The Pulp Writer Show

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 audiobook of Half-Elven Thief, Book #1 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store: 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.  

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 ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store: 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.

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 audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book #2 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: 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.  

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 ebooks in the Silent Order series at my Payhip store: 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.    

In this week's episode, I take a look back at my ten bestselling books of 2025, and consider five lessons learned from them. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, Book #1 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: DRAGONSKULL50 The coupon code is valid through February 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 287 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 23rd, 2025, and today we are discussing five lessons learned from my 10 bestselling books of 2026. We'll also have Coupon of the Week and an update at my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is DRAGONSKULL50. And as always, links to my Payhip store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I am very nearly done with Blade of Storms, the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I am probably just going to stay inside and finish it this weekend because it is very cold. It is winter, but it looks like this week we are having super winter and I'm in the part of the US where we're not getting any snow thankfully, but it is in fact -20 degrees [Fahrenheit] outside, which makes it a good time to stay inside and work on Blade of Storms. So hopefully it will start going live by the time this episode goes live or shortly thereafter. I'm also 16,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. And if all goes well, that should be my main project soon. It might come out before the end of February, but it will probably slip to March, the way things are looking. In audiobook news, we're very nearly done with the audiobook of Blade of Shadows (as excellently recorded by Brad Wills) and hopefully that should start getting through quality assurance on the various audiobook platforms before too much longer. Hollis McCarthy has started working on Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage urban fantasy series. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:09 Main Topic of the Week: 5 Lessons Learned from My 10 Bestselling Books from 2025 And now let's move on to our main topic this week, five lessons learned from the top 10 of my bestselling books from 2025. I have this growing pile of tax paperwork on my desk and that got me to thinking about what were my 10 bestselling books of 2025 because all the sales data is now in so I can parse it and look back and see which books of mine sold the best in 2025. I thought it'd be interesting to look at my 10 bestselling ebooks, audiobooks, and paper books for 2025 and see what percentage of them or what rather what percentage of book revenue came from new stuff published in 2025 and old stuff that I had published previously and then I would take a look at five lessons learned from that. So with all that in mind, let's take a first look at my ten bestselling ebooks of 2025 and what percentage of my book revenue for 2025 came from new books and from my backlist. So first up, my 10 bestselling ebooks of 2025: 1. Shield of Deception 2. Shield of Battle 3. Shield of Power 4. Ghost in the Assembly 5. Ghost in the Corruption 6. Cloak of Worlds 7. Blade of Flames 8. Ghost in the Siege 9. Blade of Shadows 10. Cloak of Illusion   And for my total ebook revenue for 2025, 29.3% came from new books and 70.7% came from things I published prior to 2025. So let's look at the 10 bestselling audiobooks of 2025: 1. The Ghosts: Omnibus One 2. Cloak Mage Omnibus One 3. Ghost Armor Omnibus One 4. Dragonskull Omnibus One 5. The Ghosts Omnibus Two 6. The Ghosts Omnibus Three 7. Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One 8. Ghost Exile Omnibus One 9. Cloak Mage Omnibus Three 10. Frostborn: The Shadow Prison: Frostborn, Book 15   So for audio, for my total revenue, 11.92% of it came from things that were newly published in 2025 and 88.08% came from things that had been published prior to 2025. Now my top 10 selling print books: 1. The Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide - Second Edition 2. The Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide 3. The Ubuntu Beginner's Guide 4. Frostborn: The Gray Knight 5. Shield of Storms 6. Frostborn: The Master Thief 7. Shield of Darkness 8. Shield of Deception 9. Frostborn: The Shadow Prison 10. Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife In terms of the percentages of my total print revenue, 5.57% came from things that have been published in 2025, but a whopping 94.43% came from stuff I published prior to 2025. So those are the numbers and the sales percentages. Let's see what lessons we can learn from looking at this data. And so I thought of five lessons. #1: My efforts in 2025 to focus up and focus on finishing series and then shift to just working on three series at a time really paid off. For instance, my three bestselling ebooks for 2025 came from the Shield War Series (Shield of Deception, Shield of Battle, and Shield of Power). So very clearly it was a good idea to focus on that and it was also a good idea to focus on doing a new epic fantasy series like Blades of Ruin because Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows were number, let's see, number seven and nine on that list respectively, and that was after they were published only in the last quarter of 2025. For that matter, I think people were very excited that I finally managed to get back to the Cloak Mage series because Cloak of Worlds was the sixth bestselling book of the year, even though it came out in I believe October and Cloak of Illusion was a year old and it was still one of the 10 bestselling books of 2025 just because people were that eager for me to get back to the Cloak Mage Series. Wizard Assassin, the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, didn't make the list, but the reason for that is very obvious. It only came out on December 23rd and if it had become one of the 10 bestselling books of 2025 in the remaining, what was it, eight days of 2025 at that point, that would've been nothing short of astonishing, but it sold very well. And I think when I do podcast episode for this at the end of 2026, then some of the Half-Elven Thief books will definitely be on the list. So my strategy of focusing on just three series at a time and having the big epic fantasy series like Blades of Ruin be the main series, and then I alternate between Cloak Mage and Half-Elven Thief every other month does seem to be the right strategy. #2: The second lesson I think I learned is that it's good to have all your books in print if possible, but if you have nonfiction books, it's especially good for them to be in print because as you remember from the top 10, my top three bestselling print books of 2025 were The Windows Command Line, The Linux Command Line, and The Ubuntu Beginner's Guides, which are all nonfiction books I wrote a very long time ago and put into print. If I remember right, Linux Command Line and Windows Command Line, both were from 2012, which is a disturbingly long time ago at this point, but they remain my two of my top three bestselling print books of 2025. Obviously it's good to have all your books in print because you'll notice that several of my older fiction books and even one of my relatively newer fiction books (Shield of Storms) were all in the top 10 bestselling print list. But nonetheless, if you have nonfiction and you're selling nonfiction, I strongly recommend you get your nonfiction books into print because I think people are more likely to buy a nonfiction book in print than they are a fiction book. For fiction, it's only your absolute favorites that you get in print these days. I think the majority of what used to be the mass market paperback market has switched over to ebooks. But if you are reading nonfiction, trying to learn how to do something (and all three of these books are technical books), it's more likely that you're going to buy the print book but you keep it as a reference. So if you have a nonfiction, it's definitely a good idea to put it into print. #3: I think the third thing I learned is that audiobook bundles very definitely pay off. You notice that of my top 10 audiobooks for 2025, 9 of the 10 were audiobook bundles, and I think we see the influence of Audible on the audiobook market there. If you're familiar with Audible, you know that most Audible subscription plans give you a credit every month (or more than one credit every month), which means that Audible listeners are very length conscious because they want to get the most audiobook possible for their monthly credit. So they're more likely to spend their monthly credit on the Ghost Omnibus One rather than getting Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Flames, and Ghost in the Blood individually because it's a much better bargain. There's much debate online in the indie author space about how much influence Audible has over the audiobook market, and many people argue that Audible has too much influence over the audiobook market, but the reality remains that Audible has a lot of influence on the audiobook market. And so consequently, the longer the audiobook, the easier it is to sell. So if you have the opportunity to do audiobook bundles, it might be worth doing them. I think you'll find that selling an audiobook bundle is significantly easier than selling an individual audiobook. The best way to promote the audiobook is to promote the ebook. For example, this past week I had a BookBub feature deal for Cloak Mage Omnibus One that did very well (and thank you everyone for that) and it also boosted the audiobook quite a bit, to the point where that as of this recording January 23rd, 2026, Cloak Mage Omnibus One will be my bestselling audiobook for 2026 so far, we'll see how the rest of the year plays out, but I will continue to do audiobook bundles when feasible. And very clearly, this is an excellent way to market your audiobooks if you have the resources to do that, and you're willing to put the bundles on Audible. Not everyone is. #4: The fourth lesson is that I basically misread the LitRPG market because if you'll remember Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, the last book in my Stealth and Spells Online trilogy, came out in July and it didn't crack the top 10. I don't think it even cracked the top 20, if I remember right, it was like my 24th, 25th maybe bestselling book of 2025, which means that a lot of older stuff sold quite a bit more than it did. In fact, I think Demonsouled Omnibus One and Demonsouled Omnibus Two both sold more copies and brought in more revenue than Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest did. Now, I think those are good books, the Stealth and Spells books, and I'm very grateful to everyone who enjoyed them. But as I've said before, I think I fundamentally misread the LitRPG market because it's about a virtual reality game but the LitRPG market these days focuses mostly on isekai style stories or system apocalypse style stories, more things like on the verge of a Dungeon Crawler Carl than people playing a virtual reality game. This isn't to say that the genre of virtual reality online game can't be done well, it's just that I don't think I executed it well in terms of communicating it to potential readers. And as you might remember, it was originally entitled Sevenfold Sword Online, which just confused people because they thought it was connected to my Sevenfold Sword series. So with all that, if I had to do it over again, I would not do a virtual reality LitRPG, I'd probably do a system one or an isekai one, but for now, I'm not going to think about that. I'm going to focus on my three unfinished series and not start a new unfinished series until I finish one of my three remaining unfinished series because as I learned in '23, '24, and '25, having five unfinished series at the same time is too many for both the writer and the reader. So if I ever return to the LitRPG genre and never say never, it will not be for a virtual reality online LitRPG. #5: The fifth and final lesson I think I can learn from this is the combination of effort over time because I've been doing this for a long time, and the reason that in 2025, 70% of my ebook sales came from the backlist (and even more for print and audiobooks) is because I've been doing this for such a long time and my efforts have been compounding over that length of time. For example, when I published Wizard-Assassin last month in December, the previous four books in the series in just the eight days of 2025 that were remaining sold like 600% more in December than they had in November, just from the boost provided by a new book. And again, that's only possible with the effort over time because of those four books hadn't been there, then they wouldn't have been available to have that significant sales boost. So I think this just reflects that one of the hardest lessons of all is patience, because when we publish a book, we want it to immediately be a bestseller and make us lots of money and all that, but that usually doesn't happen. In fact, it hardly ever happens. What you really need to do is just keep slogging away, putting in the effort every day, writing your book, publishing a new one, and building up gradually over time. And I think looking at these numbers for the last year, that the combination of effort over time and remaining patient is indeed the most valuable lesson I can learn and that all of us can learn from 2025. And I would like to conclude talking about this by saying a big thank you to everyone who bought an ebook, a print book, or an audiobook over this year. I'm very grateful for all of your readership, listening and reading, and obviously there'd be no point in doing all this if nobody was reading the books. So thank you again for reading and listening over 2025. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful, a reminder that you can listen to all the backup episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider leaving your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy. Please stay warm, and we will see you all next week.  

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 ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: 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.

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 ebooks in the Sevenfold Sword series at my Payhip store: 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.

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 ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store: 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.  

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 audiobook of Shield of Power, Book #6 in the Shield War series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: POWER2025 The coupon code is valid through January 5, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered!

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 ebooks in my Anthologies series at my Payhip store: 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.  

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 ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store: NIGHT2025 The coupon code is valid through December 22, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered!

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 audiobook of Cloak of Blades, Book #4 in the Cloak Mage series, (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 next week.  

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 ebooks in the Ghost Exile series at my Payhip store: EXILE2025 The coupon code is valid through December 8, 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 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.  

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 ebooks in The Ghosts series at my Payhip store: 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 government tried to figure out what to do about the larger group of hostages. Finally, the government comes with "Argo." A CIA operative will create a fake film crew, a fake film company, and smuggle the six out of Tehran as part of the production. The movie was very tense and very well constructed, even if you know the outcome in advance if you know a little bit of history. Ben Affleck directed and starred, and this was in my opinion one of his best performances. It did take some liberties with historical accuracy, but nonetheless, a very tense political thriller/heist movie with some moments of very dark comedy. Overall Grade: A Next up is The Naked Gun, which came out in 2025, and this is a pitch perfect parody of the gritty cop movie with a lot of absurdist humor, which works well because Liam Neeson brings his grim action persona to the movie and it works really well with the comedy. Neeson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., the son of the original Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun movies back in the '80s. After stopping a bank robbery, Drebin finds himself investigating the suicide of an engineer for the sinister tech mogul Richard Cane. Naturally, the suicide isn't what it appears and when the engineer's mysterious but seductive sister asks for Drebin's help, he pushes deeper into the case. Richard Cane was a hilarious villain because the writers couldn't decide which tech billionaire to parody with him, so they kind of parodied all the tech billionaires at once, and I kid you not, the original Frank Drebin makes an appearance as a magical owl. It was hilarious. Overall Grade: A Now for my two favorite things I saw in Autumn 2025. The first is the combination of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, which came out in 1931 and 1935. These are two separate movies, but Frankenstein leads directly to Bride of Frankenstein, so I'm going to treat them as one movie. Honestly, I think they're two halves of the same story the way that Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame would be two halves of the same story 90 years later, so I'll review them as one. Frankenstein by itself on its own will get a B. Colin Clive's performance is Dr. Henry Frankenstein was great, and Boris Karloff gives the Creature a suitable air of menace and uncanny valley. You really feel like he's something that's been brought to life but isn't quite right and still extremely dangerous. The movie does have a very pat ending that implies everyone will live happily ever after, with Dr. Frankenstein's father giving a toast to his son. But Bride of Frankenstein takes everything from the first movie and improves on it. It's one of those sequels that actually makes the preceding movie better. In Bride, Henry is recovering from his ordeal and swears off his experiments of trying to create artificial humans, but the Creature survived the fire at the windmill at the end of the last movie and is seeking for a new purpose. Meanwhile, Henry receives a visit from his previous mentor, the sinister Dr. Pretorius. Like Henry, Pretorius succeeded in creating artificial life and now he wants to work with Henry to perfect their work, but Henry refuses, horrified by the consequences of his previous experiments. Pretorius, undaunted, makes an alliance with the Creature, who then kidnaps Henry's wife. This will let Pretorius force Henry to work on their ultimate work together-a bride for the Creature. Bride of Frankenstein is a lot tighter than Frankenstein. It was surprising to see how rapidly filmmaking techniques evolved over just four years. Pretorius is an excellent villain, more evil wizard than mad scientist, and the scene where he calmly and effortlessly persuades the Creature to his side was excellent. One amusing note, Bride was framed as Mary Shelley telling the second half of the story to her friends, and then the actress playing Mary Shelley, Elsa Lancaster, also played the Bride. So that was a funny bit of meta humor. Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein combined is one of my two favorite movies of Fall 2025. Overall Grade: A+ And now for my second favorite movie of Autumn 2025, which as it turns out is also Frankenstein, but Guillermo del Toro's version that came out in 2025. And honestly, I think Guillermo del Toro's version of Frankenstein is the best version put to screen so far and even does the rarest of all feats, it improves a little on the original novel. Oscar Isaac plays Victor Frankenstein as a brilliant, driven scientist with something of a sociopathic edge. In other words, he's a man who's utterly inadequate to the task when his experiment succeeds and he actually creates an artificial human that have assembled dead body parts. Jacob Elordi does a good job as the Creature, playing him is essentially a good hearted man who's driven to violence and despair by the cruelty and rejection of the world. The recurring question of the Frankenstein mythos is whether or not Victor Frankenstein is the real monster. In this version, he definitely is, though he gets a chance to repent of his evil by the end. Honestly, everything about this was good. The performances, the cinematography, everything. How good was it? It was so good that I will waive my usual one grade penalty for unnecessary nudity since there were a few brief scenes of it. Overall Grade: A+ So that was the Autumn 2025 Movie Roundup. A lot of good movies this time around. While some movies of course were better than others, I didn't see anything I actively disliked, which is always nice. 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.  

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 audiobook of Cloak of Ashes, Book #3 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: 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 your name publicly to marketing copy you dislike or disagree with in order to not violate your contract. In a related vein, you might find that if you post heavily on your social media pages about political or controversial topics, you may be reprimanded by the publisher or in some cases, have your contract canceled entirely. Although indie authors aren't immune from social consequences of what they post, no publisher is holding them back from posting what they want just because they're writers and the publisher is scared of what the shareholders might think. #6: The publisher being sold. One of the biggest problems for traditionally published writers is when their publisher is sold to another one. This may mean restructuring that takes away staff they worked with a long time (like a favorite editor being replaced by an inexperienced one). As smaller publishers are eaten up by the larger ones, you might find that your books become an afterthought and you don't have any power to fix that. You might even have to fight to get paid what you're owed in your own contracts, which writers of Star Wars books found out when Disney acquired Lucasfilm. Apparently when Disney bought Lucasfilm, it decided it no longer owed royalties to several writers of Star Wars tie-in novels that Lucasfilm had published and weren't going to pay them until it went public and caused a bit of controversy. Finally, a settlement was reached. This is sort of the shifty behavior that Disney is well known for in certain circles, and it is something you have to watch out for with large publishers and media conglomerates. The easiest way to keep this from happening is, once again, to publish yourself and keep ownership of your work. In conclusion, when traditional publishing was the only way to become a writer, their restrictions and control were something you had to live with because you had no other option. Now that self-publishing is extremely accessible and traditional publishing is shrinking, it's no longer worth making the trade-offs that authors once had to in order to gain readers of their work. Although I never actually listened to a Taylor Swift song all the way through, her career and business ventures are proof that owning your work as a creative is the best way forward. Ownership should be the starting point, not the end goal of anyone who values creative control and fair, transparent payment for their creative work. So that is it for this week. I hope that illuminated the importance of owning your own work, especially if you are a writer or other creative. 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.

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 audiobook of Shield of Battle, Book #5 in The Shield War series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: 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.  

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 ebooks in the Silent Order series at my Payhip store: SILENT2025 The coupon code is valid through November 10, 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 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.

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 Shield of Deception, Book #4 in The Shield War series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: HALLOWEEN2025 The coupon code is valid through November 3, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we've got you covered!    

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 https://deemaltbyauthor.com/. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragonskull series at my Payhip store: 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, because otherwise you get surprises. But you get your one read through, your prep, and then you go and yes, you can stop. You can punch and roll, edit over. If you make a mistake, you go back half a line, you start again there. But there's no evolution of the work, which is what's great about series too, I think, because with the series you get, yeah, Caina was here last time I did her and now she's going through something new. And then the character grows and it becomes less and less effortful, but it also becomes like someone you really know so that it gets so much deeper and it's so much more fun to play with. Jonathan: That makes sense. 12 years really is a long time to have done audio narration or anything. So what do you think is the key to sticking it out for audiobooks for the long term? Hollis: Well, a lot of things make a difference. I didn't do it before this interview, which is why my voice is kind of rocky, but I always warm up in the morning when I'm setting up a session. I always do a vocal warmup. You got to get a good night's sleep, you have to drink water every couple of pages. I have a tea that I drink that keeps my stomach quiet because stomach gurgles is another bad thing about audiobooks. You have to eat very carefully and drink tea to keep your stomach quiet. You don't want to have to stop every time for that. And a lot of training, a lot of vocal training. I had Linklater training and the Lavan training, and Linklater to me is the most useful. And a lot of the stuff that applies to Shakespeare applies to audiobooks too. You warm up, you get yourself breathing, you warm up your resonators, your sinus, your mask resonators, the back of your head, your chest resonators. For the men [imitates male voice], you really have to have your chest warmed up, get the vibrations going here. And so I get all that kind of going before I sit down in the booth. And that also keeps you, then you keep your throat open so you're not hurting yourself. You have to have good posture so that the air can move from your diaphragm up to your throat and have it be open. And then optimally, like with Caina, Caina has a lot of mask resonance. Brits do; they are very far forward. So you really have to have all that warmed up and then that has to have no impediments between the front of your face all the way down to your diaphragm where the breath originates. And if you can do all that, then you could be an audiobook narrator. Also diction. I warm up my diction to everything from [imitates several vocal exercises] in just to get your mouth moving. You don't want lazy mouth with, there's a lot of enunciation in audiobooks that's important. But I also don't like, I really hate when you hear people enunciating. I don't like that. And with Caina, even though she's upper class, she's not like that. She's not pretentious. And certainly Nadia, you want to be able to understand what she says, but you don't want her to be enunciating. That be weird. So all of all that stuff I worked on in grad school and did all the Shakespeare plays, I would always get to the theater an hour early. You have to be there half hour for makeup and check in, but I would always get there an hour early and do at least 15 to 20 minutes of physical and vocal warmups. And so those habits have really helped me. I think I have pipes of iron, fortunately. I'm very lucky. So all that stuff really matters with audiobooks. Jonathan: It's amazing in how many different fields of life the answer seems to boil down to do the things you're supposed to over and over again forever. Hollis: Exactly. That's really true. When are we going to get old enough that we don't have to do that anymore? [laughs] Jonathan: Just one side question. What is Linklater training? I don't think I've heard that term before. Hollis: Oh, Kristen Linklater is, she's probably the biggest American vocal coach. She has a lot of books out there about voice and the actor and all of her training stems from allowing the breathing to drop in as she calls it, not forcing it to drop into the diaphragm, and then creating a pool of vocal vibrations that go from the diaphragm through an open throat to the resonators. And you can use every resonator in your body to project that sound. When I was doing Beatrice and Gertrude at Colorado Shakes in that unamplified stone amphitheater in the foothills of the Rockies, there was winds that would come down out of the mountains when we were on stage, and that theater was known for eating women's voices. And I had to thank God the vocal coach that summer was a Linklater coach, which is the method that I trained in, and he helped me work with even resonators. If you can imagine in your back, just using the whole chest box and shaking the vibrations through your body so that basically you're making your whole human skeleton an amplifier for the vocal energy coming from your breath. And that's Linklater. She's fascinating. If you ever want to study voice, you can't do better than Linklater, to my mind. Cicely Berry is another one I studied. She's the British guru for the RSC and the Royal Shakespeare Company and all those people, and she's great too. Jonathan: Well, that's just exciting. I learned something new today. Hollis: That's always good. Always learning from your books too about Medieval combat. Jonathan: We always want to learn something new every day, whether we like it or not. Hollis: Right. Jonathan: So to turn it around a little bit, what advice would you give a new indie author who is working with a narrator for the first time? Hollis: Oh yeah, I actually, I made some notes. I thought that was such a good question. Make sure that your narrator knows what you expect from them upfront. If you go through ACX, they have this great thing called the first 15 where your narrator is, if you're new to this author, you record the first 15 minutes of the book and you put that on ACX for your author to listen to and approve. You don't have to approve it if you don't like it. And in fact, if you don't like it, it's very important you don't approve it and you tell your narrator specifics about what you need them to change before they go on with the book. Because what you can't really do is once a book is recorded, say, oh, I really don't like it. I'm not going to pay you for it. I need you to go back and do it again. That's not acceptable and it will make narrators never want to work with you. But what's great about the first 15 is you have that chance to say, well, this voice was, she was a little higher than I wanted. I hear her in my head more as an alto because for me as a narrator, what I want to do is I want to take what you, Jonathan, hear your characters being as you're writing them in your head. I want to take that and translate that into an audiobook for you. So the more you give your narrators information about your characters, the better they're going to voice it. Also, if there's a style in your head, like with Nadia books, there's a little touch of noir there. It was a dark and stormy night kind of feel. If there's a style you kind of hear in your head, that would be a good thing to give them. But ACX has also, I think a character sheet where you can tell them about the different characters. You can fill that out for your narrator. That's tremendously helpful, age of the character, if you hear a vocal pitch range, soprano, alto, tenor, bass, any dialects, they need to know that. The narrator's nightmare is you finish up a book and you shouldn't do this, you should read ahead, but you get to the last line: “I love you, darling,” he said in his beautiful French accent. Jonathan: It explicitly shows up there for the first time. Hollis: Exactly. And then for the narrator, it's like, oh my God, I have to go back and rerecord everything this guy said, which is hours and hours and hours of work for you and your editor who will kill you. But yeah, let them know about all the character traits that you can and just, I think it's on the narrator too, to, I've been lucky with my authors, we always have a good give and take. I come from a theater background and you want to collaborate. You want to realize the author's vision and you want to be a partner in creating that. So try to be partners and give them more information than you think they need and use that first 15. It is totally acceptable to send it back and say, I'm going to need you to do this again, and I'm going to need these changes. And then once you get that ironed out, then you'll probably be ready to go ahead and have a book. And when you get the book, you won't be shocked and you'll be happy (hopefully) with the read. Is that helpful? Jonathan: It does. New authors, if you're listening to this, listen to that advice. Hollis: Yeah. Jonathan: Now for a slightly different topic, can you tell us about the Magic of Larlion books and how you ended up publishing that series? Hollis: Yeah. The Magic of Larlion is an epic fantasy adventures series seven, almost eight volumes. I'm working on finishing book eight now. The first book, Wizard Stone, my brilliant mother Dee Maltby started years and years ago, probably, gosh, maybe 20 years ago now, I think when my little brother moved out from home and she had an empty nest and she had more time to write, and she wrote Wizard Stone, and she sent it out a few places, and that was the only way you could get published back when she wrote it and didn't pursue it, she got discouraged, I think, by rejections from publishers, sat in her drawer for a while, and my sister-in-law, Dana Benningfield, who's also an actor, and she was my best friend even before she married my brother. I introduced them. So yeah, that was all me. She was an editor professionally for a while, and when she moved to Ohio where I'm from and was living with my brother and my parents lived right across the orchard, I told her about this book. And she wasn't editing at the time, she was kind of done with it, but she asked mom if she could read it. So she read it and edited it, and then it became a much better book and really encouraged my mom to keep writing, which I had been telling her to do for years. But hearing somebody who wasn't family, somehow giving her that input that it was really something special, changed her perspective. So she kept writing and she and I started, I was on the road doing Shakespeare a lot. We started trading chapters. She'd send me a chapter a week and I would edit it and send it back. And so Wizard Stone evolved from there into its current form, and then she started the next book, Wizard Wind and Wizard Storm. And we went that way through five and a half books. And my dad finally, when he retired from being a physicist, said he was going to, I always told you I'd get your published Dee, I'm going to take it down to the print shop and get a hundred copies made. And by this time I was working with you and a bunch of other great indie authors who were letting thousands of happy readers read their books through an independent platform. And I said, well, wait a minute. I could do better than that. So I convinced them to hire an editor that I had worked with, and I did the rewrites and got it through the pre-production process and hired a cover artist, very talented artist. And you and Meara Platt, another of my authors, gave me so much information and help. And we got it published in 2022, I believe. We had three ready to go. And we published those all within a month of each other. One a month for three months, and then four and five, and then six came. And I co-authored five, six, and seven because my mother was losing her sight and her hearing at that point. We got those done. We had six out and a lot of people reading them and loving them and reviewing them before my mom passed. And I think it's probably one of the most satisfying things I've done in my life, because not only do I love the books, and they're just a rip roaring, fantastic adventure-filled epic trip through this incredible world my mom invented. But when she was about to, one of the last things she said to me was, I told her how many people had read her books. I just went through the Kindle numbers and thousands of people in different countries and all over the world were reading and loving her books. And I told her that, and she said, that's all that matters. And she felt such a sense of pride in herself and accomplishment because they were being received for what they are, which is a brilliant creative flight of fancy, this magical world in the tradition of all the books she loved, always Tolkien. And so I promised her I'd finish it. So after she died, I published six and seven and I've got eight about 90% written now, and I'm hoping to bring that out by the end of the year, although I've been too darn busy with narration to really spend the time. I've got the big climactic Jonathan Moeller type battle at the end sketched in my head and on an outline, but I got to write that. And then we can get that out there and finish that too. Jonathan: Will you stop with eight or keep going after eight? Hollis: My feeling is that this series will culminate with book eight. It's been a long saga of Beneban, this young wizard who kind of gets flung off a mountain by his evil wizard master and has to master his fledgling wizardry powers and his magical sword to win his love Laraynia, a powerful sorceress, and save the kingdom. And that's book one. And there's ice dragons, and then they have kids, and then the later books have become much more about their kids. And the more I write, the more it's become about young women fighting with swords. Jonathan: Well, they say write what you know. Hollis: Defeating the bad guys. Plucky young women, overachieving, competing with men. And so I think that's all going to come to a head with book eight, and that will be the end of that series. But I do think I'm going to spin it off into possibly more on the younger characters. I don't know if it's going to be YA per se, I think it'll still be for adults, but more of a YA feel to it, the younger characters of the ice dragon riding school of battle and the wizarding school. I don't know if I want to make it schools necessarily, it might limit you too much. And that's kind of been done too. But I do think the ice dragons are going to figure largely in it. Oh, and I don't know, there's a plot point I probably shouldn't give away, but my mother's full name was Willa Dee Maltby. She writes under Dee Maltby and there is a character, a very magical character named Willa that shows up in this book eight. So I think Willa will be a big character going forward and the younger generation of women and some boys too. I like boys, I do. Jonathan: Well, I suppose if people want to know more, they will have to read and find out. Hollis: Yes. And please go to the website is deemaltbyauthor.com and everything you want to know (well, maybe not everything), but everything you can know for now is there. Jonathan: Well, I was going to ask you what you would say was the most rewarding things about publishing the books, but I think you covered that pretty well. On the flip side, what was the biggest unexpected challenge in publishing them? Hollis: The PR is hard. You seem to be great at it. I even did PR professionally to work my way through undergrad and then in between grad school and undergrad and after I graduated and I had an assistantship in it at my university. But the book world specifically is a whole different kind of PR and learning Amazon ads and Facebook ads and it's a lot. It's a lot. And again, you have been so helpful with it. And I mean, there are a lot of online resources out there too, which is great. But what I'm really finding, trying to do it part-time is overwhelming. You really need a full-time block of time to not only write the books, but then to publicize them the way they deserve to be publicized. Jonathan: Yeah, the tricky part is, as you said, book advertising is very different from anything else. I was talking with a guy who is an Amazon reseller for various toiletries and hygiene products and makes a good living doing that. I was telling him how much I pay per click on Amazon ads. He's just appalled. It's like, you can't make any money doing that. And then the flip side of that too is that Internet marketing is so different than any other form of PR, so it's just sort of constant challenge there. Hollis: I know, and I know I actually signed up for a TikTok account and I just don't, again at the time. Plus every time I turn it on, I'm like, I don't want to watch that. I'm allergic to the format. You'd think being an actor, being used to being on camera, I could come up easily with little things to do for the books and I probably could for TikTok. But again, just learning the platform and then applying yourself to it is just such a big time hack that I don't have that amount of time. I know that narrators are now more and more marketing themselves by recording themselves on camera narrating and putting that out there, which I can do, I guess. And that's why I got this ring light and everything. I can do that now. I haven't done anything with it, but I guess if some of the book work dries up, I'll be more motivated to do it. Jonathan: Well, that's how anything works. You try it and if you enjoy it and it works, keep doing it. And if you don't enjoy it and it doesn't work, no point in carrying on with it. Hollis: I think that's true. And you just have to keep learning too, as we know with everything. You got to keep learning new things. Jonathan: Well, this has been a very enjoyable interview and thank you for coming on the show. Hollis: My pleasure. Jonathan: Let's close out with one last question. You've obviously done a lot of theater, so what, out of all the productions you've done was the one you would say was your favorite or that you enjoyed the most? Hollis: I think I have to go back to Beatrice probably. I mean, the Alabama Shakes getting to play a man thing, that was a lot of fun. But Beatrice, we did a Wild West Much Ado about Nothing at Colorado Shakespeare. The premise was that I was the niece of Leonardo, who is the tavern keeper, the bar keeper in this Wild West world. And there was a bar fight opening this Wild West production, and I entered through a swinging tavern door with a six shooter in one hand and a bull whip in the other. And I shot the pistol and cracked the bull whip and broke up the fight and then got to do Shakespeare's incredible Beatrice and Benedict story from there. It was so much fun. Jonathan: It almost seems like the soundtrack could have been “I Shot the Sheriff.” Hollis: Yeah. Yeah, it really could. It was a heck of a lot of fun. Jonathan: Well, speaking of fun, it was good talking with you, and thank you for taking the time to be on the show. Hollis: Yeah, I am excited to start the next Cloak book soon. So I was going to offer to do a little snatch of you want the introduction for Cloak here? Jonathan: Oh, I think we'll save it for the Real Thing. Hollis: Oh, okay. All right. Well thank you, Jonathan. It's been a pleasure. Jonathan: It's been a pleasure. And see you soon for Cloak Mage #10. Hollis: Alright. So that was our interview with Hollis McCarthy. Thank you for coming on the show and giving us a very informative and entertaining interview. A reminder that the website with the Magic of Larlion books is deemaltbyauthor.com. 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 we'll see you all next week.

