Podcasts about Cloak

Fr. Anthony talks with returning guest co-host Dr. Cyril Gary Jenkins, as we reach what Frodo had hoped was the end of his quest and begin to find that it has only just begun. Music attribution: Hidden Past and Celtic Impulse, both by Kevin MacLeod (www.incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In episode 306, we looked at the advantages of taking your book wide to all retailers. In this week's episode, we'll look at the other side of the coin and examine eight advantages to placing your book in Kindle Unlimited. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, Book #8 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: JUNEDOOM The coupon code is valid through July 7, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 308 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 19th, 2026 and today we are looking at the advantages of using Kindle Unlimited for your books. Two weeks ago, we had an episode about the advantages of going wide and distributing it away from Amazon, but there is another side of the coin and today we're going to look at it in the advantages of Kindle Unlimited. We also have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects and Coupon of the Week. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, Book #8 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. That code is JUNEDOOM. As always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in these show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through July 7th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook for your travels this summer, we have got you covered. So now let's take a look at where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Blade of Thieves is done. It turned out to be just about as long as Blade of Wraiths. I'm also finished with Orcish Fury, which will be the bonus short story that newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of when Blade of Thieves comes out. I am now editing Blade of Thieves. The first two chapters are edited. I am not sure how many chapters I'll end up with because I've gotten into the habit of splitting up longer chapters into shorter chapters lately since readers seem to prefer that. I do think the book will probably be out after 4th of July weekend if all goes well, because it is a big book and I'm going to have to do a fair bit of editing and I do have a few more things to do in real life that might slow the process down. But if all goes well, the book should be out shortly after the 4th of July weekend. I am also 13,000 words into Cloak of Frost, which will be my next main project once Blade of Thieves is finally done. That will probably be available in August, if all goes well. In audiobook news, at the moment I have no audiobooks in active production, but that will change next month because Leanne Woodward will be recording Dragon-Mage. Hollis McCarthy will be recording Cloak of Worlds and Brad Wills will be recording Blade of Thieves once I finally get it done. So it's funny how things always seem to do a bunch up like that rather than having a more conveniently distributed fashion, but I suppose that's just the nature of life. In other audiobook news, I mentioned earlier that Cloak of Dragons is now available in Audible Plus for those of you who are Audible listeners who have a plan that includes that. Before too much longer, I'm going to start working on the audiobook version of Cloak Mage Omnibus Four, which will combine I believe Cloak of Embers, Cloak of Titans, and Cloak of Illusion into one audiobook bundle. I've done that before [in] the past [with] Cloak Mage books and it's worked pretty well, so we're going to do it with this one as well. I'm going to start working on that next week because I've got to make the cover and then it takes forever to upload all the audiobook files. Hopefully that will be out sometime in July, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. 00:03:23 Main Topic of the Week: When and Why to Put Your Books in Kindle Unlimited (KU) Now let's move on to our main topic this week, when and why to put your books in Kindle Unlimited. You might remember that two weeks ago (with Episode 306, I believe) we discussed the advantages and benefits of taking your books wide and not exclusive to Amazon. However, there are reasons it might actually be a good decision to put your books in Kindle Unlimited. In this week's episode, we'll talk about why you might want to consider putting your book in Kindle Unlimited. First, we should discuss how Kindle Unlimited actually works, defining our terms, so to speak. Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's merchandising program for ebooks, essentially. To use the program, you agree that your ebook will be exclusive to Amazon for the next three months (and by default, it auto renews, but you can turn that off in the dashboard). The advantages to you for using Kindle Unlimited are that in addition to buying your book outright, people can also check it out in the Kindle Unlimited program and then you get paid based on how many pages they read. The payout typically varies, but it's usually 45% of one cent [USD] per page read. For example, Half-Elven Thief, you can buy it for $4.99, but in terms of Kindle Unlimited, it comes to about 300 Kindle Unlimited pages, which means that if a reader reads the entire book, I typically get about $1.35 for a complete read. Obviously, this advantages longer books, whereas with the sale of the book, I would get like $3.49, which is significantly more, but it is possible to make up in volume of page reads lost sales on other platforms if the circumstances are right. So that is how Kindle Unlimited works. And now we will look at eight reasons why it is a good idea or why it might be a good idea and why it might be advantageous for you to put your books into Kindle Unlimited. #1: Certain genres are KU dominant. This is not true across all genres, but certain genres tend to be heavily dominated by Kindle Unlimited readers. For example, LitRPG is a unique case because the most popular LitRPG tends to be in serialized form on sites like Royal Road and similar sites, but when it does come to ebook form, it's usually on Kindle Unlimited. So if you're looking to read LitRPG, you will find most of it on Kindle Unlimited and not on the other sites. Other genres tend to be not totally dominant to that effect the way that LitRPG is, but do still have a great deal of strength in Kindle Unlimited, such as military sci-fi, certain kind of thrillers, and certain romance genres as well tend to be very heavily dominated by Kindle Unlimited. So if you are writing in one of those genres, it may be worth your while to consider that it may be advantageous to you to put your book in Kindle Unlimited and see how it performs. #2: The Kindle Unlimited Boost It's no secret that Amazon definitely puts its thumb on the scales for Kindle Unlimited books as opposed to regular ebooks. I've noticed that Kindle Unlimited books tend to go higher in the Amazon rankings. They tend to stay up there for longer than non-Kindle Unlimited books and that reviews generally show up faster for Kindle Unlimited books than they do for non-Kindle Unlimited books. That last part might vary, but the ranking thing is true. It's also true that the higher a book stays in the Amazon rankings and for longer, the more likely it is Amazon is to generate "we think you might like this" emails and send them out to readers in hopes of drawing them to your books. So it is true that Amazon definitely gives a lot of advantages to Kindle Unlimited books that other books don't get. And depending on your sales strategy and your genre, as we mentioned before, it might be worthwhile for your book to be in Kindle Unlimited. #3: Your sales data supports it. If you publish a book wide and after you look at a couple of months of sales data and you notice something like 95% of the sales are coming from Amazon, it might be worthwhile to consider taking the book exclusive and putting it in Kindle Unlimited since in that instance, the boost of page reads and page reads revenue would make up for the sales you clearly aren't getting on the other platforms. Now the threshold for this obviously varies a good deal. I've had months in the past where only like 45% of my revenue came from Amazon and in some of my older series in particular, the Amazon revenue tends to only be around like 40 to 45% and the rest comes from all the other retailers. So in that case, obviously it would be a very poor decision to take the book exclusive to Amazon and take it off all the other retailers. So this is a case where it is once again a good idea to monitor your sales data closely so you can make informed decision rather than working off of gut hunches and guesswork. #4: It permits you to reach readers who aren't buying individual books and value conscious readers. When I've talked about Kindle Unlimited on Facebook and my website in the past, I usually get comments from people who point out that they are on fixed incomes, whether from retirement or disability or taking care of other relatives and so forth and that Kindle Unlimited for them is a great deal because in exchange for $12 a month, they can read as many KU books as they have time to read. That is true. Kindle Unlimited is a much better deal for readers than it is for the majority of writers. And having your book in Kindle Unlimited is a way to reach those value conscious readers who will not buy individual ebooks for whatever reason, whether budgetary constraints or other reasons but do have a Kindle Unlimited subscription. Kindle Unlimited offers you a way to reach those readers that you otherwise would not and that is a potentially useful advantage. #5: It helps you to find new readers and binge readers. Kindle Unlimited kind of works a little bit like the permafree strategy, which I've discussed before, where that if you make the first book in your series free, people are more likely to take a chance on it than they would otherwise. The same thing is true of Kindle Unlimited because if someone's already paid the Kindle Unlimited subscription for a month, it's a sunk cost and therefore there is no disadvantage or additional cost to them for trying out your book and that can potentially lead to a strong sales boost for you if someone discovers your books and likes it. Additionally, if you have a series, every time you release a new book in the series, there is a strong chance your previous books will get a boost. This has been my strategy with the Half-Elven Thief series for the last two and a half years. Now, every time I release a new book in the series, I am fortunate enough that it does well enough that it goes high in the ranks for a while and that causes a sort of halo effect as people discover the previous books in the series for the first time and read through them with their Kindle Unlimited subscriptions, which generates a lot of page reads and therefore revenue. As I said before, a complete read through of Half-Elven Thief, the first book in a series by itself tends to get me around $1.30 to $1.50, depending on what the KU payout rate is that month. By contrast, if a Kindle Unlimited reader reads through all six books in the series, that tends to be around $8 to $8.50, which is a good chunk of revenue. These are often people who, as I mentioned in the previous point, would not have bought the individual ebooks. So that is potentially a big advantage, especially if you write in series and you regularly release in that series because then you get the halo effect to it. #6: It simplifies your ads and marketing strategy. I've often recommended to people who are just starting out self-publishing that it's a good idea to start on Amazon and KU and then see if they want to expand later because it's very simple to just manage one dashboard as opposed to like seven or eight different retailers. As self-publishers get more advanced experience, they tend to prefer to go wide. This also means that your ads are simplified because then you just have to worry about Amazon ads. You can do BookBub ads for KU books. I have not found that to be very advantageous because it's so expensive, but Amazon ads for KU books tend to be very effective and fairly cost effective so long as you monitor the costs and keep your cost per click and ad budget down closely. #7: KU has kind of what I call an immediacy bias. It definitely favors new material over older material. I would not say it's a good idea to take an old series out and put it in KU, especially if it's been on Amazon for several years because the Amazon algorithm definitely tends to reward newness. Self-publishers will talk about the 30, 60, and 90 day cliff where sales tend to drop off, partly from just the organic effect of the book having reached most of its target audience and partly because the Amazon algorithms stop pushing it so much once they reach those points. Kindle Unlimited really, really likes new stuff and I think they change the algorithms on a regular basis, but I think it gives a strong advantage to new stuff. So that ties in if you write a long series and publish new books in it on a regular basis, then you will probably see a strong advantage from that because each new additional book you published in the series will get that new book Halo Effect, which will then boost the other books in the series and that's happening with Half-Elven Thief right now with Dragon-Mage boosting the previous books in the series. #8: Don't plan on keeping your books in Kindle Unlimited forever. As I mentioned in previous episodes of this podcast, my strategy going forward is to only write three series at a time, two of which will be wide and one of which will be in Kindle Unlimited. Once Half-Elven Thief is finished, and I've written the ninth book in the series and it's all wrapped up, I will take it out of Kindle Unlimited and take it to the other platforms because of KU's newness bias. As I mentioned before, since I will no longer be writing new books in the Half-Elven Thief series, they will no longer get that halo boost of page reads from a new book and therefore it makes sense to take it out of Kindle Unlimited and then take it wide to other retailers. I know of other indie authors who do this. [They] will start out their series in Kindle Unlimited and then when it's complete, take it wide to other retailers and that is something I think is worth thinking about if you are publishing your book in Kindle Unlimited is that once the series is done and once you're no longer publishing new books that receive advantages from KU's preference for new material, it is definitely time to start thinking about taking the series out of Kindle Unlimited and putting it on other platforms. Indeed, this is advice I'm going to follow myself once Half-Elven Thief is finished. So there are eight potential reasons putting your book in Kindle Unlimited might be advantageous to you and now the question always tends to be a bit of a binary one is like, should my book be wide? Should my book be in Kindle Unlimited? The secret is there is no right answer. There is just the answer that is right for you and your individual circumstances at this point in time. Like I mentioned earlier, myself, I'm doing a hybrid strategy where most of my books remain wide and most of my new books are wide, but I do have one series in Kindle Unlimited that I am continuing and that might work for you if you write fast enough or it might work better for you to be wide. It might work what better for you to be in Kindle Unlimited. It is just important to reflect and soberly and honestly analyze the data and then make the best decision that is right for you and your self-publishing business. 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 we'll see you all next week.  

Today we have an episode of Cloak & Dagger, “The Kuchin Story”, from June 18, 1950. Cloak and Dagger was a short-lived radio series that told stories taken from the files of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War 2 forerunner of the CIA.Visit our website at BrickPickleMedia.com/podcasts. Subscribe to the ad-free version at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/worldwar2radio/subscribe.

Miles Mussenden is a British-born American actor, filmmaker, producer, and director known for his commanding screen presence and emotionally grounded performances across film and television. With over a decade of professional experience, he has built a reputation as a versatile character actor capable of delivering both intensity and nuance. Miles is widely recognized for his series regular role as Otis Johnson in the Marvel television series Marvel's Cloak & Dagger, as well as standout performances in acclaimed productions including The Good Lord Bird, Bloodline, The Walking Dead, Stranger Things, and The Blacklist. He also brought a memorable edge to the DC Universe as the super-villain Frenzy in Doom Patrol. He has continued to build momentum with recurring roles in Tulsa King, Swagger, and Based on a True Story. Upcoming projects include a recurring role in the Apple TV+ series Cape Fear and a lead role in the feature film Croatoan. Expanding beyond acting, Miles has established himself as a filmmaker with his directorial debut, Homage, an urban crime drama exploring loyalty, redemption, and the lasting consequences of one's past. The film marks a significant milestone in his creative evolution, showcasing his talents behind the camera as both a storyteller and producer. Drawing from his Caribbean heritage and early experience producing dancehall reggae music, he brings an authentic cultural perspective to his work, often exploring themes rooted in identity, legacy, community, and resilience. As a producer and director, Miles is focused on creating character-driven stories that resonate with global audiences while building sustainable independent film ventures. Originally beginning his training in New York City, he studied at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts before transitioning into a full-time career in film and television. Off-screen, Miles is passionate about family and community impact, working with organizations that support at-risk youth. With a growing slate of projects as both an actor and filmmaker, Miles Mussenden is emerging as a dynamic creative voice—bridging performance, direction, and storytelling at the highest level. Screen Heat Miami Screen Heat Miami (SHM) is hosted by veteran Miami based producers Kevin Sharpley and JL Martinez and covers the latest trends in the film, tv, and entertainment industry, including interviews with global and local industry leaders, all told from a "Miami" point of view.

Adventure: I Was a Communist for the FBI “I Walk Alone” 3/30/52 Syndicated, Cloak and Dagger “Operation Sell-Out” 9/22/50 NBC.

