Podcasts about Cloak

The fire is behind you now. No chains. No bargaining voices. Just trees, a narrow stream, and a small flame that belongs to no one. In this second chapter, the road fades and something quieter takes its place. You make camp in the forest, share water and warmth, and begin to understand who the woman beside you really is... and who you are when you're no longer being watched.   Extended audio up on Patreon, Fansly, and Just For Fans for early access tiers now!

The following article was brought to my attention by Thane Riddle, on his last live episode of Cloak & Dagger. I'm not quite sure what to think of it as a whole, but it is entertaining and says some interesting things about the realm of fiction. Beyond that, I would… The post Lemurian Time War: A Libertarian “Science Fiction(?)” Experience appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

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.  

Join Thane Riddle for his weekly, “Building The Second Realm” segment — this week, he delivers a discussion on agorism. In a sense, it's time for a revival, a reinvigoration, a reimagination. Where was Samuel Edward Konkin III right? Where was he wrong? What else is needed to bring about… The post Insurrectionary Agorism & Crypto-Anarchy: Ending The State Once & For All [Cloak & Dagger w/ Thane Riddle] appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

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Are you ready to see the 7 digital investigation tools that completely changed how I look at the internet? In this video, I'm REVEALING a powerful stack of OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) and research tools that most people have zero clue exist. These are absolute game-changers. Subscribe for more cutting-edge tech and security tools: The internet is vast, but finding the right information, or knowing what information about you is out there, requires the right toolkit. I was genuinely shocked by the advanced capabilities of some of these applications. Whether you are a cybersecurity researcher, a journalist, a private investigator, or just someone who wants to master digital reconnaissance and protect their privacy, this list of 7 secret tools will upgrade your skillset immediately. We are breaking down tools for deep email searching, uncovering hidden data in PDFs, mapping global networks, and analyzing trends that standard search engines completely miss. // MJ Banias' SOCIALS // LinkedIn: / mjbanias Cloak and Dagger Podcast (Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/show/6mT8zDM... The Debrief: https://thedebrief.org/podcasts/ Instagram: / mjbanias X: https://x.com/mjbanias Website: https://www.bullshithunting.com/ // David's SOCIAL // Discord: discord.com/invite/usKSyzb Twitter: www.twitter.com/davidbombal Instagram: www.instagram.com/davidbombal LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidbombal Facebook: www.facebook.com/davidbombal.co TikTok: tiktok.com/@davidbombal YouTube: / @davidbombal Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/3f6k6gE... SoundCloud: / davidbombal Apple Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... // MY STUFF // https://www.amazon.com/shop/davidbombal // SPONSORS // Interested in sponsoring my videos? Reach out to my team here: sponsors@davidbombal.com // MENU // 0:00 - Coming Up 0:36 - Introduction 01:17 - Who is MJ Banias? 03:55 - MJ Banias' Favourite OSINT Tools 04:28 - Bullsh*t Hunting 06:10 - Tool 1 - WhatsMyName Web 09:47 - Tool 2 - DorkGPT and Dork Search Pro 14:30 - Tool 3 - OD Crawler 16:59 - Tool 4 - Kagi Browser 21:55 - Tool 5 - Ubikron 26:35 - Tool 6 - newspapers.com and Judy Records 34:56 - Tool 7 - OSINT Industries 40:15 - Maltego 42:54 - Darkside and Breach Data 49:03 - Privacy Laws in America and beyond 50:57 - Plugs From MJ Banias 51:35 - MJ Banias Socials 52:25 - Outro Please note that links listed may be affiliate links and provide me with a small percentage/kickback should you use them to purchase any of the items listed or recommended. Thank you for supporting me and this channel! Disclaimer: This video is for educational purposes only. #osint #osinttools #privacy