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 Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: 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 an email. If a message claims there's a problem with one of your publishing platforms, don't click on the link. Go to the platform directly in a different browser tab or a different browser and see for yourself. Before spending money on anything, do some research and check that it is legitimate and not a scam. It's easy to fake legitimacy these days, so it's worthwhile to do a little investigating before spending money on anything. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a helpful guide against some of the scams you might encounter in the wild. 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.  

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 books in the Sevenfold Sword series at my Payhip store: 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: https://writerbeware.blog/2025/08/01/return-of-the-nigerian-prince-a-new-twist-on-book-marketing-scams/ Ed Zitron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ 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].    

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 audiobook of Shield of Storms, 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.

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 audiobook of Cloak of Dragons, 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.

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 ebooks in my Cloak Mage series at my Payhip store: 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.

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 audiobook of Ghost in the Serpent, 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 was an edgy young filmmaker with an alcohol problem. I suppose Mr. Gunn can rest content knowing that Superman made more money than any Marvel movie released this year. Overall grade: A-   Next up is Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which came out in 1988. This was a very strange movie, but nonetheless, one with an ambitious premise, strong performances, and a strong artistic vision. It's set in post WWII Los Angeles, and “toons” (basically cartoon characters) live and work alongside humans. Private eye Eddie Valiant hates toons since one of them killed his brother five years ago. However, he's hired by the head of a studio who's having trouble with one of his toon actors, Roger Rabbit. Roger's worried his wife Jessica is having an affair, and Valiant obtains pictures of Jessica playing patty cake (not a euphemism, they actually were playing patty cake) with another man. Roger has an emotional breakdown, and soon the other man winds up dead, and Roger insists he's innocent. Valiant and Roger find themselves sucked into a dangerous conspiracy overseen by a ruthless mastermind. This movie was such an interesting cultural artifact. It perfectly follows the structure of a ‘40s film noir movie, but with cartoons, and the dissonance between film noir and the cheerfulness of the toons was embraced and used as a frequently source of comedy. In fact, when the grim and dour Valiant uses the toons' comedy techniques as a tactical improvisation in a moment of mortal peril, it's both hilarious and awesome. Christopher Lloyd's performance as the villainous Judge Doom was amazing. (I don't think it's a spoiler to say that he's villainous, because his character is named Judge Doom and he's literally wearing a black hat.) Like, his performance perfectly captures something monstrous that is trying very hard to pretend to be human and not quite getting it right. And the amount of work it must have taken to make this movie staggers the mind. Nowadays, having live actors interact with cartoon characters is expensive, but not unduly so. It's a frequent technique. You see it all the time in commercials when a housewife is smiling at an animated roll of paper towels or something, and Marvel's essentially been doing it for years. But this was 1988! Computer animation was still a ways off. They had to shoot the movie on analog film, and then hand-draw all the animation and successfully match it to the live film. It wouldn't have worked without the performance of Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant, who plays everything perfectly straight in the same way Michael Caine did in A Muppet Christmas Carol. So kind of a strange movie, but definitely worth watching. And it has both Disney and Warner Brothers animated characters in the same movie, which is something we will never, ever see again. Overall grade: A Next up is K-Pop Demon Hunters, which came out in 2025. Like Who framed Roger Rabbit?, this is a very strange movie, but nonetheless with a clear and focused artistic vision. It is a cultural artifact that provides a fascinating look into a world of which I have no knowledge or interest, namely K-pop bands and their dueling fandoms. Anyway, the plot is that for millennia, female Korean musicians have used the magic of their voices to keep the demons locked away in a demon world. The current incarnation is a three-woman K-Pop group called Huntrix, and they are on the verge of sealing away the demons forever. Naturally, the Demon King doesn't like this, so one of his cleverer minions comes up with a plan. They'll start a Demon K-Pop Boy Band! Disguised as humans, the demon K-Pop group will win away Huntrix's fans, allowing them to breach the barrier and devour the world. However, one of the Huntrix musicians is half-demon, and she starts falling for the lead demon in the boy band, who is handsome and of course has a dark and troubled past. Essentially a musical K-drama follows. I have to admit I know practically nothing about K-Pop groups and their dueling fandoms, other than the fact that they exist. However, this was an interesting movie to watch. The animation was excellent, it did have a focused vision, and there were some funny bits. Overall grade: A Next up is Clarkson's Farm Season Four, which came out in 2025. A long time ago in the ‘90s, I watched the episode of Frasier where Frasier and Niles attempt to open a restaurant and it all goes horribly (yet hilariously) wrong. At the time, I had no money, but I promised myself that I would never invest in a restaurant. Nothing I have seen or learned in the subsequent thirty years has ever changed that decision. Season 4 of Clarkson's Farm is basically Jeremy Clarkson, like Frasier and Niles, attempting to open a restaurant, specifically a British pub. On paper it's a good idea, since Clarkson can provide the pub with food produced from his own farm and other local farmers. However, it's an enormous logistical nightmare, and Clarkson must deal with miles of red tape, contractors, and a ballooning budget, all while trying to keep his farm from going under. An excellent and entertaining documentary into the difficulties of both the farming life and food service. I still don't want to own a restaurant! Overall grade: A Next up is Tombstone, which came out in 1993. The Western genre of fiction is interesting because it's limited to such a very specific period of time and geographical region. Like the “Wild West” period that characterizes the Western genre really only lasted as a historical period from about 1865 to roughly 1890. The Western genre was at its most popular in movies from the 1940s and the 1960s, and I wonder if it declined because cultural and demographic changes made it unpopular to romanticize the Old West the way someone like Walt Disney did at Disneyland with “Frontierland.” Of course, the genre lives on in different forms in grittier Western movies, neo-Westerns like Yellowstone and Longmire, and a lot of the genre's conventions apply really well to science fiction. Everyone talks about Firefly being the first Space Western, but The Mandalorian was much more successful and was basically a Western in space (albeit with occasional visits from Space Wizards). Anyway! After that long-winded introduction, let's talk about Tombstone. When Val Kilmer died earlier this year, the news articles mentioned Tombstone as among his best work, so I decided to give it a watch. The plot centers around Wyatt Earp, played by Kurt Russell, who has decided to give up his career in law enforcement and move to Tombstone, Arizona, a silver mining boomtown, in hopes of making his fortune. However, Tombstone is mostly controlled by the Cowboys outlaw gang, and Earp is inevitably drawn into conflict with them. With the help of his brothers and Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer's character), Earp sets out to bring some law and order to Tombstone, whether the Cowboys like it or not. Holliday is in the process of dying from tuberculosis, which makes him a formidable fighter since he knows getting shot will be a less painful and protracted death than the one his illness will bring him. Kilmer plays him as a dissolute, scheming warrior-poet who nonetheless is a very loyal friend. Definitely a classic of the Western genre, and so worth watching. Overall grade: A Next up is Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, the eighth Mission Impossible movie. Of the eight movies, I think the sixth one was the best one, but this one comes in at a close second. It continues on from Dead Reckoning. Ethan Hunt now possesses the key that will unlock the source code of the Entity, the malicious AI (think ChatGPT, but even more obviously evil) that is actively maneuvering the world's nuclear powers into destroying each other so the Entity can rule the remnants of humanity. Unfortunately, the Entity's source code is sitting in a wrecked Russian nuclear sub at the bottom of the Bering Sea. Even more unfortunately, the Entity knows that Hunt has the key and is trying to stop him, even as the Entity's former minion and Hunt's bitter enemy Gabriel seeks to seize control of the Entity for himself. A sense of apocalyptic doom hangs over the movie, which works well to build tension. Once again, the world is doomed, unless Ethan Hunt and his allies can save the day. The tension works extremely well during the movie's underwater sequence, and the final airborne duel between Hunt and Gabriel. I don't know if they're going to make any more Mission Impossible movies after this (they are insanely expensive), but if this is the end, it is a satisfying conclusion for the character of Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force. Overall grade: A Next up is Deep Cover, which came out in 2025. This is described as a comedy thriller, and I didn't know what to expect when I watched it, but I really enjoyed it. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kat, a struggling comedy improv teacher living in London. Her best students are Marlon (played by Orlando Bloom), a dedicated character actor who wants to portray gritty realism but keeps getting cast in tacky commercials, and Hugh (played by Nick Mohammed), an awkward IT worker with no social skills whatsoever. One day, the three of them are recruited by Detective Sergeant Billings (played by Sean Bean) of the Metropolitan Police. The Met wants to use improv comedians to do undercover work for minor busts with drug dealers. Since it plays 200 pounds a pop, the trio agrees. Of course, things rapidly spiral out of control, because Kat, Marlon, and Hugh are actually a lot better at improv than they think, and soon they find themselves negotiating with the chief criminals of the London underworld. What follows is a movie that is both very tense and very funny. Kat, Marlon, and Hugh are in way over their heads, and will have to do the best improv of their lives to escape a very grisly fate. Whether Sean Bean dies or not (as is tradition), you will just have to watch the movie and find out. Overall grade: A Next up is Puss in Boots: The Final Wish, which came out in 2022. I don't personally know much about the history of Disney as a corporation, and I don't much care, but I do have several relatives who are very interested in the history of the Disney corporation, and therefore I have picked up some by osmosis. Apparently Disney CEO Michael Eisner forcing out Jeffrey Katzenberg in the 1990s was a very serious mistake, because Katzenberg went on to co-found DreamWorks, which has been Disney's consistent rival for animation for the last thirty years. That's like “CIA Regime Change Blowback” levels of creating your own enemy. Anyway, historical ironies aside, Puss in Boots: The Final Wish was a funny and surprisingly thoughtful animated movie. Puss in Boots is a legendary outlaw and folk hero, but he has used up eight of his nine lives. An ominous bounty hunter who looks like a humanoid wolf begins pursuing him, and the Wolf is able to shrug off the best of Puss In Boots' attacks. Panicked, Puss hides in a retirement home for elderly cats, but then hears rumors of the magical Last Wish. Hoping to use it to get his lives back, Puss In Boots sets off on the quest. It was amusing how Little Jack Horner and Goldilocks and the Three Bears were rival criminal gangs seeking the Last Wish. Overall grade: A Next up is Chicken People, which came out in 2016. A good documentary film gives you a glimpse into an alien world that you would otherwise never visit. In this example, I have absolutely no interest in competitive chicken breeding and will only raise chickens in my backyard if society ever collapses to the level that it becomes necessary for survival. That said, this was a very interesting look into the work of competitive chicken breeding. Apparently, there is an official “American Standard of Perfection” for individual chicken breeds, and the winner of the yearly chicken competition gets the title “Super Grand Champion.” Not Grand Champion, Super Grand Champion! That looks impressive on a resume. It is interesting how chicken breeding is in some sense an elaborate Skinner Box – like you can deliberately set out to breed chickens with the desirable traits on the American Standard of Perfection, but until the chickens are hatched and grow up, you don't know how they're going to turn out, so you need to try again and again and again… Overall grade: A Next up is The Mask of Zoro, which came out in 1998. I saw this in the theatre when it came out 27 years ago, but that was 27 years ago, and I don't have much of a memory of it, save that I liked it. So when I had the chance to watch it again, I did! Anthony Hopkins plays Diego de la Vega, who has the secret identity of Zorro in the final days before Mexico breaks away from the Spanish Empire. With Mexico on the verge of getting its independence, Diego decides to hang up his sword and mask and focus on his beloved wife and daughter. Unfortunately, the military governor Don Montero realizes Diego is Zorro, so has him arrested, kills his wife, and steals his baby daughter to raise as his own. Twenty years later, a bandit named Alejandro loses his brother and best friends to a brutal cavalry commander. It turns out that Montero is returning to California from Spain, and plans to seize control of California as an independent republic (which, of course, will be ruled by him). In the chaos, Diego escapes from prison and encounters a drunken Alejandro, and stops him from a futile attack upon the cavalry commander. He then proposes a pact – Diego will train Alejandro as the next Zorro, and together they can take vengeance upon the men who wronged them. This was a good movie. It was good to see that my taste in movies 27 years ago wasn't terrible. It manages to cram an entire epic plot into only 2 hours and 20 minutes. In some ways it was like a throwback to a ‘40s movie but with modern (for the ‘90s) production values, and some very good swordfights. Overall grade: A Next up is Wick is Pain, which came out in 2025. I've seen all four John Wick movies and enjoyed them thoroughly, though I've never gotten around to any of the spinoffs. Wick is Pain is a documentary about how John Wick went from a doomed indie movie with a $6.5 million hole in its budget to one of the most popular action series of the last few decades. Apparently Keanu Reeves made an offhand joke about how “Wick is pain” and that became the mantra of the cast and crew, because making an action movie that intense really was a painful experience. Definitely worth watching if you enjoyed the John Wick movies or moviemaking in general. Overall grade: A The last movie I saw this summer was Game Night, which came out in 2016. It was a hilarious, if occasionally dark comedy action thriller. Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams play Max and Annie Davis, a married couple who are very competitive and enjoy playing games of all kinds. Jason has an unresolved conflict with his brother Brooks, and one night Brooks invites them over for game night, which Max resents. Halfway through the evening, Brooks is kidnapped, with Max and Annie assume is part of the game. However, Brooks really is involved in something shady. Hilarity ensues, and it's up to Max and Annie to rescue Brooks and stay alive in the process. This was really funny, though a bit dark in places. That said, Max and Annie have a loving and supportive marriage, so it was nice to see something like that portrayed on the screen. Though this also leads to some hilarity, like when Annie accidentally shoots Max in the arm. No spoilers, but the punchline to that particular sequence was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Overall grade: A So no A+ movie this time around, but I still saw a bunch of solid movies I enjoyed. One final note, I have to admit, I've really come to respect Adam Sandler as an entertainer, even if his movies and comedy are not always to my taste. He makes what he wants, makes a lot of money, ensures that his friends get paid, and then occasionally takes on a serious role in someone else's movie when he wants to flex some acting muscles. I am not surprised that nearly everyone who's in the original Happy Gilmore who was still alive wanted to come back for Happy Gilmore 2. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show enjoyable and perhaps a guide to some good movies to watch. 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.  

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 ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: 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.  

In the much-delayed final episode of our series on mindset for writers, we take a look at when writers should change course, and talk about the importance of mental flexibility. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store: AUGUSTFROST The coupon code is valid through September 8, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 265 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August 22nd, 2025, and today we are considering when a writer should change course. This is a new episode. It's the third and final one in the mindset series that I had hoped to finish in June, but it was a very busy summer, and so I ran quite a few reruns of old episodes over the summer, but today I have time to record a full length episode, so we're going to do that and wrap up this series on mindset that we've been doing this summer. We will also do Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. First up is Coupon of the Week and this week's coupon will get you 25% off ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store, and that code is AUGUSTFROST. As always, the coupon code and the store links will be available in the show notes for this episode, and this coupon code will be valid through September 8th, 2025. So if you need a new ebook to read as we wrap up summer and head into fall, we have got you covered. Now let's do an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report to that Ghost in the Siege, the sixth and final book of the Ghost Armor series, is out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. And with that, my Super Summer of Finishing Things is finally complete because I have finished the Shield War series, the Stealth and Spells trilogy, and now the Ghost Armor series. So now that those three series are done, what is next? Right now my main project is Blade of Flames, the first book in a new epic fantasy series that will be set in the Kingdom of Owyllain from my Sevenfold Sword series and I am 29,000 words into that. My secondary project right now is Cloak of Worlds, the 13th book in the Cloak Mage series, and I am 1,000 words into that. So hopefully we will have Blade of Flames come out towards the end of September and Cloak of Worlds come out towards the end of October, if all goes well. So my plan now that I have only three unfinished series is that the Blades of Ruin series (of which Blade Flames is the first one) will be my flagship series, and I'll do one of those every other month and then the month in between I will alternate between writing a Cloak Mage book and a Half-Elven Thief book. I will continue that schedule until one of those series is completed and then I will start a new one because what I learned through 2024 and the first two thirds here of 2025 is that having five unfinished series at the same time is too many. It's hard to keep up in my head and it makes for a really long wait for the readers between the individual entries in the series. So I'm going to stick to just three from now on and as I said, I'll have a flagship series and then two that I will alternate back and forth between in the months between the releases for the flagship series. So that is probably what I'll be doing for the rest of 2025 and hopefully most of 2026, if all goes well. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Shield of Power, which will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills. I've been listening to some chapters from that. Work has just started by Hollis McCarthy on recording Ghost in the Siege, so that will hopefully be an audiobook before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. 00:03:29 Main Topic: Mindset Series: Changing Course And now to our main topic, the final episode in our mindset series and we talk about changing course. In previous episodes on this topic, I've talked about some of the practical ways to help with distractions, procrastinating, and managing time wasters. In this episode, I'm going to focus on things that derail writers from a mindset perspective. Today we're going to wrap up this series by talking about mental flexibility, knowing when to change course, and how to make those types of decisions without spiraling out. First, we'll discuss a few reasons why mental flexibility is an important attribute to possess and then provide you with five examples of times it has been important for me in my writing career. First, why is having mental flexibility and the ability to change course important? With how fast things change in publishing, you have to be willing to change strategies or discard a strategy that's not working for you. An example is that many people who are familiar with Amazon ads swear by using Amazon keyword ads. After much experimentation, I concluded they weren't very helpful for fiction. The reason for that is I found that for most books that are sold off Amazon, people will sit down and type, for example, “Brandon Sanderson latest book” or “J.D. Robb latest book” or “Stephen King latest book” and so on. If you bid high enough, you can get top of search for those where if you pay $2 a click or $2 for the bid and someone types in “Stephen King latest book”, you can get your book to appear at the top of the page with the ad. However, in practice, what actually happens is the person who sat down to look for “Stephen King latest book” isn't looking for your book, he's looking for Stephen King's latest book. So he or she will simply scroll past the ad result with your book and then click on Stephen King's book. The only way I found that keyword advertising works for fiction is if you write towards very specific tropes and are willing to pay a lot of money for those clicks. For example, you write a romance that's a “slow burn, no spice, enemies to lovers romance”, and there are people who search for exactly those tropes, and if you use keyword ads to bid for that, you could get it, but it's very expensive and it's very difficult to turn a profit. Because of my experiments with this, I saw that although many people say keyword ads are essential, I didn't cling to that piece of advice and switched my Amazon ad focus to having a few more category ads and Audible ads for each title, and that has been pretty nearly profitable most of the time, certainly more profitable than just relying on keyword ads would be. I should note the one exception for that would be that keywords ads do work very well for nonfiction where, for example, my Linux Command Line book, I can pretty easily run ads to it for search terms like “Linux Command Line” or “Linux Command Prompt.” And because people are looking for a nonfiction book on that topic without looking for a specific author, that can work. In keyword ads, I found that for fiction, people are looking for a specific author and want that specific author, whereas for nonfiction, they're looking for the topic and don't care so much about the author, so long as the book has good reviews and looks like the author knows what he or she is talking about. Another reason to be mentally flexible is that something new might actually make things easier for you. I used to work in IT support, and so I fairly often encountered someone who stubbornly clings to the way they learn something. I knew numerous people who memorized a specific way to do a task on their computer and then just stuck to that and avoided doing anything easier, such as, for example, not learning to use keyboard shortcuts. And as you know, if you do a lot of office work, learning keyboard shortcuts like Control + C for copy, Control + V for paste, or Control + Z to undo can save you a whole lot of time over compared to very laboriously clicking through the menus with your mouse. People like that very frequently resist a learning curve in favor of a slower approach because it's working for them, but then they lose out on a faster and easier way to do something. Change is not always good, but sometimes change can be good. And the thing about indie publishing is that change is constant. In a field where change is constant like indie publishing, you can't cling to something that first worked when you started out. Trying new software, learning new skills, and keeping up with changes in ebook platforms is something self-published writers must do. Another reason to retain mental flexibility is you might be missing out on a source of revenue. If you're not willing to change sales strategies when the market changes, you might be missing out on potential readers. For example, as people are tightening their budgets in these times of economic uncertainty, they might be less likely to buy individual books and focus their book spending on a subscription like Kindle Unlimited or Kobo Plus. If you don't have content on those platforms for readers, you're missing out on readers who have shifted their spending. For myself, I only have some of my books on Kindle Unlimited because of the exclusivity requirement, but everything I have on Kobo should be available through Kobo Plus, and typically on any given month on Kobo, at least 60% of my revenue tends to come from Kobo Plus instead of Kobo direct book sales. So that was a place where it was necessary to have the mental flexibility to make a pivot. Another good reason to be mentally flexible is that you might be missing out on something important that the data is showing you. One of the big advantages of being self-published is having access to complex and real-time data instead of having to wait for biannual royalty statements that don't provide information. There are some criticisms that can be leveled at Amazon for how much data they show authors. However, this is light years ahead of the kind of sales data that comes out of traditional publishing for writers where royalty statements were often quite arcane and difficult to understand by design, so the publishers could get away with paying the authors as little as possible. And because you have access to this data, you have basis for solid information, solid decision-making. For example, if one of my series is starting very strong in the UK in its first week of release, I can shift some of my ad spending to UK specific ads. Looking at sales and ad data gives you an opportunity to respond and change your approach. And sales data, even more than reviews, tells you if a book, series, or genre is working for you or if it's time to try something new. It's important not to fall prey to what's called the sunk cost fallacy, where you throw even more time and money on something that isn't profitable in hope of recouping the money that you've already spent. Sometimes it's wise to know when to cut your losses and run. It's probably a better use of your time to focus on the next book or series. Data can tell you which book or series that readers are most excited to see from you. Now that we've talked about the various good reasons that mental flexibility is important, I thought it'd be helpful to show you five times that I've had to use mental flexibility and change course over the course of my career as a writer. #1: Self-publishing. For all that I've been a proponent of self-publishing for the last 14 years, that wasn't always the case. I started out with the goal in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s of being traditionally published. Demonsouled actually was traditionally published along with some short stories. However, for a variety of reasons that I've talked about before, this turned out to be a dead end. Traditional publishing at that time was not interested in fantasy series like mine. I felt like traditional publishing was a dead end, and then I changed my efforts to blogging on computer-based topics. I'm still quite proud of the fact that in 2010, I made a good bit of money from Google Ad Sense off my tech blog, a feat which was difficult then and would probably be impossible now. Then I started to hear about self-publishing through Amazon, which at the time was a very new phenomenon. I started hearing about that in 2009/2010, thereabouts, and I initially wasn't very impressed and I wasn't very impressed with the idea of ebooks altogether. At the time, I had a huge collection of paper books and well, I don't have as many now. I still do have a fair bit of paper books, but at the time, I didn't think that ebooks could be a substitute for traditional paper books. Then at the end of 2010, in fact, the week after Thanksgiving, I bought my first Kindle, a third generation Kindle that was famously called the Kindle Keyboard because they had that little keyboard at the bottom, and I was very impressed with the device. I thought there has got to be a way to make money off this. As I started reading various writers groups, I came across Kindle Direct Publishing, and finally in April of 2011, I decided to give it a go and republished Demonsouled through it, and that's where it all began for me. #2: Learning new skills and adapting. I think one of the biggest parts of why I've been fortunate enough to be able to do this for as long as I have is the willingness to take the time and effort to learn or try something new. I've had to teach myself how to format ebooks in several different programs, how to start first the LLC and then a S Corp, which finally involved realizing I couldn't do it myself and hiring people familiar with the appropriate documentation to do it for me, how to hire narrators and proof audio, how to file 1099s for narrators (that was a whole experience, lemme tell you), how to create a direct sales platform on Payhip, how to create my own book covers in Photoshop, how to make various 3D images myself for those book covers, how to maintain and update my website, how to do Amazon ads, how to do BookBub ads, how to do Facebook ads. So in the past 14 years I've been doing this, I think it's fair to say I've acquired quite a few new skills along the way. Each time I weighed out if not having this skill was holding me back. For example, creating my own covers became an absolute necessity for me after a while because even the most experienced cover designers could not create covers at the pace I published. Well, they could, but it's more accurate to say that the cover designers, the really good cover designers, the ones I wanted to hire, worked so far out in advance that you had to book them nine months to maybe a year in advance. And I eventually came to find that very rigid and constraining to my writing process. A couple of my books have titles that are totally unrelated to what the book is about, just because I had to pick the title like nine months, twelve months out in advance. And while they were very good covers, I did find it a little bit constraining that I had to try and keep the book at least close to what the cover was. If I hadn't changed course and learned how to do it myself, it would've limited how many books I could publish in a year, and likely it would've cost me many thousands a year in lost revenue. Therefore, having the mental flexibility to learn new things is a major skill in self-publishing. And the thing I'm contemplating learning right now is something with video, because short form video seems to be a good way that many authors are connecting with their readers and their audience. It's just that I don't personally use short form video a lot, so I'm wondering if it'd be worth the effort to learn. I think it'd probably be worth the effort to learn, but I haven't decided on how to do that and need to do some more reading, which is another aspect of mental flexibility. #3: Changing pricing strategies. Permafree pricing book for free on ebook platforms was not as common of a strategy when I first started self-publishing in 2011. I mean, people were doing it, but not as many as now. At the time (and to this day, in fact), many people were outraged that thought of giving out an ebook for free and opine that it would devalue their work. The argument was that if you take a year to write a book and then people should at least be willing to pay as much as they would for, for example, a fancy Starbucks coffee. However, this overlooks the reality of economics where that something is only as valuable as people are willing to pay for it. And that in fact is, a good way to get people to pay for your remaining books is if they read the first one for free and then they like it enough that suddenly the remainder of the books in the series will have value for them and hopefully they will buy it. But back in 2011, I decided to give permafree a try because I had series instead of standalones, and it has been one of the most significant ways that people have found my work. If I listened to the sort of old school traditional thinking about pricing ebooks, I would've missed out on this opportunity. #4: Doubling down on audio. At one point, towards the end of, actually towards the middle of 2023, I was considering and had almost decided to give up on producing my own audiobooks due to the significant expense and how much time having to proof them was taking away from my writing. Instead, I thought about ways to make the workload easier. I hired someone to proof the audiobooks for me and then found ways to promote them through deals on platforms like BookBub and Chirp. I started to create more Amazon ads for them and focus on making audiobook anthologies because these are very attractive to people trying to get the most out of their Audible credit each month. Although it's still mainly a tax deduction for me at this point in terms of business value, I would've lost out on a growing revenue source and a big piece of the publishing market if I had given up on audiobooks. #5: And fifth and finally, as I've talked about before, the Stealth and Spells series. This series really challenged me because I had a very specific plan for a multi-book series (I was thinking like seven or eight books originally) and enjoyed writing the first one. However, there were a few problems with it that forced me to take a hard look at the series and change my original plans quite drastically. The series was originally called Sevenfold Sword Online, which confused fans of the original Sevenfold Sword series. I made the choice to change the title to Stealth and Spells Online to make the separation clearer, even though it's a pain to change titles, and that came with some confusion of its own. I also changed the covers to resemble some of the other LitRPG books because it was originally closer in look to some of my epic fantasy covers. These changes did help, but I had to take a cold hard look at the data. Sales and ad data clearly showed that it was time to cut my losses and focus on more profitable series. So I changed my series plans to wrap everything up in the third and final book rather than a multi-book series as I had originally planned and based on reader reception to the third book, I think it went pretty well. Ultimately, you can only plan so much as a writer, and you have to accept that those plans might need to change. One of the best gifts you can give yourself as a writer is the ability to be mentally flexible and not stick with plans, books, or attitudes that aren't working for you. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this mindset series and found it useful to your own situation. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pul Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes athttps://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.      