Full archive from 6/13/26 of Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle. Thane covers news, fan mail, and is joined by Shane/Rayo2 to get some updates on the P.A.Z.NIA Lbry & PAZcraft. Leave a message for the show: XMRCHAT.COM/PAZNIAradio Join us on SimpleX: PAZNIA.COM/SIMPLEX VonuLife, the most practical, valuable, and hardcore… The post [P.A.Z.NIA RADIO NETWORK] Self-Liberation Saturday (6/13/26) FULL: Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle with Shane/Rayo2 appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

LoC: https://substack.com/home/post/p-198686549https://x.com/ExLibrisCelaenoFox and Sons: use code JBurdenJ: https://findmyfrens.net/jburden/Buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/j.burdenSubstack: https://substack.com/@jburdenPatreon: https://patreon.com/JburdenGUMROAD: https://radiofreechicago.gumroad.com/l/ucducAxios: https://axios-remote-fitness-coaching.kit.com/affiliateETH: 0xB06aF86d23B9304818729abfe02c07513e68Cb70BTC: 33xLknSCeXFkpFsXRRMqYjGu43x14X1iEt

If you are needing a refresher course on the majesty and awe-striking wonder of the Almighty, this is a message for you. In fact, this may be the series for you. If the hem of His garment can bring healing, what if we pursued even more of this amazing God we serve?------------» Take these studies deeper and be discipled in person by Eric, Leslie, Nathan, and the team at Ellerslie in one of our upcoming discipleship programs – learn more at: https://ellerslie.com/be-discipled/» Receive our free “Five Keys to Walking Through Difficulty” PDF by going to: https://ellerslie.com/subscribe/» For more information about Daily Thunder and the ministry of Ellerslie Mission Society, please visit: https://ellerslie.com/daily» If you have been blessed by Ellerslie, consider partnering with the ministry by donating at: https://ellerslie.com/donate/» Discover more resources, books, and sermons from Eric Ludy by going to: https://ellerslie.com/about-eric-ludy/

In this week's episode, we take a look at eight reasons to diversify your ebooks sales beyond just Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, Book #7 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: WARLOCKJUNE The coupon code is valid through June 22, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 306 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 5th, 2026 and today we'll discuss eight reasons you should diversify your book sales beyond Amazon. We'll also talk about Coupon of the Week and give a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.   So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, Book #7 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. That coupon code is WARLOCKJUNE. 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 is valid through June 22nd, 2026, So if you need a new audiobook for the summer as you go on a summer road trip, we have got you covered. Now let's talk about my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am 80,000 words into Blade of Thieves, which puts me in Chapter 17 of 25 of my outline. So we're closing in on the end. I think we're going to be about 110-115,000 words or thereabouts in the rough draft. So hopefully a couple more solid pushes and we'll get there to the end. I hope to be at 90,000 words by this point, but there is quite a lot to do in real life so we didn't quite get there, but 80,000 words is still better than nothing. For Cloak of Frost, as of this recording, I am now 9,000 words into it and that will be my main project once Blade of Thieves is done. I was hoping to have Blade of Thieves come out in June, but July is looking more likely at this point. Hopefully Cloak of Frost will come out the month after Blade Thieves comes out, whenever that is.   In audiobook news, I'm pleased to report that Blade of Wraiths (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is now out at all audiobook platforms. Get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Kobo Books, Chirp, my own Payhip store and all the usual audiobook stores. At the moment, I have no other audiobooks in active production, but once Blade of Thieves is done, Brad will also be recording that. Later this month, Hollis McCarthy is scheduled to start on Cloak of Worlds and in July, Leanne Woodward is going to record Dragon-Mage, the most recent Rivah book. So we don't have any audiobooks being produced right now, but we will in the future. So that is where I am at with my current writing, audiobook, and publishing projects.   00:02:32 Main Topic of the Week: Beyond Amazon: Reasons to Diversify Your Sales Platform   Now onto our main topic this week, Beyond Amazon: Reasons to Diversify Your Sales Platform, which is something you know I do quite often given how often I talk about my links to my Payhip store on this very podcast.   For a long time, the conventional wisdom has been that Amazon has 80% of the US book market and putting your ebooks into Kindle Unlimited was the best route of success because of that monopoly and some of the algorithmic benefits Amazon gives to KU authors. While it's true that certain genres (especially LitRPG and romance) are almost exclusively focused on Amazon and KU in the US, going exclusive with Amazon is not necessarily the best course of action for everyone, especially if you're interested in growing your international sales.   Today we'll talk about reasons why putting your books in KU is limiting and in the interest of fairness, in two weeks, we will also be doing an episode later [about] when putting your book in KU is a good idea and some of the benefits of that. But today we're going to start with the benefits of diversification. Here are eight reasons you might want to consider moving beyond just Amazon, which is often called going wide in the Indie Publishing world. #1: Increasing your global reach.   It may surprise you to know that the Kindle store is not available in every country and that other countries have a strong competitor to the Kindle store. For example, in Canada, Kobo is Amazon's main competitor and has traditionally a strong market share there, quite a bit larger than Amazon Canada based on my own sales data. Kobo is also very strong in many European markets. Additionally, because there are many more Android users internationally than there are in the US, Google Play Books is important in non-US countries. It's also an easy platform for users and integrates into the Google ecosystem as well. Data usually finds that while the iPhone [iOS] is dominant in the United States, Android tends to be the majority mobile operating system in the rest of the world. So if you want to access Android users in the Google Play Book Store, then you want to be on Google Play Books. #2: Some people are boycotting Amazon.   There are many readers who boycott Amazon or American-led companies for a number of reasons. It is possible to overstate the strength of these. I've seen many people be alarmed about Amazon boycotts impacting their sales, but it never really seems to materialize. I suspect a lot of the boycotting thing is much louder online than it is in real life. That said, it is undeniable. There are people who will not buy ebooks or anything from Amazon for a variety of reasons. So if you sell your books only through Amazon, you're missing out on that group of readers. Some categories of romance have also been affected by Amazon boycotts, so it's worth investigating other options if you're an author in these categories.   #3: Kobo Plus.   Kobo offers a subscription program called Kobo Plus that unlike KU, does not require exclusivity to participate in it. Over three million ebooks and 100,000 audiobooks (quite a few of which are mine) are available to subscribers for less than the cost of a KU subscription. Kobo has been gaining popularity in the US in part due to their subscription program. I have to admit my own personal experience with Kobo Plus as an indie author has been almost entirely positive. When it first came out, I was a little leery of it, but then I decided to test it out by putting Frostborn into it and that did quite well and I was pleased enough with the results that now I just put everything in Kobo on Kobo Plus and that has paid off because the majority of my month to month Kobo revenue and the majority of my yearly Kobo revenue comes from Kobo Plus now. In March and April, I had two of my best months ever on Kobo in the 14 years I've been publishing with Kobo entirely off the strength of Kobo Plus. So my experience with it has been if you write a really long series like that that generates a strong read through (like Frostborn is 15 books, Sevenfold Sword was 12 books, Cloak Mage as of this point is up to 14 books), then it would be definitely advantageous to you to investigate Kobo Plus.   #4: It gives you the chance to support independent booksellers through bookshop.org.   This past year, bookshop.org made a deal with Draft2Digital that made it possible for indie authors to put their books on the bookshop.org platform. In the past, has not been particularly easy or straightforward for small indie bookstores to sell ebooks, so this is an opportunity for physical indie bookstores based in the US. For American readers who want to shop local but still read ebooks, it's nice to be able to offer them an option that benefits their local communities. It also gives these bookstores a way of supporting local authors without having to find physical space for them within the store itself. Bookshop.org is still in the early stages of accepting indie ebooks and there are some things that need to be worked out with features on their app, especially about user complaints about a lack of flexibility with DRM-free e-books. Still, romance and what the site calls "serious nonfiction" are growing rapidly on the platform, so it's definitely worth exploring, especially for authors in those categories. If they do succeed in their plans to put out their own ereader, that would make the platform even more attractive to many book buyers.   #5: Direct sales equals greater profit, extras, price fixability, et cetera.    Having your own sales platform (typically hosted on sites like Payhip and Shopify) gives you far more control over your sales platform. It also gives you a far greater cut of the profits. To give an example, if I do a coupon code for one of my audiobooks on my Payhip site to make it 50% off like I did earlier in this episode with the Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock coupon, I still earn a similar amount as if someone had bought it for full price on Audible.   A direct sales platform also allows you to create discounts for sales far more easily than on other platforms. Additionally, you don't have to wait for ebooks or audiobooks to get through processing on a direct sales site like you do with ACX and the other sites, which makes when a book or audiobook is ready for sale far more predictable. You can also bundle things with ebooks like such as the book file in multiple formats or bonus items like maps, worksheets, or charts. On the other ebook sites, this isn't typically possible. Direct sales gives you a greater flexibility in terms of selling. You can include bonus items and it's also a good fallback position if one of the main sites isn't working. I first got into direct sales in 2021 because Barnes & Noble had its big ransomware hack then and for a while it was impossible to publish new things to the platform and I believe that was when Ghost in the Vault came out and since I couldn't publish that on Barnes & Noble until the ransomware problem was fixed, I directed people to the Payhip site instead.   #6: Library sales and Kindle Unlimited.   The popularity of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and the Project Hail Mary audiobook made a lot of people aware of the fact that exclusivity agreements with Amazon and Audible have often been structured to leave out options for library ebook platforms or require maneuvering or additional deals in order to make it possible. The popularity of Libby in particular is growing here in the United States, especially as people are having to shift their leisure spending from things like books and entertainment to covering basic necessities like housing, transportation, fuel, and food costs due to the poor state of the economy. If library sales and library readers are important to you, then going wide is your best option for reaching the library market.   Myself, I haven't particularly pursued the library market. I haven't refused it either. I usually, when the option is available, click on the toggle switch to publish it to a library service, but then don't think about it very much after that, but there are many indie authors who are very interested in getting in libraries and have pursued that quite a bit through these programs.   #7: Vendor lock-in/user preference.   There is a concept called vendor lock-in, meaning that ebook buyers have a particular platform that they default to when buying ebooks because that is where the ebook collection is based and they want to keep their books together instead of spread across several different apps. Many Barnes & Noble and Kobo users are not interested in ebooks from Amazon or KU for this reason and won't even follow a favorite author to another platform. It's important to have an option available for these readers.   #8: DRM free. [Digital Rights Management]   Having a DRM free copy of an ebook is extremely important to many readers and that is what makes an ebook purchase a true purchase instead of a highly conditional license. Sites like Kobo allow ebook buyers to limit their searches to only DRM free titles and many will not buy a book that is not available without DRM. My Payhip store, all the files you get from that when you buy an ebook or an audiobook are DRM free as well.   For myself, a large portion of my sales come from outside Amazon, so that's why I've never been fully exclusive with Kindle Unlimited and instead rotate a small selection of my series in and out of KU. Over the years, I've experimented with having various books in KU and starting in 2023, what I settled on doing was that I would write three series ongoing. Two of those series would be available on all ebook platforms and one of those series would be available in Kindle Unlimited, which allowed me to pursue both markets at once. As of right now, the wide series are Blades of Ruin and Cloak Mage and the Kindle Unlimited series is Half-Elven Thief. Once Half-Elven Thief is completed, I will take it out of Kindle Unlimited and take it wide and start a new series for Kindle Unlimited.   Overall, I found it's worthwhile to be wide even when pursuing Kindle Unlimited with some of my books because typically in an average month about 45 to 55% of my revenue comes from Amazon and the rest comes from all the other platforms put together. So while Amazon is typically half, that's not nothing, it's only half and the rest of the revenue comes from all these ebook platforms I've been cultivating over the years. So the conclusion is that the beauty of KU's current agreement is that you only have to commit to being exclusive for a short amount of time, specifically three months, and then can always return to it if you want to try going wide for a while.    It's also important to note that growth on other platforms may be slow and if you're going to try them out, it's important to be patient and have realistic expectations. It's the benefit of being an indie author that we can experiment and make decisions quickly based on data and reader preferences. Going wide may not be the best decision for everyone, but the results may surprise you, especially over time.   The cumulative effect of things is often easy to overlook, but it does add up over time. Part of the reason I think my books do so well with Kobo Plus is because they've been on the Kobo website for the last 14 years, which gives them time to accumulate reviews and additional word of mouth. So when someone is browsing Kobo Plus for something to read and they see this long book series with a bunch of good reviews, it becomes easy for them to try it through Kobo Plus.   So that is it for this week. This week we talked about going wide. Next week I don't have time to record a full-time episode, so we're going to do another audiobook sampler roundup, which will be fun. The week after that, in two weeks from today, we are going to talk about the benefits of going to Kindle Unlimited as a contrast to this episode and I will talk about some of my Kindle Unlimited experiences (both good and bad). So 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 backups at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting and platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.  

Our hardware hacker friend, Jamin Biconik, is back on Cloak & Dagger Correspondences! Herein, Jamin fills us in on all his mesh networking, drone, local, self-hosted AI projects… They also go into quite a deep dive on self-psychology, its relation to AI, and how this manifests in physical space and… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #10: If It Smells Like Salmon, It Must Be Jamin (with Hardware Hacker, Jamin Biconik) appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

It's time for another Mike Makes Mike Watch! This week, Mike D is making Smith catch up on Denis Villeneuve's breakout hit, PRISONERS. Meanwhile, Smith is making Mike D watch the incredibly fun Hitchcock-for-kids thriller CLOAK & DAGGER!

