing. Then hopefully the audiobook should be available on all platforms by next month. Recording is also underway for Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:00 Main Topic: Movie/TV Show Review Roundup Now let's move on to our main topic this week, my movie roundup. Spring is near, so it's time for my Winter 2025/ 2026 Movie Review Roundup. I admit this is a bit shorter than my usual movie roundups because for a couple of months I didn't see anything I really felt like writing about. Not in a bad way or depressed sort of way, but I just didn't see anything I felt interested enough to write about, whether good or bad. The new year brought new movies to watch and now we have enough for a Movie Review Roundup. As always, the movies and shows are in order from my least favorite to my most favorite. The reviews are based on nothing objective, but only my own thoughts and opinions. First up is Operation Fortune, which came out in 2023. This is a Guy Richie action comedy with Jason Statham in the lead, which probably describes all you need to know about it. Like if you say the phrase “Guy Richie Action Comedy with Jason Statham in the Lead”, this would be the movie that popped into your head. Statham plays Orson Fortune, an elite special forces operative. When a mysterious device is stolen by terrorists, the UK government sends Fortune to retrieve it. Fortune teams up with a group of specialists and then sets out to punch bad guys and save the day. Some good action sequences, some funny bits, and Hugh Grant was hilarious as the evil arms broker billionaire, but definitely a paint by number action movie. Enjoyable to watch, but nothing deep. Overall Grade: C Next up is Legend, which came out in 1985. This is a very weird movie told as sort of an '80s style dark fairy tale. The premise is that the Lord of Darkness wants to destroy all light (as lords of darkness are wont to do). But to do that, he needs to kill a pair of unicorns. He sends his goblin minions to do the deed. Meanwhile, Princess Lili is in love with Jack, a forest child who lives in harmony with various elves and dwarves and other natural creatures. When the goblins kill one of the unicorns and take the other back to Darkness's subterranean fortress, Jack and Lili have to team up to rescue the last unicorn and defeat Darkness. The creature work and all the puppets and suchlike look amazing. Poor Tim Curry delivered an excellent performance under that mountain of prosthetics he had to wear as Darkness. That said, I don't think Tom Cruise had quite learned how to act yet, and I'm afraid he kind of stood around with a blank expression most of the time. So I'd say Legend is an interesting fantasy classic, but definitely very niche. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Anaconda, which came out in 2025. This is a very meta, bonkers, and yet nonetheless entertaining comedy movie. It kind of went off the rails while shouting "WHEEEEEE" the entire time. College friends Doug, Griff, Claire, and Kenny are entering middle age and are all dissatisfied with how their lives have turned out. Doug wanted to be a director, but instead makes wedding videos. Griff is a struggling actor. Claire is a divorced lawyer and Kenny is a “Buffalo drunk (he only drinks beer and wine and just some, but not all of the hard liquors). When Griff acquires the rights to make the next movie in the Anaconda series, the four friends jump at the chance to make it as an indie film. Scraping together their savings, they set off for the Amazon to film their snake movie. However, they find themselves caught in the middle of a fight between illegal gold miners and the Brazilian government and there is an actual giant anaconda that is hunting both the gold miners and idealistic American filmmakers. This was very meta since the characters were making a movie in the Anaconda series…in a movie in the Anaconda series. Despite that, it was very funny and I enjoyed it, though it might be a bit too tongue in cheek for some viewers. Comedy, alas, is ever subjective. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Fackham Hall, which came out in 2025. Sometimes a movie is funny but dumb. Sometimes a movie is dumb but still funny, and sometimes a movie is just plain dumb. However, I'm pleased to report that Fackham Hall is the best of the three: funny, but dumb. It's a goofy but affectionate parody of Downton Abbey and the kind of movie that isn't afraid to make jokes simply for the sake of jokes. Interestingly, halfway through the movie takes the right hand turn and becomes a parody of an Agatha Christie novel. It was pretty funny in the vein of the Naked Gun or Airplane movies, though a few of the jokes might be too raunchy for some viewers. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Wrecking Crew, which came out in 2026. I would say this was one part buddy cop comedy, one part noir mystery, and one part John Wick style violence. When private investigator Walter Hale is killed by a hit and run in Hawaii, both his sons (by different mothers) conclude that it was murder. Straight laced James (played by Dave Bautista) is a Navy SEAL with a stable family life, while Maverick cop Johnny (played by Jason Momoa) is frequently drunk and on the outs and on the outs with his girlfriend. Nevertheless, both half-brothers independently realize that shady corporate interests killed their father and set out to find his killers. They must also deal with their complicated feelings with their father and overcome their deep seated resentment of each other. This was a pretty fun action movie, though the violence level is definitely John Wick level and might put off some viewers. Honestly, it made me wonder if there's a “Hawaiian Noir” mystery genre, the way that “Nordic Noir” novels were popular for a while. Overall Grade: B Next up is The Running Man, which came out in 2025. This is both very dark and very funny, and I think it was actually better than the original movie from the 1980s. It explores the same concept. Future America is a dystopia ruled by the Network megacorp and Glen Powell's character needs to get medicine for his daughter, but he can't afford it, so he tries out for the Network's cruel reality shows and lands a spot on the biggest one of all, The Running Man, where contestants have to stay alive and hidden for 30 days while they're hunted by mercenaries and the general public gets rewarded for informing on them. This definitely had strong Idiocracy vibes as well and the satire of contemporary American culture was very cutting and probably quite accurate. I do think this movie deserved better than to flop at the box office like it did, but perhaps it will have a long life on streaming. Overall Grade: B Next up is A Few Good Men, which came out in 1992. This is a high quality legal thriller carried by Tom Cruise’s and Jack Nicholson's performances. Today, Tom Cruise is largely famous for extreme stunts like driving a motorcycle cycle off a cliff (it did make for a good movie) and various personal eccentricities, but both he and Nicholson really can act and their scenes together are great. Sometime between this and Legend (which we talked about earlier), Cruise really figured out how to act on screen. Anyway, when a Marine is killed during a hazing ritual, Lieutenant Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise), is called in to investigate, aided by Lieutenant Commander Galloway (played by Demi Moore). Colonel Jessup (who was played by Nicholson), the commander of the Marines in question, wants to cover up what really happened, and Kaffee and Galloway set out to prove that the Marines charged with murder were in fact following orders when the hazing ritual went wrong. Of course, the movie hinges around Kaffee's and Jessup's final confrontation in the courtroom. I have a theory that all genres are in fact variants of fantasy. Like romance is the fantasy of true love, thrillers are the fantasy of violence and so forth. This movie would be the fantasy of the legal thriller, where the bad guy cracks on the stand. In real life, of course, when generals screw up, the privates, the NCOs, and the junior officers get thrown under the bus while the generals go on to cushy gigs at the Rand Corporation or Lockheed Martin. The strength of the performances makes the fantasy and therefore the movie work. Overall Grade: A Next up is The Paper, which came out in 2025. I ended up with a month of the Peacock streaming service, so I decided to give The Paper a try. It is a spinoff of the classic The Office [US] sitcom from the 2000 to 2010s. The premise is that failing paper company Dunder Mifflin from The Office has been purchased by a large conglomerate called Enervate. Enervate 's core business is toilet paper and other paper bathroom products, but they also own the Toledo Truth Teller (we'll refer to that as TTT) newspaper, and they use paper pulp that isn't good enough for toilet paper to print the paper. TTT is a regrettably normal local American newspaper in that it's mostly AP Wire articles and ads, with one reporter who covers local sporting events. Things start to change when Ned Sampson takes over as the new editor of TTT. Ned was formally Enervate's best toilet paper salesman, but he has a romantic view of journalism and wants to be a reporter. As a favor to him, the CEO lets him take over TTT. There he meets Mare Pritti, an Army vet in charge of the paper's layout who also wants to be a real journalist, and the two of them hit it off despite their immediate attraction. Ned has to navigate his coworkers (who range from useless to insane and useless to even more insane), corporate politics, rival bloggers, and his growing attraction to Mare. It was a pretty funny first season and I enjoyed it. There's allegedly going to be a second season, so if that happens, I will definitely watch. Overall Grade: A Next up is Conan the Barbarian, which came out in 1982. I actually saw this before like 15 years ago, but I saw it again at the end of February, so it's time to write about it. This is a very specific movie that deserves its status as a cult classic, and I do think it is better than Legend. It wasn't particularly faithful to any of the Conan stories, but it somehow did a good job of capturing the essence of the character. This was one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies. It might have even been his first one, though I'm not sure. He didn't quite have the whole acting thing down yet, so he played Conan as strong, stoic, and mostly silent, which worked quite well for the character. James Earl Jones was excellent as Thulsa Doom, the evil wizard and cult leader who is Conan's nemesis. I guess in the 1980s, if you wanted your fantasy or science fiction film to be successful, you needed your villain to be an armored figure either played by or voiced by James Earl Jones. The Riddle of Steel scene where Conan throws all Doom’s atrocities into his face and Doom goes, “ah” in the sense that, “yeah, I get why you want to kill me,” was great. The fight scenes and stunts are all the more impressive in hindsight because obviously they're all practical effects and efforts since CGI didn't exist yet, especially given the large number of horses in the movie, since no horses are notoriously very difficult to work with in film. I once heard an experienced rider say managing a horse is like managing a two year old, albeit a two year old that weighs a thousand pounds and is much stronger than you are. The soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is a classic and deservedly so. Like, modern day oligarchs come across less as dark lords and more like malevolent dorks because they travel by private jets and electric car and yachts and so forth. By contrast, Thulsa Doom thunders across the countryside with his Riders of Doom, accompanied by Basil Poledouris’s score with trumpets, drums, and choral parts. If you really want to be an intimidating bad guy, your entourage needs to be armored cavalry riders and you need a Basil Poledouris light motif. Conan the character sometimes gets stereotyped or dismissed as a masculine power fantasy (erroneously in my opinion), but the female characters in the movie are pretty good. Conan's mother faces off against the Riders of Doom by herself and Thulsa Doom himself has to use his mental magic to kill her. Prince's Yasmina is kind of the McGuffin of the movie, but she has a character arc as well where she turns against Doom and helps Conan to fight him. Compared to many ‘70s and ‘80s film heroines, Valeria was very good. For example, Lois Lane in the 1978 and 1980 Superman movies screams a lot and basically causes Superman to make a lot of bad decisions while being dead weight. By contrast, Valeria kills a bunch of bad guys with her sword, fists fights some evil spirits to save Conan, and then literally comes back from the dead as a Valkyrie to help Conan in the final battle with Thulsa Doom’s goons. So this is definitely worth watching as a cult classic of the fantasy genre, though it does have a lot of nudity even by the standards of ‘80s movies. Overall Grade: A Now for my favorite thing I saw in Winter 2025/ 2026, which was Wonder Man, which came out in 2026. I was surprised by how much I liked this. The main character is Simon Williams, who is a struggling actor in LA. He's a good actor, but he's also an enormous theater nerd with an encyclopedic knowledge of both film and theater, which means he tends to overthink his performances, to the exasperation of the director and crew, which gets him fired a lot. One day he meets Trevor Slattery, the highly eccentric British actor who unknowingly was recruited to play the fake Mandarin back in Iron Man 3. Trevor has since kicked drugs and alcohol and returned to his one true love, acting. He ends up taking Simon under his wing and together they set out to get auditions for Wonder Man, a remake of Simon's favorite superhero movie from when he was a kid. However, both Simon and Trevor have secrets. Simon is concealing actual superpowers since superpowered individuals are not allowed in major film and television productions for safety and legal reasons due to a hilarious side story involving Josh Gad. Trevor was actually recruited under the threat of returning to prison by the Department of Damage Control to spy on Simon since they suspect he has superpowers but can't prove it and they want to find enough evidence to arrest him. The tension of all these plot threads keeps ratcheting up until the final episode. Anyway, this was an excellent self-contained “ground level” Marvel story without a lot of callbacks or cameos or getting lost in the increasingly complex MCU continuity. The friendship between Simon and Trevor, two extremely eccentric actors, was both touching and hilarious. Overall Grade: A+ So those are the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter 2025 and 2026. So that's it for this week. Thank you for watching The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable and interesting. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes with transcripts at https://thepulpwritershow.com. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.
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Episode 293: Interconnected Series, Pros & Cons
03/09/2026
Episode 293: Interconnected Series, Pros & Cons
In this week we look at the advantages and disadvantages of writing interconnected series. This coupon code will get you 50% off the : ELVES50 The coupon code is valid through March 16, 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 293 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 6th, 2026. Today we are looking at interconnected series/whether they're a good idea or a bad idea for a writer to pursue. We also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on 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: Blade of the Elves, Book #3 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is ELVES50. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. The coupon code is valid through March the 16th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook as we head into spring, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. Cloak of Summoning is done and it is out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, Smashwords, and my own Payhip store. It has done quite well and actually got to number one in its category on Amazon US as of this recording, which is all the more impressive because on March 5th, the day my newsletter went out, Amazon US was down for a significant chunk of the afternoon. Despite that, that doesn't seem to have slowed down Cloak of Summoning any, and it is still going strong. So thank you all very much for that. And as I said, you can now get the book at all the ebook stores. Now that Cloak of Summoning is out and published, my main project is Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I'm currently 28,000 words into it. So I'm hoping if all goes well and nothing comes up, I can have that out sometime in April. My secondary project is Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series and I am 1,000 words into that. That will take over as my main project once Blade of Wraiths is done, and hopefully that will be out in May, if all goes well and nothing crazy happens. In audiobook news, Cloak of Titans, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, is now available at almost all the audiobook stores, including Audible, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, and the other major ones. So you can get that and listen to it at your audiobook store of choice. Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Storms, which was the third book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and he is about halfway through recording that. So hopefully we should have that out in April sometime, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. With that, let's move on to our main topic. 00:02:51 Main Topic of the Week: Interconnected Series Our main topic is today we're going to talk about whether interconnected series are a good thing or a bad thing. First of all, what are interconnected series? Interconnected series have different standalone stories, but share at least some characters and locations from previous series. Many of the ideas and themes carry over as well, but not always. Romance writers use interconnected series. A couple or couples featured in previous series make an appearance in a new place or with a new group of people. Author Abby Jimenez has characters in her romances occupy the same social orbit in Minnesota across multiple series (and of course, they all share a love of the author's real life Minnesota bakery, Nadia Cakes). There's something of a joke among romance writers that your series can be as long as you want it to be, just make sure that the heroine has a large number of single/unattached sisters so that after the heroine has their happily ever after, you can go one by one down through the sisters and make sure they find their love interests and that they too can have their happily ever afters and extend the series for as long as you want. One example of a non-romance interconnected series from books I've written would be Sevenfold Sword, which is a direct follow up to Frostborn. The new series involves Ridmark, Calliande, and the other characters from the Frostborn series, but they are in a new location with new allies, new adventures, and new adversaries. A reader could (and has) read the Sevenfold series without having read Frostborn, but Frostborn fans get more time with characters they like and there are nods to the previous series. I fully intended Sevenfold Sword to be a standalone series, but what I found is that people tend to start Sevenfold Sword and then go back and start Frostborn and read all of Frostborn and then proceed on to Sevenfold Sword. So in that sense, the interconnected series was successful because that led to sales of Frostborn that might not have happened otherwise. So with all that in mind and that introduction, here are four reasons interconnected series can help you as a writer. #1: Readers are already invested. Readers have already spent a substantial amount of time with these characters and places. They have formed a bond with them across the entire previous series and are excited to spend more time with them and find out more about them. Even a brief appearance from returning characters feels exciting to readers. A very recent example of this from pop culture is how the TV show The Paper used a character from the US version of The Office. Because audiences are familiar with the character of Oscar in Accounting (who is the only returning character thus far), they are interested in seeing what he's doing and why he's in Toledo instead of Scranton. Also, his reaction to seeing a documentary crew at work again is exactly what you expect that it would be and is a great moment of humor that perfectly fits the character's personality. The show does mention some small things from the previous series, like a quote from Michael Scott, but it's certainly not a classic spinoff and is very much its own creation, reflecting how both office culture and humor have changed a great deal in the over 20 years since the US Office first began airing. #2: You already are invested as the writer, if you are the one writing the interconnected series. Writers as well as readers can get invested in a set of characters in the world building in a certain series and they're excited to continue. This is especially true if you haven't yet concluded the character's external and internal conflict arcs, because I have found after 171 books that it is generally easier to write a character that has an ongoing conflict instead of one that has all of his or her conflicts resolved. It's also a bit easier to write in a series over the long term because in a certain sense it's less work because you don't have to create everything from scratch. Cloak of Summoning was the 14th Cloak Mage book, but counting Cloak Games, it is the 26th overall book with Nadia as the main protagonist. By now, I'm very familiar with how Nadia thinks and acts and what she would do in any given situation and the rules of her world and setting are very well established. And so in some sense that makes it easier to write because I don't have to create everything from scratch again in terms of the worldbuilding. It's also in some ways easier to generate the sort of enthusiastic energy to write the book because people are very frequently asking when the next Nadia book is going to come out. So that is heartening for morale, so to speak, as one is writing the book, the knowledge that people are actively waiting to read it once it is finally published. #3: You can use ideas you weren't able to in the previous series or expand on existing characters. It's often said that there are more ideas than time for a writer. Interconnected series lets you use some of the ideas that didn't make sense to use in a previous series and lets you build on the world you have already created. It's exciting to watch characters grow and see how familiar places evolve as time has passed. For example, my Blades of Ruin series returns to the world of Sevenfold Sword in the Kingdom of Owyllain, but a century has passed and the humans from the previous series have died of old age. How did the culture of Owyllain evolve and change in that length of time? How did changes in the monarchy create new problems and enable new enemies and how else did the world change? For example, Sevenfold Sword did not have goblins when I wrote it, but in the century since, the goblins that appeared in the Dragontiarna series have migrated to Owyllain and set up their own new kingdom on the borders. This also is something I explicitly did in Cloak of Summoning. In one of the previous books, I mentioned that $34 million was stolen from one of the organizations aligned with the protagonist, so that is the major plot hook for this book, trying to figure out who stole that money and why. In addition, I'm able to expand on several ideas from the previous books, such as the Forerunner, Grayhold, and some of the other characters and expand on them and use them in the book in a way I wasn't really able to in previous books. So being able to do that as a writer is very enjoyable. #4: A series is often easier to market. New series are famously much harder to market than a continuation or interconnected series. It's easier to hook people when there is some amount of familiarity involved. After all, after 171 books, I've started a few new series from scratch and it is definitely harder to get those off the ground than it is to do say, book seven in an ongoing series. Returning to the previous example of the show The Paper, there's a reason that Oscar was featured heavily in the trailers and the promotional materials for the news series, despite being really a secondary character in the show instead of a lead character. Featuring Oscar in the promotions for the new show was a great shorthand for what type and style of show The Paper was going to be, and it made people more interested in the new series than they might have been otherwise. Given that The Paper was apparently renewed for a second season and did well enough to merit a second season, I think that strategy paid off. However, having an interconnected series may be a disadvantage and it may cause you problems. So here are five potential pitfalls and problems to be managed. #1: Managing reader expectations. One thing that can make interconnected series difficult is when your new series diverges from the expectations that readers have based on the previous series. They might feel frustrated when a character has changed significantly and acts differently than they might have before, or if there was a conflict that does not meet the way that something might have happened in a previous series. This can be potentially tricky because for the series to work, for the stories to be interesting, the characters have to evolve and change and grow and experience setbacks, but at the same time, you don't want to drift too far from what drew readers to the series in the first place. I've had a couple of times in my own series when people were not happy about specific plot points in Frostborn or Sevenfold Sword or Silent Order or The Ghosts or Cloak Mage. I think there are two ways to look at that. The first way is what you don't want to do, and this would be an example of what you should avoid. There's a story I read about a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master who had been running a campaign with his players for two years and it all had the same characters and all the characters had leveled up together, but one of the players was moving away to a new part of the country. So at the last session, the player character in question decided to murder all the other players as he left (their characters rather, not real life murder, of course). Just because he could, just because he felt like being a jerk. That would be the very extreme end of what you do not want to do. It's best to never act out of spite. The better version of that is if you are writing a long series and you have a clear artistic vision about what you want to happen with it, in terms of character development or major plot events or even major characters who get killed, it's best to stick to that and not waffle. Yes, you are going to tick off some people. That is essentially inevitable. If you are going to write something, no matter what you write, it's going to annoy somebody, but it's best to have a clear artistic vision and stick to it. And if you do have dramatic plot developments, it's best to establish them well in advance and then to deal with the consequences as well, because you want to avoid as much “handwavium” as possible. So I think the key to managing reader expectations is to be as transparent as possible. I've had people asking me for the next Cloak Mage book already, even though the new one's only been out for like two days and I've said repeatedly that I'll probably start working on it in May once Dragon-Mage becomes my main project and to also be as reasonable as possible in the writing in terms of making sure everything makes sense as you write it. #2: A second disadvantage is that you may need to help the reader in terms of glossaries, summaries, character lists, et cetera. If a series continues characters, plots, and locations from a previous series, it can be helpful to provide glossaries, plot summaries, or character lists to help refresh their memories or to explain something to a reader who has not read the previous series. Although an interconnected series should largely stand on its own as much as possible, people still feel slighted if there's a reference to something they don't remember or know. In my own books, I have often included a footnote if a reference contains a plot point from a previous book. I've done this in Ghost Armor, Shield War, and Cloak Mage a couple of times, though I haven't done it in Blades of Ruin because it's set a century after the other books. People have responded favorably to those, though I have to admit Cloak of Summoning doesn't have any just because I simply forgot to do them. So I may need to remind myself to do that once we get to Cloak of Frost. But people have responded well to that. I've also done glossaries of characters and glossaries of locations at the end of, let's see, Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, The Shield War, and Ghost Armor and people found those helpful. I may do that for other series if they get long enough to require it. I have seen some authors include summaries of previous books at the start of their new books. I've even seen some traditionally published books that do that as well. I've never done that. I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I feel like the book should stand as much on its own as possible. If you need to include the summary at the beginning, there might be something wrong, but on the other hand, some people do like those and do find them helpful. So I think that may come to a “your mileage may vary” experience. #3: The potential disadvantage number three would be adding new characters and evolving old ones. The danger of an interconnected series with a new cast of characters is that readers may not like the new ones as much or they feel cheated that their favorite characters are not there. Having at least one character return gives the reader an audience and anchor while they meet the new characters. It's important to evolve returning characters, but it's also a fine balance to make sure they don't change in a way that's forced or artificial. The famously bad examples of this are the legacy characters in the Star Wars sequel trilogy where the filmmakers made Luke and Han into Sad Old Losers just to make the new characters look better by comparison and that did not work out so well in terms of the movie's reception. The personality needs to reflect what is happening in the new series without sacrificing what readers like best about them from the previous series, which seems to be what happened in the Star Wars sequels. Returning again to The Paper, if Oscar had suddenly become a cheery and high energy middle manager instead of remaining true to his original personality of a slightly prickly and judgmental accountant, it wouldn't have felt true to viewers of The Office who spent nearly a decade with that character. Instead, he remains pretty close to what viewers remember, cautious based on his previous experience with the documentary film crew at work and as the first season goes on, philosophical about the passage of time and his relationship with the documentary crew who have been part of his life for so long, which is a good example of character evolution. I actually think the recent Ghostbusters movies are also a good example of that where the focus is on the new characters, but the legacy characters from the original Ghostbusters movies return and they act as sort of a mentors and sort of guiding authority figures for the new characters. #4: A fourth potential difficulty is gaining new readers with an interconnected series. Many readers have been burned by interconnected series that claim to be standalone, but as they are reading it, they feel lost in allusions to prior events or feel like they're missing information. It's important that even interconnected series stands on its own for readers and that references to the past book actively serve the plot of the current one. Many readers are also completionists and will want to start interconnected series from the first possible starting point. And I've already talked about that with Frostborn and Sevenfold Sword, which makes them less likely to start an interconnected series since they're possibly committing to a huge multiple series at once. #5: And that leads to the fifth and possibly the most serious disadvantage of a long interconnected series like that, what I've called before Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome. I've done a previous podcast episode on what I call Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome, which refers to the MCU movies. Essentially, a series of interconnected series can go on for so long and reference so many things that it feels daunting for someone to start. The idea of having to catch up or doing homework on dozens of items in order to watch or read something is unbearable for a lot of busy people and most people's memories can't sustain a few decades of content like the Marvel Cinematic Universe now has. This is one reason, in fact, it's probably the main reason that I started the Half Elven Thief series because of Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome. I had written Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull and The Shield War. This is this long interconnected series, but I was worried that Marvel Continuity Lockout was affecting its ability to draw in new readers. So I started Half-Elven Thief, which is completely separate and new, and it's done quite well, and I think partly because it doesn't have the sheer daunting scale of someone looking at over 50 connected books set in Andomhaim and Owyllain. To mitigate this as much as possible, I think it's best to make absolutely sure that references to the past series are only necessary for driving the plot of the current one, and that they don't make the story unnecessarily complicated. You can avoid this by following the good rules of story structure. Make sure the protagonist of the book has an interesting conflict that they have to struggle to overcome, and that the central point of the conflict isn't references to past books. So to sum up, interconnected series...
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Episode 292: The Four Thomases Of The English Reformation (with one bonus Thomas!)
03/02/2026
Episode 292: The Four Thomases Of The English Reformation (with one bonus Thomas!)
In this week's episode, I take a historical digression to look at the four major Thomases of the English Reformation - Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : QUEST25 The coupon code is valid through March 9 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 292 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 27th, 2026. Today we are taking a digression into history by looking at the four Thomases of the English Reformation (with one bonus Thomas). We'll also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing and publishing projects. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragonskull series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is QUEST25 and as always, the links to the store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code is valid through March 9th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook 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 Cloak of Summoning. As of this recording, I am 35% of the way through the final editing pass. This episode should be coming out on, let's see, March the 2nd. I'm hoping Cloak of Summoning will be available a few days (hopefully like one or two days) after this episode goes live, but we'll see how things go. In any event, it should be out in very early March, which is not far away at this point. I'm also 14,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. Hopefully that will be out in April, if all goes well. That's my secondary project right now, but once it gets promoted to primary project once Cloak of Summoning is available, my new secondary project will be Dragon Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. I'm looking forward to that since it is going to bring to an end a lot of ongoing plot threads. So it should be quite a fun book to write and hopefully to read. That should hopefully be out in May or possibly June, depending on how things go. In audiobook news, Cloak of Titans, the audiobook narrated by Hollis McCarthy, should be available in more audiobook stores than it was this time last week, though it's still not on Amazon, Audible, or Apple. Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Storms and I think the first six chapters are done. Hopefully we should have those audiobooks available to you before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:18 Main Topic: The Four Thomases of the English Reformation Now without further ado, let's get to our main topic and it's time for another of my favorite topics overall, a digression into obscure points of history. I've mentioned before that Wolf Hall (both the TV show and the book) is a lot easier to understand if you are at least passingly familiar with the key figures of the English Reformation, which happened during the reign of King Henry VIII. But who were these key figures? I had a history professor who said that to understand the English Reformation, you need to know about the four Thomases of the English Reformation: Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer, since each one of them altered events in a major way. Fun fact: only one of the four died from natural causes and right before he was about to go on trial for treason, which would have likely ended with his execution. The English Reformation was a tumultuous time and the Tudor court was not a place for the faint of heart or the morally scrupulous. So let's talk about the four Thomases and one bonus Thomas today. But first to understand them, we should look at three background trends that converged and boiled over during their lifetimes. #1: Henry VIII needs an heir. King Henry VIII was quite famously married six times and executed two of his wives in his quest for a male heir. To the modern era, this sounds odd and chauvinistic, but one of the errors of studying history is assuming that the residents of the past had any interest in 21st century standards of behavior. By the standards of Henry's time, having a male heir to assume the kingdom after his death was absolutely vital. In fact, an argument could be made that Henry was attempting to act responsibly by going to such lengths to father a male heir, though naturally he went about it in a spectacularly destructive and self-absorbed way. Remember, Henry's father, Henry VII, came to the throne after a 30-year civil war, and there were noble families that thought they had a better claim to the throne than Tudors and would be happy to exercise it. A good comparison is that the lack of a male heir for Henry VIII was as serious a crisis as a disputed presidential election in 21st century America would be. You can see evidence for this in Henry's famous jousting accident in 1536. For a few hours, people were certain that he was dead or was about to die, and this incident caused a brief constitutional crisis. If Henry died, who would rule? His daughter, Mary, who he had just declared a bastard? His young daughter Elizabeth from Anne Boleyn? His bastard son, Henry FitzRoy? A regent? One of the old families who thought they had a claim to the throne? Now, these are the sort of questions that tend to get decided by civil wars, which nobody wanted. So Henry needed a male heir and it weighed on him as a personal failure that he had been unable to produce one, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons he concluded that several of his marriages had been cursed by God and needed to be annulled. Though, of course, one of Henry's defining traits was that his self-absorption was such that nothing was ever his fault, but a failing of those around him. #2: The Reformation is here. At the same time Henry was beginning to have his difficulties, the Protestant Reformation exploded across Europe. The reasons for the Reformation were manifold. There was a growing feeling across all levels of society that the church was corrupt and more concerned about money than tending to Christ's flock, a feeling not helped by the fact that several of the 15th and 16th century popes were essentially Renaissance princelings more interested in luxury, money, and expanding the power of the papal states than in anything spiritual. Many bishops, archbishops, abbots, and other high prelates acted the same way. The situation the early 16th century church found itself in was similar to American higher education today. Many modern professors and administrators go about their jobs quietly, competently, and diligently, but if you want to find examples of corruption, folly, and egregious waste in American higher education, you don't have to try very hard. Reformers could easily find manifold examples of clerical and papal corruption to reinforce their arguments. Additionally, nationalism was beginning to develop as a concept, as was the idea of the nation state. People in England, Scotland, Germany, and other countries began to wonder why they were paying tithes to the church that went to build beautiful buildings in Rome and support the lavish lifestyle of the papal court when that money might be better spent at home. For that matter, the anti-clericalism of the Reformation was not new and had time to mature. At the end of the 14th century, Lollardy was a proto-Protestant movement in England that challenged clerical power. In the early 15th century, the Hussite wars in Bohemia following the teachings of Jan Hus were a preview of the greater Reformation to come. Papal authority had been severely damaged by the Great Schism at the end of the 14th and the start of the 15th century when two competing popes (later expanded to three) all tried to excommunicate each other and claim control of the church. In the aftermath, Renaissance Humanists had begun suggesting that only the Bible was the proper source and guide for Christianity, and that papal authority and many of the church's practices were merely human traditions that had been added later and were not ordained by God. A lot of the arguments of the Reformation had their earliest form from the writers of the 15th century. Essentially, the central argument of the Reformation was that the believer's personal relationship with God is the important part of Christianity and doesn't need to be mediated through ordained priests in the official sacraments of the church, though such things were still important. Of course, all the various reformers disagreed with each other about just how important and what the nature of that relationship was, how many sacraments there should be, and what the precise relationship between the individual, the church, and the state should be (and that argument got entangled with many other issues like nationalism), but that was a central crux of the Reformation. So all these competing pressures have been building up, and when Martin Luther posted his statements for debate on church reform in October of 1517, it was the equivalent of lighting a match in a barn that had been stuffed full of sawdust and was suffering from a natural gas leak. #3: The printing press. So why did Luther's action kick off the Reformation as we know it and not the other proto-Protestant movements we mentioned? I think the big part of that is the printing pass, perhaps the biggest part. The printing press did not exist during the early proto-Protestant movements, which meant it was a lot harder for the ideas of reform to spread quickly. The Lollards in particular wanted to translate the Bible into English instead of Latin, but the Bible is a big book and that is a lot of copying to do by hand. In 1539, after a lot of encouragement from Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII decreed that an English Bible should be placed at every church in England. In 1339, that would have been an impossible amount of copying by scribes. In 1539, thanks to the printing press, it was essentially on the scale of the government embarking on a mid-sized industrial project, perhaps a bit of a logistical and organizational challenge and you have to deal with contractors, but by no means impossible. The printing press made it possible for the various arguments and pamphlets of the Reformers to spread quickly throughout Europe. Luther published tracts on a variety of religious and political topics for the rest of his life, and those tracks were copied, printed, and sold throughout Europe. In fact, he had something of a flame war with Thomas More over Henry VIII's “Defense of the Seven Sacraments”. Kings and governments frequently tried to suppress printers they didn't like, but the cat was out of the bag and the printing press helped drive the Reformation by spreading its ideas faster than had previously been possible. AI bros occasionally compare modern large language model AIs to the printing press as an irreversible technological advancement, but one should note that the printing press of the 16th century did not require an entire US state's worth of electricity and an unlimited supply of water. So those were some of the undercurrents and trends leading up to the English Reformation. With that in mind, let's take a look at our four Thomases. #1: Thomas Wolsey. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was Henry's right hand man during the first 20 years of his reign and essentially the practical ruler of England during that time. He started his career in Henry's reign as the almoner, essentially in charge of charity, and it ended up becoming the Lord Chancellor of England. Since Henry was not super interested in actually doing the hard work of government, Wolsey ended up essentially running the country while Henry turned his full enthusiasm towards the more ceremonial aspects of kingship. Wolsey was an example of the kind of early 16th Century church prelate we mentioned above, more of a Renaissance princeling than a priest. However, as Renaissance princelings went, you could do worse than to have been ruled by someone like Wolsey. And if you were a king, you would be blessed to have a lieutenant as diligent in his work as the Cardinal. Granted, Wolsey did amass a large fortune for himself, but he frequently patronized the arts, education and the poor, pursued some governmental reforms, and deftly maintained England's position in the turbulent diplomacy of the time. He was also much more forgiving in questions of religious dissent than someone like Thomas More. Wolsey was the most powerful man in England at his apex, and the nobility hated it for him because his origins were common. So long as he had Henry's favor, Wolsey was untouchable and the nobility couldn't move against him. But the royal favor came to an end as Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon was unable to produce a son. Since Catherine had previously (and briefly) been married to his older brother Arthur before Arthur's death, Henry became convinced (or succeeded in convincing himself) that his marriage was cursed by God for violating the prohibition against sleeping with your brother's wife in the book of Leviticus. His eye had already fallen on Anne Boleyn and Henry wanted an annulment and not a divorce in his marriage with Catherine. In the eyes of God, he would never have been married at all, and then he could marry Anne Boleyn with a clear conscience. Here, Wolsey's gift for diplomacy failed him, but perhaps it was an impossible task. Catherine of Aragon was the aunt of Emperor Charles V, who at the time was the most powerful man in Christendom. All of Wolseley's efforts to persuade the pope to annul the marriage failed, partly because the pope had already given Henry VIII dispensation to marry his brother's widow. Wolsey's failure eroded his support with the king. Anne Boleyn likewise hated Wolsey partly because she believed he was hindering the annulment, and partly because he had blocked her from marrying the Earl of Northumberland years before she had her eyes set upon Henry. Finally, Henry stripped Wolsey of his office of Lord Chancellor, and Wolsey retired to York to take up his role as archbishop there. Wolsey's popularity threatened Henry and Anne, so Henry summoned him back to London to face treason charges. Perhaps fortunately for Wolsey, he died of natural causes on the journey back to London. His replacement as Lord Chancellor was Thomas More, the next of our major for Thomases. #2: Thomas More. More was an interesting contrast-a Renaissance Humanist who remained a staunch Catholic, even though Renaissance Humanists in general tended towards proto-Protestantism or actual Protestantism. He was also in some ways oddly progressive for his time. He insisted on educating his daughters at a time was considered pointless to educate women about anything other than the practical business of household management. Anyway, More’s training as a lawyer and a scholar led him to a career in government. He held a variety of posts under Henry VIII, finally rising to become the Lord Chancellor after Wolsey. In the first decades of his brain, Henry was staunchly Catholic and despised Protestantism, in particular, Lutheranism in general and Martin Luther in particular. In 1521, Henry published “Defense of the Seven Sacraments” against Luther, and More helped him write it to an unknown degree. In their dislike for all forms of Protestantism, More and Henry were in harmony at this point. More was involved in hunting down heretics (i.e. Protestants) and trying to convince them to recant. During his time as the Lord Chancellor, More ended up sending six people to be burned at the stake for heresy, along with the arrest and interrogations of numerous others. This rather clashes with his “humanist man of letters” aspect, but More was undoubtedly convinced he was doing the right thing. And while he might have believed in education, he most definitely did not believe in freedom of conscience in several areas. To be fair to More, in the view of many at the time, Protestants, especially Anabaptists, were dangerous radicals. Likely More viewed hunting heretics in the same way as some modern politicians view hunting down covert terrorist cells or surveilling potential domestic terrorists. Harsh measures true, but harsh measures allegedly necessary for the greater good of the nation. However, the concord between More and Henry would not last. Henry wanted to set aside Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, which More staunchly opposed. More especially opposed Henry breaking away from Rome and becoming head of an independent English Church. At first, More was able to save himself by maintaining his silence, but eventually Henry required all of his subjects take an oath affirming his status as head of the church. Thomas Cromwell famously led a deputation to try and change More's mind, but he failed. More refused, he was tried on specious treason charges, and beheaded in 1535. Later, the Catholic church declared him the patron saint of politicians. This might seem odd given that he oversaw executions and essentially did thought police stuff against Protestants, but let's be honest-it's rare to see a politician even mildly inconvenience himself over a point of principle, let alone maintain it until death when he was given every possible chance to change his mind. Probably the most famous fictional portrayals of More are A Man For All Seasons and Wolf Hall. I would say that A Man For All Seasons was far too generous to More, but Wolf Hall was too harsh. #3: Now for the third of our four Thomases, Thomas Cromwell. After Wolsey’s fall and More's refusal to support Henry's desire to either annul his marriage to Catherine or to make himself head with the church so he couldn't annul the marriage, Thomas Cromwell rose become Henry's new chief lieutenant. Cromwell is both a fascinating but divisive figure. For a long time, he was cast as the villain in Thomas More's saga, but Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall really triggered a popular reevaluation of him. Like A Man For All Seasons was too generous to More, I would say Wolf Hall was too generous to Cromwell. Nonetheless, I suspect Cromwell was and remained so divisive because he was so effective. He got things done on a scale that the other three Thomases of the English Reformation never quite managed. Cromwell's origins are a bit obscure. It seems he was either of non-noble birth or very low gentry birth and his father Walter Cromwell was a local prosperous tradesman in a jack of all trades with a reputation for litigiousness. For reasons that are unclear, Cromwell fled his birthplace and spent some time in continental Europe, possibly as a mercenary soldier. He eventually made his way to Italy and started working for the merchant families there, gaining knowledge of trade in the law, and then traveled to the Low Countries. When he returned to England, he became Cardinal Wolsey's right hand man. After Wolsey's fall, Cromwell went into Parliament and defended his master whenever possible. This loyalty combined with his significant talent for law and administration caught the eye of Henry and he swiftly became Henry's right-hand man. Amusingly, Cromwell never became Lord Chancellor like More or Wolsey, but instead accumulated many lesser offices that essentially allowed him to carry out Henry's directives as he saw a fit. Unlike More and Wolsey, Cromwell had strong Protestant leanings and he encouraged the king to break away from the Catholic Church and take control of the English Church as its supreme head. Henry did so. His marriage to Catherine of Aragon was nulled. The rest of Europe never accepted this until Catherine died of illness and it became a moot point. In 1533, he married Anne Boleyn. Like Cromwell, Anne...