In this week's episode, we take a look back at Episode 205, where I talk about finishing my SILENT ORDER science fiction series. I also provide an update on current writing and audiobook projects. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobooks in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SUMMERAUDIO50 The coupon code is valid through September 1, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered!

Last week's episode talked about finishing my STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE LitRPG trilogy, and in this week's episode we respond to some of the insightful reader comments the prevoius episode generated. We also discuss the mechanics of putting series numbers on book covers. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragonskull series at my Payhip store: DRAGONSUMMER25 The coupon code is valid through August 25, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 262 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August 8, 2025, and today we are looking at reader comments on my LitRPG trilogy. We will also take a look at why sometimes books do not have the series order number on their front cover. Before we get into that, we'll have Coupon of the Week and then an update on my current writing progress. First up, 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 DRAGONSUMMER25. 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 August 25th, 2025. So if you need a new ebook to read this summer, we have got you covered. And now for a progress update on my current writing projects. I am 83,000 words into the rough draft of Ghost in the Siege, which is the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series. I think maybe one or two more good sessions and I will have the rough draft done and then I'll write a bonus short story that newsletter subscribers will get for free when the book comes out and then start editing. I'm also 9,000 words into Blade of Flames, which will be the first book in my new epic fantasy series after I finish Ghost in the Siege and my Super Summer of Finishing Things. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is currently recording Shield of Power, so we should have some updates on that soon. In addition, the distribution problems I was having with Shield of Battle and Ghost in the Corruption should be cleared up. So all those books should be turning up on all the usual audiobook stores before too much longer. Before, they should have all been available on Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, and Kobo, but they should be showing up on all the other available stores before too much longer now. And of course I should mention that those audiobooks are available on my Payhip store and you can get them anytime (regardless of distribution troubles). So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:02:07 Question about Series Numbering And now let's take a look at a question about series numbering. A librarian acquaintance recently asked (with no small exasperation), why can't the series number be in the book title, on the spine, and on the cover? Well, as with so many things, the answer boils down to “it depends”, specifically, it depends on the publisher and the author (but only if the author is indie). For my books, they always have the series number on the cover. A random example- Orc Hoard, the fourth book in my Half-Elven Thief series, has plainly at the top of the cover “Half-Elven Thief Number Four”. Whether or not the series number will be on the cover depends on the publisher (or the writer, if the writer is indie). For myself, since I make my own covers, it is a trivial amount of extra work to make sure the series number is also on the cover. A small publisher or an indie author hiring a cover designer has to specifically ask for the series number on the cover, and they don't always think to do that. In terms of the spine of the print edition, it depends whether or not it is included with cover design. Typically for a print book, you need to make a wraparound PDF cover or you can use the automated tools with a platform like KDP Print to create it. The trouble is that space can be at a premium on a book spine and after you have the book title and the author name, there might not be adequate room left for the series number. For example, a title like Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest takes up a lot of real estate on the spine and combine that with the author name of Jonathan Moeller, and we really don't exactly have much space left to work with. However, for ebooks, there's really no good reason for them not to be arranged in series order on the store because all the online platforms now have good series management tools, which is admittedly a relatively new development. For a long time Amazon and the other self-publishing platforms didn't have any series metadata management tools, so we had to take things into our own hands. That's why for a long time you'd see books with titles like Frostborn: The Iron Tower (Frostborn #5), because there was no other way in the metadata to indicate that the book was part of a series. Obviously this was a problem. So eventually all the self-publishing platforms added series manager tools. So now it's fairly easy to add ebooks to a series, so on the storefront they should show up in the proper series order. But for tradpub print books, I expect traditional publishers are not terribly invested in providing series numbers on the spines of print books because it is a layer of from their perspective, unnecessary work with no return on investment. Remember, most publishers are owned by big international conglomerates these days, and from the corporate owner's perspective, the publisher's existence boils down to a cell in a spreadsheet. So a series will only get new cover art (potentially numbers on the cover) if doing so might make “number go up” in that particular spreadsheet cell. A series is most likely to get numbers on its cover and its spine if it's one, finished and two, popular enough to be re-released with new covers. So the “too long, didn't read” answer: it depends if the publisher or the indie author has the resources to add numbers to the cover. 00:05:01 Main Topic of the Week: Comments on my LitRPG Trilogy Now onto our main topic this week, reader comments on my LitRPG trilogy. You might remember last week I did an episode and a blog post about the experience of finishing up my LitRPG trilogy and some of the misjudgments I made during the process and how I was grateful for the people who did enjoy it. And this inspired many interesting and insightful comments on the topic. So I thought I would read through some of the comments and share my own thoughts on them. Our first comment is from LEJ who says: “The big problem with virtual reality type LitRPG books is that virtual reality fights have no real stakes or consequences, or if they do, they're being arbitrarily assigned. This makes them dull no matter how well the fight scene is written. The second problem is character. In epic fantasy, the party members are developed characters and the reader learns who they are through the “show, not tell” guideline of writing. The characters are a group of people who have come together to put their lives on the line to do the plot is about. In a virtual reality game book, the party members are fake personas playing a game. There's no way to be sure who they really are and they're not invested. In books and in real life, people who go through grave peril together often forge powerful friendships. A gaming group is a lousy stand in for an actual epic fantasy questing party because they're not facing actual danger together.” That's an interesting comment and that was something I thought about during the outlining of Stealth and Spells, how essentially so much of the book is about a man sitting in a chair playing in a game, which is inherently not suspenseful. So that's why in Stealth and Spells, I designed it so that the game itself was dangerous and the reason the main character was playing the game so much was to try and find proof that the game was dangerous. But I think LEJ makes a good larger point about how why LitRPGs with virtual reality MMORPGs aren't as popular as the other subgenres, just because the stakes are so low essentially when you're playing a game. I was playing Wizardry Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord the other night and had a total party kill, but so what? Just spin out new characters and start the game again. But that doesn't make for a good narrative tension in the story. Our next comment is from Justin who says: “There are some VR LitRPG books out, but they are a niche market. As LEJ noted (above), there's no real consequences and the character development is minimal. The successful ones (for measures of success) go heavy on humor. I like Stealth and Spells, but I like science fiction and had no problem with the premise. So another attempt at widening your audience has fallen flat. Sorry about that. The mystery market that you tried before is even worse now with AI pastiches flooding Kindle. You could try the superhero section, but there's lot of competition and the big boys have been stinking up that particular room, so I wouldn't recommend it. Well, at least you're a successful writer, able to apply your craft full time. That puts you in the top 1%. Getting any further requires either incredible luck or selling your soul. I look forward to Ghost in the Siege!” Thanks, Justin. I'm glad you liked the Stealth and Spells trilogy. It is true that I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do in terms of writing full-time. I should mention I'm not hugely worried about AI books partly because they're generally not very good and partly because you can't legally copyright them. Though we should mention that historically writers often have a difficult time when they try to change a genre. Even 150 years ago, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decided he wanted to write a historical fiction instead of Sherlock Holmes, so he killed off Sherlock Holmes and wrote historical fiction, which didn't go hugely over well with the public, and eventually he succumbed both to popular demand and large sums of money to start writing Sherlock Holmes again. Our next comment is from Joe who says: “I have never read a LitRPG book before. I read it because I enjoy your writing. I know I am in the minority, but it turned out to be my favorite series. Even though it shouldn't, it amazes me that Half-Elven Thief has done so much better. I guess I just dance to the beat of my own drummer.” Well, I suppose everyone dances to the beat of their own drummer in the end. I do think it's important for writers to remember, especially long-term writers like myself, that every book you've written is somebody's favorite book regardless of your personal opinion about it. Like for example, I think in all honesty, Tower of Endless Worlds is one of my weaker series. I was trying to do something in terms of urban fantasy that I don't think I had the writing skills to do until I started writing Cloak Games fourteen years later. But there are several people for whom Tower of Endless Worlds is their favorite book of all the ones I've written. So it's good to always keep that in mind and not trash one's own work unnecessarily because you are then trashing somebody's favorite book, which is just impolite. In terms of Half-Elven Thief doing better, I think that is because I really narrowed in better on the market for that than I did with Stealth and Spells. We've already talked about how Isekai, portal fantasy, progression fantasy, and System Apocalypse are much more popular genres than virtual reality LitRPG, but with Half-Elven Thief, I think I really narrowed into what the market wants and what my own particular skillset is for writing stories. So it worked pretty well. I'm very happy about that. Our next comment is from Geoff, who said: “Just went through and finished it and I absolutely loved it. It's a shame it only ended up being three when you had plans for more, but you ended it really well and made it feel like it was always meant to be ended that way. Really love that big reveal at the end about Calliande and Ridmark.” Thanks, Geoff. I'm very glad you liked the ending. I admit I thought really hard for a really long time about how to properly finish the series with just one book. I typically, as part of my exercise program, do an hour a day on the treadmill in the morning with variable rate cardio and I was thinking about Stealth and Spells a lot while I was doing that, so I'm very grateful that you appreciated the ending. Our next comment is from Keith who says: “I'm so glad you finished the series. I have avidly read pretty much everything you published almost as soon as you publish it (except the Ghost series finally lost me a year or two ago), and I was starting to wonder if you're going to continue this series. I'm sure I enjoyed Stealth and Spells a bit more because of my own experience with MMORPG games as an adult, no less from 1997 to about 2012 and still dabbled now and then. It was very entertaining reading the series about a game set in Ridmark's world that I've been so immersed in for the past few years. It's unfortunate that there won't be more Stealth and Spells to read, but I enjoyed the way the series ended as a trilogy, even though you say it was originally supposed to be more books.” Thanks, Keith. I am glad you enjoyed the ending. I suppose one of my weaknesses as I set out to write this trilogy was that I've never actually seriously played MMORPG. It was just when things like World of Warcraft and its various successors and imitators became popular it was a time in my life when I was both pretty broke and pretty busy, so I couldn't afford to play an MMORPG and even if I could have afforded to play an MMORPG, I wouldn't have had the time to do so. I think that lacking that experience may have been one of the reasons I had a bit of trouble sort of connecting the series to a wider market. That said, I have tried an MMORPG recently, Elder Scrolls Online. I enjoyed it, but the big problem with that, and the reason I didn't keep playing was that you can't pause it. I think it's fair to say that I'm a pretty busy guy and sometimes I need to pause the game right now and attend to things, but the inability to do that was just a huge deal breaker for me, so I just never really continued with it, though I did have fun with the parts I played and think it's a good game. Randy says: “I still maintain it's a great SF series and a great setting, but it does have a great ending, even if the hero never gets an encrypted message from Wire again.” Thanks, Randy. If I ever do return to this setting, it won't be as a LitRPG. It'll be just as a straight science fiction thriller adventure like Silent Order because while I don't particularly want to write another LitRPG series, I would like to write another science fiction series at some point. But as I've mentioned on earlier episodes, I've decided it's probably for the best to limit myself to three ongoing series at any one time, just for keeping the complexity level manageable. So once I finish one of my ongoing series (which currently would be Blades of Ruin, Half-Elven Thief, and Cloak Mage), then I might consider slotting a sci-fi one in as well. Our next comment is from Mike who says: “Thank you for sharing your thoughts on it. I really enjoyed the series and I'm glad you finished it. I always find it frustrating when an author leaves the story unfinished, but I understand it's a tough balance. At the end of the day, writing needs to be sustainable and that often means the books have to be profitable. So thank you for seeing it through.” Thanks Mike. I'm glad you enjoyed the ending. In terms of sustainability, Half-Elven Thief by itself across its entire lifetime has sold more than all three books of Stealth and Spells Online put together (which I am very grateful for). And the Half-Elven Thief series and the, let's see, three sequels for it I wrote in 2024 combined, did well enough to pay for my health insurance for that year, which is trust me, no small thing, for which I'm very grateful. But like I said before, I think Half-Elven Thief dialed into the market a bit better than I did with Stealth and Spells Online. Our next comment comes from Alon who says. “If you try again, you can consider progression fantasy; it is somewhere between regular and LitRPG. The best ones are Dungeon Crawler Carl and Mother of Learning.” Well, if you want to try some progression fantasy, there are some examples for you. I admit I've only read the first book of Dungeon Crawler Carl. I thought it was pretty good, if definitely a bit on the darker side. William says: “I think LitRPG/Isekai literature and other media is best understood as a specific kind of fantasy in the literal sense that happens to use fantasy aesthetics because the people in Japan who started writing it all grew up playing Dragon Quest as kids do and still do. Yet the core of said fantasy has nothing to do with the cultural nostalgia that drives a fantasy genre we know and love, but instead reflects a desire for a non-complex world where everything follows easily understood and quantifiable rules, which the authors and the readers found in video games. Anyway, I enjoyed Stealth and Spells Online as a sci-fi thriller. It reminded me of the MMOPG subplot in Tad William's Outland novels.” Thanks, William. I'm glad you enjoyed the series. And I think that's a good point about the lack of ambiguity in some LitRPG, because Stealth and Spells has quite a bit of ambiguity to it at times, where the protagonist is trying to figure out if he can trust Hardcase19. He's trying to figure out who is controlling the Calliande NPC and he's trying to determine if he can trust that person or persons as well. So there's a lot of ambiguity in there that I think I probably picked up from how many mystery novels I enjoy and that might clash with the more popular tropes in LitRPG. Jesse says: “I'm glad you gave us a proper ending and I enjoyed discovering the identity of the Calliande/Ridmark NPCs. Honestly, the bit I will miss is you taking cracks at yourself (“failed historian”, “author secure in the knowledge he would never have to visualize it”), which was hysterical. Well done, sir.” Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed the series and like I said before, I really didn't want to leave it unfinished because for a variety of reasons, it is very bad in the fantasy genre to leave things unfinished. Our next comment is from Jason who says: “Thank you for finishing the series. As you say, it was more of a science fiction thriller than a LitRPG. Nonetheless, I did enjoy it. LitRPGs have the roots in manga with their audience being teens and young adults who play video games and have kind of wish fulfillment of applying their game experience to a quasi-real world, usually like Death March to a Parallel World Rhapsody (a very long web novel, pretty bad anime, ongoing light novels and manga), combined with the cheat/administrator system to break the world in the main character's favor. Often such stories include female characters who throw themselves at the male lead for no discernible reason to be met with obliviousness, terror, or indifference. Fortunately, as authors have gotten older and married their portrayals, male characters and love interests have become more mature as well. The herbivore (a male character with no interest in women) main character still shows up, but not as often.” Thanks, Jason. I am glad you enjoyed the series and I was thinking about that to the extent that the basis that LitRPG has a strong basis in wish fulfillment and sort of retreating from reality. And I'm more interested in stories where the protagonist tends to actively protagonize and then engage with and grapple with reality. So maybe that was why I chose to write a VR based LitRPG instead of one of the other genres. And our last comment is from Michael who says: “I'm saddened that it wasn't more popular, but your reasoning makes sense to me. I tried to get into LitRPG years ago when it first appeared, but struggled to find any of the stories interesting despite loving MMORPGs and games in general. It all seemed to be about the kind of dreams that a stereotypical 14-year-old boy might have- being able to hyperfocus on min/maxing statistics, being powerful, being able to forget about the prosaic real world, being a ruler of a village/kingdom, et cetera (oh, and having lots of attractive women adore you). In any case, thanks for finishing the series. I thought it went from strength to strength and Final Quest was really good.” Thanks, Michael. I'm glad you enjoyed the books. And I have joked several times that maybe what I really needed to do to make Stealth and Spells Online popular was to add a harem of anime monster girls for the protagonist. But that ties into what we were talking about earlier where a lot of LitRPG is about sort of a flight from reality, which I should mention, there's nothing wrong with that in literature, but I'm more interested in writing the kind of stories where the protagonist has to grapple in some way with reality. So that is all the comments we are going to talk about on the show. I'd like to thank everybody who first, read and enjoyed the Stealth and Spells Online books, and second, took the time to share their thoughts about it. It was a really interesting discussion, I thought. So thank you again for reading Stealth and Spells Online. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to the Pulp Writer Show. 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 we'll see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at the challenges of finishing my STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE LitRPG trilogy. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobooks in the Malison series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: MALISONSUMMER50 The coupon code is valid through August 18, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 262 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August 1, 2025, and today we are looking at how I finished my LitRPG trilogy at long last. Before we get into that, we will have Coupon of the Week, a progress update on my current writing and audiobook projects, and Question of the Week. First up is Coupon of the Week. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobooks in the Malison series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: MALISONSUMMER50. And as always, we will include the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store in the show notes. And this coupon code is valid through August 18th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's take a look at where I'm at with my current writing projects. As I mentioned in previous episodes, Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, the final book in the Stealth and Spells Online trilogy, is finished. You can get that at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. It is doing slightly better than the previous two in the trilogy, which makes it the bestselling book in the trilogy so far. So thank you all for that. My next main project is Ghost in the Siege, which will be the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series. I am 53,000 words into that as of this recording, which puts me about halfway through, give or take. I'm also 6,000 words into Blade of Flames, which will be the first book in my new epic fantasy series that I will begin once Ghost in the Siege is out. In audiobook news, Shield of Power--recording for it is underway. That will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills and hopefully that will be out in probably towards the end of September sometime, if all goes well. 00:01:49 Question of the Week Now let's move on to Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question: what is your favorite book you've read in 2025 so far? No wrong answers, obviously. The inspiration for this question was that June 30th was the halfway point of the year, which naturally inspires both reflection and some mandatory bookkeeping. Mary says: Witch Hat Atelier Volume 13 by Kamome Shirahama (which I probably mispronounced). After having read the rest of the series, of course. Juana says: Hidden Nature by Nora Roberts. Jonathan T. says: The Genesis Enigma: Why the Bible is Scientifically Accurate. This book is like my favorite nonfiction book so far of the year, while my favorite in the fiction category is likely Hardy Boys Casefiles: Dead On Target. Roger says: Just finished the latest in the Magelands Series, The Lost Ascendant. Really good, but a long series-even longer than yours, Jonathan. Gary says: It wasn't published in 2025 (I'm tragically behind the times) but Murtaugh by Christopher Paolini. Lynda says: Sunset by Sharon Sala. Denny says: Not sure if Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archives: Wind and Truth counts. It was released in December of 2024, but it's the newest book I've read. John K. says: My favorite book so far is by new indie author, J.L. Odom, By Blood By Salt. It's in line with apparently my favorite genre of MC called (I can't tell if this is disparaging or not) “competency porn” where the main character is well, uber competent. For myself, I think my favorite book of the year so far for 2025 would be The Icarus Coda by Timothy Zahn, which wraps up his excellent Icarus sci-fi mystery series after 25 years. So I definitely recommend you check out the Icarus series if you get a chance and if you're looking for other interesting things to read, apparently we have a few recommendations for you as well. 00:03:29 Main Topic: How I Finally Finished the Stealth and Spells Online Trilogy Now let's move on to our main topic this week. How I finally finished the Stealth and Spells Online trilogy with the last book, Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest. I'm very grateful to everyone who read the trilogy and enjoyed it. All told, it took about 10 months to write Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, from September of 2024 to July 2025, when I finally published it. So that's a lot longer than it takes for me to usually write a book. So what took so long? Well, a lot of things went wrong. Let's look back. Towards the end of 2022, I decided I wanted to try something a little different, so I settled on LitRPG, which seemed promising because it's pretty popular. For the story, I had an idea of a software developer who was fired from a virtual reality MMORPG once he realized it was dangerous and how he starts playing the game to uncover the proof he needs of the corporation's evil plans. I also had why I thought would be a clever idea. The game would be based on my Frostborn books. Like, it's set 700 years in the future and some interstellar scout discovered the Frostborn books on a wrecked colony ship, and then the evil corporation built the game around them. I decided the game would be called Sevenfold Sword Online, which meant it was the logical name for the series. So I wrote Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation and published it in February of 2023. And alas, it didn't do particularly well. A couple of problems became immediately apparent. First, and perhaps foremost, the title was causing confusion. People assumed it was connected to my Sevenfold Sword series and was in some way a sequel to that series, which it wasn't. Second, people were confused and wondered if the Ridmark Arban and Calliande Arban NPCs in the game were the actual characters from the Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, and Dragontiarna books. They weren't. But in comedy, there's a saying that if you have to explain the joke you've already lost. I suppose a parallel conclusion would be that if you have to explain the characters are NPCs in the game world based on your books 700 years in the future, then the concept of the book is probably a bit too abstract. Second, the book didn't really appeal to a majority of my regular readers who prefer epic fantasy from me. Case in point- when I published Half-Elven Thief in December 2023, in its first month it did 66% of what Stealth and Spells Online: Creation has done in the entire three and a half years it has been available, and I'm recording this on August 1st, 2025. So in its first month, Half-Elven Thief did two thirds of what Creation did the entire three and a half years it's been published. In its lifetime, Half-Elven Thief has sold 250% more than Stealth and Spells Online: Creation, and it's been out for ten and a half fewer months than Creation. Clearly, the majority of my regular readers prefer epic fantasy over LitRPG. Despite these setbacks, I continued onward and published Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling in February of 2024. It did slightly worse than Creation. So for the rest of 2024, I on and off tried a bunch of things to improve how the series fared. To avoid confusion, I changed the title from Sevenfold Sword Online to Stealth and Spells Online, which it currently is. I redid the cover art, I changed the description, all the usual things for improving a series, and none of it ever really worked. I could never quite turn a profit when advertising the book. During these experiments, I realized I had fundamentally misread the LitRPG market because the three most popular kinds of LitRPG are: 1. Portal fantasy, when the protagonist falls through a portal and ends up in another world that runs on MMORPG style rules for whatever reason. 2. Isekai. The character dies and is reborn in a world that runs on MMORPG style rules. You'll see this in books with titles like I Died and was Reborn as a Level One Healer, something like that. 3. System Apocalypse. The world ends and is recreated as a living MMORPG, usually overseen by an all powerful “game system” (hence the name). The system can be created by gods or incomprehensibly powerful space aliens and is often malevolent. Dungeon Crawler Carl, where Earth is destroyed and remade into an MMORPG system as part of a sadistic alien game show is probably the most well-known example of this particular subgenre. The problem is that Stealth and Spells Online fits into none of these popular subgenres. I joke that I tried to write a LitRPG, but it ended up as a sci-fi thriller. I mean “software developer fighting sinister corporation's evil plans” is a sci-fi cyberpunk story, not a LitRPG. So I was trying to tell a story ill-suited for that particular genre, like attempting to write a cozy contemporary mystery in the format of an epic Arthurian fantasy quest. Like that idea could potentially work, but it probably wouldn't. With that realization, I had three choices about how to proceed. 1. Leave Stealth and Spells Online unfinished and never speak of it again. 2. Unpublish Stealth and Spells Online and never speak of it again. 3. Find a way to finish Stealth and Spells Online in a satisfactory fashion with a single book because I didn't want to write a long series that sold poorly. I disliked Options One and Two, partly for reasons of professional pride and partly because it's bad to get a reputation in the fantasy genre for leaving series unfinished. You don't want to leave readers hanging longer than is necessary. The tricky part for Option Three was I had originally planned Stealth and Spells Online to be like seven or eight books, and I was only two books into what I had outlined for the story. An additional, potentially major real life problem was that the Stealth and Spells Online books sold badly enough to seriously tank book sales in the month they were released. Like both February 2023 and February 2024 were some of my weakest sales months in the past decade. So that meant I needed an outline for the final book that would discard all the planned subplots and focus entirely on the main plot. I also needed to write the book as a side project and not a main project because I knew it probably would not sell well. Ideally, it would come out in the same month as a much stronger seller like one of the Shield War books. So in October of 2024, I started chipping away at what would become Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest at 500 words a day. I would write 250 words before going to the gym in the morning and then 250 more words after dinner. During the normal workday, my main focus was on whatever book in the Shield War, Ghost Armor, Cloak Mage, and Half-Elven Thief series I was writing at the time. (As I've said before, having five unfinished series at the time is way too many, which is why I spent summer 2025 trying to get that number down.) But I did my 250 words in the morning and my 250 words after dinner almost every day. I just kept chipping away at it. Finally, in July of 2025, I was very nearly to the end of the book. After I published Shield of Power, I decided I was far enough along to make Final Quest my main project. Turns out I actually was pretty far along, since I only needed to write 3,000 more words to finish the book. Two rounds of editing and some new scenes later (I added a bunch of stuff since I thought the original ending was incomplete) and I published the book in July of 2025. It turned out reasonably well. People seemed to like the ending and find it satisfactory (at least those who read it). Final Quest sold slightly better than its predecessors. But to be honest, Shield of Power has generated sales in its first three days equal to what Final Quest did in its first two weeks. So I'm grateful for everyone who read the trilogy or listened to the two audiobooks. I'm really grateful that you read it or listened to it and enjoyed it. But in all honesty, I'm glad to be done with the trilogy. I've always been kind of sad when I finished my other series, especially the big ones, but with Stealth and Spells Online, I'm just relieved to be done and that I don't have to think about it very much anymore. It's easier to promote a finished trilogy than an unfinished series. Probably I'm going to make the first book free every three months, run some ads to it while it's free, and that will be that. I just signed up with C.J. McAllister a few days ago to do the audiobook version of Final Quest (and he did a very good job on the first two books in the trilogy), so eventually we'll probably have a Stealth and Spells Online: The Complete Trilogy audiobook, since audiobook bundles always do well and I expect a complete trilogy audiobook bundle would likewise do well. Amusingly, I realized that to finish this book, I essentially followed my own advice that I've been giving for years. I always say on this podcast and my blog that you can finish a novel if you just keep chipping away at it and small efforts add up over time. Final Quest turned out to be about 117,000 words, and I mostly got there 500 words at a time. Do I regret writing Stealth and Spells Online? No. But obviously if I had to do it all over again, I would definitely do some things differently. Will I ever return to writing in the LitRPG genre? Probably not. I listed all the popular subgenres of LitRPG earlier, and while I don't have anything against any of those subgenres, I just don't have any particular interest in writing a story that revolves around those tropes. For all that my books tend to be escapist, I always need to have at least a touchstone of reality in them so they make sense to me. Characters like Wire, Admiral Winterholt, and Alexander Maskell could definitely have their real-life (even contemporary) equivalents. LitRPG story tropes in general seem to be about a flight from reality. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's not something I'm really interested in writing. I mean, I designed the Andomhaim setting in Frostborn around people who traveled from Sub-Roman Britain in the 500s A.D. to a world where magic is real, so that way I could make real-world historical references. I think if pressed, I could write a pretty good novel in the genres of epic fantasy, science fiction, mystery, thriller, and romance. But I'm not at all sure I could write a good book in the LitRPG subgenres I listed. Honestly, maybe I'm just too old for it. I don't think I encountered an MMORPG for the first time until I was, I think 24 or 25 years old, and I've never actually seriously played one, so it definitely wasn't a formative experience for me the way it was for many LitRPG authors. In fact, if I'm remembering it right, my first serious encounter with an MMORPG was in fact at work when I got an IT support ticket about network throttling, complaining about how long a World of Warcraft update was taking to download. So that is how I finally finished the Stealth and Spells Online trilogy. And once again, thank you to everyone who read and listened to these Stealth and Spells Online trilogy. I hope you found it enjoyable. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes 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.

In this week's episode, we have a preview of four of my audiobooks, each of which is the fourth in its respective series. 1.) Ghost in the Razor, narrated by Hollis McCarthy. 2.) Shield of Deception, narrated by Brad Wills. 3.) Orc-Hoard, narrated by Leanne Woodward. 4.) Ghost in the Storm, narrated by Hollis McCarthy. This 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: ASHES50 The coupon code is valid through August 19, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered!