The following is the newest installment of Cloak & Dagger Correspondences, this time with guest, Alena Vranova. Being an OG bitcoiner and super early cypherpunk Across The Pond, she co-founded Satoshi Labs, helped to coordinate conferences & meet-ups, and now, is dedicated to Gart.io, the first stealth alert app, enabling… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #9: Bitcoin, Nostr, & Gart.io with Alena Vranova appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Spring 2026, and rate them from least to most favorite. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: DRAGONJUNE The coupon code is valid through June 15, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 305 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 29th, 2026 and today we'll be discussing my Spring Movie Review Roundup for 2026, where I discuss the movies and streaming shows I watched over the last few months. We will also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is DRAGONJUNE. And as always, you get the coupon code and the links in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through June the 15th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's move on to my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. As I mentioned last week, Dragon-Mage is out and you can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited and it's doing well, so thank you for that. My next main project is Blade of Thieves and as of this recording, I am on chapter 11 of 25, though that'll probably expand in the final draft, which puts me at 56,000 words in. So I'm almost halfway through. I think probably it's going to be the length of Blade of Wraiths or a little longer, but we'll see. I'm hoping to have it out towards the end of June, but depending on how June goes, that might slip till July. Hopefully we can avoid that. I'm also 5,000 words into Cloak of Frost and that will be my main project once Blade of Thieves is done. I'm hoping to have Cloak of Frost out towards the end of July, but depending on how June goes, it might slip to August. For audiobook projects, Blade of Wraiths is still processing at ACX, though I believe as of right now, you can get it at Google Play, Kobo, Spotify, and my own Payhip store. The other stores should be available within a few weeks. As of right now, I don't actually have any current audiobooks in production, though we have some scheduled for the future. Once Blade of Thieves is finally done, Brad Wills will record that for us. Hollis McCarthy is scheduled to record Cloak of Worlds in June, if all goes well. Leanne Woodward will be recording Dragon-Mage sometime in July, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Hopefully we'll have new things for you to read and listen to before much longer. 00:02:32 Main Topic: Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup Now without any further ado, let's move on to our main topic, my Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup. It's time for the Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup, where I review the movies and streaming shows I watched over the last few months. As always, they're listed from least favorite to most favorite. The grades are wholly subjective and based on nothing more than my own opinions and thoughts. With that disclaimer out of the way, let's go to the movies. First up is Kicking and Screaming, which came out in 2005. This is a family comedy with Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall. Pharrell plays Phil Weston, a mild mannered vitamin store owner and Duvall plays his father, Buck Weston, owner of a successful chain of sports equipment stores. Buck is one of those hyper competitive guys who has to win at everything and Phil has always rolled with it. But when Phil's son is a benchwarmer on the youth soccer team that Buck coaches, Phil's had enough and starts coaching a rival team to get his son into the game and to defeat his father. Along the way, of course, he descends into Will Ferrell style comedic lunacy, but the PG version since this is a PG movie. Mike Ditka was also hilarious as Phil's sidekick and assistant coach. It seemed like an '80s family movie. It was a sort of movie where you could have taken the entire family to the theater in 2005 and everyone would have been at least moderately entertained. Overall Grade: C Next up is the animated Lord of the Rings, which came out in 1978. As I mentioned, this was the animated version of Lord of the Rings from 1978. Extremely ambitious, but I think it's fair to say this landed in ambitious failure territory, but they tried the best they could given the constraints of the technology at the time and the actual available budget. They tried to pack the entirety of the Fellowship of the Ring and the first half of The Two Towers into about two hours and 20 minutes. I'm sorry to say it just didn't work. Like Dune, the Lord of the Rings is one of those books that requires like 10 hours of very expensive filmmaking to pull off properly. That said, I think it is fair to say that this stumbled so that the Peter Jackson live action trilogy could run. Adapting a book (especially a big book) into a movie is a challenge and I don't think this quite got there. Too much was cut out and if you hadn't read the book, you would probably have no idea what was happening or just been confused the entire time. Additionally, the movie relied heavily on rotoscoping and it didn't always quite work. Like the rotoscope Nazgul looked creepy and unsettling, so that worked for them. However, the rotoscoped orcs just looked bad. You know how in live theater stagehands will dress all in black? The orcs kind of looked like that, albeit they're wearing yellow ponchos over their black stagehand outfits, almost like the stagehands were expecting inclement weather backstage. That said, the vocal performances and the music were very good. So an ambitious and admirable failure. As I said, I think the filmmaker's vision exceeded the grasp of their budget and the available technology of the 1970s. Overall Grade: C Next up is Airplane!, which came out in 1980. It was interesting to watch this as a cultural artifact. It had the leisurely pace of an '80s movie, with far more absurdist humor. It was a parody of various airplane disaster movies from the 1970s. It's also interesting that this is remembered as a Leslie Nielsen movie nowadays, though Leslie Nielsen 's character is only a supporting character. For all that he's known for his absurdist humor these days from later movies, Nielsen plays his character stone cold dead straight, which makes him all the funnier, amazingly enough. Some of the jokes in this movie have aged very badly, but it's still worth watching as an interesting and amusing cultural artifact, given how it influenced the entire genre of comedy movies afterwards. There's also the obligatory three seconds of nudity that can get cut on cable TV broadcast. Overall Grade: B- Next up is the Thomas Crown Affair, which came out in 1999. This is an interesting remake of a movie from the 1960s. Pierce Brosnan plays Thomas Crown, a billionaire who has grown bored with his life, so he orchestrates the theft of a priceless Monet painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The heist goes off flawlessly and the museum's insurance company sends out investigator Catherine Banning (played by Renee Russo) to retrieve the painting and avoid a hundred million dollar insurance payout. Banning immediately intuits that Crown is the thief and sets about to find the painting. This investigation is complicated by the fact that Crown and Banning immediately develop a strong attraction and start an affair. It was interesting to watch since neither Crown nor Banning are particularly sympathetic characters. In 2026, the phrase "bored New York billionaire" has much more sinister connotations than it did in 1999 and Banning breaks all kinds of laws and sleeping with her target is not a particularly bright idea. That said, the opening heist was interesting and Crown's final gambit to return the painting was extremely clever and enjoyable to watch. So overall, I like the movie, but there's still way too much nudity. Cable broadcasts are probably like 10 minutes shorter than the actual runtime from cutting it all out. Overall Grade: B- Next up is Whiskey Galore, which came out in 2017 and this is a remake of the original Whiskey Galore from 1949. Honestly, this is exactly the same movie from 1949 that I watched in the Movie Review Roundup for Summer 2025, just updated with modern filmmaking techniques. If the movie makers in the '40s could have done it this way, they would have. Though I would recommend watching the 1949 one first and then the one from 2017. Overall Grade: B Next up is Super Mario Galaxy, which came out in 2026. And I have to admit, it felt a little strange to be the oldest person at the theater watching Super Mario Galaxy, but I've been playing Mario games since before any of these kids were born, so I think I had a right to be there. Anyway, I would say this movie is about 75% as good as the first one. It was a little overpacked and the plot wasn't quite as tight, but it's still fun to watch. The animation was excellent and I enjoyed all the callbacks to the various Mario games and since I haven't actually played all the Mario games (as a reminder, I played no console games of any kind between 1998 and 2019), I'm sure there were quite a few I missed. The plot is that Bowser Jr is coming to rescue his father, Bowser, who's been held captive since the end of the last movie. To power his doomsday weapon, Junior kidnaps Princess Rosalina and Princess Peach goes to rescue her while Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi stay to protect the Mushroom Kingdom. Their separate subplots will end up crossing when Bowser Jr. invades the Mushroom Kingdom to get Bowser. Glen Powell was an excellent choice to voice Fox McCloud. I'd say if you could imagine a movie that the audience would enjoy and the critics would hate, you'd end up with Super Mario Galaxy. Since that appears to be what happened to the tune of $970 million, it appears that metaphor was accurate. Also, to be less glib, "movies you can take your kids to" do serve a valuable social function (in my opinion). Overall Grade: B Next up is the Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins, which came out in 2026. This was a comedy with a fun premise. Reggie Dinkins (played by Tracy Morgan) was an elite NFL player who got bounced out of the league for placing bets on himself. Years later, he teams up with an indie filmmaker named Arthur Tobin (played by Daniel Radcliffe), to make a documentary to rehabilitate his image. However, Tobin has his own issues. He has an Oscar, but after the Oscar, he got hired to direct a Marvel movie and cracked under the pressure. He and Reggie have to go on a journey to recover their reputations. I thought this was a pretty funny sitcom. Tracy Morgan is a comedic natural, but Daniel Radcliffe turned out to be an excellent comedic actor as well. He was great in that Weird Al biopic a few years ago and he's very funny in this. Craig Robinson was also great as Jerry Basmati, Reggie's sleazy nemesis. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is The Mandalorian and Grogu, which came out in 2026. I enjoyed this. It was like three pretty good episodes of The Mandalorian show put together. The end result was an adventure movie that kind of reminded me of the best of 1980s fantasy and sci-fi movies with a lot of creature work and a lot of action scenes. For an extended stretch of the movie, Grogu takes over as the primary protagonist, and given that Grogu is a very expensive puppet, that's an impressive feat. The plot picks up from the end of The Mandalorian show. The Mandalorian and his adopted son Grogu are now working for the New Republic, helping to hunt down Imperial warlords. Mando gets assigned to hunt down in a mysterious Imperial warlord named Commander Coin, but the only people who have information on Coin's location are the Twins, a pair of Hutt crime lords and relatives of Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi. The Twins are willing to give up Coin's location if Mando does a job for them, but as Han Solo could have warned Mando, working for the Hutts is not a good idea. I was surprised that the reviews for this movie were as mixed as they were, but I suspect that's a combination of three social factors: Number one, cumulative ill will towards Disney as a corporation, which has done numerous sketchy things in the 2020s. I think something similar happened with Microsoft and Starfield. Number two, the lingering bad aftertaste of the sequel trilogy and number three, the tendency of the hardcore Star Wars fandom to chronically overthink things. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is the animated Hobbit, which came out in 1977. Peter Jackson's Hobbit Trilogy from the 2010 famously stretched The Hobbit across three movies, which really didn't work and added a bunch of epic battle scenes, which was totally off for what was essentially a children's book. The animated 1977 version of The Hobbit, by contrast, went in a different direction, neatly adapting it down to 70 minutes or so, presumably because animation is very expensive. At the time, this got mixed reviews, but looking back nearly 50 years later, I think we can appreciate it more because of the sheer amount of work that goes into hand-drawn animation. Like computer-based animation is unquestionably a lot of work as well, but hand-drawn animation is on something of a higher level in terms of difficulty, in my opinion. That said, I think this adaptation did a better job of compressing the story down than the animated Lord of the Rings movie I mentioned earlier in this episode. There's also a lot of 1970s style folk singing-like a LOT. I suspect J.R.R. Tolkien would have hated every single adaptation ever made of any of his works (with perhaps the exception of the audiobooks), but he would have approved of the number of songs and poetry in this. Though it was amusing that the high elves in this movie sing in a '70s folk music style. It would be humorous if in the Silmarillion, Earnedil the Mariner had finally crossed the Sundering Seas to reach Valinor and appeal the aid of the Valar against Morgoth and his hordes, only to hear '70 style folk music echoing across the shining hills of the Undying Lands. Anyway, it's definitely worth watching this if you like The Hobbit or old style animation. Overall Grade: A- Next up is House of David Season 2, which came out in 2026. I wrestled with what grade to give this because it used a lot of AI for the big battle scene in episode one and as long time readers and listeners know, I do not generally approve of LLM generated slop. Ironically, I think episode one, the big battle sequence with all the AI, was definitely the weakest point of the entire second season. Everything else was better. That said, all the character drama and interactions and acting were really good, which amusingly shows that while LLM stuff can generate blurry scenes of mounted soldiers charging at night, the real human emotion comes from, well, real human emotion. Anyway, this picks right up from the end of Season 1, right after David kills Goliath, which means it takes place during most of the events with the third quarter of the book of 1 Samuel from the Bible. David becomes one of the chief commanders of King Saul, but David is secretly the anointed king of Israel. Saul's deteriorating mental state becomes threatening to David while Saul's children scheme for position (with the exception of Jonathan, who has accepted that God has chosen David as the next king of Israel) and the Philistines prepare for war against Israel. It is interesting how the show alternates between leaning into the Grimdark aspects of life in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age and avoiding them. Like, constant warfare was a fact of life for a Mesopotamian king around 1000 BC. But the show also shows David as having passionate romantic love for Saul's daughter Michal and in the Bible, David ended up with at least eight wives that we know about (there were likely others) and an unnamed number of concubines. So late Bronze Age/early Iron Age monarchs were not likely to have been in the grips of fervent romantic love. Though based on the Psalms he wrote, David seems to have been a man who definitely was in touch with his emotions and quite possibly he would have passionately loved multiple women at the same time. Anyway, I enjoyed the show. While I am not an expert, I probably have a higher than average level of Old Testament knowledge. So when the show expanded on something from 1 Samuel (such as the role of Doeg, the murderous Edomite shepherd), I could see where they were coming from. Or the subplot where Jonathan falls in love with an Israelite woman since in the Bible, David took care of Jonathan's son, Mephibosheth, logically, Jonathan had a wife at some point. Related to that as Saul continues his descent, in a moment of rage in 1 Samuel, he calls Jonathan "the son of a perverse and rebellious woman" and the show has a subplot explaining how Saul came to see Queen Ahinoam as a "perverse and rebellious woman". So I enjoyed this and will definitely watch Season 3 when it comes along. That said, the opening battle with the AI generated battle scenes is still definitely the weakest part of the series, though. Overall Grade: A- Next up is Maul: Shadow Lord, which came out in 2026. And in my opinion, this was pretty good. I think he could call the plot Sith Noir. Maul, desiring vengeance against the Emperor for all the pain he has endured, has decided to rebuild his criminal syndicate (previously destroyed in the Clone Wars) and use it to bring down the Empire. Meanwhile, Captain Lawson, a detective on a minor world, is trying to rebuild his relationship with his teenage son and keep his career afloat. This becomes tricky when a pair of fugitive Jedi fleeing from the Inquisitors turn up on their world. But in the younger of the two Jedi, Maul sees a potential apprentice for himself, one he could corrupt to the dark side. The animation has improved by quantum leaps and bounds since the days of the Clone War show. The lighting and the shadows are excellent. Maul looks spooky and a little uncanny. The lightsaber fights are quick and fluid. No spoilers, but the final episode is absolutely excellent. I also think one of the best things about the Star Wars animation shows is how Maul's character has evolved from simply the cool swordsmen at the end of The Phantom Menace to a sympathetic yet still evil warrior-philosopher, a tragic figure whose every effort always contains the seeds of its own downfall. Overall Grade: A Next up is Emma, which came out in 2020. This is an excellent adaptation of the Jane Austen's novel. Good performances, good cinematography, and it captures the essence of the novel quite well and it's probably a must for Austen fans to see. I don't really have anything negative to say about it, say that it has the three seconds of unnecessary nudity that can be cut in cable broadcasts. Ironically, and quite amusingly, that three seconds of nudity is quite literally the only thing this movie has in common with Airplane!. Overall Grade: A Next up is No Packers, No Life, which came out in 2025. This was a fun documentary about a group of Japanese Green Bay Packers fans. Obviously, there are fairly large cultural and linguistic divides between the United States and Japan, so American football is not hugely popular in Japan. However, the Green Bay Packers are the only community owned team in the NFL to this day and so they're quite a bit more sympathetic than one that's owned by a faceless billionaire. Anyway, an American businessman goes to Japan and stumbles across a Japanese man wearing a Packers jersey at a bar. From there, he learns of a small club called the Japanese Packers Cheering Team that gathered to watch Packers games. This businessman in question happened to be from Wisconsin, so he befriended the Japanese Packers Cheering Team and invited them to Green Bay for a game. The invitation snowballed and so the entire club and their families arrived to watch the game. Sports fandom really isn't one of my interests, so it's always interesting to look at it from the outside. That said, this was an enjoyable documentary about cross-cultural communication at its best. Overall Grade: A Let's close out this episode with my favorite thing I saw in spring 2026, which was Project Hail Mary, which came out in 2026. This is another "science man solves space problem that saves the day with math and science", type science fiction adventure like The Martian, though some new twists on the formula. Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship with all the other crew dead and no memory of how he got there. Gradually, he partially remembers and works out that he is part of Project Hail Mary, a last ditch effort to stop Earth's sun from dimming due to an extremophile organism called the Astrophage. Only one other star in Earth's stellar neighborhood was showing no signs of Astrophage infection, so Grace's ship was sent there on a suicide mission to try and recover some means of defeating the Astrophage. While there, he encounters an alien ship with a sole survivor and he slowly works out how to communicate with the alien, who he dubs Rocky. It turns out Rocky's people sent him there on a mission to solve the Astrophage problem as well and together Grace and Rocky try to work out how to save their respective home worlds. Quite enjoyable and worth seeing. At the time I typed this in March of 2026, it was the highest-grossing movie of 2026 and I think it deserved that, though it did eventually get overtaken by Super Mario Galaxy. Overall Grade: A I suppose that was an eclectic range of movies, wasn't it? Interestingly, I actually saw three of them in theaters: Project Hail Mary, Super Mario Galaxy, and The Mandalorian and Grogu, so I went to the theater three times in three months. I think that's the most I've been to the movie theater in a single year in the entirety of the 2020s. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show interesting. 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 us for one of the most POWERFUL and VALUABLE Self-Liberation Saturday transmissions thus far — essentially fully LIVE with a brand new show. First off, on Cloak & Dagger, Thane is joined by Alena from Gart.io, the first stealth alert app, enabling you to share your location with trusted… The post [P.A.Z.NIA RADIO NETWORK] Self-Liberation Saturday! Cloak & Dagger with Alena Vranova of Satoshi Labs/Gart.IO; Tinker Tribe LIVE with Greg Doud; P.A.Z.NIA Monthly News Show! appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

Spidey has to save supervillains from an evil prison warden! Thankfully, Otto Octavius is well-rested from his coma and ready to help. We talk about Otto's immediate return and his adorable romance with Anna Maria, Regent's backstory and some unfortunate implications, Cloak and Dagger's successful multi-episode arc, and the most obvious bad guy reveal of all time.We're watching Spider-Man (2017): Season 2, Episode 21: “The Cellar”.⁠⁠Take the Glitterjaw Listener Survey⁠⁠⁠⁠ and enter to win a $50 gift card!Website⁠ | ⁠Patreon⁠ | ⁠Discord⁠Part of The Glitterjaw Queer Podcast CollectiveContact us: @WallopingWebPod on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠Instagram⁠Email: ⁠wallopingwebsnapperspodcast@gmail.com⁠Theme song features: ⁠“Resonance (Cyan & Ladybot Remix)” by HOME⁠ | ⁠License (CC BY 3.0)

On this episode of Cloak & Dagger Correspondences, Thane dialogues with Lily Forester, aka Miranda Webb, a fugitive that escaped the USSA to Acapulco about a decade ago. Since then, she's learned a lot about privacy/security, living in Mexico, and even experienced severe tragedy that was later documented on the… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #8: Thane Speaks with HBO Star Lily Forester, aka Miranda Webb appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