Tawnya is back at last as we talk about episode 5 (which will blow your mind!) and 6 (sames!) of STARFLEET ACADEMY, then we wrap up our coverage of Nacelle's THE CENTER SEAT documentary. Find Tawnya's Cloak & Cairn on YouTubeNews from TREKMOVIE.COM Here's Robbie! Tom Paris featured in New VOYAGER video gameBuild-A-Bridge is the latest mindblower from NACELLE!Drop us a line at secretfriendsunite@gmail.com and let us know what you're enjoying in the ‘world of nerd' and we might feature your comments on the show! Find us online at secretfriendsunite.com for ALL of our episodes, additional content and bios of our SFU Network stars!Hear Peter on STARSHIP EXCELSIOR at https://starshipexcelsior.com/episodes/#s6Subscribe to our podcasts on Apple and SpotifyHit us up on Threads, Instagram & BlueSky: @Secret.Friends.Unite, @Secretfriendsunite, @TheCeeThreeCheck out our LinkTree for all the ways to reach usGet all your SECRET FRIENDS UNITE merch at our Redbubble store! Click here

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.

Join Thane Riddle for another enthralling Cloak & Dagger Correspondences, this time, with guest Shadrach! Shadrach is the volunteer/de facto head of the P.A.Z.NIA Department of Transportation and has done a lot of great on-the-ground work within the bitcoin, Nostr, mesh networking, and self-liberation circles generally. Please enjoy, and join… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #4: Minting Mesh Network Freedom In The Second Realm with Shadrach appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

Bill Horan and Gabby Seudath talk with Mr. Lester Paldy, a professor emeritus from Stony Brook University, who was tapped by the CIA in 1988 to join the agency for a “trial run” as they faced a troubling new situation in Russia.  That “temporary” assignment would last for 25 years. He extends an invitation to join him on his life- changing journey as the professor with his new book titled, “No Cloak, No Dagger.”

On this episode of Cloak & Dagger, Programming Coordinator Rayo joins Thane in the first hour to cover some critically important P.A.Z.NIA News: in a sentence, the P.A.Z.NIA Consulate burnt down. Tune in to learn more about what happened, ways you can help expedite the rebuild/recovery process, and for most… The post Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle (260207): P.A.Z.NIA News with Coordinator Rayo [P.A.Z.NIA RADIO NETWORK] appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

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.  

Welcome back to the syndrome! This week Ben tries to recruit Troy to the dark side, Helen is patient with Wonder Man and Troy is dealing with the madness. This week we talk about:Haunted HotelBig BoysThe TraitorsEnola HolmesThe Traitors IrelandJohn WickTake ThatCriminal RecordHis and HersThe MadnessMan In A SuitcaseRobin HoodThe Hunting PartyWonder ManPatienceIndustryPodcast artwork Manami Watanabe: https://manamiw.com/ Twitter: @squareeyessyn Email us at: squareeyessyn@gmail.com Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/272033065809081 Ben's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/Megabenny666Troy's channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/legendofold101Share, like and subscribe!Follow us on Spotify here:https://open.spotify.com/show/6oWAmQg Google podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=...Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/yf8v9j1

Hello to you listening in Marion, Ohio!Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Story Prompt Friday and your host, Diane Wyzga.They say that when Marco Polo returned from his decades of travels through Asia along the Silk Roads, he had gems sewn in his cloak to prove the fantastical nature of his stories.Where might we find the fantastical, the unexpected gift in our stories? What did we bring home from our journey? What was the agent of change? How were we transformed? And does any of it matter to someone else? “It's strange to think that there might be things we know that people who live one hundred years from now would like to know. We forget to say them.” [William Stafford]The story we bring back from our journeys is the gift of grace that was passed to us as we journeyed through our fears, doubts, and failures bringing us from There to Here.Story Prompt: What insight, glimpse of wisdom, shiver of compassion, or wee bit of knowledge have you received as you walk the story of your life? Write that story and share it out loud.You're always welcome: "Come for the stories - Stay for the magic!" Speaking of magic, I hope you'll subscribe, share a 5-star rating and nice review on your social media or podcast channel of choice, bring your friends and rellies, and join us! You will have wonderful company as we continue to walk our lives together. Be sure to stop by my Quarter Moon Story Arts website, check out the Communication Services, email me to arrange a no-obligation Discovery Call, and stay current with me as "Wyzga on Words" on Substack.Stories From Women Who Walk Production TeamPodcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story ArtsMusic: Mer's Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron MusicALL content and image © 2019 to Present Quarter Moon Story Arts. All rights reserved.  If you found this podcast episode helpful, please consider sharing and attributing it to Diane Wyzga of Stories From Women Who Walk podcast with a link back to the original source.