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Episode 291: Generative AI Overhype, William Miller, and the Great Disappointment
02/23/2026
Episode 291: Generative AI Overhype, William Miller, and the Great Disappointment
In this week's episode, we take a look at hysteria over AI, and compare it to past religious movements like William Miller's Great Disappointment. This coupon code will get you 50% off the : RIVAH50 The coupon code is valid through March 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 291 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 28th, 2026, and today we're looking at AI hysteria and whether or not AI gives any actual benefits to people. We also have Coupon of the Week, progress updates on my current writing projects, and also Question the Week, where we talk to people about AI. But first, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is RIVAH50. This coupon code will be valid through March 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook as we exit winter and come into spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Cloak of Summoning is done. It turned out to be just about as long as Cloak of Worlds, maybe a thousand words shorter. I am about 20% through the first round of editing, and I am hopeful that that book will be out sometime in March, probably the first week of March if all go as well. I've also written a short story called Dragon Claw that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook format when Cloak of Summoning comes out, which as I said will hopefully be in early March. I'm also 11,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will be my main project once Cloak of Summoning is published. In audiobook news, the audiobook of Blade of Shadows (as narrated by Brad Wills) is now out at almost all the stores, so you can get it at Audible, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and the other main stores. Cloak of Titans (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is done and is currently rolling out to the stores. I think as of right now, you can get it at Google Play, Kobo, and my own Payhip store, but it should be showing up on Audible and the other main stores before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:01:56 Question of the Week Now let's move on to Question of the Week. For the first Question of the Week of 2026 and this week's question: have you personally derived any benefits or experienced any negatives from the rise of generative AI? And this question was inspired by the topic of this week's post, obviously enough since we're talking about AI. I should note that this is a contentious topic with divergent opinions, and so I asked people to remain civil in the comments and they definitely were, so thank you for everyone for that. Now let's have some opinions on AI before I tell you how AI has positively and mostly negatively affected my life. Joachim says: I have not used AI for private purposes. My Con: My Chromebook might be obsolete rather sooner than later. In my company, we use an AI, which is helpful. It has all the knowledge articles, so you can ask, how do I do this or that? The company's Con: laptop prices are going up. Eddie says: My Cons are much the same as yours. My Pros are using it to create images for tabletop games to help players visualize monsters and NPCs. I have found it effective in turning voice to text meeting notes into meeting minutes and actions. Jesse says: Software engineer here. I have found it helpful when I'm working on something in a language I'm not as familiar with the syntax. As a “how I might do this” learning tool, it's not bad. As a “do this for me/vibe code” thing, no thanks…too much trust. John says: Yes and no. I was in an AI startup that stopped paying me and my team for two months then let us go. We're currently suing them for back pay, but the tech worked and is still working. I also work in ad tech. Devs are trying to get more productive using AI tools. It's hit and miss as far as I can tell, but using traditional machine learning and data science to optimize marketing has worked for decades and still works, but that's not what people consider to be AI nowadays. Also drove across the country last August and used ChatGPT to plan my trip, and that works splendidly. I think John might win here for largest negative in his comment though, to be fair, that's more for business reasons than for AI itself, though I, for his sake, I'm pleased he was able to use ChatGPT to plan his drive across the country and ChatGPT didn't send him driving off a cliff someplace. Jenny says: I'm so over everyone trying to push this “solution” on me. It's like protein enhanced foods. Stop trying to put protein and AI into everything. Just put it where it makes sense or let me choose it. My negative experiences far outweigh anything helpful. Jimmy says: I have quit using Google search. It never tried to find the answer that I asked for. It just returned what it felt like. Its answers usually matched the paid ads it led the list with. Rob says: Okay for meeting notes and rough drafting for job applications, et cetera. Other than that, seems to have limited use for me personally and is a nuisance on my phone, internet browser, et cetera. And finally, Randy says: my biggest Con is that the AI answers that pop up when I'm trying to search range between inaccurate and dangerously wrong. I suspect many people don't realize they aren't reading actual data when they see them. So thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts on that. For myself, I've mostly experienced negative things with AI and a few positive things though to be honest, both the positive and negative things were relatively minor in the greater scheme of things. So I shall list off the Pros and Cons of my experiences with generative AI. I should mention that none of my books, short stories, for sale audiobooks, or book covers contain any AI elements. If it says Jonathan Moeller on the cover and it's not on YouTube, then it is 100% human made. Now, the Pros and Cons. The Pros: Power Director 365, the video editing program I use for YouTube, has an “animated by AI” feature so I've used it to animate some of my book covers for use of Facebook ads with middling results at best. I used Google's Voice AI stuff to create AI voice versions of the Silent Order books and then put them on YouTube because I wanted to understand the technology. I'm not planning to ever do actual audiobook versions of Silent Order since they wouldn't make back any money, so I wasn't screwing a narrator out of work and the voices involved were licensed by Google, so there was no copyright infringement the way there is with companies like Anthropic. That said, I suspect this is less generative AI and simply a more advanced text to speech technology, which has been around forever. I mean, you could do text to speech back on the earliest versions of the Macintosh. I mean, ideally, I would like text to speech to just be a button in your ereader app of choice for accessibility reasons, and then you can purchase the audiobook if the text to speech was too bland. Overall, a lot of people listen to the AI versions on YouTube, but the listeners mostly complained about the synthetic voice and would've preferred a real narrator, unsurprisingly. Now onto the Cons. Facebook ads went from very effective to middling at best on a good day, thanks to their Advantage Plus AI. I am constantly bombarded by AI generated scam emails of several different varieties. I deleted twelve before I recorded this. The price of Microsoft Office went up, the price for RAM and GPUs went up due to data center hoarding them all. The price for electricity has gone up. Windows 11 and Microsoft Office’s performance has gone down quite a bit due to forced AI integration. In fact, I got so annoyed at Windows 11, I switched to writing on a Mac Mini, which I suppose was a positive because I like the Mac Mini, but still. Google Search and all Google products in general are much less useful because of AI and the quality of information on the internet (already low) has gone down quite a bit due to the prevalence of AI slop. Admittedly, neither these Pros or Cons are majorly serious to me personally (with the possible exception of electricity prices going up), but the Cons definitely outweigh the Pros. I can confidently say I have derived no real benefit from generative AI, and I suspect a lot of other people could say the same, if they're honest. 00:07:27 Main Topic of the Week: William Miller, The Great Disappointment, and AI Now onto our related main topic this week, AI hysteria, William Miller, and The Great Disappointment. This past week there were numerous articles from and interviews with various AI bros saying that within 12 to 18 months, AI will replace white collar work and humanity must simply adjust. When I read these articles, I wasn't reminded of the Singularity, of AI, of Skynet and the Terminator, or anything technological. Instead, I thought of a preacher named William Miller who died about 190 years ago. William Miller came out of the Second Great Awakening, which was one of the waves of religious vitality and furor that grip America every so often. Miller almost died in combat as an officer in the War of 1812, and saw one of his men killed in front of him, which understandably left a lasting impression. His experiences led him to an examination of mortality that resulted in a fervent Baptist conversion. He also became convinced that he could calculate the date of Christ's return from the Bible and decided that Jesus Christ would return on October 22nd, 1844. By then, he had a substantial following, and on the day his followers gathered in their churches to await the End of Days and the judging of the living and the dead, many of them having already given away their possessions, but nothing happened. Miller's movement collapsed and most of his followers abandoned their beliefs, though some splinter groups eventually involved into the Adventist branch of American Protestantism, of which the Seventh Day Adventists are the most prominent. Nowadays, when Miller is discussed online, the usual tone is to laugh at the religious rubes from the benighted past, so unlike us enlightened and savvy moderns. But I think the truth is that Miller succumbed to a universal human impulse. Every generation thinks that it is going to be the last generation or the generation that will see the culmination of history, whether they're viewing that through a religious lens or a secular lens. For example, when I was in my early twenties, I knew a very religious woman my own age, who was convinced that the world had become so wicked that it would end by the time she was 30. A few years later, I met another woman who thought global warming would ensure the collapse of the ecosystem and the end of the food chain by the time we were 30. However, I have not been 30 for a rather long span of time now, and for better or for worse, the world grinds on. Nor is this an impulse limited to my own generation. People who came of age during the Cold War thought the world would end in nuclear fire during their lifetimes and a little after that from global cooling. Lesser examples could be seen in the Y2K scare in 2000. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, it was common for peasant revolts to be led by charismatic preachers who predicted that soon all thrones would be overthrown and Christ would return to judge the living and the dead. Because of all these examples, I'm certain there is a universal human impulse to believe that the world will end in our lifetimes. I think this comes partly from a combination of fear and hope, fear of the future and the end of the world and hope that one's life will be lifted out of the mundane in the final fulfillment of history. You don't have to get up and go to school or work tomorrow if the world ends, but the truth is that the world is most likely not going to end, and you and I are probably going to have to get up and go to work tomorrow. I think the hyperbole about AI comes from that same sort of apocalyptic impulse, this idea that one is living to see and participating in the apotheosis of history when what one is in fact doing is using a money losing chatbot that frequently gets things wrong. To be clear, AI isn't going to wipe out white collar work, and it isn't going to cause the collapse of society, though like cryptocurrency, it will cause a lot of harm without very much benefit. AI simply isn't good enough and doesn't do what does boosters say that it can do. There are numerous people who, in my opinion, are accurately explaining and pointing out the many flaws in AI and in the economic bubble it has created, just as there were people who predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot-com bubble, the housing bubble, the criminal activities of FTX and the flaws of cryptocurrency, and were frequently derided as cranks until subsequent events prove them right. So why all the hyperbole around AI? I think part of it is the end of days impulse we discussed above. The rest of it, I'm afraid, is simple crass desire for money and power. Why are all these tech companies burning unfathomable sums of money on AI when it's obvious, painfully obvious, that the bubble is heading for a crash? After the dot-com crash of the early 2000s, the Internet companies that survived eventually evolved into the tech titans of our day (Amazon and Google come to mind). All these different AI companies and boosters are hoping that their company is the one that survives and becomes the next titan conglomerate of the 2030s. Admittedly, I think this is unlikely. I think that while the most probable outcome for the current model of AI, LLMs, and generative AI is that it ends up like cryptocurrency. For a while, crypto advocates thought that it would overthrow central banking and lead to unprecedented freedom and prosperity. However, while there are many valid criticisms to be made of central banking and fiat currency, one of their advantages is that that they do a good job of shutting down the kind of scams that crypto easily facilitates. For all the glowing promises of its boosters, the primary use case for cryptocurrency has been to cause economic disruptions and to facilitate crimes and scams. I suspect AI will probably degenerate down to a similar state once the bubble pops. The technology won't go away, but it can't do all the miraculous things its backers promise. The money is going to run out eventually and it will inflict a lot of economic damage on its way out. And like crypto, AI will mostly have negative uses. Likely its most common use cases will be to help students cheat on exams, make stupid political memes where someone's least favorite politician (whoever that is) is shaking hands with Emperor Palpatine or Thanos or whoever, engage in mass copyright infringement, and to scam seniors out of their savings. So if you are disturbed by the rhetoric around AI, take heart. When you read an article from someone announcing the glories of AI and discussing how all of civilization will have to rework itself around AI, remember that the person in question is most likely seeking money or power, or are like William Miller's followers the day before October 22nd, 1844. 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.
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Episode 290: Five Instagram Marketing Tips For Writers
02/16/2026
Episode 290: Five Instagram Marketing Tips For Writers
In this week's episode, we take a look at five Instagram tips for writers, and we also discuss recent Facebook ad changes. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : CAINA25 The coupon code is valid through February 23, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 290 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 13th, 2026, and today we're looking at five tips for Instagram marketing for writers. We will also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects. So let's first start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store, and that code is CAINA25. The coupon code is valid through February the 23rd, 2026 so if you need a new ebook for this winter, we've got you covered. And now on my current writing and publishing projects. I'm currently 91,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th book in my Cloak Mage urban fantasy series. I am hoping to finish the rough draft in the coming week, and then it's going to need a fair bit of editing because I've decided to change things and move things around to improve it. So if all goes well, I hope that book will be out in the first week of March, assuming nothing comes up before then. I am also 8,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, which will be the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and I am hoping that will be out in April, if all goes well. In audiobook news, Blade of Storms is completely finished and I believe as of right now you can buy it at my Payhip store, Kobo, and Google Play, and it is currently working its way through processing at all the other audiobook stores. Hollis McCarthy has finished recording Cloak of Titans, which is the 11th book in the Cloak Mage urban fantasy series, and if all goes well, my proofer should be able to listen to it this week and then hopefully the audiobook will be available to you sometime in March. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. 00:01:51 Thoughts on Facebook Ads Before we get to our main topic, I want to have a brief digression into another part of the Meta empire, specifically Facebook ads and my recent experiences therein. I've mentioned before that I stopped using Facebook ads in October since the Advantage Plus system, which is their AI targeting system, was giving me headaches. For a brief summary of my experience with Facebook ads. I started using them in 2019, did really well with them in 2020, then Facebook randomly started banning accounts during this craziness of summer 2020. I got my account reinstated, used them less frequently more and more until October of 2025 when I stopped using them altogether because Advantage Plus made targeting so hard. Since then, I've relied mostly on Amazon ads and BookBub ads to good results. However, I've also read various blog posts from people who have been struggling with the Advantage Plus system as well, and they've been investigating it thoroughly as internet marketers tend to do, and they've uncovered something interesting that isn't mentioned at all in Facebook's documentation about the new changes, specifically that Advantage Plus uses the text content of your ad to target it. Under the old system, it didn't work that way at all. You would select interests that match your ad, usually popular authors in the fantasy genre (like J.R.R Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, George R.R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and so forth) and then you wrote the text of the ad and supplied an image, which was usually called a creative. The creative was like 80% of a successful Facebook ad. You just needed a good picture, more or less. The Advantage Plus system by contrast targets according to the text in the ad. So while you still need a good creative, you need to be precise in the ad text. So for example, you need to write something like this: “Fans of The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, Mistborn, and Game of Thrones will love this free epic fantasy available for Kindle readers.” Now, I found the arguments in these blog posts persuasive, so I decided to give it a try. The results are on the better side of okay-ish, I will admit. I didn't lose any money and did make a bit of money. The results were definitely better than I expected, though the ad using Advantage Plus typically only has a shelf life of six to 10 days before it stops working. That said, the old system was still better because the interests were more granular and I could assign them more precisely. I used to be able to advertise Frostborn, Cloak Mage, The Ghosts, and Demonsouled all at the same time because I could target the ads so precisely and granularly. There's absolutely no way I could do that now because the Advantage Plus system is a black box. It basically boils down to “trust us, the AI will figure it out” when it very obviously can't. So for the moment I will have one Facebook ad in the rotation until Meta changes something and everything breaks. There's no way I'll run as many Facebook ads as I did in 2020, when sometimes I had eight different Facebook ads going at once. Apparently in the last three years, Meta spent around 130 billion on AI, give or take, and what they got for that money is an ad targeting system that frequently doesn't work, and when it does work, doesn't work as well as the old system did. Spending unfathomable sums of money to replace a system that worked pretty well with one that intermittently doesn't work, and then when it does function, doesn't work as well as the previous system seems to be a pretty good summary of the “AI revolution” so far. 00:05:05 Main Topic: 5 Tips for Instagram Marketing for Indie Authors Now onto our main topic this week, five tips for Instagram marketing for indie authors. Because I'm looking for new alternatives to Facebook ads for reasons I just discussed, I have just started using Instagram as part of my marketing strategy, and many indie authors, especially in the romance genre, have reported a lot of success marketing through Instagram so I wanted to learn more about it and share what I learned. In today's episode, I'm going to focus on marketing through your author account, not paid Instagram ads, which could be a separate podcast topic in the future. Here are five tips that might help you with running an author Instagram account. #1: Find a strategy beyond book promotion. Like any other form of social media, if all you post is promotion for your books, it'll be hard to gain a following. Before you start posting regularly, you'll have to think about what else you have to offer your audience. Even if you want to keep your posts exclusive to writing, there are other types of posts you can make, like behind the scenes peeks, extra facts about a character, or using the poll/question feature to engage with your followers about the books. Follow other author accounts from writers in your genre to learn about their successes and how they engage with their followers. That said, a warning with that, spending a lot of time looking at posts from engaging with other authors creates a closed loop and doesn't further your goal of getting your books into the hands of your readers. Looking at other author accounts and engaging with them definitely falls into the category of what I've called writing adjacent activities that can easily give you the illusion of progress but not actual progress that I've talked about on this podcast before. Ideally, you should spend most of your time on Instagram with readers, not other authors. It's also important to find the balance between providing personal content to make readers feel more connected to you and having it drift too far into being a personal account. Most of us have seen author accounts and social media accounts that post far too personal of relationship details or various long types of rants on various topics that I find it hard to believe help sell any books. The balance will be different for everyone, but always keep in mind that your primary goal on your author accounts is to be a space for your brand as an author. In that same vein, posting negative reviews of other books or negative comments about other writers is not a smart idea in the long run. At best, it looks like you're attacking someone else to make yourself look better, and at worst, you can end up as part of one of the many Bookstagram dramas that crop up with predictable and tedious frequency and in the process, you may make yourself some enemies for life. Nobody wants that. Spamming your books by promoting them in other author's accounts, comments sections, or worse, DMing them is considered bad form and not even remotely effective in the long run. #2: Your space, your rules. Don't be shy about blocking people or deleting comments, especially from spam accounts. Remember that it's your space, not theirs. The flip side of that is turning off comments altogether will limit your reach on Instagram. Although engagement with other accounts matters on Instagram, not every single comment or DM needs a reply, and it would be a waste of precious writing time to even try. Many authors find a compromise in liking non-spammy, well-intentioned comments instead of replying to each one. Although it's important to post regularly, putting out a public schedule for what you'll post is an invitation for people to get upset when you miss a day. #3: Captions matter. Although Instagram is about images and video, substantial captions are important for helping people to find your content. The algorithm rewards decent size but not overly long captions with good hashtags, even if people don't read them. The more specific you make your hashtags, the more effective they will be. Broad ones like “writing” and “author” won't be as effective as “Arthurian Fantasy” or “Enemies to Lovers Historical Romance.” There are also a lot of genre specific abbreviations, especially in romance such as “HEA” (which stands for happily ever after) or the pepper emoji to suggest that the romance is a spicy one (which is a euphemism for saying that it gets explicit). Take the time to learn these by following other authors or accounts in your genre because it'll help others find your posts. #4: Try Instagram Reels. The algorithm for Instagram Reels (the short videos on Instagram) rewards interaction more than videos on TikTok. So it's best to watch videos in your genre, post regularly, and expect that you won't get a lot of views starting out or the views might come much later after the initial post than they would on TikTok. Some authors report that it took months of regular posting before they saw success, or that videos would take off weeks after posting. So keep on posting consistently, even if you're not seeing a lot of followers and engagement at first. Some authors use Reels for off topic things like memes and lighthearted content so their posts remain completely about their writing. Pick a strategy of things you can consistently post Reels about two to three times per week because the algorithm rewards frequent posting of Reels. #5: Don't pay influencers or accounts to promote your content. If someone approaches you to pay for reviews or promotion, it is 99.9% likely that it is a scam. Delete and move on. When in doubt, assume it is a scam. Even if that person or account who wants to be paid to promote you is magically legitimate (which is, as I mentioned, very unlikely) the Bookstagram community is very savvy and distrustful of paid reviews. It's not good strategy. Real reviews from real, unpaid people take time, but the results are far more effective. You could try a raffle giveaway of your book to get reviews instead of paying an influencer or offering a special Smashwords coupon code just on your Instagram account. Above all, Instagram will work if you're authentic, post regularly, and are patient in building up a following. Taking shortcuts like buying followers or spamming other accounts is not an effective strategy. Like so many things, there isn’t a magic pill that substitutes for hard work over time, which if there was an overwhelming theme of this podcast over the last 290 episodes, I think that hard work over time is probably the lesson we want to take away here. 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 back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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Episode 289: Using The Universal Monsters To Write Compelling Villains
02/09/2026
Episode 289: Using The Universal Monsters To Write Compelling Villains
In this episode, we look at how the classic black & white Universal movie monsters tap into universal fears, and how you can use that to create compelling villains in your book. This coupon code will get you 50% off the : GARETH50 The coupon code is valid through February 16, 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 289 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 6, 2026, and today we are discussing how you can use the Universal monsters to write interesting villains. Before we get into that, we will have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects. First up is Coupon of the Week and this week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book #2 of my Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. And that code is GARETH50. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through February 16th, 2026, so if you need a new audiobook to get you through the middle of February, we have got you covered. Now let's see where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. As of this recording, I am 63,000 words into Cloak of Summoning and I am almost but not quite halfway through my outline. So this is definitely going to be a long book and it's probably going to come out in the first part of March because it's long enough that it will take me a while to finish writing it and then to edit and proof it and everything else. So I'm making good progress on it. It was a very productive week, but I am still not even halfway through, so I think it's probably going to be March. I am also 5,000 words into Blade of Wraiths. That will be the fourth book of my epic fantasy Blades of Ruin series, and that will probably be in April, if all goes well. In audiobook news, Blade of Shadows (as narrated by Brad Wills) is done and it is slowly starting to roll out to the various platforms. I think as of this recording, the only place it is live right now is my Payhip store and Google Play, but hopefully by the time I record the next episode, it will be available at even more stores than that. Hollis McCarthy is working on Cloak of Titans and I think she's about halfway or two thirds of the way through recording, so we should be able to get that to you before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:13 Main Topic: Universal Monsters, Universal Fears, and Creating Villains Now our main topic, which is the Universal monsters and the universal fears and how you can use that to create villains. One idea a writer can use to create compelling villains is to tap into some of the universal fears, and in some ways, those universal fears are embodied by the classic Universal monster movies. I mentioned before that in Halloween of 2025, I saw that a bunch of the old black and white Universal monster movies were on Prime Video. So I watched them for the first time since I was a kid, and I was pleased to see that they held up pretty well for movies that are nearly a century old, especially considering these were some of the very first movies ever made with sound and the filmmakers were kind of figuring it out as they went along. Dracula is a bit uneven because they tried to cram the stage play version of the book into a 70 minute movie, which really doesn't work, though Bela Lugosi’s performance as Dracula and Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing really carried the movie and helped define the characters in the public eye, but the others are all good and Bride of Frankenstein is legitimately a great movie, but why have these particular movies lasted so long in the public consciousness? For that matter, why do people keep coming back to new versions and new stories of Dracula and Frankenstein's Creature and all the others? Partly it's because these characters are in the public domain and you can use them without getting sued. True, but there's a lot of stuff in the public domain that doesn't see the light of day nearly as often as these classic monsters. I think it's because the classic monsters tap into the universal (small U) fears or classic archetypes of the things that people fear in real life. It's interesting to note that most of the classic Universal monsters were either originally humans who became monstrous or creations by humans that turn monstrous. Essentially, the monsters tap into archetypal fears and are exaggerated versions of villains and monsters we might actually encounter on a day-to-day basis. What do I mean? Let's expound. First up, Dracula. Count Dracula is in some ways the easiest metaphor to explain. He's an aristocratic vampire that feeds upon people and gives them nothing but evil in return. Perhaps he will pass on his own immortality to some of his victims, but it's a cursed and hellish form of immortality and any vampires that he creates are essentially his slaves, sometimes his mindless slaves. Dracula is the fear of the Evil Elite. This of course, takes many different forms in the modern era, but it is very much alive and well. The various conspiracy theories that the elite of society might be devil worshippers or engaged in sinister cults are definitely Dracula adjacent (and based on recent news reports, it indeed appears at least some of these conspiracy theories turned out to be accurate). More prosaically, “rent seeking behavior” is often characterized as vampirism. Rent seeking behavior is defined as finding ways to extract profit without adding value by manipulating the legal or regulatory environment. The landlord who raises rent by $500 a month for no reason. A software developer who reduces features while raising the subscription price or a financier who manipulates the regulations for an industry while investing in it are good examples of rent seeking behavior that is metaphorically vampiric. For that matter, it can be downright mundane. The middle manager who bullies his employees and then takes all the credit for their work is a very boring and unpleasant, but nonetheless, an all too common example of the vampire metaphor in real life. Frankenstein's monster is a much easier metaphor to explain now than it would've been before ChatGPT went mainstream. There is always a fear that we will be destroyed by the works of our own hands, especially in the last a hundred years since the creation of nuclear technology and gene editing. Probably most famous examples of that in science fiction are The Terminator and The Matrix movies series. However, these days the metaphor for Frankenstein's monster is almost ridiculously easy. We have generative AI to fulfill the metaphor of Frankenstein's monster for us. Karl Marx famously said that history repeats twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Nuclear weapons as a metaphor for Frankenstein's monster was a tragedy but generative AI is a farce. The tech bros sold it as this omniscient mind that could solve all problems and eliminate all jobs. What we've actually gotten is an imbecilic chatbot that makes a lot of mistakes, can't remember anything, can't actually do anything right, inflicts widespread damage to the economy, drives up electricity costs, and makes existing products like Windows 11 and Google search much worse. It's like as if Frankenstein's monster was really, really stupid and wanted you to add glue to your pizza to keep the cheese from sliding off. The Wolf Man, of course, is a metaphor for the potentially bestial nature of man. We all know, of course, or are eventually forced to learn that human beings have a dark side that can come out in times of anger and stress. Civilization is sometimes a thin veneer over the animalistic side of humans. Sometimes the veneer grows even thinner and the dark side comes raging out in riots and wars and mass slaughter. For Larry Talbot, the original Wolf Man in the movie, his situation is even more terrifying. He's a rational man who believes in science and psychology and doesn't believe in things like werewolves. Yet when he is bitten, he nonetheless loses control and transforms into the Wolf Man. He doesn't want to transform and attack people, but he has lost control of himself to the werewolf curse, and so he does. In a sense, all humans are werewolves in that we have a monstrous side that can come out under the right or the wrong conditions. The worst of us embrace that fact, just as in medieval legends, sometimes people would make pacts with the devil to become werewolves. The Invisible Man was originally a science fiction story, which means that the Invisible Man represents a new fear created by science. “Transhumanism” is an idea that eventually humans will merge with machines and evolve and become something new. Naturally, many people think this is a bad idea, and so a new idea has emerged: “posthumans” or humans that have been so modified by science that they are no longer recognizably human. So far, this has remained mostly science fiction, but you can see the glimmers of it beginning in biology and medical science. There's a reason performance enhancing drugs are banned in most sports. Genetic engineering opens up the possibility that corporations could create their own custom humans, essentially their own posthumans. The possibilities for abuse in such situations are sadly endless. So the Invisible Man, like Frankenstein's Creature, taps into the fear of science or more accurately the fear of what horrors science might create. On the surface, the Creature from the Black Lagoon is a monster story about a creature that carries off a pretty girl. I think it taps into a deeper fear, however, namely that the world is older and stranger and more alien and incomprehensible than we can possibly know. Like hardcore creationists say that the earth is 6,000 years old or so, and the traditional scientific view is that the earth has been around for four and a half billion years or so, and both groups have detailed charts explaining why their theories are correct, but what if they're both wrong? Oceanographers say that we don't fully understand the oceans. And a common theory among UFO people is that UFOs emerged from hidden bases at the bottom of the ocean, inaccessible by any human. There are other theories that there have been entire civilizations such as Atlantis that have vanished without a trace and were more advanced than our own, or that all of human civilization is a cycle that constantly destroys itself and restarts without a memory of its previous failures, or that aliens have influenced and controlled human history or that aliens created the earth and this is all some sort of elaborate science experiment. Of course, all these theories are likely bunk. Probably. I think it is true to say that not only is the world stranger than we know, it is stranger than the human mind is actually capable of comprehending. And depending on how far that goes, that could be a terrifying thought. So the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the idea that some race of fishmen lurks beneath the waves that we don't know about, taps into that fear. Like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy on the surface is another story about the monster who wants the girl since Imhotep waits 3,000 years for his love to be reincarnated. But I think this taps into a deeper fear, namely that we can't escape history, that no matter what we do or how hard we try, history will catch up to us (whether our own personal history or national history). Political philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called The End of History and The Last Man in 1992, arguing that with the collapse of Communism, liberal democracy was the final form of government achieved by mankind and it would have no serious competitors in the future. This was a nice dream, but I think it's fair to say that the last 34 years since 1992 have proven that thesis profoundly wrong. History is definitely not over and in every domestic or international political crisis of the last 34 years, you can trace its roots back for decades or even centuries. It took 3,000 years for the dead hand of Imhotep to affect the present, but it usually doesn't take nearly that long for history to have negative effects in the present world. The Phantom of the Opera is considered one of the Universal monsters, but I don't think he really taps into a deeper fear, maybe just to be wary of a creepy guy who lives in a theater basement and is unhealthily obsessed with the leading actress. Honestly, that just seems like good common sense. Maybe poor Christine Daae just needs some pepper spray or a good solid shotgun. In conclusion, I think each of these Universal monsters remains popular because they tap into a deeper, more profound fear. So if you're a writer looking to create a memorable villain, you could do worse than to follow those universal fears. You don't even explicitly have to write horror, science fiction, or fantasy to do it. In a mystery novel, you could have a Dracula type villain in the form of a slumlord who traps his tenants with restrictive lease agreements to bleed them dry financially or an Invisible Man villain in the form of a scientist who is illegally injecting college athletes with an experimental drug without their knowledge. The Wolf Man appears quite often in detective and thriller fiction as a serial killer or some other kind of violent criminal. Naturally we cannot escape history, so the Mummy can appear as a conflict that had its roots in events that happened decades ago. Of course, the range for universal fear villains in science fiction and fantasy is much greater. Then you don't even have to be metaphorical. So hopefully this look at the Universal monsters and the universal fears they tap into will give you some good tips and ideas for writing villains in your book. 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 back episodes in https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.
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Episode 288: Five Additional Business Lessons For Indie Authors From Brandon Sanderson's Apple TV Deal
02/02/2026
Episode 288: Five Additional Business Lessons For Indie Authors From Brandon Sanderson's Apple TV Deal
In this week's episode, we look at five business lessons for indie authors from Brandon Sanderson's recent Apple TV deal. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This coupon code will get you 25% off the : CALASKAR25 The coupon code is valid through February 9, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 288 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 30th, 2026 and today we are discussing five additional business lessons for indie authors from Brandon Sanderson in the aftermath of his recent Apple TV deal. Before we get into that, we will have a Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing progress. First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Silent Order series at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is CALASKAR25. And as always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February the 9th, 2026. So if you need a new science fiction ebook to read for this winter, we have got you covered. And now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. Now that Blade of Storms is out and is doing well (thank you all for that), my main project is now Cloak of Summoning, and I am 34,000 words into it as of this recording, which puts me on Chapter 6 of 23 in the outline. I think it's probably going to come out in March because February is a short month and Cloak of Summoning is going to be a long book. So hopefully it should come out early in March. I'm also 1,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, which will be the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. That will be my main project once Cloak of Summoning is done. So hopefully that will come out in probably April or thereabouts. In audiobook news, recording is very nearly completed for Blade of Shadows, the second book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will be narrated by Brad Wills. Hollis McCarthy is currently working on the audiobook of Cloak of Titans, and I think she's about halfway through. So hopefully we should have some new audiobooks for you to listen to before much longer. And that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:04 Main Topic of the Week: 5 Business Lessons For Indie Authors From Brandon Sanderson Now onto our main topic this week, five additional business lessons for indie authors from Brandon Sanderson. And I think it is objectively factual to say that Brandon Sanderson is probably the most successful fantasy author who is currently publishing. Beyond the sheer number of sales, what many find most impressive about what he's achieved is his company, Dragonsteel Entertainment, that he has been able to create. It consists of Kickstarter campaign work, special book editions, a successful convention, merchandising (including an RPG), and a whole slew of other things. Even for authors like me operating on a much smaller scale, there are a few things to learn from his success at publishing and creating a specialized empire. Now what's amusing is the notes for the show were prepared a couple of weeks ago, but a few days ago, the news was announced that Brandon Sanderson entered into a licensing deal with Apple TV to produce adaptations based on his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series. As the author himself said on Reddit, “The decision to pick Apple was due to two factors. First, the levels of approvals and control. Apple wants to be a true partner with me and they feel like they really get what I want to do. Second, their track record. Apple does fewer things, but higher quality than some other studios. I find virtually everything of theirs I watch is excellent and creator driven.” So that and an impressive degree of creative control he wrung out of Apple for this and if you are at all familiar with the history of movie adaptations, you know that the author getting any degree of creative control does not happen all that often. Usually what happens is the studio cranks out the adaptation that butchers the book and then it disappears into obscurity. So this actually happens to tie in quite well with the original theme of today's episode, which is the Five Business Lessons from Brandon Sanderson. He was able to reach this level of success by following these five business lessons consistently over a period of decades. So we will go into that now. #1: Find a way to meet fan demand and find gaps in the market. Sanderson was ahead of traditional publishing when it came to responding to fan requests for high quality letter bound or other enhanced special editions. By focusing on this gap in the market, he was able to meet a need expressed by his most passionate fans and get an additional round of sales from existing customers who already have the mass market paperbacks or ebook versions. Even in an age with ebooks and audiobooks, physical copies are still important to many readers, partly because they can't be deleted off your ereader. This is even more true of special editions being gifted or displayed like decor. He further cemented the respect of his fans by spending a great deal of time and effort adding elaborate details like gilding and full color illustrations to the premium editions. He listened to fan demand and exceeded their expectations without pricing out or alienating fans by only offering the premium versions. It's also been long been a complaint of readers that they can't buy bundles of the physical book, ebook, and audiobook at the same time. There's a wide variety of reasons it’s not easy or even possible to bundle these formats together, but Brandon Sanderson found a way to make it work with books from his largest Kickstarter campaign because he was controlling the production of all three formats. He found a gap in the market by addressing this need and made fans feel like they're getting a more complete experience by getting the formats all at once. #2: Take advantage of an opportunity. One of the most surprising parts of Brandon's largest Kickstarter campaign is how one of the Secret Project books, Tress of the Emerald Sea, took off on BookTok and became popular with readers who haven't read other Brandon Sanderson or even fantasy books before. Tress also gave potential readers who are intimidated by how prolific he is and how long and interconnected the books in his series are a chance to try his writing in a less intimidating way. Dragonsteel responded to this development by commissioning special editions of Tress, Mistborn, and The Emperor’s Soul in a Sanderson starter pack on the TikTok shop, which did extremely well. Authors who are prolific would do well to think about entry points in a similar way. What are your “starter pack” books? How can people feel more comfortable trying out your work and sampling from your books in your different genres? For myself, one way I do this is making the first book in almost all my series permafree. This gives people a chance to try my work without making a financial commitment, and usually the second book is $0.99, which is a little bit of a financial commitment, but not very much. And if someone has read the first two books in the series, odds are they are probably going to continue on to the full price rest of the series. #3: Be transparent. Brandon uses weekly update videos and his podcast to update readers on his writing and publishing progress as well as new merchandise releases. If there is a delay or an unexpected development, he can use this outlet to explain what happened in more detail. For example, when there was a delay in the printing of the premium hardcover of Tress of the Emerald Sea, he posted to Kickstarter, social media, and his weekly video to explain what happened and what Dragonsteel was doing to address it. For myself, I include writing updates at the beginning of each of my podcast episodes and also post updates to my website and Facebook page on a regular basis. He also posts a State of the Sanderson every year on his website and YouTube channel that summarizes the status of his various projects in a more collected form so more casual fans can catch up on his news there. This level of transparency builds trust with your readers. Some authors hide from failed promises about publishing dates or future books, but it's better to be transparent when something changes than to act like it never happened or keep giving vague answers. For example, very recently, I'd hoped Cloak of Summoning was going to come out in February, but like I explained at the start of the episode, it's a long book, February is a short month and I've got a bunch of stuff to do in February that’s not related to writing, so it's probably going to be early March that the book comes out. #4: Keep creative control. One of the reasons that even during the era of peak streaming, we did not see an adaptation of a Brandon Sanderson book (besides Wheel of Time, which doesn't really count because it mostly belongs to Robert Jordan and the series didn't last long enough to get to the final books in the series that Sanderson authored). It was in part because creative control of the work is important to him. He wants to find a production company that respects his work and is at least reasonably faithful to the original books. As anyone who has been disappointed by a show or movie that was created by people unfamiliar with the work or uninterested in following the original plot knows, that is not as simple of a request as you might think. Like of all the books I've read that have had TV or movie adaptations, I think I can think of only three adaptations that were better than the original book: Goldfinger (because Goldfinger's plot in the movie made more sense than it did in the book), The Godfather (because The Godfather movie frankly eliminated some unnecessary and frankly weird subplots from the book), and I think the show adaptation of Wolf Hall (because I've been reading the Wolf Hall books this year and while the books are good, I think the show kind of gets to the point in a better way and avoids some of the long internal monologues that Cromwell has that seem to kind of not be necessary, but that could be a matter of taste). So, but back to the main point, out of all the adaptations I've seen, I think I've only encountered three that were better than the original source material. So you can see how having creative control of the adaptation will be very important for an author. Even though most books will never become movies or shows, keeping as much creative control as possible is extremely important as a writer in general and indie publishing allows you to do that, which I found has been very useful to me in my writing career, especially after I started doing my own audiobooks because then I can move the audiobooks to different stores and make bundles of them as I want without having to fight with the rights holder about that. #5: Find good people you can trust and treat them well. One of the most underrated elements of Sanderson's success is that he has built a strong and loyal team at Dragonsteel headed by his wife, Emily, who is co-president of Dragonsteel Entertainment. The company has over 50 employees that work on merchandise, the podcast, the convention, and all of Sanderson's various projects, which baffles my mind because I don't think I talk to 50 different people in a month, let alone every day. Many of the employees are longtime friends (some going back as far as college) or family members, but Emily says that it's still important that each employee is qualified for their role. Treating employees well is a stated priority of Sanderson. One specific example is how he structures his major annual sale, which is called Light Day, early in November to not take place over the American Thanksgiving holiday, and the Dragonsteel Shop has earlier Christmas holiday ordering deadlines than most online stores do so his employees can have more time off around that holiday. Another example of treating others well is although many people have offered to volunteer at the Dragonsteel Nexus Convention, he hired temp employees instead. I hope that one of the reasons I've been able to keep employees like a cover designer and narrators for so long is that I try to treat people well. I try to act professionally, not make unreasonable quote requests, and pay people promptly. You can get away with a lot if you pay people on time as agreed. I'm not saying this is an excuse to act like a jerk, however, you will find that people are much more patient with you and much more willing to accommodate reasonable requests when they know that you will in fact pay on time when they are done. So finally, although you and I may never manage a media empire like Dragonsteel Entertainment, you and I can still learn from Sanderson's success and take lessons and apply them to our own businesses from what he has done well. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and interesting. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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Episode 287: Five Lessons Learned From My Ten Bestselling Books Of 2025
01/26/2026
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 , (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.