In this week's episode, we share five tips & tricks for writing believeable ways characters can overlook the obvious. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book #6 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: TALONS2026 The coupon code is valid through June 8, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 304 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 22nd, 2026, and it's our first new episode in two and a half weeks, so that is exciting. Today we'll be talking about how writers can believably write characters who miss the obvious or fail to notice important facts without exasperating the reader. We also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer, Book #6 in the Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That is TALONS2026. As always, the links to my Payhip and the coupon code will be available in these show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through June 8th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook for your summer travels, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Since I recorded the last episode on May 6th, I'm pleased to report that Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, is done. You can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited since Half Eleven Thief is my Kindle Unlimited series (until it is finished). It's doing quite well and thank you all for that. Now that Dragon-Mage is finished, my main project is now Blade of Thieves. And as of this recording, I am 29,000 words into it. I think the rough draft will be 100,000 words or so, give or take. I hope to have this out in June, though it might slip to July (depending on events). My secondary project is Cloak of Frost, which will be the 15th book in the Cloak Mage series. I am 2,000 words into that and I am hoping to have that out towards the end of July, though of course that by slip to August (depending on events). So that is what I am working on right now. In audiobook news, since I recorded the last episode, we had two audiobooks mostly come out. Cloak of Illusion (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is available at Audible, Apple, Google Play, and all the other audiobook stores. Blade of Wraiths (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is also finished. I believe as of this recording, you can get it at my Payhip store, Google Play, and Kobo (though Audible and the other audiobook stores should be following along before too much longer). As for Dragon-Mage, Leanne Woodward will be recording that in July (if all goes well). So that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:38 Main Topic: Perception Failure Mode for Writers Now let's go to our main topic, how to write characters who miss the obvious in a way that's believable and doesn't exasperate the reader. When writing a story, it's sometimes useful to have a character miss the obvious. Of course, if done badly, this can sometimes inspire exasperation in the audience, like the cliche of the woman going alone into the basement with a flickering candle to reset the circuit breaker while a serial killer is on the loose and you get bonus cliche points if she's wearing a bikini. The trick is to have the character miss the obvious in a believable way that matches the circumstances. The obvious might be obvious, but it is often obvious only in hindsight. For example, here is a story about the time I failed to notice the obvious. In the morning, I typically get up, use the restroom, and then get dressed to go to the gym. I normally sleep with earplugs and don't usually remove them until I get dressed. While using the restroom, I will bring my phone or my tablet, depending on which is closer at hand and play chess puzzles to help my brain wake up. Now this detail is important. My tablet is an iPad, but my phone is an Android. Gradually, I began to notice that whenever I started the day, I could hear a woman talking very loudly outside the window. At first, I thought nothing of it. The house is fairly close to the sidewalk, so I often hear people talking as they walk past. However, as the days passed, I noticed I frequently heard exactly the same woman whenever I went into the bathroom. That started again on my nerves, so I glanced out the window to see who it was, but I never saw anyone nearby. For that matter, it didn't happen every day. Then a very strange fact occurred to me. This only happened on days when I had my phone, not my iPad, and this led me to discover the truth. The chess app had been updated to have the virtual chess coach talk to you as you played chess. My iPad and my phone were on mute, but on Android, apps can sometimes override the system mute setting to make noise. So my phone was talking to me as I did chess puzzles, and because I still had my earplugs in and hadn't enjoyed my morning coffee yet and my brain wasn't working, I failed to realize that my phone was the source of the voice. I had failed to notice the obvious. So once I had turned off the voice on the chess app, this got me to thinking. My specific example is so implausible and convoluted that it would be impossible to use in a novel since it would seem contrived, but how can you have characters in a novel fail to notice the obvious in a way that doesn't annoy the reader? I think there are five ways you can do it. #1: The character fails to notice something because of reasonable circumstances. Human perception is quite fallible and more so when we are stressed. It's common knowledge that if five people witness a crime, there will be five contradictory accounts of what happened based on what the individual in question happened to notice. For example, if you see a car accident in front of you, that will dominate your attention and cause you to miss background details, like the color of a nearby parked car or a nearby house. A character can also miss important details when he or she has no good reason to notice these details. There's a reason that in real life many spies try to be unremarkable as possible. The brain sort of slides over the unremarkable and makes it into part of the background. This can also work in mundane settings. For example, if a character is an electrician, he won't know what accounting software his clients use because he has no reason to know or care, especially if he gets paid on time. Stress is also a good way to have a character fail to notice something important. Job loss, an illness, a bad day, lack of sleep, and other things might mean the character is not operating at his or her best and may fail to notice important details. #2: Missing information causes you to miss the obvious. Insufficient information can cause a character to come to the wrong conclusion. Here's another example from my own life. Earlier this year, I drove a 2,000 mile road trip in a few days and towards the end, my right foot and leg started to hurt. The explanation for that I thought was obviously that I'd driven 2,000 miles in four days and put too much unaccustomed strain on my right foot. Once I got home, I would take a few days to rest and it should be good. Except when I got home, the pain got worse. I developed a fever and an uncomfortable swelling on the side of my right foot. I didn't have tendonitis or muscle strain. I had actually developed cellulitis for some reason. If you haven't heard of cellulitis, it's a potentially serious infection of these subdermal skin layer. A trip to the doctor and some antibiotics later, it was better. But this is an excellent example of coming to a reasonable, nonetheless wrong conclusion based on the available facts. Considering the amount of driving and walking I had been doing, it was perfectly reasonable to assume that I had strained something in my leg, but that wasn't what was happening at all. All the facts I knew were correct, but I was missing the key fact, the infection, and so had come to the wrong conclusion. This is a technique you can use in fiction quite easily and it's common in detective and mystery novels. It's common for the protagonist to construct a theory about the crime only for it to be proven wrong by a single piece of additional information. #3: All the information, wrong conclusion. Sometimes you can have all the correct information, but you draw the wrong conclusion from it. Here's another example from my life. As you may know, I have a lot of audiobooks available on Spotify, so if you're a Spotify listener and want to use your audiobook hours, I have some for you. So this naturally means I get a tax form from Spotify every year. During the run up to the 2026 tax season, I got an email from Spotify saying that my tax information was wrong and needed to be updated, which was baffling because my tax information had not changed. So I logged into the dashboard, but nothing seemed amiss and I saw no notifications about it there. Then I realized the truth, the email was fake. It had been sent to a different email address than the one I actually used for Spotify. The email was a very clever and very well written phishing attempt. The habit of never clicking on any link in an email (instead going directly to the dashboard in question) had served me well here. I had all the facts before me, but I arrived at the wrong conclusion because it was tax season and so it was reasonable to expect to get an email like that. Now this can be used in fiction in multiple ways. Probably the most famous example is how Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy come to the wrong conclusion about each other's motives in Pride and Prejudice. They both have all the facts but draw wrong assumptions from them. #4: Deliberately deceived. A character can also come to the wrong conclusion or fail to notice the obvious or if he or she is deliberately deceived. The phishing attempt I mentioned earlier was an example of this. Having a character be believably deceived and indeed deceiving the reader as well is a very useful technique in fiction. Agatha Christie was very good at this in her mystery novels. For example, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The ABC Murders, and Murder on the Orient Express, the characters and the readers are operating under assumptions for most of the book that turn out to be the result of deceptions on the part of some of the characters. Granted, using this method can be kind of a rug pull for the reader. However, there's nothing wrong with a rug pull if it's done well. As I mentioned earlier, it's a common saying that the obvious is only obvious in hindsight. If you have the characters believing the deception for reasonable reasons only to have them realize the truth later, if you do it well and make the book all the more satisfying if there were subtle clues and foreshadowing about the truth earlier in the story. That kind of rug pull is a bit like garlic in cooking. You don't want to overdo it, but it's highly effective when used in the proper amount. #5: Something more important is happening. Sometimes you don't notice something that would otherwise be obvious because something more urgent is demanding all of your attention and focus. I think this is one of the biggest reasons people miss the obvious and it's very relatable. In my earlier bout with cellulitis, I didn't realize the obvious truth that I was getting cellulitis because I was focused on something more important at the time, namely not accidentally driving my car into an overpass embankment for the next thousand miles or so. People have varying attention spans, but every individual person has only so many things they can think about or worry about at any given time. You can use this to cause your characters to miss things they might otherwise have noticed. For example, imagine a village in a fantasy book. There's an evil wizard living incognito in the village and he's summoning tribes of goblins to destroy the village. The protagonist is busy trying to fight off the goblins, so he overlooks the subtle hints that one of his neighbors is an evil wizard because all his attention is on fighting and he's tired enough that he's missing things he might otherwise catch. In this example, the problems are linked. The goblins are attacking the village because the evil wizard is summoning them. Having linked problems like that can help drive the plot forward and provide narrative tension as the character gradually realizes the truth or stumbles across clues pointing to the truth. So those are five tips and tricks you can use to have your characters believably overlook the obvious, but there's one bonus reason that has developed in the last 15 years or so and that bonus reason is number six: stop looking at your phone in public. In recent years, I've become amazed at how many people allow themselves to be utterly mesmerized by their phones in public. I suppose I'm old enough that it's a generational thing. I didn't have my first smartphone until I was well into my 30s, but it still surprises me every time I see it. That said, for all that you hear about crime and disorder on the news in the United States, you can tell that the US still is by and large and for the most part a pretty safe country because people are so comfortable focusing on their phones in public and ignoring their surroundings. Safety experts will tell you that the number one thing you can do to keep yourself safe in a public place is to maintain situational awareness and yet an astonishingly large number of people simply don't do that in favor of looking at their phones. So if you are writing a book set in the modern era, a quick and easy way to make sure a character doesn't notice something is to have him or her looking at [his or] her phone. Granted, you can overuse this, but this makes for a very believable technique for making sure that a character misses a detail or an event. Conclusion It's annoying when a character is all-knowing, but it's equally annoying when a character fails to notice the obvious because it's convenient for the writer. Hopefully these five tips and one bonus tip will help to create plausible reasons for characters to overlook things and miss things they would [have] otherwise noticed. Used well, this can help you create a compelling story for your book. 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, often with transcript [transcripts are available for episodes beyond Episode 228]. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on our podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we'll see you all next week.  

Adventure: I Was a Communist for the FBI “I Walk Alone” 3/30/52 Syndicated, Cloak and Dagger “Operation Sell-Out” 9/22/50 NBC.

In this episode we continue to look at the month of May on our planet's vibration has grown to an all time high within our human species in this part three podcast edition. The collective consciousness in people from all over the world is beginning to see the manipulation from our loved ones that we trust and have an emotional connection with. These are the stages of the voices; the voices from the people we trust most such as your parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, etc. The gray cloak is positioned to wait for what triggers you to come out through these people.  In this month of May this energetic gray cloak will be attempted to be placed on everyone to create a sense of frustration, irritation and almost a series of private digs or verbal attacks so we have our guards down and never see it coming. Spirit says not to question the human that said the thing that may have disrespected you or made you feel awkward. This podcast will tell you exactly why they said it and the reasons that you were insulted. This is the time for strategy not reactions. Check it out.  If you are looking for more answers on this topic listen in and discover more about the source in which your brain is talking to you in this podcast. This Meditation only podcast channel with Tony and his Tuning Forks: https://raisingyourspiritsmeditation.buzzsprout.com In the meditation portion of this podcast we used the Aura Clearing Meditation: Aura Clearing with Tuning Forks & Drums For safety reasons we ask that you not listen to the meditation portion of this podcast if you are driving or operating any machinery as the sounds and frequencies will place you in an altered state. Here is a link to Tony's many classes/workshops especially his world class transformational Sound Bathing Events every month where you can attend virtually on ZOOM from your home: https://lovehigherself.com/eventsSubscribe to our YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@raisingyourspiritswithtony108 Meditation only Podcast Library: Raising Your Spirits Meditation Podcast (buzzsprout.com)Tony Gyenis conducts a free weekly Facebook LIVE meditation class on Fridays at 1:30pm Eastern called Tuning In with Tony . Here is the link to Tony's page to join his weekly class: https://www.facebook.com/tony.gyenis Book your spot here: https://calendly.com/whitelight878/tune-in-with-tonyTony's eCard:https://link.v1ce.co.uk/pbex/tonygyenis Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Jeremiah needs to find some answers to the source of his powers, but he'll need to deal with some shady characters to do it...Thanks to Rich for the email and the fan art of Paladin V!Rich's blog -https://lunchboxadventures4.wordpress.com/Game System: Custom (Novas & Nebulae Modern Playtest)Oracle - “The Oracle” (My own free oracle on itch.io and DTRPG)Music/Background Sounds - Tabletop AudioSend me an email with any feedback here -> jamessral@proton.me This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit subclassact.substack.com

Being pure in heart doesn't happen by accident. A pure heart is a heart that is KNOWN. A pure heart is a heart that enjoys the affection of God.We do not wear an INVISIBILITY cloak before God, but an ACCEPTABILITY Cloak.  A pure heart is one of borrowed purity. Find out how:https://youtu.be/3rSfRMZ_j-4

In this week's message, we explore the ethic of the Kingdom found in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Far from ordinary or expected, this ethic is both extraordinary and deeply challenging. How can we possibly live up to such demanding standards? Join us as we wrestle through that question together.

An expert in traditional Maori weaving says the return of a centuries-old cloak to Aotearoa New Zealand has brought surprise, intrigue, and a closeness to her ancestors. Erin Johnson reports.