In this week's episode, we take a look at how the meaning of words can shift and evolve over time, and the challenges and opportunities that can create for writers. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store: MALISONJULY25 The coupon code is valid through August 12, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 19, 2025, and today we are reflecting on how the meaning of words changes over time. We will also have Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing and audiobook projects, and Question of the Week. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store, and that is MALISONJULY25. And as always, both the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through August the 12th, 2025. So if you need a new series of ebooks to read for this summer, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Stealth and Spells Online: The Final Quest, the final book in the Stealth and Spells trilogy, is now out and you get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. People have read it, have liked it, so I'm pleased that people are enjoying the ending to the trilogy. Now that that is out, my next major project will be Ghost in the Siege, the sixth and final book of the Ghost Armor series. I am 32,000 words into the rough draft, and I think it's going to be about 100,000 words, give or take. I am also 2,000 words into Blade of Flames, which will be the first book in my new epic fantasy Blades of Ruin series, which will be set in the realm of Owyllain about a hundred years after the end of The Shield War. So listen for more updates on that coming later as I work on it. In audiobook news, both Ghost in the Corruption (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) and Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) actually came out on the same day, so as of right now, you can get them at Audible, Apple, Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, and my Payhip store. There's usually a few more stores in the mix, but I've been having trouble with Findaway Audio and I'm looking into different audiobook distributors. So hopefully we will have some progress on that soon. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:02:07 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question, do you get food delivery? Do you ever have pizzas delivered or perhaps a sandwich from a place that does delivery, or do you use some of the various delivery services that have sprung up in the last 10 years like DoorDash, Grubhub, or Uber Eats? No wrong answers obviously, since everyone's circumstances are different. The inspiration for this question was a massive online discussion I saw about the etiquette of tipping DoorDash drivers, and since I had never used DoorDash or a similar service, I realized it was yet another massive technological and cultural shift that I had that happened to miss me out. So I was curious about what people thought about it, and as you expect, we had a range of answers. Perry says: No, and we haven't for years. We live too far away to make it worthwhile, even if we wanted to. Sarah says: I do very rarely get cooked food delivery, and then almost always pizza for the kids when I feel really sick. However, as a Walmart Plus member, I routinely get grocery delivery. I'm pregnant and homeschool three of my four kids (the littlest is too young for formal schooling). It saves me so much time to only have to bring it in the house. The time savings is about 90 minutes on an average week. I sometimes do grocery pickup, which my husband grabs on the way home for an hour time savings, since it is on his way home, but since he works awful hours, it's simpler for me to get the groceries than for him to grab them after a twelve hour day. Of course, feeding six mouths (and usually my dad too for a seventh), we have multiple short runs to Walmart throughout the week for stuff we run out of or general merchandise needs for home maintenance, so we managed to hit lots of in-store time and sales that we would otherwise miss too. Mary says: No, even for Chinese takeout, we would call in the order and pick it up, and I haven't done that for years. Justin says: No food delivery for me, thanks. It's not available where I am, but even living in a college town, I always picked it up. Norma says: I do have Italian food delivered because they have delivery in-house. Have never used a delivery company, but I just heard from my grandson that he's working for one while at university. David says: Maybe once or twice a year I'll get delivery for pizza. Everything else is pickup or eaten at the restaurant. I'm not pressed for time, so having it delivered doesn't make sense. Tracy says: I get pizza delivered from Papa John's. John says: When I lived in Houston, I rarely got anything delivered since it was as fast to just go out and get it myself. Now I live way out in the woods. Nobody delivers that far out, so I usually have to go get it for myself. I usually prefer to cook for myself. Michael says: Alas, I am far too fond of such services (as reflected by my Winnie the Pooh body shape). I live in the middle of the most densely urbanized city in the country, with the result that there are at least 40 takeaways and restaurants within a mile or so radius of my home. While I usually go out if getting takeaway, sometimes an Uber Eats or a Deliveroo is too tempting! For myself, as you might've guessed when I said that I missed out on DoorDash and Uber Eats, the answer is no, I don't get food delivery. I think it might've been over 25 years since I last had a pizza delivery. I did occasionally when I was a teenager and in college. When I moved out into the adult world, I never did. The reasons were one, I was extremely broke, and two, at the time I lived near a university campus with all the attendant fast food places that surrounded it. So if I wanted fast food, I'd get a bunch of stuff within walking distance. If I wanted fast food on a workday, all I had to do is just go through the drive-through on my way home. Anyway, as I got older, the habit of never ordering delivery solidified, which is probably just as well because services like DoorDash and Uber Eats look massively expensive, even before the social etiquette question of tipping arises. These days, if I want fast food or a pizza, I would go get it myself (or more likely persuade myself that I'd really be better off to stay at home and eat vegetables and lean protein). Though it is interesting given the range of the responses, it's a good reminder that people's circumstances can vary wildly and something that would be a waste of time or money for one person might actually be very advantageous for another. 00:05:51 Word Meanings and Chivalry And now onto our main topic. It is interesting to reflect how the meaning of words shifts over time and how a word can sometimes long outlast its original purpose and meaning. “Mile” is a good example, since it's originally derived from the distance covered by a Roman soldier marching a thousand steps. Nowadays, the usage of miles has nothing to do with marching Romans, and most of the world uses kilometers anyway, but the name remains, having long outlived its original meaning. “Chivalry” is another good example. Nowadays, chivalry or chivalrous typically means a man acting in a deferential way to a woman- holding the door, pulling out a chair for her, taking her coat, standing when she approaches the table, et cetera that an individual woman will either find charming, annoying, patronizing, or perhaps some combination of the three depending on her particular disposition and her opinion of the man in question. But that definition of the word chivalry is only a ghostly relic of what it used to mean. Chivalry comes originally from the French word “chevalier”, which means “mounted warrior on horseback”, which was a French term for the medieval knight In the Middle Ages, the term chivalry both referred to the expected conduct of a knight and in a larger sense knighthood as an institution or perhaps the proper behavior expected of the knightly warrior class as a whole. Medieval knighthood originated from essentially three sources. First, the practice of barbarian kings and chieftains, gathering a “comtitatus” around them, a group of chosen warriors who lived with him and were expected to die with him if necessary. Two, the influence of the medieval Catholic church and three, how a combination of the stirrup, the lance, and heavy armor meant that cavalry dominated the battlefield for most of the Middle Ages. Number three meant that knighthood was usually available only to the wealthy. The knight fought on horseback and fighting on foot was for lesser men, peasants, serfs, and churls. Horse mounted combat was the knight's defining trait. Horses were (and still are) very expensive and suitable armor and weapons were likewise expensive. Additionally, learning to ride a horse in battle while effectively wielding melee weapons was a difficult endeavor, which meant that the boys and men who did needed to make a full-time profession of it, which again, limited knighthood to those able to afford it. A lot of what we think of as chivalric behavior evolved out of the medieval churches efforts to control and regulate knighthood. Early medieval knights were essentially armed thugs employed by local warlords. The early history of feudalism in post-Roman Western Europe tends to boil down to “local warlordism” based around holding land, with centralized states only slowly developing. In the late 800s-900s A.D., the church advocated movements like the Peace of God, which tried to instruct knights and nobles not to kill or rob women, children, the elderly monks, nuns, priests, and other non-combatants and the Truce of God, which tried to unsuccessfully ban fighting on holy days and any possible holidays. The fact that the church felt the need to be that specific shows just how widespread that kind of local warfare was. While many knights adopted the external forms of piety, movements like the Peace of God and the Truce of God did little to dissuade them from practical business of looting and seizing as much land as they could hold. Evidence of this is found in the First Crusade and the subsequent crusades. One of the motivations for the First Crusade was to drain off a lot of the belligerent young knights out of Western Europe and send them off to fight “infidels” in the Holy Land instead of making trouble at home. “Chivalry” as a code of conduct developed out of the combination of the fact that it was expensive to be a knight and the church's attempts to regulate it. That meant that knighthood saw itself as a distinct social class with standards of expected behavior. A knight was supposed to be pious. He should show no fear and charge to meet the enemy without hesitation. A knight fought on horseback (fighting on foot was for lesser men). A knight should be reverent towards the church and obey his lord unquestionably. He also should show courtesy to women of noble rank. This did not apply to peasants and townswomen. He also should develop romantic love for an unattainable married woman (since marriage between nobles was usually for reasons of power and not love) and should use that unrequited love to spur him on to feats of valor. A knight should also be generous and open-handed to the poor and to his fellows. Now, all of this sounds good, but in practice a lot of these virtues twisted around into vices. Fearlessness in battle turned into arrogance and delusions of invincibility. One of the reasons France did so badly for much of the Hundred Years' War was because the French knights insisted on charging into battle at once to demonstrate their knightly valor and prowess, which let them get slaughtered en masse by English longbowmen. Additionally, readiness to fight evolved into fighting for any excuse at all, which frequently led to wars both ruinous and utterly pointless. Knighthood's class awareness often cause nobles to treat warfare as a chivalric adventure, which was not conducive to sound strategy leading to victory. Generally, the most successful medieval monarchs were those like Henry II of England, Edward I of England, Charles V of France, and Philip II Augustus of France, who did not allow knightly virtues to get in the way of hardheaded practical policy. Generosity turned into extravagant displays of public magnificence, which in turn meant attempting to squeeze more tax money out of the peasants and merchants. A knight's respect towards the church often meant giving large donations to have Masses set in perpetuity for his soul after a lifetime of plunder. And of course, knight might have unrequited Lancelot-style love for an unattainable, married noblewoman. But in practice, many knights had many, many illegitimate children, sometimes with their “unattainable” married noblewomen. Moralistic writers in every century of the Middle Ages bemoan the laziness, greed, and luxurious living of their contemporary knights and frequently exhorted them to return to the heartier, more virtuous knights of the past years. Even the Middle Ages had the Nostalgia Filter. As is so often the case with institutions that have outlived their useful utility, knighthood was never really reformed, but eventually became obsolete. By the end of the Hundred Years' War, the French King maintained a professional standing army, which is far more useful than giving land to nobles and attempting to get knights out of them through feudal obligations. Other nations soon follow suit. Longbows and Crossbows heralded the weakness of armor, and then gave way to trained infantry soldiers equipped with firearms. Horsemen remained an important part of warfare for centuries, since they were vital for scouting and attacking unprepared infantry formations. The American Civil War was the first truly industrial war, and yet the Civil War still had numerous significant cavalry battles, but the armored knights' days as master of the battlefield were over, and while knights remained part of the upper class, knighthood gradually became a ceremonial honor that had nothing to do with its original purpose of mounted warfare. Recently, filmmaker Christopher Nolan became Sir Christopher Nolan, Knight Bachelor of the United Kingdom, for reasons entirely unrelated to wielding a lance on horseback while wearing heavy armor. So as we can see, the word “chivalry” has a long, long history. So it is amusing to see how the last remnant of its original meaning in the modern era is to hold the door open for women. It occurred to me as I wrote this out that the reason I'm a fantasy novelist and not a historian is that I thought “hmm, there's the ideas for like twelve different books in all of this.” Which, I suppose, is perhaps the point. Chivalric knighthood was something of a myth even in its own time, but the myth inspired some great stories over the centuries. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. I 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.

In this week's episode, we look at five ways writers can avoid the self-destructive mindset trap of "comparisonitis", and five ways that comparing oneself to other writers can be useful. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This 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: WOLVES50 The coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 259 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 11th, 2025, and today we are looking at why comparing yourself to other writers is a bad idea. Before that, we will do Coupon of the Week and have an update on my current writing progress. 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, and that is WOLVES50. This coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to listen to during your travels this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Shield of Power is 100% done, completing the Shield War series. You can get Shield of Power at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords and my own Payhip store. It's been selling briskly and it's gotten good reviews so far, so thank you very much to everyone who has bought and enjoyed the book. Now that Shield of Power is done, the first third of my Super Summer of Finishing Things is complete. So what's next? My next main project is Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest. It was originally going to be named Reactant, but I changed the title to Final Quest to emphasize really and truly and definitively that this is the final book in the trilogy. In fact, I'm already done with the rough draft and I am done with the first phase of editing it as of this recording. If you've been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know how I frequently say that if you keep chipping away the novel over a long enough time, sooner or later you'll finish it. That is exactly what happened here. Since October of 2024, I've been writing 500 words a day on Final Quest, and this piled up over time enough so that after Shield of Power came out, I only had 3,000 more words to write to finish Final Quest, and I did that in an afternoon. One more phase of editing on that and then I would like to have Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest out before July 22nd, if all goes well. I'm also 21,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which will be my main project once Final Quest is finished. Ghost in the Siege will be the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series and will hopefully cap off my Super Summer of Finishing Things. In audiobook news, Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is now out. You can get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple, and Google Play as of this recording. Because of some difficulties with Findaway Voices, it's going to take a little bit longer to get into the other stores, but I'm working on a way to do that and as I mentioned before, Ghost in the Corruption (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy ) is done and just has to finish processing on the various stores, and so hopefully that should be out before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:02:52 Main Topic: Comparison Now let's move right on to our main topic, The Dangers of Comparison. In Episode 257, we started a series on mindset for writers. In some of the previous series I've talked about some of the practical ways to help with distractions, procrastination, and managing time wasters. In this series, we're going to focus on things that derail writers from a mindset perspective because as we know with any endeavor in life, mindset is something like three quarters of the battle where if you convince yourself that you're going to fail before you start, you're probably going to fail. So that's why it's important to have an appropriate mindset to the task at hand. Today we're going to focus on comparing yourself to others, and I will share five reasons it's not a great idea to compare yourself to others aimlessly and how to shift your focus to five more constructive ways to compare your work to other authors. Comparisons are a constant of the reading world. Librarians and Goodreads reviewers talk constantly about “readalikes” or finding books that have similar themes or settings. Book displays and shops and libraries love to group similar books or authors together. People look at the bestseller lists like they're sports scores. Dollar amounts in publishing deals are a constant source of gossip and jealousy. Sometimes comparison is useful, especially when creating ads or finding the right demographics to market to. Other times, it can lead to limiting or self-destructive thoughts. So let's start off with five reasons not to compare yourself to others. #1: It can limit you creatively. It can be easy to look at the bestseller list and try to think of ways to write a similar book. Following publishing trends keeps you from your most creative work and frankly isn't as enjoyable to write and most likely for your readers to read. Also, unless you're a fast writer, the publishing world might have moved on by the time you finished that book. In fact, I just saw a thread on social media about that where the commenter was bemoaning the fact that she used to enjoy what's now called cozy fantasy, but that as the genre has evolved, it's developed established tropes and the writers of it are not willing to variate from those tropes. So you have what she said in her words were dozens of clones of Lattes and Legends and Bookshops and Bone Dusts floating around, which is a tricky thread to balance, I do admit, because you want something that'll appeal to the reader, but then the readers like familiarity. What they really seem to like is familiarity presented to them in a way they've never seen before, which can be a challenge when you are trying to look at the bestseller list and limit yourself creatively. #2: What other people are doing is out of your control. You can't control if a book you think isn't as good as yours is suddenly the runaway hit of the year or an author who isn't experienced as you suddenly gets a movie deal. You can't control their success, so don't worry about it or get upset by it. You can control if you're wasting time online mocking those people or complaining about it, for example. That's a waste of your time and energy and doesn't actually make you feel better in the long run (and possibly in the short run as well). I believe in psychology and in military theory for that matter, there's something called the locus of control where you identify the things that you can control and then you drill in and focus in on the things you can control rather than worrying about the things you can't control. As we said, if an author who wrote a book you don't think is very good or you don't personally like has had a massive amount of success, there's nothing you can do about that and worrying about it is a waste of time and comparing yourself to that writer is also a waste of time. So that's why it's a better idea to focus in on what you can control. #3: You're not being fair to yourself. Comparing yourself to other authors, especially as an aspiring or new author, isn't being fair to yourself. They have years (if not decades) of experience that you don't have. It's like comparing yourself to an ultra-marathoner when you're someone who's just starting to jog and struggling to get all the way around the block, which is some of the tricky parts of someone like me giving advice to new writers because Shield of Power was my 163rd book and Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest will be my 164th. I've been doing this for a long time, which means I probably know what I'm talking about, but that not everything I do is immediately reproducible by someone who hasn't been doing it as long as I have. If you're writing something that's not as marketable or in a smaller genre, it's not fair to compare yourself to people in the biggest genre or even your own previous work. For example, I can't compare the amount one of my technical books earns to one of my fantasy books. If I did that, it'd be a disappointment. But in reality, my technical books have had steady success and have even been used as textbooks at times (which is always surprising when I discovered that's happened because my Windows Command Line book and my Linux Command Line book have both been used as textbooks at various times, which was a surprise to me because that's not what I expected when I set out to write them, but I'm glad that they've been able to be useful for people). #4: And point number four, which I think is a really important one, someone's online life is only the highlight reel of someone's actual life. Looking at someone's social media accounts isn't a great way to know what they're actually doing or how they're actually doing. Just because they're posting pictures of tropical vacations, speaking at conferences, or showing off shiny new stuff doesn't mean you're seeing the full picture of how they're actually doing. As I said in a recent episode that when I was applying for disability insurance (just in case I need it someday), I learned that writers are actually one of the hardest professions to insure due to their high rates of mental illness and substance abuse. You might see the good stuff, but they might not be posting the challenges that come with their success: increased stress and anxiety, more criticism, the need to hire people and how much time it takes to manage them, more complicated taxes, increased business expenses, and relationship problems from the demands of success. These are all things that can accompany success. You're not getting the whole picture. You need to keep that in mind when you compare yourself to people online. The best fictional example out of this that applies to so many situations is Lord Denethor and the Palantir from Return of the King. If you read the book, Denethor has been using the Palantir for years to spy on Sauron and give advantages to his forces and the soldiers of Gondor. But Sauron is able to manipulate what Denethor sees in the Palantir and has been gradually using this to create an edited version of what Denethor sees in the Palantir, and that drives Denethor to despair and eventual suicide. People talk about the increased rates of mental illness related to social media. Sauron did that deliberately to Denethor through the Palantir. It's a sign of how good J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer that he managed to anticipate the effects that Facebook would have on some people by like 60 years. So always bear that in mind when you're looking at someone online and feeling jealous of them. You are not getting the whole picture and there are more than likely things going on that are difficulties in their life that they just don't talk about. #5: Your time is better spent writing than comparing yourself to other writers. And this is back to our old friend, the locus of control. Looking at other authors' sales ranks and reviews is not a productive use of your time. As I mentioned in the writing adjacent activities series, you need to be purposeful in non-writing tasks that take up your time and make sure you're not pretending they're writing related. If you need to compare sales ranks or some other data point with other authors or something you're actively working on like ad targeting, schedule that time and don't let it turn into an Internet spiral of time wasting. And now to avoid those Internet spirals of time wasting, here are five ways to use comparisons positively and constructively. #1: Number one, getting keywords or demographics for marketing purposes. For sites like BookBub or when creating keyword ads, knowing authors who are similar to you is incredibly helpful and can help you structure your ads. And this doesn't even necessarily require you to read the other author's books to see if they actually compare. There are tools that let you expedite this process. For example, if you look on Amazon at the Also Boughts, you can scroll through some of that and see which other authors and which other books people have bought in addition to your own and then you can test using those for keyword targeting. On Goodreads, people put books in lists or compare books. You can use that data to generate keywords for ad targeting. You can test them very easily. With BookBub ads in particular, if you build a campaign around just a single author and keywords and test the results. You can quickly see whether a specific author generates an appropriate click-through rate for you to use or not. #2: A second way is to find authors you might want to do a promo with. Some authors, especially in the romance genre, do really well with group promotions. Finding other authors that write similar books and are at a similar level of success may be a way to take advantage of that. I've never actually set up a group promo, but I have participated in several of them from time to time with pretty good results. #3: A third way is to better understand reader preferences in a genre. My best story for this is I've gone through six different variations of cover design for the Silent Order series. When I started out, I was using GIMP and stock photo images. GIMP is the free Linux version of Photoshop essentially. After I learned Photoshop, I upgraded to characters on the covers, but they never quite sold quite as well until finally I saw a Penny Arcade comic where they were commenting how they just want to buy books where they have spaceships in close proximity to planets on the covers. And I thought, huh, that makes a lot of sense. So I redesigned all the covers to have a spaceship in close proximity to a planet, and the series immediately started selling a fair bit better with those covers. I would say that was not so much a comparison thing, just a genre preference I stumbled across and then had sort of the moment of enlightenment that I did. But if I had looked at the bestseller list for various science fiction categories, I would have realized that most of the bestsellers had spaceships and planets in close proximity to each other on the cover. So I redesigned all the covers. It was just that I was too fond of the character based covers to give them up until I had that moment of revelation. So all the main books in the series were redesigned to have the spaceship covers, though for the free short stories, I did keep the character covers just because I was giving away the free short stories and I did like the character covers, so I got to have my cake and eat it too, which was nice. #4: Learn from the successes and failures of others. You can learn from what another author does well. For example, Brandon Sanderson is very good at communicating his writing progress and other updates to his fans through weekly video messages on YouTube. Other authors are good at collaborating with other authors, while others make engaging and funny videos that make people more interested in their work. Knowing your own strengths is an important first step. If you're just trying to follow everyone who is a success without first reflecting on that, you'll chase too many options and then can't excel at any of them. You can also learn from when an author responds poorly and how the Internet reacts to it. Understandably, I'm not going to give specific examples here. For myself, I tend to focus on what I do best, which is writing really fast and doing social media updates. I never got into video because I kind of have a face for radio and I just don't enjoy doing video. I don't enjoy editing them. It's a lot of work that I don't really enjoy, so I don't do it. #5: Being informed makes comparisons less emotional. Knowing, for example, that an author was hired to write a book based on an existing outline created by the publisher, and then promised a future book deal with a big marketing budget in a preferred genre as part of the contract makes their cross-genre success seem less surprising and makes you feel less guilty for not being able to do the same on your own as an indie author. It's not a fair comparison because they have advantages that you can't understand without some industry knowledge. For people that compare themselves to me, for example, they should know that I've been writing since I was a teenager a very long time ago. I was an early adopter of self-publishing when it was less competitive and I usually work more than eight hours a day and I generally keep to a very rigid writing schedule. Some authors like me were able to get the rights back to their earlier published works and then self-publish them early on in order to finish a series, which is much less likely to be an option in a contract for a traditionally published author now. If you're just starting out, travel frequently for work, and only have an hour a day to write (and even that is dicey because your partner would rather you spend that time on some other activity because they don't support your writing), you can't possibly compare your writing output to mine. Knowing all this about me explains why it might be harder for you and why you shouldn't feel bad about having a harder time with writing. Comparison has been called “The Thief of Joy” all over social media for many years. That can definitely be true, but like so many things in life, how you respond to something and find ways to help it make you stronger is what really matters. Comparison has its place in the writing world, but it's important to keep it in perspective and not to let it overwhelm you emotionally or keep you from your writing goals or plans. So that is it for talking about comparison. I hope that was helpful and offered some useful tips on how to avoid the trap of comparison-itis. 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 a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's 4th of July episode, I take a look back at Episode 147 and try to figure out how many short stories I have actually written. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook version of Silent Order: Omnibus One at my Payhip store: SILENTOMNI25 The coupon code is valid through July 28, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered!

In this week's episode, we take a look at five obstacles that can impact your writing, and offer tips and tricks for dealing with them. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Dragons, Book #1 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: DRAGONAUDIO50 The coupon code is valid through July 21, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 257 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 27th, 2025, and today we are looking at mindset obstacles to writing. Before we get to that, we'll have Coupon of the Week, an update at my current writing progress, and then we will do Question of the Week.   First up, let's do 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. That is DRAGONAUDIO50. And as always, the coupon code and the links to the store will be included in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through July the 21st, 2025, so if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. The rough draft of Shield of Power, the sixth and final book in the Shield War series, is done and I'm editing it. As of this recording, I am about 68% of the way through the first pass of editing. I had hoped to be a bit further along than I actually was, but there was a lot to do this week and because of that, I think it's going to slip to early July for the release date. I'd hoped to have it out in June, but I don't think that's going to happen, but it should be not too much longer once we get to July. Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, I'm 114,000 words into that. So I am very much hoping that will come out very quickly once Shield of Power is out. And I'm also 14,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which would be the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series. So it sounds like my Super Summer of Finishing Things is well underway and making good progress. Hopefully I can continue that.   In audiobook news, Shield of Battle and Ghost in the Corruption are both essentially done in audio and just have to get through processing. Shield of Battle was narrated by Brad Wills and Ghost in the Corruption was narrated by Hollis McCarthy. They both did an excellent job and I'm looking forward to being able to share those audiobooks with you in July. So it looks like July is going to be a big month for releases with Shield of Power, Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, and then the audiobooks of Ghost in the Corruption and Shield of Battle. So lots to look forward to in July.   00:02:20 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: how do you pass the time when you find yourself compelled to spend a good chunk of time waiting away from home or work (such as in the hospital waiting room, in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, or waiting in your car to pick up someone from sports practice, a sort of situation like that)? And as you can expect, we had a range of answers.   Justin says: Reading your books.   Mary says: Reading.   David says: Reading or listening to books is my default. Sometimes email.   Keith says: I pace around mulling on problems that I otherwise have no time to think about.   Gary says: A variety of things. I do think it is good practice to teach yourself to wait an hour or more without something external to occupy your mind. My own opinion is that our constant need for distraction hinders us in many ways.   Mandy says: Reading. If I know I'm going to be waiting (or suspect it), I bring a book or my Kindle and I read. I almost always have a book in my car, too.   Mike says: I read books by Jonathan Moeller.   John says: I bring my tablet and read.   Juana says: I read.   Catriona says: Read a book or play a game on my phone. When I worked, I'd do emails, but I am retired now.   Tom says: Usually I read a book on my Kindle app on my phone. Often it's one of yours.   Bonnie says: Usually I scroll through Facebook or do one of the games on my phone or tablet. Don't usually read because I get focused and have a hard time tearing back to reality.   And Jesse says: Reading ebooks or thinking through Work problems for later. If I know up front it'll be an hour or more, I'll bring a laptop and tether it.   For myself, the answer is easy. I bring my laptop and work on my current book. The inspiration for this question was that I had to bring my car in for some maintenance, so I spent the time working on Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest and got a thousand words more into it. I've been doing that for a long time. I think most of my books for the last 10 years, or at least a majority of them, I had a session where I worked in a waiting room on them. I think the earliest I can recall working in a book in a waiting room would be Soul of Skulls way back in 2013, possibly 2012.   00:04:22 Handling Obstacles as a Writer   Now onto our main topic of this week, obstacles. We're going to do a series of a couple mindset obstacles that get in the way of writers. The first one we're going to talk about is obstacles because no writer works without obstacles. Some of them are internal, like mental or physical illness, self-doubt, and perfectionism. Others are external, like having your fence collapse in a storm or being interrupted every five minutes by a toddler who needs something. There is a false belief that time is the biggest obstacle, and if only a writer could write full-time, they would finally be able to start writing or finish a draft. The sea of full-time writers with unfinished books would easily prove this wrong, as would the wide variety of traditionally published authors with full-time day jobs.   I would argue that the biggest obstacle you'll face is how well you handle any kind of obstacle and develop mental flexibility and resilience. In previous series, I've talked about some of the practical ways to help with distractions, procrastination, and managing time wasters. In this series, I'm going to focus on things that derail writers from a mindset perspective. In this episode, we're going to focus on five examples of obstacles that writers face and how to mentally shift your perspective on them.   #1: Getting started. The perfect is the enemy of the possible. I say this often, and I say it often because it's true. Many people don't want to write until they have perfect conditions and feel like they're creatively inspired. Those days I'm afraid, are quite few. It's more productive to work consistently within your limitations than to wait for inspiration and motivation to magically find you. It's generally easier to edit than it is to write, so just get something done on the page without editing as you go.   Activation energy is also the enemy of many. Essentially, some people struggle with transitions and starting something because it takes a lot of mental energy for them to get going or to switch gears. Routines remove the decision making that takes up a lot of that energy. Making the process of starting as easy and pleasant as possible also makes it less daunting. How can I make this easy? It is a great question to ask yourself. Start with a block of time that is so small it feels ridiculously easy, such as one minute. Write without stopping for one minute each day without making any edits, and you'll end up with paragraphs sooner rather than later.   #2: Short amounts of time with purpose add up over the long run. For example, our transcriptionist started writing 300 to 500 words each weekday for 15 minutes as a part of our November Writing Challenge. Even with taking time off for the holidays and real life stuff, she hit 50,000 words on her rough draft in May just by committing to the short burst of focused work as part of her daily routine.   For myself, I mentioned earlier that I'm 114,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, and I started that back in October 2024, and I've been scratching away at it for 500 words a day for that entire time, which as you can clearly see, adds up. More time doesn't necessarily mean more productivity. A small liberal arts college was once concerned that students with a work study award (meaning a part time job on campus offered to those under a certain family income) didn't have as much time to study as their more privileged peers. What they found after looking into the matter was that students with work study awards were getting better grades, so they set out to interview them to find out why. Those they interviewed had schedules and routines for studying that the more affluent students hadn't developed. Even if you don't have the privilege of having a whole day free to do whatever you want, spending your day purposefully is far more important.   Finally, be honest about how you're actually spending your time. For example, the American Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the average person surveyed spent 2.7 hours per day watching television, to say nothing of wasting time on social media or other forms of entertainment. By taking an honest look at how you're spending your time, you might find time that you can take from other less useful or even less enjoyable activities.   My mindset about managing my time is that I do try to be pretty disciplined about it. When I'm writing new material, I use the Pomodoro method and try to hit a minimum of 6,000 words a day of new stuff. When I'm editing, I have a number in mind of words I want to edit per day. Usually I try to get around 18,000 to 25,000. Though with that, it can depend very strongly on how much needs to be moved or changed or deleted in the section that I'm editing.   I do have things that I spend time on that aren't necessarily productive, of course. I did probably spend about 50 minutes last night playing Oblivion Remaster on Xbox. I do go to the gym for an hour every morning, though I really think at my age that's more necessary maintenance than an indulgent hobby. But it's always good to be honest about what you're spending time on and where you can improve it and maybe rearrange things to be a bit better.   #3: Number three is interruptions. Interruptions are inevitable and unavoidable. There will never be a day in your life when you're not interrupted by family members, friends, domestic tasks, chores, and even the occasional genuine emergency. Accepting that no perfect day exists and interruptions will be part of your writing routine is the first step in helping yourself manage them.   Focus on the interruptions you can control. If you can pick where you write, pick a spot where it's harder for people to pass by and interrupt you. If you can wake up a bit earlier than the rest of your household to squeeze out a quick hundred words with your first cup of coffee, then choose that time, even if it's a smaller block of time than after when the kids go to bed. Plan what you'll do when interruptions come and how you'll need to be flexible with your routine in order to get writing done. Here are some examples. Your computer breaks down or you're stuck in a hospital waiting room during your writing time. The solution is to keep a pocket notebook somewhere convenient or to use a notes app on your phone so you at least get some words down in either of these situations. You have a long commute and find that when you get home, your kids come to see you every five minutes while you're trying to write. Where is there time in your day you can control? Maybe you could squeeze out five minutes writing on your lunch break. Maybe you could find a way to dictate your writing on the way home, provided your local laws allow for hands-free device use and it doesn't impair your attentiveness while driving. You have a whole day planned to write and a storm hits, and sometimes you just have to accept that getting something done is better than trying to get the whole goal in the event that something comes up. Like for example, I've recently had to spend a good deal of time doing fence repair due to storm damage, and on those days I didn't get as much writing done as I wanted, but I did get some writing done, and as I do frequently say, one slice of pizza is better than no pizza at all. So when you do have days like that, it's better just to grab the one slice of pizza and get a little bit of writing done than to beat yourself up over how you didn't get to the writing goal that was in your head.   #4: Number four is distractions. Distractions like social media and doom scrolling are a huge obstacle, even though they feel more like a treat or a break than a problem. Treating them like a problem instead of a solution to not wanting to work is an important mindset shift. If such things like social media and doom scrolling are keeping you from beating your goals, distractions have to be managed like any other obstacle we're talking about. I've talked about practical ways to manage distractions in my November Writing Challenge series. I recommend you check that out for practical tips.   #5: And finally, number five, motivation. Consistency over passion or motivation wins the day. Slogging through when you don't feel motivated doesn't mean that you're not creative or a good writer. In fact, every good writer will admit that they do that more often than you might think. Removing your ideal of what you should be as a writer and focusing instead on your actual daily behaviors is important. It's easier to keep a routine going (even imperfectly or badly) than it is to keep having to start it over and over again.   There's a theory that was popularized on Reddit called No Zero Days that essentially says that you must do something (however small) each day in order to further your goal.   For example, instead of having the goal of writing 1,000 words each day, the goal is to write every single day. Even getting one single word on the page each day helps keeps the routine or habit going. It makes it easier to start the next day and helps with any guilt associated with a bad day or difficulties getting started.   In conclusion, obstacles are inevitable, but many of the ones we discussed today, especially distractions, are largely within your control. Even when you're not in control of an obstacle, you're fully in control of how you react to it and how quickly you can regroup and keep going. So those five tips, hopefully they will help you navigate your way around any obstacles to your writing goals.   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 and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

In this week's episode, I take a look at the frozen pizzas that I enjoyed in 2025, and give my recommendations for the best frozen pizzas. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: WARDEN25 The coupon code is valid through July 14, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 256 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 20th, 2025 and today we are looking at my favorite frozen pizzas from Winter and Spring 2025. Before we get to our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing progress, and then we will do Question of the Week this week.   First up, let's do 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 is WARDEN25. This coupon code is valid through July 14th, 2025. So if you need a new series of really long ebooks to read for this summer, we have got you covered and as always, the links to the store and the coupon code will be included in the show notes.   Now for an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. As I mentioned before, I want Summer 2025 to be my Super Summer of Finishing Things because I want to finish The Shield War, Stealth and Spells, and Ghost Armor series this summer before I start on new things. I'm pleased to report that I have reached a milestone of that. The rough draft of Shield of Power is done at 101,000 words. This will be the sixth and final book in the Shield War series. I am currently writing A Consort of Darkness, which will be a short story that newsletter subscribers will get a free copy of in ebook form when Shield of Power comes out. I am also 109,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest and hopefully that will come out very quickly after Shield The Power is out. I'm also 10,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which will likewise be the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series.   In audiobook news, recording is still underway for Ghost in the Corruption, which will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy and Shield of Battle, which will be narrated by Brad Wills. Hopefully we will have some more updates on that soon and I don't think it'll be too much longer before both audiobooks are out and available.   00:02:02 Question of the Week   Now let's go to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question: when was the last time you went to an actual movie theater to see a movie? No wrong answers, including “I don't go to movie theaters.”  As you can guess, we had a range of responses on this one.   Justin says: Last month we saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail (fifty year release) in the theater. Yes, we have the DVD.   David says: I guess Dune Two is the last time I went to a theater. For the price of going to the theater, I can wait and stream it later. If I don't like the price, I can even wait a few years. I'm not so quick to give them my money. Haven't gone to the theater yet in 2025. Nothing called out to me.   William says: Except for 2020-2021, I've been going to the movies frequently every year since the Hobbit movies first came out. It's not that my habits has changed, just that they started making the kind of movies I wanted to watch like Star Wars, Jurassic World, the Disney remakes, and so on. Before 2012, the last time I went was in 2006 for the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It probably helps that it's only two tickets each time and not four or five for a whole family.   Randy says: Top Gun: Maverick. It was a throwback to the days when movies were fun to watch. Everything doesn't have to have a deeper meaning and make us think. Just have an unlikely crew of misfits take out the bad guys. Bonnie says: Last one was Mary Poppins Returns with granddaughter in Spring 2019. I can't see spending the price for a one time deal.   Cheryl says: The last time I went to the cinema…when did American Beauty come out? That's how long ago it was and the movie was disappointing.   Jenny says: Thunderbolts! I wish movies weren't so pricey.   Elizabeth says: Last time I went to the movie theater was to see Jumanji 2 with my now husband as our first date because both of us are terrible at first date ideas.   I don't know- if Elizabeth's first date with her now husband was Jumanji 2, it seems like that was a very successful first date.   John says: War of the Rohirrim, December of last year.   A different John says: Dune Two and A Complete Unknown are the only two I've seen in the theater in the last two years. In both cases it was because A: the movie deserved to be experienced completely, and B: there was someone I wanted to share it with. Otherwise, modern tech in the home works just fine.   Michael says: Last movie I saw in an actual cinema was Avengers Infinity War, so that's going back a bit. I think the COVID lockdown just killed any desire to do so and haven't been back since.   Michael [A different Michael than the one listed above] says: It has been years.   For myself, the answer is quite simple. I went on May 31st to see Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning. The inspiration for this question was technological change. I only went to the theater twice in 2024, for Dune Part Two and The Fall Guy. In 2025, I've been to the theater twice so far, for Thunderbolts and Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning, but a long time ago when I was much younger and had far fewer demands in my time, I would usually go to the movies on Saturday afternoons if I saw something that looked at all interesting. I'd always go in the afternoons because afternoon matinees were cheaper and I usually preferred to spend Saturday night playing computer games anyway. Nowadays, like I said above, I only went twice in 2024 and twice in 2025 so far. I am not sure what changed. The obvious one is that I'm old enough to have enough to do week to week that giving up three hours on a Saturday afternoon can often be a problem. The other obvious answer is technological change in the form of streaming, which makes it a lot easier to see things at home and perhaps one's taste change as one gets older. For example, there is no way I would go to the theater to see the Minecraft movie, though I would probably watch it on streaming when it rolls around (and I did in fact watch it in streaming last week and thought it was pretty good. It'll be in my next Movie Roundup.) So that is it for Question of the Week.   00:05:52 Main Topic: Winter/Spring/Summer 2025 Frozen Pizza Roundup   Now onto our main topic this week, my Spring/Summer 2025 Frozen Pizza Roundup (though I suppose I've been working on this long enough that it should be the Winter/ Spring/Summer 2025 Frozen Pizza Roundup). I suppose it is a bit odd to talk about frozen pizza on a podcast ostensibly dedicated to indie publishing and indie writing, but I like frozen pizza and it's my podcast, so if I want to talk about frozen pizza, I'm going to talk about frozen pizza. Besides my previous pizza review roundup episode was pretty popular, so that's why I decided to do another one. Unlike a movie roundup, the pizza reviews will be in chronological order based on when I ate them. The grades are, as always, totally subjective and based on my own opinions. I'll also be rating the pizza by eating it hot and eating it cold, since cold pizza is a different experience than hot pizza. Cold pizza for lunch the next day is something to look forward to, especially during a busy day. I should also mention that I purchased each pizza myself with my own money. No one sent me any free stuff, so while my opinion may be subjective, it is nonetheless unbiased. Additionally, I exactly follow the preparation directions for each pizza since I wanted to avoid the phenomenon you sometimes see on recipe blogs where a commenter complains that a recipe didn't work and then admits that they took out the butter, cut the sugar in half, replaced the flour with corn starch, and substituted canola oil for frosting. So with those disclaimers, disclosures, and caveats out of the way, on to the pizzas.   The first one is Orv's Ultimate Rizer Three Meat Pizza, which I had on February 28th, 2025. Orv's is a pizza brand owned by Minnesota based pizza maker Bernatello's. In the last pizza roundup, I mistakenly said Bernatello's was based in Wisconsin (though they do in fact have numerous Wisconsin facilities) and Bernatello's also owns many different pizza brands I have mentioned the last roundup. I had never tried Orv's before, so I thought I would give it a try.   Eaten hot, the sausage, Canadian bacon, and pepperoni are quite good, as are the cheese and sauce. However, the crust really is quite bready and kind of overwhelmed the other tastes. This is a thick crust pizza and to be honest, I really prefer thin crust because it's generally less caloric and the crust has a greater chance to work in harmony with the other flavors and not overpower them.   Eaten cold, it's pretty much the same experience. This is definitely a pizza that would benefit from a bit of added oregano, garlic salt, or perhaps other spices. Overall, I do think I strongly prefer Bernatello's Brew Pub Lotzza Motzza pizza instead of Orv's, though I should mention that Orv's is in fact quite a bit cheaper. Overall Grade: C+   The next pizza is the Red Baron Four Meat Classic Crust Pizza, which I ate on March 7th, 2025. Red Baron is a frozen pizza brand that started in 1976 by the Schwan's Frozen Food Company of Minnesota. Currently, Schwan's is owned by a large Korean conglomerate. Whatever one might think of large corporate consolidation, the fact that the stylized World War I fighter pilot mascot of a Minnesota company is now owned by a Korean conglomerate is kind of hilarious in an absurdist sort of way. Anyway, the pizza!   Eaten hot, I liked the crust. It was a bit thicker than usual for thin crust pizza, but it was crisp and didn't get bready. The sauce was a bit sweeter than usual, but I still liked it. The various meats and the cheese were good as well. Eaten cold, it's still pretty good. The cheese and sauce set well and remained flavorful. Overall Grade: B+   Our next pizza is Good and Gather Pepperoni Pizza, which I had on March 14th, 2025. Store brand foods can be hit or miss, like if you go to a big box grocery store and they have their own store brand of essentials like coffee and cereal and bread and so forth. And as I said, those can be really hit or miss since it depends on the company that is actually supplying the food to the store. That said, I've had good results with Good and Gather, which is the store brand of Target, which is a major big box retailer in the United States. So I thought I'd give the Good and Gather Pepperoni Pizza a try. Eaten hot, I was pleasantly surprised. The crust was crisp, the cheese and sauce were good (if not outstanding), and the pepperoni was flavorful. A good workman like frozen pizza. Eaten cold, it still tastes quite good. An important detail is that this is a good deal cheaper than many of the more premium pizza brands I have mentioned in these pizza roundups. So I would say this is a good solid option for the budget minded consumer. Overall Grade: B     Next up we have Bellatoria's Ultra Thin Crust Meat Trio Pizza, which I ate on March the 21st, 2025. Bellatoria's is yet another brand of the Bernatello's Frozen Pizza Company, a frequent entry in these pizza roundups and it is a seems to be more of a premium brand compared to Orv's. It also has a less heavy load topping compared to Lotzza Motzza, which is another Bernatello's brand. Despite that, I quite like this one. Eaten hot, the crust was crisp and just a bit flaky in a good way and the cheese, sauce, and meat toppings were all good. Sometimes on a pizza you can't taste the crust. Other times you taste it too much, like with thick crust pizza, but I think this was a good crust that complemented the toppings, which were all flavorful. Eaten cold, it fares well. The thin crust doesn't get soggy and the meat and cheese remain flavorful. A very good pizza. I prefer a thin crust to a thick crust, but this was an excellent thin crust. Overall Grade: A   Our next pizza is the Totino's Party Pizza Triple Meat, which I ate March 26th, 2025. Totino's was famously one of the first companies to make frozen pizza and it was later acquired by General Mills. These days, Totino's is mostly known for its pizza rolls, but they still put out small individual pizzas and for the sake of historical continuity, I decided to give it a try. It was okay. It definitely tasted like pizza, but it didn't compare to the stronger ones I've tried like Heggie's or Pothole Pizza. You do need to cook it for a long time for the crust to be adequately crispy and not soggy. I didn't bother to try it cold since I didn't think it would be improved, and this is definitely a pizza where you might want to add some oregano or garlic salt. Its biggest advantage is that it's quite inexpensive, a cheap meal, but don't expect too much. Overall Grade: C+     Next up is Authentic Motor City Pizza Company Three Meat Pizza, which I had on March 28th, 2025. Authentic Motor Pizza Company is owned by the Ilitch billionaire family of Michigan who are the original founders of Little Caesar's Pizza. This pizza is a Detroit style pizza, which is essentially a square pizza cooked in a square pan with a thick crust and lots of cheese. The square shape comes from the fact that Detroit style pizza was originally cooked in a car oil drip pan since the commercially available pans at the time weren't suitable for the pizza. There is some dispute about what actually happened, but it seems Detroit style pizza started at a restaurant called Buddy's Rendezvous in the 1940s, which later became the local Michigan pizza chain Buddy's Pizza. I have to admit, I was originally only vaguely aware of Detroit style pizza, but in 2019 I went to the Detroit area for a funeral and had dinner at Buddy's Pizza, which was amazing. (There was also a guy getting arrested in the parking lot at the time, but thankfully that did not affect the dining experience.) If your travels ever take you to the Detroit area, you should definitely try Buddy's Pizza. Anyway, so after all this, when I happened across a Detroit style frozen pizza, I decided I needed to give it a try. Eaten hot, it is quite good. As I've said before, I'm generally not a fan of thick crust pizza, which this is, but it's a good thick crust, crispy on the edges and bottom without being bready or chewy. The toppings are all excellent, which is helped by the fact that the sauce is good and has a good garlic flavor to it. I was curious how it would hold up when eaten cold and I actually liked it a bit better than when it was hot. The cheese sets well and then everything holds together and so it's a very substantial, very tasty cold pizza. This is good pizza, though that said, I still prefer a thinner crust because the Detroit style of pizza is delicious, but dang, is it a heavy meal. Overall grade: A   Next up is Pothole Kitchen Sink Pizza, which I ate on April 4, 2025, and this is another pizza from the Midwestern convenience store chain Kwik Trip and features pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, onions, and red and green peppers. I really like this one, like the other Pothole varieties I've tried. It's quite good: good crust, good cheese, good sauce, and very flavorful toppings. This has a slight advantage over my other favorite version, the Pothole Meat Sweats Pizza, since the lesser amount of meat means it isn't as greasy. Eaten cold, it is likewise quite good. I think this ties with the Meat Sweats Pothole Pizza. They both represent excellent versions of two different pizza experiences. If you don't want mushrooms and vegetables on your pizza, get the Meat Sweats, but if you do want vegetables, go for the Kitchen Sink. Overall grade: A+     Next up is Heggie's Six Pack Pizza, which I tried on April 11th, 2025. This is another pizza from Minnesota company Heggie's, which had one of my favorite pizzas of the last roundup. Heggie's Six Pack Pizza comes with sausage, pepperoni, Canadian bacon, regular bacon, mozzarella cheese, and cheddar cheese. Let's just say if you're eating this, you probably don't have a six pack.   Anyway. Eaten hot, it was quite good. I like the thin crust and all the meat was good. I would say the biggest weakness is that you can mostly taste the cheese and the Canadian bacon since they kind of drown out all the other flavors. Eaten cold, I would say it tastes better. You can taste all the individual toppings. The cheese, sauce, and crust are pleasant when cold as well. This was a good pizza, but I do like the pepperoni only version better since I think the taste is superior. Overall grade: A-   Next up is the Tombstone Tavern Style Meat Crumble Pizza, which I had on May 2nd, 2025, and this is a more upgraded version of the basic model Tombstone pizza with thinner crust, slightly different cheese, and a mixture of pepperoni and crumbled pork sausage. Honestly, it tasted about the same as the standard model Tombstone. The crust and meat were slightly better, but I thought the sauce was rather watery. Eaten cold, it was better since the watery flavor of the sauce wasn't as strong. That said, I do think the standard model Tombstone pizza is a better pizza. Overall grade: B-     Then we had a bit of a gap here because I had basically tried most of the pizza brands that I actually wanted to try for this review. There are some more lower cost brands out there, but I figured they'd be mostly similar to the cheaper ones I already tried.   Then I came across the final pizza for this review roundup, Screamin' Sicilian Mountain of Meat, which I had on June 6th, 2025. This is another pizza from the Screamin' Sicilian line, which is part of the Palermo Pizza Company of Wisconsin. I tried an all pepperoni version for the last pizza roundup and thought it was pretty good. It got an A-. I decided to try the Mountain of Meat, which has pepperoni, sausage, ham, and bacon, and has a stone fired crust. I liked it better than the all pepperoni version. The different meats blend together well, and I think this version of the crust is quite a bit better. It's a little bit thicker, but still quite crispy. Eaten cold, it likewise holds up quite well. The spiciness of the meat remains flavorful even when cold and the cheese holds it all together. Overall grade: A   So to sum up after two pizza review posts, here are my favorites.   Overall favorites: Pothole Meat Sweats and Pothole Kitchen Sink. Excellent strong runners-up: Heggie's Pepperoni Pizza, Lotzza Motzza, Bellatoria, and the Screamin' Sicilian Mountain of Meat. The downside of all these choices is that they tend to be expensive, usually $10 US or above. So with that in mind, here are best my choices for the best budget options, which would be Tombstone Pepperoni & Sausage and Target's Good & Gather Pepperoni.   Also, one advantage of frozen pizza is that you can add spices to flavor the taste. I found that frozen pizza in general frequently benefits from the addition of oregano or perhaps a dusting of garlic powder. So if you are looking for some frozen pizza, hopefully this will help you find one.   So that is it for this week. Next week I promise we will go back to writing and publishing topics instead of pizza. 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 see you all next week.

Due to an unexpected time shortage, this week we're looking back at Episode 182, where I discussed the favorite scenes I wrote in 2023. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods, Book #9 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: CROWN50 The coupon code is valid through July 9, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered!

In this week's episode, we look at five tips and tricks for optimal ebook pricing. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of my Tower of Endless Worlds series at my Payhip store: TOWER25 The coupon code is valid through June 30, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 254 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 5, 2025, and today we are looking at ebook pricing strategies. Before we get into that, we will do Coupon of the Week and have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects.   First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of my Tower of Endless World Series at my Payhip store, and that is TOWER25. And as always, the coupon code and the links to the store will be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June the 30th, 2025, so if you need a new ebook series to read this summer, we have got you covered.   Now for an update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am 53,000 words into Shield of Power, which will be the sixth and final book of my Shield War series, and that puts me on Chapter 13 of 29. I feel like the book is going to be between about 105,000 to 110,000 words in rough draft, but we will see when I get there. I'm hoping to have it out before the end of June, but there's a good chance it may slip to July, so listen to this space and watch my website for updates.   I am also 104,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: The Final Quest, which as the name implies, will be the third and final book of the Stealth and Spells trilogy. I am right in the middle of writing the climactic scenes of the story and because of the length and how far I've gotten and I've been chipping away at this since October, it will come out very quickly after Shield of Power, possibly even in the same month. I'm also 5,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which will be the sixth and final book of the Ghost Armor series, and that should probably come out towards the end of summer, if all goes well.   In audiobook news, Brad Wills is recording Shield of Battle and Hollis McCarthy is recording Ghost in the Corruption right now. I know they're hard at work at it because both of them sent me emails with questions about pronunciations today. Hopefully we'll have some exciting new audiobooks for you later this summer.   00:02:12 Main Topic: Ebook Pricing Strategies [Note: All Prices Referenced are USD]   And now let's move right into our main topic, ebook pricing strategies, which is often a contentious topic for indie authors. We're going to go over five different ebook pricing strategies to look at when they're the most effective or why you might want to try them. I'll talk about when I have used each of them and why I chose to do so or not to do so, as the case might be.   As I said, this is often a contentious topic for indie authors, especially newer indie authors who often have in their head an idea that their book is worth X amount of dollars because the amount of work they put into it, like for example, “my novel should be a minimum of $9.99 or $14.99 because of all the work I put into it. It was a year's worth of work, and if you can buy a fancy latte at Starbucks or $6 or $7 or whatever, then you should be able to pay $9.99 for this novel upon which I toiled for a year.”   And that is a nice sentiment, but in reality it doesn't work that way for a couple of reasons. For one thing, people are only willing to drop that kind of money on authors that they've known for a long time, like hardcore Stephen King or James Patterson or Jack Reacher fans dropping $20 or $30 for the novel in hardcover when comes out the first time. That kind of loyalty has to be earned over the long term, and if you're brand a new indie author or a newish indie author, charging $9.99 for your ebook is something of an ask.   For the second thing, an ebook is not a physical object, and there is a point where people blanch at paying a lot of money for an item that is essentially electronic and digital. If you're paying $9.99 for a paperback, at least you're getting the paperback, the physical object. Paying $9.99 for something utterly intangible like an ebook is a much harder sell. Because of that, the optimal price point for ebooks tends to be a bit lower than that.   For the sake of not adding too many caveats to each point based on genre and format, let's assume for each of these strategies, the ebook we are pricing is a fantasy novel of about 90,000 words without any maps or images and is not being traditionally published by an established author. In an interview, Smashwords founder Mark Coker presented data from Smashwords that showed most indie authors selling full length fiction will see the most success setting their ebook prices at either $2.99, $3.99, or $4.99 (depending on genre). That is still the case, generally speaking. However, there are some special pricing strategies that may increase your sales, and that is what we'll be focusing on this episode. #1: The first of the five pricing strategies we will look at is permafree, and permafree means that the book is permanently set to free instead of just for a short period of time. Why does this work? People like free things. People will eagerly take something that's free while something that's even $2 or $3 will lead to hesitation on their part, especially for an unfamiliar author, and that is true of $0.99 as well.   However, permafree is a strategy only makes financial sense if the book is the first book in a series and there are at least a few books in the series already published. If you have one book and make it permafree, that's fine if you want to give away the book to readers so it's read, but it will not make you any money. It makes more sense to make the first book in a series free when there are like four or five or more books in the series. Just setting a book to permafree is not enough on its own. You still need to spend money on ads and marketing, so you're relying on sales from the next several books in the series to subsidize the free book and marketing cost. Very often I will advertise the free first book in one of my series and then calculate whether the ad was successful or not based on how many copies of the rest of the books in the series that I have actually sold.   There also needs to be a strong hook at the end of the first book to lure readers on to the second book to inspire readers to continue, but not an outright cliffhanger, which will annoy most readers and could hurt your reviews. If you're going to make your first book in the series free, it is a generally bad idea to end that book with a cliffhanger or to end that book with an unresolved main plot. People will get mad at you and accuse you of trying to nickel and dime them on the rest of the series.   It's also a good idea to put the link to the second book right at the end of the first book in order to help the reader continue on in the series. You also need to accept that most of the attention for permafree titles often comes from so-called book hoarders. This strategy is not a great one for trying to get reviews as there is a significant segment of readers who blindly grab whatever is free and then they never get around to reading it, much less finishing it.   In the same vein, you have to accept that the percentage of readers converting from the free ebook to the rest of the paid series will be much lower than the conversion from a paid book to the next paid book in the series normally would be. What kind of conversion rate am I talking about? If you have say, a conversion rate from the free first book to the paid second book of 5-10%, you are doing very well.   How have I used the strategy? I've made almost all of my series starters permafree, and since I write fairly long series, it's easier for me to do that than for people with a series with only two or three books. Making books permafree has been a major part of my indie publishing efforts over the last 14 years, and I found it's pretty much the most consistent low effort thing I can do to drive sales. It's like a constant trickle, though it does work better on the non-Amazon stores than it does with Amazon today.   #2: So now we will move on to our second pricing strategy, which is the $0.99 price. Some authors will temporarily set the $0.99 price at launch in order to gain some reviews and then raise the price once that has happened. Others will price the first book in the series at $0.99 and then price the subsequent books in the series higher, in a similar strategy to permafree. This strategy gets a higher percentage of the people reading the book than permafree and authors have reported a higher percentage of read through continuing to the next book as well.   This price does well with BookBub deals and could be used temporarily for that. BookBub customers are extremely price sensitive and they expect steep discounts. The biggest downside of the strategy is that on sites like Amazon, you'll be paid a lower royalty rate of 35%, so any ads or marketing costs will effectively eat most of your profits. However, if your book is wide in all the stores, many of them offer better royalty rates than Amazon for books at $0.99. For myself, what I've done for long series is that I make the first book free and then the second book $0.99, and then all the books after there are full price. Obviously, you take a bit of a hit on the first few books in the series, but if you have a long series like I do, then you can definitely make up the lost costs with sales of the rest of the books. I've also used $0.99 to pretty good results with BookBub deals over the years.   #3: The third pricing strategy we're going to look at is the box set. This strategy applies to a series since you're packaging multiple full length novels together and sometimes throwing in a short story or other special content. The important thing about pricing box sets is that it should be a substantial discount over buying the full length books in the sets separately. The price will be a bigger hook than adding special features. You might want to make the first box set less expensive than the subsequent ones in order to motivate readers to begin the series. This strategy is great for Kindle Unlimited (KU) since readers are getting multiple books but only have to take one of their allocated book spots in the KU Library. Longer books also lead to bigger payouts, since KU operates on pages per read system, which means that the longer the book is (and assuming someone actually reads it), you'll then get a bigger payout. This also applies somewhat in a more limited way for Kobo Plus, in the way that it calculates page reads. They use minutes read instead of page reads.   How have I used this? I have many box sets, and because of the limitations of Amazon pricing, most of my box sets aren't above $9.99, but if the three novels in the box set are individually $4.99, that is a savings of 33% as opposed to buying the books individually. So I mostly did the box sets to provide a base for doing the box sets in audio, but they do also generate some income on their own because of the savings.   #4: The fourth pricing strategy we're going to look at is coupons. The most common way to provide coupons in Indie Author World is either through Smashwords or a direct sales page, such as My Payhip store, which I mention frequently on this podcast. Coupons are a convenient way to make a book free to only a select group of people, such as newsletter subscribers or contest winners. It is by far the easiest and most flexible way to discount your books temporarily. For example, on Payhip, it only takes a couple minutes to set up a coupon and then it will be ready to use instantly or for whatever specific dates and times you have set the coupon to run. They are the most effective when they are short term to create a sense of urgency to buy the book, but not so short term that readers miss out on the deal. The biggest downside is that most buyers are not as familiar with using Smashwords or a direct sales page, so they may be hesitant to use a new site, especially if they have a large ebook collection on another platform like Kindle.   How have I used this strategy? For years, I've used the Smashwords coupon strategy to give away a free short story when I publish a book (with Ghost in the Corruption, it was Ghost Spells, and when I finish Shield of Power, the short story for that will be called Consort of Darkness and newsletter subscribers will get a Smashwords coupon code they can use to get a free ebook copy of the short story). I also frequently do Coupon of the Week through my Payhip store, where I offer 25% off a featured ebook or series or 50% off an audiobook. Since the royalty rate on Payhip is higher than on Amazon or Audible, I'm able to offer generous sales prices without losing money on a discounted sale. So once you have a large enough catalog, coupons through direct sales can be an effective strategy.   #5: And the fifth and final sales strategy we'll look at this episode is Kindle Countdown Deals. If your book is in Kindle Select/Kindle Unlimited, Kindle allows you to run a limited time discount on it. Readers will see a countdown clock showing how long they have to buy it at the price. To be eligible to run a Countdown Deal, your book must have been enrolled in KDP Select for at least 30 days, and your book's list price must have been unchanged for 30 days before and 14 days after the deal runs. There are some other requirements, so read Amazon's documentation page very carefully before you decide to run a Countdown Deal. The biggest advantage of a Countdown Deal is the royalty rate for the book during the deal will be based on the book's regular price and not what it's discounted to during the sale, so this is a nice way to try a lower price for your book. For example, if the book is usually $4.99 and during the Countdown Deal it is lowered to $0.99, you'll still get 70% of the sale rate. Now granted, 70% of $0.99 is not as good as 70% of $4.99, but you may be able to make it up in sales volume. This strategy gets a lot more viewers than a coupon with Smashwords or your direct sales page would. However, it's not nearly as flexible as those options. It requires some advanced planning. This method is most effective when paired with a marketing push, such as an increase in ad spending or a newsletter notifying your newsletter subscribers about the deal. The biggest downside of this strategy is that you have to be exclusive with Amazon in order to take advantage of the deal. If your books are wide, you can't do a Kindle Countdown Deal for them. I've used this strategy intermittently with limited success, I have to admit, because generally I don't have that many books in KU at any given time. That said, when I have had books in KU, I've tried Kindle Countdown deals and had moderate success with them. Overall, I do think the other methods I've already mentioned on this episode are more effective, but if you have books in KU, it is definitely worth trying a Kindle Countdown Deal in combination with some ads and a newsletter push.   So hopefully these five pricing strategies will help you make sense of the pricing of books in Indie Author World and will be helpful to you as you decide how to price your own books.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we will see you all next week.  

In this week's episode, we take a look at the major self-publishing platforms that I use, and examine the pros and cons of each. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, Book #8 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: DOOM50 The coupon code is valid through June 24, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 253 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 30th, 2025, and today we are looking at the current major self-publishing platforms and what they offer indie authors. Before we get to our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing projects.   So let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress (book number eight in the Dragonskull series, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That code is DOOM50. And as always, we will have the coupon code and the links to the store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June 24th, 2025. So if you are setting out on summer travels this summer and you need an audiobook to listen to while you're in the car or plane, we have got you covered. So now for an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. Ghost in the Corruption (as I mentioned last week) is now out and available at all the ebook stores: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. It is selling well. So thank you all for that. Now that Ghost in the Corruption is finished, what am I working on next? Well, back in 2023, I finished the Dragonskull and The Silent Order series back to back, so I declared Summer 2023 to be my Summer of Finishing Things. Well, it looks like Summer 2025 is going to be the Super Summer of Finishing Things because I intend to finish three series back to back.   First up is Shield of Power, the sixth and final book of The Shield War series. As of this publishing, I am 26,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 6 of 29. So I think it's going to end up being around 100,000-110,000 words long, and I am hoping it will be out in June, though it might slip to July depending on how things go. Once that is done, the next one up will be Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, which will be the third and very definitely final book of the Stealth and Spells Online trilogy. Believe it or not, I have been working on Final Quest on the side for so long that I passed the 100,000 word mark in that book this week. In fact, it's been a side project for so long that I don't remember how long I've been working on it, and I had to look up the metadata to check that I indeed started chipping away on it on October 18th, 2024. So I am very pleased that I'm nearly done with the rough draft and because of that reason, if all goes well, it'll come out very quickly after Shield of Power, since I think the rough draft will end up at about 125,000 to 130,000 words or in that neighborhood. Once Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest is finished, I will then write Ghost in the Siege, which will be the sixth and final book of the Ghost Armor series. I am 1,500 words into that and hoping for that to come out in August or September, if all goes well. Once The Shield War, Stealth and Spells Online, and Ghost Armor are finished, I will finally be free to return to the Rivah and Nadia series. I realized that through all of 2024 and the first half of 2025, I had five unfinished series at the same time, and that was just too much for me to keep track of as a writer, and I think it may have been too much for the readers because it was too much of a wait between the different series as I worked my way through them. So five series at the same time is too much, so hence the Super Summer of Finishing Things. Going forward, I've decided that three unfinished series at the same time will be my maximum, which after the Super Summer of Finishing Things will be Cloak Mage, Half-Elven Thief, and a new epic fantasy series that I will set in the realm of Owyllain.   In audiobook news, Brad Wills started working on Shield of Battle this week and Hollis McCarthy started working on Ghost in the Corruption, so hopefully before probably about July or thereabouts, we will have those audiobooks available for you to listen to. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:03:49 Main Topic of the Week: Self-Publishing Platforms for Ebooks [Note: Information in this Episode is Very Likely to Change]   So now let's move on to our main topic for the week, which is the main self-publishing platforms for ebooks. Today we will do a brief overview of the self-publishing platforms I currently use: Amazon/KDP, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Draft2Digital/Smashwords. The reason I wanted to do this is because there are many scammy platforms for self-publishing out there, but fortunately there are also many legitimate ones. Today we'll compare several of the most popular ones for ebooks. Just to make things easier for comparison, we'll be using the term platform to discuss both retailers and aggregators and we're not going to talk about options for self-publishing print or audio formats today. We're going to focus solely on ebooks.   First of all, what should you look for in a publishing platform? The first thing is to make sure you retain complete ownership of your content in all formats. Some of these scammer ones try to claim all rights to anything you try to post or sell through them, so that is definitely a red flag to watch out for. Make sure that you understand any exclusivity requirements of any programs that you sign up for such as KDP Select, such as if other formats like audio are also included in their requirements, how long exclusivity lasts, et cetera. If the platform requires exclusivity, that is definitely something to pay attention to. Make sure you do your research carefully to understand how pricing, royalties, and payments work on each individual platform. Sometimes some of them will pay quarterly, some of them pay monthly, and some of them pay you last month's royalties at the end of the month. Some of them like Amazon run like two months behind.   Finally, and this is a big one, you should not have to pay any money in order to upload your work. If they are asking for money upfront, it is probably a scam. Now, there are some aggregators that don't take a percentage and instead charge you a yearly fee. I'm not talking about them in this podcast episode because I don't use them, but they are out there. One example would be Book Funnel, which does charge a yearly fee for you to use but provides a valuable service in being a backend for running your own store on like Payhip or Shopify, and there's a couple of other useful services in that way, but they're not a storefront and they don't take a percentage of any royalties. They just charge a yearly fee. So they're not the topic with this episode.   All the platforms I've talked about today do not have any fees in order to upload. Reputable sites like Amazon or Kobo will instead take a percentage of each book's sale. It's also good to have a few realistic expectations before you start using self-publishing platforms, and one of them is that the platform is not a marketer. For example, many people complain that KDP doesn't showcase their books and they get lost in the millions of books available. However, none of these services are promising that you'll make the front page of their site just by publishing there. It's a common delusion among new indie authors that when you publish your first book, that's all you have to do and people will flock to it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.   In fact, since Amazon makes a small fortune off book ads, it's not in their interest to give away screen space for free, and this isn't to knock on Amazon, that's just the way the retail industry works. For example, if you go into a Target or a Walmart or another big box retailer, note the products that are prominently displayed on the aisle displays or the endcaps of the aisles. They didn't just get there randomly. The manufacturers of those products paid big money to Amazon and Target and Walmart and the other big box retailers to have their products featured there. In many cases, online commerce is no different.   Getting your book uploaded onto a platform is just the first step. Promoting and marketing the book is up to you and strategies for those will vary based on which ones you choose to use. For example, if you choose to make your work exclusive to just one platform, it's not a good idea to run Facebook ads in countries where that platform either doesn't exist or where it's not terribly popular. Today we're going to be just focusing on comparing the platforms, not how to best to market from them. So what are the options?   #1: First up is the most common platform people use and it's the 800 pound gorilla in the self-publishing space, and that is Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing. And what are the pros and cons of KDP?   Pro: They are the biggest force in ebook publishing in many countries, including the United States. Some authors find that as much as 80 to 95% of their ebook sales come from Amazon, even if they are not exclusive with Amazon. For myself, it's usually about 50 to 60% of my sales on any given month are from Amazon and the rest come from the other retailers.   Heavy readers are generally very familiar with the Kindle Store interface and Library setup, and many readers are kind of locked into Amazon because they own Kindle devices, subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, and have large Kindle Libraries. So those are all the pros of publishing with KDP.   Cons: If you're expecting a large portion of your sales to come from the print version of your book or if print sales are very important to you, be aware that many bookstores and libraries either can't or won't buy print books from Amazon, so you should find an additional platform for the print version such as Ingram Spark or maybe Barnes & Noble's print division. One big concern about going exclusive with Amazon is that you're losing readers who don't have Kindle books in their countries, people who are boycotting Amazon for a variety of reasons, people who are locked into another platform such as Apple or Kobo, or people who want to self-archive their ebooks since Amazon doesn't allow that anymore. If you're already wide, you'll have to look carefully at what percentage of your sales are non-Amazon and if this percentage is an amount you'd be comfortable risking losing in order to be exclusive. Occasionally authors do complain about the customer service available to KDP, especially if it's urgent. For myself, I've not personally had any huge problems with KDP customer service. That said, I think you should expect a lead time of about one to two business days on anything you ask because I usually go through the email form.   Does KDP offer a subscription service? Yes. Kindle Unlimited (KU) readers pay a set amount and can read an unlimited number of books each month, although they're limited as to how many they can have in their library at any one time. Promotions happen regularly, usually based around big sales like Prime Day, and it can make a subscription as cheap as $0.99 for a three month period. Some also receive free subscriptions by buying certain Amazon products such as a new Kindle or Kindle Fire.   The downside of being in Kindle Unlimited is the exclusivity. You can't be in KU without being exclusive with Amazon, or at least the specific book in question has to be exclusive. Not all of your books have to be exclusive, and many authors such as myself will usually put one series in KU and then make sure everything else is wide. You must agree to be exclusive with them for ninety days and that time period is renewable.   What does KDP pay in terms of royalty? For $2.99 to $9.99, they give you 70% of the sale price. Under $2.99 and above $9.99, it's 35%. So that is sort of an encouragement from Amazon to price your ebooks in the $2.99 to $9.99 range. Currently I price new novels at $4.99 and do short stories at $0.99 cents.   What do I do? I have all of my titles available through KDP. I have a smaller portion of my collection exclusive through KDP Select/KU, and I have only recently increased that amount of Select titles due to the economic downturn. I suspect that KU users are likely to hold onto their subscriptions while cutting other expenses because honestly, KU is a pretty good deal for readers and the monthly subscription costs is about the same as one tradpub frontlist ebook, but with a KU subscription, they could read thousands of books for the same price. The value of KU is really very strong for frequent romance, LitRPG, science fiction, and fantasy readers. There's a strong population in the KU subscriber base often referred to as binge readers. They care more about variety, discovering new books, and the ability to read a lot over the ability to read specific authors or stories.   So overall, I think if you are self-publishing and even if you don't like Amazon very much or don't plan to go exclusive, it's still in your best interest to publish your ebook with them, even if you are wide and intend to do all the other retailers just because Amazon really is the biggest ebook platform out there at the moment. #2: Now, the next self-publishing platform we're going to look at is Barnes & Noble Press, which as the name implies, belongs to Barnes & Noble. The Pros: some people are never, ever going to let go of their Nooks or they already have a large personal ebook library through the Nook so they feel locked into that platform. These readers are the majority of people buying ebooks through Barnes & Noble, but fortunately that group tends to read a lot. There's also a lot of trust in Barnes & Noble as a brand, and that inspires people to continue buying from them.   In fact, for a while in the indie author space at the end of the 2010s and the start of the 2020s, it was a regular prediction that Barnes & Noble was going to go out of business soon, but then the company was bought by a private equity firm, and while private equity firms often have a deserved bad reputation for stripping a company of assets and then selling it off at a bargain basement price (such as the fate of Red Lobster), that does not seem to be the case of what happened with Barnes & Noble and the company really has been strengthening in recent years. So they may be here to stay for a while.   The downsides of publishing with Barnes & Noble Press is that Barnes & Noble is relatively a minor player in the ebook market, though usually in the top four of most indie author ebook sales if they're wide. They have shifted their focus to selling print books instead of Nook devices, especially in the retail space.   Do they offer a subscription service? They do not. However, nothing about Barnes & Noble requires exclusivity, which is nice, and the royalty structure is pretty good. It's 70% over all titles over $0.99. So if you want, you could price your ebook at $0.99 or $19.99 and still make 70%, which you couldn't do with those prices on Amazon.     #3: The next self-publishing platform we'll look at is Kobo Writing Life, which is the ebook platform to publish on Kobo, which is owned by Rakuten. Pros: Kobo is strong in the international market and will help you to reach readers in many countries. Based on my sales data, in Canada and Australia, Kobo is significantly bigger than Amazon for ebook sales. Kobo has also had a surge of recent media attention in the US as people seek out alternatives to Amazon and Kindle devices.   The Con of Kobo, and this is a fairly small one, is that their US market share is still fairly small compared to Amazon or Barnes & Noble or some of the others. But as I mentioned, they're a lot stronger in Canada and Australia, and they do reach a lot of different countries, more than Amazon does.   Does Kobo have a subscription service? Yes, Kobo Plus. Kobo Plus is significantly less expensive than Kindle Unlimited, and there's an additional tier that allows you to add audiobook content to the plan. The library isn't quite as extensive as KU though, though. I should note that in the years since Kobo has been introduced, I'd say about half of my revenue from Kobo (sometimes 60% of my revenue from Kobo) comes from Kobo Plus and not from direct ebook sales. So it's getting to the point where the majority of their ebook revenue I suspect, is coming from Kobo Plus and not direct Kobo sales.   Do they require exclusivity? No, which is another strong selling point for Kobo Plus. For their royalty structure, ebooks over $2.99, you get 70% and any books over below $2.99, you get 45%, which is a more generous term than Amazon in terms of the royalty rate for below $2.99 and above $9.99.   So what do I do? I currently use it as one of the platforms for my ebooks. It's been a pretty strong seller for me consistently over the years, and every Kobo book that I have is also available in Kobo Plus, which probably explains the revenue split I was talking about earlier. #4: The next platform we'll look at is Draft2Digital/Smashwords, which we'll do as one because Draft2Digital and Smashwords are in the process of merging. Draft2Digital is technically what's called an aggregator, where you upload your book and then they can publish on a variety of different platforms for you, and in exchange, they take a small cut of the sales. Draft2Digital is, in my opinion, probably the most effective way to get your ebooks through Apple and Smashwords. Apple does have its own direct uploading service, but I've never used it because there are a bit too many hoops to jump through.   Draft2Digital does, as I mentioned, have a way to publish on multiple storefronts at once while managing uploads and sales reporting through just one interface. They're not a storefront in and of themselves, although since Draft2Digital does own Smashwords, Smashwords essentially acts as their storefront for them. Although Draft2Digital lists Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble as an option, most authors will upload to these sites separately, and in fact, that's what I do for myself.   The Pros of Draft2Digital is that it's a definite time savings using Draft2Digital to publish across multiple platforms, especially with platforms like Apple that are more difficult or time consuming to learn. This is also a convenient way to make your work accessible to library platforms like Overdrive/Libby, Hoopla, and Bibliotheca, if that is important to you. Library sales have never been a huge priority of mine, but I've never been opposed to them either, so I usually just flip those switches on and then don't think about it again.   The Cons for Draft2Digital are that there was a period after the Smashwords migration where they received complaints about customer service and difficulty in setting up tax information, though I think that is mostly ironed out now.   One potential hazard for Draft2Digital with a very specific subset of writers is that if you are a writer of, shall we say, very hard erotica, the sort that ends up in very restricted categories on most stores, you will probably have trouble publishing through Draft2Digital. This is not, however, a problem that's unique to Draft2Digital. Amazon has what is called the “erotica dungeon”, where if you publish certain kinds of, like we said, very harsh erotica, your book isn't searchable on the Amazon store. You can link to it directly, but it will never show up on any search results. Kobo in particular has had problems with erotica.   Back in the 2010s, Kobo was also distributing ebooks to some British retailers, and these British retailers suddenly got upset when they noticed that these kinds of hard erotica were showing up on their store pages, which was not a good look for the company. And so there was a kerfuffle until that was all sorted out. My frank opinion with that is if you are writing these kinds of erotica, the big stores and Draft2Digital will never be on your side, and so you are better off pursuing a sort of a Patreon/running your own store on Shopify or Payhip strategy, but that is a bit of a digression.   So in terms of royalties, Draft2Digital takes 10% of the book's retail price per copy sold, which is in addition to whatever amount is taken by the specific storefront. So you are paying a bit of money in exchange for convenience for just uploading your book to Draft2Digital and having it push out the book to all the different stores for you.   What I do is I use Draft2Digital for Apple mainly because for a while I was using Smashwords, but Smashwords in the 2010s was a bit more persnickety than is now, and you needed to prepare a specially formatted doc file to publish on Smashwords and sometimes getting it through the Smashwords processing onto Apple was a bit of a pain. Draft2Digital took epub files, which are much easier to work with, and after a while I switched over all my Apple publishing to Draft2Digital entirely. So that's why I use Draft2Digital for Apple and for various library services that tend to be a minor amount of sales. Because of the difficulties on publishing direct to Apple, I do find that that 10% is good trade off in terms of selling books on Apple for me.   #5: Now onto Google Play's ebook self-publishing platform, which is, I think its full name is the Google Books Partner Center, which lets you publish books to the Google Play Store for sale on Android devices.   The Pros are that for writers interested in the international market, Google Play is another strong choice for a platform since the international mobile device market is very Android heavy. The iPhone (Apple) tends to be concentrated mainly in the US and a few of the wealthier countries like the UK and Canada, but Android has a much more international reach in general than the iPhone. Google Play also has some interesting promotional options for ebooks, such as offering the buyer a chance to subscribe to a specific series.   The cons are that some authors report that their sales reporting doesn't always consistently generate reports, and others are annoyed that it only generates a CSV file, (which isn't that much of a hardship for people who are familiar with Excel).   For myself, I found that there is a bit of a reporting lag on Google Play where it will sometimes take as long as five or six days for sales to show up on the dashboard, though usually it's only a delay of two days, though sometimes during the month you'll get these bigger lags and sometimes processing new material on the Google Play Store can be slow, and it can sometimes take two to three days for things to appear, though it usually gets worked out in the end. Does Google Play have a subscription service? It does not, nor does it require exclusivity, which is another point in its favor. And the royalties, the data is quite nice here. It is 70% for all price points in the countries listed on their support page, which only excludes a handful of countries like India, South Korea, and Japan (because of currency conversion regions or other local laws).   So those are the ebook publishing platforms that I currently use, and because I use them myself, I would recommend them. Hopefully that is helpful to you as you are looking for places to self-publish your book as you set out to become an indie author.   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 a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter and Spring 2025. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook versions of my anthologies at my Payhip store: JUNE25 The coupon code is valid through June 17, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 252 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 23rd, 2025, and today we are looking at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter and Spring 2025. We missed doing an episode last week for the simple reason that the day before I wanted to record, we had a bad thunderstorm that knocked down large portions of my fence, so my recording time was instead spent on emergency fence repair. However, the situation is under control, so hopefully we'll be back to weekly episodes for the immediate future. And now before we get to our main topics, let's have Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my current writing projects.   So first up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook version of all my short story anthologies at my Payhip store and that is JUNE25. As always, the coupon code and links will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June the 17th, 2025, so if you need a new ebook for this summer, we have got you covered.   And now an update on my current writing projects. Ghost in the Corruption is finished. It is publishing right now. In fact, I paused the publishing process to record this and so by the time this episode goes live, hopefully Ghost in the Corruption should be available at all ebook stores. My next main project now that Ghost in the Corruption is done will be Shield of Power and as of this recording I am 15,000 words into it. My secondary projects will be Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest and I'm 97,000 words into that, so hopefully that will come out very shortly after Shield of Power and I'll also be starting Ghost in the Siege, the final book in the Ghost Armor series as another secondary project and I'm currently zero words into that. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   In audiobook news, Ghost in the Assembly (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now out and should be available at all the usual audiobook stores so you can listen to that if you are traveling for the summer. Recording of Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is underway soon. I believe he's starting it this week, so hopefully we will have another audiobook in the Shield War series for you before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:02:17 Main Topic: Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup   And now let's move on, without any further ado, to our main topic. Summer is almost upon us, which means it's time for my Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup. As usual, the movies and streaming shows are listed in order for my least favorite to my most favorite. The grades are based upon my own thoughts and opinions and are therefore wholly subjective. With all of that said, let's get to the movies and our first entry is MacGruber, which came out in 2010 and in all honesty, this might be objectively the worst movie I have ever seen. The Saturday Night Live MacGruber sketches are a parody of the old MacGyver action show from the ‘80s. And so the movie is essentially the sketch stretched out to make a parody of an ‘80s action movie. It is aggressively dumb and crude. Its only redeeming feature is that the movie knows it's quite stupid and so leans into the stupidity hard. I'll say this in its favor, MacGruber has no pretensions that is a good movie and does not take itself seriously and then runs away hard with that fact. For that he gets a plus, but nothing else. Overall grade: F+   Next up is Down Periscope, which came out in 1996. Now the fundamental question of any movie is the one Russell Crowe shouted at the audience in Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?” Sadly, I was not entertained with Down Periscope. This wanted to be a parody of Cold War era submarine thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, I say wanted because it didn't really succeed. Kelsey Grammer plays Lieutenant Commander Thomas Dodge, an unorthodox US Navy officer who wants command of his own nuclear sub, but he's alienated a few admirals, which is not traditionally a path to career advancement in the military. Dodge gets his chance in a Navy wargame where he has to command a diesel sub against nuclear subs. Sometimes parodies are so good that they become an example of the thing they are parodying (Hot Fuzz and Star Trek: Lower Decks are excellent examples of this phenomenon). The trouble is that the movie takes itself too seriously and just isn't all that funny. A few funny bits, true, but not enough of them. In the end, this was dumb funny but didn't resonate with me the way other dumb funny movies like Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder did. Overall grade: D   Next up is Deadpool and Wolverine, which came out in 2024. Unlike Down Periscope, I was entertained with this movie, though both movies reside on the dumb funny spectrum. Deadpool and Wolverine is basically one long meta in-joke/love letter for the last 30 years of superhero movies. If you've seen enough of those movies, you'll find those movies funny, if occasionally rather tasteless. If you haven't seen enough of those movies, Deadpool and Wolverine will just be incomprehensible. The plot is that Wade Wilson AKA Deadpool gets pulled into some Marvel style multiverse nonsense. To save his universe from destruction, he needs to recruit a Wolverine since in his universe, Wolverine died heroically.   In the process, Deadpool stumbles across the worst Wolverine in the multiverse. Together they have to overcome their mutual dislike and attempt to save Deadpool's universe from destruction at the hands of a rogue branch of the Time Variance Authority. This means the movie can bring in a lot of cameos from past Marvel films. Hugh Jackman's performance really carries the movie on its back. Like I said, this movie is essentially one very long Marvel in-joke. I thought it was funny. I definitely think it can't stand on its own without having seen a sufficient number of the other Marvel movies. Overall grade: C   Our next movie is the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which came out in 2024. This is very loosely (with an emphasis on “very”) based on Operation Postmaster during World War II, when British Special Forces seized some Italian ships that had been supplying parts for German U-boats. It was entertaining to watch but it couldn't quite make up its mind tonally if it was a war thriller or a heist movie about Western desperados recruited into a crew. It kind of tried to do both at the same time, which killed the momentum. Like, the first parts of the movie where the protagonists take out a Nazi patrol boat and then free a prisoner from a base were good thriller stuff, but then the plot fused with the heist stuff and really slowed down through the middle forty percent or so. It was also oddly stylized with a lot of spaghetti western-style music that seemed out of place and some stuff just didn't make sense, like at the end after pulling off the mission, the protagonists were all arrested. That just seems bizarre since if anything, Winston Churchill and a lot of the British wartime leadership were enthusiastic about special operations and probably had too much confidence in the effectiveness of covert operations. So I did enjoy watching this, but I can see why it didn't make a lot of money at the box office. Overall Grade: C   Next up is The Gorge, which came out in 2025. This was a peculiar mix of science fiction, romance, and horror. For the romance part, perhaps shooting zombies together is a good idea for a first date. Before I dig into the movie, a brief rant. In one scene, a character is using a chainsaw with no protective gear whatsoever and she's not fighting zombies or anything in a situation where she has to pick up a chainsaw without preparing first. She's trimming branches to pass time. If you're using a chainsaw, at a minimum you want protective eyewear and headphones. Ideally you'd want chainsaw pants as well to reduce the chance of serious injury if you slip and swing the saw into your leg. Since I became a homeowner, I've used a chainsaw a number of times and believe me, you definitely want good eye and ear protection. This has been your public safety announcement for this movie review.   Anyway, loner former sniper Levi is approached by a high ranking intelligence officer giving him a mysterious job. He needs to guard a tower overlooking a mysterious mist-filled gorge for one year. On the other side of the gorge is another tower, guarded by an elite Lithuanian sniper named Drasa. Like Levi, Drasa has a fair bit of emotional damage and they're officially forbidden to communicate. However, they're both lonely and they soon start communicating over the gorge using telescopes and whiteboard messages. Eventually Levi gets emotionally close enough to Drasa to rig a zipline to cross the gorge and speak with her in person.   Unfortunately, it turns out the gorge is full of twisted creatures that storm out and attack and the job of the two snipers is to keep them contained. If Levi and Drasa want to save their lives, they'll need to unravel the dark secret within the gorge. This movie was interesting and I enjoyed watching it, but it falls apart if you think about it too much (or at all). Like the chainsaw thing I ranted about above. The entire movie runs on that sort of logic. That said, I appreciate how the filmmakers were trying something new instead of something like Deadpool and Wolverine. Additionally, this was an Apple+ movie and it's interesting how Apple's approach to streaming is to just make a whole bunch of random stuff that's totally distinct, from Ted Lasso to Mythic Quest to Severance to The Gorge. It's like, “we have more money than most countries, so we're going to make Ted Lasso because we feel like it.” Then again, Apple+ is apparently losing a billion dollars every year, so maybe they'll eventually change their minds about that approach. Overall Grade: B-   Next up is Click, which came out in 2006. Cross It's a Wonderful Life with A Christmas Carol and the comedic style of Adam Sandler and you end up with Click. Basically Sandler plays Michael Newman, a workaholic architect with a demanding boss and increasingly strained relationship with his wife and children due to his workload. In a fit of exasperation with his situation, he goes to Bed Bath and Beyond, where he encounters an eccentric employee named Morty (played entertainingly by Christopher Walken). Morty gives him a remote control that lets him fast forward through time, which Michael then uses to skip the boring and tedious parts of his life, but he overuses the remote and goes too far into the future and sees the disastrous results of his current life choices. Definitely a story used in A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful Life but effectively told and I was entertained (rather on the crude side, though). Overall Grade: B- Next up is Mr. Deeds, which came out in 2002. This was actually one of Adam Sandler's better movies, in my opinion. It was a remake of the ‘30s movie Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. In this new version, Sandler plays Longfellow Deeds, a popular pizzeria owner in a small New Hampshire town. Unbeknownst to Deeds, his uncle is the owner of a major media mega corporation and when he dies, Deeds is his legal heir. When the company's CEO and chief lawyer arrive at the pizzeria to inform him of this fact, Deeds goes to New York and soon finds himself involved in the CEO's sinister machinations. Yet he happens to rescue an attractive woman from a mugger, but there is more to her than meets the eye. The movie was funny and not as crude, well, not quite as crude as some of Sandler's other stuff. It had good story structure and several great lines, my favorite of which was “he was weak and cowardly and wore far too much cologne.”   Sandler's movies, in a strange way, are often very medieval. Like various medieval fables had a savvy peasant outwitting pompous lords, greedy merchants, and corrupt clergymen. The best Adam Sandler protagonist tends to be a good natured everyman who defeats the modern equivalent of medieval authority figures- evil CEOs, arrogant star athletes, sinister bureaucrats and so forth. Overall Grade: B     Next up is House of David, which came out in 2025 and this is basically the story of King David from the Bible told in the format of an epic fantasy TV series. Like if someone wanted to do an epic fantasy series about Conan the Barbarian, it could follow the same stylistic format as this show. And of course Conan and David followed a similar path from adventurer to king. Anyway, if one were to pick a part of the Bible from which to make a movie or TV series, the story of David would be an excellent choice because David's life was so dramatic that it would hardly require any embellishments in the adaptation. The story is in the Books of First and Second Samuel. King Saul is ruling over the Israelites around 1000 BC or so, but has grown arrogant. Consequently, God instructs the prophet Samuel to inform Saul that the kingdom will be taken away from him and given to another. God then dispatches Samuel to anoint David as the new king of Israel. David is a humble shepherd but then enters Saul's service and undertakes feats of daring, starting with defeating the giant Goliath and leading Saul's troops to victory and battle against Israel's numerous enemies. (The Iron Age Middle East was even less peaceful than it is now.) Eventually, Saul's paranoia and madness gets the best of him and he turns on David, who flees into exile. After Saul and his sons are killed in battle with the Philistines. David returns and becomes the acknowledged king after a short civil war with Saul's surviving sons and followers.   If Saul's fatal flaw was his arrogance of pride, David's seems to have been women. While the story of David and Bathsheba is well known, David nonetheless had eight wives (most of them at the same time) and an unknown but undoubtedly large number of concubines. Naturally David's children from his various wives and concubines did not get along and David was almost deposed due to the conflicts between his children. Unlike Saul and later David's son Solomon, David was willing to repent when a prophet of God informed him of wrongdoing and to be fair to David, monogamy was generally not practiced among Early Iron Age Middle Eastern monarchies and dynastic struggles between brothers from different mothers to seize their father's kingdoms were quite common, but enough historical digression.   Back to the show, which covered David's life up to the death of Goliath. I thought it was quite well done. Good performances, good cinematography, excellent battles, good set design and costuming, and a strong soundtrack. All the actors were good, but I really think the standout performances were Stephen Lang as Samuel, Ali Sulaman is King Saul, Ayelet Zurer as Saul's wife Queen Ahinoam, and Davood Ghadami as David's jerkish (but exasperated and well-intentioned) eldest brother Eliab. Martyn Ford just looks extremely formidable as Goliath. You definitely believe no one in their right mind want to fight this guy.   Making fiction of any kind based on sacred religious texts is often tricky because no matter what you do, someone's going to get mad at you. The show has an extensive disclaimer at the beginning of each episode saying that it is fiction inspired by the Bible. That said, House of David doesn't really alter or deviate from the Biblical account, though it expands upon some things for the sake of storytelling. Queen Ahinoam is only mentioned once in the Bible as the wife of Saul, but she has an expanded role in the show and is shown as the one who essentially introduces Saul to the Witch of Endor. Goliath also gets backstory as one of the “Anakim,” a race of giants that lived in Canaan in ancient times, which is something that is only mentioned in passing in the Old Testament. Overall, I enjoyed the show and I hope it gets a second season.   What's interesting, from a larger perspective, is to see how the wheel of history keeps turning. In the 1950s and the 1960s, Biblical epics were a major film genre. The 10 Commandments and Ben Hur with Charlton Heston are probably the ones best remembered today. Eventually, the genre just sort of ran out of gas, much the way superhero movies were in vogue for about 20 years and began running out of steam around 2023 or so. Like, I enjoyed Thunderbolts (which we're going to talk about in a little bit), but it's not going to make a billion dollars the way Marvel stuff often did in the 2010s. The wheel just keeps turning and perhaps has come back around to the popularity of Biblical epics once more. Overall Grade: A   Next up is Chef, which came out in 2014. I actually saw this back in 2021, but I watched it again recently to refresh my memory and here are my thoughts. I quite liked it. It's about a chef named Carl Casper, who's increasingly unhappy with his work after he gets fired over a Twitter war with a writer who criticized his cooking. Carl is out of options and so he starts a food truck and has to both rediscover his love of cooking and reconnect with his ex-wife and 10-year-old son. In Storytelling: How to Write a Novel (my book about writing), I talked about different kinds of conflict. Carl's conflict is an excellent example of an entirely internal conflict. The critic is an external enemy, but he's basically the inciting incident.   Carl's real enemy is his own internal conflict about art versus commerce and a strained relationship with his son. I recommend the movie. It was rated R for bad language, but there's no nudity or explicit sexual content and honestly, if you've ever worked in a restaurant kitchen or a warehouse, you've heard much worse in terms of language. The movie also has an extremely valuable lesson: stay off social media when you're angry. Overall Grade: A     Next up is Thunderbolts, which came out in 2025 and I thought this was pretty good, both very dark and yet with quite a lot of humor to balance the darkness. Former assassin Yelena Belova has been working as a mercenary for the sinister director of the CIA, Valentina de Fontaine (now there's a villain name if there ever was one). Yelena has grown disillusioned with her life and career and is suffering from increasing depression since she never really dealt with the death of her sister. Valentina promises her one last job, only for Yelena to realize that Valentina decided to dispose of all her freelance contractors at once, which includes US Agent and Ghost (previously seen in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Antman and the Wasp). In the process of escaping Valentina's trap, Yelena stumbles across a mysterious man who identifies himself as Bob, who has no memory of how he got there, but shows increasingly unusual abilities. Yelena wants to deal with Valentina's betrayal, but it turns out one of Valentina's science projects has gotten out of control and is threatening the world. The movie was well constructed enough that it didn't rely too heavily on previous Marvel continuity. It was there, but you probably wouldn't be lost without it. It almost feels like Marvel looked at the stuff they did the last couple of years and said, okay, a lot of this didn't work, but makes great raw material for new things. It helped that the central conflict was in the end, very human and about the characters, not stopping a generic villain from getting a generic doomsday device. Overall Grade: A   Next up is The Hound of the Baskervilles, which came out in 1988. This is a movie length episode of The Return of Sherlock Holmes television series, which had Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes and Edward Hardwicke as Dr. Watson. The plot deals with Sir Henry Baskerville, the American heir to an English manor set in the Windswept moors of Dartmoor. Apparently there's an ancestral curse laid over the Baskerville estate that manifests in the form of a spectral hound. Local rumors hold that the previous holder of the manor, Sir Charles Baskerville, was killed by the ghostly hound and many of the local people fear it. The local physician, Dr. Mortimer, is so worried about the hound that he comes to Sherlock Holmes for help. Holmes, of course, is skeptical of any supernatural explanation and soon becomes worried that an extremely subtle and sinister murderer is stalking Sir Henry.   Jeremy Brett's version of Holmes is, in my opinion, the best portrayal of the character and Edward Hardwicke's version of Watson is a calm, reliable man of action who sensibly takes a very large revolver with him when going into danger. Definitely worth watching, Overall grade: A   Next up is Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which came out in 2024. The 2020s have been a downer of a decade in many ways, but on the plus side, between Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog, people have finally figured out how to make good video game movies, so we've got that going for us. Sonic 3 was an excellent kids movie, as were the first two in the trilogy. In this one Sonic is living with Knuckles and Tails under the care of their human friends Tom and Maddy, but then a dark secret emerges. The government has been keeping a Superpowered hedgehog named Shadow in stasis and Shadow has broken out. It's up to Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails to save the day.   Meanwhile, Dr. Robotnik is in a funk after his defeat at Sonic's hands in the last movie, but then his long lost grandfather, Gerald Robotnik returns seeking the younger Dr. Robotnik's help in his own sinister plans. Keanu Reeves was great as Shadow (think John Wick if he was a superpowered space hedgehog in a kid's movie). Jim Carrey famously said he would retire from acting unless a golden script came along and apparently that golden script was playing Dr. Ivo Robotnik and his evil grandfather Gerald. To be fair, both the Robotniks were hilarious.   It is amusing that Sonic only exists because in the 1990s, Sega wanted a flagship video game character that won't get them sued by either Nintendo or Disney. It is also amusing that the overall message of the Sonic movies seems to be not to trust the government. Overall Grade: A   Next up is Paddington in Peru, which came out in 2024. This is also an excellent kids' movie. In this installment, Paddington has settled into London with the Brown family and officially become a UK citizen. However, he receives a letter from Peru that his Aunt Lucy has mysteriously disappeared into the jungle. Distraught, Paddington and the Browns set off for Peru at once. Adventures ensue involving mysterious lost treasure, a crazy boat captain, and an order of singing nuns who might not quite be what they appear. Anyway, it's a good kids' movie. I think Paddington 2 was only slightly better because Hugh Grant as the chief villain, crazy actor Phoenix Buchanan, was one of those lightning in the bottle things like Heath Ledger as the Joker in the Dark Knight. Overall Grade: A   Now for the two best things I saw in Winter/Spring 2025. The first of them is Andor Season Two, which came out in 2025. Star Wars kind of has an age range the way Marvel stuff does now. What do I mean by that? In the Marvel comics and some of the TV series like Jessica Jones, they get into some really dark and heavy stuff, very mature themes. The MCU movies can have some darkness to them, but not as much because they're aiming at sort of escapist adventures for the general audience. Then there are kid shows like Spidey and Friends that a relative of mine just loved when he was three. You wouldn't at all feel comfortable showing a 3-year-old Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but Spidey and Friends is just fine.   Star Wars now kind of has that age range to its stuff and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you want to see a dark meditation upon human nature. Sometimes you need something kid friendly to occupy the kids you're babysitting and sometimes you just want to relax and watch Mando and Baby Yoda mow down some space pirates or something. All that said, Andor Season Two is some of the darkest and the best stuff that Star Wars has ever done. It successfully shifts genres from Escapist Pulp Space Fantasy to a gritty Political/Espionage Thriller. We in the audience know that the emperor is a Sith Lord who can use Evil Space Magic and wants to make himself immortal, but that fact is totally irrelevant to the characters. Even though some of the characters are high ranking in their respective organizations, this is essentially a “ground's eye” view of the Rebellion and life under the Empire.   In some ways, this is like Star Wars' version of Wolf Hall (which we're going to talk about shortly), in that we know how it ends already, but the dramatic tension comes from the harrowing emotional journey the characters undertake on the way to their inevitable destinations. Cassian Andor is now working for the nascent Rebellion under the direction of ruthless spymaster Luthen Rael. Mon Mothma is in the Imperial Senate, covertly funneling money to the Rebellion and realizing just how much the Rebellion will require of her before the end. Syril Karn, the ineffective corporate cop from Season One, has fallen in love with the ruthless secret police supervisor Dedra Meero, but he's unaware that Director Krennic has ordered Meero to manufacture a false flag incident on the planet Gorman so the planet can be strip-mined for resources to build the Death Star and Dedra has decided to use Syril to help accomplish it. All the actors do amazing jobs with their roles. Seriously, this series as actors really should get at least one Emmy. Speaking of Director Krennic, Ben Mendelson returns as Orson Krennic, who is one of my favorite least favorite characters, if you get my drift. Krennic is the oily, treacherous middle manager we've all had to deal with or work for at some point in our lives, and Mendelson plays him excellently. He's a great villain, the sort who is ruthless to his underlings and thinks he can manipulate his superiors right up until Darth Vader starts telekinetically choking him. By contrast, the villain Major Partagaz (played by Anton Lesser) is the middle manager we wish we all had - stern but entirely fair, reasonable, and prizes efficiency and good work while despising office drama. Unfortunately, he works for the Empire's secret police, so all those good qualities are in the service of evil and therefore come to naught. Finally, Episode Eight is one of the most astonishing episodes of TV I've ever seen. It successfully captures the horror of an episode of mass violence and simultaneously has several character arcs reach their tumultuous climax and manages to be shockingly graphic without showing in a lot of actual blood. Andor was originally supposed to be five seasons, but then Peak Streaming collapsed, and so the remaining four seasons were compressed down to one. I think that was actually to the show's benefit because it generates some amazing tension and there's not a wasted moment. Overall Grade: A+   Now for the second of my two favorite things I saw, and that would be Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, which came out in 2024, but I actually saw it in 2025. This is a dramatization of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, who is King Henry VIII's chief lieutenant during the key years of the English Reformation. The first series came out in 2015, but the nine year gap between this and between the second series and the first series actually works quite well since Thomas Cromwell looks like he ages nine years in a single year (which may be what actually happened given how stressful working for someone like Henry VIII must have been). Anyway, in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell has successfully arranged the downfall and execution of Anne Boleyn, Henry's previous queen. Though Cromwell is haunted by his actions, Henry still needs a queen to give him a male heir, so he marries Jane Seymour. Cromwell must navigate the deadly politics of the Tudor Court while trying to push his Protestant views of religion, serve his capricious master Henry, fend off rivals for the King's favor, and keep his own head attached to his shoulders in the process. Since Cromwell's mental state is deteriorating due to guilt over Anne's death and the downfall of his former master Cardinal Wolsey and Henry's a fickle and dangerous master at the best of times, this is an enterprise that is doomed to fail. Of course, if you're at all familiar with the history of Henry's reign and the English reformation, you know that Cromwell's story does not have a happy ending. Rather, Wolf Hall is a tragedy about a talented man who didn't walk away from his power until it was too late and he was trapped. Anyway, in my opinion, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light was just excellent. All the performances were superb. Mark Rylance is great as Cromwell and has some excellent “WTF/I'm SO screwed” expressions as Cromwell's situation grows worse and worse. Bernard Hill played the Duke of Norfolk in the first series, but sadly died before Series Two, so Timothy Spall steps in and he does an excellent job of channeling Hill's portrayal of the Duke as an ambitious, crude-humored thug.   Damien Lewis is amazing as Henry VIII and his performance captures Henry's mixture of charisma, extreme vindictiveness, and astonishing self-absorption. The real Henry was known for being extremely charming even to the end of his life, but the charm was mixed with a volcanic temper that worsened as Henry aged and may have been exacerbated by a severe head injury. Lewis's performance can shift from that charm to the deadly fury in a heartbeat. The show rather cleverly portrays Henry's growing obesity and deteriorating health by having Lewis wear a lot of big puffy coats and limp with an impressively regal walking stick.   Overall, I would say this and Andor were the best thing I saw in Winter/Spring 2025. I wouldn't say that Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is an accurate historical reputation. In real life, Cromwell was rather more thuggish and grasping (though far more competent than his rivals and his master) and of necessity the plot simplifies historical events, but it's just a superb historical drama. Overall Grade: A+ As a final note, I should say that of all the 2024 and 2025 movies mentioned here, the only one that actually saw in the theater was Thunderbolts, and I hadn't actually planned to see it in theaters, but a family member unexpectedly bought tickets for it, so I went along. Which I suppose is the movie industry's biggest problem right now. The home viewing experience is often vastly superior to going to the theater. The theater has the big screen and snacks, but at home you can have a pretty nice setup and you can pause whatever you want, go to the bathroom, and you can get snacks for much more cheaply. That's just much more comfortable than the movie theater.   Additionally, going to the theater has the same serious problem as booking a flight in that you're an enclosed space with complete strangers for several hours, which means you're potentially in a trust fall with idiots. All it takes is one person behaving badly or trying to bring their fake service dog to ruin or even cancel a flight, and the theater experience has much of the same problem, especially since the standards for acceptable public behavior have dropped so much from a combination of widespread smartphone adoption and COVID. The difference between the movie industry and the airline industry is that if you absolutely have to get from New York to Los Angeles in a single day, you have no choice but to book a flight and hope for the best. But if you want to see a movie and are willing to exercise some patience, you just have to wait a few months for it to turn up on streaming. I'm not sure how the movie industry can battle that, but sadly, it is much easier to identify problems than to solve them.   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, stay healthy, and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at four different ebook formatting tools for indie authors. We also discuss the phenomenon of Star Wars day. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Malison: The Complete Series at my Payhip store: MALISON25 The coupon code is valid through June 3, 2025. So if you need a new book for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 251 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 9, 2025, and today we are looking at ebook formatting tools. Before we get into our main topic, we'll have Coupon of the Week, a progress update at my current writing and audiobook projects, and then Question of the Week. We'll also close out the show with a preview of my new audiobook Ghost in the Assembly (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy).   This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Malison: The Complete Series at my Payhip store, and that is MALISON25. As always, we'll have the coupon code and the links in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through June the 3, 2025. So if you need a new ebook for spring, we have got you covered. Now here's where I'm at with my current writing projects. I am 87,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption and I'm hoping to hit 90,000 words by the end of today. So if all goes well, I will finish it up later this week and then begin editing. I am also 9,000 words into what my next project will be, which is Shield of Power, the final book in The Shield War series. I'm also 91,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, and that will be my main project after Shield of Power is finished. So my writing goals for the next couple months will be Ghost in the Corruption, Shield of Power, Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest, and then the final book in The Ghost Armor series (the title of which I should really decide since I'm getting close to being finished with the fifth book).   In audiobook news, recording of Ghost in the Assembly (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is finished. That should be turning up on all the various audiobook stores before too much longer. Shield of Deception (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is finished and available at all the audio stores: Audible, Apple, Google Play, Spotify, Chirp, and all the others. You can get that right now. Brad should be starting a recording of Shield of Battle sometime in the second half of May, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:02:09 Question of the Week   And now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question: what is your favorite Star Wars? The inspiration for this question is the fact that May the Fourth has become Star Wars Day (in a very tongue in cheek manner). And as you might expect, we had a variety of responses to this question. Justin says: I have not seen any Star Wars TV series, but your other choices are mine as well. I have the Trawn Trilogy in the box set and got a PC joystick just for playing TIE Fighter again. Jonathan D. says: Empire Strikes Back is still the best film. I cannot get into the Disney canon after they destroyed the Expanded Universe. I watched The Force Awakens and that killed any interest in watching Disney Star Wars for me. Books is either Heir to the Empire Trilogy or the Darth Bain trilogy. A well done film adaptation of the Darth Bain books would be the only thing that would make me want to watch any new films. Video games would have to be Knight of the Old Republic 1 or 2, with Jedi Academy coming in third. The original Battlefront games were also great.   John Paul says: Loved the Mandalorian and the Book of Boba Fett, especially when they had the characters from each other's show guest starring in them. I saw somewhere they aren't making another series, but [there] was talk about a TV movie to finish it off, but [they are] now showing Series 4 on IBMD with no date. I grew up with the original trilogy though some of the later films are good, especially the special effects, though Jar Jar Binks spoiled the first three movies. Maybe they should reedit the character out since Lucas has spent some money on adding new effects to the trilogy to bring in line with the new movies. Skeleton Crew made me think of the movie Flight of the Navigator with Star Wars added, so I enjoyed that even though it's mainly for kids. I have fond memories of Space Invaders with the sidekick from the original Fall Guy TV show. Again, made for kids though adults can enjoy if they watch tongue in cheek.   Andrew says: There are only three Star Wars movies, of which Empire Strikes Back is my favorite. I really enjoyed Mandalorian Season One. Now Star Wars is dead to me, except for lightsaber battle videos. I really like the Princess Bride Battles. I played TIE Fighter, Dark Forces, and Knights of the Old Republic.   Tom says: Favorite film, Rogue One. With you on Mandalorian Season Two as favorite TV show. Favorite game, Rogue Squadron.   Tracy says: My favorite was Return of the Jedi.   Jenny says: Thrawn Trilogy for sure! Dark Forces was my very first computer game, so it's always going to hold a special place in my heart.   William says: The unofficial remasters of the original trilogy from preserved reels are a godsend.   MG says: Knights of the Old Republic was quite good and Knights of the Old Republic 2.   John K. says: I'm a grim dark sort of guy. Really liked Rogue One but it's slightly edged out by the original Episode IV. I absolutely love Andor but honestly, have not hated anything. Enjoyed them all. I was a nut for the original X-Wing game. Got good enough to one shot TIE Fighters with one quad shot and rarely missed and learned how to solo Star Destroyers pretty easily, though it would take forever. Having played the game that John K. is talking about, I can agree with him that you could take down Star Destroyers in your X-Wing if you knew what you were doing, but it really would take forever.   Dave says: Book wise, I really enjoyed the Thrawn books by Timothy Zahn, also the X-Wing series by Michael A. Stackpole was a personal favorite.   And finally Michael says: I agree on Empire Strikes Back though as a kid, I disliked the lack of upbeat movie. Also really liked the Solo movie. I confess I found the Thrawn books underwhelming, though the original Star Wars novelization is pretty good. And finally, I got to agree on TIE Fighter, such great game. Also, I have a soft spot for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2.   For myself, I would have to break it down into four categories because Star Wars media covers so many different formats now. For favorite movie, I would say Empire Strikes Back, with Return of the Jedi as the runner up. For the favorite TV series, Season 2 of The Mandalorian. For my favorite book, The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, with Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Stover, Darth Plagueis by James Luceno, and The Darth Bane Trilogy by Drew Karpyshyn coming in as strong runners up. Seriously, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably enjoy reading books, so these five are definitely worth your time.   For my favorite video games, I would say TIE Fighter, with Knights of the Old Republic as a very close runner-up. But TIE Fighter was definitely my favorite. In the game, you play as an Imperial pilot, and the designers had the clever idea of making the Empire sympathetic by having the player spend most of the missions hunting ruthless pirates, suppressing alien civil wars, and fighting renegade Imperial warlords who are trying to overthrow the Emperor. In the last two expansion packs for the game, the player is flying as Grand Admiral Thrawn's elite pilot against the renegade Grand Admiral Zaarin, and finally defeating Zaarin after like forty missions was VERY satisfying.   So those are my favorite Star Wars media items. As we can see.  there is quite a range of opinion in the answer to that question.   00:06:54 Main Topic: Ebook Formatting Tools   Now let's move on to our main topic, which is ebook formatting tools. And this is an important thing for indie authors to discuss because if you do want to self-publish your books, it is one of those foundational skills you have to master. You need to know what kind of file format the platforms you're publishing to you take and how to produce it. Now this is something you can hire out but you really, really shouldn't in my opinion, especially because some ebook formatting services charge as much as $2,000 to turn a Word document into files ready to upload for ebook stores. Considering that it is something you can easily do yourself with free tools and a little bit of practice, spending any amount of money on it is probably a waste. I mean, there's a difference between the kind of intricate formatting you would need for say, a full color medical textbook with illustrations and a 60,000 word romance novel. Fortunately, all the major software programs are nowhere near as expensive as $2,000 a book and don't have as much of a learning curve as you might expect. Both video and written tutorials are plentiful for all of these options, making it easy to learn at your own pace. Today we're going to go over four software options for formatting ebooks and discuss their pros, cons, and the best uses for them. Although some of these products have word processing functionality and other features built in, today we'll focus on just the ebook formatting part of the software. #1: The first option we will look at is Atticus. Atticus is from the same company that makes Publisher Rocket, which is a software program I've spoken of very favorably of on the show over the years. The company has made an effort to understand the needs of authors over the years and added new features to Publisher Rocket consistently as time went on. The company Kindlepreneur has also made significant enhancements to Atticus since it launched. As of the time of this recording, it is a one-time purchase option that has free ongoing updates and the current cost is $147 (in United States dollars). Expensive, but the founder of the company Dave Chesson has said frequently he doesn't like software subscriptions. So hopefully this will continue to be a one-time fee and not become a subscription thing.   So here are the pros to using Atticus. It is less expensive than Vellum and has the same features. It works on operating systems other than Mac. In theory, since it has a web client, it can work on any platform. Reviewers say it is very pleasant to use and those who want a lot of customization options are generally happy with it and it has a nice tool for creating and reusing the template for things like author bios or link pages.   The con is that it does require an Internet connection to use and you have to have a computer connected to the Internet. Some people also prefer not to have their work stored in the cloud like Atticus does. Some users report slowness while opening or closing or when saving a file, especially if it's a book with a high word account. Because of the online requirement, there can be issues related to syncing. It does not support .mobi as a file export option. However, that's not a big deal anymore because Amazon is officially phasing out the .mobi file extension and is requiring people to use .epub. So this is not a major point and it's only for people who have a customer base with very old e-readers that can't handle .epub.   And finally, Atticus does not offer a free trial period if you just want to try it out, but does offer a refund within the first 30 days if you try it and decide that you don't like it. So what users would find Atticus the best? It's probably best for PC or Linux users who don't want a Mac and also want to have lots of fine control of your formatting or customizing your layout. Atticus is also heavily built around collaboration, where different people can work on the same file. So if you do work with a team (and many indie authors do) or are co-writing a book, then Atticus might be a good tool for you to use.   #2: The second program we're going to look at is called Vellum.  Vellum has been seen as the default option for ebook formatting for a lot of writers for a while now. As of the time of recording, there is a one-time purchase option that has free ongoing updates. The current cost is $199 for the ebook only version or $249 for the version that includes paperbacks. Vellum has gone on sale occasionally in the past, usually for Cyber Monday in November. The pros for Vellum are that many reviewers consider it the best option for ebook formatting and say it delivers professional results without too much work and a minimal learning curve. Vellum lets you try out the software for free, but you won't be able to export the files you're publishing until the software is purchased. Like Atticus, it offers a 30 day window for a refund.   Vellum is not cloud-based software and it can be used offline. So if you are, for instance, working on a laptop on the road with spotty internet connectivity, this can be a lifesaver. Now for the cons and the biggest con is a big one- that Vellum is Macintosh only. You need to have a Mac to use it and it is not currently available for Windows and Linux. The developers have said that presently they have no plans to port it to either Windows or Linux. It will also not work on iOS, so that means you can't run it on your iPad or your iPhone. You can in theory use it on a PC with a Mac OS virtual machine, but people have reported very mixed success with that. The other con is that it is the most expensive option. So the users this is best for I think would be if you already have a Mac or you are willing to buy a Mac for just one piece of software. #3: The third software program we're going to look at is called Jutoh. Jutoh is a labor of love, mainly created by two people in the UK and has been around for a long, long time. As of the time of this recording, there is a one-time purchase option that costs $45 (US dollars) and a Plus version for $90 that supports some additional features. It currently offers a free trial that you can download and install, but functionality is limited in the trial version. The pros of Jutoh is that it works on Windows, Mac, and most versions of Linux. It is not cloud-based software/is local to your computer. It does not need a constant Internet connection to function. Reviewers frequently praised how responsive their customer support is and of the paid options we are discussing, it will be the least expensive of all of them. The cons are the interface is a bit dated. It does kind of look like something from the early 2000s in terms of the buttons and where they are. Because of that, it can be more difficult for some users to use than Atticus or Vellum. It does not create PDFs or print ready files, so you would not be able to use it to format your files for print books, which is something both Atticus and Vellum offer. I think this is best used for users who want a less expensive option than Atticus or Vellum or a PC user who wants a non-cloud based option.   #4: The fourth and final program we're going to look at is called Kindle Create. And as of this recording, it is the only one of these four options that is free. It is a free download. This software is created and maintained by Amazon. The pro? It's free and you can use the .epubs it creates to upload your books onto other platforms. Just because you've made your ebook in Amazon Create, that doesn't mean you can't use the file for Barnes & Noble and Kobo and Apple and so forth. You can go ahead and do that. However, because it is free software, there are quite a few cons to it. The functionality is pretty limited and only a few fonts are available. It is not good with complex layouts and Amazon's own documentation recommends not using it for books with tables, footnotes, or complex text formatting.   The program doesn't handle edits well. There are people who write books in Vellum even though the developers don't exactly recommend that. And Atticus is designed to have books written in it. However, Kindle Create definitely cannot handle that very well. Windows and Mac are supported, but you can't install it on Linux. Kindle Create no longer supports .mobi as a file export option since Amazon is moving away from that option and most other vendors haven't used it ever. That is a minor point.   I think Kindle Create is best used by users who are just starting out and don't have much in the way of budget and have books that don't require a lot of complex formatting. Kindle Create is actually quite good for novels because novels in general don't have a lot of complex formatting and because it's free, it has a little bit of a steeper learning curve, but that can be advantageous as well.   So looking at those four options, what do I use and why? Well, for the first seven or so years I was self-publishing, I didn't use any of these. I used a program called Sigil, which is an .epub editor. And if Kindle Create has a high learning curve, Sigil's is much higher because you're essentially editing the raw guts of the .epub file.   I was content using that for a number of years, but what I needed was a program that would make uploading print books and formatting print books much easier because at the time I was using Create Space and Create Space required a specialized Word template that was just an enormous headache to use. And the reason that many of the Frostborn books have exactly 24 chapters is because I had a template that worked really well with 24 chapters for print books and I wasn't going to mess that up by trying to add a chapter or have one fewer chapter. So for some of the Frostborn books, I made sure there were 24 chapters.   Obviously this was not a tenable situation for the print books, even though I was happy using Sigil for the eBooks. So I eventually heard good things about Vellum. In 2018 (I believe) I got a used Mac and installed Vellum and started using that for print books. I was much happier with that.   Because the books looked so good in print, I eventually switched over to using Vellum for formatting my ebooks as well and I've been using that ever since. So my main ebook format writing program (as of May 9, 2025) is Vellum and I have a Mac specifically for that purpose. However, I also has high praise to say about Jutoh. I got started using Jutoh because for a while, Smashwords required you to upload a book using a specialized Word format. They didn't accept .epubs for the longest time and formatting a book in that proper Word format for Smashwords was a large headache, I have to admit. I never managed to get it automated quite right. And I had frequent problems with Smashwords rejecting the Word document I uploaded and so forth. Eventually, I discovered that Jutoh also had an export option for creating Smashwords-friendly Word documents. So I tried it out and that was just a godsend, I have to admit. It saved me so much time. So for about seven years as well, I used Jutoh for Smashwords formatting. However, in 2024 after Smashwords was acquired by Draft 2 Digital and the two companies became more and more merged, Smashwords changed and now accepts properly formatted .epubs. They don't do that specialized Word document thing anymore, which has made it much easier to upload files to Smashwords, I must say. But that also means that I've used Jutoh less and less in favor of Vellum because I no longer need those specially formatted Word documents. However, I do have nothing but positive things to say about Jutoh; it is a very good program. If you don't want to shell out the $249 for Vellum or if you don't have a Mac, I think Jutoh is an excellent option for you to use. I have never actually used Atticus, but it's popular enough that I wanted to talk about it on this show. I do know a lot of people who have used it to good effect. Just bear in mind the pros and cons we mentioned. And as for Kindle Create, there's nothing wrong with it. I think it's good starting point, especially if you're just starting out and want to format your book without paying a lot of money or having to pay $2,000 to someone on the Internet to do it. I do think it's a good starting point, even though it's very basic and for your first couple of books, it would be good. But as you get more experienced and want to branch into things like print books, you'll probably want a program with greater functionality like Jutoh, Vellum, or Atticus. So myself, I use mostly Vellum (with Jutoh occasionally), and that is what I use for ebook formatting.   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.   00:19:53 Audiobook Excerpt   And now we'll close out the show with a short excerpt from Ghost In the Assembly, as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. [Remainder of podcast is audiobook except]

It's the 250th episode of The Pulp Writer Show! To celebrate this occasion, this episode takes a look at the expectations people have of a full-time writer's life and contrasts them with the reality. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book #6 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: TALONS50 The coupon code is valid through May 27, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 250 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 2, 2025, and today we're looking at what it is really like to be a full-time writer. This is also the 250th episode of the podcast, so thank you all for listening to the podcast over these last six years. Before I started recording, I totaled up the total length of previous podcast episodes and came to about 78 hours, give or take. That's like three days of continuous talking, which sounds less impressive when you realize it was recorded over the last six years.   Thank you all for listening and here's hoping you can stick around with the next 250 episodes. Before we get to our main topic, which is the expectations versus reality of being a full-time writer, we are going to do Coupon of the Week, a progress update my current writing projects, and then Question of the Week. So let's kick off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book Six in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That code is TALONS50. As always, you can get that coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through May 27th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered.   Now an update on my current writing projects. I am 60,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption, which puts me on chapter 13 of 21, so I'm about two thirds of the way through. I think the rough draft will be between 90-100,000 words long, so hopefully I can have that out before the end of May, if all goes well. I also just finished Chapter One of Shield of Power, which will be the final book of the Shield War series and that'll be my main project once Ghost in the Corruption is finished. I'm also 87,000 words into Stealth and Spells Online: The Final Quest, and that will be my main project once Shield of Power comes out. I expect Final Quest should come out pretty soon after Shield of Power just because I've been chipping away at it for so long and I'm getting close to the end.   In audiobook news, recording is almost done for Ghost in the Assembly and that'll be narrated by Hollis McCarthy. Recording is totally done for Shield of Deception (as narrated by Brad Wills) and that is working its way through processing at the various audiobook platforms, so hopefully we'll not be too much longer before we can get that to you.   00:02:26 Question of the Week So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. And now let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what is your favorite Jonathan Moeller book? The reason for this question is that this is the 250th podcast episode, so it seems like a good topic for that particular milestone. And as you might expect, we had an array of different opinions.   Joachim says: You are kidding us! By the end of the week? How long did you think about your own answer? Let me mirror you: for my own answer, the question is a bit difficult because I spent money on all your books, which meant I thought all of them a good buy. So let me split my answer into male and female protagonists. The best female book was Ghost Exile: Omnibus One because it prompted me to continue with Ghost Exile and fill in the Ghost series later. The Ghosts Omnibus One and Ghost Exile: Omnibus One were my first two books from you. The best male book was the one with Jack March where Thunderbolt said, “males are ogling breasts which never existed”, especially as such AI generated videos are now all over the place on YouTube.   I have to admit that I first came up with the character of Thunderbolt back in early 2021 when I was working on Silent Order: Rust Hand (that was before the AI boom really took off), so she turned out to be a very prescient character for the AI era in a number of ways.   Joe B. says: That is a tough question as there are many contenders. I'm going to go with one that is a little different, Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, but now known as Stealth and Spells Online: Creation.   Justin says: I nominate Soul of Swords, an excellent end to an excellent series.   Perry says: There can only be one! Demonsouled. Paul says: For me, I think my favorite female protagonist  book is Cloak Games: Truth Chain. Such a dramatic change to Nadia, sets up the series in her struggles with self and enemies so well.   Brad Wills (who as you know narrated the Frostborn, Dragonskull, Malison, and Shield War series for me) says: Does a three book arc count?  Excalibur, The Dragon Knight, and The Shadow Prison made for a fantastic lead-up and finale of the Frostborn series.   Hollis McCarthy (who as you know, narrated the Ghosts and Cloak Mage audiobooks) says: Ghost in the Storm, when Caina and Kylon meet in the Battle for Marsis. Nonstop action, incredible chase scenes, and a great intro to their combative relationship.   Fred says: It's hard for me to say which book is my favorite. All your book series were all great.   Juana says: Frostborn: Excalibur with Ridmark. I happen to love stories about Excalibur, odd but true. Caina in Cloak and Ghost: Rebel Cell because Caina and Nadia are an incendiary team. So there! Randy says: Frostborn: The Dragon Knight. This whole series is great, but that is one of the high points.   Dennis says: I couldn't name my favorite as I enjoy everything you write. I probably enjoyed the Frostborn series best at the time, but having bought and read every one of your books it's now impossible.   Kevin says: There's no way on earth that I could put one book above another, so I would've to take the coward's way out and say Frostborn: The Gray Knight simply because it has a book that drew me to the worlds of Jonathan Moeller back in the spring of 2017, since which time I have bought 117 of his books, including a few omnibus editions, so a few more actual books, I suppose. I avidly read them all as they're published these days, except the Silent Order series (just doesn't grab me and pull me in like the others). Jesse says: Cloak Games: Sky Hammer. Damaged Nadia at her best, epic action the whole way. And yeah, the chapter The Last Death of Nadia Moran was viscerally cinematic and probably the biggest emotional payoff you've written in my opinion, tied her entire journey together. In my head, I cast Castle-era Stana Katic as Nadia, and it worked better than I expected it might.   Morgan says: I can't narrow it down to just one. So top three in no particular order, Sevenfold Swords: Swordbearer, Dragontiarna: Gates, and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling. That being said, I think Niara might be my favorite character of all your books I have read.   Jonathan T says: I too am torn though only between two books, Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife and Frostborn: The Shadow Prison.   [Side note/addition from The Transcriptionist: My vote is for Half-Elven Thief!]   So thank you everyone for the kind words about all those books. For my own answer, the question is a bit difficult because I've written them all, which meant I thought all of them were good idea at the time. I suppose the glib answer would be the one that made me the most money, which was Frostborn: The Iron Tower, but it really depends on the category, like my favorite heist book, my favorite mystery book, my favorite dungeon crawl, my favorite first in series. So I think I'll go for the most basic level of categorization and split it up by male and female protagonists.   My favorite book of mine with a female protagonist would probably be Cloak Games: Rebel Fist, since it's such a turning point for Nadia and starts the trajectory of the rest of her character arc. It's the first time she really has to save the day instead of just trying to save herself and shows that her brother Russell can also handle himself, which as you know, comes up again later. My favorite book of mine with a male protagonist would probably be Dragontiarna: Defenders, since it has the Battle of Shadow Crown Hill, which was one of my favorite sequences to write. Four different characters have plans and they all crash into each other at the same time, which was a lot of fun to write and set up, which was a real highlight for me in 2020 because as we all know, 2020 was a fun year.   00:07:35 Main Topic of the Week: Writing Full Time: Expectations Versus Reality   So that is it for Question of the Week. Now let's move on to our main topic this week, writing full-time: expectations versus reality (admittedly from the perspective of a self-published author). If you spent any time around the writing community on the Internet at all, you know that many people dream of becoming a full-time writer, and sometimes people think that the only way to be successful as a writer is to write full-time. There are many expectations that people have about what it means to be a full-time writer. Now that I've been a full-time indie writer for nearly nine years at this point, I can provide some lived perspective. In this episode, I will talk about five of those expectations that people have about full-time writing and the way those expectations might be skewed.   So before we get to those, I should mention how I actually became a full-time writer. In 2016 (which seems like a really long time ago now), the Frostborn series was doing really well, and at the time I was also working full time and I realized that summer I was going to have to move for family reasons. I wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea of moving at first, but I decided to embrace the idea and try to make the best of it. This would involve moving a considerable distance to a different state and all the different problems that entails. So I thought about it and I thought I could look for a new job, but any job I would be qualified for in the area I was moving to would make less money than I was actually making from writing part-time. So I thought, why not try and make a go of full-time writing and see what happens?   Since that was nine years ago, I think I can safely say it's worked out pretty well. And I will say that it's been a pretty good experience and I am very fortunate and very grateful and very blessed to have been able to do this because not everyone has the opportunity to pursue a full-time creative job like I have been able to for these last nine years. That said, while it has been pretty great, it comes with a lot of flexibility and I've gotten to write a lot of great books that many people have enjoyed, it's not always all wine and roses, so to speak, which is part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode to let people more in what the reality of being a full-time writer for this long has been like. So with that introduction out of the way, let's move on to our five expectations versus reality.   Expectation #1: Full-time authors make a lot of money. The reality is that even full-time authors generally don't make that much money. A survey from The Author's Guild showed that the median amount that full-time authors make was just about $20,000, though full-time romance writers had a higher median income of about $37,000. Remember that this amount is before any health insurance costs, benefits, retirement contributions, and of course taxes that a traditional job might be able to provide or help with. In the United States, buying even fairly basic health insurance can easily be a thousand dollars per month for a family, and that doesn't include any costs related to deductibles, prescriptions, or additional dental or vision insurance. Authors are either on their own for healthcare in the US or have to rely on a spouse or partner's healthcare coverage. In other words, you either have to pony up a lot of money to buy your own health insurance or you have to rely on your spouse or partner's healthcare coverage.   And at least in the US, taxes are also much higher on the self-employed. Uncle Sam really does not like the self-employed. If you are self-employed, it is in your best interest to essentially form a small corporation and work for yourself (though for details on how to do that, you should consult with an accountant licensed to practice in your region). Now all these costs can add up pretty quickly, and they make the amount of money that you'll earn from writing much less than you think based on raw earnings before taxes and all the other expenses we were talking about. You also have business expenses like cover design, site hosting, editors, narrators, advertising, et cetera, that take even more pieces out of those earnings. You can duck some of those, but not all of them.   So it boils down to that you have to make a significant amount of money as an author to make an actual living after taxes, healthcare costs, and business expenses are taken out of your earnings, which is one of the reasons that writing part-time as you have a full-time job is not the worst idea in the world and can in fact be a very good idea.   Expectation #2: My next book will make as much or more than the last one did. The reality is that your next book or series might not make you as much money as the previous ones did. In fact, you can reliably predict that most book series will have a certain amount of reader drop off as a series goes on, which is why these days I tend to want to keep my series under nine to ten books or so. Budgeting based on your current income levels is not wise, especially with the current economic climate (which for a variety of reasons is very unpredictable) and with increased competition in the ebook market. Most authors have a peak at some point in their career. For example, Stephen King is still obviously making a great living as a writer putting out new books, but his new books don't sell nearly as well as the ones he put out in the ‘80s. J.K. Rowling's novels for adults (she writes as Robert Galbraith the Cormoran Strike series) don't sell anywhere near the number of copies as her Harry Potter series did at its peak.   For myself, my peak years in terms of writing income were 2016 and 2017, and I've never quite been able to recapture that level. In fact, in 2024, I only did about two thirds of what I did in 2017 (my peak year), which can be a little nerve wracking as you watch those numbers move up and down. That is why it is important for a writer (like many other creatives like actors) to anticipate that they might only have a limited window of peak success and to save aggressively rather than living large on the amount you're earning in that peak era. And I am pleased to report that I was fortunate enough and sensible enough to do that, so that even if my income has varied from year to year (2017 onward), it hasn't been a crippling loss and I haven't been out in the street or lost the house or anything like that.   Expectation #3: You will be happier if you write full-time. The reality is that is not true for everyone. Some people actually do better creatively and emotionally with the time restrictions placed on them by having a full-time job. Many famous writers, including Trollope and Kafka, kept their full-time jobs. Even Tolkien was never a full-time writer. He was a professor of philology until he retired. That was interesting to me because personally, I haven't had much in terms of emotional trouble being a full-time writer. I've always kind of had the ability to hyperfocus on a task, and I've been doing that for almost nine years now, and it's worked out well for me.   I've since realized that is not true for many people. One of the things that demonstrated it to me, believe it or not, was insurance actuarial tables. One thing that I tried to do after I became a full-time writer was try and get disability insurance in case I had an accident or severe illness and could not write anymore. I learned that it's extremely difficult for full-time writers to get disability insurance due to their high rates of substance abuse and mental illness. I was astonished by this because I've never had problems with substance abuse or mental illness myself, but given the number of writers and other creatives I've known who have had those issues, perhaps that's not that surprising, but I was still baffled to learn that.   For example, in my area there are a number of tree management companies (because it's a heavily wooded area) and it's a lot easier for an arborist who works with a chainsaw all day to get disability insurance than it is for a writer, which is somewhat crazy to think about because as a writer, I'm mostly sitting in a chair all day pressing buttons on a keyboard while an arborist is climbing a tree or in a crane with a chainsaw, which is a much more physically dangerous thing. But because of the rates of substance abuse and mental illness among full-time writers, apparently it is very difficult for full-time writers to get disability insurance. Some people struggle with the lack of structure and outward accountability that comes from being a full-time writer and find that actually decreases their productivity and leads them to fall into substance abuse or sink deeper into mental health problems. Very few people have the self-discipline and mental resilience required to be a full-time writer for years on end. And that's not me tooting my own horn so to speak, but apparently it is just the facts. Some writers even go back to full-time work just because they find it less stressful or better for their wellbeing. So I think this is an excellent example of having to know yourself and know what is best for you. For example, if you're a very extroverted person who enjoys talking to people at the office, becoming a full-time writer where you spend most of your time by yourself typing might not be the best for your long-term mental and physical health. Expectation #4: Writing full-time will make me more productive. The reality is having more time does not necessarily mean that you'll be more productive. Writers are notorious for falling prey to time wasters, such as social media scrolling, research spirals, and writing adjacent activities (of which there is a whole series about on this podcast already). It does take a lot of a self-discipline, focus, and determination to be a full-time writer. If you are a full-time writer, especially a full-time indie writer, you also have to balance writing time with various administrative tasks, marketing and ads, social media, fan correspondence, and the various tasks involved in the self-publishing process. Writing is not the only thing that writers actually do, and the other tasks often make finding time for writing more difficult than you might expect. Even traditionally published writers still have to carve out time for administrative work and assisting with marketing and social media work.   As your writing career scales up, so does the behind the scenes workload. This is true in my case. Up until 2023, I basically did everything myself, but I did have COVID pretty badly for a while in 2023 and it just knocked out my energy for a while and I realized that I can't keep trying to do everything by myself. I basically had a choice, either cut some tasks or get some help. So I have some people now, some contractors who help me with things like listening to audiobook proofs (I used to do that all myself), doing the podcast transcript, and Excel record keeping (which I used to do myself). While that is an expense, I don't regret it because it really has taken a lot off my plate and freed up more time for writing, which of course is the entire point.   Expectation #5: I admit this one made me laugh. I will have more free time as a full-time writer. I can attest firsthand that that is not true. What you have as a full-time writer is flexibility. The reality is, although there is flexibility on the job, the hours can be more than for a full-time job. There's a joke that full-time writers can work any 12 hours they want every day.   Most indie authors are putting out far more than one book a year in order to make a full-time income, and that requires a fairly demanding pace that most people don't have the self-discipline to maintain as a lifestyle for years and years on end. The majority of full-time writers right now are either romance or erotica writers who are putting out at least a book a month, sometimes even more. As I mentioned in an earlier point in the show, the administrative task can take far more time than most people would imagine. They could, depending on the circumstances, be easily 40 hours a week on their own before you have time to do a single word of writing on the page. I found you really have to guard your writing time well and find ways to keep administrative tasks, distractions, and necessary tasks such as home maintenance or childcare separate from writing.   Anyone who has ever worked from home is familiar with how difficult that can be because home comes with a wide set of distractions. Granted, that's often fewer distractions than the office, but home can have its own set of distractions. I've mentioned before that you need a bit of tunnel vision to produce the quantity of writing I do month after month. I do keep to a pretty rigid schedule. I have daily word count goals I always try to meet and I use the Pomodoro Method to make sure that I'm prioritizing my writing time.   If you are self-employed and working for yourself, that means there are no allocated vacation or sick days and no paid sick leave in the writing world. Taking a couple of weeks off usually means anticipating a loss in income, such as a month without a book being released. Sometimes, especially in the case of illness, family emergencies, and so forth, that just can't be helped. However, the long vacations people imagine writers being able to take mean either a loss of income or a couple of weeks beforehand of working extra hours to make up for it. For example, Brandon Sanderson, who is probably the most famous fantasy author right now, still works and writes on his vacations and does extra work before leaving for a vacation (such as pre-recording videos).   So as you can see, most of the expectations people have about what it's like to write full-time come from the hope that it will change their productivity or make it easier to write. In reality, if you manage your time well, you can often meet all your writing goals even while working another full-time job. Some people are even more productive under the time pressure of only having an hour or so available to write each day. You don't have to wait until you are a full-time writer for your writing career to start. I wrote for decades and published for years before I was a full-time writer.   Frankly, the idea that you need to be a full-time writer in order to be taken seriously or make money exists only in your own mind. Whether you are a full-time writer or not, what matters is having the discipline to shut out distractions and write with absolute consistency regardless of the circumstances. Even writing 250 to 300 words every single day can add up very quickly, even if you don't do it in 15 minute bursts like Anthony Trollope did.   Finally, I suppose this makes it sound like I'm painting a very bleak picture here, but I'm not. As I said before, I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do, and I'm very grateful to all my readers that I'm able to write full-time and even hire on contractors for narration and behind the scenes work. I appreciate and am very grateful to all the readers who have supported me by continuing to buy my work and access it through subscription services like Kindle Unlimited or Kobo Plus or library options like Libby and Hoopla.   So that is it for this week. I hope it provided some insight into what it's like to be a full-time writer. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and all 250 episodes. I hope you found the show and all 250 episodes 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.  

In this week's special spring episode, I share samples from four of my audiobooks. Each audiobook is the third book in its series! 1.) Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, narrated by Brad Wills. 2.) Cloak of Ashes, narrated by Hollis McCarthy. 3.) Half-Orc Paladin, narrated by Leanne Woodward. 4.) Ghost in the Blood, narrated by Hollis McCarthy. (The next one is technically the 2nd in its series, but it wasn't ready in time for the last Sampler Platter episode.) 5.) Stealth & Spells Online: Leveling, narrated by CJ McCallister. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Cloak Mage: Omnibus Three at my Payhip store: NADIAOMNI3 The coupon code is valid through May 18, 2025. So if you need a new book for spring, we've got you covered!

In this week's episode, I take a look at some of the dangers and difficulties of worldbuilding for writers, and look back at the last fourteen years of self-publishing. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebook of Cloak Mage: Omnibus Two at my Payhip store: NADIAOMNI2 The coupon code is valid through May 11, 2025. So if you need a new book for spring, we've got you covered!

In this week's episode, we take a look at marketing for writers, and discuss how it can both benefit and hinder writers. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians, Book #5 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store: BARBARIAN50 The coupon code is valid through May 2, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 247 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 11th, 2025, and today we are looking at marketing challenges for writers.   First, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians, Book Five in the Dragonskull series (as excellent narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That code is BARBARIAN50. We will have the coupon code in the show notes along with links to the store. This coupon code is valid through May 2, 2025, so if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered.   Now let's have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. I am done with the rough draft of Shield of Battle and its accompanying short story, Raven's Hunt. I am currently editing them and making good progress on that. The book should come out either right before or right after Easter, with right after being the more likely option the way it looks right now. I'm also 14,000 words into Ghost in the Corruption, which will be my main project once Shield of Battle comes out. Audio recording is still underway for Shield of Deception and Ghost in the Assembly. So more updates on that to come. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:01:17 Question of the Week   And now let's take a look at Question of the Week. Question of the Week is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week's question, what is the best TV show you started watching in 2025 (if any)? No wrong answers, obviously.   Justin says: Television shows? The TV in my house is used for video games and movies. It has been 18 years since I watched any TV shows. Surabhi says: Nowadays the only non-Marvel series I watch are animes like Doraemon and Shinchan XD.   Perry says: I never watched a lot of TV but I do catch the odd European football or hockey game. That said, I'm enjoying The Wheel of Time.   Sam says: Clarkson's Farm. He might be a love him/hate him chap, but he certainly does make for entertaining shows. It also shows just how fickle the farming industry can be and shines a much needed light on the issues they face.   I would like to second Sam's recommendation of Clarkson's Farm. It's definitely well worth watching if you have access to Amazon Prime. Bonnie says:  I'm totally out of the loop. Haven't really watched any TV since I binged Avengers and Star War when home with Covid in 2021. I read during downtime.   Andrew says: Tracker is okay. Matlock is good, well-written. I want to like Watson, but have given up. Dark Winds is excellent. 1923 got so dark, I quit. Landman started great, got worse when wife character entered the picture. Re-watching Lonesome Dove. Love it.   David says: The Blacklist.   Michael says: No particular series as I don't really watch much on TV, but a shout out to the Japanese NHK World Channel, which is essentially their international service in English available to watch live on their website, at least in my country or via their app. There's so much good content on there, really interesting documentaries, news features, Japanese shows, and of course the highlights of the Sumo tournaments.   Larry says: Starting The Outpost.   John says: My brother has recommended Wolf Hall. My most anticipated series is Andor. I think of what I watched this year thus far my guilty pleasure was Reacher, most emotional was 1923, most cerebral has been Severance, and funniest has been The Residence. No favorite standout yet.   Juana says: Tracker.   William says: Poker Face was enjoyable.   For myself, I think it would be Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light about the downfall of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. I'll have more to say about that later in my Winter/Spring 2025 Movie Roundup post in a few weeks.   00:03:29 Main Topic: Marketing   Now let's move on to our main topic, writing adjacent activities: marketing. This is part of my podcast series about what I call writing adjacent activities. What do I mean by this? I'm talking about the tasks that seem like they're part of the writing process but really belong in a different category. These tasks are important, don't get me wrong, but they can also be a pitfall if you spend too much time on them or don't use that time correctly. In this series, we are focusing on a few of these tasks and how they can benefit or hinder your writing process, even though they seem like good uses of time and may in fact be beneficial. In this episode, we will talk about marketing. For the self-published author, it is an absolutely essential thing to do. Even traditionally published authors are becoming involved in their marketing or hiring marketing firms apart from their publishers to help with that work. Even important tasks can still take time away from the most important one, writing.   First, how does marketing work for writers in the first place? Even as traditional advertising and print media like newspapers and periodicals has all disappeared by 2025, there are still many, many ways to advertise a book. Here are some examples:   Social media and I don't mean ads, I mean posting content about your book or engaging readers on social media about your book. It's become increasingly common in this age of a video-based social media like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels for authors to post short clips about them interacting with their book or doing things with their book and so forth. And that is, I think, a distinct category from ads.   Ads of course are another type of marketing such as Amazon Ads, Facebook, BookBub, etc.   An email newsletter where you send out an email to your newsletter subscribers when a book comes out   Having an author website   Group promotions where you work together with a group of authors to promote   Doing interviews with podcasts, local media, etc. (though these days podcasts have essentially superseded local media)   Sending out advanced reader copies   Permafree/discounts   I should note that of everything on this list, I've done them all except for advanced reader copies, which I never really bothered to do because I write so fast that it seems to be kind of pointless at that point. Now I got to admit that list seems overwhelming, but you're not going to do them all simultaneously. Most authors pick a few from the list and then focus on them, and then some of them take some work upfront like setting up your author website and then it's less work to maintain it and update it as you go along than it is to set it up to begin with.   For example, making many of my series starters permafree has been an extremely successful strategy for me. For an author who only has two books, that strategy would not be as effective, but if you have a series of nine books then that is a good idea.   So why is it beneficial to market your books? A couple years ago (and I've told this story before, but it bears repeating), I was at a Subway waiting in line to order lunch. The person in front of me was staring at the menu in great confusion. “Does this shop sell submarine sandwiches?”, she finally asked the sandwich artist. Even with 40,000 locations worldwide and millions of dollars in advertising each year, this person was completely unaware of Subway's offerings.   This moment made me realize that marketing must be constant even for big legacy brands like Subway or Coca-Cola because there is always someone out there who isn't familiar with what you have to offer them. If multi-billion dollar corporations like Coca-Cola and Subway have people who haven't heard of them, how much more [work is there for] indie authors like us? There is in my opinion, an erroneous sentiment that getting too involved in marketing as an author somehow cheapens your work, devalues your art, or means that you're not as committed to your art. That sentiment is frankly, in my opinion, self-destructive and keeping a lot of people from reaching new readers or keeping existing ones as new books come out.   Marketing is necessary and needs to be ongoing to work. It's important to remember that readers love new books and want to know more about them. Your goal is to just let them know what's available and how to find your work. You're not being annoying by creating an ad or sending out a newsletter when a new book drops. Even if you have loyal readers, it's likely only a very tiny percentage of them are obsessively checking ebook stores daily for your latest publications. Social media and newsletters in particular are effective ways to let people know when the latest content is ready or can help them get excited for an upcoming release. Just as importantly, good marketing can help you find people who are interested in your genre or read authors similar to you.   So marketing is a good thing and it is in fact necessary if you want to have a career as an indie author or sell books in any quantities. However, it can become a pitfall that takes time away from actually writing new books. So when can it be a pitfall? There are about five different ways it can become a hindrance to writing.   #1: The most obvious pitfall is that time spent working on marketing is time not spent on writing. Although marketing is an essential part of how writers make income, it's only going to go so far compared to creating new books. This is in fact a decision I've had to make many times where if there's only so many hours in the day, and if I have an hour and I have to choose an hour spent fiddling with ads to try and optimize them to sell old books or to focus on writing new books, very often I have decided to focus on writing new books. Or if I have ads that are underperforming, I just shut them off and don't think about them until I have a free moment when the current book is done because writing the latest book is where my attention and priority should be. #2: The second pitfall is that spending too much time on social media or various forums like Reddit can also skew your perspective and give you an unreal view of the preferences of your readership. You'll likely only engage with a small percentage of your readers online. Just because they're reaching out to you or sharing their opinions online doesn't mean that their opinion matches the rest of your readership. An example of this is when Warner Brothers thought there was a massive demand for the Snyder Cut of the Justice League movie based on an online fan campaign and spent a very large amount of money for the recut of the movie, only for it to have a fairly modest audience that didn't recoup the cost. Later it came out that much of the Twitter campaign for the recut were bot accounts, people with multiple social media accounts, or people that ultimately pirated the movie instead of getting an HBO subscription to watch it when it finally became available on streaming. The Internet is a very useful tool, but it's best to take it with a grain of salt and remember that that just because one person is saying something on the Internet doesn't mean there are ten or even a hundred silent people who share their views. As with the example with the Justice League movie, large businesses have run into that trouble where they assume just because a particular audience segment is very loud on social media, therefore it must be a large segment when in fact it turns out to be just a very loud minority that ultimately isn't going to have much buying power. So that is something to keep in mind when you examine [social media], that opinions expressed online may not necessarily reflect reality.   #3: There is also the temptation to get so lost in thinking of how a book will be marketed, that when you write it, you don't try to write a book that is authentic to you or your readers. Trying to piece together a book based on the latest tropes or sales trends will likely mean that by the time the book is ready, social media will have moved onto another one. Writing to market is a form of marketing that sometimes works, but often results in something that feels formulaic or doesn't match your writing style. You can't always tell if the author hated the book when they were writing it, but sometimes you can. And it's sometimes very obvious to tell if an author wrote a book not because he or she enjoyed writing it but because they thought it would sell. And I think deep down, you really have to enjoy the genre you're writing in, which is why many frustrated mystery, fantasy, and science fiction authors saw how well romance doing and so decided to try writing romance only to deep down they didn't enjoy reading romance and so they didn't write a romance book that anyone would enjoy reading. So that is the potential risk of that temptation.   #4: Another pitfall is the urge to market your way out of a book that isn't connecting with readers. If a book doesn't meet reader expectations, no amount of marketing is going to significantly change that. Sometimes it's best to cut your losses with a book or series if it's not performing the way that you expect instead of throwing even more money marketing at it. I'm afraid I have a very recent example for my own life in the form of these Stealth and Spells Online series.   I think the problem with that series is I fundamentally misread what the LitRPG audience wants. Stealth and Spells Online is about a virtual reality game, but what the LitRPG audience really seems to want these days is either Portal Isekai or System Apocalypse Fantasy, which Stealth and Spells Online most definitely isn't. I told the narrator that I intended to write a LitRPG, but what I ended up with was a science fiction espionage thriller with LitRPG elements. So that, as you might expect, has been very hard to market and very hard to turn a profit while marketing it. So what I decided to do was I originally planned for seven or eight books in the series, but I'm going to cut it down to three and wrap up the story in hopefully a satisfying way with book number three this summer. That is a lived experience example of a changing course when some marketing doesn't work.   #5: There can be a feeling that you're missing out if you're not trying a marketing strategy that worked for someone else, so you'll end up stretching yourself thin by trying everything, stretching your marketing time across social media, newsletters, video content, posting the spaces like Goodreads, assembling a launch team, sending out advanced reader copies, going on podcasts, doing interviews with local media, and doing guest blog posts simply is not sustainable. There is a potential value in doing a short-term marketing sprint like that where you do all the things for a few days, but doing that all the time is not a good idea. As we mentioned earlier, it can take away time that should be spent writing. So really the best marketing course is to pick a few tactics that you enjoy and are comfortable using and then do those most of the time and save everything else for special occasions or if an opportunity comes up. For myself, I mostly focus on setting first in series permafree and doing various ad campaigns on Facebook, Amazon, and BookBub. I tend to stay away from TikTok and video marketing and some of the more time intensive things. I prefer things like permafree or various CPC ads where I can set it up and let it run and then check on it every few days to make sure it's working or not spending too much. So how can you balance time spent on marketing with making progress with your writing? The best way to market your old books is to publish a new one. Algorithms on online stores like Amazon and all the others reward fresh books and readers have short memories, so taking years between series risks them forgetting you.   Finishing a series in a timely fashion is crucial now many readers, especially in Epic Fantasy (for a variety of reasons), will only start series that are already completed, having been burned by series that were left unfinished. Having a polished product should also precede your marketing efforts. If your cover looks bad, your money would be better spent on getting a professional looking cover instead of more Facebook ads. Taking the time to make a good cover and good ad copy for your ads is also important before you spend money on marketing. For marketing, it will save you time and money to map out your goals for it each year just like you map out a set of goals for what you'll publish each year. Having a clear set of goals will keep you from trying every new thing that you hear about just because it worked for someone else. It's also wise to be honest with yourself about your strengths when considering how you spend your marketing time. If you hate TikTok, forcing yourself to make videos there isn't going to lead to compelling content that would make people want to buy your book. The authors who have had success with TikTok had that because they were able to genuinely connect with an audience there, not just because they threw a book trailer on the platform and hoped for the best. As with many writing adjacent activities, it is best to have a set block of time to work on marketing and to plan even the time spent checking ads and responding to social media comments so it doesn't take over your writing time. Just like having a plan for each year with some larger goals is a good idea, having a daily or weekly set of goals for marketing can help keep you focused.   In conclusion, the true pitfall of any writing adjacent activity is they need to be kept adjacent to the actual production of new writing. All the tasks we covered in the series are important, but writing should always be the priority if you are a writer.   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 see you all next week.