Welcome to Day 2790 of Wisdom-Trek. Thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom. Day 2790 – Wisdom Nuggets – Psalm 109:6-25 – Daily Wisdom Wisdom-Trek Podcast Script - Day 2790 Welcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! I am Guthrie Chamberlain, and we are on Day 2790 of our Trek. The Purpose of Wisdom-Trek is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. The title for today's Wisdom-Trek is: The Boomerang of Justice – Wearing Curses Like a Cloak. Today, we are walking into the storm. We are continuing our journey through Psalm One Hundred Nine, and we are covering the most difficult and controversial section of the entire book: verses six through twenty-five, in the New Living Translation. In our previous trek, we stood with David in the opening five verses. We saw him as a man betrayed. He said, "I love them, but they try to destroy me." He told us that in return for his friendship, they acted as his "accusers"—literally, they acted as "satans" or adversaries against him. They repaid evil for good and hatred for love. David's response in that first section was to become "prayer"—to retreat entirely into God. But today, we see what he prayed. And frankly, it is terrifying. Verses six through twenty are often called the "Imprecatory Psalms"—the cursing psalms. David unleashes a torrent of judgment upon his enemy that leaves no stone unturned. He prays for his enemy's death, the destruction of his family, the loss of his job, and the erasure of his name from history. Many people struggle with these verses. They ask, "How can a man after God's own heart pray this way? Isn't this un-Christian?" To understand this, we must put on our Ancient Israelite worldview lenses. This is not personal revenge; this is an appeal to Retributive Justice. This is the law of the boomerang. David is asking God to let the punishment fit the crime exactly. The enemy wanted to destroy David's life and legacy without cause; David is asking the Divine Judge to let that destruction fall back on the enemy's own head. It is a passionate plea for the moral order of the universe to be upheld. So, brace yourselves. We are about to witness the severity of God's justice. The first Segment is: The Appointment of the Accuser. Psalm One Hundred Nine: verses six through seven. They say, "Get an evil person to turn against him. Send an accuser to bring him to trial.  When his case comes up for judgment, let him be pronounced guilty. Count his prayers as sins." Now, there is a debate among scholars here. Some translations, and the NLT implies this with "They say," suggest that these verses are actually the enemies' curses against David. However, the Hebrew text is ambiguous, and historically, most interpreters view this as David speaking against his enemy, asking God to subject the enemy to the very legal warfare he used against David. We will proceed with that understanding, as it fits the flow of the rest of the psalm. David prays: "Get an evil person to turn against him. Send an accuser to bring him to trial."...

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.    

Join Thane Riddle, host of Cloak & Dagger, in another enthralling conversation with hardware hacker & permaculture farmer, Jamin Biconik. Herein, we get some updates on what Jamin's been up to hardware hacking-wise, lots of mini-conversations, and even some deep psychological, spiritual self-liberation stuff towards the end. Please enjoy, and… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #3: Hardware Hacking, Open Source Surveillance, & Psychological/Mental Self-Liberation w/ Jamin Biconik appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

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.  

Join Thane Riddle for another installment of Cloak & Dagger Correspondences. This time, his guest is Dave, formerly of Start9. Herein, Dave and Thane run the gamut, from natural law, to deep cypherpunk conversations. Please enjoy, and consider joining us for a live Self-Liberation Saturday transmission on the P.A.Z.NIA Radio… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #2: Cypherpunk Conversations with Dave, formerly of Start9 appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

Join Thane Riddle for a powerful discussion with JFK researcher, Cory Hughes. Though, unlike most of Cory's interviews going over the events & happenings, Thane focuses on the extraction of valuable information, strategies, and tactics that could be utilized by self-liberators and freedom pioneers today. Please enjoy, and consider joining… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #1: CIA Spycraft & Tradecraft with Cory Hughes appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