On this Cloak & Dagger Correspondences, Thane Riddle has a ~3 hour long discussion with co-founder/CEO of Start 9, Matt Hill. Herein, we learn about Start9, the company and the mission, as well as Matt Hill, the father, coder, self-liberator…and after you put in the time listening, you'll have a much… The post Cloak & Dagger Correspondences #7: Securing The Sovereign Individual with Matt Hill (CEO/Co-Founder Start9) appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

In this episode we continue to look at the month of May on our planet's vibration has grown to an all time high within our human species. The collective consciousness in people from all over the world is seeing the manipulation from the heavier energies and old tactics are not working as it use to. A specific part of our population of our world are moving to the higher realms seeing and feeling more light and this is exactly what the darker energies are targeting. This sector is beginning to see more of who they really are and discovering their true nature and capabilities. Our devices are listening to our every word and behavior and these energies are smart and strategic. The moment you declare you want time alone to relax or reflect this is the time interruptions will occur then. This is not an accident.  Why are there so many cars, boats and even houses now have this shade of gray as a color. We know that our eyes are responsive to color and it affects our moods and so many other aspects of our health energetically, why do we see this color now? Is it a "coincidence" or a planned strategy to shift our minds for those are unaware or not awake. In this podcast Tony briefly chats about this to see if you see it as well. Many colors of history that were beautiful we don't see anymore.  In this month of May this energetic gray cloak will be attempted to be placed on everyone to create doubt and frustration globally. In our class we will briefly discuss this cloak and how to keep yourself clear and focused throughout the month which will be the most intense. Once we know what is coming and how to identify this energy we can prepare ourselves and not react but to better manage our energies. Nothing can control you if you aware of how to manage the light within. Check it out.  If you are looking for more answers on this topic listen in and discover more about the source in which your brain is talking to you in this podcast. This Meditation only podcast channel with Tony and his Tuning Forks: https://raisingyourspiritsmeditation.buzzsprout.com In the meditation portion of this podcast we used the Ho'oponopono Jupiter and Angel Tuning Forks Meditation: Ho'oponopono Meditation with Jupiter & Angel Tuning Forks For safety reasons we ask that you not listen to the meditation portion of this podcast if you are driving or operating any machinery as the sounds and frequencies will place you in an altered state. Here is a link to Tony's many classes/workshops especially his world class transformational Sound Bathing Events every month where you can attend virtually on ZOOM from your home: https://lovehigherself.com/eventsSubscribe to our YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@raisingyourspiritswithtony108 Meditation only Podcast Library: Raising Your Spirits Meditation Podcast (buzzsprout.com)Tony Gyenis conducts a free weekly Facebook LIVE meditation class on Fridays at 1:30pm Eastern called Tuning In with Tony . Here is the link to Tony's page to join his weekly class: https://www.facebook.com/tony.gyenis Book your spot here: https://calendly.com/whitelight878/tune-in-with-tonyTony's eCard:https://link.v1ce.co.uk/pbex/tonygyenis Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Escríbenos un MensajeEn la vida experimentamos cambios y en este caso hablamos de los cambios que vivimos después de convertirnos en madres. Queremos desearle un feliz día de las madres a todas las mamacitas que viven en los Estados Unidos. Como en cada semana estaremos tomándonos una cerveza, en este caso es la Icehouse.Recomendaciones de la Semana;

In this week's episode, we take a look at best practices for indie authors' email newsletters. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store: CALLIANDE25 The coupon code is valid through May 18, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 301 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 1st, 2026, and today we are looking at the effective use of email newsletters for indie authors. We'll also have an update on my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects and a Coupon of the Week. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code, we'll get you 25% off the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is CALLIANDE25. 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 May the 18th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. My main project right now is Dragon-Mage, the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. I'm pleased to report the rough draft of that is done at 82,000 words. So I think this will end up being the longest book in the series to date by a slight margin. I believe the previous longest one was Half-Orc Paladin, which came in at 78,000. I've started editing. The first editing pass is 9% through. Hoping to get a little further with that after I record this episode. I'm hoping to have this book out before the end of May, if all goes well. My secondary project is Blade of Thieves, the fifth book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I am currently 8,000 words into that. So once Dragon-Mage is published, Blade of Thieves will be my new main project. My new secondary project then will be Cloak of Frost, the 15th book in the Cloak Mage series. I thought I should mention that in the podcast because I had two questions in my email about that today. So I will be starting on Cloak of Frost sometime in the second half of May, if all goes well. Hopefully it will be published in July, with Blade of Thieves coming out in June (if all goes well). In audiobook news, recording is underway for Cloak of Illusion, and that will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy and Blade of Wraiths, which will be narrated by Brad Wills. We're making good progress on both. I am looking forward to sharing those audiobooks with you before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:28 Main Topic: Email Newsletters for Indie Authors Now let's move on to our main topic, email newsletters for indie authors. If you are listening to this podcast, there's a pretty good chance you're also subscribed to my newsletter and if you are not subscribed to my newsletter, I recommend you do so because not only do you get three free ebooks when you subscribe to my newsletter, then every time I have a new book announcement, I give away a free short story as well through links in the newsletter. So it really is to your benefit if you want to read my books to be subscribed to my new release newsletter. But there are other reasons for an indie author to have a newsletter and we're going to talk about some of those reasons in this episode and some of the things you should not do with a new release newsletter or an email newsletter (if you have one). For a while, email newsletters were considered obsolete in the age of social media. Why not just put things on Facebook or Twitter? Well, for one thing, Twitter doesn't exist anymore. For another, as social media algorithms changed and it became harder for people to see content in their feeds consistently, many authors began to look for alternatives to social media and ended up back on email newsletters or Substacks. The main benefit of an email newsletter is that you have control and it's not dependent on a specific platform. You don't have to worry about your account being flagged or closed by some random AI glitch and lose your ability to communicate with your readers. Most importantly, you're targeting people who want to know more about you instead of trying to fight through all the digital noise that is the modern internet. So today, we're going to talk about five things to try with your author email newsletter, and five things that would probably be the best to avoid. #1: Give people a reason to care. People need a reason to subscribe to an email newsletter, and it should be substantial enough to be a motivator. For myself, I offer three free full length books to new subscribers, Malison: Dragon Curse, Blade of the Ghosts, and Frostborn: The Skull Quest, and they arrive in a three book bundle from Book Funnel. People also need a reason to open the emails once they subscribe. For myself, I offer newsletter subscribers free short stories, usually timed around the release of a new book. For example, I just published Blade of Wraiths, and that came with a free short story, Halfling Alchemy, and I gave away a bunch of copies of Halfling Alchemy when Blade of Wraiths came out. For Dragon-Mage, yesterday I finished writing a short story called Paladin and Priest, and that will also be given away for free to newsletter subscribers when I send out the new release newsletter after Dragon-Mage is finally published (hopefully later this month). Other things you can try are offering exclusive discounts, sneak peeks of new books, and giveaways. When I have a BookBub featured deal, I will usually send out a newsletter like the day before or two days before that to share the upcoming discount with my newsletter subscribers as well. Sometimes when I have special sales like that, I will also use the newsletter to send things out to try and generate interest in the sale. #2: Get to the point. It's good to get to the point as quickly as possible in an email newsletter. People are skimming emails at best. We all get lots and lots of emails, and the longer the email is, the less likely it is to be read. Make it easy to scan for the main points and try not to have a long, rambling introduction. Good formatting also helps people who are skimming to find what they want quickly. Good formatting also helps people who are skimming to find out what they want quickly. Based on my own email data, what gets the most clicks are the images of book covers I put on there. Usually I have an image of the book cover that goes to Amazon and an image of the short story cover that goes to my Payhip store where I'm giving away the short story for free, and those consistently get the most clicks in my email newsletters. So that is an example of getting to the point and good formatting because the point of the newsletter is to let people know that I have a new book out or that something's on sale and the good formatting in the form of the cover images lets people quickly get to the thing I am offering them. #3: Use data to figure out what's working. Once you've done a few newsletters, you will have the data to see if there's certain types of newsletters that are more successful than others. You can go even further and test if there's certain days of the week or times of day that are more likely to be successful. Conventional wisdom is to send things early on the day on a Monday or Tuesday and avoid Friday afternoons when people are already distracted by the weekend. For myself, I've generally gotten the best results with newsletters sent on Monday, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Now, obviously many people are at work at that time, but you'd be surprised how many people have signed up for the newsletter with their work email address and seem to welcome the distraction during the workday when a new release announcement arrives. I have sent newsletters on Fridays and weekends. It's never as effective. Usually Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are the most effective days to send out a newsletter. #4: Use a consistent format. Using a consistent format for your newsletter can make it easier for people to find the information they're looking for and makes reading a newsletter more of a ritual. For example, author James Clear does a weekly newsletter with three quotes from his own books, two quotes from other people, and one reflection question each week. For myself, my newsletters almost always follow the same format. I'll have one section with the cover image and links to the main thing I'm selling and then below that, two smaller areas, which are for the short story I'm giving away for free, and then another one with another short story I'm giving away for free or some other item I want to promote. Sometimes it's an audiobook. Sometimes it's another author's book who has asked me to include it in a newsletter swap. It's usually something of that nature. I've been using that in the same email format for like the last 10 years or so, and it's been working pretty well. #5: Be sure to preview and proofread before sending. Be sure to preview how the newsletter will actually work before sending it out. Proofread the text, make sure none of the images are pixelated, and make sure all the links are working correctly. If you include a wrong link in the newsletter (which I have done in the past), people will let you know about it. It might be helpful to have someone else test it before sending it out. So those are five tips that you want to do with your newsletter. And I'm also going to add a bonus sixth one: follow the law. There are several regulations related to email newsletters, both in the US and the EU, and I think most of the EU ones still apply to the UK, even though they left a couple of years ago. In the US, if you are sending an email for a commercial purpose, you need to include a physical mailing address with every newsletter you send out. Many authors use PO boxes or UPS box numbers to avoid putting their home address in there, but if you are sending out an email for commercial purposes, you do need to have a physical address somewhere in the email. Usually it's at the bottom. If you look at, for example, emails you get from like Amazon or Microsoft or Apple and you scroll to the bottom, you will note that they are including a physical address for the company in every email they send out because that is the law. There's also something that is required in the EU, and I believe it's now required in the US called a double opt-in. That's where if you add someone to your newsletter, they have to have given explicit permission for them to have been added to the list. For the subscriber, how that usually works is they fill out a form and then you are required to send them a follow-up email with a link to officially subscribe and that should get them officially subscribed to your email list. It also works that they send you explicit written permission to add them to the list. For example, I've had a couple of tech support questions where someone said, "I want to be on your newsletter, but I can't figure out the form. Could you just add me? " That counts as explicit permission. You should only add emails to your list if you have this explicit permission for them to do it, and that's with a double opt-in explicit, written permission, or the kind of giveaway that properly follows these rules, where various services offer things where you can put up your books and people sign up to receive free ebook copies of the book and if they do so, they acknowledge that they will be added to your email list. That also qualifies as the permission. So those will be the things you want to be aware of with your newsletter. You'll need a physical address and to be aware of the rules involving permission and double opt-in. Don't randomly add email addresses to your list. Probably nothing will happen, but if someone complains that they're on their list and they can appeal to the appropriate authorities and you don't have documentation that they were added to your list in that way appropriately, you could get in trouble. So try to follow the law whenever possible with your ... Actually, no, not whenever possible. Always follow the law with your email newsletter. So let's launch from that into five things not to do with your email newsletter. #1: This is not a diary. It's good to be a little bit personal in your newsletter, to have a warm and welcoming tone, and to give people a tiny peek into your life. However, some authors put their entire life on display in their newsletters, which includes epic rants, details about relationship problems, photographs and personal details about minor children, and breathless pages on pages about how writing is so very hard. And this is not (in my opinion) a healthy way to engage with the Internet. Again, it's good to be a little bit personal, but as a writer, your newsletters are still professional communication, and it's good to be mindful that many people have a very, very low tolerance for personal details. Even innocuous information like a picture of yourself boarding the plane to your minor child's hockey tournament has to be done with caution. Something like that gives people a way to find you at a specific place and time and know exactly when you will be away from home, two things you probably want to avoid. All the usual precautions about posting things about yourself and your children that apply to social media also apply to your newsletter as well. #2: Don't spam people. Although it's good to regularly send out a newsletter, sometimes it can cross the line into being too much. It can be tempting to send out a barrage of updates when a new book comes out, but daily emails are overwhelming and will get ignored. The conventional wisdom is to send out things no more than once per week. That's the rule I followed myself and it's worked out pretty well. #3: Don't treat it as only an ad. If you only send out links to your books, people will eventually tune out. Beside the incentives we mentioned earlier, it's a good idea to do things like provide writing updates, answer reader questions, and giving behind the scenes peeks like a teaser quote from a work in progress. #4: Don't put the most important stuff on the bottom. The most important information in the newsletter needs to be near the top. Not everyone will scroll all the way through each newsletter, so it's important to put any important news, links, or updates within the first couple of paragraphs or lines. That's why whenever I publish a new book and send out the newsletter, the first thing on the ... Well, actually the second thing, we'll talk about the first thing in the next point, but very near the top is the link and the cover image to the new book. #5: You do not want to force your subscribers to stay. Don't hide the unsubscribe button. You want people who don't want to be able there to leave or to not to flag it as spam. For myself, I put a link at the very top of each email to give people the chance to unsubscribe without having to hunt around for that information. It's best to do this because many people do not unsubscribe to email newsletters. They simply mark them as spam and move on. If enough people mark your newsletter as spam, then it will get harder and harder for it to show up in people's inboxes, which is the entire point. So you want to make it as smooth and easy and as frictionless as possible for people to unsubscribe from the newsletter because that will be to your advantage in the future. I have read some horror stories about authors who flip their lids when someone unsubscribes and then manually re-add subscribers to the list after people have unsubscribed. Do not do this. This is illegal. You may get in trouble for it, and even if you don't get in trouble for it, it will irritate your reader/the person who unsubscribed, and they will start leaving bad reviews and spreading bad word of mouth about your books. So for all these reasons, it's definitely to your advantage to make it very easy to unsubscribe from your newsletter. So to sum things up, email newsletters are a great way to reach people, but it's a delicate balance of providing people information they want and treating it like an ad or diary while also making sure you are complying with relevant laws and regulations. It may take some trial and error to find the right balance that your readers want and one that you can keep up with consistently and most importantly, enjoy doing. Just because something works for one author doesn't mean it's going to work for you or interest your readers. If your newsletter isn't an instant success, don't give up, but keep trying new things and be consistent with it. After all, everyone needs to start with their first subscriber at some point. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

In this episode we look at the month of May on our planet's vibration has grown to an all time high within our human species. The collective consciousness in people from all over the world is seeing the manipulation from the heavier energies and old tactics are not working as it use to. A specific part of our population of our world are moving to the higher realms seeing and feeling more light. This sector is beginning to see more of who they really are and discovering their true nature and capabilities.  In this month of May an energetic gray cloak will be attempted to be placed on everyone to create doubt and frustration globally. In our class we will briefly discuss this cloak and how to keep yourself clear and focused throughout the month which will be the most intense. Once we know what is coming and how to identify this energy we can prepare ourselves and not react but to better manage our energies. Nothing can control you if you aware of how to manage the light within. Check it out.  If you are looking for more answers on this topic listen in and discover more about the source in which your brain is talking to you in this podcast. This Meditation only podcast channel with Tony and his Tuning Forks: https://raisingyourspiritsmeditation.buzzsprout.com In the meditation portion of this podcast we used the Archangel Michael Meditation: Archangel Michael Meditation For safety reasons we ask that you not listen to the meditation portion of this podcast if you are driving or operating any machinery as the sounds and frequencies will place you in an altered state. Here is a link to Tony's many classes/workshops especially his world class transformational Sound Bathing Events every month where you can attend virtually on ZOOM from your home: https://lovehigherself.com/eventsSubscribe to our YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@raisingyourspiritswithtony108 Meditation only Podcast Library: Raising Your Spirits Meditation Podcast (buzzsprout.com)Tony Gyenis conducts a free weekly Facebook LIVE meditation class on Fridays at 1:30pm Eastern called Tuning In with Tony . Here is the link to Tony's page to join his weekly class: https://www.facebook.com/tony.gyenis Book your spot here: https://calendly.com/whitelight878/tune-in-with-tonyTony's eCard:https://link.v1ce.co.uk/pbex/tonygyenis Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Enjoy this episode? Please share it with at least ONE friend who you think needs to hear it!Investigative mythologist William Henry explains how Babylonian prophecy, Judeo-Christian tradition, and Islam converge on the Temple Mount and the Ark of the Covenant, and why that timeline may still be unfolding today, in episode 244 of the Far Out with Faust podcast.William Henry is an investigative mythologist, author, and longtime researcher of human spiritual transformation, known for his work on Ancient Aliens and his Gaia series The Awakened Soul: The Lost Science of Ascension. With over 30 years of research and multiple books including Cloak of the Illuminati and The Watchers, his work explores the intersection of ancient texts, ascension science, and emerging technologies, including transhumanism and the evolving relationship between consciousness and the human body.In this conversation, Faust and William Henry challenge the conventional view of the Ark of the Covenant, suggesting it may have been something far more than a relic: a form of ancient technology tied to human transformation. They explore how overlapping messianic timelines across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam continue to shape real-world events, while tracing a hidden thread that links the Anunnaki, Osiris, and Jesus through a shared concept of the “garment of light.” As the discussion moves into the present, the question shifts: are transhumanism and artificial intelligence a break from the past, or the latest phase of the same ancient impulse to transcend the human body?In this episode: • Temple Mount prophecy: why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all point to the same contested site • Ark of the Covenant: relic, weapon, or lost technology tied to ascension and human transformation • Solomon's Temple and Babylon: how destruction, exile, and prophecy created a timeline still unfolding today • The Messianic race: why multiple religions may be working toward the same prophesied endgame • The “garment of light”: the hidden link between the Anunnaki, Osiris, and Jesus • Iraq Stargate theory: what Saddam Hussein was allegedly searching for in ancient Babylon • Sacred sound and resonance: the lost technology behind megaliths and suppressed scientific breakthroughs • The Anunnaki and human origins: genetic intervention, the neocortex, and the rise of civilization • Transhumanism and AI: are modern technologies continuing an ancient blueprint for human evolution • The future of humanity: what happens when AI replaces labor and reshapes human purposeIf these ancient timelines, religious prophecies, and emerging technologies are all pointing in the same direction, the real question isn't what's coming — it's whether we're recognizing it in time.00:00:00 - Teaser & Introduction00:03:11 - The Middle East, The Temple Mount & The Ark of the Covenant00:08:22 - Messianic Prophecies & Modern Political Symbolism00:17:16 - Saddam Hussein, Nebuchadnezzar & The Babylon Connection00:23:40 - The Anunnaki, Osiris, Jesus & The Transmittable Garment00:28:51 - Ancient Genetic Alteration & The Awakening of the Neocortex00:32:42 - Rethinking AI, Transhumanism & Scientific Materialism00:46:10 - The Fall from Eden & Technology as a Tool for Ascension00:55:49 - Sacred Geometry, Crop Circles & The Shroud of Turin00:59:53 - The Lineage of Ascension & Avatars01:05:39 - Sound Frequency, Megaliths & Suppressed Ancient Tech01:14:12 - The Next 50 Years: Singularity, Awakening & The Soul01:27:11 - The Viral Story: Saddam Hussein's Secret Iraqi Stargate01:34:42 - Outro & Final ThoughtsCheck out William Henry's bookshttps://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B006FYUDHUConnect with William Henrywe'd love to hear from you