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Episode 286: Office Setup For Writers
01/19/2026
Episode 286: Office Setup For Writers
In this week's episode, we offer four tips for setting up a comfortable and productive home office space for writers. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : DRAGONTIARNA25 The coupon code is valid through January 26, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 286 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 16th, 2026 and today we are discussing office setups for writers in terms of computers and furniture and so forth and how do you do that in a way that is maximally comfortable and maximally beneficial to overall joint health. We will also talk about Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So first up, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store and that coupon code is DRAGONTIARNA25. And as always, links to my Payhip store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes to this episode. And this coupon code will be valid through January the 26th, 2026. So if you need some new ebooks to read as we head into the winter, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. The rough draft of Blade of Storms, the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, is now done at about 90,000 words. It's time to start editing. It might actually be a little longer once I'm done editing because I was thinking about it on the treadmill this morning and I think I may need to add some scenes to some of the chapters, but we'll see when we get there. I have also written a short story called Talon Depths. That is a tie into this book. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of Talon Depths when Blade of Storms comes out. So this is an excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter if you haven't already. I am hoping to get it out before the end of January, but we'll see how the next two weeks go; it might slip to the first week in February. I'm also 13,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the ... Yeah, it'll be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. It'll be my main project once Blade of Storms is published. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Shadows, the previous book in the series, and is about one third of the way through. So if all goes well, hopefully we'll get that out and available to everyone sometime in February or March, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at on my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:17 Main Topic: Home Office Setups for Writers and Remote Workers Now let's move on to our main topic, home office setups for writers and remote workers. This isn't as trendy of a topic now as it was six years ago during the peak COVID times, but I still want to talk about setting up a home office as a writer or a remote worker. Even people who don't work remotely can benefit from thinking about changing their writing environment to better suit their needs and having the right setup for you makes a huge difference in your productivity and comfort. The wrong setup can make you feel drained, stressed, and distracted, and can potentially contribute to carpal tunnel syndrome or shoulder troubles or other related joint or posture problems as people, for example, can find out if they spend all their time sitting on the couch working on their laptop. I have been a full-time writer for almost 10 years now, and during that time, my work from home setup has evolved quite a bit. I thought that I would discuss the specific things I've changed and why. Our transcriptionist for the podcast also thought this was a really interesting topic, and so she will also share her remote work setup, which is quite a bit different than mine. And then to close out the episode, I will give four general tips for writing and working from home, which is something I know a little bit about at this point since I've been doing it for 10 years. So the basics: what is my office set up? I work from a sort of ad hoc U-shaped desk that I've assembled myself out of bits and pieces. The center part, sort of the bottom of the U is a piece of a glass top wraparound desk that I originally bought at Shopko [(a now defunct Wisconsin-based big box store)] back in I think like 2006. I've carried it with me through every apartment and residence since. I lost half of it a while back, but I still have the other half and it's a glass top desk. My monitor is sitting on an Amazon Basics riser atop it. It has a keyboard tray for the keyboard and it is where I do most of my main writing and editing. And in fact, this month I've written 50,000 words of Blade of Storms on that setup. So it is working quite well for me. The sides of the U are two white plastic contractor tables I've picked up. The one on the right is the one I use for ... It has the keyboard and monitor and the mouse for my graphic design computer because I have two different computers, which we'll get to in a bit. And it has the keyboard, the mouse, and the monitor riser for that. The other side, the table on the left, I try to keep as empty as possible for when I need to do paperwork. It turns out when you're self-employed, there's a surprising lot of paperwork you have to do on a regular basis. So whenever I need to do paperwork or read documents or that kind of thing, I try to keep that side of the desk as empty and as clean as possible. And it also looks nice to have it empty, though at the moment it's not empty because I have a growing stack of tax paperwork since it is tax season. As I've mentioned before, I use two desktop computers. I have a Mac Mini that I use for writing and editing and the keyboard and mouse for that are on the central computer, sort of the bottom of the U. And I have a Dell XPS tower that I use for graphic design, 3D modeling, and other multimedia things such as podcasting. I am literally recording this podcast on that computer right now. Both of the computers are actually sitting next to the U on an old kitchen cart that I think I bought back in like 2005 and again, has been moving with me from a residence to residence over the past 20 years. The reason for that is I didn't want to put the desktop computers on the desktop because that takes up a lot of space and I didn't want to put them on the floor because that's a good way to get a lot of dust into a computer and pretty much truly shortens its life. So what I ended up doing was I put this kitchen cart next to the bottom of the U-shaped desk and I put the desktop Dell computer and the Mac Mini on the kitchen cart and that keeps them off the floor, keeps them off the desk, and it's worked pretty well. And that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years, keeping a computer on that. How has it changed over time? Originally I just had one Windows computer that I did everything on. I did writing, I did editing, which was fine in 2016 when I started doing this full time because back then I didn't do my own covers. Back then I didn't do any graphic design. I didn't have the podcast and so my computing needs were a bit more limited back then. However, as you know, since then I've started doing my own covers. I have this podcast; I occasionally do YouTube videos and so I found it helpful to have a separate computer to do that, partly because when I render 3D models into 2D images for cover images, that takes up a lot of processing power and depending on the size of the render, it can take like 20 minutes. And so you have 20 minutes where the computer's processor is maxed out, which is not a comfortable experience using Microsoft Word while that is happening. So I decided eventually it would be best to have a separate writing and graphic design computers. And that's worked pretty well for the last year for me. For my chair, I have a very basic office chair I got from Amazon Basics, which is because it gets kind of hot in here in summer, and so I didn't want a big office chair. And so instead I just have one with the basic cushion, basic armrest, and sort of a net back in a plastic frame. And that has the twofold benefits of not getting too hot and then because it's not got a great back, it's got an excellent way of forcing me to have good posture while I type, which is probably why I haven't developed any serious back or shoulder problems in the 10 years I have been a full-time writer. So I realized that my office setup might seem a little bit idiosyncratic, half a glass top desk from Shopko from 20 years [ago] to contractor folding tables and an old kitchen cart that holds the computers, but it's worked pretty well for me for the last 10 years. And honestly, it's preferable to buying like a really expensive heavy computer desk and paying twice as much for something that I'd like half as much. So that's what I do. And our transcriptionist thought this was an interesting idea for an episode. So she thought she'd share her setup since it's quite a bit different than mine. She does more traditional office type tasks such as working in spreadsheets, checking audio files against documents for things like this podcast transcript, and entering data into various websites. Her computing needs are far less intense than mine, but she has done a lot more specific things customized to her physical office space than I have, namely the setups of her desk. She does not have a dedicated office, but has found a way to carve out space in her living room for both a sitting and a standing desk. The sitting desk has dual monitors at a desktop computer, and this is used for the more data and writing intensive tasks like transcription work. She has a standing desk with a laptop and a second monitor for more reading-based work that doesn't require as much data entry or typing. She mentioned she also likes to watch webinars on that since it doesn't require her to do a lot of typing. How has this changed? The walking pad and standing desk setup took some trial and error to figure out. The adjustable laptop stand was a major part of getting the setup to feel comfortable since it could be positioned at a better angle than a monitor stand or a stack of books. Much of her setup was thrifted when people started returning to work in person in their offices, including the matching dual monitors and the stand for the second monitor. As you can see, there are a variety of approaches and budgets you can take. My transcriptionist’s computing needs are simpler than mine, but she has spent funds on making a space that's flexible and encourages movement when possible. As different as our setups are, they're both based on an understanding of what works best for us. I tried to think of a few tips that would apply to anyone making a space for working or writing from home and came up with four. #1: Taking a gradual and sort of iteration-based approach to adding things made it easier to get the things that would help best instead of following lists of online “must haves”. Everyone’s work needs and work styles are so different that these type of lists might lead you to over buy or overspend. Additionally, the thing about working with anything is that the reality doesn't often match up with the idea in your head. Like you might have a tool or a chair or a desk that you think, this will be really great for my setup and you try it only to find out that it doesn't work. So it's really a good idea to sort of iterate and see what works best for you before committing to spending any money. #2: Make a space that's as far from the high traffic areas of your household as possible. Kitchens and living rooms are particularly tough spaces to concentrate [in] for many people because so much activity happens there. So the further away you can get from the high traffic areas of your home is probably a good idea since that will give you a better chance of concentrating. #3: Walking pads and standing desks are something people often buy with good intentions, but people find it distracts them or they just don't like them once they start using them. For myself, I knew for a fact that I didn't want a standing desk and never wanted to try one, so at no point have I ever used a standing desk while writing. If possible, try other people's setups first before investing a lot of money into it. Used standing desks are pretty cheap right now, so that's another option for lowering the cost of one if you really want one. A free option to get yourself moving during the day is to set a few reminders to walk around a bit or do a few body weight strength exercises such as pushups or squats. For myself, I've talked before about how I use the Pomodoro method of working in 25 minute bursts and I frequently get up and move around or maybe do a few exercises during the five minute gap between those 25 minute working bursts. #4: Let go of your idea of what an office has to be and focus on what works best for you. It doesn't have to be a dedicated room with a thousand dollar specialized office chair or even a desk in order to be a good workspace. What you need most is a space that's comfortable and helps you to focus. If that's working on a laptop from the chair in a corner or a stack of books piled on a ledge to make a standing desk, that's okay. One of the advantages of writing from home is that writing is an activity that doesn't need a specific configuration and you can try out a few different options to see what works best for you. I hope you got some ideas from your at-home working and writing setup from this episode. 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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Episode 285: 5 Amazon Ads Tips For Indie Authors
01/12/2026
Episode 285: 5 Amazon Ads Tips For Indie Authors
In this week's episode, we share five tips for effectively using Amazon Ads for indie authors. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : SEVENFOLD25 The coupon code is valid through January 19, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 285 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 9th, 2025 and today we are discussing five tips for Amazon ads for authors. We will also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing and publishing projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Sevenfold Sword series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SEVENFOLD25. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through January the 19th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this winter, we've got you covered. And now for an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am about 68,000 words into Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I think the book will be about 100,000 words, give or take, so that means I'm 68% of the way through. And I'm really hoping I can finish the rough draft by the end of the week of the 12th, if all goes well. So hopefully finishing up the rough draft by the 16th or the 17th, if all goes well, but we'll see if I can get there or not. I am also 9,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. Hopefully that will come out a month or so after Blade of Storms. I'm hoping Blade of Storms will come out in January, but it might be tight. And then Cloak of Summoning will come out the month after that. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Shadows, the previous book in that series and Hollis McCarthy will start recording Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage series, at the end of this month. And a few people asked if Wizard-Assassin was going to have an audiobook. It will. Leanne Woodward will record it in March, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:12 Main Topic of the Week: 5 Tips for Amazon Ads for Indie Writers And now let's move on to our main topic of the week, five tips for Amazon ads for indie writers. And let's not beat around the bush here. Amazon ads for writers can be extremely difficult to figure out, especially when you're just starting out. The advice you'll find online can be contradictory or confusing, and it doesn't help that books tend to act very strangely in terms of advertising compared to other products. A while back, I was chatting on Facebook with someone else who does Amazon ads, and he mainly does cosmetics reselling, and he was shocked by how much a click for an ebook would cost compared to a click for say like a six pack of shampoo or whatever. And that's just the nature of the market category that ebooks are in. Because of that, the advice you'll find online can be contradictory or confusing. Some Amazon ad experts insist that you devote at least an hour or even two a day to managing your ad results and then have intricate formula-filled spreadsheets for doing so, while others advise you to set them and forget them. Advice about the bids and spending vary wildly. It can be very easy to get overwhelmed or overspend starting out, but that doesn't have to be the case. I will say that compared to Facebook ads or BookBub ads, it is a lot harder to accidentally lose a lot of money on Amazon ads because regardless of how you configure your Facebook ads or your BookBub ads, Facebook in particular will cheerfully spend your ad budget and give you nothing in return if you haven't configured or targeted your ad correctly. By contrast, an Amazon ad that doesn't work tends not to display and therefore doesn't spend any of your money. So when I'm talking ad platforms for beginners, I tend to recommend that beginners start out more on Amazon ads just because it's much harder to lose money, but it's not impossible, which is something to keep in mind as we get into that. I'm not going to get into the individual specifics of how to set up Amazon ads today, since there's many other people out there who provide that information and probably do a better job than I would. That said, I'm going to just focus on broad principles based on things I've learned instead of providing a specific step-by-step guide for the topic. So without further ado, here are five lessons I've learned about Amazon ads for writers in the last eight or nine years that I've been learning them. #1: Do your research before you start. It can be tempting to dive in right away, but before you spend a single cent on Amazon ads, you should take the time to learn how the bidding process works and how keyword and category ads work. You should also familiarize yourself with other books and trends in your categories. Your book and its ad copy should feel like it belongs with the others in your category and genre. For example, having a neon pink, high heel boot, and flowers [on a cover] in the political thriller category doesn't match the colors since most political thriller books tend to have a solitary dark figure walking in the opposite direction of the camera and many, if not most of the books in the genre have that kind of cover design. Optimizing your book cover for the category before you start doing ads can make a huge difference in the ad results you see. And this is true on many levels as well since when indie authors ask, "Why isn’t my book selling?", the number one thing to fix in like 90% of the cases is a bad cover that looks like it was done in Canva or was slapped out of an AI like Copilot or ChatGPT or something that is immediately off-putting to the reader because it's not attractive. You should also make a set budget before you start out and make sure that your daily budgets for your campaigns reflects that budget instead of using whatever daily budget or bids that Amazon suggests for your ad campaigns. Amazon likes to suggest pretty high suggested bids in daily spending limits, which isn't a great use of money if you're just starting to learn how the ads work. And as always, in business it is very, very, very good advice and a very good idea not to spend money that you don't actually have. #2: Targeting is everything. We've all seen baffling book results when browsing on Amazon. For example, once when I was searching for space opera books, a book on visiting Wisconsin Dells as a tourist showed up as a sponsored result in my search, which is insane because I was searching for space opera books. Sometimes an author will choose to advertise in too many categories or choose ad keywords that don't represent their book well. That's the most likely reason why you see things like that Wisconsin Dells book in search results that don't match it. I've told this story before on the podcast, but our transcriptionist once was taking a class on Amazon ads and heard someone say that they wanted to advertise their gritty memoir in every possible category because everyone should read their book. And I think that is a small-scale example of hubris because someone shopping for children's picture books or Spanish language technical manuals is very unlikely to buy that book. Someone looking for a romance novel might be actively annoyed if they start reading that gritty memoir expecting a happily ever after love story and might leave a negative review since they didn't get the book content that they expected. One of the foundational principles of book marketing is that your book is not in fact for everyone. Your book is for a subset of the reading population. The key to successful advertising is to find a way to advertise that book to the subset of the reading population that would actually be interested in reading your book. There's a reason that when you are publishing your book through Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon wants you to pick three categories for your book and that is in part because they know books do their best when they're paired with other books in the specific topic or genre. It's not a bad thing to focus your desired audience for a book when marketing it. In fact, ad targeting will save you time and money and help people to find your book. Your goal isn't to find every possible reader for your book. It's to find the readers who are most likely to be interested in your book in the subset of the reading population that I was talking about earlier. The more focused that your category targeting is, the better this process will be. For example, picking romance as a category is so broad and so competitive that you might not get any traction at all on a small bid. Choosing a more targeted category like “Amish romance” or “clean and wholesome romance with a happily ever after ending” that is more targeted is better both for helping readers to find your work and for getting good results on your ads. #3: Start small. My best advice is to ignore Amazon's suggested bid amounts and start out with a small per click bid and daily budget. It may take a few weeks to see results using that method, but it's best to start small and gain some understanding of Amazon ads before you spend lots of money that you may not be able to earn back. Some smaller categories like children's books and technical manuals actually do pretty well with very small bids. Aggressive bids make more sense when you have the data to know that they're going to work well and reach the exact audience that you want to see them. As a new author, it's not your best bet to chase the biggest authors in your category as keyword targets. Bids for those authors will be extremely high and competitive. It's most likely better to find comparable authors in your categories with less expensive bids starting out. Amazon will suggest you advertise in a wide variety of countries (in fact, every country in which they currently offer the Amazon ads platform), but it's probably wisest to start out with just the US before expanding to other countries. Starting with Amazon's largest market will provide you with a lot of ad result data that you can use to refine your ads before you try them in other countries. If you're based outside the US, it may make more sense to start out with the country you're most familiar with. For example, if you're a UK author or a German author, you might have better luck starting advertising your books in Amazon Germany or Amazon UK than in Amazon US. #4: Be patient. And I have to admit this is the hardest one, whether you are just starting out or like me, if you've been self-publishing for almost 15 years because you want to see results now, now, now, but that's often not the case and the best results usually come with applied effort over a span of time. If you're just starting out and your bids are small, it will most likely take at least a few weeks to see a significant amount of impressions on your ads. Don't adjust for anything for at least a couple of weeks unless an ad is spending more than you'd like or is getting a lot of poorly targeted searches to it, which can frequently happen with autotarget ads. #5: Check your Amazon ads dashboard regularly. It's important to review your ad spending regularly and to keep an eye on it, not to maybe obsessively deep dive into it but to keep an eye on it. Sometimes an ad can go a bit haywire and start spending more than you want, seemingly at random. It's good to go into ads that are doing this and see if they need some negative targeting added to them or something needs to be adjusted. The reverse of that is to not check the dashboard obsessively. It can be tempting to do that, but it's what I call a writing adjacent activity that can take too much time away from your actual work of writing. For myself, what I do to check Amazon ads is I just glance at the dashboard at least once a day to make sure that the spending isn’t out of control or there isn’t something big and obvious that I need to fix. And then at the midpoint of the month and the end of the month, I do take about an hour to do a deep dive into each of the campaign groups I have running to make sure that they are turning a profit, which is the main point after all, and to make sure that nothing is going wrong. And I've been doing that schedule for a couple of years now and that works pretty well for me. Check the dashboard once a day and then a deep dive twice a month to make sure that nothing is going berserk or that something is broken that I need to fix. Now, your ad results can also teach you how people are searching for your books and what other topics and authors are searching for, and this can be a great source for creating keyword ads. I found in the last few years that keyword ads really work a lot better with nonfiction books. And if you're going to use them for fiction books, you need, at least in my experience, at least a very focused keyword ad list with like less than 10 keywords. But as always with anything in Amazon ads, your mileage may vary. So those are my five broad lessons for creating Amazon ads for your book. It can be a frustrating process and there is a bit of a learning curve, but it can also teach you a lot about your potential readers and how they are trying to find your books or what appeals to them about your books specifically. Like many things in life, there are many ways to do it and succeed, but these are a few of the things I've noticed make a difference when working with Amazon ads and I hope you will find them helpful. 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 back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.
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Episode 284: Why is WIZARD-ASSASSIN in Kindle Unlimited?
01/05/2026
Episode 284: Why is WIZARD-ASSASSIN in Kindle Unlimited?
In this week's episode, I explain my reasoning for putting my new book WIZARD-ASSASSIN in Kindle Unlimited, even though the majority of my books are wide and will remain so. I also examine the phenomenon of British Christmas chocolate boxes. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : FROST25 The coupon code is valid through January 12, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and British Christmas Chocolate Boxes Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 284 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 1st, 2025 and today we are discussing why Wizard-Assassin is in Kindle Unlimited. We'll also talk a bit about British Christmas chocolate boxes, something I just learned about recently. We will also have a Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects. But first off, Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year's holiday, whatever form that may take for you and I hope that 2026 turns out to be a great year. Now, let's move on to Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off all the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store. That code is FROST25. And as always, the coupon code and links to my store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through January the 12th, 2026, so if you need a new ebook series to dig into this snowy winter, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing and publishing projects. I said I wanted to take the week off between Christmas and New Year's and I mostly did. Played a lot of video games, saw a lot of family, ate a lot of good food, but I do get a bit bored. So I did get some work in and I'm currently at 35,000 words of Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I think the book's going to end up about 100,000 words or so, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, so that means I'm about 35% of the way through the rough draft. So that's good progress and it's back to full speed now that the New Year's and Christmas holidays are over. I am also 5,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th Cloak Mage book. I'm hoping that Blade of Storms will be out in January and Cloak of Summoning will be out in February. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Shadows, the second book in the Blades of Ruin series and Leanne Woodward has signed up to record Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and she's hoping to start work on that in March, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. And now for a brief digression into the subject of British Christmas chocolate boxes. Now, I'm grateful for all my readers, but I am surprised by how many UK readers I have. Mathematically, it is surprising because based upon which statistics you read, the UK has about 25 to 20% of the total population of the United States. So do you think that the UK book sales would be only about 20% of my US sales, but that isn't the case? In December of 2025, the US made up about 58% of my sales, but the UK did 34. I think the reason for that is that fantasy is generally a more popular genre in the UK than it is in the US. Like numerically speaking, the US probably has more fantasy readers because of the larger population, but the UK population's overall percentage of fantasy readers seems higher. Of course, maybe I'm completely wrong since the US and the UK are very different places, even if they both speak English. Anyway, that was a long-winded introduction of saying that before I started self-publishing in 2011, I knew practically nothing about the contemporary UK. I couldn't have told you if the UK was on the Euro or the Pound. However, in the 15 years since, I've absorbed a fair few facts by osmosis. One of them is Christmas chocolate boxes. I didn't know about this until recently, but apparently Christmas chocolate boxes are very popular in parts of the UK, with frequent debates about the best brand, quality, et cetera and this has been a tradition going back almost to the 1930s and the 1940s. Now, this was only an abstract fact I knew for a while, but a nice person got me a Quality Street chocolate box for Christmas. That's the brand name, if you're not familiar with it, Quality Street, which I suppose is better than Cheap Street. It was pretty good. There are apparently great debates about which chocolate ones are best, but honestly, I think I like the red cherry flavored ones the best. I know not everyone feels this way, but I do like that sort of artificial cherry taste that it has and that sometimes turns up in other things. So all in all, it was pretty tasty and [an] interesting way of experiencing a different culture. 00:04:28 Main Topic: Why is the Half-Elven Thief Series in Kindle Unlimited? Now onto our main topic this week: why is the Half-Elven Thief Series in Kindle Unlimited? Now with the release of Wizard-Assassin recently, the fifth book in that series, a few people wrote in to ask why Half-Elven Thief was in Kindle Unlimited (KU) and not wide and on all the other ebook stores. Short answer: business of publishing reasons. The “too long; didn't read” answer: of my three unfinished series, I determined that one of them needs to be in Kindle Unlimited and Half-Elven Thief drew the short straw, so to speak. What I've realized over the years I've been self-publishing is that if you have a new book that does well in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon puts its thumb on the scale for the book in a big, big way. More eyeballs get on the book. It stays higher in the rankings for a lot longer than it would otherwise, and therefore more people read and buy it. More people get email or app notifications about it. A new Kindle Unlimited book that does well even has a halo effect on the rest of my backlist, even for books that are not in Kindle Unlimited. Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows had their best days in a couple of weeks in the days after Wizard-Assassin came out and even Stealth & Spells Online got a boost. And of course, the price for this buffet of algorithmic bounty from Amazon is that a Kindle Unlimited book must be exclusive to Amazon. Now, a lot of writers get really mad about this fact, but the truth is that this is how retail works and in fact is how retail has always worked. Like for example, let's say you go to Walmart, Target, Costco, Tesco, or some other big box store and see a big display of Tide detergent towards the front of the store and near the registers. It's partially there because the store thinks it will sell, but it's mostly there because Procter & Gamble paid big bucks to have Tide detergents featured at the front of the store. This is even frequently true when the big box stores send out emails with discounts and coupons for this and that, though there is more of an algorithmic component to that than in traditional brick and mortar retail, since it's very often the case that, for example, from Target, no two customers will get identical offers. Now, admittedly, compared to the kind of draconian contracts between a big box store and an industrial conglomerate like Procter & Gamble, Kindle Unlimited by comparison is relatively mild. Amazon doesn't charge anything for it, and the term is only three months if you want to take your book out of it. The exclusivity requirement is probably anti-competitive, but the US government can't even rouse itself to do something very popular like changing Daylight Savings Time, so there's no way it will address a more complicated and more obscure issue like ebook exclusivity anytime soon. Of course, traditionally in US antitrust law, you only get in trouble for raising consumer prices and Kindle Unlimited is objectively a very good deal for heavy readers. And for that matter, exclusivity is fairly common in retail arrangements, which is why you occasionally see things like special edition holiday themed body wash available only at Target or something like that. Or in the book world, this happens as well, which is why Barnes & Noble sometimes has B&N exclusive hardback editions of various books. So that's just the reality of Kindle Unlimited since the program settled into more or less its current form around 2015 or so. To deal with it, indie writers typically settle on one of four strategies. #1: they go all in on Kindle Unlimited. #2: they ignore Kindle Unlimited, perhaps as a point of ethics and protest of Amazon. #3: they split the difference with Patreon, and #4: they split the difference with publishing windows. Strategy #1's big, big drawback is that book revenue becomes entirely dependent on Amazon, and Amazon's algorithms occasionally go berserk and start banning accounts at random. A smaller but still significant drawback is that you cut yourself out of every market that Amazon doesn't address, which means if your Amazon sales tank, there's no fallback position. Strategy #2 is much more viable across the long term, and I did it for a lot of years, but it does mean you are operating under a permanent handicap on Amazon, which remains the largest bookseller in the US and the UK. The most successful example I've seen in strategy #3 is with indie author Lindsay Buroker, who first offers her books to her Patreon subscribers and then puts the series on Kindle Unlimited. Once the series is complete, she takes them out of KU and puts them on all the other retailers and starts a new series that is first up on Patreon and then on Kindle Unlimited. I've thought about doing something like this myself, but I'm not ready to commit to the extra work Patreon would require and the Andomhaim and Cloak Mage books have such large audiences built up on the other retailers that switching them to KU would be a massive rug pull for people. With strategy #4, the publishing windows, the indie author makes the book available on all retailers for the first week and then switches them over to Kindle Unlimited. I think that approach has serious drawbacks, especially since you don't have the opportunity to build up an audience long term on the other retailers. An overlooked factor in a lot of indie publishing strategies is the long-term effects that build up over time. Part of the reason my books do well on, for example, Kobo is because I've had the majority of them on Kobo for the last 14 years, and so they have 14 years worth of reviews accumulated around them. So with all that in mind, in late 2023 and early 2024, I settled on strategy #5, which plays to the fact that I'm pretty fast as a writer. Namely, I will start a new series unconnected to everything else I've written and put that in Kindle Unlimited. Once it's finished, I will take it out of KU and put it all on all the other retailers and start a new series for Kindle Unlimited. Honestly, this has worked out pretty well so far. In 2024, the Half-Elven Thief series did well enough that it paid for my health insurance in 2024, which as we know, is no small feat. It didn't do as well for the first 11 and a half months of 2025 for the obvious reason that I didn't publish any new books in the series in that time. I had too many unfinished series and needed to wrap some of them up first, which was a separate, self-inflicted problem I've talked about in other episodes. But Wizard-Assassin did really well, as I mentioned above. So moving forward, that's my publishing strategy, and it will have three prongs. #1: Only three unfinished series at any one time. #2: Two of those series will be available on all platforms, and #3: One of those three series will be on Kindle Unlimited. So when Half-Elven Thief is finished at nine books, which will probably be in 2027, I will take it out of KU and put it on all the other retailers. One rule for my Kindle Unlimited series: it will always have to be something new and unconnected to anything I've previously written. No Andomhaim books will be in Kindle Unlimited since Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, The Shield War, and Blades of Ruin have always been wide. Likewise, Cloak Mage is staying wide. If I ever go back to the Silent Order universe for a new science fiction series, that will also be wide. So that is the longer answer for why Wizard Assassin was in Kindle Unlimited. And as always, thanks for reading. I am tentatively hoping Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, will come out in April or possibly May, depending on how the next few months go. And once again, thanks for reading the Half-Elven Thief series and all my other books, and there would be no point in writing all these books if you guys didn't want to read them. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found it useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. And if you enjoyed the podcast, it would be very helpful if you were to please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.
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Episode 283: Audiobook Sampler Platter For 2026!
12/29/2025
Episode 283: Audiobook Sampler Platter For 2026!
In this week's episode, I provide an update on my writing projects, and then share samples from four of my audiobooks to start 2026! This coupon code will get you 50% off the : POWER2025 The coupon code is valid through January 5, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we’ve got you covered!
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Episode 282: Did I Meet My Writing Goals For 2025?
12/22/2025
Episode 282: Did I Meet My Writing Goals For 2025?
In this week's episode, I take a look back at my writing goals for 2025, and see how many of them I met. I also take a loog ahead at my writing goals for 2026. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : STORIES2025 The coupon code is valid through December 29, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 282 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December 19th, 2025 and today I'm taking a look back at my writing goals from the start of 2025 and seeing how many of them I reached. We'll also take a look ahead at my writing goals for 2026. Before we get to that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing projects. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in my anthology series at my Payhip store. And that is STORIES2025. And as always, I will put the coupon code and a link to the store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through December 29th, 2025, so if you need new ebook to read as you travel for this upcoming Christmas week, we have got you covered. A reminder that the anthology series is collections of my short stories, which I tend to release every year. And in fact, next month, if all goes well, we'll have 2025: The Complete Short Stories. Now for an update on my current writing projects. Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Rivah Half-Elven series is now done. By the time this episode goes live, you should be able to get it off Amazon and Kindle Unlimited since it is my series that is in Kindle Unlimited. So I hope if you are looking for something to read, you will give that a shot. Now that Wizard-Assassin is done, my main project is going to be Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. And I believe I'm 12,000 words into that. I'm hoping to have that out in January, but depending on how January goes, it might slip to February, but January would be ideal. And after that, my next main project will be Cloak of Summoning, the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. And I literally just started it this morning before I went to the gym, which puts me at 250 words into it, so there's definitely a ways to go in that. In audiobook news, we are still waiting on Cloak of Embers (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) to get through processing at the various platforms, which always, as you imagine, tend to slow down this time of year. And Brad Wills has just started working on recording for Blade of Shadows. So hopefully we should have Cloak of Embers available for you at all platforms before too much longer. And Blade of Shadows will probably be our first audiobook for 2026. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:28 Main Topic: 2025’s Writing Goals and My Writing Goals for 2026 And speaking of 2026, in this week's episode, we're going to take a look back at my writing goals for 2025, see how many of them I met, and then look ahead for my writing goals to 2026, which is in fact just around the corner. So first off, a big thank you to everyone who read one of my books over the year of 2025. 2025 for me was an interesting year, both in a personal and a professional way, and sometimes in both the good and bad senses of the word interesting. Sales were down from 2024, but given all the economic turbulence of the year, I am grateful they were only down a relatively small amount compared to 2024. Facebook ads went from my main advertising platform at the start of 2025 to near uselessness by the end of the year due to all the AI nonsense Meta has injected into them. Spotify converted Findaway Voices to Inaudio and made a total mess of it this summer, which after that got settled is why I now upload my audiobooks directly to Google Play and Kobo rather than through Findaway Voices. It seems like a lot of companies are pursuing AI in the desperate hope that it will somehow magically become profitable even as the expense of running AI services devours them from the inside out and renders them incompetent at their primary missions. I was so annoyed at all the half-baked AI stuff Microsoft shoved into Windows 11, I did all my writing on a Mac Mini this year and have been pretty happy with it as a writing platform. Apple, of course, has AI stuff as well, but what Apple has that Microsoft doesn't is a switch that flips it all off at the system level and doesn't do any “install later” passive aggressive crap that Microsoft does. On the plus side, my Super Summer Of Finishing Things let me finish The Shield War, Stealth & Spells Online, and Ghost Armor one after another. Five unfinished series at once was too many. Three has been more manageable. And after five years, I finally got my weight down to what it was before COVID in 2025. Watching some relatives go on Ozempic and the side effects they experienced was very inspirational in the sense of wanting to avoid that experience myself. I thought I would take a lot of exercise and vegetables to do lose weight. It turns out instead it takes a whole freaking lot of exercise and a truly staggering quantity of vegetables. I tell myself the carrot sticks are really just like potato chips when I eat them, and I can almost convince myself of it. They're crunchy, right? Just like potato chips. I told myself that often enough that I very, nearly almost believe it. So let's start with a look back at my writing goals for 2025 and see how many of them I reached. #1: Write as many new words as possible, hopefully hitting one million new words of fiction in 2025. And I'm pleased to report that I hit this one. 2025 was the second year in a row where I reached a million words of new fiction and will come in at 1.12 million words with Wizard-Assassin. It did get a bit tight, but I passed the million word mark with Blade of Shadows in November, so is a nice milestone to reach. Two years of a million words in a row! #2: Finish The Shield War. I did that one! Shield of Power, the final book in The Shield War series, came out in July. It's even available in audiobook (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills). #3: Finish Ghost Armor. I did this one as well. Ghost in the Siege, the final book in the Ghost Armor series, came out in August. It's also available in audiobook (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy). #4: Continue Cloak Mage. There was a year gap after Cloak of Illusion, but I'm pleased to report I finally got back to Cloak Mage with Cloak of Worlds in October. As I mentioned earlier, in 2024, I had five unfinished series, which is way too many. So my goal was to finish some and then limit myself to only three unfinished series at any one time. By the end of summer 2025, I successfully achieved that. So going forward (barring any illness or Unexpected Events), there shouldn't be another year-long gap between Cloak Mage books. In fact, I'm hoping to write the outline for Cloak of Summoning this weekend, if all goes well. And in fact, I started this morning. #5: Continue Half-Elven Thief. It went down to the wire with only 12 days left in the month, but I was able to publish Wizard-Assassin and meet my goal. Like with Cloak Mage, there's a yearlong gap between the books, but that should be much shorter going forward. I'm hoping to start work on Rivah #6 in March or February, if all goes well. #6: Conclude Stealth & Spells Online. I did this as well. I'm not going to lie, it really was quite challenging. I originally thought of Stealth & Spells Online as a seven or eight book series, but it sold weakly enough that I didn't want to put six books’ worth of effort into it. So I thought about it and figured out how to wrap up the story in one volume, and I wrote most of it at 500 words a day from like October 2024 to July 2025, squeezing it between other things as time allowed. Then in July, I was far enough along from all that cumulative work that I finished it in like one quick burst. I think I had only like one full-time day working on it. So I'm very glad that people liked the ending for the trilogy and thought that it worked. I'm hoping to release a single volume edition of the audiobook sometime in 2026, if all goes well. Fun fact: the book was 116,000 words long, and since I published 1.12 million new words in 2025, it was in fact Stealth & Spells Online: Final Quest that got me over the million word mark. #7: New epic fantasy series in the Andomhaim/Frostborn world. I did that as well with Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows. As I mentioned before, I'm about 12,000 words in Blade of Storms, and hopefully that will be the first book I publish in 2026, ideally in January, but it might slip to February. #8: New audiobooks as time, budget, and narrator availability allow. This worked out as well. Like I said, in 2024, I've brought as many of my old series into audio as I'm going to, so instead we're going to focus on recording the books in the new series. We have books from The Shield War and Blades of Ruin narrated by Brad Wills, new books from Ghost Armor and Cloak Mage [narrated] by Hollis McCarthy, and a new Half-Elven Thief audiobook [narrated by] Leanne Woodward. So I am pleased to say that I met all my 2025 writing goals. Now with that in mind, let's take a look at what I would like to do in 2026. I'm not planning on starting anything new in 2026, but I don't think I'll reach the end of any ongoing series in that year. So basically 2026 will be The Year of Continuing. #1: Publish a million words of new fiction. I'm going to try and hit a million words again, but there's a chance ... I'm going to say right up front, there's a chance it might not work out in 2026. I'm going to have to spend at least a couple of weeks on travel, and I know for sure there are a couple of mandatory Real Life Activities that will take up an unknown amount of time. The older I get, the more I can emphasize with former UK Prime Minister, Harold McMillan when he said his biggest problems were “events, dear boy, events.” But assuming we can avoid too many “events,” I will aim to publish a million new words of fiction in 2026. #2: Continue Blades of Ruin. I also want to continue with Blades of Ruin, which will be my main series for a while. I'm planning for 12 books in this series, so we should hopefully make some good progress with it in 2026. #3: Continue Cloak Mage. I would also like to continue Cloak Mage in 2026. Cloak of Worlds was number 13 in the series and I'm planning for 18. Since I'm only working on three series at a time now, like I said before, we shouldn't have those yearlong gaps between books like I've had in the past for Cloak Mage. #4: Continue Half-Elven Thief. I'm also continuing Half Elven Thief in 2026. I had planned for six books originally, but there was just too much story to fit into six, so we're going to end up with nine. So I'm planning to continue that in 2026 as well. There was a year's gap between Orc-Hoard and Wizard-Assassin like there was with Cloak Mage but hopefully won't have as big a gap for Half-Elven Thief now that I'm only writing three series at the same time. #5: New audiobooks as time, budget, and narrator availability allow. I did this in 2025 and it worked pretty well. I don't want to bring any more of my old backlist books into audio, but instead I'll focus on Blades of Ruin, Cloak Mage, and Half-Elven Thief as time, budget, and narrator availability permit. #6: Other opportunities as available. I think it is fair to say we live in turbulent times, which is often unsettling. The flip side is that sometimes this can bring unexpected opportunities your way, so it's wise to remain alert and flexible. So we will see what 2026 brings. So those are my six writing goals for 2026. Once again, thanks for reading and listening. I hope I have new books for you to read in 2026. And as ever, when I make plans for the new year, it seems like a good idea to reflect on this quote from the book of James: “Go to now, ye that say, Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.” 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 your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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Episode 281: So The Pope Is Mad At You – A Practical Guide For Secular Lords
12/15/2025
Episode 281: So The Pope Is Mad At You – A Practical Guide For Secular Lords
In this week's episode, I indulge my hobby of medieval history, and take a look at six times Catholic monarchs came in conflict with the pope during the medieval peroid. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the : NIGHT2025 The coupon code is valid through December 22, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 281 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December 12th, 2025 and today, even though this is a podcast about indie writing and publishing, I'm going to indulge one of my hobbies and talk about Medieval history, specifically six specific instances of conflicts between Popes and Catholic Monarchs during the Middle Ages. We'll also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off all the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store, and that code is NIGHT2025. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode, and this coupon code will be valid through December the 22nd, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter or something to read as you do Christmas holiday travels, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. I am pleased to report the rough draft of Wizard-Assassin is done at exactly 70,000 words. I have also written a tie in short story called Dwarven Treasure that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook format when Wizard-Assassin comes out. So this is an excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter, in my opinion. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that book out very shortly before Christmas, like maybe the Monday or Tuesday before Christmas because that way if I do, I can reward myself by taking off the entire week between Christmas and New Year's, which is what I really want to do. So I am going to definitely hustle and try to get Wizard-Assassin out before Christmas. I'm also 9,000 words into Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will come out in January or February, depending on how things go, hopefully January, maybe February, we will see how things go. After Wizard-Assassin is published, Blade of Storms will be my main project and my secondary project will be Cloak of Summoning, the 14th book in my Cloak Mage series. Cloak of Worlds, the last book in the series, just came out in October, so considering the year gap between the last two books, that is quite a bit shorter, but as I mentioned before, the summer of 2025 was my Summer of Finishing Things. I am now down to just three active series, which means thankfully there is less of a wait between books in the series. There is a year gap between the last book in the Half-Elven Thief series and a year gap between the last book in the Cloak Mage series. Hopefully we will avoid those kind of big gaps moving forward. In audiobook news, Cloak of Embers is done (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) and is gradually filtering out to the retailers. I believe as of this recording, you can get it at Payhip, Google Play, and Kobo. The other retailers, including Audible, should be showing up before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. 00:03:11 Main Topic: So The Pope is Mad at You: A Practical Guide for Secular Lords And with that, let us move on to our main topic this week and our main topic is So The Pope is Mad at You: A Practical Guide for Secular Lords. This episode was inspired by news reports, which we'll get to in a little bit. John F. Kennedy was elected the first Catholic President of the United States in 1960. Before that, there is a widespread suspicion against having a Catholic president in the US, partly because the origin of the United States was heavily Protestant and partly for fear that a Catholic president would take his orders from the Pope in Rome. However, practical experience has proven robustly otherwise. In the past 20 years of United States history, there has been one officially Catholic president and two Catholic vice presidents and their disagreements with the various popes have made frequent news articles. For that matter, American Catholic officials of lesser authority such as Speaker of the House, mayors, governors, and senators have also found themselves frequently in disagreement with the Pope. Whenever a US Catholic political official or office holder disagrees with the Pope about something, the news media always seems to react in baffled astonishment, but Catholic political leaders disagreeing with the Pope is not shocking. It is in fact a tradition going back centuries if not millennia. Compared to the way the things used to be, the vice president and the Pope exchanging harsh social media comments is downright tame. For example, in the early 14th century, the extremely Catholic King of France sent his lawyers to kidnap and beat up the Pope. This sounds outlandish, but it actually happened. So here are some of the more dramatic disagreements between Catholic secular leaders and the Pope and we will pick six of the most prominent examples. #1: The Investiture Controversy The Investiture Controversy in the 11th century was about who had the right to appoint bishops, the Pope or the emperor. To the modern era, this sounds quite dry and boring, however, at the time it was serious business for many reasons. There wasn't much of the way in centralized state authority in Western Europe after the death of Charlemagne and the withdrawal of the Byzantine Empire from Italy and between the Viking invasions and local warfare, violence was endemic. Often the church was the only functioning large scale organization and so bishops frequently came to hold lands like feudal lords and to wield significant local power. As kings began to grow in authority and try to construct centralized governments, they often began to rely on bishops as essentially secular lords and officers of state. Like to put it in a modern context, imagine that the Archbishop of New York also served as the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City. That would mean a lot of political leaders would be very heavily invested in making sure the Archbishop was a man who had their approval. Naturally then the king had a very strong interest in appointing the bishops to make sure they were reliable men or at least men on his side. Of course, this involved a good deal of corruption, which reformers in the church condemned as simony, the buying and selling of church offices. The name comes from the Apostles’ encounter with Simon the Sorcerer in the Book of Acts who tried to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from the Apostles. Despite widespread disapproval, simony was essentially standard business through much of the ninth and 10th centuries. However, by the 11th century and through the 13th, many of the popes who came to office were zealous reformers who wanted to purge the church of all corruption. One of them was Gregory VII, who became Pope in 1073 AD. Like many of the popes of his time. Gregory VII was an energetic reformer which quickly brought him into conflict with Henry IV, the King of Germany who wanted to be anointed Holy Roman Emperor. Both Henry and Gregory wanted to strengthen their respective domains, which led to them officially deposing one another. However, Gregory had greater moral authority on his side and many of Henry's nobles disliked their king a great deal. An excommunication from the Pope gave them all the excuse they needed to move against Henry. Gregory sheltered with his ally, Countess Matilda of Tuscany at Canossa, and to lift the excommunication, Henry famously stood barefoot in the snow wearing a hair shirt. Gregory was suspicious, but eventually he succumbed to the pressure and forgave Henry. The pendulum swung back soon enough. Henry crushed his internal rivals, marshaled an army, appointed his own anti-pope and marched on Rome. Desperate, Gregory called on his ally, the Norman adventurer and warlord Robert Guiscard. Guiscard himself is a fascinating character who went from a landless adventurer from Normandy to ruling Sicily and making war on the Byzantine Empire. Guiscard 's army drove off Henry's horses. Neither Henry nor Gregory would have the last laugh, but rather Guiscard, as his troops sacked Rome in the process. The people of Rome blamed Gregory for this and he had no choice but to flee with Giscard. Gregory died in exiled at Salerno in 1085, famously and bitterly declaring that “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.” The Investiture Controversy between Emperor and Pope continued for a few more decades, but was finally settled by The Concordat of Worms in 1122. The emperor gave up the right to appoint bishops but still had a major unofficial say in the matter. Essentially, canons could elect their own bishop and monks could elect their own abbots, but if they were smart, they would make sure that their choices were acceptable to the emperor. However, choosing your own bishops could backfire, as the next example will show. #2: Will No One Rid Me of This Turbulent Priest? In England, King Henry II had his own challenges with the church and the Pope. Henry II was a vigorous king who faced significant challenges, both in holding on to his extensive territories and ruling in England that had been divided by nearly 20 years of civil war during the conflict between Empress Matilda and King Stephen. (Fun fact, I based the civil war in Blades of Ruin off the war between Matilda and Steven.) Justice had largely broken down during the Civil War and Henry undertook reforms of the legal machinery of England. He ran into a problem with the church courts. At that time in England, the church essentially had its own courts for trying cases involving clergymen, and all you needed to do to prove that you were a clergyman was to read a sentence of Latin. Naturally, some frequent malefactors used this to escape justice, since the church courts were quite a bit more lenient than the royal ones since they were not allowed to spill blood. This went on to the point where it became something of a scandal. In the US and UK, there are sometimes scandals when a judge is more lenient with members of his or her own ethnicity or social class than with other defendants. This shocks the conscience and people frequently experienced similar reactions to some of the light sentences given by the church court to serious criminals. So Henry II rolled out a full-scale program of reform and he was assisted by his chancellor Thomas Becket, who had started as a relatively low ranking clerk in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Becket was a good and faithful servant of the king, and when the previous Archbishop died, Henry arranged for him to become the new Archbishop. However, Becket seems to have undergone a personal crisis of some sort after becoming Archbishop, perhaps believing himself unworthy of the office. He resolved this crisis by becoming something of a self-righteous aesthetic and started pursuing the rights of the church and church courts with the same fervor that he once pursued the king's interests. Henry was shocked and then increasingly angry and Becket attacked Henry's reform program more and more, finally threatening excommunication and to put threatening to put England under interdict. Becket fled to take refuge with King Louis II of France, who understandably did not like Henry very much because Henry had stolen his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (who, to be fair, had cheerfully allowed herself to be stolen). Pope Alexander III managed to mediate a compromise and Becket returned to England, but Henry and Becket remained enemies. Events came to a head in 1170 AD when Henry crowned his son (also named Henry) as co-king with him in an effort to establish the succession. Since he was angry at Becket, he had other clergymen carry out the coronation, which was traditionally done by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Furious, Becket excommunicated all the clergymen involved. Henry, who had a volcanic temper blew his top at this, the source of the famous quote of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” This however, is a paraphrase. According to one of his biographers who was an eyewitness to events, what Henry actually said was something along the lines of “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?” Henry seems to have been blowing off steam, but four of his knights took this as a royal command. They proceeded to Canterbury and went to arrest Becket in his cathedral. Becket refused to submit to arrest and refused to flee, and the knights killed him before the altar. It is commonly observed that the Middle Ages was a much more physically violent time than our own, with people of all social classes much more willing to employ violence in quarrels than is the norm in the modern US. That said, killing an archbishop in his cathedral was a massive scandal that broke every social norm of the time. The murder was a serious blow to Henry's authority. While he may not have ordered Becket's murder, no one actually believed that, and many people found it politically convenient to believe that had commanded the archbishop's death. Henry's relationship with his family was already strained because of his refusal to share meaningful power and several of his sons and his wife Eleanor rose revolt against him. Henry put down the revolt, managed to make peace with his sons, imprisoned his wife, and diffused the crisis over Becket's death by doing penance and praying in front of Becket's tomb. Pope Alexander III declared Becket a saint and Henry actively encouraged the development of the cult of this new saint. Having to pray and do penance in front of the tomb of a former enemy had to have been galling to a proud man like Henry, but Henry had a keen instinct for political survival and he came through the crisis of the murder and the revolt of his sons with his crown intact. His son John would not be nearly so savvy. #3: So you've Sold Your Kingdom to the Pope. Henry II and his son and heir Richard I were both capable warriors and ruthless leaders. When Richard died, however, his brother John took the throne. John is something of a controversial figure because historians keep constantly reevaluating him, but I think it is on balance fair to say that he had all the vices of his father and brother, but none of their virtues. Henry and Richard were ruthless men who crushed their enemies whenever possible, but they also rewarded their friends and had a knack for winning battles. That was probably one of the reasons Henry was so offended at Thomas Becket. He felt he had rewarded Becket and been repaid with self-righteous ingratitude. John had the first part down, but he had an amazing gift for making new enemies, often by breaking his word at the worst possible time and frequently lost battles. Victories can paper over any number of problems, but John didn't have many victories. To be fair, he also had extraordinarily bad luck, but he also did put a lot of work into making that bad luck even worse. If John had been a quarterback in an American football team, he'd be the kind of quarterback who throws a lot of interceptions. Anyway. Throughout Henry II's reign, the English crowd had large parts of in northern France as feudal fiefs. Henry spent a lot of time maintaining control of France, and in 10 years of his reign, Richard only spent six months in England. The rest of his reign was spent campaigning to hold his lands in France. After John became king in 1199 AD, he very swiftly lost control of most of his lands in northern France in 1204 to the King of France Philip II, who was a much savvier politician than John. Philip had been on the back foot against Henry and Richard for most of his reign but against John, he had an opponent he could dominate. After 1204, John spent the next decade extracting as much money from England as possible. Every possible device for raising revenue was used, and John employed the judicial reforms his father had made to raise even more money from court cases. This led to John's conflict with the church. When the old Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1205, John favored one candidate, but the canons elected Stephen Langton as the new archbishop. The election became disputed, but Pope Innocent III favored Langton. Enraged, John declared that anyone who supported Langton as a public enemy. Innocent III would not take this lying down. When various anti-Catholic American writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries imagined an all-powerful Pope controlling Catholics from Rome, Innocent III was probably the closest the papacy ever actually came to achieving that vision. Innocent was a savvy enough politician and had enough moral authority that he could sometimes act as sort of an over king across all of Christendom, and he was frequently involved in international politics. In response to the Langton controversy, Innocent put England under papal interdict. No church services or masses were to be offered in all of England. To ratchet up the pressure, Innocent also declared John deposed and authorized Phillip II to overthrow him. However, this is where John's more competent side actually came out. He used the opportunity to loot as much money from the church as possible, and Innocent realized there wasn't actually a lot he could do to force John's compliance. A compromise was reached. John would accept Langton as archbishop and become a vassal of the Pope, and Innocent would lift the interdict. By this time, John was unpopular enough that his barons were plotting against him and Langton swiftly sided with the barons. Finally, all of John's hopes came to crashing ruin in 1214 at the Battle of Bouvines. For 10 years, he extorted enormous sums of money from England to conquer northern France and with that money, he sent a vast army to France. Philip II and his allies crushed that army, ruining 10 years of John's efforts and destroying his last vestige of authority. His barons promptly rebelled against him and forced him to sign the Magna Carta, which limited the king's powers over the nobility. John immediately (and with tedious predictability) went back on his word and England was in full civil war when he died of dysentery in 1216. England would technically remain a papal fief, though nothing much came of it. In 1365, Parliament declared that John surrendering England to the Pope had been invalid, and that was that. The papacy, preoccupied with its own impending crisis, which we'll talk about shortly, could do nothing about it. Ironically, John's greatest contributions to history came from his failures, since the Magna Carta was one of the foundations of the modern concept of constitutional government. A king with few limits on his power is a tolerable state of affairs when the king is competent, wins battles, and keeps order. When the king is capricious, cruel, and wastes 10 years of heavy taxation in losing a war, it's much less acceptable. Later kings in negotiation with Parliament would solemnly reissue Magna Carta and swear to uphold its provisions in exchange for taxes. Fun fact: Langton was also the first to divide the Bible into the chapters and verses it has today. Innocent III was powerful enough to bend kings to his will or at the very least force them to compromise, but his successors would not be as fortunate. #4: Talk to My Lawyers Fist The papacy in the 13th century was at the height of its power, but problems were on their horizon. One problem...