Individually they were just like those guys who like to hang around the comic book shop and talk comics but together they form EMX! Check out Thacher's books a DemonWeaselStudios.com In this eXplicit, uncut and unedited episode of EMX we review Marvel Comics X-Men books of December 2025: Amazing X-Men (2025) #3 Binary  (2025) #3 Cloak or Dagger #3 Expatriate X-Men  (2025) #3 Iron & Frost  (2025) #3 The Last Wolverine  (2025) #3 Laura Kinney: Sabretooth  (2025) #3 Longshots  (2025) #3 Omega Kids  (2025) #3 Radioactive Spider-Man #3 Rogue-Storm  (2025) #3 Sinister's Six  (2025) #3 Unbreakable X-Men  (2025) #3 Undeadpool  (2025) #3 X-Men - Age of Revelation Finale #1 X-Men - Book of Revelation (2025) #3 X-Vengers  (2025) #3 [RSS] Subscribe [RSS] EMX Subscribe [Apple Podcasts] Subscribe [Google Podcast] Subscribe All Podcasts  Email: EMP@EarthsMightiestPodcast.com Website: http://www.EarthsMightiestPodcast.comFacebook Group: http://facebookgroup.earthsmightiestpodcast.com/Viet's Website: http://www.comedianviet.comThacher's Website: http://www.DemonWeasel.com  

Today we have an episode of Cloak & Dagger, “The Brenner Pass Story”, from June 4, 1950. Visit our website at BrickPickleMedia.com/podcasts. Subscribe to the ad-free version at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/worldwar2radio/subscribe.  

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.

The end of the Age of Revelation is FINALLY here. We'll look at the highs and the lows of the event in the Month in X for December 2025. Month in X - December 2025 Spider-Man & Wolverine #8 Age of Revelation - Month Three X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity Comic  #6 - 9 Amazing X-Men #3 Binary #3 Laura Kinney: Sabretooth #3 Iron & Frost #3 Longshots #3 Unbreakable X-Men #3 Rogue Storm #3 Sinister's Six #3 Omega Kids #3 Radioactive Spider-Man #3 The Last Wolverine #3 X-Men: Book of Revelation #3 Cloak or Dagger #3 Undeadpool #3 X-Vengers #3 Expatriate X-Men #3 X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale #1

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.

Individually they were just like those guys who like to hang around the comic book shop and talk comics but together they form EMX! Check out Thacher's books a DemonWeaselStudios.com In this eXplicit, uncut and unedited episode of EMX we review Marvel Comics X-Men books of November 2025: Amazing X-Men (2025) #2 Binary  (2025) #2 Cloak or Dagger #2 Expatriate X-Men  (2025) #2 Iron & Frost  (2025) #2 The Last Wolverine  (2025) #2 Laura Kinney: Sabretooth  (2025) #2 Longshots  (2025) #2 Omega Kids  (2025) #2 Radioactive Spider-Man #2 Rogue-Storm  (2025) #2 Sinister's Six  (2025) #2 Unbreakable X-Men  (2025) #2 Undeadpool  (2025) #2 X-Men - Book of Revelation  (2025) #2 X-Men of Apocalypse (2025) #1 X-Vengers  (2025) #2 [RSS] Subscribe [RSS] EMX Subscribe [Apple Podcasts] Subscribe [Google Podcast] Subscribe All Podcasts  Email: EMP@EarthsMightiestPodcast.com Website: http://www.EarthsMightiestPodcast.comFacebook Group: http://facebookgroup.earthsmightiestpodcast.com/Viet's Website: http://www.comedianviet.comThacher's Website: http://www.DemonWeasel.com  

Glad to have our minds back in the present as we try to make sense of what just happened and what comes next - Age of Revelation has concluded! But the ramifications last. Some highs, some lows and a bit of side eye. News - 1:41 Data is Beautiful - 5:51 Poll - 9:03 Personal News - 10:14 Age of Revelation Digis - 13:19 Week 7 Issues - 28:36
 - Radioactive Spider-Man 2, The Last Wolverine 2, Unbreakable X-Men 2, Omega Kids 2, Book of Revelation 2   Week 8 Issues - 43:53
 - Undeadpool 2, Cloak or Dagger 2, X-Vengers 2, Expatriate X-Men 2   Week 9 Issues - 53:04 - 
Binary 3, Laura Kinney Sabretooth 3, Amazing X-Men 3   Week 10 Issues - 1:01:45
 - Longshots 3, Iron and Frost 3, Sinister's Six 3, Unbreakable X-Men 3   Week 11 Issues - 1:12:28
 - Radioactive Spider-Man 3, The Last Wolverine 3, Rogue Storm 3, Omega Kids 3, Book of Revelation 3   Week 12 Issues - 1:28:42
 - Undeadpool 3, Cloak or Dagger 3, X-Vengers 3, Expatriate X-Men 3   Finale - 1:37:25 Thanks for joining us in our twelfth episode of an evolving new format. We're trying out different ways to talk about things within continuity that excited us and we'd love to hear what you think! Leave us a review, send us a DM or shout from the telepathic rooftops! It's all greatly appreciated. 

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.  

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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.  

Send us a textWe have ideas in our minds of what makes a hero, but we're sometimes surprised. In this episode, the VC looks at one of the heroes who pops up out of one the most unlikely places.  

Actress Betsy Borrego (Insta: @itsbetsy) joins Dean to kick off Season 2 with a raw, funny, and wildly honest conversation about the mindset shifts that took her from theater to screen and into 24+ film and TV credits — even through the pandemic, industry shutdowns, and the chaos of strikes. In this episode, Betsy breaks down the moment everything changed: moving from traditional acting techniques into deeper self-work, identity awareness, and what she calls “waking up.” Dean walks her through the inner rewires, the ego checks, and the toolbox mentality that helped her transition into a consistently working actor. They talk: Acting as self-discovery Why mindset became Betsy's secret weapon How to build characters through humanity instead of “performance” What directors actually respond to Set stories from Renfield, Cloak & Dagger, Daisy Jones & The Six, and more The moment Betsy realized she had to switch coaches, switch strategy, and switch identity If you want to train, grow, and evolve as an actor without dropping $300 a month on classes, check out Tilt Acting Skool— the community built around this entire philosophy. Learn, grow, and level up inside a space designed for actors at Skool.com/tilt. Perfect for actors, creators, and anyone fascinated by character work, mindset, manifestation, or the psychology behind great performances. And you can follow The Dean West Perspective on Instagram: @TheDeanWestPerspechttps://www.instagram.com/thedeanwestperspective?igsh=MTQzeW15c2EzN25pbQ==tive and @TheDeanWest Keywords (SEO): Betsy Borrego, Dean West Perspective, acting podcast, acting mindset, character development, manifestation for actors, audition tips, acting technique, actor interview, acting coach, season 2, Renfield, Cloak and Dagger, self-development for actors, Tilt Acting Skool. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.  

The Age of Revelation continues on into its second month and there's a lot to discuss in the Month in X for November 2025. Month in X - November 2025 X-Men of Apocalypse #1 Spider-Man & Wolverine #6 Age of Revelation - Month Two X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity Comic  #1 - 5 Amazing X-Men #2 Binary #2 Laura Kinney: Sabretooth #2 Iron & Frost #2 Longshots #2 Unbreakable X-Men #2 Rogue Storm #2 Sinister's Six #2 Omega Kids #2 Radioactive Spider-Man #2 The Last Wolverine #2 X-Men: Book of Revelation #2 Cloak or Dagger #2 Undeadpool #2 X-Vengers #2 Expatriate X-Men #2

This week we were subject to the latest Clockwork Torgo: Zardoz. Ugh. We also talk about Cloak and Dagger, The Inevitable Ruin, Child of Light, Stranger Things, Deb and Barry's cooking, DND 2024, Clover Pit, Wake Up Dead Man, Wicked for Good, The Soundtrack Show, Star Wars Fashion, Amazon's God of War, Guinness video game records, Ibelin, Portrait of God, the Helldivers movie, and the Stranger Things LEGO set. So, turn up those burners, it's time for a GeekShock!

Evan, Canty, & Michelle discuss Giannis exiting with a calf strain just hours after reports circulated that he's considering options outside of Milwaukee. Is our view of Chris Paul's dismissal any different after new details have emerged? The Cowboys might have one path to the playoffs and the Lions might no longer have a path to a championship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evan, Canty, & Michelle discuss Giannis exiting with a calf strain just hours after reports circulated that he's considering options outside of Milwaukee. Is our view of Chris Paul's dismissal any different after new details have emerged? The Cowboys might have one path to the playoffs and the Lions might no longer have a path to a championship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evan, Canty, & Michelle discuss Giannis exiting with a calf strain just hours after reports circulated that he's considering options outside of Milwaukee. Is our view of Chris Paul's dismissal any different after new details have emerged? The Cowboys might have one path to the playoffs and the Lions might no longer have a path to a championship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evan, Canty, & Michelle discuss Giannis exiting with a calf strain just hours after reports circulated that he's considering options outside of Milwaukee. Is our view of Chris Paul's dismissal any different after new details have emerged? The Cowboys might have one path to the playoffs and the Lions might no longer have a path to a championship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evan, Canty, & Michelle discuss Giannis exiting with a calf strain just hours after reports circulated that he's considering options outside of Milwaukee. Is our view of Chris Paul's dismissal any different after new details have emerged? The Cowboys might have one path to the playoffs and the Lions might no longer have a path to a championship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Brendan is joined by comedian Adam Gilbert! They talk about making divorce your whole personality, private eye novels, and Chicago vs. New York. Brendan also teaches Adam how to lucid dream. FOLLOW ADAM: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamgilbert__ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@adamgilbertcomedy YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AdamGilb JOIN THE PATREON FOR BONUS EPS EVERY WEEK: patreon.com/sagdaddydapod WATCH BRENDAN'S SPECIAL "THIN LIPS": https://youtu.be/HpA3u7ZctsY SUBSCRIBE TO THE POD ON YOUTUBE: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BrendanSagalow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Who do you want to see on the show next? Got topic ideas? Email us at sagdaddydapod@gmail.com. FOLLOW BRENDAN: Tickets: https://punchup.live/brendansagalow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brendansagalow X: https://x.com/BrendanSagalow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brendansagalow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Brendansagalow4 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrendanSagalow FOLLOW NICOLE: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicoleclyons/ Produced by Nicole Lyons Productions Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicolelyonsproductions/ Website: www.nicolelyonsproductions.com Credits: Theme Song: Brendan Sagalow and Linds Cadwell Show Art: Doctor Photograph Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EP 119 BONUS- Nov. 2025 Trek of the Month Welcome to First Flight's Bonus Trek of the Month thematic episodes chat! Chris and Abby love ALL Trek and have given themselves, and the Carrot Crew, some franchise spanning, thematic episode choices for each month.   This month of November the theme is Veterans Day and/or Thanksgiving, and our episode picks are (Forget Me Not DSC S3 Ep 4) and (Under the Cloak of War SNW S2 Ep 8)  Take a listen and hear why we picked them for this theme, a connection to our personal lives and a Grappler Rating. *** Next Month in (December) the episodes are (The Gift VOY S4 Ep 2) and (Generations Movie TOS/TNG) *** Feel free to let us know your thoughts on these monthly episodes and if you have any connections or Grappler Ratings of your own.  (Please note, contributions might be shared on the podcast!) Find Us on Twitter (X), Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and Facebook:  @FirstFlightPod Abby: @abbymsommer Chris: @ShelfNerds  Find Us on YouTube: Chris' Channel : Completing the Shelf

Topics discussed on this week's #FlashbackFriday episode from 2018 include: Steve's lack of headphones Kyle's Macy Gray impression is on point! A sad day for podcast snacks Cloak and Dagger Non-Denominational Winter Solstice Gift Exchange Update Steve's review of the A Star is Born soundtrack Kyle cried at another movie And more! Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky! Get show merch here! Please review the show wherever you download podcasts! Wanna send something? The Steve and Kyle Podcast P.O. Box 371 Hudsonville, MI 49426 Opening music: "Malt Shop Bop" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Closing music: "Pulse" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ TAGS: funny, friends, family, kids, comedy, talk radio, talk, radio, pop culture, music, food, garage, sports, relationships, viral videos, social media, politics, fbhw, free beer and hot wings

Just in case you are thinking of getting some books for Christmas (and who wouldn't be?), we're bringing you our eighth instalment of Cloak, Books, and Parchments (2Tim 4:13). There is no book like the Bible but we all learn from the ministry of others, including ministry that comes to us in written form. Mike & Matthew share brief reviews of 7 books for your reading pleasure, and also provide a heads up for the February Reading Challenge.- Let Earth Receive Her King by Allistair Begg (Good Book Co)- Elisabeth Elliot: A Life by Lucy S.R. Austen (Crossway)- One With My Lord, The Life Changing Reality of Being in Christ, by Sam Allberry (Crossway)- Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime by Matthew McCullough (Crossway)- I Am David by Anne Holm (Farshore)- Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and England's Deliverance in 1588 by Colin Martin & Geoffrey Parker (Yale University Press)- Taking God at His Word by Kevin DeYoung (Crossway) Visit PracticologyPodcast.com for more episodes.Follow the Practicology Podcast on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MandMsPodcast

As we sift through the stacks of comics that have come out over the last six weeks, it feels like the perfect time to check in. So many titles! Which ones have stood out? Which ones have fallen to the side? Do you have a top five from the list or are you just sticking to the handful that interested you? We go through each of the last six weeks of comics with reactions, theories and questions! Week 1 Issues - 4:31 Amazing X-Men 1, World of Revelation 1, Binary 1, Laura Kinney Sabretooth 1, Longshots 1 Week 2 Issues - 22:12 Unbreakable X-Men 1, Sinister's Six 1, , Rogue Storm 1 Week 3 Issues - 38:29 X-Men Book of Revelation 1, Omega Kids 1, The Last Wolverine 1, Radioactive Spider-Man 1 Week 4 Issues - 55:45 Expatriate X-Men 1, X-Vengers 1, Cloak or Dagger 1, Undeadpool 1 Week 5 Issues - 1:10:55 Amazing X-Men 2, Laura Kinney Sabretooth 2, Binary 2, Longshots 2 Week 6 Issues - 1:27:25 Sinister's Six 2, Rogue Storm 2, Iron and Frost 2 Thanks for joining us in our ninth episode of an evolving new format. We're trying out different ways to talk about things within continuity that excited us and we'd love to hear what you think! Leave us a review, send us a DM or shout from the telepathic rooftops! It's all greatly appreciated. 

In this sermon from The Mountain Church, the pastor examines the Elijah-Elisha narrative to reveal how God breaks isolation through generosity and service. He highlights that Elisha—a successful farmer with no religious background—responded to God's calling by immediately abandoning his livelihood, sacrificing his oxen, and humbly serving Elijah before becoming a prophet himself. The core message emphasizes that God's anointing first leads to serving others rather than authority, encouraging listeners to find mentors, gain wisdom through humble service, and embrace Jesus's model of leadership as foot-washing rather than power-wielding.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Go to http://betterhelp.com/super to get 10% off your first month.Go to http://shopify.com/scb to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period. What makes Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak truly special? Sure, it's one of the legendary Deathly Hallows — indestructible, eternal, and able to render its wearer perfectly invisible. But Dumbledore tells Harry that it only ever worked fully for him, its rightful master. So what's the secret power hidden inside the Cloak? In this video, J dives deep into the theory that the Cloak's magic isn't about invisibility at all — it's about protection. From Moody's enchanted eye to the Marauder's Map and even Nagini at Godric's Hollow, every moment the Cloak “fails” actually proves it's doing something more powerful…

In this special, we look back at the top five half-hour Old Time Radio programs of our 2024-2025 season, and one of our best Old Time Radio Snack Wagon episodes.First up, it's The Falcon in "The Case of the Jumping Jack":A woman hires The Falcon because she suspects that her husband has hired a private eye to follow her.Original Radio Broadcast Date: April 20, 1952Originating from New YorkStarring: Les Damon as The Falcon; Chuck Webster as Sergeant CorbettThen we turn to the Your Playhouse of Favorites production of "The Suicide Club":A bored crown prince, looking for excitement, joins a club of men who want to end their lives.Original Air Date: Sometime between 1947 and 1949Originating from New YorkStarring: Dwight Reese; Walter VaughnSpeaking of Robert Louis Stevenson, we turn to an excerpt from The Orson Welles Almanac wherein Welles reads Stevenson's lesser-known letter defending Father Damien against the scathing remarks of Reverend Dr. C.M. Hyde. This impassioned response, penned in 1890, highlights the stark contrasts between the selfless heroism of Father Damien and the hypocrisy of his critics.Join us as we explore the rich historical context and emotional weight of Stevenson's words, showcasing not only a brilliant literary takedown but also a tribute to compassion and service in the face of adversity. Welles's masterful narration brings this poignant piece to life, reminding us of the enduring legacy of Father Damien.Complete Text of Stevenson's letter:https://www.gutenberg.org/files/281/281-h/281-h.htmThen we turn to a surreal episode of Mr. and Mrs. North, "Call Me Choo Choo"Today's Mystery:Pam and Jerry hear a clarinet being played in the middle of the country near a wrecked car.Original Radio Broadcast Date: December 9, 1947Originating from New York CityStarring: Joseph Curtain as Jerry North; Alice Frost as Pamela North; Larry Haines; Mandel KramerWe will also have a listen to one of our new series, Cloak and Dagger, about the true adventures of the OSS during WWII. Here is "Roof of the World":A husband and wife team of geologists are recruited by the IRS to journey into Tibet to seek the favor of the Dalai Lama. They find themselves in competition with two Nazi officers.Original Radio Broadcast: August 13, 1950Originating from New YorkStarring: Louise Barclay; Grant Richards; Raymond Edward Johnson; Stefan Schnabel; Berry Kroeger; Janice Gilbert; Karl Weber; Ralph Bell; Jerry JarrettThen we conclude with one of our most memorable guest-starring appearances in the Yours Truly Johnny Dollar story, "The Price of Fame Matter"Vincent Price summons Johnny Dollar when a $100,000 painting is stolen from his private collection.Original Radio Broadcast Date: February 2, 1958Originating from HollywoodStarring: Bob Bailey as Johnny Dollar; Vincent Price as Himself; Virginia Gregg; Howard McNear; Junius Matthews; Forrest Lewis; Tony BarrettSupport the show monthly at patreon.greatdetectives.netPatreon Supporter of the Day:John, Patreon supporter since September 2016.Support the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectivesJoin us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp – Go to http://betterhelp.com/super to get 10% off your first month. This episode is sponsored by Uncommon Goods – Go to http://uncommongoods.com/supercarlin for 15% off your next gift. Today J dives into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter to ask What If Draco kept the invisibility cloak when he takes it from Harry on the Train.  Could he have used it to unwittingly become master of Death? What does it take to Master the Cloak?  Could Draco have defeated Voldemort if he had united the Deathly Hallows? #HarryPotter #SuperCarlinBrothers  Written by :: J & Ben Carlin Edited by :: Ethan Edghill

Today's Adventure: Two OSS Agents go into occupied Norway to blow up a key Nazi-controlled bridge.Original Radio Broadcast: August 20, 1950Originating in New YorkStarring: Berry Kroeger, Raymond Edward Johnson, Jerry Jarrett, Frank Barrens, Karl Weber, Joseph Julian, Ralph Bell.To subscribe to this podcast and, go to https://greatadventures.info/Become one of our ongoing Patreon supporters at https://patreon.greatdetectives.netSupport the show on a one-time basis at http://support.greatdetectives.net.Mail a donation to: Adam Graham, PO Box 15913, Boise, Idaho 83715Take the listener survey at http://survey.greatdetectives.netGive us a call at 208-991-4783Follow us on Instagram at http://instagram.com/greatdetectivesFollow us on Twitter @radiodetectives