This might as well be Sedition Saturday on the P.A.Z.NIA Radio Network — though, I guess that could be any transmission. Hit “PLAY” for a 6+ hour masterclass on guerrilla warfare, just war theory, and much more. Please enjoy and consider joining us for a LIVE Self-Liberation Saturday transmission, starting… The post Self-Liberation Saturday, 5/2/26: Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle + Bill Cooper, Militias + Guerrilla Warfare with Shane & Kyle appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

Classic non-James Bond spy movies shaped the genre long before 007 ever existed. In this episode of Cracking the Code of Spy Movies, Dan and Tom are back with 10 more essential pre-Bond films. These are the movies that built the blueprint for everything that followed. Each pick is packed with moral complexity, grounded tradecraft, and real espionage tension. No gadgets, no tuxedos — just paranoia, deception, and atmosphere. We span two decades of spy cinema history, from 1939 all the way to 1959. Every film on this list has influenced the spy movies you already love. Some of these titles are buried gems that most fans have never seen. Others are legendary films finally examined through a spy movie lens. Here's a taste of what we cover: ·       The Spy in Black (1939) — the film where serious British spy cinema truly begins ·       Night Train to Munich (1940) — features the very first aerial tramway chase in spy movie history ·       Decision Before Dawn (1951) — the first spy movie ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture ·       Cloak and Dagger (1946) — Gary Cooper goes undercover to stop the Nazi atomic bomb program ·       North by Northwest (1959) — Hitchcock's masterpiece, widely called the first James Bond movie before Bond existed If you loved our first list, this episode delivers ten more must-watch classics. Remember: Trust no one — except us. New details. Every rewatch. That's the Cracking the Code of Spy Movies promise. Tell us what you think about these classic non-James Bond spy movies? What movies did we miss?  Are any of these new to you?  Don't forget that we have espisoded that dive deeper into each of these movies.  Find them on http://spymovienavigator.com/episode Let us know your thoughts, ideas for future episodes, and what you think of this episode. Just drop us a note at info@spymovienavigator.com.  The more we hear from you, the better the show will surely be!  We'll give you a shout-out in a future episode!   You can check out all our CRACKING THE CODE OF SPY MOVIES podcast episodes on your favorite podcast app or our website. In addition, you can check out our YouTube channel as well.   Episode Webpage:  https://spymovienavigator.com/episode/10-more-classic-spy-movies-from-before-james-bond-that-you-need-to-watch

GK Chesterton was many things—journalist, philosopher, poet, and debater—but what does his life look like through the eyes of a young reader? In this episode, Joe sits down with Holly Gyger Lee, author of the new young reader's biography The Man Who Carried a Swordstick and a Pen, to explore what drew her to Chesterton, what surprised her in the research, and why a boy who didn't fit the classroom mold became one of the most prolific writers in the English language. From Charlotte Mason's "living books" philosophy to Chesterton's theology of play, this conversation is a delight for readers of all ages. In This Episode: How Holly discovered GK Chesterton through C.S. Lewis—and why The Man Who Was Thursday wasn't the right entry point The Charlotte Mason "living books" philosophy that inspired Holly to write a biography for young readers What surprised Holly most in her research: Chesterton the unconventional student, and the headmaster's famous remark—"He is six feet of genius" The swordstick, the cloak, and how Frances shaped the image of a man who was a walking anachronism—out of time, and for all times Chesterton's theology of play and leisure, from the Toy Theater essay to his belief that the heavy work is the play Chapters: 00:00: Welcome and Introduction 00:54: Holly's Background, Homeschooling, and Life in North Carolina 04:01: Discovering Chesterton Through C.S. Lewis 09:11: Charlotte Mason, Living Books, and the Inspiration Behind the Biography 13:39: The Swordstick, the Cloak, and Chesterton's Persona 16:18: Chesterton on Leisure, Play, and the Toy Theater 19:14: Taking Children Seriously—Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald 24:32: Research Surprises: The Unconventional Student 28:43: The Junior Debating Club, Frances, and a Life of Hospitality 33:37: Holly's Current Projects and Where to Find Her Resources Mentioned: Get the Book Holly's Website Holly's YouTube Gilbert Magazine American Chesterton Society Shop FOLLOW US: Instagram Facebook X SUPPORT: Consider making a donation Visit our Shop Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios

Like the title suggests, this one introduces Marvel characters Cloak & Dagger (voiced by their concurrent live action actors!) But the big surprise? The introduction of Anna Maria Marconi, who shakes up the Superior Spider-Man story and even brings early conversations about super genius schools vs. underfunded public schools back into the fray. We get into Peter in a robot body, the startling lack of the Spider-Women, Miles finally getting into the action but still being underused, and more!We're watching Marvel's Spider-Man (2017): Season 2, Episode 18: “Cloak and Dagger”.Website⁠ | ⁠Patreon⁠ | ⁠Discord⁠Part of The Glitterjaw Queer Podcast CollectiveContact us: @WallopingWebPod on ⁠Bluesky⁠ and ⁠Instagram⁠Email: ⁠wallopingwebsnapperspodcast@gmail.com⁠Theme song features: ⁠“Resonance (Cyan & Ladybot Remix)” by HOME⁠ | ⁠License (CC BY 3.0)⁠