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Episode 280: Six Software Tools For Indie Authors
12/08/2025
Episode 280: Six Software Tools For Indie Authors
In this week's episode, we take a look at six software tools for indie authors to help them write and improve their workflow. This coupon code will get you 50% off the , (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: BLADES2025 The coupon code is valid through December 15, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT [This episode’s content is not sponsored. Jonathan has not received any compensation for these reviews and has not received any free products or services from the companies mentioned in this episode. He does not currently use affiliate links for the products mentioned.] 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 280 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is a very snowy December 5th, 2025, and today I'm discussing six software tools that are useful for indie authors. Before we get into that, we will have Coupon of the Week and then an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So first up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Blades, Book #4 in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), at my Payhip store. And that is BLADES2025. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through December the 15th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for this winter or for your Christmas travels, we have got you covered. And now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. As I mentioned last week, Blade of Shadows is out and it's available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store, and it's been doing quite well and gotten a good response from everyone. So thank you for that and I am looking forward to continuing that series. Now that Blade of Shadows is done, my main project is the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, which is Wizard-Assassin. I had originally planned to name it Elven-Assassin, but decided Wizard-Assassin sounded a bit punchier, so I went with that instead. I am 46,000 words into it, which puts me on chapter 10 of 16. The final draft will have more chapters because one of the chapters is 11,000 words. I'm going to have to cut it up. I've also noticed that readers in general these days seem to prefer shorter chapters, so I've been trying to lean more into doing that and having books with shorter chapters. I think the rough draft is going to be about 70 to 75,000 words, give or take. So I'm hoping I can finish that next week, and I am cautiously optimistic I can have the book published before Christmas. If I can't get it published before Christmas, it is going to slip to my first book of 2026. But at the moment, and of course, barring our old unwelcome friend unexpected developments, I am cautiously optimistic I can have it out by Christmas 2025. So watch my website and listen to this space for additional news. My secondary project is Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in the Blades of Ruin series and the direct sequel to Blade of Shadows. I am about 6,000 words into that, and once Wizard-Assassin is done, that will be my main project. I'm hoping to have that out at the end of January, but if Wizard-Assassin slips to January, then Blade of Storms will [of necessity] slip to February. In audiobook news, Blade of Flames, the audiobook of the first book in the Blades of Ruin series, is now out and you can get that at Audible, Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Google Play, my own Payhip store, Spotify, and all the other usual audiobook stores. So if you're looking for something else to listen to during your Christmas travels this year, I suggest checking out Blade of Flames (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills). Cloak of the Embers, the 10th book in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy)…the recording of that is done and it is being proofed right now, so I am hopeful we can hopefully have that out before Christmas (if all goes well). In fact, after I record this podcast episode, I'm going to have to convert the ebook cover of Cloak of Embers into an audiobook cover for Cloak of Embers. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. There is definitely a lot going on. 00:03:40 Main Topic: 6 Helpful Writing Tools for Indie Authors in 2025 [All Prices referenced are USD.] Now we're going to move on to our main topic this week, which is six helpful writing tools for indie authors in 2025. Last year in 2024, I did a roundup of popular software tools for writers and I thought I would give a quick update for it. Some of these tools like Calibre and LibreOffice I use, while others like Scrivener and Notion just aren't great fit for my workflow, I still want to talk about them anyways since just because I don't use them doesn't mean that they're not good and a lot of writers do in fact use them. Many writers also have complex systems for organizing their files and would benefit from tools like that. Without further ado, here are six pieces of software used for writing and writing adjacent tasks. I should mention before we get going as well that none of these tools are explicitly generative AI tools because as you know, if you've listened to the podcast over the years is my opinion of generative AI remains mostly negative. I have and continue to do some marketing experiments with generative AI elements, but I remain overall unimpressed by the technology. So with that in mind, none of these software tools I’m going to mention are explicitly AI tools. Some of them do have AI elements that you can plug in and use if you want to, but they aren't part of the core functionality of the application unless you specifically seek it out. With that in mind, let's get to it. #1: The first one we will talk about is Scrivener. Scrivener is of course essentially a word processor and project management system specifically designed for creative or nonfiction writing, unlike a traditional word processor like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or Apple Pages. It features tools for outlining, for breaking documents into chapters, tracking word count goals and et cetera. One of the major benefits of it is a one-time cost instead of as a subscription because it seems like everything is a subscription nowadays, but Scrivener is still $60 a pop. They also offer a free trial and student discount and occasionally [it will] go on sale during peak times like the holidays. The downside of this is that Scrivener has a sharp learning curve. For myself when I write, I write either in Microsoft Word or Libre Office and I just sit down and write. When I write an outline, it's one Word document and the rough draft is another document that I write until I'm done. Scrivener is definitely a more complex software application, which I have to admit is funny to say because Microsoft Word is ridiculously complicated and has, in my opinion, far more functionality stuffed into it than it really needs. But Scrivener is a different kind of functionality and therefore the learning curve could be quite high for that. Additionally, this may not be the right software tool to work with your style of writing or how you organize your files. A couple extra thoughts with that is it's important to know yourself. Will you actually use the extra features included with Scrivener or do they just look cool and shiny? Scrivener probably is best for those who take extensive notes on their work, especially if trying to organize research based on chapters where it's needed. So if you're a nonfiction writer or if you're a historical fiction writer or a thriller writer who is very concerned about accuracy in your books, this may be useful for you so you can put in notes about the proper way to address a duke in 19th century England or what caliber of ammunition your thriller hero's preferred firearm takes. It's maybe the best for the kind of people who enjoy curating their Notion and Trello accounts and are able to think about their book in a very visual way without letting that process be an excuse to keep them from writing. I'd also say it's good for people who extensively revise blocks of text within a chapter and move chapters around a lot. #2: Canva. Canva has been around for a long time and it is a platform that makes it easy to create visual content using a drag and drop interface that provides a variety of templates, fonts, and designs to use for things like social media posts. They currently have two tiers for individuals, a limited free option, and Canva Pro, which is $12.99 a month. Some of the pros for Canva are it is well-suited for using templates for writers to create images for social media posts and book marketing material. The learning curve is not very steep, especially compared with something like Photoshop. If you’ve used PowerPoint before, you can definitely handle Canva. The cons: although some people use it to create book covers, many books have been flagged by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and some of the other publishing platforms for doing so. I would advise you to avoid Canva for creating book covers because of the potential for issues that could keep your book out of ebook stores. At the very least, read Canva's terms of use and the rules of KDP and the other ebook publishers very, very carefully before you would even begin to consider using Canva for this purpose. Many of the free features have been folded into the pro version such as sharing template links. The editing and design features are basic compared to something like Photoshop, though that may change as we're going to discuss a little bit here. Because Canva is so popular, there's a certain amount of snobbery out there about using its designs without significant modification. You may have encountered on social media or the Internet people who react very negatively to the presence of AI generated images and this exists to a lesser extent with Canva templates. “Looks like it was made in Canva” is sometimes used as an insult. If you want a unique style and look for your images, you'll have to work a little more to achieve that using Canva. Canva is quick for great one-time things like Facebook or BookBub ads, but I wouldn't recommend using it for book creation or book covers at this time because of the potential problems that can arise from that. For myself, I don't usually use Canva. I've had enough practice with Photoshop that I'm pretty confident in making whatever I want in terms of ad images or book covers in Photoshop, and I use Photoshop for that. However, since I organized the notes for this episode, there is a major caveat to that. Recently, Canva acquired a program called Affinity Photo Editor, which is essentially a much lower cost alternative to Photoshop. When this happened, there was a great deal of negativity around it because people thought Canva was going to jack up the price or make it into an overpriced subscription. But what Canva did surprised a great many people in that they made Affinity totally free and essentially are using a freemium model with it where you can use Affinity Photo Editor for free. It used to be, I believe like $79, possibly $69, and then any of the other features like downloading additional content from Canva would cost part of your Canva subscription. So I have to admit, I'm sufficiently curious about this, that when I write the tie in short story for Wizard-Assassin, I may use Affinity Photo Editor to assemble the cover for it just to see if it would work for that or not, because as I've said, I use Photoshop, but Photoshop is very expensive, Adobe frequently does business practices that are a bit shifty, and the idea of a freemium alternative to Photoshop is not necessarily a bad idea. So when I write a tie in short story for Wizard-Assassin later this month, I think I will attempt to make the cover in Affinity Photo Editor and see if that is something that would be good for my workflow or not, and I will report on that later. #3: Number three is Notion, which can be used to organize information, links, calendars, and reminders into one central dashboard. They have two plans for individuals, a free plan and a Plus plan, which is currently $10 to $12 per month (depending on whether you want a monthly or an annual plan). The Plus version offers unlimited file uploads, greater customizations, and integrations with Slack and Google Drive. The pros for using Notion is that it is popular with writers and content creators for being able to have project planning tools, notes, lists, links, trackers, and reminders all in one dashboard. If you enjoy customization and getting something set up exactly the way you want, you might enjoy setting up your lists, calendars, trackers, and notes through Notion. You can add images and adjust the layout and colors for a more “aesthetic” experience. It is easy to find customized templates [online], especially for writers and for things like storyboarding, word counts, and keeping tracks of sources for nonfiction writing. These Notion templates are shared by individuals, not the company and can be free or paid. Now, some of the cons with Notion. It didn't used to use very much AI, but the company is leaning increasingly heavy into AI, both as a company and in its features on the boards, if that is a concern. The amount of customization options and detail can be absolutely overwhelming. Someone who gets decision fatigue easily or doesn't want to customize a lot and might not enjoy using it. Some people are increasingly complaining that the software is getting too overloaded with features and is slow. For people who value being organized and love having complex and highly visual systems, Notion might be helpful. The downside is that maintaining your Notion boards can easily turn into what I call a “writing-adjacent activity” that gives you the illusion of productivity because of the time you spend managing and updating it aside from the business of getting actual writing done. So once again, this is a good example of “know thyself.” If this is something that would be helpful for you, go ahead and pursue it. But if it's something that could turn into a tool for procrastination, it's probably better to avoid it. For myself, I am old enough that when I need to make lists and keep track of things, I have a yellow legal pad on my desk that I write things down on. #4: The next piece of software we're going to look at is LibreOffice. It is an open source piece of software that closely matches Microsoft Office, including Microsoft Word. Pros: It's free and open source. There's a minimal learning curve for those already familiar with Microsoft Word. The interface is a little different, but it's pretty easy to figure things out if you're familiar with Word or Excel. Some swear that that LibreOffice is faster than Word. It depends on the kind of document you're working on and the kind of computer you're using. So that's an area where your mileage may vary. It is also the best word processing option for privacy advocates, especially for those who are concerned about Microsoft and Google storing their work and possibly harvesting it for AI because by default, LibreOffice doesn't work with any AI elements. If you want it to work with any AI elements, plugins are available but they are not included. It’s great for the writer who doesn't want to support Microsoft for any reason but still wants to be able to easily save documents in Microsoft file formats like .docx. It works. I've written entire books using it. I wrote all of Soul of Serpents and Soul of Dragons in it, and that was 13 years ago now, and the software has only improved since then. I wrote Silent Order: Eclipse Hand [using it] in 2017 and was very happy with the results, and I still use it for various projects every week, and I found a couple times if something was screwed up in the formatting of Microsoft Word, if I opened it up in LibreOffice, I could fix it pretty easily and much easier than I could in Word. It does have a few cons. The user interface compared to Word or something like Apple Pages does look a bit dated, but it's still navigable. It doesn't have any cloud storage functionality. You would need to piece it together with another storage option if you want to be able to backup stuff to the cloud. But overall, if you can't afford the Microsoft Office Suite, don't want to support Microsoft, and value your privacy, this is your best bet for word processing. Some people may not like its interface, but it's still an extremely solid piece of free software. #5: And now let's move on to our fifth software tool, which is Calibre. Calibre is a tool for ebook management. It can be used for file formatting, changing your books’ metadata, or changing file formats. Many use it to create a custom ebook library. Pros include: the product is free and open source. It is easy to generate different file formats for book publication. Do you want to categorize and organize your books in a very specific way? Calibre works for that. The cons: some people find the interface a little clunky and it comes with a bit of a learning curve. To be honest, the interface does look like it came from Windows 2000 and some of the features rely on knowledge of HTML and CSS. Editing and formatting of the book itself is better done using other software. Final thoughts on that? The software is trustworthy, reliable, and has been maintained over the years. It does exactly what it says it does, without any real style but plenty of substance. And I've been a regular Calibre user for like 15 years now, and whenever I get a new computer Calibre is usually one of the very first things I install on it. #6: And now for our sixth and final tool, Inkarnate. Inkarnate is a very useful piece of software that is designed for creating maps. I believe it was originally intended to create maps for role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder and so forth. But it's also very useful for creating maps for fantasy novels. As I may have mentioned on the podcast a few times before, I really don't like making maps. I find it constraining and it makes the writing feel a bit crabbed at times. That said, I write primarily in the fantasy genre and people in the fantasy genre love maps, so I'm kind of on the hook for making maps. I used to draw the maps by hand and then import it into Photoshop and add all the locations and add colors and so forth. But that is a lot of work, I have to admit. Inkarnate makes it a lot easier, and I've used it for the last couple of maps I've made. The map of the city of Tar-Carmatheion in the Half-Elven Thief books came from Inkarnate. The map of Owyllain for Blades of Ruin came from Inkarnate, and the map of New Kyre and adjoining regions for Ghost Armor also came from Inkarnate. It's very affordable too. The subscription, I believe, is only $30 a year, and I've been using for a few years now and have never regretted it. So I'd say all the pros are all the ones I’ve already listed. The cons are that the learning curve is a little bit sharp, but there are excellent YouTube videos and tutorials for that. So, final thoughts. If you find yourself needing to make maps and don't enjoy the process of making maps, then Inkarnate is the software product for you. So those are six tools, software tools for indie authors that I hope will make you more productive and make your work easier. 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 backup episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all...
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Episode 279: Five Things I Am Thankful For As An Indie Author
12/01/2025
Episode 279: Five Things I Am Thankful For As An Indie Author
In this Thanksgiving episode, I take a look at five things I am thankful for as an indie author. This coupon code will get you 25% off the at my Payhip store: EXILE2025 The coupon code is valid through December 8, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter, ! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 279 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November 24th, 2025, and today I'm discussing five things I'm thankful for as an indie author for this Thanksgiving themed episode. As you might guess, I am recording this a little early to get ahead of the [United States] Thanksgiving holiday, but all the news and updates should still be current. We will start off with Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my current writing and publishing projects. First up is Coupon of the Week and this week's coupon code will get you 25% off all the ebooks in the Ghost Exile series at my Payhip store. And that code is EXILE2025, and as always, the coupon code and the link to my store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through December 8, 2025, so if you need a new ebook this winter as we head into the Christmas season, we've got you covered. Now an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Blade of Shadows is done and it should be available on all the ebook stores: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my own Payhip store. Initial reviews and reactions have been positive, so thank you all very much for that. My next main project is Wizard-Assassin, and that will be the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series. If my math is right, I think I'm about 25% of the way through the rough draft, and my goal is to get that out on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited before Christmas 2025, which will make (hopefully if all goes well) Wizard-Assassin the final book I publish in 2025. The first book I hopefully publish in 2026 will be Blade of Storms, the third book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and the direct sequel to Blade of Shadows. I am about a thousand words into Blade of Storms, so just starting and hopefully that will be the first book I publish in 2026 (if all goes well). In audiobook news, Blade of Shadows…the status of that is pretty much the same as the last time I recorded three days ago. It's available at some of the audiobook stores but hasn't finished processing and gotten up on ACX yet. That was narrated by Brad Wills. We are approaching proof copies of the audiobook of Cloak of Embers, and that will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy. So that is where we are at with my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:24 Main Topic: 5 Things to Be Thankful For as an Indie Author So let's move on to our main topic in keeping with the Thanksgiving holiday, which is only a few days away as I record this and was only a few days past when this episode was live, and that is five things to be thankful for as an indie author because I do spend on the show a lot of time talking about the various challenges and difficulties of being an indie author, but there are a lot of things to be thankful for as well. So as I said before, the Thanksgiving holiday is coming up here in the United States and that day always leads [me] to reflect on what we have to be thankful for. And one of the things at the top of my list is my work as an indie author and publisher. Today I'm going to talk about five things that I can be thankful for as an indie author and that other indie authors may be thankful for as well. #1: Creative freedom. As I've talked about before on this podcast, the most immediate benefit to indie publishing is not having to make creative compromises in order to get published. For example, you can make a series the exact length that you want it to be, not what the market can support. You can write in whatever genre, style, and using the themes you want without any interference. As we all know, traditional publishing is pretty trend driven and they seek out books that match trends because they are very risk averse. There's a time about a decade and a half ago when publishers were outright telling authors not to submit books with goblins and orcs and other traditional fantasy creatures, for example. Instead of trying to change your book or writing style in order to get accepted by traditional publishing, indie publishing allows you to create and share the exact book that you want to and then it can rise and fall on its own merits and how well you market it. In fact, what has been traditionally called genre writing (such as categories [like] science fiction and fantasy and mystery and so forth) have flourished without the constraints of traditional publishing. The Internet and platforms like Amazon and the other ebook platforms as well have made it easy for readers to discover books that fit in their preferred genres and styles, not what publishers think they want to read. #2: Freedom from bad deals. The traditional publishing industry is not quite as exploitative as the music industry, but it is not through a lack of trying. Bad deals abound in traditional publishing because they're relying on the fact that new authors want to be published so badly that they're willing to compromise on things like royalty rates, exclusivity agreements, and control over rights. This mindset persists quite strongly even today where if you go on any of the social media platforms, you'll see writers desperately trying to get themselves an agent rather than doing what they should be doing, self-publishing and learning digital marketing. The amounts paid out in advances (which is the amount that publishers pay authors before a book is released) are decreasing and fewer and fewer books are earning out (which means that the author receives royalties beyond the initial advance). Romance writers are especially benefiting from indie publishing because one of the top publishers in that genre is known to make deals that don't favor the author such as low advances and royalty rates, and they don't allow for contract negotiations. Indie publishing gives you the ability to get published and get your book to readers without taking a bad deal from a publisher or worse yet, turning to scammers. And unfortunately, there are a lot of scammers out there. In indie publishing, where you publish is what determines how much you receive. Each platform has their own royalty setup and payment structures, and you'll get paid far more often (usually monthly, sometimes quarterly) and have the ability to review book sales in real time instead of waiting for quarterly statements (if that or sometimes biannual statements) from a publisher that feel like they're written in hieroglyphics. If you're publishing on a direct sales platform like Pay Hip or Shopify, you can get as much as 90% of each sale and you don't have to wait for a book to reach the mysterious point where it earns out in order to get that money because the money is immediately available to you, although usually after a period of 60 days or so. And if you are an indie author, you don't have to worry about your publisher canceling your active series because of sales that the publisher doesn't like, which is allowed in a standard traditional publishing contract. It's becoming increasingly common to have publishers do this even when the next book in the series is ready for publication or even scheduled for publication. Indie authors can always complete a series for their readers, (which I've been able to do with Stealth and Spells Online most recently, for example). #3: Write [and] release at your own pace. There are no, or at the very least, very, very, very few traditional publishers that would let me have the frequent release schedule I currently have. For example, Blade of Flames came out in September, and then Blade of Shadows is coming out right now in the gap of only two months. Publishing still thinks in terms of seasonal releases, especially the fall and spring release seasons. The schedules for these releases are created far, far in advance and don't change all that much. In self-publishing, there is no one bumping your release to another season or telling you that you can't put out a book because a similar book is coming out at the same time. If you want to put out a book monthly like the pulp writers of old, you are completely free to do that. I do that myself when possible because I'm hoping there's less about a month gap between Blade Shadows and Wizard Assassin. #4: Control over your online brand. Traditional publishers like their authors to have a strong social media presence and heavily favor authors with a large and preexisting follower account. They even give pre-written social posts to their authors or require pre-approval from their team before posting on social media. With indie publishing, you are completely free to exist online in the way that makes the most sense and is the healthiest for you, and no one is telling you what you can or you can post. You can post as much as you want or even forego certain media platforms altogether or as many of them as you want. For myself, I like to post about my hobbies like vintage video games, even though that's a not a high engagement topic that the algorithm favors. There is no one telling me what I can post or trying get me to increase my follower count as a condition of getting future contracts. #5: And for me personally, the fifth and final thing to be thankful for that we'll discuss on this episode is the ability to make a living and hire others. And obviously this is a big, big, big thing to be grateful for. I've been an indie author for 14 and a half years now, and a full-time one for over nine years, and I was able to hire people to help me two and a half years ago with many non-writing tasks such as Amazon Ads, podcast transcripts, bookkeeping, and so forth. I have also been able to hire narrators like Brad Wills, Hollis McCarthy, C.J. McCallister, and Leanne Woodward to produce my audiobooks since the majority of my audiobooks are self-funded by me. I don't have to rely on a team that a publisher that has been picked out for me, and I can choose my own team as an indie author, or I can do everything myself, which is what I really did for the first 11 years. Unlike a team that a traditional publisher that has been spread too thin across an increasing number of authors, the team I hire is focused on making the best ebook or audiobook we can, and we're all on the same page. The ability to make a living at my work and even hire others is because of all of you. I am very, very grateful for all of you who have read my books and listened to my audiobooks, and so thank you very much, and we hopefully we will have new things for you to read and listen to in the coming months and in 2026. In conclusion, there is a lot to be thankful for in the world of indie publishing. Although it is hard work, the benefits of being an indie author over a traditionally published one are significant, and I suspect they're only going to grow over time as the traditional publishing industry continues to consolidate into one or two few mega corporations. So for Thanksgiving 2025, I'm grateful for all of my readers who allow me to be an indie author, and thank you once again for all of your support. 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 back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review of your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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Episode 278: Autumn 2025 Movie Roundup - Frankenstein, Universal Monsters, The Naked Gun, and others
11/24/2025
Episode 278: Autumn 2025 Movie Roundup - Frankenstein, Universal Monsters, The Naked Gun, and others
In this week's episode, I rate the movies and streaming shows I saw in Autumn 2025. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : GHOSTS2025 The coupon code is valid through December 1, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 278 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November 21st, 2025, and today I am sharing my reviews of the movies and streaming shows I saw in Fall 2025. We also have a Coupon of the Week and an update my current writing, audiobook, and publishing projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off all the ebooks in The Ghosts series at my Payhip store, and that is GHOSTS2025. And as always, we'll have the link to my Payhip store and the coupon code in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through December 1, 2025, so if you need a new ebook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now for my current writing and publishing projects: I'm very pleased to report that Blade of Shadows, the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, is now out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. By the time this episode goes live, all those stores should be available and you can get the book at any one of them and I hope you will read and enjoy it. I'm also 15,000 words into what will be my next main project Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and if all goes well, I want that to be out before Christmas. I'm also working on the outline for what will be the third book in the Blades of Ruin series, Blade of Storms, and that will hopefully, if all goes well, be the first book I publish in 2026. In audiobook news, as I mentioned last week, the audiobook of Blade of Flames is done and I believe as of this recording, you can get at my Payhip store, Google Play, Kobo, and I think Spotify. It's not up on Audible or Apple yet, but that should be soon, if all goes well. That is excellently narrated by Brad Wills. Hollis McCarthy is still working on Cloak of Embers. I believe main recording is done for that and it just has to be edited and proofed, so hopefully we'll get both audiobooks to you before the end of the year. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:08 Main Topic of the Week: Autumn 2025 Movie Review Roundup Now on to this week's main project, the Autumn 2025 Movie Review Roundup. I watched a lot of classic horror movies this time around. The old Universal black and white monster movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s turned up on Prime for Halloween and I hadn't seen them since I was a kid, so I watched a bunch of them in October and November, which seemed an appropriate thing to do for Halloween. They mostly held up as well as I remembered from when I was a kid, which was a nice surprise. As ever, the grades I give these movies are totally subjective and based on nothing more than my own opinions and thoughts. With that, let's take a look at the movies from least favorite to most favorite. First up is The Other Guys, which came out in 2010 and this is a parody of the buddy cop/ cowboy cop movie along with a heavy critique of the reckless and corrupt culture of late 2000s Wall Street. “Dumb funny” movies I've noticed tend to fall on either side of the “dumb but actually funny” or “dumb and not funny” line. And this one definitely landed on “dumb but actually funny”. Danson and Highsmith, played by The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson, are two maverick popular detectives who never do paperwork. Their paperwork is always done by Allen Gamble, who's played by Will Ferrell and Terry Hoitz, played by Mark Wahlberg. Gamble is a mild-mannered forensic accountant, while Hoitz desperately wants to be as cool as either Danson or Highsmith, but since he accidentally shot Yankees player Derek Jeter (in a recurring gag), he's a pariah within the New York Police Department. However, Danon and Highsmith's plot armor suddenly run out and they accidentally kill themselves in a darkly hilarious scene that made me laugh so much I hurt a little. Hoitz wants to step into their shoes, but Gamble has stumbled onto potentially dangerous case and soon Hoitz and Gamble have to overcome their difficulties and unravel a complicated financial crime. This was pretty funny and I enjoyed it. Amusingly in real life, someone like Gamble would be massively respected in whatever law enforcement agency he works for, since someone who prepares ironclad paperwork and correct documentation that stands up in court is an invaluable asset in law enforcement work. Overall Grade: B Next up is Fantastic Four: First Steps, which came out in 2025. I like this though, to be honest, I liked Thunderbolts and Superman 2025 better. I think my difficulty is I never really understood The Fantastic Four as a concept and why they're appealing. Maybe the Fantastic Four are one of those things you just have to imprint on when you're a kid to really enjoy or maybe at my age, the sort of retro futurism of the Four, the idea that science, technology, and rational thought will solve all our problems does seem a bit naive after the last 65 years of history or so. Additionally, the idea of a naked silver space alien riding a surfboard does seem kind of ridiculous. Anyway, the movie glides over the origin story of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm and gets right into it. To their surprise, Reed and Sue find out that Sue is pregnant, which seemed unlikely due to their superpower induced genetic mutations. Shortly after that, the Silver Surfer arrives and announces that Earth will be devoured by Galactus. The Four travel in their spaceship to confront Galactus and realize that he's a foe far beyond their power, but Galactus offers them a bargain. If Reed and Sue give him their son, he will leave Earth in peace. They refuse and so it's up to the Four to figure out a way to save Earth and Reed and Sue's son. Pretty solid superhero movie all told, but it is amusing how in every version of the character, Reed Richards is allegedly the smartest man on Earth but still can't keep his mouth shut to save his life. Overall Grade: B The next movie is Superman, which came out in 1978. After seeing the 2025 version of Superman, I decided to watch the old one from the ‘70s. It's kind of a classic because it was one of the progenitors of the modern superhero film. Interestingly, it was one of the most expensive films ever made at that time, costing about $55 million in ‘70s-era dollars, which are much less inflated than today. A rough back of the envelope calculation would put 55 million in the ‘70s worth at about $272 million today, give or take. Anyway, this was a big gamble, but it paid off for the producers since they got $300 million back, which would be like around $1.4 billion in 2025 money. Anyway, the movie tells the origin story of Superman, how his father Jor-El knows that Krypton is doomed, so he sends Kal-El to Earth. Kal-El is raised as Clark Kent by his adoptive Kansas parents and uses his powers to become Superman- defender of truth, justice, and the American way. Superman must balance his growing feelings for ace reporter Lois Lane with his need for a secret identity and the necessity of stopping Lex Luthor's dangerous schemes. Christopher Reeve was an excellent Superman and the special effects were impressive by the standards of 1978, but I think the weakest part of the movie were the villains. Lex Luthor just seemed comedic and not at all that threatening. Unexpected fun fact: Mario Puzio, author of The Godfather, wrote the screenplay. Overall Grade: B Next up is Superman II, which came out in 1980. This is a direct sequel to the previous movie. When Superman stops terrorists from detonating a nuclear bomb by throwing it into space, the blast releases the evil Kryptonian General Zod and his minions from their prison and they decide to conquer Earth. Meanwhile, Superman is falling deeper in love with the Lois Lane and unknowing of the threat from Zod, decides to renounce his powers to live with Lois as an ordinary man. I think this had the same strengths and weaknesses as the first movie. Christopher Reeve was an excellent Superman. The special effects were impressive by the standards of the 1980s, but the villains remained kind of comedic goofballs. Additionally, and while this will sound harsh, this version of Lois Lane was kind of dumb and her main function in the plot was to generate problems for Superman via her questionable decisions. Like at the end, Superman has to wipe her memory because she can't keep his secret identity to herself. If this version of Lois Lane lived today, she'd be oversharing everything she ever thought or heard on TikTok. The 2025 movie version of Lois, by contrast, bullies Mr. Terrific into lending her his flying saucer so she can rescue Superman when he's in trouble and is instrumental in destroying Lex Luthor's public image and triggering his downfall. 1970s Louis would've just had a meltdown and made things worse until Superman could get around to rescuing her. Overall, I would say the 1978 movie was too goofy, the Zac Snyder Superman movies were too grimdark, but the 2025 Superman hit the right balance between goofy and serious. Overall Grade: B Next up is Dracula, which came out in 1931, and this was one of the earliest horror movies ever made and also one of the earliest movies ever produced with sound. It is a very compressed adaptation of the stage version of Dracula. Imagine the theatrical stage version of Dracula, but then imagine that the movie was only 70 minutes long, so you have to cut a lot to fit the story into those 70 minutes. So if you haven't read the book, Dracula the movie from 1931 will not make a lot of sense. It's almost like the “Cliff's Notes Fast Run” version of Dracula. That said, Bela Lugosi’s famous performance as Dracula really carries the movie. Like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and The Mummy (which we'll talk about shortly), Bela Lugosi really captures the uncanny valley aspect of Dracula because the count isn't human anymore and has all these little tics of a creature that isn't human but only pretending to be one. Edward Van Sloan's performance as Dr. Van Helsing is likewise good and helped define the character in the public eye. So worth watching as a historical artifact, but I think some of the other Universal monster movies (which we'll discuss shortly) are much stronger. Overall Grade: B Next up is The Horror of Dracula, which came out in 1958. This is one of the first of the Hammer Horror movies from the ‘50s, starring Peter Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula. It's also apparently the first vampire movie ever made in color. Like the 1931 version of Dracula, it’s a condensed version of the story, though frankly, I think it hangs together a little better. Van Helsing is a bit more of an action hero in this one, since in the end he engages Dracula in fisticuffs. The movie is essentially carried by the charisma of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and worth watching as a good example of a classic ‘50s horror movie. Overall Grade: B Next up is The Wolf Man, which came out in 1941. This is another one of the classic Universal horror movies. This one features Lon Cheney Jr. as Larry Talbot, the younger son of Sir John Talbot. Larry's older brother died in a hunting accident, so Larry comes home to reconcile with his father and take up his duties as the family heir. Larry is kind of an amiable Average Joe and is immediately smitten with the prettiest girl in the village, but when he takes her out for a walk, they're attacked by a werewolf, who bites Larry. Larry and everyone else in the village do not believe in werewolves, but they're about to have their minds changed the hard way. The transformation sequences where Larry turns into the Wolfman were cutting edge of the time, though poor Lon Chaney Jr had to stay motionless for hours as they gradually glued yak hair to him. I think Claude Rains had the best performance in the movie as Sir John and he's almost the co-protagonist. Overall Grade: B Next up is Jurassic World: Rebirth, which came out in 2025, which I thought was a perfectly straightforward but nonetheless enjoyable adventure film. After all the many disasters caused by various genetic engineering experiments in the previous movies, dinosaurs mostly live in relatively compatible ecosystems and tropical zones near the equator. No one's looking to create a theme park with dinosaurs or create bioengineered dinosaurs as military assets any longer. However, the dinosaurs are still valuable for research and a pharmaceutical company is developing a revolutionary drug for treating cardiac disease. They just need some dinosaur blood from three of the largest species to finish it, and so the company hires a team of mercenaries to retrieve the blood. We have the usual Jurassic Park style story tropes: the savvy mercenary leader, the scientist protesting the ethics of it all, the sinister corporate executive, the troubled family getting sucked into the chaos. And of course, it all goes wrong and there are lots and lots of dinosaurs running around. It's all been done before of course, but this was done well and was entertaining. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is The Thursday Murder Club, which came out in 2025, and this is a cozy mystery set in a very high-end retirement home. Retired nurse Joyce moves into Coopers Chase, the aforementioned high end retirement home. Looking to make new friends, she falls in with a former MI6 agent named Liz, a retired trade unionist named Ron, and psychiatrist Ibrahim, who have what they call The Thursday Murder Club, where they look into cold cases and attempt to solve them. However, things are not all sunshine and light at Coopers Chase as the two owners of the building have fallen out. When one of them is murdered, The Thursday Murder Club has to solve a real murder before Coopers Chase is bulldozed to make high-end apartments. A good cozy mystery with high caliber acting talent. Both Pierce Brosnan and Jonathan Price are in the movie and regrettably do not share a scene together, because that would've been hilarious since they were both in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies in the ‘90s with Brosnan as Bond and Price as the Bond villain for the movie. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is The Creature From the Black Lagoon, which came out in 1954 and is one of the last of the black and white classic horror movies since in the ‘50s, color film was just around the corner. When a scientist finds the unusual half fish, half human fossil on a riverbank in Brazil, he decides to organize an expedition upriver to see if he can find the rest of the fossil. The trail leads his expedition to the mysterious Black Lagoon, which all the locals avoid because of its bad reputation, but a living member of the species that produce the fossils lurking the lagoon while it normally doesn't welcome visitors, it does like the one female member of the expedition and decides to claim her for its own. The creature was good monster and the underwater water sequences were impressive by the standards of the 1950s. Overall Grade: A- Next up is The Invisible Man, which came out in 1933, and this is another of the classic Universal black and white horror movies. Jack Griffin is a scientist who discovered a chemical formula for invisibility. Unfortunately, one of the drugs in his formula causes homicidal insanity, so he becomes a megalomaniac who wants to use his invisibility to rule the world. This causes Griffin to overlook the numerous weaknesses of his invisibility, which allow the police to hunt him down. The Invisible Man’s special effects were state of the art at the time and definitely hold up nearly a hundred years later. It's worth watching as another classic of the genre. Claude Rains plays Griffin, and as with The Wolf Man, his performance as Griffin descends into homicidal insanity is one of the strengths of the movie. Overall Grade: A- Next up is The Mummy, which came out in 1932, and this is another of the original Universal black and white horror movies. Boris Karloff plays the Mummy, who is the ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep, who was mummified alive for the crime of desiring the Pharaoh's daughter Ankh-es-en-Amon. After 3,000 years, Imhotep is accidentally brought back to life when an archeologist reads a magical spell and Imhotep sets out immediately to find the reincarnation of his beloved and transform her into a mummy as well so they can live together forever as undead. Edward Van Sloan plays Dr. Mueller, who is basically Edward Van Sloan's Van Helsing from Dracula if Van Helsing specialized in mummy hunting rather than vampire hunting. This version of the Mummy acts more like a Dungeons and Dragons lich instead of the now classic image of a shambling mummy in dragging bandages. That said, Boris Karloff is an excellent physical actor. As he does with Frankenstein, he brings Imhotep to life. His performance captures the essence of a creature that hasn't been human for a very long time, is trying to pretend to be human, and isn't quite getting there. Of course, the plot was reused for the 1999 version of The Mummy with Brendan Fraser. That was excellent and this is as well. Overall Grade: A- Next up is The Wedding Singer, which came out in 1998, and this is basically the Adam Sandler version of a Hallmark movie. Adam Sandler plays Robbie, a formerly famous musician whose career has lapsed and has become a wedding singer and a venue singer. He befriends the new waitress Julia at the venue, played by Drew Barrymore. The day after that, Robbie's abandoned at the altar by his fiancée, which is understandably devastating. Meanwhile, Julia’s fiancé Glenn proposes to her and Robbie agrees to help her with the wedding planning since he's an expert in the area and knows all the local vendors. However, in the process, Robbie and Julia fall in love, but are in denial about the fact, a situation made more tense when Robbie realizes Glenn is cheating on Julia and intends to continue to do so after the wedding. So it's basically a Hallmark movie filtered through the comedic sensibilities of Adam Sandler. It was very funny and Steve Buscemi always does great side characters in Adam Sandler movies. Overall Grade: A Next up is Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, which came out in 2025. This movie was sort of a self-indulgent victory lap, but it was earned. The writers of the sitcom Community used to joke that they wanted “six seasons and a movie” and Downton Abbey got “six seasons and three movies”. Anyway, this movie is about handing off things to the next generation. Lord Grantham is reluctant to fully retire as his daughter goes through a scandal related to her divorce. The next generation of servants take over as the previous ones ease into retirement. What's interesting is both the nobles and the servants are fully aware that they’re sort of LARPing a historical relic by this point because by 1930, grand country houses like Downton were increasingly rare in the UK since World War I wiped out most of them and crippling post-war taxes and economic disruption finished off many more. Anyway, if you like Downton Abbey, you like this movie. Overall Grade: A Next up is Argo, which came out in 2012, a very tense thriller about the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. During that particular crisis, six Americans escaped the embassy and hid out at the Canadian Ambassador's house in Tehran. For obvious reasons, the Canadian ambassador wanted them out as quickly as possible, so the CIA and the State Department needed to cook up a plan to get the six out while the rest of the...
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Episode 277: Digital Content Ownership For Readers & Writers
11/17/2025
Episode 277: Digital Content Ownership For Readers & Writers
In this week's episode, we discuss the advantages of digital content ownership for both readers and writers. This coupon code will get you 50% off the , Book #3 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) : CLOAK2025 The coupon code is valid through November 24, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 277 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November 14th, 2025, and today we are discussing the benefits of owning your own content for both readers and writers. Before we get to our main topic, we will start off with Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Ashes, Book #3 in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is CLOAK2025. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through November 24th, 2025, so if you need a new audiobook for your Thanksgiving travels this month, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report the rough draft of Blade of Shadows is done. This will be the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. Right now, it is just about exactly as long as Blade of Flames. It may be a little longer or a little shorter depending on how editing goes since there's some stuff I'm going to cut out, but there's also some scenes I'm going to add. I also wrote a short story called Elven Arrow. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of Elven Arrow when Blade of Shadows comes out, which will hopefully be before American Thanksgiving at the end of the month. I'm about 23% of the way through the first editing pass, so making good progress there and hope to keep up with the good progress. I am 11,000 words into Wizard-Assassin. That will be my next main project once the Blade of Shadows is published and probably the final book I publish in 2025, because I think the first book I do in 2026 will be Blades of Ruin #3, if all goes well. In audiobook news, the recording for Blade of Flames is done and it's gradually making its way out into the world (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills). I think as of the time of this recording, the only place where it's actually live is Google Play, but hopefully more stores will come online soon, and it would be cool if the Blade of Flames audiobook was available everywhere before Blade of Shadows came out. Hollis McCarthy is still working on Cloak of Embers and we hope to have that to you before the end of the year, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at with current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:25 Main Topic: Digital Content Ownership as a Reader and Writer Now let's move on to our own topic, the ownership of digital content as both a reader and a writer. As the digital revolution has gone on and on and put more decades behind it, people are increasingly building very large digital content libraries and it's an increasingly tangled point of law what happens to those digital libraries when for example, their account gets suspended, or for example, someone else dies and wants to leave their Steam library of games to their heirs. We're today going to be focusing on digital content ownership for readers and writers, and we'll start with readers. Although the price of an ebook and print book of many traditionally published books are roughly the same at this point (and sometimes bafflingly, the ebook versions cost more), the rights you have as the owner of the ebook copy are substantially less powerful. In fact, technically speaking, you aren't actually the owner of an ebook purchased from Amazon or other retailers. It's more accurate to say that you purchased a long-term conditional lease. As a side note, I'm talking about this from the perspective of United States Copyright law and ebook/audiobook stores there. The laws and standards in your own country may be different. Also, I am not a lawyer and nothing in this episode should be taken as legal advice. You obtain legal advice by hiring a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction. But now back to the main argument. In America, there is something known as the First Sale Doctrine. This section of the US Copyright Act allows physical media to be lent out and resold, among other things. For example, someone who purchases a physical book is considered its owner and the publisher can't take it back from them. The physical version of books can be used in libraries or as classroom materials until they literally fall apart, unlike their electronic equivalents, which face complicated licensing agreements that generally offer far less favorable terms of use for a much larger cost (especially for libraries and academic institutions). In the US, electronic content ownership is covered by contract law instead of the First Sale Doctrine. Although each seller has their own licenses and standards, a few things tend to remain consistent across those licenses: the inability to lend or resell the content, the inability to remove DRM from the content, and the right of the seller to alter or even remove the content. Ownership is not a right guaranteed for digital content. There is an American lawsuit currently challenging Amazon Prime Video and its use of words like “purchase” and “buy” for its video content. The lawsuit accuses Amazon of misrepresenting a heavily conditional license as a purchase, giving the average customer the impression that they own the content in perpetuity. Amazon lawyers argue that the average customer understands the difference, but frequent outrages over content being removed from users’ libraries suggests otherwise. Here are four reasons owning your ebook content is important. #1: Keeping access to the content if the company closes or gets bought out. One of the early leaders in the US ebook store market way back at the start of the indie revolution was Sony. When their Sony Reader store closed, they gave readers the option to migrate their libraries to Kobo. Books that were not available through Kobo were not able to be transferred, so some purchased content was lost for readers. A more egregious example comes from, as you might expect, Microsoft with the closing of the Microsoft ebook store in 2019. When the store closed, they offered refunds instead of giving readers an opportunity to self-archive or transfer their purchases. Any margin notes taken by readers were lost, and they were given a $25 credit for the inconvenience. Although refunding customers was a good gesture, it's not a guarantee that readers are able to repurchase the ebooks elsewhere or even that the price would be the same when they did. As an aside, I spent a good chunk of time in 2018 trying to figure out how to get into the Microsoft ebook store and then finally gave up because it was too complicated, which in hindsight turned out to be a good decision. Owning your ebooks outright gives them independence from the store that you bought them from. #2: Keeping content from being altered. Ebooks can be altered anytime. Most of the time these changes are harmless, such as updating a cover, fixing a typo, or adding a preview chapter. I do that myself all the time. Every time I get typo corrections, I upload a new version. Yet there is a potential for books to be edited or censored from the original copy that you purchased. Chapters could be removed, scenes altered, or in extreme cases, the entire book could be removed. Owning a hard copy means that you have a version that cannot be changed without your knowledge. #3: The ability to self-archive. Most ebook stores use a form of digital rights management (DRM) that makes it difficult to transfer or permanently store your collection outside of their collection or library. Trying to do so is a violation of the license you purchased from the store, so I won't discuss how to do that. Amazon recently made self-archiving more difficult by discontinuing the feature to download and transfer Kindle books via USB. Finding DRM-free ebook stores is important if you want to organize and store your ebook collection as you see fit. Two examples of stores with DRM-free ebooks are Smashwords and direct [sales] sites like My Payhip store. Other stores like Kobo have a dedicated section devoted to DRM-free ebooks. #4: Keeping your reading habits private. Companies like Amazon track reading data, mostly out of a desire to sell you similar books or ad space. They track what you're reading, the amount of time you spend reading, your reading speed, and the highlights that you make in a book. Now, most of the time this is generally pretty harmless. It's mostly used for…you look on Amazon, you see that the section “customers who enjoyed this book also enjoyed this”. Then if you use the Kindle app on your phone a lot, it has a lot of badges and achievements and it tends to be used for that kind of thing. However, there could be sinister undertones to this, especially if you're reading things you would prefer other people not know about. So if this concerns you, if there are some settings that you can adjust, but if you want complete privacy, outright ownership of your ebooks is the way to go. So what is the easiest way to own your own ebooks as a reader? The easiest way and perhaps the safest way to own your content outright is to buy print copies of books. That said, buying direct from authors or finding ebooks that have more favorable license terms is easiest way to own your ebook purchases. One of the reasons that opening a Payhip store was important to me was I gave my readers a chance to outright own purchased copies of my work and self-archive them in the way that they saw fit, if that was important to them. The price is the same on my Payhip store as other ebook or audiobook stores (and sometimes even cheaper if you're using Coupon of the Week). The ebooks and audiobooks there are DRM-free and untethered from specific stores and companies. You have the option to download files in a variety of file formats and store them in a way that makes the most sense to you. Buying direct also gives a greater share of the sale price to the authors, especially in the case of audiobooks. In conclusion, ebooks lag behind print books in terms of ownership rights for purchasers here in the United States (at the time of this recording). That said, you can be an informed consumer by reading terms of use carefully and educating yourself to make sure that you have the most possible access to your purchased content. Now, we've covered that from the reader side, and let's look at it from the side of the content creators, specifically writers. This can also apply to other content creators such as musicians, and we're going to use a very famous example for that, Taylor Swift. The general public learned about the importance of fully owning your content as a creator during the long and very public battle between musician Taylor Swift and the record company that sold her work to a private equity firm associated with someone she personally disliked. She owned the copyrights to the works (along with her various collaborators), but not the masters, the specific recordings of each song. As long as she didn't own her masters, she didn't have control over song choices for her public performances, the label releasing older content against her wishes, or how her music would be licensed out for commercial use. Swift reasserted control by rerecording old albums (a strategy previously used by the musician Prince), which gave her ownership of these new masters and devalued the original masters to the point where she could later afford to buy them outright. Many artists, including Olivia Rodrigo, credit Swift for helping them to negotiate adding the ownership of their masters into their contracts. As predatory as the publishing industry can be, the music industry tends to make them look like rank amateurs in terms of sheer evil. So it is a testament to her popularity and business success that she was able to convince them to do this. The world's most famous pop star taught millions of fans that owning your work is the ultimate goal of a creative. Why is ownership of your work important for writers specifically and not just American pop stars? We'll discuss six reasons why it's important for content creators and specifically writers in this episode. And as a reminder yet again, I'm talking about this from the perspective of United States law. Laws and standards in your own country may be different. Also, I am not a lawyer and nothing in this episode should be taken as legal advice. You obtain proper legal advice by contacting a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction. So with that in mind, let's get into the topic. What is ownership as a writer? Writers generally keep the copyrights to works they sell to publishers. Writers are essentially selling the right or a license to produce and distribute their book in a certain format, language, and geographic area. Most of the time, geographic area rights are sold separately. For example, rights for the Harry Potter books are owned by Scholastic in the United States and Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom. Sometimes writers will keep the rights in a specific format, like when I signed with Tantor to give them the audio rights to the first five Frostborn books while keeping the rights to my print and ebook formats. What writers lose in the process of selling to publishers is the ability to control how their work is marketed, packaged, and sold. They do not have the freedom to make major decisions such as when a book is released or where it is marketed. Today I am going to share six reasons that retaining ownership is important for writers and what things you generally sacrifice when you sign with a traditional publisher instead of self-publishing or indie publishing. #1: Creative control. It is not standard to have complete control over your book's cover design. Often an artist is able to submit suggestions to the designer, but the publisher has ultimate authority over the book's cover. Sometimes covers end up being wildly inappropriate for the book, but the author has no recourse. The same is usually true with the ability to pick an audiobook narrator or change anything about the narration. At times, writers (especially new ones) are pressured into changes they do not want by editors. The surest way to completely lose all creative control is signed with a book packager like Alloy Entertainment. If you want to hear the story of how L.J. Smith was fired from her own series due to a plot dispute with that publisher, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson covers it in her epic length summary of The Vampire Diaries show. Although a certain paycheck from a book packager is tempting, you'd be wisest not to create any fictional characters or worlds for this type of publisher for that reason. #2: Dead Series Syndrome. If the first book in a series does not sell well, the publisher tends to abandon the series. The next book in the series might be ready for publication, but they're not obligated to publish it if they suspect it will not be profitable. Unfinished series are extremely common in traditional publishing, unfortunately. Writers who are locked into a contract for a series are generally out of luck putting out the books on their own. Even if they put out later books on their own, not having the rights to the first book in the series makes it difficult for a writer to sell and market subsequent books. I had a series (Demonsouled) that I wanted to continue even though the first book was released by my publisher. I was able to get the rights back for it and then was able to self-publish this rest of the series. This was much easier to do 14 years ago than it is now. Modern contracts, especially from larger publishers, are not so generous in letting authors do this. It would be much easier to start as a self-published author and have full control over the trajectory of your series and make sure readers are able to finish it instead of waiting for a contract to elapse or fighting a difficult, hard to win battle to get the rights back. #3: The ability to change. One of the perks of owning your book is the ability to make quick changes that react to data. For example, I was able to retitle the Stealth and Spells series fairly quickly when it became immediately clear upon release that some found the original title confusing. A traditional publisher would likely not have bothered to make the effort unless there was a legal reason for doing so. The ability to change covers, repackaging books in different ways (like omnibus editions), and to make quick changes to the book on the fly (such as fixing typos or continuity errors), is the unique privilege that comes with owning your own work. Publishers are slow to make these types of changes, if they do it at all. #4: Profit. Writers typically only receive an advance (an initial lump sum) when working with a traditional publisher. The complexities of publisher accounting usually ensure that only great successes receive royalties, and often even those that do can take a while to reach that benchmark. Royalties are typically doled out quarterly or semi-annually, for those who make enough to receive them. The earning statements are fairly byzantine. It's hard for the average person to understand them fully to make sure they're being paid exactly what is owed to them. Owning your own work and publishing yourself means that you keep all of the profit after the cut taken by the ebook store and whatever you pay cover designers, editors, and so on. You can see all of the sales as they come in and don't have to wait for those two to four royalty checks each year in order to get paid. It's much easier to make a living as a writer and to feel confident that you can pay others when you have more accurate data on the money coming in. Indie publishing sacrifices the certainty of an advance for a far, far greater share of the profits in the long run. Additionally, agents typically take a 15 to 20% commission on author earnings, and they are an essential part of the process in traditional publishing. It's just about impossible to get foot in the door with traditional publishing without one. Most self-published writers don't bother with an agent, which means they're able to keep that cut of the money and don’t have to shape their work around the preferences and whims of an agent. They also spared the stress and hassle of working with an unethical or bad agent (of which they're unfortunately far too many). #5: Professional freedom. The publisher decides when the books are released or if they're released at all. Are you ready to publish a book two months after the first one is released? Too bad. A publisher is not going to put out the next one that quickly. The traditional wisdom of publishing schedules seems wildly out of date in the content-heavy modern world, where algorithms reward recent titles and frequent publishing. Publishing more often also helps fans stay connected to your work, and frankly, it's much easier to make a living as a writer putting out several books a year instead of just one. Additionally, traditionally published writers do not control how a book is marketed. Are you upset that your book is being marketed as a romance when you think it's complex literary fiction? Too bad. It's not your call. In fact, writers may be contractually obligated to post content to their social media pages written or approved in advance by the marketing department at the publisher. You might have to put...
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Episode 276: Six Lessons Learned From A 300% Increase In Direct Sales
11/10/2025
Episode 276: Six Lessons Learned From A 300% Increase In Direct Sales
In this week's episode, I take a look at my direct sales for 2025, and consider six lessons for improving direct sales. I also answer a reader question about Kobo Plus. This coupon code will get you 50% off the , Book #5 in The Shield War series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) : SHIELD2025 The coupon code is valid through November 17, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 276 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November 7, 2025, and today we are discussing how I had a 300% increase in direct sales for 2025 so far, and the challenges that might pose. We'll also have Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing progress, and a reader question about Kobo Plus. First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Shield of Battle, Book #5 in The Shield War series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store, which seems appropriate because we're talking about direct sales. That coupon code is SHIELD2025 and as always, links to my store and the coupon code will be in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through November 17th 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing progress. As of this recording, I am 70,000 words [into] Blade of Shadows, the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. That puts me on chapter 16 of 20, so I'm about three quarters of the way through. I think the rough draft is going to land at about 85 to 90,000 words. So if all goes well, I'm hoping to finish that rough draft next week and hopefully get the book out before Thanksgiving, but we'll see how the rest of this month goes. I'm also 8,000 words into Wizard-Assassin, which will be the fifth book of my Half-Elven Thief series. If all goes well, I want to have that out in December, which will make it the final book I publish in 2025. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Flames, the previous book in the Blades of Ruin series and good progress is being made there. And Hollis McCarthy is also working on the audiobook of Cloak of Embers, which was Book 10 in the Cloak Mage series. So if all goes well, we should have both of those audiobooks to you before the end of the year. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:00 Thoughts on Kobo Plus Let's talk a little bit about Kobo Plus before we move on to our main topic. A reader recently asked if I made more money from sales on Kobo from direct sales on the Kobo platform or through Kobo Plus, which is Kobo’s subscription service. And the answer is, well, it depends. My primary answer always is that readers should read my books on whatever platform they prefer and which is most convenient for them (with the exception of piracy). As for the specific details, it gets a little bit more complicated. I suspect at this point more Kobo readers use Kobo Plus than actually buy ebooks off Kobo. Like in September alone (which is the last month I have complete figures for), 75% of my Kobo revenue came from Kobo Plus. So very clearly not having my books in Kobo Plus is a non-starter of an idea. That said, Kobo Plus (unlike Kindle Unlimited) runs off minutes read rather than pages read that KU uses, which makes it a lot harder to game the way some people do with Kindle Unlimited because the system is more opaque. So obviously longer books do a lot better with Kobo Plus and I have a lot of longer books in the form of various omnibus editions. Even a fast reader is going to take a while to get through Frostborn: Omnibus One, so I know for a fact those do quite well on Kobo Plus. So I suspect with individual novels I make less with Kobo Plus than I do with ebook sales, but for the omnibus editions, I make more from Kobo Plus than I do with the individual sales. Overall, I would say if you're a Kobo user and you want to read a book just once, Kobo Plus is probably the economical choice, but if you want to reread the book many times, you're better off buying it outright. For an interesting bit of data, here are my 10 most read Kobo Plus books for 2025 so far. Thanks for reading them, everyone! 1.) Shield of Deception 2.) Cloak Mage Omnibus One 3.) Shield of Battle 4.) Ghost in the Assembly. 5.) Cloak of Illusion 6.) Ghost in the Corruption 7.) Cloak of Embers 8.) Dragontiarna Omnibus One 9.) Dragonskull Omnibus One 10.) Cloak of Masks So as you can see, there were three different omnibus editions in that Top 10 list, so those do quite well on Kobo Plus. 00:04:00 Main Topic: Six Lessons Learned from a 300% Increase in Direct Sales Now onto our main topic, six lessons learned from a 300% increase in direct sales for 2025. By means of some background, in 2021 I started a direct sales site for my books and audiobooks using the Payhip platform. I'd been thinking about this for some time and the instigation was that at the time I was about to publish Ghost in the Vision. The Barnes and Noble site had problems with a ransomware attack that made it impossible to upload new books to the Barnes and Noble site for about three weeks (if I remember correctly). And obviously this was concerning because I had Ghost in the Vision coming out during that time and I wanted to be able to get it to Barnes and Noble readers, but I couldn't because the Barnes and Noble site was having technical difficulties. So that's when I started using Payhip and mentioned that hey, Barnes and Noble readers, I know I can't upload it to the Barnes Noble site right now, but you can get it from Payhip and obviously Barnes Noble restored the website and I was able to upload a book again, but I kept going with the Payhip site. Why did I do that? Well, as I've said before for direct sales, it makes sense for me to have a place that I could fully control since (barring technical difficulties that we talked about) the main ebook platforms can take a day or two before the books are ready to be sold. And as we mentioned before, sometimes oddities happen and a book can get delisted on a site like Amazon or a site could suffer a cybercrime attack like Barnes and Noble did in 2021. Direct sales also give authors a greater percentage of the profits, especially for audiobooks. The highest rate of royalty I get for any audiobook sales is definitely through direct sales. Progress was slow for getting people to use the Payhip site for obvious reasons. People are locked into the platforms where they feel the most comfortable (the Kindle Library, for example). It takes a lot to get people to change their buying behaviors, but over the last year, I've seen a 300% increase in sales at my Payhip store over what I had made in 2024. And there are six reasons why I think that happened that I'd like to share with you in this week's episode. #1: The first reason is it gives people an alternative. For a variety of reasons, many people are frustrated with Amazon or Google and the other big tech companies and are boycotting them for a number of reasons. If you've paid attention to the news at all over the last five years, you can probably guess what a few of those reasons might be. Others are concerned with the amount of tracking data on these sites and having their browsing data sold as advertising info. Having a direct sales platform gives readers who have these concerns a way to support you. Payhip is great for those with privacy concerns because it provides us with very, very little user data and there's no way to put ads on the site or even sell ad space there. The only customer data I get from a transaction through Payhip is the email address, which is obviously necessary since there needs to be a place to send the ebooks and the audiobooks. I don't sell or share that data with other companies or even other authors, so that is a good way to buy my books while leaving a minimal data footprint that can't be used for any kind of tracking. #2: The second reason and one that I think is about 50% of the sales growth this year, is new releases. And that is because my Payhip site is always the first place to find any of my new releases since I have complete control over the uploads there. How fast books appear on other sites is out of my control and can sometimes take a day or two (or in extreme cases, even longer than that). But I have complete control on Payhip of upload time (so long as Payhip is working and my internet connection is working). Consistently having the new releases available on my Payhip site right away also makes people feel like they're not missing out by shopping there. Having someone to help me with my Payhip store has made that a lot easier to do that consistently over the past couple of years. I did hire someone to help me out with that and it's been light years forward in having all my ebooks and audiobooks available on the Payhip store. #3: Number three, which I think is the other 50% of the reason I had a direct sales increase this year, is Coupon of the Week, which we already listened to on this episode. Coupon of the Week only takes about a minute to set up, but it has been an effective way to get people to buy ebooks and audiobooks at my Payhip site. The discount amounts I use means I'm still getting paid roughly the same amount that I would from a sale on Audible or Amazon, but the reader is getting a pretty substantial discount. Discount amounts are usually 25% off for an ebook or 50% off for an audiobook. It's enough of a discount to make it worthwhile for my readers. I've also been experimenting with discounting entire series in a Coupon of the Week instead of only one book. This change has been good for sales. It lets readers stock up on a whole series for a fraction of the price. That kind of whole series discount is also a good response to (only a few) readers who want omnibus editions that cover every single book in the series, which frankly isn't profitable to me for a couple of reasons. One is that if it's on Amazon, a file that size would incur a significant delivery fee from Amazon, which would cut into the profits. Another reason is that the file size for that just gets to be unwieldy. Frostborn is 15 books and 15 fairly long novels combined into a single ebook file does get pretty unwieldy. #4: The fourth reason and one that has consistently been helpful is the free short stories. Switching ebook platforms is a big change for many readers and it's best to give them a good incentive to do that. The old saying that it's easier to draw someone in with a carrot instead of a stick is true in ebook sales, as is in every other facet of life. Free items are a low-pressure way for someone to try out the site and test out the experience of downloading a book through my direct sales page. Direct sales pages are the best way to have control of free content that you're giving out to readers since price changes on other sites can vary wildly in when they occur, which makes setting up promotions very difficult if you're not sure when the price change will be live on all platforms. It's also a lot easier than what people used to do in the early 2010s for this kind of thing, which is directly email ebook files to readers, whereas having them nicely delivered through Payhip and then the Book Funnel backend is much more convenient. Coupon codes can be too much of a hassle for some readers, and setting up coupon codes on multiple platforms is definitely a massive hassle and can't be done on some platforms as frequently as I would like, so giving away free short stories via Payhip is an effective use. #5: The fifth reason is my direct sales page [content] is DRM free. This winter, Amazon removed the option to download and transfer Kindle books via USB for any books purchased through Amazon, which created a stir on social media even though most readers weren't using the feature and weren't even aware that it existed. What the outrage over the change did was make many people aware that they weren't truly owners of the content they bought from Amazon. It might be your instinct as a writer to put DRM in your ebooks and audiobooks in the belief that doing so prevents piracy. As anyone in the music industry can tell you, people will always find a way around DRM. All it does is punish the honest people who are supporting you by buying your content legally and making it more difficult for them to use in the ways to make the most sense to them. Selling books without DRM gives people a chance to truly own the content and archive it the way that works best for them. Everything on my Payhip store is DRM free for those reasons. Because the books can be downloaded and stored without restrictions, they can't be removed from your collection like a book in a Kindle Library can. A book purchased from Payhip is one that you can truly and completely own. #6: The sixth reason that has been helpful I think is honestly simple patience. Direct selling ebooks is a lot harder than just putting them on Amazon because Amazon is very well optimized for getting people to buy things and direct sales are often not. The very first year I did direct sales in 2021, by the end of the year I made a grand total of $10. This year I am probably going to make high three figures (if all goes well), which still is not a lot compared to some of the sales people can report off platforms like Amazon. But if you go from $10 in 2021 to high three figures in 2025, that is quite a growth trajectory. So again, if you were to start using direct sales, be patient and bear in mind it might take a long time of using things like free short stories and Coupon of the Week to gradually build up interest in the site. I also want to talk a little bit about what I think will be future challenges with direct sales and a big one that will happen if my direct sales continue to grow at this rate will be US sales tax. In 2018, the US Supreme Court ruled that states can charge sales tax for any purchases online. Previously they had not been able to do so and the law has been changed and challenged and tweaked a little bit since then, but it's boiled down to that for most of the states (it varies by states, and this is not legal advice), the rule is if you are selling more than $100,000 worth of product in their state or more than 200 individual transactions in that state, then you're obliged to pay sales tax on those sales to that individual US state. For me, obviously that is not a problem right now. I believe as of this recording, I have had a total of 95 individual transactions for direct sales. If you divide that out among the 50 US states and UK and several EU countries, I'm nowhere near the reporting thresholds for any individual US state, even the most restrictive ones. That said, it could happen if direct sales continue to grow, that will be a problem I need to address in the future. Payhip collects a VAT for EU countries, but it doesn't do any sales tax collecting for the US. So if my direct sales continue to grow to the point where I'm hitting sales tax thresholds for the individual states, I would probably have to change platforms from Payhip to something like Shopify where there are a number of plugins on Shopify (like Tax Jar for example) that will take care of the sales tax reporting and filing and paying for you. But that is obviously not a problem right now unless my direct sales grow a good bit. But that is something to keep in mind for future endeavors. So in conclusion, Payhip has been a growing source of income for me (although still far from my primary one) because of these strategies. Payhip has been a great platform for direct sales and has given my readers another choice in where to buy my books and audiobooks. And as always, I would like to thank everyone who has bought and read my books from either Payhip or any other platform. And even though I have this direct sales platform, a reminder that my preferred answer to the question “where should I get your books?” is “wherever is most convenient for you” (with the exception of piracy, of course). 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting by form of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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Episode 275: The Praetorian Guard of Ancient Rome & Fantasy Novels
11/03/2025
Episode 275: The Praetorian Guard of Ancient Rome & Fantasy Novels
In this week's episode, we take a look at the Praetorian Guard of the Roman Empire, and consider how ancient history can inspire fantasy novels. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : SILENT2025 The coupon code is valid through November 10, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this fall, ! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 275 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 31st, 2025, and today we're talking about the Praetorian Guard of Ancient Rome and how that can inspire fantasy novels. Also, Happy Halloween (or Happy Protestant Reformation Day, if you prefer). Before we get into all that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in my Silent Order series at my Payhip store: SILENT2025. And as always, both the coupon code and the links to my store will be in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through November 10th, 2025. So if you need a new ebook for this fall as we come into winter, we have got you covered. And now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. As I mentioned last week, Cloak of Worlds is now out and you get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and at my Payhip store. The initial response has been very strong and very positive, so thank you for that and I'm glad that people are enjoying and reading the book. Now that Cloak of Worlds is done, my next main project is Blade of Shadows, which will be the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I'm currently 44,000 words into it, which puts me on chapter 9 of 20, though I'll probably have more chapters in the final draft than I will in the first draft. I found people really do tend to prefer shorter punchier, shorter chapters. Anyway, I'm about 44,000 words into it. I think I'll be about 109,000 words, when all is said and done. So hopefully that will be out in November. I'm also 4,500 words into the next Rivah book, which is Wizard-Assassin. It'd originally been entitled Elven-Assassin, but I decided Wizard-Assassin sounded punchier, so we went with that instead. I'm about 4,500 words into that and if all goes well, it will come out in December, which will make it the final book I'll publish in 2025, though hopefully I'll be publishing more books in 2026 before too much longer. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Flames and we've been listening to some proof chapters of it and are very excited about what we're hearing. Hollis McCarthy is starting work on recording Cloak of Embers. That'll be the 10th book in Cloak Mage, and hopefully we will have both of those audiobooks out before the end of the year, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:33 Main Topic: Praetorian Guard of the Ancient Roman Empire Now let's move on to our main topic this week, which is the Praetorian Guard of the Ancient Roman Empire, and they were very bad at their jobs, but we'll get into that more very shortly. One of the fascinating (if occasionally depressing) aspects of history is how often institutions end up having the exact opposite outcome of what they were intended to do. The late science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle had something called Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which once the bureaucracy got large enough, it will inevitably start turning its main focus to perpetuating the bureaucracy rather than carrying out its actual mission. And we can see examples of that time and time again, and no doubt you yourself can think of many examples: schools that make their students dumber, military organizations that fail to defend, hospitals that make people sicker, bureaucracies that exacerbate the problems that they are created to solve, and so forth. This can also apply to social movements as well. My favorite example of this is Prohibition in America. The Temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th century achieved its goal of banning alcohol sales in the United States during the Prohibition period, but the backlash and the consequences made it unpopular. And today, while alcohol is much more heavily restricted than it was at the end of the 19th century, the idea of banning alcohol in the United States is utterly implausible. The Praetorian Guard of Ancient Rome, the personal bodyguards of the Emperor, might be another example of such an institution that utterly failed at its primary goal. For over a thousand years, people have been asking why the Roman Empire fell, and I think that might actually be the wrong question. The better question is why did the Roman Empire last as long as it did, because it sure almost didn't. At the height of its power, the Empire controlled land on three different continents in an area larger than many modern states, and it had to maintain that control without anything resembling modern technology and organization. Think of the difficulties involved in governing a large multi-ethnic state in the 21st Century with modern technology and communications and imagine how much harder it was in the first century AD. Travel was difficult and dangerous even with the Roman road system. The account of St. Paul's shipwreck in the book of Acts must've been an all too common experience in the Roman Empire, given the number of Roman wrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Messages could take weeks to reach their recipients, and there was no division between civilian and military authority. That meant if the Emperors wanted to do anything, they had to use the army to do it because the army was the only pool of skilled men loyal to the state. Since the Empire never really solved the problem of succession and the transfer of power, it didn't take long before ambitious men figured out that the man with the largest army could declare himself Emperor and the Roman Empire actually broke apart into three competing mini empires and almost fell apart entirely in the middle of the 200s AD. So as we can see, there were a lot of reasons the Roman Empire fell apart and the Praetorian Guard, the bodyguard of the emperors, was one of them. The Praetorian Guard certainly wasn't the sole reason the Roman Empire collapsed, but the guard most definitely didn't help. In the last century of the Roman Republic, one of the growing problems was that the armies were less loyal to Rome and more loyal to their general, who made sure they got paid and received grants of land upon discharge. To show their prestige and to guard against the danger of assassination from rivals, generals began collecting personal bodyguards. Since the Roman generals commanded from a tent in a legionary camp called a “praetorium,” the general's private guards became called “praetorians.” Obviously, the general wanted his best troops as his bodyguards so becoming a praetorian was a privileged position with higher pay and perks. This practice continued as the Roman Republic split apart into civil wars between the ambitious generals of the First and Second Triumvirates. The civil wars of the Roman Republic ended with Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus, as the last man standing with sole control of what we now think of as the Roman Empire. Augustus is remembered as the first Roman emperor, but the office of Emperor didn't really exist at the time, not the way we think of it now. Rather, Augustus was essentially a military dictator, but after he won, he went to great lengths to conceal his power under cloak of legality by having the Senate invest him with various official powers and offices. In modern terms, it'd be like if the United States was ruled by a military dictator who simultaneously held the offices of President, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, the governorships of the five most populous states, all while claiming to be only the first citizen among equals. Essentially, Augustus invented the powers of the Roman emperor on the fly while being a military dictator and his successors followed suit. Julius Caesar famously pardoned his enemies and went around without a bodyguard to show his courage, which ended up getting him assassinated. Augustus, by contrast, was determined not to repeat that mistake. So after annihilating his enemies, he founded a personal bodyguard in what we know today as the Praetorian Guard. That's a modern term. The praetorians never called themselves the Praetorian Guard, and they always refer to themselves as the praetorian of whichever emperor they happen to be serving like the Praetorians of Augustus or the Praetorians of Claudius and so forth. Augustus seems to have seen some of the potential danger in the institution of the Praetorian Guard, and during his reign, they were scattered around Italy with ones guarding him rotated out every so often. The Praetorians in Italy, when not guarding the Emperor, tended to do odd jobs for the government that needed doing like policing, construction, surveying, settling boundary disputes, and so forth. However, Augustus's successor Tiberius concentrated the Guard in Rome, which made it even more dangerous. It also tied into another problem with the Roman Empire, one that it never quite managed to solve, which was the succession problem. Augustus was a military dictator who assembled a sort of ad hoc legality around his position with various offices and powers. But how would he pass that onto a successor or what if someone else decided they were the proper successor? Augustus had taken his office by force, so why shouldn't anyone else? The Praetorian Guard exacerbated this problem further. Was their loyalty to the office of the Emperor (which was tricky because that office didn't technically exist)? Was it to the man himself or to his heirs? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Praetorian Guard eventually settled on the most practical answer to this question. Their loyalty belonged to whoever paid them the most money. There's a very high chance that Tiberius was murdered by the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, which means that the imperial bodyguard made it only two emperors [repeated for dramatic emphasis] before it started killing them. Tiberius’s successor Caligula was famously insane and the Guard eventually got sick of him and participated in his murder. After Caligula's death, the guard declared Claudius as the new Emperor, who repaid them by giving them lavish donatives. That meant the Guard had gone from protecting the emperors to killing ones that didn't like, and then installing new ones. After the Senate turned against Nero and he committed suicide in 69 AD, the Roman Empire had its year of four emperors: Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian, who won the civil war and became the new emperor. Each of the potential claimants had their own praetorians who fought against other praetorians. The original Praetorian Guard of Nero did not cover itself in glory, as their comfortable life in Rome did not make them effective as field soldiers and they lost against the toughened legionaries from the frontier armies who came to fight in the civil war. That said, during the reigns of the Five Good Emperors (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius) from 96 to 180 AD, we don’t hear much about the Praetorian Guard. The most likely explanation is that these emperors were strong and capable rulers, so the guard had no reason to turn against them, and therefore any potential conspiracies that would've involved the Guard just didn't get off the ground. However, part of the reason the 100s AD were the apex of the Roman Empire is that Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius did not have sons, so they adopted a capable leader as their son and heir, thereby creating continuity of rule. Marcus Aurelius unfortunately had a natural son named Commodus, and after he died, Commodus became Emperor. Commodus was a spectacularly incompetent narcissist, nowadays famously known as the villain from the movie Gladiator. If anything, Gladiator toned down Commodus’ brutality, though to be fair to Commodus, he didn't murder his father like the fictional version did in the movie. Commodus was eventually assassinated, and the Praetorian Guard hit its lowest point soon after. Pertinax became Emperor after Commodus, and there was hope he would be a Nerva-type figure, a respected elderly Senator who would adopt a capable heir the way Nerva did with Trajan. However, Commodus had used the Guard as his privileged force of personal thugs, and Pertinax tried to impose discipline upon them. The Guard most definitely did not care for that, so they murdered Pertinax and then auctioned off the title of Emperor to whoever would pay them the most. Soon after Septimius Severus seized control of the Empire and he summarily fired all the Praetorian and put his own veteran legionaries in their place. So the Praetorian Guard, which had been intended to guard the emperors, ended up murdering the Emperor on a regular basis and sometimes choosing a successor and even auctioning off the title of Emperor to the highest bidder. Septimius Severus was a brutal ruler and held the Empire together long enough to die of natural causes. His sons Caracalla and Geta were his successors, and Caracalla murdered Geta before he was assassinated himself by yet another plot from disgruntled praetorians. After that, both the Empire and the Guard declined precipitously. This was the period later historians would call the Crisis of the Third Century, when the Roman Empire fractured into the three competing mini empires I mentioned earlier. A depressing pattern rapidly took hold. The Praetorian Guard or the army would kill an Emperor and proclaim a new one. The Emperor would last until he tried to do something the army didn't like, such as imposing discipline and then the pattern would repeat. The Praetorian Guard was never really reformed, but like so many failed institutions, it gradually became obsolete. Part of the reason was that the Empire was subject to frequent barbarian invasions throughout the 200s. The Emperor was required constantly on the frontiers to supervise the defense with the field armies. The emperors developed a different kind of bodyguard called the “scholae palatinae”, a mounted group of soldiers that would accompany him in the field as he moved about the Empire. The constant defensive warfare also resulted in a subtle shift within the Empire. Rome was no longer the center of power within the Empire. The center of power was actually wherever the Emperor happened to be at the moment. The city of Rome itself had become in many ways an expensive vestigial relic of another age. Some of the emperors only visited Rome once. Some of the shorter-lived ones never made it there at all, and the Emperors certainly did not rule from Rome. Because of these changes, the idea of the Praetorian Guard, a permanent bodyguard force based in Rome, had become obsolete. The actual end of the Praetorian Guard came after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, the battle where the Emperor Constantine famously had the vision that led him to convert to Christianity. The Praetorian Guard sided with Constantine’s opponent Maxentius, and since Constantine had no use for the Praetorian Guard and indeed would move his capital to the new city of Constantinople, he simply had the Guard disbanded and continued to rely on mounted cavalry units for his personal bodyguard. So the Praetorian Guard, after three centuries of frequent treachery and corruption, had come to an end. Amusingly, while the Guard was gone, the title of “praetorian prefect” remained in use in the Empire for the rest of its history, which came to show just how powerful the commander of the Guard could become. In the end, the Praetorian Guard was yet another example of institution that became a hindrance to the very goals it was founded to advance. This seems to be a curse of any organization, and the only cure is constant vigilance and strong leadership, two qualities, alas, that are all too rare at any age of history. Yet you can definitely see why I say history is the best source of material for fantasy writers. You could get like 20 different novels out of the events I discussed above. So that is it for this week. Thanks 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.
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Episode 274: Avoiding Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome
10/27/2025
Episode 274: Avoiding Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome
In this week's episode, we take a look at the Continuity Lockout Syndrome that can sometimes happen with long series like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and how to avoid it. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of : HALLOWEEN2025 The coupon code is valid through November 3, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 274 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 24th, 2025, and today we are talking about continuity lockout in long series and how to avoid that. Before we get to our main topic, we will start with Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code we'll get you 50% off the audiobook of Shield of Deception, Book #4 in The Shield War series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is HALLOWEEN2025. As always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes and this coupon code is valid through November 3, 2025. So if you need new audiobook for this fall, we've got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. I'm pleased to report that as of this recording, Cloak of World, the 13th book in my Cloak Mage series, is now available and you can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my own Payhip Store. It's already selling quite well and I've gotten several nice comments about it, so thank you everyone for that. Now that Cloak of Worlds is out, my next main project will be Blade of Shadows, the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and I am 18,000 words into that and I think probably on Monday, I will start full speed ahead with that. My secondary project will be the fifth Rivah book, which I am working on the outline today and tomorrow. Originally it was going to be called Elven-Assassin, but I think I'm going to change the title as I write the outline to Wizard-Assassin. If all goes well, Blade of Shadow should be out in November and Wizard-Assassin will be out in December for the final book of 2025. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Flames, which will be the first audiobook in that series and hopefully we'll have more news for that for you soon. And Hollis McCarthy, who you might remember we interviewed last week, is working on Cloak of Embers and that should hopefully be out before the end of the year, so that's what we're working on for audiobooks right now. 00:02:18 Avoiding Continuity Lockout in a Long Series: Lessons from the Marvel Cinematic Universe Now onto our main topic this week: Avoiding Continuity Lockout in a Long Series: Lessons from The Marvel Cinematic Universe, as that is the most famous example of I think of continuity lockout available in the public eye right now. Mild spoiler warning: although there aren't going to be any specific spoilers for movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I will talk broadly about the series and some of the major themes and trends in it. If you're extremely sensitive to spoilers or haven't seen Avengers Endgame yet, proceed with extreme caution. Now over the course of a long series, there's a tendency for readership or viewership to drop off. Not everyone who starts a series will finish it. One of the reasons for that is called continuity lockout. What is continuity lockout? Continuity lockout describes when a series has reached a point where new readers or viewers can't understand what is happening, especially when the amount of older material in a series that’s essential for understanding new plots becomes too much of a burden. It can also describe when casual fans of series begin to drop off and turn to other kinds of entertainment. A good example of that from my own life is earlier this year the Marvel movie Thunderbolts came out and I thought that was a pretty good movie and I gave it an A in my movie roundup for the summer. Some relatives of mine went to see Thunderbolts and their reaction was, well, we didn't know who any of these people were, so we weren't sure what was happening, but it was a hot day and the air conditioning was nice. So while I'm glad they enjoyed the nice air conditioning, you can see the problem we are demonstrating because the main characters of Thunderbolts were Bucky Barnes-the Winter Soldier, Yelena, Red Guardian, the former Captain America (what was his name…John Walker?), Taskmaster, and Ghost. All of these people are introduced in previous Marvel projects, and if you didn't know who they were, it would be hard to connect with these characters. Now, some series like Doctor Who and James Bond are designed to have new entry points every few years and don't take a lot of pains to keep consistent canon across the decades. For example, you think about how many different actors have played James Bond and all of Bond's various supporting characters like M and Q and Moneypenny. There tends to be a consistent canon within each iteration of James Bond, but then they start over with a new Bond. Now that Amazon is having Denis Villeneuve do the new Bond, no doubt we will have a completely new Bond continuity for the 21st century. And although a series like James Bond will have a lot of recurring characters, like as I said, M, Q, and Moneypenny, knowing their entire history beyond what's happening in the current production usually is not important for following the plot or a brief Google search will quickly explain what's needed. Other series like Star Trek or Star Wars rely heavily on decades of established canon, even when starting a new series, making them intimidating to begin with. Another good example of this is when the Star Wars TV show Ahsoka came out in 2023, the creators were at pains to explain that, no, you don't need to see anything else to watch this and you just jump right in. In practice, however, a lot of news sites ran articles like “34 Essential Episodes of Star Wars Rebels To Watch Before You Watch Ahsoka”, which kind of belies the point. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (which we will refer to as MCU in this episode to save time) is certainly one of those series that relies heavily on older content to drive its plots. Like the many comic series it draws from, the MCU requires a great deal of prior knowledge from its viewers that in the later installments can start to feel like homework. Now, how did continuity lockout happen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? The people who initially enjoyed the first Ironman and Avengers movies will most likely find themselves very confused if they try to watch the latest Marvel movies without catching up first. The full MCU canon to date would take well over a week to watch at this point, assuming you did nothing else that week. The MCU is over 16 years old now and still producing new content at a fairly brisk pace, though it has slowed down a bit after the end of the peak streaming era when Disney was pushing them to make as many shows and movies as possible to draw subscribers to their Disney Plus streaming service. The multiverse arc of the last few years (with multiple alternate realities for the characters) has only added to viewer confusion. As longtime listeners might know, I am not a big fan of the multiverse as a storytelling concept. There's also a debate about what content is official MCU since there are older shows from ABC and Netflix and movies filmed before Ironman, which increases that confusion. A good example of continuity lockout in the MCU was the 2023 movie The Marvels, which I thought was an enjoyable (if perfectly straightforward) science fiction flick that felt like it was something from the ‘70s (in a good way). But to fully know who all the characters are and to understand their abilities, the viewer would need at the minimum, to watch Captain Marvel, Avengers Endgame, the Ms. Marvel series, and the WandaVision series, and that is over 10 hours of content to watch as homework before watching a movie with characters that are fairly new to the MCU and a plot that is a one-off that doesn't tie into subsequent films. In the age of Disney Plus, access to the prior films and TV shows is easier than it would've been in the pre-streaming era, but it's still a major time commitment, especially for a film like The Marvels that did not have strong enough reviews to motivate viewers to make the trip to the theater. Additionally, streaming itself is getting more and more expensive, which in these troubled economic times can get to be something of a pinch. I've found in my own writing career that people tend to be completionist and want to read everything in a series before they move on to the next one. And many people feel they have to rewatch movies or catch up on Disney Plus before they go see a Marvel movie in theaters, which makes the impulse to wait until the newest movie hits the streaming service instead of seeing it in theaters all the stronger. Anecdotally, I know of many people who fell off watching the MCU movies after Endgame and never watched any of the Disney Plus series. I mean, logically that makes sense because if you saw Endgame, it felt like a very epic and cinematic end to the saga and the story's over, why tell more? The reasons they gave were because they didn't have Disney Plus, as I mentioned, because of cost. They didn't have time to rewatch the older movies before watching the new ones, or they found the newer movies confusing. The drop in viewership in the MCU over the course of its 16 year run can teach us writers some valuable lessons. So now we will go into five lessons from the MCU you can apply to your book series, especially if like me, you tend to write longer book series. #1: Tell a complete story. Although it's nice to believe that all your readers are exactly following your intended order (believe me, as I know from many reader emails, that's not always what happens), someone will start mid-series if given the book as a gift or pick up a later book in the series if it goes on sale. They might not even realize they're not starting with the first book when they pick up a book. Although you don't have to explain everything that happened in previous books in your current one, it does have to stand on its own. A book ultimately needs to tell a complete story, even if it is part of a series. It needs to have a clear beginning, middle, and end that belong entirely to that book. Ending or starting on a cliffhanger is one example of something that upsets readers and viewers. Some people who went to the Infinity War movie in theaters were not aware that the movie was a part one and were confused when the movie ended abruptly, which amusingly ties into one of my rules with cliffhangers is that I'll only really do a proper cliffhanger in the second to last book in a series. Ghost in the Pact was definitely a cliffhanger because that was right before the final Ghost in the Winds. In Cloak Games, Sky Hammer ended on cliffhanger because that was right before the final book of Cloak Games, Mage Fall. So cliffhangers are generally best avoided and you should tell a complete story whenever possible. #2: Don't run forward too fast. Post Endgame, the MCU lost some of its core characters and the next set of films largely focused on new characters who sometimes only appeared once and didn't connect together. Although introducing new characters is important, it needs to be done in a deliberate way and they need to connect well into your established world and its characters. An example of this in the MCU is the character Shang-Chi. Although his standalone movie was popular and I thought it was pretty good, he has not appeared in the MCU for four years. Any momentum or interest in that character has dissipated in that near half decade. Many, many, many new characters were introduced in the MCU after Shang-Chi and have suffered a similar fate. Those new characters all are going to be crammed into the next Avengers movie where most of them will meet for the first time, and that movie has to also fit in characters from previous phases of the MCU who also largely don't know the new characters. This upcoming movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will carry the burden of all these non-interlocking continuities and unrelated characters. Prior phases of the MCU did some of that work ahead of the big team up movies and made the movies feel purposeful and easier to understand like they were bigger events. Although new characters breathe life into a series, they need to be introduced slowly and meaningfully and need to connect well into what you have already established in your series. Having an anchor character from prior parts of the series goes a long way to help the readers gain a connection to the new one. #3: Focus on key themes. There is a temptation with worldbuilding in a series to feature every possible aspect of that world and use everything you have developed when working on the series. A good series knows that you can't possibly feature it all. Instead, it focuses on what serves the plot and your key themes in a story. For example, in the first phase of the MCU, viewers didn't know the complete history of every character or have full access to every aspect of something like the SHIELD Organization. The MCU writers chose to focus on what built up the central plot of bringing the group together to fight evil and to confront aspects of their characters that made them reluctant to do that. It was extremely effective and made the first group of movies feel cohesive and like they were leading up to something important. Having key themes front and center of the story helps readers feel connected to the story as it spreads across many books. This also helps characters from straying from their core values and goals as the series continues, which is something that greatly annoys readers and can make them stop this series. For myself, I found that I generally do just enough worldbuilding as I need and too little world building is bad, but getting too lost in the weeds with the worldbuilding is a bad idea and it's generally best to focus on what you need for that particular story. #4: Help your readers remember. There is a brisk market on YouTube for recap or explanation videos to help people catch up on MCU content, which Disney at one point attempted to recreate on their service as shorts called Marvel Studio Legends, but has since apparently given up on that as streaming content budgets have been trimmed. The more you can help your readers with continuity like recaps, guides, or even short form video about previous books, the more likely they are to be willing to start or restart a series. People are busy and some people have better memories than others. Giving readers this content outside of the text also prevents awkward infodumps about past books that could stop the plot dead in its tracks. Above all, keep your readers from feeling confused or frustrated. #5: Know when to retire a character (or at least rest them). Although it's tempting to continue with a popular character forever, there comes a point when that character's arc has logically concluded, and they have matured and achieved all their goals. Continuing with that character might force them to act in ways that don't make sense for the character, plots that don't feel right for the character, or plots that feel repetitive. The MCU retired several popular characters during the movie Endgame. The way they did it showed that they thought carefully about the character's emotional journeys and what their goals were. It wasn't done for shock value or the sole purpose of hiring new, cheaper actors (though, to be honest, that was probably part of the motivation). A satisfying ending for a character is a crucial part of any series, even if the series continues on without them. It's good to know when to stop. I mean, to be fair, I've written a lot of Ridmark books and a lot of Caina books, but there also comes a time when you need to try something new, which is why I'm writing the Rivah Half-Elven series and why I started the Blades of Ruin series. Eventually, as I said with the previous lesson, there comes a time when you need to do something new, when the previous characters’ arcs and stories have reached their logical end. Sherlock Holmes has a great quote about this in the story of The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, where he's almost defeated by the villain, but the villain has made a perfect trap but wants to improve it just a little bit, and that blows up in his face. The quote goes like this: “It was a masterpiece of villainy, and he carried it out like a master. The idea of the will, which would give an obvious motive for the crime, the secret visit unknown to his own parents, the retention of the stick, the blood and the animal remains and buttons in the wood pile, all were admirable. It was a net from which that seemed to me a few hours ago, there was no possible escape, but he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop. He wished to improve that which was already perfect to draw the rope tighter yet around the neck of his unfortunate victim, and so he ruined all.” Now, I think I read that particular Sherlock Holmes story for the first time over 25 years ago, but that quote has remained with me ever since about how the supreme gift of the artist is the knowledge of when to stop. I think that might be true of a long series as well. I mean, the temptation is if you have a series that is selling well is to keep writing books in it forever and ever, but eventually you do have to take the risk and try something new. In conclusion, it's important to be deliberate about how a series evolves, whether it's a multi-billion dollar movie franchise or a book series that you're just starting to write. Looking at the ups and downs of the MCU post Endgame shows the importance of plotting a series well, not overcomplicating it, staying close to what makes fans enjoy it, and maybe avoiding plots to do with the multiverse concept. So that's it for this week. Thanks 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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Episode 273: An Interview With Hollis McCarthy
10/20/2025
Episode 273: An Interview With Hollis McCarthy
In this week's episode, we interview narrator Hollis McCarthy, who has narrated over 300 audiobooks, including many of THE GHOSTS and CLOAK MAGES. She is also co-author with her mother Dee Maltby of the MAGIC OF LARLION series, which you can learn more about at . This coupon code will get you 25% off the : DRAGONSKULL25 The coupon code is valid through October 27, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT Introduction and Writing Updates (00:00): Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 273 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moller. Today is October 17th, 2025, and today we have an interview with audiobook narrator Hollis McCarthy. Hollis has narrated many audiobooks, including numerous books from the Ghost and Cloak Mage series, so we'll talk with her about that. Before we get to our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my current writing projects. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragonskull series at my Payhip store, and that coupon code is DRAGONSKULL25. The coupon code is valid through October 27th, 2025. So if you need some new ebooks to read for this fall, we've got you covered. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my store will be available in the show notes. Now for an update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am 80% of the way through the first round of edits in Cloak of Worlds, so making good progress and if all goes well, the book should be out before the end of the month. I'm also 14,000 words into Blade of Shadows, which will be my next main project after Cloak of Worlds is published, which means I also have to write the outline for Elven-Assassin soon, and that will be the fifth book in the Rivah series. In audiobook news, recording will be underway next week for Blade of Flames. That will be narrated excellently by Brad Wills. Ghost in Siege is now out. It should be available at of all the audiobook stories (except Spotify) and it should be available there in a few days. And that is the final book in my Ghost Armor series that is excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook and publishing projects, which makes for a good segue into our main topic, our interview with Hollis McCarthy, which begins now. 00:03:56 Interview With Hollis McCarthy Hi everyone. I'm here today with Hollis McCarthy, who is a classically trained actor. Hollis has played leads in regional and off-Broadway theater, specializing in Shakespeare. On CBS. she's been a recurring guest star judge on Bull, the president of Ireland on Bluebloods, and a senator on Netflix's House of Cards. She's narrated more than 300 books for a variety of publishers and is the proud co-author of her mom Dee Maltby’s epic fantasy series, The Magic of Larlion. Hollis, thanks for coming on the show today. Hollis: My pleasure. Jonathan: So to start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into acting and performing? Hollis: That's a great question. I think it all started with doing my little brother's Sesame Street finger puppets. He's 10 years younger than me, so I mean, I got to reread all my favorite books with him and I started voicing the finger puppets to Burt, Ernie and Cookie Monster and all those guys in the backseat of the car and playing all the characters. And then my brother went into theater. My other brother's seven years older than me, and I used to go see his shows up at the college when I was in high school and kind of fell in love with it there. I absolutely meant to be an aeronautical engineer/physicist like my dad, but it didn't end up working out. I fell in love with theater and went to Stratford. I had a dual major because I was in an honors program, so I didn't have to declare a major until my fifth year of undergrad. But then I went to Stratford up in Canada and I saw two Shakespeare shows in one day and that was it. I had to do that. That was what I loved. Jonathan: Well, since we've had many audiobooks together, I'm glad it worked out that way. Hollis: Me too. Yeah, so I got my BFA in acting, and then I got my MFA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in performance, and I was lucky enough to have some great coaches from the RSC and did a bunch more Shakespeare, and I've done that regionally a lot. And then I fell into audiobooks because I got tired of traveling, and I love to work from my home in my jammies. Jonathan: That is the dream. Speaking of that, could you tell us a bit more about how you sort of got into audiobooks or ended up doing a lot of that? Hollis: Yeah. Well, again, it starts with my childhood. My mom, who was a writer and an artist, she had, there were five of us kids and she would read out loud to us in the kitchen to keep us from fighting when we were cleaning up. So she started with Tolkien and Watership Down and Narnia and all of that. And then I got to, like I said, read to my little brother all my favorite books. And so I started doing all different voices for the characters and I always thought that was normal until, of course I volunteered to read in class in high school and people thought I was some sort of freak, but I always loved playing all the characters. And so when I started looking at staying home more and what could I do to work from home instead of being on the road for work, which was great for a long time, but then at some point you want to stay home and have a life as an actor as well as doing what you love. And audiobooks seemed a good fit. So my husband, who's also an actor, took a class from Paul Rubin here in the city in New York. We live in the New York area now. And he got a bunch of good tips from that that he passed on to me. And then my agent got me an audition with Audible and Mike Charzuk there. I came in and read a couple of pieces for him and he came back to the booth with a book he wanted me to start on. And from there I just kept building and got a lot of great indie authors through ACX like you. I don't know how many books we've done together now. Jonathan: It's over 30, I think. Yeah, 30 over the last seven years. So it's been a while. Hollis: And you're seriously, I mean, I'm not saying this because I'm on your blog, but your series are absolutely my favorites, especially because, yeah, the two series that I do, one is Nadia from the Midwest like me and then the other one with Caina, the epic fantasy world, which uses all my British and Irish bits and I absolutely love them. So yeah, I've just kept building up, getting in with a few more publishers now, which is harder to do and I just love it. Our first booth, when the pandemic hit, we had to build a booth at home and I had been going to studios in the city up until that point, but it hit pretty suddenly. It was obvious on St. Patrick's Day when it was like us going to the studio and people who were absolutely desperate folks were the only other ones on the street. We had to stay home. So my husband took our rapier blade (we fight with swords. We're actor combatants, like you said). He took two broadsword blades and a rapier blade, and he's handy with carpentry, fortunately. That's how he worked his way through school. He bracketed those to the wall and we ordered through Amazon before they kind of shut down too. We ordered packing blankets to hang over them and I ordered a new microphone and a new interface and it was trial and error for a bunch of days. And we had an engineer on call who talked us through how to run the software programs and stuff, how to set them up. And from there I've just kept recording at home. I sometimes still go into the studios when they have a budget where they can spring for a studio, but mostly they want you to work from home these days. So that's mostly what I do. Jonathan: Oh, building a recording booth out of swords. That's very Caina. Hollis: It's very Caina. I love Caina. Caina is me as a young woman. If I had been a superhero, I would've been a Caina. All my favorite roles in Shakespeare were the girl as boy ones. You asked, one of my favorite roles in theater was when I was at Alabama Shakespeare and I was playing Queen Elizabeth in Richard III and dressing in gorgeous gowns and being very seductive and very powerful and manipulative and all that. But in the earlier scenes, we did the three plays and in the Richard III and the Henry VI we did all three. And in the earlier scenes where Elizabeth wasn't in, I got to dress up and doublet and hose and I like stippled some stipple of beard on my face and climbed a siege ladder with a sword in one hand and did a spectacular pratfall running away from the bad guys and would slide on my stomach on the deck of the stage and I would come out into the lobby and the other guys who were playing my fellow fighters would be holding up rating cards for how far I'd slid that day. Jonathan: Sounds like very practical cardio. Hollis: Yeah, very. It was a lot of fun. That was probably my most fun I've ever done, though I also loved Beatrice and Much Ado, which I got to do twice because she's just so funny and witty and passionate. She's great, and Shakespeare, you know. Jonathan: Very good. So after all these audiobooks, what goes into preparing to record an audiobook? Hollis: That's a great question, too. It depends on the book, really. And I'm lucky enough to do a lot of series now, so when you're doing a series, it gets easier as you go along. I remember with the first ones I did for you, the first Caina, it probably took me an hour of prep to get through the first chapter. There were so many made up place names that I needed to figure out how to say, and then you have to be consistent. Even if they're made up, you still have to be consistent. So I really used my theater training there because I learned the international phonetic alphabet when I was in school, and so I can write down phonetic pronunciations and for each book, I'm old school with my prep, I'll keep a legal pad and I'll write down phonetic pronunciations, the word, page number, and the phonetic pronunciation for each word, so I have a record. You don't retain them from book to book. Pronunciations is a big part of what you do. Also, character voices, because again, you want to be true to the author's intent and you want to stay consistent. Again, for Caina, it became very complicated because you had to have Caina's basic voice, which is this [speaks in Caina’s voice]. She started out a bit higher because she was younger. And then as she aged, she's gotten more medium pitch-wise, but then she was in disguise as various people. She was disguised as a cockney guy for a while, and she was an Irish guy for a while. And so for each of those personas, you have to notate for yourself in the script. Oh, now she has this accent. Now she has this one. And really for each chunk of dialogue, every time a character speaks, I'll put the initial of their name and if there are a lot of characters in the scene, I will have to differentiate between them pretty frequently. If it's two characters and I know them both very well, then I kind of have the shorthand in my head. So the different character voices I also put on my legal pad so I have a record, so Calvia sounds like this [speaks a line in the character’s voice]. And sometimes I'll write down physical aspects of them so that I can just kind of feel the character. And after I do them for a while, the feel of the character will give me the voice and you write down everything that the author says about the character too. I'll just notate for myself that will oftentimes give you the voice. If it's a good author, which thank God you are, you write in different voices, which makes my job easier. Jonathan: The joke I sometimes say is I didn't do audiobooks for the first seven years I was publishing, and people would ask me, how do you pronounce this? I say, I don't care, pronounce it however you want. And then suddenly we started doing audiobooks and suddenly no, it matters very much how it's pronounced. Hollis: Yeah, exactly. It's funny, I'm just looking at my tablet. I have your Shield of Power up on my tablet. I've been reading that on the treadmill and at lunch. But yeah, we have to keep tabs. And when we have so many books now, I've started special folders just for the Ghost series and the Cloak series because a lot of times a character will show up from several books previous and I go, I remember them, but I don't remember what they sounded like. So I will have notated forward alto, slightly Irish or something like that for them. I have shorthand for all of it, and so I'll do that. Jonathan: Yeah, I spent a lot of time with Control + F searching through Word documents, trying to remember the first time I wrote this character and what they looked like. Hollis: Yeah, I bet you do. Some writers I guess do, well, if they don't do it all themselves. And if they have somebody who's like an administrative assistant, they have somebody who gives you, I've gotten these from authors before. Their assistant will send me a story log of characters with everything that's said about the character. I'm like, oh, well, that's very organized and helpful, but I would think it would be massively time consuming. Jonathan: It is. I did hire someone to help me with that this year. It was getting to be too much to go back and search through things and it is a very time consuming project, but once it's done, it's very helpful because it's quite easy to find things and look things up and refresh your memory. Hollis: I bet so. When I was working on my mom's books, we hired an editor and she did a spreadsheet, a database kind of different terms and characters and what was said about them. And I go back to that and amend it all the time now that I'm trying to write book eight. Jonathan: Yeah, that kind of thing is very helpful. But on a related topic of preparation, since you've done audiobooks, stage, and TV, how would say narrating audiobooks is different from the experience of doing theater or TV? Hollis: The major thing and the hardest thing for me when I was starting out was you can't move around all the time. I had an engineer at Audible. It was just, and a lot of times the chair is very important because if you move, what you're bound to do, if you're producing your voice correctly, you need to sit up and you need to use your hands to express yourself, and you have to have an absolutely silent chair. And the chairs at Audible at that time, were not absolutely silent. So every time I moved, the chair would squeak and we'd have to stop and start again. So that was very, very hard for me. In fact, I've been doing so much audiobooks now, and I also do TV and film, but that's gone to all for auditioning for that. It's all self tape, which means it's just like head and shoulders, so still you're just kind of using a little part of your body. And I had a theater callback for Pygmalion in the city the other day, in person, in a studio, in a rehearsal room. The day before, I used to do those all the time, and that's so rare now for them to do in-person auditions since the pandemic. But I put on my character shoes and my skirt and I practice just being bigger, opening my body up and doing all this stuff I learned to do in school and that you do when you're on stage to own the space because the space is the back wall of the theater. And that's a big difference between theater, film, TV, and audiobooks is the scope of it. When I did Beatrice, I was in an 1,100 seat unamplified stone amphitheater outdoors in Colorado. So you can imagine the scope physically and vocally is so big. And then for TV, film and you have to what they say, reach the back wall of whatever space you're in. Well, for film and TV, the back wall is the camera. It's right in front of your face a lot of the times. And the back wall is really kind of the inside of your head. It's almost like you have to have internal gaze so that the thoughts are just happening. You don't have to project them, you don't have to project your voice because all the equipment comes right to you, and all you have to do is feel the feelings and think the thoughts and the camera and microphone picked that up. Similarly with audiobooks, I'm just in a little tiny padded booth. My microphone is just a few inches from my face, and so I could be very, very intimate and everything gets picked up, and you have to do a lot less work for the emotion to come through. Again, really all you have to do is kind of feel the emotion. And for me, that's always for me is being in the moment and feeling the moment and letting that dictate the pace and the vocals and everything. I guess I'm pretty Method. I'm very Method, but that's how I trained. It's what works for me. Not every narrator is like that. There's a million different proper ways to narrate, and that's just my take on it. But everything is right there. So it's just kind of keeping it much smaller and more intimate. And in fact, when you want to be big like [character name’s said in the character’s] voice and he was yelling a lot, and I would have to pull back from the microphone to let his scope come out. Jonathan: Well, after 30 audiobooks together, I can say that method definitely works. Related to that, as we mentioned earlier, you're now at over 300 titles on Audible over the last 12 years. Congratulations for that. What would you say is most surprising or unexpected things about audiobooks you learned during that time? Hollis: Oh, well, it was very surprising that we could make a booth out of sword blades and blankets. That surprised me. Yeah, that's a great question. It's surprising to me how simple I can be. I went back and I had an author recently who wanted me to do a new chapter to begin and end a book that I had done like 2014, something like that, shortly after I started. And I thought at the time that I was really filling these voices and what I did was fine. You're always your own worst critic. But what I've discovered now is the more you do it, the more you record, the more you use your instrument every single day for 300 some books, the more effortless it becomes and the more depth you can bring to it. And as a young actor, we always resist that. My acting coach used to say, age and experience. There's no substitute for it. I'm like, yeah, yeah, but talent and hard work, that's something. But it's really true that just the repetition, there's no substitute for it. Those chapters that I did, they were the same voices basically. But when I went back and listened to the original, I was like, oh, it surprised me how without really changing anything mechanically, the work has just gotten deeper, more effortless, but it sounds better at the same time. Does that make sense? Jonathan: It does. Because you've probably noticed I've redesigned the covers for the Caina series like seven times over the last 10 years. And every time you think this is it, this is it. I'm done. This is good. And then with more practice, you look back and think, well, maybe I can improve this again, though. I suppose that's not often something that happens in the audiobook world where you get to go back and revisit something you did previously. Hollis: That is one of the hardest and most surprising things about audiobooks. And I've heard people say that this happens to every young narrator when they're starting out, you get through the first two chapters of a new book and you go, oh God, now I get it. I want to go back and start again. Well, there's no do overs with audiobooks. With audiobooks, “done is good” is what they always tell you when you're starting out. So even in film and TV, which you don't get much rehearsal for, you get a couple of run run-throughs, but with audiobooks, you got your prep. Not everyone does, but I always read the whole book before I start if possible,...
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Episode 272: Six Scams Targeting Indie Authors
10/13/2025
Episode 272: Six Scams Targeting Indie Authors
In this week's episode, we warn against six different scams targeting indie authors. I also take a look at my advertising results for September 2025. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of : WOLVESAUDIO The coupon code is valid through October 20, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 272 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 10th, 2025, and today we are looking at six common scams that target indie authors. We'll also look at my advertising results for September 2025 and some changes I will make because of that. But first, let's start with Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing projects. First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is WOLVESAUDIO, and as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through October 20th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, I'm pleased to report the rough draft of Cloak of Worlds is done at 107,500 words. I think it's going to end up being about 30 chapters or so once I finish editing and I'm going to start editing very shortly. Before I start editing, I am going to write a short story called False Iron set in the world of Nadia and newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of False Iron when Cloak of Worlds comes out, hopefully before the end of the month (if all goes well). I am also 11,000 words into Blade of Shadows, the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series that will be my next main project after Cloak of World is published. In audiobook news, Ghosts in the Siege (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is done and it's processing through the various platforms. I believe as of right now you can get it at Payhip, Kobo, and Google Play and then hopefully it should be available at the other stores within a few weeks. Brad Wills is starting work on the audiobook of Blade of Flames. In early 2026, I believe we should have the final audiobook from the Stealth and Spells series from C.J. McAllister. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:18 Ad Results for September 2025 [Amounts Mentioned Are in USD] Now let's take a look back at some of my ad results for September 2025. First, the big changes. I am going to either give Facebook ads a rest for a while or more likely continue them in a very more limited way with a more focused strategy. As I've mentioned before, Meta has been shoving all this Advantage Plus AI stuff into Facebook ads and it just doesn't work. The key for online advertising, especially with books, is to narrow your target audience as much as possible and the Advantage Plus AI stuff all goes for a broad audience. To test that out, I did a couple of experiments. I didn't advertise Frostborn with Facebook ads in August, but I did advertise them with Facebook ads in September. The end result was I actually made $20 less from Frostborn in September than I did in August, but I also had the advertising expense for the month of September, so I made less overall. I also tried the reverse of that experiment. I advertised Cloak Games and Cloak Mage in August with Facebook, but not in September. The end result was that Cloak Games and Cloak Mage made about $200 less in September, but without the cost of advertising, that meant the profit was substantially higher. So I'm not sure if Facebook ads are effective or as effective as they used to be any longer (thanks generative AI), but in the [interest of] full testing, it'll experiment with it a bit more. I did try one ad campaign entirely with Advantage Plus this month and it was objectively terrible. I do not recommend using Advantage Plus for anything if you are advertising anything on Facebook. I probably will end up doing Facebook ads in a more focused way, similar to the way I do my BookBub ads, where I will set a time limited ad for one of my permafree books for four days or so and then shut it off when it's done because BookBub ads tend to work well the first three days and then lose their punch after. So I might end up doing something similar with Facebook ads, but we will report more on that in November once we finish with October's advertisement results. Meanwhile, Amazon ads did a lot better. Here are some of the campaigns I ran. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be successful, it needs to generate a sale or complete Kindle Unlimited read through for every six through eight clicks. For Demonsouled Omnibus One, I got back $2.44 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 1.41 clicks. For Half-Elven Thief, I got back $1.31 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 2.48 clicks. For Half-Elven Thief Omnibus One, 48% of the profit came from the audiobook for that one. I got back $10.13 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 1.26 clicks. For Stealth and Spells Online: Creation, it did really well, with $24.01 for every dollar spent, with one sale for every 0.66 clicks. That was still enjoying the halo result from the release of Final Quest earlier this year. For Cloak Mage Omnibus One, I got back $3.64 for every dollar spent, with 65% of the profit coming from the audiobook and one sale for every 0.61 clicks. For Sevenfold Sword Omnibus One, I got back $3.47 for every $1 spent and one sale for every 2.42 clicks. For Dragontiarna Omnibus One, I got back $13.40 for every dollar spent and one sale for every 1.2 clicks. Out of all my campaigns. I only had one campaign that lost money, but it lost a grand total of $1.48, so that was good. So we can also see that omnibus editions definitely do very well with Amazon ads, especially if they have attached audiobooks. It turns out finishing Stealth and Spells Online made it a lot easier to advertise. A finished series is a lot easier to advertise than an incomplete one (who knew?). Though if I really want to kick up Half-Elven Thief, I need to write another book in the series, which I plan to do later this year. Once Cloak of Worlds is published, I will start on that. As I mentioned earlier, I'm also [doing] a variety of BookBub ads for my permafree books on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple; these consistently do very well since it's a lot cheaper to get clicks through the non-Amazon stores for books when you're advertising them on BookBub. So that's where my ads are for September 2025. As I mentioned, I'm going to experiment a bit more with Facebook ads in October and November, but the end result (even if I have good results) is I'm going to use them a lot less than I used to moving forward because targeting is somewhat harder. That means it's time to start thinking about other marketing ideas. There is precedent. I resisted using Facebook ads for four years before I started experimenting with them in early 2020, so maybe it's time (after dragging my feet on the idea for five years) to start playing with short form video in 2026. That seems to be where all the growth and all the eyeballs seem to be. You may have noticed that the previous episode of this podcast, Episode 271 was the first one that was on YouTube, and it seems to have been a good idea since that doubled the amount of views an episode usually gets. So I may have more video experiments coming soon, but we'll see, and as always, thank you for reading, everyone and it would be pointless to advertise the books if people didn't want to read them, and that is a fact for which I am very grateful. 00:07:26 Main Topic of the Week: Six Scams Targeting Indie Authors Now on to our main (and to be honest, somewhat less enjoyable) main topic this week, six scams that are targeting indie authors. The old saying was, “there's a sucker born every minute”, but in the year of our Lord 2025, I think it's more accurate to say there's an AI powered scammer born every minute. As you might've gathered from my tone about this, I admit to being pretty annoyed by how many scam emails I get related to writing and indie publishing. These days it's pretty constant and they tend to cluster around when I have a new release. Some bot (or more realistically, a whole bunch of bots) is presumably scanning all new releases and then turns out a bunch of scammy emails when it detects a new book. I despise these people because they prey upon the vulnerable for money, which is wrong. Imagine a 75-year-old who just self-published the novel he or she has been working on for the last 30 years and finally decided to finish in retirement. Then they get a ChatGPT generated email from “John Grisham” praising their book in detail and asking for some money for marketing services. A lot of people would have absolutely no mental defense against this kind of scam, like someone from modern earth encountering a wizard who can cast illusion spells. Unfortunately, scamming is endemic everywhere these days. It is a constant debate how much the [US] federal program Medicare gets scammed out of every year. One of the local drug stores where I live has numerous signs warning about gift cards after so many local seniors were getting scammed into buying gift cards. Then there were a recent chain of text messages telling me I owed money for driving on toll roads in the state of Illinois, which was amusing because one, I haven't been to Illinois since 2022. Two, I was a passenger in someone else's car at the time, and three, the last time I was on a toll road in Illinois in a vehicle I actually owned was in 2017. As an amusing aside, when I mentioned this on Facebook, a frequent commenter and reader mentioned that he lives in the UK and he still got a bunch of text messages about toll roads in Illinois, even though A, he lives in the UK and B, he doesn't actually have a driver's license. Unfortunately, it is the truth that the internet makes scamming so easy, that constant vigilance is required these days, and with that in mind, here are six different kinds of scammy emails writers (and indie publishers) can expect to get. #1: ChatGPT. One of the reasons (you know if you've listened to the show before) that I'm very down on generative AI is that generative AI is a scammer's paradise. Lately, a new trend is that a scammer will feed a pirated copy of a book into ChatGPT and then use it to generate personalized pitch letters. These personalized pitch letters will also be littered with emojis and the tone will vary from warm and sycophantic to encouraging and edgy. Here's a quote from a recent one I got for Blade of Flames: “Talembur wakes in a forgotten catacomb, sword in hand, memory shredded, enemies sniffing blood in the dark. That’s a hook so sharp it could flense an orc. Blade of Flames reads like classic, grim-and-gorgeous sword-and-sorcery with a hunger for blood, mystery, and very satisfying blade choreography.” In fact, I got two more just like that this morning before I started recording. This is an effective illusion for a scam because it seems like the scammer read the book and liked it and is making personalized compliments about it, even though that's the result of a ChatGPT or a similar bot. However, the rest of the email is a hard pitch for various marketing services that don't actually exist. I admit I fell halfway for this one the first time. I got one of those very detailed emails and I thought it would respond with a polite refusal since it seemed like a lot of work had gone into it. However, after responding, I think I then got five more emails in rapid succession, all of them pushing for the purchase of dubious marketing services, and I realized the whole thing was a ChatGPT powered bot. So watch out for these very personalized emails, especially the ones that appear instantaneously or very quickly after you publish a book. #2: Fake book clubs. This one is sometimes tied in with the ChatGPT scams. Sometimes the book club people use ChatGPT to generate their emails. The way this works is you'll get an email for someone claiming they run a large book club or reader group on Goodreads (or Facebook or whatever) and they think your book would be a good fit for their reader group and have a few questions about it. However, if you respond to this email, you'll start getting pressure for payment. Turns out the reader group or the book club doesn't actually exist and this is yet another scam, so watch out for emails that talk about the “5,000 member reader group” or something along those lines. By good luck, one of these emails arrived while I was writing the notes for this episode, so I thought it would quote it here. “I’m Jason, and I organize Book Club NYC, a community of more than 3,300 readers across New York who gather to read, reflect, and connect through books that challenge perception and spark deep conversation. When I discovered Ghost in the Siege, I was immediately struck by its layered power, a story that confronts truth and deception, morality and survival, within a world both haunting and familiar. It’s the kind of book that doesn’t just entertain; it lingers, asking questions about justice, humanity, and what it means to stand alone in the face of decay. That blend of atmosphere and insight makes it exactly the kind of story our members love to explore together. We'd love to feature Ghost in the Siege as part of our upcoming event on Wednesday, October 15th. Here’s what that experience will look like: Quiet Reading & Reflection: members immersing themselves in your world, letting its tension and themes unfold in silence. Open Discussion: exploring the moral and psychological dimensions of corruption, redemption, and resistance.” And blah, blah, blah. It goes on in this vein quite a bit. You notice that if you actually read Ghost in the Siege (and I’m actually quite fond of Ghost in the Siege as a book), I don’t think it would be fair to say that Ghost in the Siege “isn’t just the kind of book that entertains, it lingers, asking questions about justice, humanity, and what it means to stand alone in the face of decay.” That is the kind of generic nonsense you can expect ChatGPT to spit out for this kind of thing. Now, as we mentioned, of course this book club doesn't actually exist, and if any of these good Goodreads or Facebook groups or whatever even exists, they'll be full of bots under the control of the scammer, and if you respond, the book club organizer will start talking about fees for having your book read before the group. As ever, if you pay, the scammer will either immediately disappear or continue to pressure you for more money. #3: “John Grisham” wants to promote my book. This type of email is just a straight up catfishing or identity theft attempt. You'll get an email allegedly from a famous author (for myself, I've gotten emails from “John Grisham” and “Colleen Hoover”, among others), and they'll offer to help you promote your books. Obviously, this is very fake. The actual John Grisham and Colleen Hoover (among other famous authors) have better things to do with their time than emailing random indie authors like me for marketing collaborations. If you respond to these emails, you'll get a request for payment, and if you pay, the scammer will promptly disappear and stop responding, or of course, ask for more money. #4: Meta Ads has a new dashboard. I've gotten this one quite a bit this year, allegedly from Meta. This email claims that Facebook is rolling out either a new ads dashboard or a new mobile app for managing ads, and you've been invited to participate in the beta test for the new dashboard or the new app. Just click on the link and start installation. I admit I ignored these at first because there's no way I'm ever installing any Meta apps on my phone because they're so intrusive and halfway to being spyware. Also, the current version of the Facebook ads dashboard is annoying enough and complicated enough to use it as it is, and I don't want to play with any half-baked beta features. So I ignored these emails, but then I realized I was getting surprisingly a lot of them. So I checked the senders and realized they weren't coming from an actual Meta address, but from a variety of different Gmail addresses, which meant they were in fact phishing attempts. Facebook ad phishing, alas, is a serious problem. The basic scam is that a hacker finds a way to gain control of your ads account and then uses it to advertise various scam projects, usually involving cryptocurrency. Since Facebook's customer support is so notoriously bad, it's very difficult to get this kind of situation resolved. So if you are using Facebook ads, be wary of any emails you get from Meta since they could be phishing attempts. #5: Bad tax news or payment failure. This one tends to be common around tax time or the end of the year. You'll get an email allegedly from one of the publishing platforms claiming that there's a problem with your tax information or that one of your payments failed. The email will include a link you can click to resolve the situation, which is of course fake so the scammers can capture your account and personal information. I've gotten a couple of these lately and some of them, to be honest, were quite good. I got one from Spotify claiming that my tax information was out of date, which was baffling because my tax information hasn't changed in the entire time I've had audiobooks with Spotify. I was suspicious, so I logged into my Spotify dashboard and checked that everything was in fact, okay. Then I realized the scam: the email had actually come to a different email account than the one I actually used for my Spotify dashboard. It was an exceptionally well done phishing email, but thankfully, years of ingrained caution against clicking email links served me well. So if you do get one of these, don't click on any links. Instead go directly to the dashboard of the platform in question and see for yourself. If there actually is a tax or a payment problem, there will probably be a notification of some kind on the dashboard, and of course if the notification email comes to a different email account than the one you actually use for that platform or service, it will obviously be fake. #6: Fake publishing services. There are a variety of fake publishing services out there offering a range of alleged benefits like more Facebook followers, more readers, more email subscribers, et cetera, or someone will offer to get your book into Publishers Weekly or something like that in exchange for a payment. Some of these blend over with the scammy sort of vanity publishers. Granted, I think that all vanity publishing (which is “you pay us and we publish your book”) is a scam, but some of them are worse than others. At best, if you engage with these kinds of services, you'll get some new followers from bots or so forth, which is useless for selling books. At worst, nothing will happen at all. The scammers will take your money and disappear. At the absolute worst, they'll pester you forever for more money or find a way to steal more personal information from you. Generally, if you get an unsolicited email from book marketers, it is almost surely a scam. If you're unsure, asking about the company in question in a Facebook group like 20BooksTo50K or Wide For The Win will help identify whether or not they're legit, but they're probably not legit. In conclusion, I'm afraid one has no choice but to exercise constant vigilance in the Internet world these days, especially if you're a self-publisher. Be extremely wary of any unsolicited emails. Never click on a link in...
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Episode 271: Creating Character Backstories
10/06/2025
Episode 271: Creating Character Backstories
In this week's episode, we take a look at creating good backstories for characters and how that can advance the plot. We also discuss two articles about the problems of generative AI. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of : SEVENBOOKS The coupon code is valid through October 13, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we’ve got you covered! Here are links to the articles mentioned in the episode. Writer Beware: Ed Zitron: TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 271 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 3, 2025, and today we are looking at how to create character backstories. We'll also look at some good articles about the problems created by generative AI technology. If you hear occasional drumming noise in the background, it seems like the elementary school a few blocks from here is practicing their marching band. Hopefully it won't be too disruptive. First off, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of books in the Sevenfold Sword Series in my Payhip store, and that coupon code is SEVENBOOKS. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code will be valid through October the 13th, 2025. If you need a new ebook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now let's have a progress update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am 83,000 words into Cloak of Worlds, which will be the 13th book in the Cloak Mage series. I'm thinking the book will end up about 110,000 words, so hopefully I will finish up the rough draft next week. We'll see how things go. I'm also 8,000 words into Blade of Shadows, which will be the sequel to Blade of Flames from last month, and that will be my main project once Cloak of Worlds is published (hopefully by the end of October, if all goes well). In audiobook news, I'm very pleased to report that recording and all the work is done on Ghost in the Siege (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) and we will actually close out this episode with a preview from that audiobook. It's currently up on my Payhip store and probably Google Play as of this recording, but it should be showing up on all the other stores before too much longer. 00:01:52 Generative AI Now onto our next topic, which is two very good articles about the problems of generative AI I read recently. The first (and I'll have the links to both articles in the show notes) is from Writer Beware, which talks about how generative AI is causing a new round of super targeted scammers. These scammers feed your book into the chatbot, which then generates a highly personalized email praising the book and offering marketing services. I got a ton of these scam emails after Stealth and Spells Online, Ghost in the Siege, and Blade of Flames came out in the past couple months and a bunch more after Malison: The Complete Series did well on BookBub at the end of August. So if you are a writer and you publish a book and a few days later or perhaps even the very same day, you get a very detailed email praising the book with very specific plot points and offering marketing services, beware, it's probably a scam that will give you no value whatsoever for your money. Journalist Edward Zitron wrote a great article explaining in extensive detail why generative AI is a bad idea that's probably going to cause a serious market crash in the next few years. I admit I started out with a mildly negative opinion of LLM based generative AI tools in 2022 and 2023, but I wanted my opinion to be an informed one. I've experimented with them on and off and read a good bit about them and as I've experimented with them, my opinion has moved from mildly negative to highly negative and finally arriving at completely anti-AI this year. I never used AI for any of my books, short stories, or cover images. I experimented a bit with using AI images for Facebook ads, but people generally hated them, so I stopped entirely with that. In fact, Facebook ads have become far less effective this year because of all the AI stuff Meta has crammed into them, but more on that later. So why did I arrive at a highly negative opinion of AI? It's because these tools do not actually do what their advocates promise, they're hideously expensive to run, and the enormous costs and downsides significantly outweigh any benefits. In addition to the problems mentioned in the Zitron article like cost, false promises, economic bubbles, and the companies blatantly lying about their capabilities, I think the fundamental difficulty with generative AI is that it's essentially a cognitive mirror for its users, like a Narcissus Machine like I've called it before. What do I mean by this? In Greek myth Narcissus was enraptured by the beauty of his own reflection. LLM based AI is essentially very fancy autocomplete, which means it guesses the most likely response to your prompt based on a statistical likelihood. In other words, it ends up mirroring your own thoughts back at you. So I think LLMs are highly prone to inducing an unconscious confirmation bias in the user. Confirmation bias is a logical fallacy where one interprets new information as confirming one's preexisting beliefs. It's healthier to reevaluate one's beliefs based on new information that comes in, but with confirmation bias, you warp any incoming information to fit a preexisting belief. For example, let's say you have the preexisting belief that you're immortal and nothing can kill you, and then you accidentally shoot yourself in the arm with a nail gun and you bleed. The correct interpretation of this is no, you are not in fact immortal and you can in fact die. Someone suffering under confirmation bias would say the fact that they accidentally shot themselves in the nail gun in the arm with a nail gun and didn't die is proof that they're immortal. That's obviously a logical fallacy, but you see why it's called a confirmation bias. I think even highly intelligent people using LLMS are prone to this kind of confirmation bias because the AI model settles on what is the most statistically likely response to the prompt, which means that consciously or not, you are guiding the LLM to give you the responses that please you. This is why you see on the tragically hilarious side, people who are convinced they've invented a new level of physics with the LLM or taught it to become self-aware or think that the LLM has fallen in love with them. And on the outright tragic side, people who have serious mental breakdowns or blow up their lives in destructive ways because of their interaction with the LLM. Grimly enough, I suppose the problem is going to sort itself out when the AI bubble crashes, whether in a few months or a few years. As one of the linked articles mentioned, AI companies have no clear path to profitability, save for chaining together infinite NVIDIA graphics cards and hoping they magically stumble into an artificial general intelligence or a super intelligence. They're not going to and it's all going to fall apart. The downside is that this is going to cause a lot of economic disruption when it crashes. I know I'm very negative about AI, but in the end I see hardly any good results or actual benefits from the technology. Lots of technology products are becoming worse from having AI stuffed into them (like Windows 11 and Microsoft Office) and what a few good results have come about will not last because the data centers are burning cash like there's no tomorrow. So again, you can see the links to these articles in the show notes and those are my thoughts on generative AI at the moment. 00:07:04 Writing Backstory for Characters [Note: Contains some mild spoilers for early books in the Frostborn, Half-Elven Thief, The Ghosts, and Cloak Games series] Now let's move on to a happier and frankly more interesting topic and that is writing backstory for characters. I will define it, talk about why backstory is important, give three tips about writing effective backstories, and share examples of good backstories from my own work and other media. First of all, what is a backstory? It's what happens to a character before the story begins or details of situation that happens before the story begins. Very often you'll have characters who have preexisting pasts before the story begins. It's very rare the story will begin when the main character is born and go from there. Even if that is the case, then some of the supporting characters obviously will have backstories. One example of a backstory could be a detective who had a twin sister who is kidnapped, which explains why he gets overly invested when a similar case happens. An example of a location's backstory would be knowing that a particular country was once part of another one and split off after revolution or war. That detail influences how people in that country currently treat people in the other nation. And you can see that a backstory is also an important component of world building as well, especially for fantasy and science fiction novels, though even novels set in in the contemporary world like mysteries and contemporary romance will often have backstories as well that require world building, because the location is very often fictional or will have fictional elements to it. Now, why is backstory important? For one thing, it makes a story feel more realistic and “lived in”, for lack of a better word. It’s not realistic that absolutely nothing of interest happened to the protagonist before the story begins, or that nothing from their past would influence their current beliefs, behavior, and decisions. Backstory also gives characters clearer reasons for doing things. Returning to the earlier example of detective who had a younger sister who was kidnapped. What if the detective was a very procedural and by the book until a sudden similar case happened? Backstory can explain his unorthodox methods and willingness to solve the case at any cost. Backstory can also drive the plot in many ways. Continuing with the detective example, the detective's knowledge of his little sister's case leads him to find similar patterns in the new case and sends him on a search to prove that the cases are connected. As we can see from that, backstory is also a good way to set up plot hooks for later characters, such as we could have our detective here with his twin sister who disappeared in circumstances similar to his current case. It could be a fantasy hero who had previous battles with orcs and explains why he doesn't like seeing orcs. It could be a contemporary romance heroine who is reencountering her old flame, in which case the backstory would be central towards the plot, essentially. And now for three tips for writing backstory. First, it's important to not stop the plot to reveal backstory. Infodumping is generally something to be avoided when you are writing a novel. A little bit of it is unavoidable, but you want to avoid infodumping as much as possible and to reveal only as much information as necessary, partly because that creates a less cumbersome read for the reader and partly because that can also inspire a sense of mystery that sort of helps hook the reader and propels them forward into the story. It's also good to only reveal backstory that serves the plot or provides key information. For example, you could have in your detective's backstory that he went to high school and he was only a mediocre student and graduated with a GPA of 2.9 while doing well in athletics. Unless that's actually relevant to the story or has some significance to the plot, it's probably best to not include that. You can always tell when a writer has done a lot of research on a particular topic like firearms or travel or the history of a particular country because they are going to put that information in the book whether you want it or not. And if you're inventing an elaborate backstory for your character, it's best to avoid that impulse and only bring in details from the backstory as necessary. It's also important not to have the characters tell each other backstory that they would already know. For example, if you have two characters who've been married for 20 years, it would not be good to have them appear in dialogue as, “As you know, beloved wife, we have been married for 20 years this Tuesday.” It would be better if it's important to the plot to reveal that information like they're going out to a 20th anniversary party or their friends are throwing them a 20th anniversary party, that kind of thing, rather than having it come out in sort of a cumbersome conversation like that. Additionally, it's also important to only do as much backstory as necessary. For your main character, you may need a good deal of backstory or for the antagonist, but for supporting characters, it's less important to have a fully realized background. You need just enough so that they feel realistic and can contribute to the plot without overburdening the plot with too many details. Now, a few examples from my own books, mild spoilers here, nothing major but mild spoilers. I have written characters who have one key backstory element that influenced the plot. Ridmark Arban from Frostborn would be one and his major backstory point is that he was unable to save his wife Aelia from being killed five years before the story starts. Later on, there would be additional backstory that comes out for him in relation to his father and his brothers, but that is the main backstory point that defines his character for easily the first half of the series. Another example would be Morigna, whose parents were killed by the dvargir and then she was raised by a mysterious sorcerer who called himself the old man. And that is a major defining part of her character, that backstory that happened before we meet her in the narrative. I've also written characters with a lot of backstory, and the chief example of that would be Calliande from Frostborn as well, where she wakes up in the first book with no memory of her past and discovering what her backstory actually is a major driving force in the first eight books of the series. So that is a good example. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but that is a good example of using backstory as a mysterious narrative hook to pull the characters forward. Rivah from Half-Elven Thief is another character of mine who has a lot of backstory. In the backstory, she was raised in a noble household, her mother died, her father was about to sell her into slavery, so she fled into the streets and then she met Tobell and became part of his thieving crew. Tobell suffered a serious injury, and the thieving crew broke up and Rivah had to sort of strike out on her own while coming under debt to the procurator Marandis. So there is a lot of backstory there and all of it is important to Rivah’s character and I think I've done my best to sort of feed that into the story as necessary to drive the plot rather than hopefully unloading it all in a massive infodump. And I have written characters with very little backstory, and the prime example of those would be Caina and Nadia. In Caina’s series, the series starts when she's 11 years old and living with her parents and we develop Caina as she goes along and follow her she grows to adulthood and then increasing prominence in her world. With Nadia, the very first scene in the book is her first day of kindergarten pledging allegiance to the flag, the United States, and the High Queen of the Elves, which is the first indicator that Nadia's world, while very similar as to ours, is nonetheless very different. Like Caina, the book’s narrative starts when Nadia is very young and then we see her develop along the course of the books. In a good example of backstory used well from another book would be Aragorn from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where Aragorn's backstory is extremely important because when the hobbits first meet him at The Prancing Pony in Bree, he's just this mysterious wanderer known as Strider. But later on, we learn that he's actually the last heir of Gondor and Arnor and the rightful king of Gondor. His desire to reclaim his heritage and fulfill the role destiny has prepared for him is a major part of his character and that actually grows organically out of his backstory. I'm not usually fond of prequels, but a good example of a prequel using backstory effectively would be the combination of the Andor TV show and the Rogue One movie, where they create this excellent backstory for the Star Wars movie [Episode IV]. They do it through good characterization so you can see all the motivations of the characters as they go about their various missions and errands. So hopefully that gives you a good look into the process of creating backstory and how best to use it for writing your own stories. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of the show at 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 let's close out with a preview of the audiobook of Ghosts in the Siege, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy [audiobook excerpt follows].
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Episode 270: 6 TikTok Marketing Lessons For Writers
09/29/2025
Episode 270: 6 TikTok Marketing Lessons For Writers
In this week's episode, we take a look at six marketing lessons writers can learn from TikTok. I also answer questions about my new book BLADE OF FLAMES. This coupon code will get you 50% off the , Book #1 in the Shield War series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: FALLSHIELD50 The coupon code is valid through October 6, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 270 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September 26th, 2025, and today we are looking at six trends from TikTok that help with marketing books (even if you're not on TikTok). We'll also answer some questions about my new book, Blade of Flames. Before we get to our main topics, we will do Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Shield of Storms, Book One in the Shield War series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store and that is FALLSHIELD50. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through October 6, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to listen to this fall, we have got you covered. Now here is where I'm at with my current writing projects. As I mentioned last week, Blade of Flames is now out and you get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and My Payhip store. Now that it is out and published, my new main project is I'm finally returning to the Nadia series. I am 50,000 words into Cloak of Worlds, which I believe puts me on chapter 10 of 28, though I'll probably split up some of the longer chapters in editing to make them punchier. So hopefully that will be out in October, probably towards the end of October (if all goes well). My secondary project is now Blade of Shadows, which will be the sequel to Blade of Flames and the second book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. And as of this recording, I'm about 4,000 words into it and I'm hoping that'll be out towards the end of November, maybe right before or right after Thanksgiving, depending on how the next couple of weeks go. In audiobook news, Shield of Power is now finally out at all audiobook stores: Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp, Spotify, and all the others. You can listen to that on a platform of your choosing. Recording is almost done on Ghost in the Siege and I should have some audiobook files to proof for that soon. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, audiobook, and publishing projects. Now, Blade of Flames is the first book in a new epic fantasy series with the first new protagonist I've had since I wrote Rivah in Half-Elven Thief back in 2023. So as you might expect, it has generated more than the usual amount of reader questions. So for convenience, I will answer them all right here on the show. Question #1: Is Blade of Flame set in the world of Andomhaim/Owyllain (from Frostborn Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, and The Shield War)? Yes, it is set in Owyllain, specifically in the Year of Our Lord 1588, so 88 years after the end of The Shield War. Question #2: Is Ridmark the main character? No, the main character is named Talembur. I've written 43 books with Ridmark as either the protagonist or one of the protagonists, and across those books, Ridmark has gone from an angry young man to a grandfather, so it was time to do something different. The poor man deserves a break after 43 books. Question #3: Is Talembur secretly Ridmark in disguise? No. Question #4: Is Talembur secretly…(various character theories)? No, Talembur's a new character. Question #5: Do you need to read any other books before starting Blade of Flames? No. That was one of my intentions in writing it. You can read Blade of Flames without having bred any of the other Andomhaim books, since all the major characters in Blade of Flames are new and we're in a part of Owyllain we've never visited before. Question #6: Are there any recurring characters in Blade of Flames? Exactly one and that character only has, like three lines. Well, two (technically, depending on how you look at it). Question #7: Will other recurring characters return in future Blades of Ruin books? Yes, but we shall have to read and find out after I write them. Question #8: The opening is very similar to Frostborn: The Gray Knight, isn't it? Yes, for reasons that will become clear. Without any spoilers, let's say that this similarity is a significant plot point. Question #9: Is there a dog in this book? Yes. People like dogs, so there is a dog in the book. Question #10: Does the dog die? He does not. Question #11: Seriously, truly, does the dog die? I promise the dog does not die. Question #12: How many Blades of Ruin books will there be? I'm planning for 12, though that might change if I have a good idea that requires an extra book or if I think I can consolidate it down. Question #13: Will there be Blades of Ruin audiobooks? That is the plan, if all goes well. Brad Wills has signed up to narrate the series. Question #14: Are you still going to write Rivah books? Yes. After I publish Cloak of Worlds, which as I mentioned will hopefully be sometime in October, I will start writing the next Rivah book, Elven-Assassin. Question #15: Are you still going to write Caina books? Eventually. I need some time to think about where they're going to go next. I have done this before. There is a two year gap between Ghost in the Sun (the end of the Ghost Night series) and Ghost and the Serpent because I wanted to think about what to do next. At this point in my life, I don't want to have any more than three unfinished series at any one time, so we'll see what I want to do next when either Blades of Ruin, Cloak Mage, or Half-Elven Thief are completed. Question #16: Seriously, Talembur is secretly Ridmark, isn't he? In 1884, retired Civil War General William T. Sherman was approached about running for president. He point blank refused, famously stating, “I will not accept if nominated. I will not serve if elected. Though this usually gets paraphrased to “If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.” He really meant it and refused to get involved in politics for the remaining years of his life. I'm not sure if writers of fiction have the equivalent of a Sherman statement, but if there is, this is it. Talembur is a new character and not secretly a character who has appeared before in the Andomhaim/Owyllain books and I cannot be blunter about it than that. So hopefully that will answer any questions you may have had about the Blades of Ruin series and Blade of Flames in particular. 00:05:50 Main Topic: 6 Things BookTok Trends Can Teach You About Marketing Books Now on to our main topic this week, which is six things BookTok trends can teach you about marketing books (even if you don't use TikTok). One thing is clear though, is that books are thriving on the TikTok social media video platform. Readers (very often in the romance, young adult, and fantasy genres) are excited to show off their trips to bookstore and their “hauls” of the latest books in videos. BookTok influencers are even paid to promote new releases in videos in the same way Beauty Gurus have been paid to promote mascara. Some traditional examples of bestselling BookTok books are the Fourth Wing series by Rebecca Yaros, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover, and the works of Emily Henry. Anecdotes are not the same as data of course, but the last couple of times I've been to a Barnes & Noble, I've been surprised by how young most of the customers there are. Obviously that might be attributed to my own advancing age, where I'm very often the oldest person when I go someplace. But nonetheless, I do think this is a real thing where BookTok and TikTok in particular are drawing more young people into reading because they see it's a trendy thing on TikTok, so they get into it. The BookTok effect can make even an otherwise obscure book the latest bestseller, even one that isn't a new release. Many authors have found success marketing their books on the platform and have seen an increase in their sales from BookTok. Using TikTok as an author is hardly a requirement, though. In fact, I haven't used it in my marketing because I would rather focus on something like my newsletter that I have control over and that isn't vulnerable to bans. TikTok has been threatened with a US ban several times, but it hasn't ultimately been banned (at this time of this recording), and it doesn't look like that's going to happen since in the past few days, it looks like the US government has managed to finalize the sale of the company to an American investor. Now, as I just mentioned, using TikTok as an author is hardly requirement though, but nonetheless, there are lessons to be learned from the success of BookTok when marketing your books. We'll talk about six of those lessons today. #1: Have your highlight-worthy quotes and pitch ready. TikTok is full of action-packed book trailers or short, dramatic reenactments of scenes from books. The most popular of these book-based clips are very short, sometimes even just a single quote or sentence. Some writers write page-length book blurbs, wanting to fit in every detail about their books. In the words of many Internet posters, “too long; didn't read.” You need to be able to explain your book in less than three sentences, to clearly explain the main character and the stakes they face. Having a few snappy or interesting quotes from the book itself as a teaser can also be useful aid in marketing. BookTok is a place to learn that art, as many successful authors and BookTok creators have perfected the short summary and attention-getting clips. #2: Finding Your Readalikes Libraries and bookstores have long championed “readalikes” in their displays, which are books with similar settings, topics, or themes. For example, fans of suspense writer JD Robb might enjoy books by Patricia Briggs, Karin Slaughter, or Louise Penny. You can find authors that might be similar to you by using the “also read” section of your book's Amazon page. You can also think about themes that may connect your books to others such as “cozy mystery set in Wisconsin”, or “friends to lovers romance set in a theme park”. These themes can be broken down into something called tropes. #3: Acknowledging Tropes Acknowledging tropes (such as plot or character types that frequently appear) used to be a sign of creative weakness, which I honestly always thought was misguided because we're all obviously inspired by previous writers, and so there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that inspiration. Now in the BookTok era, it's how many readers search for books, especially in the romance genres, they try to find “enemies to lovers” or “fake dating” titles. If you can break down two or three tropes that match your series, that will give you an advantage in marketing. There are sites and books with lists of tropes if you're not familiar with the ones for your genres. #4 Finding Your Market Segment (You're not for everyone.) My podcast transcriptionist once encountered a new author who insisted they wanted to market their book to all readers and wanted to advertise in every single category Amazon offered since they believed everyone needed to read their gritty memoir about surviving abuse and alcoholism. Whether or not someone believes that everyone needs to read their book, that's a pretty quick way to overspend on advertising while receiving extremely poor results. The key to understanding online advertising is that the basic principle is the narrower you can target your audience, the more effective your ads are likely to be. Advertising that memoir so broadly that it’s in the same category as say, children picture books or German language cookbooks is a quick way to disappoint (or even annoy) potential readers. It's okay that your book isn't a match for every category or type of reader. In fact, it's expected. There's a reason that the TikTok algorithm quickly pinpoints what viewers are most interested in and brings them similar content, because it's the quickest and easiest way to engage the user. People watching video game themed videos on endless loop probably aren't going to become suddenly interested in the videos about the benefits of living without electricity, for example. It's more profitable to keep showing variations of what they've already seen, with a little bit of new content mixed in. That's true in book advertising, too. The most effective way to find the readers who are most excited to read your book is to segment your advertising by your subgenres, authors whose books are most similar to yours, and keywords that match your tropes or important features in your book. With enough time and data, you will even be able to segment by a geographic location based on what countries your book sells in the most. The more that you can get specific when creating ads, the more likely you are to limit your spending and find the group of readers who wants to find you the most. And the more you work at marketing, the more you'll realize that the answer is definitely not “everyone.” #5: Don't give up on your backlist. One of the most surprising parts of TikTok is how often something that's decades old suddenly becomes popular for seemingly no reason at all. For example, 1962 Song “Pretty Little Baby” by Connie Francis was one of the top trending songs of this spring after became ubiquitous in TikTok videos. Books have seen the same phenomenon occur on TikTok. Classics by Jane Austen or Stephen King frequently end up in popular recommendation videos, while slightly older bestsellers by Sally Rooney or Susanna Clarke can get surprising second rounds of attention, too. The rules of retiring or even abandoning your backlist books may not apply in a social media-based attention cycle where people are constantly discovering books. You can try to rotate your ads to periodically give your older books attention, or if you see a sudden spike in sales on an older title, check through your sales data and social media to understand if there is a specific reason why that's happening and maybe give it some extra advertising funds during that window of opportunity. I've been an indie author for 14 years now, which means I've built up quite the backlist and I've noticed that very often the backlist will outsell new books. For example, this month (so far as of this recording), Blade of Flames is my new book for the month, and that has been 10% of my revenue for September 2025 so far, which is obviously a significant amount, but 90% of it comes from things I've previously written and I've noticed in previous years as well that for total yearly revenue, the revenue from new books tends to be around 22 to 25% (with the rest of it coming from my accumulated backlist). #6: (To Use Some Internet Vernacular) Don’t Give Readers “the Ick” by Being “Cringe” Social media requires at least the appearance of ease and authenticity. People talk about something overly manufactured or awkward as being “cringe” or giving them “the ick.” How does that apply to marketing your books? Simply put, don't try to be what you're not. If you're absolutely terrible at being in front of the camera, don't force yourself to make videos. If you're skilled at explaining the historical or cultural influences behind your books, maybe a newsletter or a Substack would be a better use of your marketing time and effort. You shouldn't have to try every possible form of marketing and you probably shouldn't in order to succeed as an author. Just because someone else in your genre is making good money from TikTok or Instagram doesn't mean that it's what's right for you or that it would work if you tried it. Likewise, be aware of the spaces you're entering and the dynamics of a group when you're entering an online space. Writers who show up in a writing forum, hashtag, or subreddit meant for other writers in order to promote their book aren't in the right spot. In fact, that's why many of those places have a rule against self-promotion. Their time would be better spent in an online space related to their sub-genre where there are readers who are specifically looking for what they have to offer. Begging or using some sort of pity-based story in your social marketing is not a good plan. Approach your marketing from a place of confidence about your book because desperation is not attractive to potential readers who are surrounded with options. At best, it only leads to short-term results, whereas finding the readers interested in your book will be a better use of your time in the long run. Be confident. Very few people are able to finish a book (much less must publish one), and there's at least a few people out there who will enjoy your book without being guilted into doing so. I suppose the best rule of thumb overall for social media is don't beg, don't be needy, and perhaps most importantly of all, be as authentic as possible. By that I mean, I don't mean oversharing details about your personal life or personal opinions and beliefs and so forth, but just simply being authentic and not putting on airs or pretending to be something you're not. So much of what we see on the internet now is fake. Since I published Blade of Flames last week, I've gotten dozens of emails allegedly from “readers” who are interested in helping promote the book, but are actually generated by ChatGPT as a front for various scam services. So the best way to combat that kind of AI generated slop, I think, might just being as authentic as you can without resorting to lies or other fakery. In conclusion, BookTok has changed many of the old rules about book marketing and brought a new, more diverse, and younger group of readers into the market. Even if you don't plan on using the platform yourself for marketing (and I still don't), there’s still many lessons you can learn from BookTok and how it has shifted how readers find books and share recommendations. So I hope that has given you some food for thought about how to approach future marketing efforts. So thanks 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 at 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.
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Episode 269: The Personal Curriculum Trend For Writers
09/22/2025
Episode 269: The Personal Curriculum Trend For Writers
In this week's episode, we take a look at the "personal curriculum" social media trend and look at how it can be useful for writers. This coupon code will get you 50% off the , Book #1 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: FALLMAGIC50 The coupon code is valid through September 29, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 269 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September 19th, 2025, and today I am looking at the idea of a personal curriculum for writers. We also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing projects. So let's start things off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Dragons, Book Number One in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is FALLMAGIC50. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code will be valid through September the 29th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to listen to as we head into fall, we have got you covered. And now for an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Blade of Flames is finished and by the time this episode goes live on what should be the 22nd, it should be available at all ebook stores. Initial impressions have been positive so far, so I hope you'll check that out and enjoy it. Now that Blade of Flames is finished and out in the world, my next main project will be Cloak of Worlds. After a year, I am finally getting back to Cloak Mage. I am now 21,000 words into it, and I'm hoping it will be out in October, though it might slip to November because I think this one might be a bit on the longer side. My secondary project is now Blade of Shadows, which is the second book in the Blades of Ruin series and the direct sequel to Blade of Flames. I'm a thousand words into that. In audiobook news, Shield of Power is still in processing and quality assurance at most of the audiobook stores. It is now available at, I think Google Play, Kobo, my own Payhip store, and a few others, but it's still not up on Audible, Apple, or Amazon yet, though hopefully that should be fixed soon. Recording on Ghost in the Siege is finished and we're just waiting on files so we can proof-listen to them. So some new audiobooks will be available before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:02:18 Personal Curriculum for Writers So let's move on to our main topic this week, the personal curriculum trend for writers. What is a personal curriculum? The trend of creating a personal curriculum has been going around social media for the past month or two. Basically, a personal curriculum uses a structure of an imaginary class to reframe your personal and professional development goals. It can be as simple as creating a set of reading to do in a month or as complex as creating a major project that will take many steps and months to complete. How does this work? Instead of having an undefined goal of wanting to learn how to learn more about how to market your books, you make yourself a course called Marketing Literature with Social Media, with a list of related books, videos, and tasks divided into blocks of time, just like the class would have things that are connected in each session. The key to the personal curriculum trend is having weekly goals and projects just like homework (and of course keeping up with it). Some people create monthly personal curriculum while others keep the more academic framework of quarters, terms, or semesters. Some people create multiple classes, while others focus on one at a time. The amount of detail in the curriculum's development ranges from scrawling a plan on a sheet of notebook paper to creating intricate Notion boards that are essentially a prettier version of an online course system used at universities. The personal curriculum trend is fueled by many things, including nostalgia for the structure of school and its relatively clear paths to success, the desire to spend less time doom scrolling on social media, and the desire to make goal setting more whimsical. Having clear and specific deadlines for completing tasks is one of the most important parts of goal setting, and that is at the center of the trend of creating personal curriculums. Most people spend 14 to 19 years in school (depending on the individual), so it's a structure that's familiar. It also takes an overwhelming and broad goal, such as learning about marketing and gives it focus by defining what is actually being learned and determining how to apply that to real tasks in a manageable way. It transforms the nebulous goal of learning something specific and also gives a clearer path on how to apply the learning into action. By design, it also emphasizes goals that can be done in weeks instead of years, which makes starting much less intimidating. Many people also need some outside accountability in order to work well, and this is a way of creating it for yourself. Being able to give yourself an “A” if you're completing your homework each week is a simple and free motivator for many. Since this is mostly a writing podcast, I want to discuss how the personal curriculum trend can be applied to writing goals and professional development for writers. To that end, I will share five ways that I think the trend can help you grow as a writer and make more specific and actionable goals. #1: Defining your priorities. There are endless things to learn both in life and as a writer, especially in the world of self-publishing. Therefore, it can be tempting to chase after every trend or every new thing that's working for other people. The problem with that is that it's impossible to do that in any meaningful or focused way. It's better to pick a focus for every month or every few months and gain as much proficiency as you can instead of dabbling at things without taking the time to understand them well and then bemoaning that they don't work. A month or a fake semester is still a narrow enough timeframe to pivot if you want to change your goals, instead of being locked into yearly goals. For example, I set specific goals for getting books out, and then each month is pretty well defined into writing, editing, cover design, layout, publishing, and marketing tasks for me based on each book. Other things I want to try, such as creating videos, doesn't fit within those specific goals because they're not the priority. Other things that are lesser priorities (like trying new effects in Photoshop for my book covers and ad images) are things that I know I can work on after finishing the primary goals I've set for myself each week. #2: Trying something new. The structure of a personal curriculum makes trying something new feel less intimidating. For example, “making my own book cover” is something of a massive and undefined goal. You know that's important and you want to do it, but you can never seem to get past watching a TikTok video or two on Photoshop when they come into your feed. By creating a course for yourself on learning how to use Photoshop and the best techniques for creating book covers and giving yourself homework of different things from your readings or viewings to try out, you give the goal a specific plan and tie what you're learning into actual tasks that will help you move forward and then make your learning stick by applying it in the right way. For example, what I did for myself to learn Photoshop well enough to do a book cover was during early COVID in 2020, I bought a couple of courses on it and took the courses. Now, I suppose that's something of more of an actual structured curriculum since someone set up that course, but you could do it for yourself with the same thing by getting The Beginner's Guide to Photoshop or (the some unfortunately titled) The Complete Idiot's Guide to Photoshop from your library, reading that, and then watching a few longer focused YouTube videos on the process of creating a book cover. And then that would give you enough to go on in terms of starting your own personal curriculum and then developing your own book covers. #3: Managing your time. With endless distractions, it's too easy to look at a week or even a month and wonder where the time went with little to show for it. In contrast, the school environment has a rigid time structure, even at the university level. There is never a question of where the time went there. Work must be done at a specific time, and you have to show up multiple times a week to learn more and prove you understand what you've learned already. People often struggle without that structure after graduation, especially people who thrived in the school environment. But there's no harm in recreating it for yourself, especially if you are one of those people who thrived in the academic world. For example, if you want to do research on a specific time period for your next book, creating a course defines what that means. Instead of endless scrolling and watching videos online, you define what the scope of needed research is before you begin, so you're spending your time more efficiently. If you pick out the books, videos, and what you specifically need to research for the plot in advance and give yourself a set amount of time to learn the material, you're spending your time more wisely and freeing up time for other tasks. For example, in my most recent book, Blade of Flames, part of one of the subplots is inspired by a period in English history called The Anarchy, which was the civil war in the early 12th century between Empress Maude and King Stephen for the throne of England. Now, I knew a fair bit about this period already because of other reading I've done, but if I wanted to learn more about it, the best way to do it would be to read a few books and some of the more accessible books by popular historians. Like for example, maybe the best way to learn enough about The Anarchy to base a book on it would be read some of the books by Dan Jones, who has written many excellent popular history books about the medieval and early modern English time period. #4: Professional development. Most professions have professional development where you have to keep your skills updated, whether you're a teacher who has to get re-certified, a doctor who has to learn new procedures, a system admin who has to learn the latest bugs Microsoft has baked into their software, and so forth. Writing is no different (especially if you're a self-published writer) because there's so many side skills like layout and web design and so forth that it's kind of helpful to keep up on. It's hard to carve time out for professional development because as a writer, it's time away from the task that actually gets you paid, which is writing new stuff. Learning or trying new things becomes something that either feels insurmountable or happens in a haphazard way that doesn't actually move things forward for you. A personal curriculum gives you the permission to carve out time to learn new things. It's easy to hyperfocus on writing and feel like anything else is less productive, but there are many parts to being a writer, especially for the self-published, so it's important to give yourself a structured way to explore new software, marketing strategies, and social media channels as they emerge. For example, to use something of a negative example, I rather notoriously have a very low opinion of the AI tools currently flooding the market like ChatGPT and Midjourney. That wasn't an opinion I arrived at haphazardly. I did thoroughly investigate each of these tools. I tried Adobe Firefly, I tried Midjourney, I tried Microsoft's ones, Bing Chat and Bing Image Create. I tried ChatGPT, I tried one other, I can't think of off the top of my head, and I just did not come away impressed with these tools or the capabilities. So I suppose that was a negative example of something I'm talking about, whereas a positive example would be in 2018, I started using a Mac program called Vellum to format my paper books. It was a lot easier and more useful than the method that I'd been using previously, and I was so impressed with that that I eventually switched over into using Vellum for my ebook formatting as well, and learned how to do that as well, and I've been using it ever since. So that'd be a positive example of professional development. #5: Holding Yourself Accountable. One of the most difficult things about writing is that it lacks the structure of a traditional job or school environment. For that reason, many high achievers tend to struggle with starting or completing tasks when they leave school. Creating specific goals and making a clear timeframe for completing them helps with that tendency. For that reason, some personal curriculum devotees will even assign class times on a certain day of the week or a certain time of the night to make sure they're on track with their goals or homework for the week. National Novel Writing Month has kind of crashed and burned from its scandals over the past year, but the principle of accountability in giving yourself a set period of time to do something is helpful there. In the same way, your homework for each day for writing could be a set number of words or a certain percentage of progress in editing. Did you spend that day looking at social media instead of getting words done? There is a grade for that and it's not a good one. “A” students complete their work and turn it in, and that's the core of writing, putting down words consistently and publishing them. Now, I suppose you could think that the personal curriculum thing seems like a silly social media trend, but for some people, especially people who really thrived in and enjoyed the academic environment in school, it might work in a way that average yearly goals do not. Studies show time and time again that the happiest adults are those with defined priorities who make time to learn new things and enjoy hobbies. A personal curriculum provides a way to emphasize those important things in your life in a more whimsical way than say, the various yearly evaluation goals of the corporate world. For writers, it can be a much-needed way to add structure to an unstructured work environment and make sure that they're spending their time in the best way possible. And it all boils down to essentially one of the oldest dictums: know thyself. If this kind of thing would not be helpful for you, then there's no point in pursuing it. But if you know yourself and know that you have the kind of personality and mental inclination that would respond well to structure like this (even if it's structure you're creating for yourself), then a personal curriculum might be a good idea to pursue. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. I reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.
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Episode 268: Does Permafree Still Work For Indie Authors?
09/15/2025
Episode 268: Does Permafree Still Work For Indie Authors?
In this week's episode, we take a look at permafree as a marketing strategy for indie authors, and examine if it still works. I also take a look at advertising results for August 2025. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : FALLMAGE25 The coupon code is valid through September 22, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 268 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September 12th, 2025, and today I'm looking at whether or not Permafree is still an effective strategy for indie authors. As a related topic, we'll also take a look at how my ads performed in [August] 2025, and we'll also have a Question of the Week this week. But first, let's start with Coupon of the Week. So for Coupon of the Week to celebrate the fact that I'm working on Cloak Mage again, this coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Cloak Mage series at my Payhip store, and that is FALLMAGE25. And as always, the coupon code and links to my store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through September 22nd, 2025. So if you need a new ebook for this fall, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. I'm about 82% of the way through the first round of edits for Blade of Flames, the first book in my new epic fantasy series called Blades of Ruin. If all goes well, that will be out before the end of September, and if you want to see what the cover art will look like, it's on my website and my social pages right now. I'm also 12,000 words into Cloak of Worlds, the aforementioned return to the Cloak Mage series, and that will be my main project once Blade of Flames comes out. In audiobook news, recording is done for both Shield of Power (as narrated by Brad Wills) and Ghost in the Siege (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy). They're both going through processing right now. As of this recording, I believe you can get Shield of Power on Google Play, Kobo, and my Payhip Store. The other links and the other links for Ghost in the Siege should be coming up before too much longer, hopefully before the end of the month. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:00 Question of the Week [Question of the Week was posted on September 10, 2025] Now It's time for Question of the Week, which is intended for enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, do you dislike guns showing up in fantasy novels? No wrong answers for opinions, obviously. The inspiration for this question was a blog post I saw where the writer was complaining about the increased number of guns in modern fantasy novels and how it shatters her suspension of disbelief, and she also found it an unpleasant topic because the ownership and regulation of firearms in the United States is a contentious topic and has been so for decades. And as you might expect, readers had a variety of opinions on this question. Adrian says: Nope. Fantasy is basically, in my humble opinion, the swords and sorcery type of genre. Yes to old fashioned weapons like bows and arrows, javelins, and trebuchets, et cetera, but definite no to guns (of any type), tanks, airplanes, et cetera. Jonathan D. says: In the right setting, firearms are fine in fantasy books. Men in Arms by Terry Pratchett and the Rigante Series by David Gemmell are great examples of firearms in fantasy done well. Wilson says: It depends on your definition of a gun because an energy rifle powered by a soulstone would be something that would fit into Andomhaim. Though I have to say that is not something I will ever write in an Andomhaim book. Mary says: Steampunk and suchlike genres are developing how to work with technology and fantasy, and I approve when it's done right. I particularly like what Moe Lane's doing in The Fermi Resolution. If you start with the first published book, Frozen Dreams, which is a post-apocalyptic North America high fantasy, hard boiled detective novel, it goes into how every wizard can make your own ammo blow up on you and the consequences. Ioana says: Mrs. World Burner should have lots of guns. #HailToTheHighQueen #SingularitySucks Jason says: Handheld firearms were first used in the West in the 1330s, so they actually predate full plate armor by about a hundred years. That said, the gun shape we're used to came about in the late 1400s. I'm perfectly fine with firearms and fantasy novels provided they’re (more or less) what we expect in a medieval setting. Jesse says: Never bothers me as long as long as the stage of weapon development reasonably lines up with the field of the science in said fantasy world. Someone walking around with laser sights in a medieval hamlet would break it for me a bit. Michael says: I remember much of video games (and at least one famous Dungeons and Dragons scenario, possibly two) back in the ‘80s had the “players stumble across a crashed starship trope” where you could end up with power armor and ray guns in a fantasy settings, which would be perceived as magic. I like that kind of cross genre gun introduction more than gunpowder becoming commonplace, I think. The video games he's referring to are Heroes of Might and Magic 6 and 7, both of which I played back in the day and are quite good. Juana says: My suspension of disbelief gets knocked out more by dialogue than guns. Jenny says: Guns aren't as bad as cell phones, in my opinion, or the magical equivalent of a cell phone that is not even trying to be anything but a cell phone. What's interesting is if you read a book that is determinedly set in the 1980s, like the Kinsey Millhone Mysteries by Sue Grafton are all determinedly set in Los Angeles in the 1980s, which is way pre-cellphone and how much extra work the protagonist has to do in investigating since Google doesn't immediately bring everything to her fingertips. Jimmy says: Fantasy doesn't require medieval setting, nor does it require swords. If you study medieval warfare, then you'll notice two things. One, only the rich have swords. Two, it is a secondary or tertiary weapon. Swords are notoriously weak. They break often. The use of guns really depends more on the story's background than it does on the genre. Bonnie says: I agree, they're okay, depending on the time period/environment involved. There's no way that they would be okay with Caina or Ridmark! Cheryl says: Nadia needs guns. I guess it depends on the fantasy topic being written. John says, I'm kind of into Flintlock fantasy, e.g. Powdermage series, et cetera. Urban fantasy also requires firearms. My favorite historical European period is really the “Knights and Guns” era, which would be the early modern period. Todd says: A deeper question is how do guns fit into the culture? In the Cloak Games/Cloak Mage universe, there are ongoing wars, so gun use and safety is taught in schools and veterans are expected to maintain proficiency against the Shadowlands incursion. There's a balance there, and the punishment for criminal misuse includes slogging and loss of freedom, if not execution. So while I think the amount of firearms in Nadia's world is a bit over the top, I can see it making sense culturally and contextually. In a different culture, it may or may not make sense. In a classic medieval setting, it wouldn't make sense. Conversely, in early 1800s Western America, a limited amount of firearms were to be expected. Every little house on the prairie would be expected to have a few rifles and perhaps a pistol or two. Setting, culture, and context all determine what the reader will find appropriate. And finally, Randy says: Depends on how they get there. Guardians of the Flame series had college kids reinvent them, which made sense, and their opponents figured out their own version. When one side has them and the other is too dumb to steal/capture some and figure them out, then yes, it doesn't work. So as you can see, we had quite a range of opinions there. For myself, I really have no strong feelings about it one way or the other. I do think guns are best suited to urban fantasy environments. In Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, as several commentaries mentioned, Nadia goes through a lot of guns. Granted, my favorite type of fantasy is what it's called basic fantasy or generic fantasy where a barbarian, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard go to a dungeon and kill orcs and monsters. Firearms would definitely be out of place in that sort of setting. That said, I think guns and fantasy is like any other story trope and just needs to be done well to be enjoyable. I suppose it's a matter of properly setting the table for reader expectations. Like if you have a medieval style of fantasy world like Half-Elven Thief, it'd be weird to have guns suddenly show up. But if you create a setting that's an analog for 1880s America, but with wizards, then guns wouldn't be out of place. So that is it for Question of the Week. Thanks to everyone who commented and left insightful and interesting comments. 00:07:40 Advertising Results for August 2025 [Prices mentioned are USD] Now let's go on to the first of our interrelated main topics, my advertising results for last month, which would be August 2025. I haven't done an ad results roundup for a couple months, partly because it's been a really busy summer and partly because I've been adjusting some things and waiting to see the results. I'll explain more later, but the short version is that I'm losing confidence in the effectiveness of Facebook ads for selling books. But first, let's see some advertising results for August 2025. Let's start with Facebook ads where I advertise the Ghosts, Cloak Games/Cloak Mage, and the Frostborn series. The Ghosts, I got back $8.40 for every dollar spent, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks, which was really nice. This one was a bit of anomaly because Ghost in the Siege did a lot of heavy lifting for this. For Cloak Games/Cloak Mage, I got back $2.70 for every dollar spent, with 12% of the revenue coming from the audiobooks. And for Frostborn, I got back $2.83 for every dollar spent, with 30% of the revenue coming from the audiobooks. Now on to Amazon ads. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be profitable, it needs to generate at least one sale/complete KU readthrough every six to eight clicks. So for Demonsouled Omnibus One, I got $5 back for every $1 spent, with a sale for every 0.82 clicks, which was really good. For Half-Elven Thief, I got back $1.22 for every dollar spent, with a sale for every 2.47 clicks. And for Dragonskull Omnibus One, I got back $28.75 for every dollar spent, with 65% of the profit coming from the audiobook, with a sale for every 0.11 clicks. Now, obviously these numbers require some explanation. The profit margin on Half-Elven Thief was narrow, but the entire series made up for it, so that's okay and it will improve when I start writing more books in the series later this year. In fact, I think I’m going to start writing the fifth one in October, if all goes well. The numbers for Dragonskull Omnibus One were so high because the ebook is $0.99, but the audiobook brings in a lot more than the ebook, something like 10 times, no, 20 times more than the ebook. BookBub ads do quite well with Google Play and Barnes and Noble. The numbers are too long to quote here, but they did quite well. All that said, the reason I'm losing confidence in Facebook ads is a combination of the loss of granular targeting and over-reliance on AI targeting. One of the paradoxes of online advertising is that the smaller and more granular your audience, the more likely your ad is to convert to sales. Narrow, targeted advertising is so much better than broad targeting. Unfortunately, Facebook has been slowly removing the more granular targeting options in favor of broader categories that don't work as well. Like you used to be able to target dozens of fantasy authors as interests for Facebook users. Now, you can only target epic fantasy and maybe J.R.R. Tolkien. In fact, I confirmed this just this morning, but you can't even target Brandon Sanderson as an interest, and he's probably the most popular epic fantasy author publishing today. To take the place of more granular targeting, Facebook has introduced AI assisted targeting, which they call Advantage Plus. Now, there's no beating around the bush. Advantage Plus isn't very good. It can garner a reasonable number of clicks on an ad, but those clicks don't convert to sales. Even with ads that don't use Advantage, Facebook still sneaks it in. So the effectiveness of Facebook ads has been in decline. Like I turned off the Facebook ads for the Demonsouled series entirely in August, and my results actually improved a good bit. So I'm going to test another series with no Facebook ads for September, and we'll see how much the results vary. Specifically, I think I'll turn off Facebook ads for Cloak Games/Cloak Mage, leave them on for Frostborn, and see if it makes any difference, and if it does make a difference, it will be time to reevaluate some advertising strategies. On the plus side, I didn't lose any money at any of my ads this month and they all turned a profit, and as always, thank you to everyone who was reading and listening to ebooks and audiobooks. 00:11:41 Does Permafree Still Work For Indie Authors? Now on to the other half of our main topic: Does Permafree still work for indie authors? One of the perennial debates in Indie Author Land is whether or not making the first book in your series free still works as a marketing tactic or not. Now, at this point, I've been doing this for over 14 years, and I have a lot of different series and quite a few different ones with free first books in the series. I thought it might be interesting to dig into the sales data and see what percentage of people who downloaded the first book went onto the second book and then the final book in the series. A few caveats and conditions: first, this is only for 2024 and the first half of 2025, since I wanted a set time sample for the data. Additionally, this is also useful for showing the conversion rate on a finished series that hasn't had a new book in years, since the final book in the Frostborn series came out in 2017, which was eight years ago at this point. Second, it will only apply to a series whose first books were free for that entire time period. Third, when I talk about conversion rates, I mean what percentage of free downloads translated into sales. For example, if Book One had a hundred free downloads and then 12 sales of Book Two and nine sales of the final book, that means 12% of people went onto the second book and then 9% on to the final book. So we had a conversion rate of 12% from the first free book to the paid second book, and then a conversion rate of 9% from the free first book to the final book in the series. So with all that in mind, let's take a look at permafree conversion rates for some of my series in 2024 and 2025. For The Ghosts, 13.47% went to the second book, and 12.72% went on to the final book. For Frostborn, 13% went to the second book and 12.93% to the final book. For Sevenfold Sword, 22.93% went to the second book and 22.81% on to the final book. For Cloak Games, 11.85% went on to the second book, and 11.67% to the final book. Silent Order, 14.64% went on to the second book, and 14.54% went to the final book. For The Tower of Endless Worlds, 17.46% went to the second book, and 17.46% went onto the final book. So I think there are a couple of conclusions we can draw from this. First, making the first book in a series permafree remains a viable marketing strategy. It doesn't usually result in dramatic spikes of sales, but instead it is good at generating more of a steady trickle. Second, anything you can do to increase the number of downloads of your free books will likely increase the sales of the paid books later in the series. That said, there are caveats. You want methods to increase the free downloads to people that might conceivably be interested in buying the books. Targeted advertising can be an effective way to do this. What's not effective is using bot farms or help from a bunch of scammers to generate a big download in free books. At best, you'll generate a bunch of downloads that won't convert, and at worst ebook platforms will detect suspicious activity and either delist your free ebook or suspend your account. Third, this strategy works even with books you don't promote very often. For example, I don't bash on the Tower of Endless Worlds because for some people it's their favorite book of mine. But in all candor, I do think it's one of my weaker books. I was trying to do something with urban fantasy I don't think I had the skills to do until Cloak Games, which was like 12 years later. So I don't really promote it, save that I made the first book in the series free a long time ago and kept it that way. It's still 17% of the people who downloaded the first book continued onto the final one. Fourth, this strategy does require some patience. It can take a while for people to read through a series. It can also take a while for a free book to get traction. Fifth, I at times hesitate to recommend this because saying write five books and make the first one free is easy to say, but it's a lot of work to do. For many new writers, getting the first book done and out into the world is a monumental challenge, then telling them to do it three or four more times and then to make the first book free does seem like a big ask, but it does work (sometimes slowly), but it does work. 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 back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and see you all next week.
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Episode 267: Summer Movie Review Roundup
09/08/2025
Episode 267: Summer Movie Review Roundup
In this week's episode, I take a look back at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Summer 2025. This coupon code will get you 50% off the , Book #1 in the Ghost Armor series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: FALLSERPENT50 The coupon code is valid through September 15, 2025 (please note the shorter expiration date). So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 267 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September 5, 2025 and today I'm doing a review roundup of the movies and streaming shows I saw in Summer 2025. Before we do that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing and audiobook projects. First up, this week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Serpent, Book One in the Ghost Armor series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store. That is FALLSERPENT50. This coupon code will be valid through September 15th, 2025 (exactly one week). So if you need a new audiobook to listen to as we head into fall, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. I am pleased to report that the rough draft of Blade of Flames, which will be the first book in my new Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series is finished. The rough draft came at about 90,000 words long, which was what I was aiming for. Next up, I will be writing a short story set as sort of a bonus in that plot line called Thunder Hammer and that will be the backstory of one of the characters in Blade of Flames. And when Blade of Flames comes out (which will hopefully be later this September), newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of Thunder Hammer. So this is an excellent time to subscribe to my newsletter. I am also 8,000 words into Cloak of Worlds. At long last, I am coming back to the Cloak Mage series after nearly a year's absence. Longtime listeners will know the reason was that I had five unfinished series and I wanted to spend the summer of 2025 finishing the unfinished ones and focusing up so I will only have three ongoing series at any given time. I'm hoping Blade of Flames will come out before the end of September and Cloak of Worlds before the end of October, and after that I will be able to return to the Rivah series at long last. In audiobook news, recording is finished on Shield of Power. That will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills and hopefully once it gets through processing and quality assurance and everything, it should be showing up on the various audiobook stores before too much longer. Hollis McCarthy is about halfway through the recording of Ghost in the Siege, which was, as you know, the last book in the Ghost Armor series that just came out. And if all goes well, the audiobook should be coming out probably in October once everything is done with recording and quality assurance and all that. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:02:34 Main Topic: Summer 2025 Movie/TV Roundup So without further ado, let's head into our main topic. The end of summer is nigh, which means this time for my summer movie review roundup. As is usual for the summer, I saw a lot of movies, so this will be one of the longer episodes. For some reason I ended up watching a bunch of westerns. As always, the movies are ranked from least favorite to most favorite. The grades of course are totally subjective and based on nothing more than my own opinions, impressions, and interpretations. Now on to the movies. First up is the Austin Powers trilogy, the three movies of which came out in 1997, 1999, and 2002. The Austin Powers movies came out just as the Internet really got going in terms of mass adoption, which is likewise why so many Austin Powers and Dr. Evil memes are embedded in online culture. Despite that, I had never really seen any of them all the way through. They've been on in the background on TBS or whatever quite a bit when I visited people, but I've never seen them all. But I happened upon a DVD of the trilogy for $0.25 (USD), so I decided for 25 cents I would give it a go. I would say the movies were funny, albeit not particularly good. Obviously the Austin Powers movies are a parody of the James Bond movies. The movies kind of watch like an extended series of Saturday Night Live skits, only loosely connected, like the skit is what if Dr. Evil had a son named Scott who wasn't impressed with him or another skit was what if a British agent from the ‘60s arrives in the ‘90s and experiences culture clash? What if Dr. Evil didn't understand the concept of inflation and demanded only a million dollars from the United Nations? What if Dr. Evil was actually Austin's brother and they went to school together at Spy Academy? Michael Caine was pretty great as Austin's father. Overall, funny but fairly incoherent. Overall grade: C- Next up is Horrible Bosses, a very dark and very raunchy comedy from about 14 years ago. It came out in 2011. Interestingly, this movie reflects what I think is one of the major crises of the contemporary era, frequent failures of leadership at all levels of society. In the movie Nick, Dale, and Kurt are lifelong friends living in LA and all three of them have truly horrible bosses in their place of employment, ranging from a sociopathic finance director, the company founder's cokehead son, and a boorish dentist with a tendency to sexual harassment. At the bar, they fantasize about killing their horrible bosses and then mutually decide to do something about it. Obviously, they'd all be prime suspects in the murder of their own bosses, but if they killed each other's bosses, that would allow them to establish airtight alibis. However, since Nick, Dale and Kurt are not as bright as they think they are, it all goes hilariously wrong very quickly. Bob Hope has a hilarious cameo. If the best “crude comedies” I've seen are Anchorman, Zoolander, Tropic Thunder, and Dodgeball, and the worst one was MacGruber, I'd say Horrible Bosses lands about in the middle. Overall grade: C Next up is Cowboys and Aliens, which came out in 2011. Now I almost saw this in 2011 when it came out, but I was too busy to go to the theater in July of 2011, so I finally saw it here in 2025 and I would say this was almost a great movie, like the performances were great, the concept was great, the scenery was great, the special effects were great, and the story was packed full of really interesting ideas, but somehow they just didn't coalesce. I'm not entirely sure why. I think upon reflection, it was that the movie is just too overcrowded with too many characters and too many subplots. Anyway, Daniel Craig portrays a man who wakes up with no memory in the Old West, with a mysterious bracelet locked around his wrist. He makes his way to the town of Atonement, and promptly gets arrested because he is apparently a notorious outlaw (which he doesn’t remember). While he is locked in jail, space aliens attack the town. The aliens, for unknown reasons, abduct many of the townspeople, and Daniel Craig’s character, who is named Jake even if he doesn’t remember it, must lead the town’s effort to recover their abducted citizens. Harrison’s Ford has an excellent performance as this awful cattle baron who nonetheless has virtues of courage and fortitude that you can’t help but admire. An excellent performance. That said, the movie was just too packed, and I thought it would work better as a novel. After I watched the movie, it turned out that it was indeed based off a graphic novel. Novels and graphic novels allow for a far more complex story than a movie, and I don’t think this movie quite managed to handle the transition from a graphic novel to a film. Overall grade: C Next up is Heads of State, which came out in 2025. This was kind of a stupid movie. However, the fundamental question of any movie, shouted to the audience by Russell Crow in Gladiator is, “are you not entertained?!?” I was thoroughly entertained watching this, so entertained I actually watched it twice. Not everything has to be Shakespeare or a profound meditation on the unresolvable conflicts inherent within human nature. Anyway, John Cena plays Will Derringer, newly elected President of the United States. Idris Elba plays Sam Clark, who has now been the UK Prime Minister for the last six years. Derringer was an action star who parleyed his celebrity into elected office (in the same way Arnold Schwarzenegger did), while Clarke is an army veteran who worked his way up through the UK’s political system. Needless to say, the cheerful Derringer and the grim Clarke take an immediate dislike to each other. However, they’ll have to team up when Air Force One is shot down, stranding them in eastern Europe. They’ll have to make their way home while evading their enemies to unravel the conspiracy that threatens world peace. So half action thriller, half buddy road trip comedy. The premise really doesn’t work if you think about it too much for more than thirty seconds, but the movie was funny and I enjoyed it. Jack Quaid really stole his scenes as a crazy but hyper-competent CIA officer. Overall grade: C+ Next up, Captain America: Brave New World, which came out in 2025 and I think this movie ended up on the good side of middling. You can definitely tell it went through a lot of reshoots and retooling, and I suspect the various film industry strikes hit it like a freight train. But we ended up with a reasonably solid superhero thriller. Sam Wilson is now Captain America. He’s not superhuman the way Steve Rogers was and doesn’t have magic powers or anything, so he kind of fights like the Mandalorian – a very capable fighter who relies on excellent armor. Meanwhile, in the grand American political tradition of failing upward, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who spent years persecuting The Hulk and whose meddling caused the Avengers to disband right before Thanos attacked, has now been elected President. To Wilson’s surprise, Ross reaches out and wants him to restart the Avengers. But Ross (as we know) did a lot of shady black ops stuff for years, and one of his projects is coming back to haunt him. Wilson finds himself in the middle of a shadowy conspiracy, and it’s up to him to figure out what’s going on before it’s too late. I was amused that lifelong government apparatchik Ross wanted to restart the Avengers, because when the Avengers had their biggest victory in Avengers: Endgame, they were essentially unsanctioned vigilantes bankrolled by a rogue tech billionaire. Overall grade: B- Next up is Ironheart, which came out in 2025. I'd say Ironheart was about 40% very weird and 60% quite good. It's sort of like the modern version of Dr. Faustus. The show got some flak on the Internet from the crossfire between the usual culture war people, but the key to understanding it is to realize that Riri Williams AKA Ironheart is in fact an antihero who’s tottering on the edge of becoming a full-blown supervillain. Like Tony Stark, she’s a once-in-a-generation scientific talent, but while she doesn’t have Stark’s alcohol problems, she’s emotionally unstable, immature, ruthless, indifferent to collateral damage and consequences, and suffering from severe PTSD after her best friend and stepfather were killed in a drive-by shooting. This volatile mix gets her thrown out of MIT after her experiments cause too much destruction, and she has to go home to Chicago. To get the funds to keep working on her Iron Man armor, she turns to crime, and falls in with a gang of high-end thieves led by a mysterious figure named Hood. It turns out that Hood has actual magic powers, which both disturbs and fascinates Riri. However, Hood got his magic in a pact with a mysterious dark force. When a job goes bad, Riri gains the enmity of Hood and has to go on the run. It also turns out Hood’s dark master has become very interested in Riri, which might be a lot more dangerous for everyone in the long run. Overall, I’d say this is about in the same vein as Agatha All Along, an interesting show constructed around a very morally questionable protagonist. Overall grade: B Next up is A Minecraft movie, which came out in 2024. I have to admit, I've never actually played Minecraft, so I know very little about the game and its ecosystem, only what I've generally absorbed by glancing at the news. That said, I think the movie held together quite well, and wasn’t deserving of the general disdain it got in the press. (No doubt the $950 million box office compensated for any hurt feelings.) One of the many downsides of rapid technological change in the last fifty years is that the Boomers and Gen X and the Millennials and Gen Z and Gen Alpha have had such radically different formative experiences in childhood that it’s harder to relate to each other. Growing up in the 1980s was a wildly different experience than growing up in the 2010s, and growing up in the 2010s was an even more wildly different experience than growing up in the 1960s. Smartphones and social media were dominant in 2020, barely starting in 2010, and implausible science fiction in 2000 and earlier, and so it was like the different generations grew up on different planets, because in some sense they actually did. (A five-year-old relative of mine just started school, and the descriptions of his school compared to what I remember of school really do sound like different planets entirely.) The Minecraft game and A Minecraft Movie might be one of those generation-locked experiences. Anyway, this has gotten very deep digression for what was essentially a portal-based LitRPG movie. A group of people experiencing various life difficulties in a rural Idaho town get sucked into the Minecraft world through a magic portal. There they must combine forces and learn to work together to master the Minecraft world to save it from an evil sorceress. As always, the fundamental question of any movie is the one that Russell Crowe’s character shouted to the audience in Gladiator back in 2000. “Are you not entertained?” I admit I was entertained when watching A Minecraft Movie since it was funny and I recognized a lot of the video game mechanics, even though I’ve never actually played Minecraft. Like, Castlevania II had a night/day cycle the way Minecraft does, and Castlevania II was forty years ago. But that was another digression! I did enjoy A Minecraft Movie. It was kind of crazy, but it committed to the craziness and maintained a consistent creative vision, and I was entertained. Though I did think it was impressive how Jack Black’s agent managed to insist that he sing several different times. Overall grade: B Next up is Back to School, which came out in 1986 and this is one of the better ‘80s comedies I've seen. Rodney Dangerfield plays Thornton Melon, who never went to college and is the wealthy owner of a chain of plus-sized clothing stores. His son Jason is attending Great Lakes University, and after Thornton’s unfaithful gold-digging wife leaves him (Thornton is mostly relieved by this development), he decides to go visit his son. He quickly discovers that Jason is flailing at college, and decides to enroll to help out his son. Wacky adventures ensue! I quite enjoyed this. The fictional “Great Lakes University” was largely shot at UW-Madison in Wisconsin, which I found amusing because I spent a lot of time at UW-Madison several decades ago as a temporary IT employee. I liked seeing the characters walk past a place where I’d eat lunch outside when the day was nice, that kind of thing. Also, I’m very familiar with how the sausage gets made in higher ed. There’s a scene where the dean is asking why Thornton is qualified to enter college, and then it cuts to the dean cheerfully overseeing the groundbreaking of the new Thornton Melon Hall which Thornton just donated, and I laughed so hard I almost hurt myself, because that is exactly how higher ed works. The movie had some pointless nudity, but it was only a few seconds and no doubt gets cut in network broadcasts. Overall grade: B Next up is Whiskey Galore, which came out in 1949 and this is a comedy set in Scotland during World War II. The villagers living on an isolated island have no whiskey due to wartime rationing. However, when a government ship carrying 50,000 cases of whiskey runs aground near the island, wacky hijinks ensue. I have to admit the first half of the movie was very slow and deliberate, gradually setting up all the pieces for later. Then, once the shipwreck happens, things pick up and the movie gets much funnier. Definitely worth watching both as a good comedy movie and an artifact of its time. A modicum of historical knowledge is required – if you don’t know what the Home Guard is, you might have to do some Googling to understand the context of some of the scenes. Regrettably, the version I watched did not have captioning, so I had to pay really close attention to understand what the characters were saying, because some of the accents were very strong. Overall grade: B Next up is Happy Gilmore 2, which came out in 2025. This was dumb and overstuffed with celebrity cameos but thoroughly hilarious and I say this even though it uses one of my least favorite story tropes, namely “hero of previous movie is now a middle age loser.” However, the movie leads into it for comedy. When Happy Gilmore accidentally kills his wife with a line drive, he spirals into alcoholism and despair. But his five children still love him, and when his talented daughter needs tuition for school, Happy attempts to shake off his despair and go back to golf to win the money. But Happy soon stumbles onto a sinister conspiracy led by an evil CEO to transform the game of golf into his own personal profit center. Happy must team up with his old nemesis Shooter McGavin to save golf itself from the evil CEO. Amusingly, as I’ve said before, the best Adam Sandler movies are almost medieval. In medieval fables, it was common for a clever peasant to outwit pompous lords, corrupt priests, and greedy merchants. The best Adam Sandler protagonist remains an everyman who outwits the modern equivalent of pompous lords and corrupt priests, in this case an evil CEO. Overall grade: B+ Next up is Superman, which came out in 2025 and I thought this was pretty good and very funny at times. I think it caught the essential nature of Superman. Like, Superman should be a Lawful Good character. If he was a Dungeons and Dragons character, he would be a paladin. People on the Internet tend to take the characterization of superheroes seriously to perhaps an unhealthy degree, but it seems the best characterization of Superman is as an earnest, slightly dorky Boy Scout who goes around doing good deeds. The contrast of that good-hearted earnestness with his godlike abilities that would allow him to easily conquer and rule the world is what makes for an interesting character. I also appreciated how the movie dispensed with the overused trope of the Origin Story and just got down to business. In this movie, Lex Luthor is obsessed with destroying Superman and is willing to use both super-advanced technology and engineered geopolitical conflict to do it. Superman, because he’s essentially a decent person, doesn’t comprehend just how depraved Luthor is, and how far Luthor is willing to go out of petty spite. (Ironically, a billionaire willing to destroy the world out of petty spite is alas, quite realistic). Guy Gardener (“Jerkish Green Lantern”) and the extremely competent and the extremely exasperated Mr. Terrific definitely stole all their scenes. The director of the movie, James Gunn, was quite famously fired from Disney in 2018 for offensive jokes he had made on Twitter back when he...
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Episode 266: Is Writing Fiction Like A Theme Park?
09/01/2025
Episode 266: Is Writing Fiction Like A Theme Park?
In this week's episode, I look at what goes into a successful theme park, and compare it to the process of creating a compelling story. This coupon code will get you 25% off the : FALLDRAGON25 The coupon code is valid through September 8, 2025 (please note the shorter expiration date). So if you need a new ebook this fall, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 266 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller and today is August 29th, 2025, and today we are considering if theme parks are like writing. Before we get into this topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my current writing projects. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store, and that coupon code is FALLDRAGON25. And as always, we'll have the coupon code and links in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is only valid through September 8, 2025. That's only one week, so if you want to use it, act now. And if you need a new ebook for fall, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing projects. I am 63,000 words into Blade of Flames, the first book in my new epic fantasy Blades of Ruin series, and I think 63,000 words puts me about almost two thirds of the way through. I think the book will end up being between 90,000 and 100,000 words, so hopefully we are on track to have that out before the end of September. I'm also 5,000 words into Cloak of Worlds, which will be the 13th book in the Cloak Mage series. And if all goes well, I think that will probably be out in October, towards the end of October, maybe a Halloween book. In audiobook news, recording is still underway for Shield of Power (that will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills); we're coming up on the end of that, so should have some good news on that before too much longer. Recording is underway for Ghost in the Siege, and that will be excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. So that is where I am at with my current writing and audiobook projects. Some good progress this week. 00:01:53 Main Topic: What Epic Universe Can Teach Us About Creating Memorable Characters Now on to our main topic this week: are theme parks like writing and what theme parks can teach us about creating memorable characters and settings. I have to admit, this is an unusual topic for me because I am not really a theme park person. I have several family members who are interested in the history of Disney Corporation, so I've picked up some through osmosis, but that's essentially it. This topic was suggested by my podcast transcriptionist, and it was an interesting idea, so I thought we would go with it. I don't really know all that much about theme parks. As I mentioned, I'm not really in the target audience and I'm not in the sort of demographic where I would watch, for example, someone's four hour live stream through the latest Disney attraction or whatever. Though I did watch the video that Jenny Nicholson put out last summer about her experience with the Star Wars “hotel”, and I think that was interesting as a piece of essentially documentary journalism depicting a tale of sort of corporate greed and cost cutting and how that can lead to inevitable failure. But that is a bit of a tangent from our main topic, which is whether or not writers can learn anything from theme parks. I did pick up enough through osmosis from the history of Disney to know that in the early days before the Disney Corporation became as sort of corporatized and cost cutting as is now, that when they built a new attraction, the attraction had to be able to tell a story, like there was some sort of a story that needed to be told or an essential narrative that needed to be followed through the layout of the attraction so the guests, if they were paying attention, would be told a story. So apparently the big news in the theme park universe this year is that Universal opened a new theme park called Universal Epic Universe in Florida in May 2025. The park is built on a central hub, which then divides out into five intellectual property based lands like Super Nintendo World with all of the Mario characters. What's interesting is that two of the five lands in the theme park are directly based on content that began as book series, the How to Train Your Island- Isle of Berk (which was originally written by Cressida Cowell) and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and the Ministry of Magic, which was originally written by J.K. Rowling. One other land, The Dark Universe, draws heavily on the Frankenstein story, which was originally written by Mary Shelley (among other creatures like Dracula, who as a character originated in Bram Stoker's novel in the 19th century). Now, what does this have to do with writing? I mean, for most writers, the idea of becoming popular enough that people build theme parks based on your characters is probably a bit unrealistic as a career goal. However, I think there are lessons that can be learned there for writers about holding the interest and compelling readers. All three of the intellectual properties we discussed previously were more often known for their movie adaptations than the books they were originally based upon. But we can learn what makes memorable characters and settings in the book series and how a theme park would draw upon a beloved book series to generate ticket, merchandise, and food sales. I think it is both fair to say and a profound understatement that books, movies, and theme parks are wildly different kinds of art forms. However, the fundamental principles of storytelling, of world building do seem to apply across all three. So let's take a look at some of those principles. Part I: Creating Fictional Worlds Memorably People like distinct and creative worlds that make them feel immersed in something beyond mundane reality, even if that reality is not safe, easy, or pleasant. In all three stories that inspire these theme parks, the main character faces something that no one has before. Harry Potter readers can imagine that they're an owl delivery letter away from arriving at a new school full of friends, magic, and danger. How to Train Your Dragon lets readers soar through the air while rescuing a lovable dragon from a dark fate. Dragon riders are considered to be a special group of people in this world. Frankenstein allows us to imagine a world where humans are powerful enough to have power over life and death itself, though in the grand tradition of science fiction and horror, this always goes horribly wrong. After all, creating an artificial life form did not end particularly well for Victor Frankenstein in the first book. And where this comes into theme parks is that readers want to find a way to be included in the fictional world. In Harry Potter, readers can imagine which house they're sorted into based on personality traits. By choosing a house in the Hogwarts school or magic wands whose components reflect their personalities, they feel more included in the story because they know where they would belong in it. Many, many, many young adult series since then have tried to include some sort of factions or special lands or organizations in their stories for this reason, but it never seems to land quite as well as it did in the Harry Potter series. Though to be honest, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry seems like it would be immediately shut down if any sort of educational authority or ministry of education or department of education ever investigated it because it (laughs) is not a well-run school. In How to Train Your Dragon, dangerous dragons are not only faced, they're befriended and protected. Something frightening becomes a chance to feel powerful and help others. And readers often enjoy reading about dark creatures or villains like Frankenstein's monster because it makes the real world seem more secure or stable by comparison or because they feel like misfits or outcasts and can sympathize with these characters. Now, for writers, specific world building details often are very distinct things that readers remember, sometimes even more than the plot. For myself, that's worked advantageously with several of my different settings where some of the distinct details of the Cloak Games settings or the Half-Elven Thief settings stick in people's minds. For the examples we're talking about here, some readers might remember a biting textbook, a flying broomstick, or what's on the Hogwarts banquet table more than they remember the plots of the individual Harry Potter movies or books. Now for the theme parks, Universal Studios capitalizes on this and makes money by creating merchandise and food items from those moments in the books, and they give visitors an opportunity to buy a nice cold glass of Butterbeer or a t-shirt from their Hogwarts house. And that feels more special than buying a pair of, for example, Mickey Mouse ears because they have a preexisting connection with Harry Potter, and though it's extremely unlikely that any of us will end up owning a theme park, as writers, don't be afraid of adding details like that, very specific details like that to the world building because it does help create a distinctive atmosphere and help the readers connect with the story. Part II: Investing Audiences in Your Characters Now onto part two, investing audiences in your characters. It's a good idea to find a way to make the readers root for your characters. Harry Potter and Toothless the dragon both begin as scrawny, unloved, and unimpressive, but they rise in the face of danger to become brave and important. When characters team up in a structured way, such as Dumbledore's Army or the creation of the Berk Training Academy, it gives the readers a chance to imagine how they could join the main characters and be part of the group. It's also important to remember a character doesn't have to be likable to be memorable, though obviously this often works better for villains. For example, Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter is a very memorable character, even though she's totally unsympathetic and unlikable because she represents a sort of bureaucratic, pettiness, and evil that we inevitably all have to deal with at some point in our lives, whether in school or dealing with various bureaucracies (whether government or corporate) as we get older. Frankenstein's creature likewise isn't always likable, though he is sympathetic because he didn't ask to be created. His creator mistreated him. He tried to fit into human society and totally failed. So while he does many morally reprehensible things like for example, murdering Victor Frankenstein's bride to be, nonetheless he retains an element of sympathy because if he's a monster, it’s because Victor Frankenstein created him to be a monster. Even when his decisions aren't ideal or are quite bad, his loneliness and curiosity are still deeply relatable. Part III: Adapting To Grow With Your Audience Now, Part III, adapting to grow with your audience/adding new characters to an existing world or an interconnected series. Don't be afraid to age up your characters and change them across a series. In Harry Potter and How to Train Your Dragons, the characters age through series and face new and more complex challenges. Watching characters change is a great way to make them feel more lifelike and give them new complexities. I was reminded of that very recently with the publication of Ghost in the Siege, where I believe that is the 34th novel with Caina as the main character. Obviously she has changed and grown quite a bit since that first book all those years ago and some part of the plot was Caina coming to terms with how much she's changed and how much she's changed as a result of what she's had to do to save people she cares about, which is kind of an interesting comparison to the fact that I found it a bit challenging to write the book just because Caina has changed so much from her original start in trying to find a way to write that while remaining true to the character. Given how well the book has been received (thanks, everyone!), I think I might have landed on the mark for that one. If you want to continue in the world and write another series in the world, it's usually a good idea to include some carryover characters between the series. I've done that a lot with Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, and Shield War, where some characters continue over between the series. In the theme park, for example, in the Dark Universe, Dr. Victoria Frankenstein continues the work of her ancestor, Victor Frankenstein. That can also help to remind readers why they like the series so much by bringing back favorite characters. Returning to favorite locations in the series is a way to keep fans engaged, as long as it makes sense or fits the story. Give your books emotionally satisfying, not necessarily happy conclusions. Give them a chance to say goodbye to characters in places they've come to care about. Remember, the ending doesn't have to be happy. It doesn't have to be sad. It can be a bit of both. But what is important above all else is that the ending provides emotional resolution to the emotional conflicts and stakes raised within the story. Anything else and the readers will feel cheated. And now the conclusion. Fortunately, your readers won't have to wait in line for two hours to experience your characters the way that Epic Universe visitors must. But it's a testament to strong writing that people are willing to pay very large sums of money to do that, especially in Florida where the heat and the extreme humidity are constant, especially in summer. It's proof that well-developed settings, memorable characters, and immersive plots are important to readers and go a long way. Although you and I will probably not ever be theme park owners and I do not plan to ever go to Florida and go to Epic Universe, you can learn from how they build and maintain the relationship between their intellectual properties and their paying guests. Remember that you want compelling characters, a good story, and a satisfying conclusion. 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 at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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