In this week's episode, I celebrate both the 300th episode and my 15th anniversary of indie publishing, and look back at 15 lessons learned during that time. You can get the ebook of WRITING LESSONS FROM THE PULP WRITER SHOW at my Payhip store until the end of May 2026. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, Book #4 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: ORCS2026 The coupon code is valid through May 4, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 300 (yes, that is 300!) of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 24th, 2026 and today we're looking back at 15 lessons I've learned over my last 15 years of indie publishing. We'll also start off with Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs, book number four in the Dragonskull series, (as excellent narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is ORCS2026. And as always, the coupon code and links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through May the 4th, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook for this spring, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing projects. As of this recording, I am about 62,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that out in May, though it might slip to June, depending on what I have to do in May. I'm also 4,500 words into Blade of Thieves, which will be the fifth book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. In audiobook news, a recording of Cloak of Illusion by Hollis McCarthy is approaching the end, one more proofread listen, and it should be there. And then hopefully the audiobook should be out in May. Brad Wills is also recording Blade of Wraiths right now. So hopefully we should have those audiobooks for you before too much longer. And that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:01:46 Main Topic: 15 Years of Indie Publishing Now onto this week's main topic, 15 years of indie publishing because as of April 2026, I have now been indie publishing for 15 years, which is the longest continuous time I've ever actually done anything in my life. I've never had any other job or professional association that has lasted this long. I've done this for so long that when people are angry with me, they no longer preface their remarks on my feelings by saying, "Listen here, young man." I suppose that puts me in the upper tier of indie authors, not in terms of income or market footprint, but in sheer, bloody-minded longevity. There are still indie authors out there who have been doing this for longer and are still publishing regularly, but not all that many. Eventually, indie authors typically burn out and just stop publishing, or stop publishing due to real life reasons, such as illness, family illness, moving, changing jobs, et cetera, or get some kind of tradpub deal and stop indie publishing. It makes sense that indie authors burn out. Sometimes, or even frequently, both writing and the business side of writing can feel like a slog, but I've been blessed with a mind that loves the grind. I don't say that to gloat, but to instead express my immense and humble gratitude to God (as Abraham Lincoln said long ago, the "beneficent Creator and Ruler of the Universe" & the "Great Disposer of Events") and to all of you, the many people have read (and after 2017 when I started with audiobooks, listened to) one of my books. Thank you all very much. By good fortune, my 15th anniversary of indie publishing and the 300th episode of this podcast coincide. So for the 300th episode of this podcast, I thought it would take a look back at the last decade and a half and reflect on 15 lessons learned in 15 years of indie publishing. #1: Embrace the slog. I think if you want to be a writer, you have to actually like writing. There are a surprising number of writers for whom this is not true, like they enjoy having written or the rewards of the writing, but they don't actually enjoy the part Glenn Cook famously called "put your backside in the chair and do it. " I'm fortunate that I do enjoy that part, but a lot of writers don't. Writing is often a grind in the same way that things like diet, exercise, and home maintenance are. Like if you do them for one day, it's not enough. You have to do them consistently day after day to have results. I think writing is kind of the same way. Effort applied over time cannot do all things, but it can do a lot. This applies to writing as well. A little bit every day can really add up over enough time. #2: Finish the book. A lot of writers get like one third of the way through their book and then give up or start something else. There's often a good deal of perfectionism involved in this. Here is a rule of thumb: a finished, imperfect book is infinitely better than the perfect version that exists only in your imagination, but will never exist anywhere else because you will never write it. Steve Jobs famously said, "real artist ship." I think the corollary is that if you want to be a writer, you have to finish things and then move on to the next thing. If finishing a novel seems daunting, I would suggest first writing short stories or perhaps novellas and learning to finish those. No one runs a marathon without first learning to run a mile after all. #3: Back up your data. This is an important one. I've gone through a lot of computers in the last 15 years, but I've never lost a large chunk of work because I back up regularly. I would suggest a three part system. Use whatever automated local backup your OS provides onto an external hard drive. Do manual local backups onto a flash drive of appropriate capacity and then have some sort of cloud backup you can rely on, which means you'll probably have to pay for it. That way, even if your house or apartment blows up (God forbid!), you will still have a copy of your stuff somewhere. #4: Be willing to learn new skills as needed. It occurred to me that most of these software tools and programs I use on a day to day basis nowadays did not exist when I started in April of 2011, or they're things that I've had to learn in the years since. Like 15 years ago, I didn't know anything about online advertising, Photoshop, 3D rendering, graphic design, social media, paperback formatting, ebook formatting, audiobook production, podcasting, small business taxes, and a bunch of other stuff, but I've picked it up in the year since. I wouldn't say I'm an expert at any one of those things, but I've been able to combine them well. Life, as we know, is change. That means you're going to have to change whether you like it or not, but it's best to make sure you're changing to your advantage. That can mean having to learn new skills. Depending on the skill, it can either be onerous or fun, but it's still worth doing. #5: When possible, give away stuff for free. I know some writers get really worried or upset about giving away stuff for free. They'll price their first novel at $9.99 [all prices mentioned are in USD] or higher, and then say things like a latte at Starbucks costs five bucks, why shouldn't my book, which was so much more work, costs more? (Though these days, I think a Starbucks latte probably is more like $8.37.) Giving things away for free gives readers a chance to try your work in a risk-free environment. If someone picks, for example, Frostborn: The Gray Knight and they don't like it or give up on it by chapter four, they're not out anything but time. But if they enjoy it, they might pick up Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife for $0.99. If they like that, they might go on to the rest of the series where the books are $4.99. That really adds up over time. I've also written and given away via my newsletter a lot of short stories. I have to admit that while I enjoy short stories, I mostly do this to increase the click-through rate of my newsletter. It's best to think of giving away things for free as like planting seeds. If you're a farmer, you pay a lot of money for your crop seed, but then you have to sacrifice it in hope of getting a crop and potentially losing all the money you spent on the seed if it doesn't grow. Giving away ebooks for free is kind of like that. #6: Don't expect sales to go up every year or every quarter. There are pros and cons to the publicly held and traded corporation model, but I think one of the big cons is that the shareholders often demand that revenue goes up every quarter ("Number Go Up", to quote the Internet meme). The trouble is that this isn't sustainable in reality and leads to a lot of economic damage along the way. There's a good chance that when the AI companies tank in the next few years, they're going to take a good chunk of the economy with them because they push this growth at all cost mindset. Even on a smaller scale when a company has mass layoffs to make Number Go Up, it causes all kinds of havoc in people's lives. In writing and publishing, you definitely should not expect sales to go up every quarter or even every year. It just doesn't work that way. Overall, if you have more books, you can generally expect they'll sell more, but it doesn't always or even frequently work like that. Ebook sales, like everything else, tend to ebb and flow. Also, what we will politely call "macroeconomic events" tend to affect sales a good deal. After 15 years, I found that the book reading population tends to overlap a fair bit with the "news doomscrolling" population. So every time there's a significant news event, sales tend to drop. They always drop during a US presidential election year, which inevitably shocks any authors who started publishing after the last election. The 2024 [US Presidential] election had that happen a lot because as you no doubt remember, there were a lot of dramatic news events that summer. Sales also tend to drop around Christmas because of holiday bills, and again in August and September, since that's when a lot of people have significant back to school expenses. If you have a really good sales month or year, that's great, but definitely do not plan on it lasting forever or going up forever. And if you do have that kind of windfall, it's a good idea to do sensible financial things with it- pay down debt, save it in sensible investment or retirement accounts, that kind of thing. It is a terrible, terrible idea to take on additional debt, hire employees you don't need, or commit to other unsustainable financial commitments. Living well below your means is a principle that can help you avoid much pain. Also, if you do have a windfall month or year, be sure to save for the tax bill you will have the next time you file taxes because Uncle Sam (or your national equivalent of Uncle Sam) will very much want his cut. #7: Don't start a series unless you plan to finish it. This is less of a thing for romance or mystery novelists since their books tend to be more episodic. However, if you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's a really good idea to make sure you finish your series because there's nothing science fiction/fantasy readers hate more than a series that never gets finished. There are a couple of reasons for this, but there have been a few very high profile examples of popular series remaining unfinished and that really soured readers on the idea of unfinished series, which is often detrimental to new writers who are just starting out. So if you're going to write in series, you need to commit to finishing them even if it's a lot of work. I've done that myself a couple times. For a while, I wasn't really sure if I wanted to finish Silent Order or Stealth & Spells Online, but I got them done. If you are a newer writer and you want to write in series, I would suggest starting with trilogies. They're less of a commitment than say something like Frostborn, which was 15 books. #8: Don't stress about bad reviews. Every writer has to learn to let bad reviews go. Obsessing over them isn't healthy and freaking out over them on social media is never good and can have bad consequences. It is a hard lesson to learn, but you just have to learn to ignore bad reviews. People can take reacting to bad reviews to insane extremes. There was a criminal case a while back where writer drove to someone's house and attacked a critic with a wine bottle because of a Goodreads review. Granted, that is an extreme case, but there have been numerous examples of writers going to war with critics over social media or even just complaining about bad reviews on social media only for the Internet to fall on their heads. You just have to learn to ignore bad reviews. It's not easy, but you can just follow these two rules about bad reviews. First, say nothing. Second, do nothing. "Never complain, never explain," to paraphrase Benjamin Disraeli. If it helps, the longer you do this and the more you write, bad reviews matter less because you can't remember everything. Like after you've written your first book, you can remember every single bit of it and every little decision and bit of thought process that went into the writing. But after 172 books, I honestly can't remember everything I've written unless I look it up. Like if someone complained about the griffin diarrhea joke in Malison: Dragon Fury, I would just kind of stare blankly because it would take me a while to remember it! #9: Social media is a potentially destructive time sink. This kind of relates to the previous lesson, but there are a lot of ways that social media can waste enormous amounts of your time. Arguing with strangers is one of them and the most obvious and potentially the most destructive, but passive consumption can be just as insidious. The phenomenon of doomscrolling, of endless scrolling through bad news is well known and is psychologically harmful. There's also "comparisonitis", which can be especially insidious for writers, since people generally put their curated selves on social media. Interestingly, sometimes people put the curated negative selves on social media. The way some people complain and present themselves in their posts, it's amazing they have the energy to type up posts complaining about their woes. No doubt that is done for engagement. There are also countless people who simply make up outrageous stories about hot button issues for clicks and clout. You also want to avoid arguing with strangers on social media because it will inevitably turn out that person in question is unemployed and therefore has infinite free time and also has poor reading comprehension and some sort of rage-based mood disorder. Overall, I would say that the best way to engage with social media while keeping your sanity is to remain positive. Share as few personal details as possible. Don't argue with strangers and only say things that are verifiably true. That will let you avoid a lot of potential trouble. #10: Pay people promptly and on time. Speaking of avoiding trouble, paying people on time will let you avoid a galaxy of woes. No one person can't possess all skills. So if you write long enough, you're going to need to subcontract out some stuff, whether it's editing, cover design, web design, accounting and taxes, audiobooks, and so forth. So if people do work for you and you are satisfied with this work, then you should pay them on time. This is a concept that a lot of people can't seem to grasp, and I've heard a lot of horror stories over the years about authors who try to weasel out of payment. So if you hire people to do things for you and they do them to your satisfaction, then pay them the agreed amount on time. This will also have the nice effect that if you pay people on time and build up track record of this, they'll be more willing to accommodate reasonable requests from you. #11: Don't worry about NFTs, Crypto, the Metaverse, LLMs, or whatever the latest doomsday tech trend is. The second half of the 2010s and the entirety of the 2020s have been filled with technologies that turned out to be useless, stupid, infested with scammers, and overall destructive, such as cryptocurrency, NFTs, the Metaverse, and of course, generative AI. (Apple CEO Tim Cook announced his retirement right before I started recording this episode. I think one of the chief positives of his legacy will be that he kept Apple mostly away from the generative AI mania.) I remember when cryptocurrency was inevitably going to replace fiat money, or when NFTs would be the future of art, or when all the very smart people said that the Metaverse would be the future of work and online communication. A lot of these technologies' boosters said you had to get on board with it right now, or you'll be left behind in the glorious technological revolution. You'll note that none of that actually happened. Crypto's main use case is facilitating cybercrime and NFTs are worthless. The Metaverse, like most of Facebook's bright ideas, wasted a lot of money and did nothing useful. Generative AI is on a similar course. None of its glorious promises of a better future have actually happened, and all it's really done is a lot of destruction and waste of money. The money is running out, public opinion is turning against it, and eventually LLM technology will dwindle to a sketchy corner of the internet much like crypto. Or to put it both more optimistically and snarkily, the best quote I heard about LMMs was that with strange people heralded the next generation of industrial automation technology as the beginning of the Singularity. It's like thinking that the computer that controls the fuel/airflow mixing your car is suddenly going to overthrow society and replace all human work. The one thing these technologies had in common, other than all being massive frauds, is that many writers worried it would be the end of writing, that crypto was going to replace government money or that all art would become NFTs, or that people would prefer AI slop novels over human written ones. However, none of this actually happened and people who predict the future are usually wrong. Various ancient and medieval societies made attempting to predict the future punishable by death. There's an element of religion to this, but I suspect some hard-headed jurists were less worried about offending the gods through false prophecy and had instead realized that many so- called prophets were just grifters attempting to scam money out of the credulous. This principle holds true today. I'm sure by 2030 there'll be some new technology called "groobelfarts" or whatever. Various grifters will swarm over social media saying "groobelfarts" are the future and if you don't get behind the "groobelfarts" (preferably by buying their course and signing up for their newsletter), then you're going to get left behind by the great and glorious "groobelfarts" revolution. But it will turn out to be 95% of scam and then by 2035, all the grifters will move on to the next tech. So I wouldn't worry about generative AI or whatever the next big technology is, which is probably "groobelfarts". #12 It's a really good idea to have your own website. If you're serious about indie publishing, you're essentially running a small business. These days, a small business really needs its own website. I know some writers rely entirely on their Amazon profile pages or social media profiles. This is a really bad idea, in my opinion, because the ebook stores and the social media platforms are changing things all the time and one of those changes might knock your visibility down to nothing. By contrast, with the website, you control it and you can set the content. It's also very useful to have a central location to direct readers. Ideally, your website will have links to all your books, so you can just send readers there. A lot of writers overthink this, but a standard WordPress or Wix template or something of that nature will work just fine for you. In fact, the fewer bells and whistles on your website, the better. It makes it easier to maintain and is that much harder to hack. #13: It's a really good idea to have your own email list. Related to the previous point, it's also an excellent idea to have your own email list to mail your readers. There are some legal requirements around this involving opt-in permission and physical addresses, and obviously it's best to follow them. But an email list, even after 15 years, is still my most powerful tool for reaching readers. As we mentioned above, the various ebook stores and social media platforms forever tinker with their algorithms and visibility. Having your own website is important, but getting people to visit it can be something of a challenge. That's where the email list comes in. With it, whenever you have a new release, you can email people and let them know. Whenever I publish a new book, the best sales day is always, without fail, the day I send out the newsletter. How do you get people to sign up for the newsletter? I found the best way is to consistently give away things for free. If you sign up for my newsletter (and if you haven't, you should do so right now), you get a bundle of free ebooks. Almost every time I publish a new book, I also give away a free short story. So giving away free stuff via the newsletter is a good way to build it and keep subscribers. #14: Don't cheat or be unethical. Like every other business, there are a million ways you can cheat or be unethical in indie publishing- plagiarism, stealing covers, paying for fake reviews, paying for bad reviews for someone you don't like, buying social media followers, manipulating Kindle Unlimited page reads, cranking out LLM slop books, and so forth. Some of it is technically legal, but unethical, and some of it is outright illegal. It can be very frustrating to see people you know are cheating get ahead. That said, it is always best to walk the straight and narrow road as best you can. There are many religious and ethical arguments for doing so, but if those don't appeal to you, the consequences might. If you cheat and do sketchy stuff, sooner or later it will catch up to you. It might take a long, long time. Bernie Madoff ran his scam for decades before he ended up dying in a prison hospital. Sometimes it catches up to you much more quickly. Sam Bankman-Fried only ran FTX for three years or so during the height of crypto mania before it all blew up in his face. People who work for the devil in the end always end up paying him rather than the other way around. So don't cheat or do unethical stuff. Your life will be happier and easier. And at the very least, you won't have to live with a constant low level fear that the consequences are about to catch up with you. #15: Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps today didn't go well. Maybe you're too busy getting your writing done or you got to your writing time and you're just too tired to concentrate. Maybe it was a bad sales day or you got a bad review or you got some bad family news or one of the other myriad ways that Real Life exacts its tolls arrived. Perhaps today was a bad day, but tomorrow is another day. It will be another shot at the ring. I suppose 15 years of self-publishing means I've been doing this for over 5,400 days. There have been some good days and bad days in the mix, but the thing to remember about bad days is that tomorrow is another day. If you miss your writing goal one day, you can try again tomorrow. And that little bit of daily effort adds up cumulatively over time. Conclusion. So those are 15 lessons I've learned in the last 15 years in indie publishing. As always, I would like to thank everyone who read and enjoyed my books and I hope to keep them coming. Meanwhile, we'll close out with a bonus. As I mentioned earlier in the show, by happy coincidence, my 15th anniversary of indie publishing overlaps the 300th episode of this podcast. So to mark the occasion, I'm giving away a free ebook, Writing Lessons from The Pulp Writers Show, which was written by me, Jonathan Moeller, and A.B. Bachmann (who is the researcher, editor, transcriptionist, and webmaster for this podcast and has been very helpful). You can get this ebook for free at my Payhip store until the end of May. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and the past 300 episodes of The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you have found the show useful as we finish up 300 episodes and continue on to hopefully the next 300. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your view on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

Here's the FULL archive of the 4/25/26 Self-Liberation Saturday transmission on the P.A.Z.NIA Radio Network. SCHEDULE/PLAYLIST: Leave a message for the show: XMRCHAT.COM/PAZNIAradio Join us on SimpleX: PAZNIA.COM/SIMPLEX VonuLife, the most practical, valuable, and hardcore freedom zine is BACK! Sections include: *The VonuLife Message Board*Intentional Communities, Networking, & Vonuing in… The post [Self-Liberation Saturday FULL, 4/25/26] Cloak & Dagger LIVE + Billy Mays' Triumphant Return + The Life & Times of P.A.Z.NIA with Shane/Rayo2 & Shadrach appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

"TEACH ME." Amongst the gallery of heroes, one Marvel character that had been trying to break into Hollywood was the Master of the Mystic Arts himself. Between a low budget pilot-turned-film in the 70's, a direct-to-DVD animated film in 2007, numerous guest appearances in cartoons, as well as multiple film pitches, it seemed like it'd be an eternity. However, the reveal of MCU Phase 3 brought about its official announcement, and two years later Benedict Cumberbatch donned the Cloak of Levitation on the big screen. So, how does it hold up? Come join Brian, Alec, Darby, and Trey to find out as they continue Phase 3 of the MCUathon with DOCTOR STRANGE!

In a dramatic leak, The New York Times has published seven private memos from a 2016 exchange between Supreme Court Justices leading up to the now-famous interim order that blocked President Obama's "Clean Power Plan." The Times's lopsided framing accuses Chief Justice Roberts of being flippant and taking unprecedented action. But the so-called "shadow docket" has been used more broadly to shut down both rampant Biden-era lawfare and Trumpian overreach. This week, the guys detail how the courts of both law and public opinion have been changing in the era of the imperial presidency.Recommended:The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme CourtLeaked Supreme Court Memos Reveal Why Court Stayed Clean Power PlanThe Pity PartyWatch with video on Youtube This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit claremontinstitute.substack.com/subscribe

In this week's episode, we discuss the recent changes for new accounts at Draft2Digital, and talk about how there is no magic pill for success for writers. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store: MALISON2026 The coupon code is valid through April 27th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this spring, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 299 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 17th, 2026 and today we are discussing Draft2Digital account changes and how writers need to embrace the writing grind. Before we start on that, we will have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. First up is Coupon of the Week, and this week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Malison series at my Payhip store. That code is MALISON2026. This coupon code is valid through April the 27th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this spring, we have got you covered. And now an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, is finally done. You can get Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, bookshop.org, Smashwords, and my own Payhip store. It has been selling strongly, so thank you all for that and I'm glad I was finally able to get it out into the world despite delays. Now that Blade of Wraiths is done, my next main project will be Dragon-Mage, which is the sixth book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series, and I'm about 29,000 words into it. I think it will be about 80,000 words, give or take. So I'm hoping to have that out in May, if all goes well. In audiobook news, the fifth book in the Rivah series, Wizard-Assassin, is now out in audiobook. You get it at Audible, Apple, Amazon, Chirp, Google Play, Kobo, and all the other usual audiobook stores. In other audiobook news, Cloak of Illusion is being recorded by Hollis McCarthy right now and Brad Wills will start recording Blade of Wraiths on Monday, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Good progress all around. So it's nice to have a good progress update there. 00:02:00 Barnes & Noble/ Draft2Digital Changes Now, before we get to our originally planned main topic, we will pause to address a news item. A few people ask what I thought about recent changes that Barnes & Noble and Draft2Digital made for self-publishers. If you're outside of Indie Author World and haven't heard of any of this, the gist is that Barnes & Noble is putting new restrictions on indie author accounts and Draft2Digital is now charging a one-time $20 fee for anyone opening account and an annual $12 fee on any accounts that make less than $100 a year on the platform and if you make more than $100 a year on the platform, the yearly fee is waived. Now, as you can expect, there was a good deal of consternation about this online, especially among indies with only one or two books who might not make $100 a year from their books. So what is my opinion on this? My opinion is threefold. First, it's unfortunate they had to do this. In a more optimum world, they would not have had to do this, but I suspect they were forced into it due to circumstances. And because of that, number two, it is inevitable that something like this was coming along because number three, the reason this happened was the overwhelming flood of AI generated slop from scammers. The ultimate source of the problem, as is the ultimate source of many recent problems in the world, is generative AI. A small number of scammers are generating enormous quantities of AI generated slop books and uploading them to the publishing platforms. We're talking like tens of thousands of books a month or even a week, and the books are absolutely low effort as well: AI generated gibberish text, AI generated cover, and then thrown on the store. Since I wrote this podcast script, James Blatch of Self Publishing Formula put out a Substack stack article on it, and he mentioned that he was talking to someone from Draft2Digital. He mentioned an example of the kind of low quality slop books they're dealing with. Last year when US political activist Charlie Kirk was murdered, within hours, several nonfiction books on the murder appeared on the stores, and these books were essentially either copy and pasted Wikipedia summaries or AI generated books on the topic that, as you might expect since it was a very recent event, contained no useful information whatsoever. The scammers were just hoping that to take advantage of a contentious current event and make a few bucks along the way. Now imagine this multiplying tens of thousands of times over every single day, and that is the scale of the problem. Now, this has always been a problem with self-publishing, especially with Kindle Unlimited, but AI takes it to an industrial scale. With some basic LLM knowledge, you can automate the entire thing. The figures I've heard are that something like 70 to 75% of new submissions to Draft2Digital in the last year have been AI generated scam books of that nature. Now, obviously this is not viable in the long term and is an existential threat to the platform, so something had to be done. Amazon already took some steps in that direction by limiting accounts to only three uploads a day, so it was inevitable that the other platforms would have to follow suit. Now, the best way to reduce scams is to increase friction. That's why it's sensible to lock your front door and your car. If someone really, really wants to break into your house or car, that's not going to stop them, but a locked door will deter lots of casual thieves or junkies who are strolling around looking for low risk things to steal. In the same way, these changes won't stop the problem of AI generated slop books, but it will help [make] the problem more manageable by increasing friction. So it's unfortunate that these changes have to happen, but I suspect something like this was inevitable, and I also strongly suspect that more of this will be coming. I think eventually we're going to end up with a per book publishing fee, like $10 per title, [which] while unfortunate, would severely reduce the financial viability of these scams, but perhaps we'll be fortunate enough that the era of free and low cost generative AI is going to collapse before that happens. The economic signs are increasingly pointing in that direction with the various AI providers hiking prices in the last few months, and scamming with AI becomes a lot less attractive when you're spending thousands of dollars a week on tokens. Ultimately, in my opinion, the villain here is not Draft2Digital and it's not Barnes & Noble, but the villain is the AI companies who have very recklessly and irresponsibly pushed this highly destructive and often useless technology out of a combination of messianic hubris and old-fashioned greed disguised as self-righteous altruism, much like the crypto and NFT advocates before them. I've said before that I think the primary problem with LLM based AI is that it comes with a whole lot of negative results and virtually no positive ones. The changes of Draft2Digital and Barnes & Noble are yet another example of AI creating negative outcomes and no corresponding benefits. But thankfully, it is not all gloom and doom. It's heartening to see how increasingly unpopular AI is becoming with the general public, with shutting down data center construction projects becoming a hot issue in local US politics. I think the best outcome for the entire mess created by AI technology would be for using it to become as socially unacceptable as, for example, smoking in front of small children or placing bets on a dog fighting ring. 00:07:15 Main Topic of the Week: There is No Magic Pill For Writers Now our other main topic of this week, how there is no magic pill for writers and writers should embrace the writing grind. A while back, I was watching a sports documentary and one of the athletes said that when she was asked for advice from those just starting the sport, she would happily share her routines with these competitors because she knew that most people lacked the work ethic necessary to complete them for any length of time. She lamented that all people wanted was a magic pill and that there was no magic pill for success in her sport. And I think the same thing is true of writing and publishing. People want a magic pill to land on top of the bestseller list right away and make lots of money instantly. The truth is for any kind of lasting success, there isn't that magic pill. Most writers make money by persistence instead of trickery. In this episode, I will give you five of the most important things you need as a writer in order to succeed in publishing your work. I can't give you a magic pill, but like that athlete, I can give you my routine. I've mentioned these tactics before in this podcast, but I wanted to collect them all in one place as a starting point of advice for working hard for that magic secret to success. #1: Work hard. You might hear stories of writers only working an hour or two a day, but the reality is that prolific authors are working far more than that. Only a handful of writers can make a full-time living publishing one book every few years. The rest of us are writing as much as possible and getting out books at least a couple of times a year, if not more. Times have changed. In a saturated entertainment industry, people are quick to forget and move on to the next thing. Website algorithms reward authors who put out new content frequently. So to be able to be a full-time writer, I do work typical workday hours, but I also do some work in the morning before I actually start, and then some in the evening as well, though of course that can be modified based on the needs of the day. I also do some work on weekends. I don't work all day on the weekend, but I do try to get at least a thousand words in and any administrative stuff wrapped up on the weekends. And I try to avoid long vacations, partly because I don't want to miss that much work and partly because I don't really enjoy long vacations. I'm not much of a traveler, I have to admit. This is generally more work than in a typical office setting. Especially around tax time, there's also its own share of a boring administrative paperwork that needs to be done. #2: Don't mistake what working hard is or where you should focus your effort. I've talked a lot about the perils of writing adjacent activities on this podcast, meaning things that feel like productive work but aren't. For example, some authors spend hours a day on social media and feel like they're marketing, but really they're just posting an echo chamber of other authors or getting themselves upset by doom scrolling and calling it keeping up with the news or research. They are as mentally drained as if they did hours of productive work, but unlike productive work, they have nothing to show for it. Writing adjacent activities have to be tightly controlled and managed because the majority of your work time should be spent writing and/or editing. Distractions like these writing adjacent activities can take up an entire day if you let them. I keep to a pretty rigid schedule, planning my breaks throughout the day. #3: When possible, do the publishing yourself. Don't rely on sketchy publishing services or vanity presses asking for thousands of dollars to help publish your book. Despite all the outrage over the Draft2Digital's change, $12 a year is still pretty reasonable compared to some of the outrageous fees that these vanity publishers charge. It's worth taking the time to learn how to format and publish books yourself. There's an abundance of free tutorials or low cost ones from reputable sources that can teach you how. It's better to spend time than money and then you have the skill forever. That is one writing adjacent activity that is absolutely worthwhile. Don't wait for the approval of an agent or spend years chasing one down. You can put your book out yourself. By doing it yourself, you have complete creative control, keep all the profits, and get to decide what you publish next. There's a reason that many authors return to self-publishing after accepting a contract with the Big Five publishers in the US. #4: Manage your expectations. The fact is that some genres sell more than others, especially in ebook form. For example, children's picture books are one of the toughest categories for indie publishers, especially as it fills with AI generated slop replacing illustrators. Children's books, technical books, and very specific nonfiction is simply harder to sell than romance, fantasy, or other kinds of fiction. Most authors don't have a massive success with their first book and find that their sales increase gradually over time. Don't expect to become the next indie success mega success story on your first time out. #5: Be willing to change. The beauty of being an indie author is that you have access to a lot of real time data about your books. If you are seeing a lot of clicks on your ads but few purchases, it's best to try changing your book's cover or blurb before giving up on it entirely. If the search results for your book on Amazon don't match your book at all, it's best to tweak the categories and add in some negative targeting to your ads. There's a saying that the best thing you can do to sell your book is to write the next one in the series, and I have found that to be very true myself. If the book isn't an instant success, it might be better to put out the next one instead of endlessly tweaking the first one. #6: Keep going. Most people can work hard for short bursts of time. The real challenge is to work hard over a sustained period of time, especially if there isn't an immediate reward for it. There is something of the same challenge in exercise and eating healthy too in that you don't usually see immediate results. You have to do it consistently for several weeks or months before you start seeing results. The truth is, most writers are not an overnight success or even a success after a year or two of writing. I wrote for years before my first book got published in 2005. Even after my first book was published and didn't sell well (I think my royalties could have bought me a combo from Burger King). It took years of writing and rejection from publishers before indie publishing became viable, and I was finally able to make money from my unsold novels. If I hadn't kept going, I wouldn't have been able to have those books ready when the opportunity of self-publishing began to lead to actual money. So keep going. Even if your first draft is not your liking, even if your first book you put out doesn't sell, even if you feel frustrated, the best thing you can do is just keep going. In short, ignore the influencers who have advice for becoming an instant bestseller, usually by throwing lots of AI produced slop onto bookselling sites. Taking the easy way out is not a long-term strategy. There is no magic pill that leads to selling over two million books over 15 years like I have done (not to toot my own horn about that, so to speak), but I think that shows the results of effort applied consistently over time for a long period of time. So if you want to be a writer, get to work. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. Next week will be our 300th episode. Talk about effort applied over time, right? So be sure to tune in next week for the 300th episode because we're going to have a special giveaway for that. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of this podcast 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.  

On this abridged Guerilla Warfare Saturday transmission, you'll catch the first hour of Cloak & Dagger, a no-show guest, and then a surprise Goat-Rilla Warfare Saturday raid by General Willy2 & the Seal Goat Six that brought an abrupt end to the broadcast. At some point in the next month… The post SELF-LIBERATION SATURDAY: CLOAK & DAGGER with Thane Riddle + General Willy2 Goat-Rilla Raid appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

Cloak and Dagger (1946) is one of the most overlooked spy films ever made — and this episode proves it deserves a second look. Dan and Tom decode this gritty WWII thriller starring Gary Cooper and directed by Fritz Lang. It's raw, tense, and surprisingly realistic. Before James Bond made espionage glamorous, this film showed what it really looked like. No gadgets. No tuxedos. Just survival. A physics professor is yanked from the Manhattan Project and sent to Europe — with no training and no safety net. His mission: find out how close Nazi Germany is to building an atomic bomb. That fear was real. The stakes were enormous. We dig deep into what makes this film stand out: the brutal, visceral staircase fight scene, the film noir cinematography by Sol Polito, and Max Steiner's understated score. We also explore the Hitchcock parallels, the Bond connections, and the censored anti-nuclear ending Fritz Lang never got to film. Episode highlights: ·      

On this full archive of Self-Liberation Saturday on the P.A.Z.NIA Radio Network (4/11/26), you'll catch Thane Riddle's, Cloak & Dagger. In the first hour, Thane covers the normal segments — news, a down to earth tip, some fan mail — and in the second, he's joined by Doc Barber from… The post Self-Liberation Saturday (4/11/26) FULL: Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle + New P.A.Z.NIA Folklore Storytime appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

In this episode, Tim Williams and Ben Carpenter discuss the 1984 film 'Cloak and Dagger' and share their childhood memories, nostalgia, and behind-the-scenes trivia. They explore the cast and characters, reflecting on the impact of the film on their lives. A nostalgic journey through the 80s classic 'Cloak and Dagger' as the hosts discuss the cast, iconic scenes, 80s nostalgia, box office performance, and the enduring legacy of the film.TakeawaysNostalgia for childhood filmsImpact of family dynamics in films Nostalgic journey through 80s classicDiscussion of cast, iconic scenes, and 80s nostalgiaExploration of box office performance and legacyChapters00:00 Introduction to Cloak and Dagger08:46 Trivia and Behind the Scenes17:16 Cast and Characters27:49 Revisiting Cloak and Dagger53:02 The Box Office and Legacy

Join our Thinking Out Loud w/ Friends of SoundBroker Zoomcast show hosted by Jan Landy and his knowledgeable affable panel of friends and colleagues for an entertaining robust discussion offering opinions on anything related to a working professional life in general.Our ZoomCast isn't just a fountain of knowledge; it's also a opportunity to laugh. Think of it as therapy, but with more jokes and fewer couches. Join us and share your thoughts. Stay updated on life and world events, and enjoy multiple good chuckles along the way.

Please enjoy the test reading of chapter 2 of my newest book "Motorcycle Club Chaplain's Handbook."  Let me know what you think. Thank you! CHAPTER TWOThe Origin of the Chaplain: From the Cloak of Martin to the Colors of the Club“Every title has a story.The story behind ‘Chaplain' begins with a cloak and a soldier.”A Soldier's Gesture Back in the fourth century, a young Roman cavalry officer named Martin of Tours rode the boundary between power and poverty. One bitter winter day he saw a beggar shivering outside the city gate. Martin had no money, no food—just the heavy wool cloak issued to every soldier. He drew his sword, cut the cloak in two, and wrapped one half around the man. That night, legend says, Martin dreamed of Christ wearing the torn half of that cloak and saying to the angels, “See how Martin has clothed me.” That act became a symbol—compassion expressed through courage.   The Cloak and the Word After Martin left the army and devoted his life to ministry, the half‑cloak he had shared became a relic, carried into battle by the kings of the Franks to remind them that mercy must ride alongside might. The Latin word for cloak—cappa—gave name to the small temporary tents where it was kept. Those small tents or small churches came to be known as chapels: the capella. The clerics who tended that relic and prayed for the soldiers were called cappellani — the guardians of the cloak.Over time, cappellanus in Latin evolved into the French chapelain, and finally into the English chaplain. So in the beginning, the chaplain wasn't a priest behind stone walls. He was a field companion who guarded a fragment of compassion among warriors.   From Battlefield to Brotherhood Centuries later, the title traveled with armies, navies, and fleets. Chaplains stood in the mud of Agincourt, on the decks of wooden ships, and in the trenches of Europe—not preaching doctrine, but carrying presence, hope, and human decency into chaos. When the modern armed services formed formal Chaplain Corps—like the Navy Chaplain Corps whose guides shape this handbook—the same principle survived: care for the morale, spirit, and dignity of the unit.   The Parallels with Motorcycle Club Culture Every motorcycle club, especially those with paramilitary roots, mirrors that structure of comradeship in arms.  The colors resemble banners.The patch hierarchy mirrors a chain of command.The rides and runs are long deployments shared under risk, weather, and watchfulness.The wars some clubs engage mirror the campaigns fought by militaries.  Within that structure, the MC Chaplain inherits precisely the same mantle as Martin's cappellani: protector of compassion inside a brotherhood of warriors.   Where the ancient chaplains carried a fragment of a cloak, today's MC Chaplain may carry a patch, a coin, or a piece of cloth from a fallen brother's cut—each a reminder that mercy and loyalty must never be strangers. What the Etymology Teaches The language itself carries the mission:  Chapel (capella) once meant field tent.Chaplain (cappellanus) originally meant caretaker of the camp's soul.The cloak—cappa—symbolized shelter and warmth, offered even at personal cost.  So, when an MC Chaplain steps forward, he joins a line that began with a soldier who cut his comfort in half. The uniform may change—chain mail, dress blues, leather vest—but the job description hasn't: to guard the spirit of those who ride into risk. Modern Echoes That single story, told for seventeen centuries, gives context to why the title commands respect regardless of religion. Whether you follow Christian faith, another path, or none, every Chaplain stands for the same timeless principle: serve those who serve others. When an MC Chaplain blesses a ride, comforts a widow, or listens to a brother wrestling with demons, he continues the work that began with Martin's blade and broken cloak—turning strength into service.   Reflection “They called the first chaplains guardians of a cloak.We carry that same duty wrapped in leather and road dust. Different uniform, same promise:Never forget the man standing in the cold.”Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-dragon-s-lair-motorcycle-chaos--3267493/support.Sponsor the channel by signing up for our channel memberships. You can also support us by signing up for our podcast channel membership for $9.99 per month, where 100% of the membership price goes directly to us at https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-.... Follow us on:Instagram: BlackDragonBikerTV TikTok: BlackDragonBikertv Twitter: jbunchiiFacebook: BlackDragonBikerBuy Black Dragon Merchandise, Mugs, Hats, T-Shirts Books: https://blackdragonsgear.comDonate to our cause:Cashapp: $BikerPrezPayPal: jbunchii Zelle: jbunchii@aol.com Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/BlackDragonNPSubscribe to our new discord server https://discord.gg/dshaTSTSubscribe to our online news magazine www.bikerliberty.comGet 20% off Gothic biker rings by using my special discount code: blackdragon go to http://gthic.com?aff=147Join my News Letter to get the latest in MC protocol, biker club content, and my best picks for every day carry. https://johns-newsletter-43af29.beehi... Get my Audio Book Prospect's Bible an Audible: https://adbl.co/3OBsfl5Help us get to 30,000 subscribers on www.instagram.com/BlackDragonBikerTV on Instagram. Thank you!We at Black Dragon Biker TV are dedicated to bringing you the latest news, updates, and analysis from the world of bikers and motorcycle clubs. Our content is created for news reporting, commentary, and discussion purposes. Under Section 107 of the Copyright

Catch the full show of Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle for April 4, 2026, featuring guest Max Hillebrand. To catch every episode of C&D, tune in live every Saturday or find the archives here. Leave a message for the show: XMRCHAT.COM/PAZNIAradio Join us on SimpleX: PAZNIA.COM/SIMPLEX VonuLife, the most… The post Cloak & Dagger with Thane Riddle [4/4/26 FULL w/ Guest Max Hillebrand][P.A.Z.NIA RADIO NETWORK] appeared first on The Vonu Podcast.

Go to http://shopify.com/scb to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period. Today Ben dives into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter to ask: Why did Harry drop the Resurrection Stone?  He could have seen his parents anytime he wante to but leaves it to the infinite depths of the Forbidden Forest instead? And what of the Elder Wand and the Invisibility Cloak? Should he have kept the wand? Destroyed the Cloak?

In this episode, Xan and I review Cloak & Dagger (1984) -- quite possibly the Greatest Movie EVER?

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Evan, Canty, & Michelle discuss what the Knicks proved by destroying the Spurs. Is Draymond Green secretly defending LeBron James? The Vikings are the only team we can imagine becoming a Super Bowl contender this offseason with a new QB and Mike Tannenbaum joins us to tell us what he learned at the combine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Evan, Canty, & Michelle discuss what the Knicks proved by destroying the Spurs. Is Draymond Green secretly defending LeBron James? The Vikings are the only team we can imagine becoming a Super Bowl contender this offseason with a new QB and Mike Tannenbaum joins us to tell us what he learned at the combine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices