In this week's episode, we conclude our November Writing Challenge with questions from beginner writers. We also check in with our transcriptionist and see how she did with the challenge. Bonus! The transcriptionist's official Writing Playlist: Now I’m in It-HAIM Build Me Up From Bones- Sarah Jarosz Outnumbered- Dermot Kennedy Pain is Cold Water- Noah Kahan Orpheus- Vincent Lima Flight Risk- Tommy Lefroy If I Don’t See You Again- Wyatt Flores Brink of Love- Teddy Thompson The Wire- Patrick Droney Coming Home- Leon Bridges More Love- Sara Bareilles White Flag-JOSEPH TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 228th of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 22nd, 2024, and today we are discussing the fourth and final part of our November Writing Challenge, which will answer questions from beginning writers. Before getting into that, we will have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects and our Question of the Week.   First up, Cloak of Illusion, as I mentioned last week, is now out. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip Store. There was a bit of a processing glitch on Kobo that slowed it down this week, but now the book should be available at Kobo, so if you're a Kobo reader, you can buy it for your Kobo reader or read it in Kobo Plus without any difficulty. Now that Cloak of Illusion is out (and selling very well, thank you all for that), my next project is Orc Hoard. That will be the fourth Rivah Half-Elven Thief book and I am 44,000 words into it (on chapter 10 of 18, which means I'm over halfway through). I very, very much want to have this book out before Christmas and I will be doing my best to make that happen. I am also about 2,000 words into Shield of Deception, which will be the fourth Shield War book (and hopefully will be my first book in 2025). The outline has 31 chapters, which means this will be the longest book I have tackled in a while, so I'm glad I'm getting kind of a head start on it as the secondary project while I work on Orc Hoard.   In audiobook news, as we mentioned last week, Shield of Conquest is out at all the audiobook stores (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), and you can get that at your favorite audiobook store. In other good audiobook news, Cloak of Spears (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now out at all the audiobook stores and if you are looking for something to listen to on your long Thanksgiving drive or plane trip, I should mention that Cloak of Spears is about 12 hours long, so it will have you covered.   00:02:01: Question of the Week So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects and let's move on now to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics and this week's question ties directly into what we just talked about: what do you do for entertainment while traveling (whether by car, plane, train or otherwise- podcasts, audiobooks, portable games, that kind of thing)? No wrong answers, obviously. The inspiration for this question, as you might guess, was the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, which for many people was a great deal of travel and finding ways to amuse yourself while traveling.   So in answer to this question, Justin says: music- classical, rock, movie scores, and video game tunes. If I'm traveling, I'm almost always driving. Music helps relax and entertain without demanding my attention.   Brett says: I read- very often one of your books. You've published 100+ books, but because I've read them multiple times, I may be at 1,000 plus reads of your books. (I got to say Brett has a good taste here.) If I'm driving, I don't usually have any entertainment.   Surabhi says: I love reading while traveling. Kindle is a nice advantage, being easy to carry, and I usually have easy to read books to read for traveling, which of course is why I have so many of your books in my Kindle Library. They're simple yet enjoyable to read.   I got to say Kindle does make traveling with books a lot easier. I remember in the old days all I had was space for two books to bring on a trip, and so I was trying to pick out which two books to bring. Venus says: Reading and geocaching.   Bonnie says: about all the traveling I've done recently is to work and back, usually local radio station and ‘80s music.   Juana says: so my dad drove like he was in NASCAR. Consequently, I read books, because I was not brave enough to watch death coming for us. The habit is still with me.   Darla says: riding in car listening to Sirius XM, looking at scenery or talking to the driver, driving by myself- listening to radio or CD music and singing. On an airplane, I read hard copy books or ebooks on my tablet, maybe try to sleep.   Cheryl says: read the Kindle, but mainly keep an eye on the road, even as a passenger. You never know what is going to jump out into a country highway here in Australia.   Ashley says: I listen to audiobooks while driving and that has made working overnights more bearable.   Adeline says: Apple's Books app on my phone has been my best friend while on the move for years-planes, trains, London's public transportation.   MW says: while driving, I listen to either music or a podcast. When I'm being a passenger, I love to read or draw. I'm always carrying my Kindle and my sketchbook everywhere, or I try to catch some sleep. I generally avoid conversing unless I'm actually traveling with someone, but even then I reserve some time for myself.   John says: audiobooks while driving, Kindle on my phone while flying or lounging around, physical books while camping, though I use the phone at night. I like to hang out in restaurants and pubs at the bar, reading books and talking to strangers. If there's a beach or river, occasionally fish and walk around either the city, beach, or trail.   Jenny says: all the books or podcasts/radio shows. BBC has a fun one I have on CD called Cabin Pressure. It's hilarious. And if I'm alone in the car, singing along at full volume with my singalong playlist.   Just a comment quick, I did listen to all of Cabin Pressure in 2022 and early 2023, and it is indeed hilarious and I recommend listening to it if you get the chance. JT says: when I travel, I generally intend to read and thus take several books. Instead, I listen to YouTube videos, audiobooks, music, play games, or nap. It is rather frustrating. Brandy says: I haven't been able to drive myself since 2010, so I generally read books, coordinate meds, snacks, and travel stops since my partner is diabetic and I am epileptic. I navigate, take pictures of interesting scenery for attempted art later, bug people through texts, and Facebook.   Barbara says: if I'm not driving, I usually just watch the traffic and scenery. Of course, depending on whom the driver is, I may just close my eyes so I don't panic. Unfortunately, I have to board an airplane in a couple of weeks for an out-of-state wedding. I'll distract myself from the agony of the flight by reading.   Morgan says: I don't travel much, but I'm a delivery driver for work and I do a lot of audiobooks and podcasts, especially tabletop RPG actual play podcasts. And Rob says: usually talk to the driver/navigate. If it's by bus or train. I read.   For myself, whenever I travel, most of the time I'm the one who's doing the driving, which obviously narrows down the entertainment options. So when I travel any long distances, I'm usually listening to audio books. A quirk I have with that is that I prefer to listen to audiobooks of books I've already read. So if I need to tune out the audiobook and focus on heavy traffic for a while, which happens often, then I don't feel like I'm missing anything.   00:06:30 Main Topic of the Week: November Writing Challenge Week 4   Now it's onto our main topic, the fourth and final week of our November Writing Challenge. As you know, if you've listened to the previous three episodes, our November Writing Challenge is sort of a let's call a low stress way to build a writing habit and get into writing and do writing because the traditional way of getting into writing in November, NaNoWriMo, may be a bit overwhelming for some people. If you feel like you're missing out when others are working on a bigger writing challenge this month, and if you want to start writing but feel overwhelmed, a smaller writing challenge for the absolute beginner- 300 words a day or some other small number of your choosing. The key is that it should be small and something you can manage daily. Follow along with our podcast transcriptionist who has never finished writing a book and feels overwhelmed at the idea of starting one. Follow her progress and see what advice I have for her and other beginner writers.   So with that in mind, let's start with our transcriptionist update for the fourth and final week of the challenge. She says, “I completed another week of the challenge. I averaged 355 words per day, taking an average of 14 minutes per day. It's getting easier as the challenge goes on this month. For my overall challenge, I averaged 363 words per day, taking an average of 14 minutes per day to finish my daily word count. I finished three chapters of a rough draft even in a month where a lot of things happened in real life that ordinarily would've kept me from trying. I plan to keep going with the challenge in December since it feels like a habit at this point.”   So as we can see, our transcriptionist had good results from the challenge and feels like she's gone a long way to build a consistent writing habit. As I've said before many times on the podcast, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible and the achievable. And if a 1,000 words or 1,600 words a day just seems overwhelming, 300 words a day might be far more achievable. So that might be something worth looking into. So now onto the questions I've been sent about writing from beginning writers. So we're going to go through these questions one by one.   #1: Do you listen to music while you write? Yes, I do. My preferred genre is soundtracks from movies, TV shows, and computer games that I like. And my listening habits tend to be a bit eclectic and not transferable to other people because if I talk to other people about my age, they prefer listening to bands they remember from their teenage years or their twenties. It’s true for everyone, whatever the music you were listening to when you were a teenager and in your early twenties becomes the gold standard for music for the rest of your life, and nothing else can quite live into that. But for me, I prefer listening to soundtracks from movies, TV shows, and especially computer games I enjoy. For example, yesterday I was working on chapters 9 and 10 of Orc Hoard, and during that time I listened to the main theme from Dragon Age: The Veilguard like 15 times in a row. Am I going to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard? No, I don't have time for another computer game of that size, but I like Han Zimmer's music and have many of his soundtracks and I like the main theme to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, so I listen to it like 15 times in a row.   #2: Our next question: is writing fun for you most of the time? I would say it is fun for me most of the time. It's always an expenditure of energy, however. I mean there's always this temptation in the back of your mind or in my mind that I could knock off for the day and play Starfield all day, but then the words wouldn't get done, the books wouldn't get done, and then the books wouldn't sell, so I would have no money to pay my bills. So that is pretty good motivation to write for me. But we're talking about beginning writers here and I'd say it's important to recognize that writing should usually be fun, but it's not always going to be fun.   Creating anything, whether writing a book or writing a song or painting a picture or building a cabinet, whatever it is, is always going to take an expenditure of energy and it is a form of work. Even if it's not as difficult as compared to say digging ditches or doing open heart surgery, it is still a kind of work and therefore there are times when it will feel like work and you have to make yourself do it. If you absolutely hate writing and don't enjoy doing it at all, then by all means you should not be doing it. Go find something else to do that you enjoy and you'll be happier and healthier for it, but if you do enjoy writing most of the time, then that is probably a good place to be.   #3: Our next question: how do you know how much worldbuilding is too little or too much? That is a good question because worldbuilding is definitely one of those writing adjacent tasks that can really be something of a rabbit hole that writers go down and then don't actually get writing any writing done. And I would say the answer is simple. You need to do whatever the right amount of world building is just enough, which I realize is very glib and pat answer, but it's true. You just need to do just enough worldbuilding that the story will be interesting, so that there may be mysteries for the character to solve. Worldbuilding is a bigger deal in fantasy obviously, especially fantasy that deals entirely with secondary worlds where you've made up the entire world and the history and so forth. What you want to do is avoid info dumping. I did an earlier episode about that where the joke was that if contemporary novels written the way that a fantasy novel is written, when someone went to an American airport for the first time and they encountered the security checkpoint, one of the characters would stop and deliver a three page history of the TSA and airplane security procedures in the United States over the last 30 years, which is what you want to avoid. You want to do just enough world building that the story moves forward. You don't want to get bogged down into it. And depending on the nature of your story, you may want to keep some of the world building secret in order to help create a mystery that will hold the reader's interest and drive the plot forward. For fantasy novels, Brandon Sanderson is notoriously good at this where he'll design an elaborate magic system and keep part of it concealed from the reader, and then the reveal about the magic system or the nature of the world is part of the climax of the book. Even in contemporary novels like mysteries or thrillers, you can do that with world building since obviously mysteries and thrillers have their own fictional parts of the world that you construct as part of the world building and so you can have reveals about your fictional police department or fictional spy agency be part of the world building. So to sum up, just do enough world building that you can tell your story, but don't get bogged down in it.   #4: Our next question: what's something no one told you about writing but you wish they had? Well, that's a good question. I think the biggest thing that I wish someone had told me, but it turns out I probably would've had to learn it myself, is the extreme value of persistence plus time plus experience. I saw an interesting Tweet the other day that said that your twenties are basically like being a level one character in an RPG where you have no skills, no experience, and you need to spend all your time level grinding on boring and repetitive tasks in order to acquire the experience and skills that will carry you through your thirties, forties, fifties, and hopefully onward. That struck me as very true because in my case, I started self-publishing when I was about 30 and I obviously spent all of my twenties essentially learning how to self-publish even though I didn't know that what is what I was doing at the time because self-publishing in this current form hadn't come along yet. So as I was teaching myself to write novels and with my technology blog, teaching myself about how to write for the internet and search engines and so forth, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was acquiring these skills that would be very valuable to me in my thirties and forties as I continue self-publishing. So to sum up that question, I would say what I wish I had been told and really understood in my twenties when I was starting out was the value of persistence over time. Because if you look at it, the Grand Canyon is essentially water exercising persistence over time.   #5: Our next question: should I tell people I'm writing a book? Well, that is a tricky question and I would say the answer boils down to it depends, which again is a pat and glib answer, but it really does depend on your personal circumstances and your relationship with your family and friends as well. For one thing, a lot of people say they're going to do things and never do them. In fact, I'd say a lot of people who announced very loudly that they're going to lose weight or learn to draw or learn to write a book or learn to program, never actually get very far or give up on it. So there's something to be said for remaining quiet and just doing things and letting the results speak for themselves once they can no longer be kept quiet. I would also say it really does depend on your relationship with your family, friends, and spouse and/or life partner. If you have a spouse or life partner who is very supportive of your goals and is willing to encourage you, then it's a good idea to tell them. It's not a good idea to keep secrets in that kind of relationship. But if you suspect your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend, or life partner is going to belittle and mock you, it might be a good idea to keep this to yourself. For your family and friends, it might, again, it really depends on the individual personalities involved in your relationship with them. Some friend groups and families have this very bad habit of crab bucket syndrome or tall poppy syndrome where if someone tries to exceed the overall average of the group, they try to pull them back down to their level. That's why you occasionally hear stories of someone who gives up drinking or loses a lot of weight ends up losing their friend group in their process because it turns out their friend group was based on excessive consumption of alcohol or excessive consumption of food and something like that might occur with your friends and family as well. So I would say, on balance, it probably would be best to keep it to yourself unless you think your friends, family, and a significant other would be encouraging and welcoming of your efforts in this endeavor. But as always, it depends and your mileage may vary.   #6: Our next question is a pretty interesting one that people ask frequently: how long until I can become a full-time author? Now this is again a very complicated question that boils down to your circumstances, and once again, the answer is it depends. Terry Brooks, when he wrote a writing advice book about 20 years ago, said that his editor, Lester del Rey, advised him not to go full-time until he had a year's salary in the bank, and that was 40 years ago. Nowadays, I would say at the bare minimum of going full time is you want to have a year's full salary in the bank and you would want to be making at least 40% more than you would be from your day job. Why 40%? Because once you are self-employed, especially in the US, you are responsible for paying a lot of things that your employer usually does, such as a variety of taxes and insurance costs. Also it's a very good idea, especially in the US, to have some sort of savings for retirement such as a 401K or something similar because there's absolutely no guarantee Social Security is going to be around by the time you retire. So I would say those are the absolute bare minimum before you would even think about doing this is to have a year's salary in the bank and you are making 40% more than your day job on a consistent basis. Again, it might be something you don't want to consider doing at all and you would need to ask yourself, why do you want to be a full-time author? Would it be the prestige of it? Would it be the fact that you really hate your day job? I have to say the reality of being a full-time author is often quite different than the fantasy people have of it, and that there have in fact been many authors who very successfully wrote while also maintaining day jobs. Anthony Trollope very famously wrote for two hours every morning before he went to work for the British Postal Service, and he did that his entire career and some of his books are remembered as classics of English literature to this day. Glenn Cook the fantasy author worked at a GM plant the entire time he was a writer because the benefits and pension were quite good. J.R.R. Tolkien was famously a professor of philology for his entire professional career and he wrote on the side and that became Lord of the Rings. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with keeping a full-time job and also writing on the side as you're comfortable doing so. So some writers have gone full-time, especially since the indie revolution started, found they absolutely hated it and then went back to working a day job and working and writing on the side. And again, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And for many people it is in fact a very good idea, especially if you have children, more than one child (children are expensive) and they need medical care or if you or another family member has a sort of chronic condition and it helps to have it covered by your employer's health insurance. So again, I hate to keep saying this, but it really does boil down to your personal circumstances and whether it's the right fit for you and your family and your financial situation or not. For myself, I'll give a few examples for my own life here. For myself, I've been a full-time writer for over eight years now. I've been very fortunate to be able to do that. Thank you all for buying the books and helping me to do that. I think my personality is pretty well suited to that because I have absolutely no problems writing for most of the day the way when many writers would find uncomfortable, and I have no problem doing a 6,000 word days or higher on a regular basis. That said, it was not originally my plan to be a full-time writer. I had originally planned to keep my day job and write on the side, but due to family circumstances, I had to move to a different state. And at the time I thought I could look for a different job or I could give full-time writing a go and see what happens, and I gave full-time writing a go and it's worked out pretty well for the last eight years. Thank you. So for me, in my circumstances at the time and the time since going full-time made sense and was a good choice. But again, and I hate to keep saying it, but it really does depend on your personal circumstances, finances, and family situation.   #7: Now our last question, does piracy and AI mean that people won't be able to make money writing anymore? The answer to that is a big old no. Let's address those one at a time-first, piracy. Piracy has been around since the existence of the internet. It is older than the internet. Both J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Dickens had American publishers who ripped off their works and made bootleg copies of them that led to a bunch of lawsuits. So piracy is nothing new. The internet has just made it easier, and we know that the way to beat piracy is to make getting your books easier and more convenient than it would be to pirate them. There's always going to be a level of people who pirate stuff no matter what. And to be frank, you should not consider that being lost sales because the people who pirate everything are going to pay for anything anyway, though I've had a few readers email from me from time to time saying that they did pirate my stuff and felt bad about it and eventually went on to become regular readers and paying customers. So there's really nothing you can do to stop piracy and it's kind of futile to try and fight it. I do know one indie writer who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to shut down pirate sites, and it was, in my opinion, while that was a noble fight, it was a tremendous waste of money. So piracy, it’s best not to worry too much about it. It is one of those things like retail shrink (which is what the big box retailers call shoplifting) that is always going to be with us. The way as an indie author to fight that is to make your work as available as on many paying platforms as possible so that it's very easy for people to get it legitimately.   While AI is a big deal, I think it is somewhat overrated, and I also think that it has some structural problems that it's going to run into sooner or later. For one thing when it comes to writing, while you could use AI to churn out an entire novel, it would require significant editing to make it palatable, in which case you might as well just write it yourself. For another thing, AI is very, very expensive mainly not for the individual users, but for the companies that run them. And I'm not at this point entirely convinced that AI has long-term profitability. I wonder if it's another tech bubble, like the way the Metaverse was at the start of the 2020s when Facebook thought that the pandemic restrictions were going to be permanent and that society was going to become entirely remote. Subsequent events proved otherwise, and Facebook ended up temporarily losing about two thirds of its company value on its whole Metaverse bet. Finally, this is a bit on the fluffier side, but novel writing’s art and art is essentially about human emotion and human connection. And no matter how smart the AI gets, that is something that would be very difficult for it to copy -one's own unique voice, one's own unique writing style. Those are something that only humans can do. And so I don't think AI is a long-term threat to fiction. It might be a long-term threat to things like sports writing and instant news articles, but less so for fiction. So to sum up, I don't think piracy and AI mean that people will no longer be able to make money from writing.   And now for the final segment of our writing challenge episode, Jon's Advice Corner. We'll start with editing tips, what to do once your rough draft is done.   So first, what should I do to edit the book once it's done. For myself, what I usually do is I do a first read through using track changes in Microsoft Word, chapter by chapter. And what I focus on then is reducing length, getting rid of sections that don't make sense, reducing excess words, tightening up sentences, making sure there are no continuity errors. I very often in this phase will split up chapters and do smaller chapters or rearrange scenes or move things around. Once that's done, I do a second edit where I essentially have my computer read the book aloud to me, and that's for typo checking. And sometimes you notice things when read aloud that you wouldn't have noticed on the page.   After that, I have a couple different people who check it for typos for me and then we publish. Then I do another typo check, and then any typos that I find after the publishing process, I upload and correct as I get them. So that's my process. People would say that you need to hire an editor, and I think for many people that's true, but for myself, after 157 books, I'm reasonably confident I know what I'm doing and so I am confident doing it myself, even as I recognize that's not good advice to give to younger writers.   Our next question, how do drafts work? The standard term is the first draft is just the first writing you do, getting all the writing down on the page. Depending on the writer, some people do second, third, and fourth drafts where depending on the writer, they might rewrite it entirely from scratch or just do editing on what they've already written. And then the final draft is one you are done with and comfortable with. Next question, how do I know when I should stop editing? That's a tricky question because many beginning writers fall into the trap of endlessly polishing their book over and over and over rather than writing new things. I would say once you've done your edits, once you've had a couple of beta readers look at it, eventually just decide that it is done and that we are going to move on and write new things because no matter how well you write, it's never going to be quite as cool as it is in your head when you are imagining it. I mean, you can get close, but it's never going to be quite there. So I would say a quick rule of thumb is maybe do two drafts, have your beta readers go over it, and then that would be a good place to call it quits because the truth is you can endlessly repolish the same book over and over and over again, but that may not be the best use of your time. Next editing question, how many beta readers should I have? It depends. I heard of one writer who has like 30 or 40 beta readers, and I think that might be a bit excessive, but if you can do three to five people whose opinions you trust and who aren't going to just say complete nonsense, that would probably be a good idea to do. I'd say around three to five (though as I mentioned, some writers can go much higher).   Once you're editing is done and you have a final draft, you decide if you want to self-publish it or look for an agent.   Here are things to avoid while publishing. For one thing, you really need to avoid predatory publishers. If you are approached by a publishing company that wants you to pay in any capacity to publish, it is probably a scam and you should avoid it. If you are self-publishing, you will need to come up with your own cover design anyway. But if you are approached by a publishing company that offers you a package where you pay $1,000 or $3,000 or even more, that is probably a scam and you won't get good value for your money. This is again, my opinion. I think new writers and in fact writers at all levels of experience would be better off self-publishing, but I would recommend avoiding agents and avoiding publicists.   Hiring a publicist for your book is just going to waste your money, and an agent will probably not get you anywhere these days. It really helps if you want to be traditionally published to be famous before you try to get traditionally published-like a former president of the United States. If a former president of the United States decides that he (or someday she) is going to write a book, the former president of the United States is going to have absolutely no trouble finding the book a publisher whatsoever. If a music star or a movie star on the level of someone like Taylor Swift or Tom Cruise decides they want to write a book, they also will have no trouble finding a publisher. But for regular people like you and me, you are probably better off self-publishing and learning the skills to market and the various related publishing skills yourself. Things you would want to understand well before proceeding with these is finding a cover designer. Unless you are proficient with Photoshop and familiar with book covers, you should probably hire a cover designer, and this can be very affordable since many of the big cover designers offer premades where they just drop in your name and title for around $150 to $200 (though custom cover can require more). Hiring editors-this is again, something probably you should research and check out various writing groups on Facebook for recommendations. You want someone who isn't that expensive. You'll want someone who comes with good client recommendations. Hiring narrators is also something to research well in advance. But it might be a little early with your first book because audiobooks are so expensive.   So that's it for our questions, and that is it for our November Writing Challenge. As a bonus, our transcriptionist included her official writing playlist, which I'm not going to read here, but you can see it on the show notes if you are curious. And I would include my writing playlist, but as I said, it's mostly random computer game, movie, and TV show soundtracks that I enjoyed.   So that is it for this week. Thank you for coming along for our November Writing Challenge. I hope you found it helpful and informative. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we continue our November Writing Challenge, and take a look at the most common roadblocks writers face. We also check in with our transcriptionist, and see how she is progressing in our November Writing Challenge. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 227 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 15th, 2024, and today we are discussing part three of our November Writing Challenge, which will deal with overcoming roadblocks in your writing progress. First we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we will have Question of the Week, and then we'll get to our main topic of overcoming roadblocks. First up, writing projects. I am almost/very nearly done with Cloak of Illusion. In fact, I would have finished completely yesterday, but I had some unexpected home repairs come up and now that those are resolved, as soon as this podcast recording is completed, I'm hoping to finish up completely on Cloak of Illusion and publish it this weekend. So hopefully when this show comes out on Monday the 18th, the book should be showing up on the various ebook stores. Be sure to subscribe to my new release newsletter as well and you will get a free Nadia short story called Trick or Treat in ebook form. I am 24,000 words into Orc Hoard, which will be the next Rivah book, and I'm hoping to have that out in December as my final book of 2024. My secondary project while I'm working on that will also be Shield of Deception because I am hoping to have that out as my first book in 2025. Hard to believe we're about halfway through the 2020s already. In audiobook news, Shield of Conquest came out this week and you should be able to get it at all the usual audiobook stores, and that is excellently narrated by Brad Wills. Cloak of Spears, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, should be out before too much longer as well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects.   00:01:36 Question of the Week Now on to Question of the Week, which had a lot of responses this week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week’s question: do you buy any hardback books? No wrong answers, obviously. I asked this question because I was reading an article about for many traditionally published authors, hardbacks used to be the primary source of royalties. Nowadays, for many authors, that has been superseded by audiobooks. Since I’m indie, my main source of revenue has always been ebooks. We had many different responses to this question. JL says: I only read ebooks now. I have not bought a physical book in over a decade. Surabhi says: Hardcovers, being very expensive, are a big no-no for me. I’d love to be able to afford hardcovers, it’s always either paperbacks or ebooks. Justin says: If I’m getting paper, I will do my best to make it hardback. Paperback books have a limited lifespan and number of readings in them compared to hardback books. Most of my book purchasing is ebooks but reference works and great stories get the hardback treatment. Mary says: Only if there’s no paperback. Dave says: Ebooks and audiobooks all the way. They’re generally cheaper or easier to read, or with audiobooks I can do other things while I listen. Also as I get older, being able to increase the font size makes it easier to read. I definitely agree with Dave on that, let me tell ya. Jenny says: Can’t afford it usually. My hardcover budget goes to RPG books. I myself do have quite a few RPG books, which is amusing because I don’t actually play the game but I just like looking at the artwork. Juana says: Yes. I have 60+ signed editions of authors I like. Some paperbacks of the Frostborn series (Wonder who wrote those?). That is indeed a mystery. Catriona says: I used to collect hardbacks of favorite authors- buy each new release e.g. Terry Pratchett. But when I moved from Hong Kong to Thailand I got rid of most of my fiction books and bought the Kindle versions. Shipping after COVID was just extortionate! Morgan says: I don’t really buy physical books anymore. My brain is too fried to read so I mostly do audiobooks while I work. I only have so much money, so it is hard to justify buying a physical copy of a book I already have the audio copy for when I know I probably won’t physically read it. Gary says: I prefer hardbacks. When buying new though, I generally buy paperbacks unless it is for reference or one of my favorite authors. I always check though because now the hardbacks are often not much more. Jeanne says: Depends on the book. I would totally invest in hardcover copies of Lord of the Rings, for example. I am currently investing in leatherbound versions of the Word on Fire Bible, which is a step up from the hardcover. Authors I don’t know or who I read for light fun, I’ll get as ebooks. Marilyn says: No, but used to buy only hardback books. Ran out of room on my bookshelves and didn’t like to get rid of my books. I ended up buying an ereader. I have 1,729 books. I do have a few hardbacks but not many. Not everything is in an electronic format. When I used to travel, my suitcase would be full of books. Now I have room for clothes. That is one nice advantage of the ebook revolution. Back in the day when I would pack for a trip, I would have to choose which books I would bring but now you can just bring your phone and you’re set. MG says: If I can get a hardback I do, but I haven’t bought any recently. Barbara says: I purchase very few print books these days and those I do purchase tend to be theology related. Whether I purchase hard or soft bound print books will depend on the availability and price. And since I’m no longer in seminary (I graduated in 2021), my theology books tend to be digital because that’s what I read. If I purchase print books, I’d run out of room to store them. Especially since I’m already out of bookshelf space. Michael says: Not really, not anymore. They take up too much space. I might buy a very posh one if it looks amazing (stuff from the Folio Society perhaps) but that’s it. Bonnie says: I mainly read ebooks now. I think the last hardcover I bought was Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon. Jeff says: Since I got a Kindle in 2010, I haven’t bought a physical book. I am approaching 500 ebooks. I was a SF Book Club member for many, many years so I do have hundreds of hardcover books. A lot of them are stored in totes because of lack of room. Juan says: Used to. Space is a factor now. So now only for my son because I don’t want him to have an electronic device in his face so much, but usually the first thing I do at a bookstore when I see a good book is look for it on Apple Books. Usually half the price or so. Always less expensive as well. Barbara says: Used to buy lots of books, got at least 3,00 but with arthritis in my hands, I’m now stuck with ebooks. Got at least 3,000 of them, too. I’ve got to get rid of some of my physical books, but I’ll still keep the ones that aren’t replaceable. John says: I only buy collectible editions at this point, or if there isn’t an ebook for something I want to reread (but then it’s usually paperback). Sometimes old hardbacks have been cheaper than the Kindle versions. When I reread Wheel of Time a few years ago in anticipation of the Amazon series that was the case. Ended up just donating the books just a couple of years later. Carol says: I do love the feel of a hardcover book, the smell, the sound of pages turning, but I’m fully converted to ebooks. So convenient, can read anywhere, carry everywhere, so sadly I haven’t bought a physical book for years. Cheryl says: I only have hardbacks of the “classics” as collections to hand down to my grandchildren. Haven’t bought any paper versions of books for a few years now and they were paperbacks. Most were on Kindle. Venus says: I will buy certain books in hardcover but only the ones I wish to have available after a collapse of society. David says: I have always preferred hardback, but space constraints have left only those of my favorite authors. I have over 2,000 books on my Kindle. Michael says: I do. For myself, I do buy hardbacks but still very, very selectively. If Timothy Zahn, Jim Butcher, and a few other select authors I’ve been reading for decades have a new hardcover, I’ll buy it. Otherwise, it’s ebooks or paperbacks. For nonfiction books, I’m a bit less choosy. If I read say, a historical ebook and liked it, I might get the hardback or possibly the paperback to keep as a reference book. It’s interesting from the general consensus of the comments that it seems like ebooks are the dominant format for books now and that if you really want to know if you’re someone’s favorite author or not, see if they buy your hardbacks. Given the expense and space premium of hardbacks, that’s how you know they really like your book.   00:07:43: Main Topic of the Week: November Writing Challenge Now on our main topic of the week, week three of our November Writing Challenge. The topic we are discussing this week is overcoming roadblocks. If you're not familiar with our podcast series for November, you can listen to the previous two episodes, and we have a short summary here. If you feel like you're missing out when others are working on bigger writing challenges this month and you want to start writing but not to feel overwhelmed, a smaller writing challenge for the absolute beginner, 300 words a day (or some other small number of your choosing). The key is that it should be small and something you can manage daily. As I mentioned on previous episodes with this topic, I wonder if National Novel of Writing Month is akin do a sort of crash diet for people where you can lose weight very quickly, let's say like five pounds in a month, but then once you do that, you go back to your old habits. In fact, you go back to your old habits with as much force as before and you end up gaining 10 pounds and you're worse off than you were before. I think a more gradual writing challenge might be akin to losing one pound a month, but you keep it off and that adds up over time. So follow along with our podcast transcriptionist who has never finished writing a book and feels overwhelmed at the ideas of starting one. We can follow her progress and see what advice I have for her as she faces writing challenges. So week three, overcoming roadblocks. If you've ever done any writing or you've ever had anything to write, as you know, there are many roadblocks that can come up to impede your writing progress. The first ones we'll address are logistical roadblocks and we'll recap some points from Episode 220: 8 Tips For Finishing Your Rough Draft. Perhaps one of the biggest roadblocks is time. It's trying to find the time to write. I found is a good idea to schedule your writing time and take advantage of smaller moments of opportunity to write. There is a difference between the perfect time to write and the available time to write. As I've said many times before, the perfect is the enemy of the possible or even the achievable. You might have in your head the image of the perfect time to write and the perfect environment. That may take a lot of work to achieve and be difficult to find. Additionally, I found that many people in their days have what tend to be wasted chunks of time that you kind of have to waste based on the circumstances, like you're in a waiting room, you're on hold, or you are sitting in a room with nothing to do. You have to watch for somebody to arrive or wait for the phone to ring, that kind of thing. There are a lot of ways to pass the time that way. If you're in, for example, the doctor's waiting room, you see everyone sitting on there on their phones reading the news or whatever, but that could be an excellent time to get some writing done. You could obtain a cheap laptop like a netbook type laptop or you could even teach yourself to write on your phone with your thumbs. Those kind of chunks of wasted time throughout the day are an excellent time to squeeze out a couple hundred words and if you can squeeze out a couple hundred words every day, that will add up very quickly. The biggest enemy of finding writing time I found are the many distractions we have in our day-to-day lives. And in fact, I was just talking about your phone. If you have your phone with you, that's a built-in distraction machine where you could maybe write 15 words and then reward yourself by checking your email or your Facebook or whatever. And then before you know it, you've been on your phone for 20 minutes and your writing time has disappeared. The same thing obviously can happen if you're writing on a laptop or a desktop computer or whatever. To manage these distractions, there's a couple of different tricks. You could just shut off the internet on your phone for a while and not turn it on again until you've reached your writing goal. If you find being distracted on your phone or your computer is a consistent problem, you could use apps or browser extensions to manage digital distractions that will prevent, say notifications from interrupting you, whether from email or turning off the internet and keeping from getting into it until a set period of time has passed. For environmental distractions (and what I mean by environmental distractions are noise, people interrupting you and so forth), it can be a good idea to find a place where you'll face fewer interruptions. At various times, I have written in a school or a university or a public library where people tend not to bother strangers too much and therefore, if you sit quietly and get on with your typing, no one's going to bother you. Some people enjoy writing in a coffee shop. I've never really found that to be an enjoyable experience. I have done that many times based on what the circumstances were at the time, but if it was up to me, my favorite writing place would be in my office with the door shut and headphones on and music playing and I'm just writing away. But life doesn't always give us that luxury, so I have written in other locations, but if you can figure out the best way to give yourself a distraction free writing environment, even if it's just noise canceling headphones, that might be the way to go.   Another thing to watch out for that can eat up your time is writing adjacent tasks, things that are connected to writing but not actually writing itself, such as researching, outlining, reading about writing, listening to podcasts about writing, et cetera. These are all keeping you from the goal of getting your words down, which is and the ultimate purpose of our November Writing Challenge, to get your words done every day. Some of these things may be necessary, but you can do them later and some of them are not necessary and not helpful to your productivity, like reading about writing or social media relating to writing or authors is only giving you the illusion of productivity rather than actual productivity. There may be value in these activities, but they are not helping you get the words down on the page.   So let's move on to what could be a more difficult type of roadblocks, the mental roadblocks, roadblocks where you just don't feel confident or you don't feel like you want to write or you don't even feel like you're good at writing and you're wasting your time by writing. So motivation is a thing to consider. It's like you might want to write down a few reasons why you started a writing challenge in November. Why do you want to write? Why is this important to you? Do you want to be able to finish a novel and say that you finished a novel? Do you want to create something cool that's similar to the vision of the creative things you see in your head when you think about it? And what's the best outcome of you writing each day and what's the best-case scenario of what will happen if you keep writing? It might be a good idea to consider all of these things. If you feel bad at writing or feel that you're not good enough, that seems to be a bigger problem for many people. There are a couple tips and tricks that you can use to work around that. The first thing is to don't revise as you go. Don't revise, don't look back. Just keep going. Get it all down on page as fast as you can and then keep going. And the secret is if you're writing a rough draft, you can ignore your inner critic because the point of the rough draft is to get all the words on the page and then you fix them later in editing. An amusing anecdote about that-one of my audiobook narrators wanted to get caught up on projects and he asked if I could send him the rough draft chapters and then as I was writing the book and then he could narrate the rough draft chapters and then he could make any changes I made in editing later. I had to turn him down because the truth is I do a lot of editing on my rough drafts, like Cloak of Illusion was originally 96,000 words, and I think when all the editing is done, it'll be like 94,000 words, maybe 93,500. So that's a lot of things eliminated. I moved around a lot of scenes. I changed a character's name six times, which is one of the reasons why I had to turn down that idea from the narrator because when I introduced a new character, sometimes I change the character's name four or five times during the course of writing until I'm finally satisfied that this is what the character's name should be. So imagine having to go back and rerecord that all the time, but that returns to my original point, where it's best to just ignore your inner critic while you are writing and just get all the words down on page and you can sort them through later. I found editing to be something of a less harrowing process than writing the rough draft. A metaphor I've used before is that a couple years ago, actually, well more than a couple years now, I moved into a third-floor apartment with no elevator, and so I had to carry all my books up those stairs to the new apartment, which since I had a lot of books at the time, was a lot of work (this was before ebooks). Once all the books were carried upstairs to the apartment, only then could I take them out of the boxes and put them on the shelves. That was a lot easier than carrying all those books up three flights of stairs, let me tell you. But I use that as a metaphor to compare the writing process, the first draft is carrying all the books up the stairs and then arranging them on the library shelves as the editing process. Another metaphor that people have found helpful is that the rough draft is like building a sand castle. You first have to drag all the sand to your sandbox and only then is it time to start building the sandcastle. You got to fill up that sandbox first. Now what to do if you hate what you're writing, you absolutely hate it. You don't like what you're doing and you're dragging yourself to the word processor every day. It might be time to ask yourself a couple of hard questions. And the hardest one is, is this really what you want to write? Are you writing something that you want to write or are you trying to write something that you think would sell well or market well to the audience? I talked a bit about this way back in Episode 191: The Worst Writing Advice, about writing to market. Writing to market, if you go too far with it, is a bad idea because by the time you finish and the book is ready to sell, the market may have already grown tired of the trend and moved on to dystopian mermaid stories or something else. Readers also have a sense of when a story is rushed or written in a way that the author hates, not always but very often sort of picked up that the writer hated what they were writing and didn't want to be doing it. It's much better to write something that you're excited to write. You can do a little bit of writing to market in that you look what's popular and say something like, hey, romantic suspense is popular and I enjoy romantic suspense and I want to write romantic suspense. So go ahead and do that. Something else to keep in mind is that tastes change. I saw an interesting article the other day arguing that sort of cynical anti-heroes and deconstruction of popular tropes is going to become less and less popular because that was very popular in the US in the 2000s and the early 2010s when the US in general was more stable and more prosperous. Although I don't think anyone would disagree to say that the United States in the 2020s, thanks to Covid and a variety of other factors, seems to be less stable and less prosperous than it was 20 years ago. And so times are more troubled, then people have less of an appetite and troubled times for cynical anti-heroes and are more drawn to straightforward tales of noble heroes prevailing over evil, whatever the genre might be, whether fantasy or mystery or thriller or whatever. That's the kind of thing to keep in mind with how taste change. So you're really better off writing what you want to write rather than chasing trends because the trends we were just talking about went over a 20 year period. But trends on a smaller level can change very quickly within the space of a few years or even a few months. So you should write in a genre that interests you and you should write characters that you respect and characters that are dealing with an action and conflict that you find interesting. That is one way to hold your interest as you're writing is because you like the characters, you like what you're writing, and you want to see what happens next.   Another problem that you might face if you hate what you're writing is that you might be writing something boring that doesn't need to be in the book. Mystery writer Elmore Leonard famously said in his rules for writing, try to leave out the parts that readers skip. In other words, leave out the boring stuff. So if you're writing a scene and you don't enjoy writing the scene, and you're not looking forward to writing the scene, and you find it boring, maybe it's time to ask yourself: does this scene really need to be in the book? We've all read books that had scenes where it was clear the writer was trying to fill space or thought necessary to go into more detail of, for example, a thousand mile river journey than was really necessary for the plot. If something's boring, just cut it out. There's a famous story that veteran actors who are really good at their craft will sometimes convince the director to cut out dialogue when they say that the actor can convey the meaning of the scene with just the look or expression rather than clunky dialogue. And that is often the case for these experienced actors and is very often the case for writers as well. So if you find yourself struggling with a particular scene, it might just be a good idea to cut it out or sum it up in a paragraph. Like if you have difficulty writing a journey, you could say, just sum it up in a paragraph that they got on a plane and went from New York to Los Angeles. There's no reason to devote two chapters to that. So those are our tips this week for overcoming roadblocks in your writing. Let's have an update from our transcriptionist on her progress with our November writing challenge. “An episode on roadblocks is good timing because I hit some roadblocks last week. There was a day where I wasn't able to get time to write because of what was happening in real life, but since I have been averaging over my goal a day, I still averaged 363 words per day this week, even with missing a day. It took me an average of 13 minutes each day. I wrote out a plan for the challenge that said I could miss a day under specific circumstances and my word count for previous days could apply to that day or if I didn't have extra words, I would make up the words on a Saturday, so I didn't beat up myself or feel like I failed the challenge for missing a day. I had a plan for if I missed a day.” So that seems like a good approach to planning the challenge. And she had a few questions for me actually. The main question for me was: how do you manage distractions? For myself, I use a couple of different techniques. I've mentioned before when I'm writing new stuff, my main method is the Pomodoro method. That's where you set up a timer for 25 minutes, turn off the internet, and just focus on your task for 25 minutes. And I found that if I adhere properly to the Pomodoro method, I can usually get about 1,000 to 1,100 words every Pomodoro for 25 minutes. To reset my brain between Pomodoros, I will usually play Classic Super Mario Brothers on the Switch for five minutes (because you're supposed to take breaks between Pomodoros) and then back to a 25 minute Pomodoro. I do try to hit a minimum word count during the day, ideally 5,000 to 6,000. If I get more, great. If something goes wrong, I tend to have a fallback position if of like 3,000 words. That's usually good on a busy day. I do revise my goals if something comes up because sometimes things come up that you have to pay attention to immediately and it can't wait. Home repair is a big one. For example, a couple times I have this very old wooden fence on my property that I really need to get replaced, and sometimes the wind will knock something loose and a couple times I've had the wind knock the beams of a segment loose from a fence post. If I spot that right away and fix it immediately, it's not a problem. But if I miss it and the entire fence segment falls over, then that's like a couple hours, maybe even a half a day repair job to fix that. So sometimes you come across things like that that need to be addressed immediately. And if that happens, I just roll with it. I try to fix the problem as quick as I can and then try to get as many words as I can in the time that's left, which is why I talked about having a fallback position of 3,000 words if something goes wrong. Sometimes you just lose the entire day to writing until something more important comes up and that's just the way it is. But if you have a no writing day, don't despair and remember the words of Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind: Tomorrow is another day. If you have a bad writing day, that doesn't mean tomorrow has to be a bad writing day and you get another swing at the ball, so to speak. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show and Week Three of our November Writing Challenge. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we continue with our November Writing Challenge, and discuss how outlining can be a helpful tool in writing your novel and building a writing habit. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 226 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is November the 8th, 2024 and today we are discussing Part 2 of our November Writing Challenge and that will mostly discuss the usefulness of making outlines. Before we get into that, we will have an update on my current writing projects and Question of the Week. We will also close out the episode with a preview of the upcoming audiobook Cloak of Spears, as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. First up, writing progress. The rough draft of Cloak of Illusion is done at about 96,000 words, and I'm about 25% of the way through the first editing pass. I also wrote a short story called Trick or Treat that will be a companion to the book. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of that short story when Cloak of Illusion comes out, hopefully before the end of November. So now would be an excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter. After Cloak of Illusion is published, my next project will be Orc Hoard, the 4th book in the Rivah Half-Elven series, and I'm about 21,000 words into that. In audiobook news, as you may have already heard, Cloak of Spears is done. That will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy and it is working its way through processing right now. Shield of Conquest narrated by Brad Wills is also still working its way through processing on the various audiobook platforms. So you can get both audiobooks on my Payhip store right now if you don't want to wait. So that is where I met with my writing projects. 00:01:25 Question of the Week Now let's talk about Question of the Week. It's time for Question of the Week, designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite book cover (like in terms of the artwork, the design, etcetera)? No wrong answers, obviously. We had a few answers this week. Justin says: For that, I go back to the guilty pleasures of my youth, a teenager on a Burroughs kick at the time, digging for paperbacks in a secondhand bookstore. Savage Pellucidar, cover by Frank Franzetta (the 1974 Ace edition reprint), which I still have stashed away. Franzetta was an incredible artist. I love his Sea Witch and Death Dealer, but we’re talking about book covers here. Savage Pellucidar was the one for me. Mary says: Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon. Then, that cover was a work of art with three detachable bands. Surabhi says: Hard to choose one. I personally love those young adult “Book Tok” book covers: Shadow and Bone, Six of Crows, The Cruel Prince. I don't know. Something about such covers immediately sparks interest in me. Randy says he always liked the Heinlein juvenile covers. Gary S. says: This was difficult for me because I like hardcovers, but I like to take the jacket off while I read so it doesn't get torn. Consequently, I seldom look at the covers. Gary B says: Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon. I’ve got a poster/artwork of it and pretty much anything by Michael Whelan. Becca says: Stoner by Tad Williams, pretty much tops my list of favorite covers, then maybe The Dragonstone by McKiernan. Catriona says: Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic. MG says: That's quite difficult to answer, but I have a Return of the King copy with this Alan Lee cover, going to have to go with this. For myself, I think I would go with a hardback edition of The Silmarillion from the late 1990s. I think it was published in ‘99. It was illustrated by Ted Nasmith and the cover image shows Maglor throwing the final Silmaril into the sea in despair for his deeds. If you know the context of that scene, it's an amazingly powerful cover. So that is it for Question of the Week and tune in again for next week's Question of the Week. 00:03:22 Main Topic of the Week Now it's time to our main topic for our second week of our November Writing Challenge. This week we're going to talk about building story structure and how outlining can help with this. If you haven't heard of my November Writing Challenge, the idea is that you write 300 words or a similarly small number every day in hopes of building up a small but sustainable writing habit. I was thinking of NaNoWriMo, where you write 1600 words a day in an effort to get to 50,000 words a month, is well and good for someone like me, where I essentially write a book every month unless something comes up. But for someone starting out, it can be a bit like the sort of crash diet where you lose 5 pounds in a month and then gain 10 back over the next two months as your habits snap back. That’s because you didn't lose the weight through sustainable means, so that is the goal with the November writing challenge: to build the base of a sustainable writing habit. So let's talk about how story structure can help you do that. In last week's episode, I mentioned that making the outline of your story can help with the process of writing. In this week's episode, we're going to go into more detail about story structure and conflict. Knowing how these work in your stories is essential to building an outline. You will find that having a proper structure to your story makes it easier to write, in the same way that having a proper foundation for your house makes it easier to construct. We'll talk about what I call the five iron laws of storytelling and the importance of your story having conflict and at the end of the episode, we will get a quick update from my podcast transcriptionist, who is following along with the November Writing Challenge. We will see how that is working out for her so far. So first, why write an outline? I think the main value of writing an outline, especially for beginning writers, is that it forces you to think about the story in advance and forces you to work out any potential plot holes in advance, since it's very easy to find yourself writing yourself into a corner and not knowing how to proceed. Obviously, writing an outline is not for everyone, and some writers say it impairs their creativity and they can't write with an outline. And that's fine, if you know that about yourself. But if you're just starting out, you may not be experienced enough to realize that about your writing style, and you may in fact benefit quite a bit from having written an outline in advance. So with that in mind, what does an outline need? First thing you need to understand is the shape of the story. Who is the protagonist? What is the protagonist’s goal? What is the conflict, and what will the protagonist have to do to resolve that conflict? You can, if you want, put in the number of chapters in the outline. The way I usually do it is I write a 2,000 word or so synopsis of the book, and then I chop it up into chapters, though lately my final drafts don't have the same number of chapters as the outline because as I go through, I'll think of things to improve or scenes to move around and so forth. You may find a similar experience when writing from an outline yourself. It is nothing to worry about and can happen. It's also important to keep in mind that the conflict does need to escalate, and you do need to have a strong central conflict. So what do I mean by having a protagonist with the conflict that escalates and he takes action to it? This is something I actually have talked about in this podcast quite a bit, and in my nonfiction book Storytelling: How to Write a Novel. I have something I (rather tongue in cheek) call the five iron laws of storytelling, where if you want to write a good, compelling story, you need to have these five rules you should follow. Now, this is not, you know, true at all times in all places. But I do think you will probably get good results by following these five rules. Now what are these five rules, the five iron laws of storytelling? #1: The protagonist must have a problem that results in a conflict. #2: The protagonist’s problem and conflict must be consequential and have real stakes. #3 The protagonist must take action and struggle to resolve his or her conflict and problem. #4 The protagonist must face challenges and setbacks, and his or her efforts to resolve the problem may even backfire. #5, The ending must absolutely provide satisfactory emotional resolution to the problems raised in the story. That might be the most important one of all. Where outlining can help you with this is if you see the story laid out in an outline as in a chart in something like Plottr or something like that, you can look it over and see- do I have a protagonist who has a interesting problem? Is the problem consequential for the protagonist? Is the protagonist trying to resolve the conflict? Is the protagonist experiencing setbacks and challenges, and perhaps even unintended consequences as he or she tries to resolve the problem? And finally, is the resolution emotionally satisfying? It doesn't have to be a happy ending. It doesn't have to be a totally sad ending. It can be a bittersweet ending. But whatever the ending, it has to resolve the conflict of the story in an emotionally satisfactory manner. Anything else can be absolutely disastrous. So if you are writing an outline for your novel or story, and you follow these five iron laws of storytelling, then I think you are on good track to have a good, well written story with a conflict and a protagonist that readers will find enjoyable and interesting. It is important to have a good conflict in the story. You can jump back to Episode 222 of the podcast, in which we talked about story conflicts, which offered much valuable advice on introducing conflicts. Some of the key points of that episode are there are many different types of conflict the story can have. The word conflict by its very nature seems to pull up images of like, violent conflict. That's often the word we use to describe conflict, to describe violence as conflict, but it doesn't have to be a violent conflict at all. It can be, you know, certain types of legal thrillers. There's no violence at all. It can be, you know, conflict between a man and a woman who are romantically attracted to each other but are unable to resolve these feelings, which can, you know, that kind of conflict drives a significant portion of the entire publishing industry. Ideally, a story should have multiple conflicts and even different types of conflict. There are numerous ways to add conflict into a story. They include putting characters into an unfamiliar environment, forcing your characters into making decisions, and having different characters face the same conflict in different ways. For more details on that, you can check out Episode 222 of this podcast. For tips and tricks on introducing more conflicts into your novel, I would recommend Episode 110 of this podcast, Three Techniques for Starting Your Novel and Introducing Conflict. In Episode 110, I said that there are lots of fun and exciting ways to introduce the conflict. I say fun and exciting because this is often where the story starts getting quite energetic. In a fantasy novel, it might be when the hero’s village is attacked by orcs. In a mystery story, it's when someone stumbles across a dead body. In a thriller novel, perhaps the hero finds that a sinister terror plot is already well underway. The conflict can also be introduced more sedately. In an action-themed book, it is easy to introduce the conflict via sudden violence, the attack of orcs, or a surprise murder. Other kinds of stories may not involve so much physical danger. The central conflict of most romance novels, for example, is whether or not in the heroine and the love interest will get together and whether or not they can overcome the assorted obstacles preventing them from having a relationship. Romance novels might introduce conflict by having the love interest antagonize the heroine in some way, which is a common trope. Perhaps the love interest is a lawyer who represents the heroine's business rival, or the heroine is a local law enforcement official and the love interest is an FBI agent who threatens to take over her case. Regardless of how the conflict is introduced, the most important part of the conflict is that it must compel the protagonist to take action. If the conflict or the antagonist isn't serious enough to force the protagonist to act, then nothing happens and you don't have a story, so that perhaps is the main take away from conflict. The conflict has to be emotionally significant for the protagonist, and the protagonist has to take action to resolve it, even if the action makes things worse or causes setbacks. If you have a passive protagonist, that will very quickly turn off quite a few readers. So to sum up, the advantage of outlining is that it lets you work through potential problems in advance, and what you want in the outline is a protagonist with an emotionally relatable problem, a protagonist who takes action to resolve the problem, and a resolution to the story that is emotionally satisfying in terms of the conflict being resolved. The five iron laws of storytelling are a good checklist to look over your outline and make sure that you have a good, solid story structure. You can use them in fact as a checklist to see whether you think your outline is going to work and whether or not you can write a, you know, satisfying novel off it. So now we come to the update from my transcriptionist. As I mentioned, she was doing our November Writing Challenge and as part of our series of shows on that, she will send in weekly updates with her progress. Here is how she did this past week. “My goal for the challenge is 300 words a day. I picked a number that felt really low to help with the problem I have of not starting something when the goal is too undefined or too big. I also tend to do something intensely or not at all, with most days tending to the latter when in real life or obstacles get in the way. 300 words a day felt like something I could commit to without any worry, provided nothing really major comes up this month. So far I'm averaging 484 words per day and it’s taking me an average of 15 minutes per day. I picked a specific chapter from my outline that was not the introduction I've been stuck on and a specific time of day to write. Doing both has made the process easier. In that vein, my questions for you are: do you write chapters or any pieces of the story out of order, or do you stick to the outline order when writing? Do you recommend people try writing out of order if they feel stuck?” So those are both interesting questions. For the first one, do you write chapters or any pieces of the story out of order, or do you stick to outline order when writing? I almost always write in the order of my outline. What changes is that when editing, I will very often split chapters up and move them around because I tend to write long chapters. In the editing for Cloak of Illusion so far, one chapter was like 10,000 words and another was 7,000 words, both of which are too long to be chapters. So the 10,000 word chapter got split up into three smaller ones and rearranged. The 7,000 word one got split into two chapters and moved around. So to give a shorter answer to that question, the answer would be no. When writing I tend to stick to the outline, but during editing I do tend to move things around as I think works best for the story. But editing is a different topic entirely. The second question: do you recommend people try writing it out of order if they feel stuck? You can try that. The pros are if you feel stuck on a particular scene, you can go ahead and write a different scene and then come back to that scene later. Or maybe it will turn out that the reason you're stuck is because the story didn't need the scene. You know, I do know some people who do write from an outline, but then tend to write out of order. The downside of that is if you're not careful, you can get your story’s internal continuity mixed up a bit, but then that is another problem to fix in editing once the rough draft is finished, since right now we're at the stage where you get all the words down on the page or the word processor and then worry about fixing them later. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and that you are finding our November Writing Challenge series to be useful as well. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. 00:15:45 Audio excerpt from Cloak of Spears, as narrated by Hollis McCarthy  

In this week's episode we take a look at a November Writing Challenge and offer tips for new writers to develop a sustainable writing habit.

In this week's episode, we take a look at the best methods for finding ad graphics for book advertising. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 224 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 25th, 2024 and today we are discussing the best methods for sourcing images for ad graphics. We'll also have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. Let's go right to that. I am currently 61,000 words into Cloak of Illusion and am hoping to have that out before the end of November, since 61,000 words puts me about halfway through the rough draft, I think. I'm also 14,000 words into Orc Hoard, which will be the 4th Rivah book, and if all goes well, the final book I publish in 2024. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Shield of Conquest. That will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills, and it's also underway for Cloak of Spears and Ghost in the Tombs, which will be narrated by Hollis McCarthy. I think probably Cloak of Spears will come out first, but we will see how things play out for the rest of the month. So that's it. That is the update on my current writing project. Next month and next week, I want to do a new podcast series for the month of November that I’m going to call Moeller Writing Tips Month as sort of a gentler alternative to National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo) for a couple of reasons. The NaNoWriMo organization has had a number of problems over the years, especially recently, so I don't feel comfortable endorsing it anymore. I've also begun to wonder if NaNoWriMo is a bit like a shock diet. If you talk to doctors and other medical experts about weight loss, they say the best way is always to make small, sustainable changes that you can keep up with over time. It's better to lose like a pound a month and keep it off than it is to lose like, 5 or 10 pounds a month in a shock crash diet only to gain it all back once you go back to your own old habits because that kind of a weighty yoyoing is very hard on the body. I wonder if National Novel Writing Month, where you write 50,000 words in a month is like that for a lot of people; it’s sort of a crash diet. For someone like me, Ghost in the Tombs was my 156th novel. I typically can write a rough draft or novel in a month if I don't have anything else come up. So for me, that's normal, but for most people who don't have that kind of experience, I wonder if National Novel Writing Month would be the sort of writing equivalent of those crash diets that might leave you worse off than you were to begin with. So with that in mind, next month I'll start a podcast series discussing gentler ways one can ease into the regular habit of writing. More discussion on that topic next week and next month.   00:02:45 Main Topic: Sourcing Ad Graphics Now onto our main topic for the week, sourcing ad graphics. Before we get into that, a disclaimer. I am not a lawyer and none of what I'm about to say is actual legal advice. You obtain actual legal advice by hiring a lawyer who is qualified to practice in your jurisdiction. It is very important (to continue the disclaimer) to be on firm footing with the copyright of your ad image. If you don't own the image or the right license to use it, you're infringing on someone's copyright and they can respond either legally or through the places where your book is sold. This is less of a problem with ad images than is with book covers, but it still can happen. With that in mind, some of the free stock images sites have restrictions on commercial use or modification of the images. It's a good idea to read the licenses carefully. Some of these sites have often not gotten the appropriate clearances from the models in the pictures, so be cautious of using images with identifiable faces from those types of sites. If you're not familiar with the legal term, a model release is when a model or someone in a stock photograph appears in the stock photograph. They sign a release that gives the rights for their likeness to be used for the commercial image and not all free stock image sites do that. Good stock image sites like Shutterstock or iStock Photo or Dreamstime will clearly state on the image page whether or not a model release has been included. If a model release has not been included, you can't use it for commercial purposes, and though it is not terribly likely, you can open yourself up to legal liability that way. In that vein, be also cautious about Creative Commons sites, since copyrighted work frequently ends up on those sites. This is also true of the free stock image sites, where sometimes people will pirate images and post them there. Also, many Creative Commons photos are restricted from commercial use, modification, and/or the artists require attribution. Tread carefully and make sure you understand the conditions of using images with any of the various Creative Commons licenses. And before we get into further details, it's also important to understand the difference between creating book covers and creating ad images. The number one thing to remember about ad images is that ads are ephemeral, and they should change often because you often get diminishing returns for using the same ad graphics. Ads can be tailored for different audiences. Ads can be tailored for different platforms. In fact, you kind of have to tailor ads for different platforms because, for example, Bookbub and Facebook, the two ad platforms where indie authors are most likely to use ad graphics, have very different requirements for images. People are more tolerant of AI images in ads than in book covers, but AI is very polarizing, and if you use an ad image that is easily and immediately identifiable as AI, you will probably get some pushback for that. So with all that in mind, let's first look at some free places to get images for ads and then some paid options. The number one free option is public domain images from the US government pages. It is the law of the land in the United States that images produced by the US government or federal employees in the course of their duties (with some exceptions) are in the public domain. Some of these are great as using as backgrounds or components of an ad. For example, are you a sci-fi author in need of a planet you can put behind a spaceship? You're in luck; NASA has plenty of those images and you can find them quite easily. However, sometimes U.S. government websites use stock images or government created images that have some types of restrictions. For example, NASA forbids use of images of current astronauts for commercial purposes for any reason and has some pretty strong feelings about people using their images to create NFTs. You do not want to go through life getting sued by the federal government, so you probably want to avoid that. Sources that are easiest to be confident in, images that are explicitly included in public domain collections on U.S. government websites such as the Library of Congress free to use and reuse sets website or NASA's Images Hub (this page also includes some guidance on NASA specific researchers) and the National Gallery of Art Open Access Images page. All of these have ample supplies of images that are in the public domain, and you can look over them for images you can use for ads or components of ads. Another free option is other public domain collections. Some libraries and some museums have created public domain image collections or let you filter for public domain images on their site. Very large institutions tend to be cautious about using this type of copyright language and their staff generally have training on what is or is not public domain. The Art Institute of Chicago has a public domain filter on their search page and The Met museum in New York has an Open Access filter in their search page where you can look for images in the public domain. The third free option and one that I have done myself a lot is take your own photos and use your own photographs for backgrounds components in an ad, etcetera. Since you're the creator, you hold the copyright. I have done this in a lot of the books I have published in 2024 and the ad images I created in 2024. A fair bit of them have my own photos because I took some trips to some fairly scenic parts of the country this year. I was fortunate enough to be able to do that, so while I was there, I took lots of pictures with an eye towards using them in ad images and book covers because as you get more practice with graphic design, your projects tend to have more layers to them. You often come across things and think well, this wouldn't be a good image by itself but would be a great background or great foreground and I can use pieces of it to assemble a better picture. So I've done that a fair bit and since I own the rights to all the photographs, I am one hundred percent in the clear. Now let's move on to a few free or low-cost options and one that might be a bit controversial. In fact, it is controversial: AI generated images. The pros of this are that the US government has consistently ruled so far (this might change after the election, but it might not) is that AI images cannot be copyrighted in any capacity. This means you can quickly make eye-catching art that matches your specifications instead of hunting for stock art. The con is that many people will assume that the book is AI generated if they see an AI generated ad image and many people strongly dislike AI art in general, or object to AI art on principle, viewing it as a form of theft. For myself, I've decided that my personal ethical line on this (barring changes in circumstances or laws) is that I will not sell anything that was created by AI. If I am selling anything or giving away a free ebook, it is 100% written by me and the cover was either made by me or someone I hired to do it. And in the audio books I sell, they are 100% narrated by an actual human being. That said, I have, I'd say, from time to time, used AI for ad images for the reasons we've discussed. Ads are ephemeral and phased out pretty quickly, but I have found that it's generally unwise to use an unmodified AI image, because it has such a very clear and obvious AI look to it. It's a good idea if you are going to use an AI image for an ad to run it through Photoshop a bit and change the look and maybe eliminate some of the more obvious AI tells such as extra fingers or misshapen eyes, that kind of thing. So if you are comfortable using AI, it can be a good source of ad images with some work, but otherwise, if you're not comfortable with it and you think your audience would be offended by it, it's probably best to avoid it. So those are the free/slightly free options, and now it's time to move on to the official paid options. The first paid option we're going to discuss is Shutterstock. You pay by image. It's simpler than the credit systems that Dreamstime uses, and the interface is easy to use. I have not generally used Shutterstock all that much because it tends to be a bit more expensive than the other options. However, you can find some very high-quality photos there if you are patient enough to look. The second paid option we're going to look at is Dreamstime. You can either pay images a la carte with credits you buy or by subscription. I have used Dreamstime quite a bit and quite a few of my covers have images I have licensed from Dreamtime. I'd say the pros of Dreamstime is that it has a very large and very strong library. The con (and this is true of stock photo sites in general) is that it's very easy to find an image that is like 95% perfect, but that 5% would be a lot of work to fix in Photoshop or just isn’t right for some reason. Additionally, I don't agree with this decision on Dreamstime where they’ve begun including a lot of AI generated stuff on their page. It's clearly labeled as AI and you can use filters in the search engine to filter out the AI stuff, but if you're looking for stuff for covers because like I've said before, my personal ethical line (barring changes in law) is that I won't sell anything that was made by AI. If I'm looking for elements for a cover, it's really annoying to have to double check to make sure that the image was not AI generated, which is another good reason to use your own photos because you can then be certain it wasn't AI generated. The final paid option that many authors and many professional graphic designers use is Adobe Stock. Adobe Stock is probably the gold standard for stock photos. It has a large library with a range of image types and very clear license terms. The flip side is it's expensive. You can often include it with an Adobe subscription (which is in itself quite expensive) and then you get a limited number of image credits every month and that can be quickly expensive. If you have an Adobe subscription, you can also use Adobe's Firefly AI image generating service. It's not quite as powerful as Midjourney or some of the other ones available, but that said, it is trained only on stuff that Adobe technically has the legal rights to do. In my experiments with it, I found that Adobe Firefly’s AI generator is not good at generating scenes. It is good at generating components of scenes, like you could tell it to generate a forest or a beach or a mountain, or a castle or something, and that'd be pretty good. Then you can modify it and add in other elements later, but it's not so good at generating a finished scenes the way that something like Midjourney would be. Now that we've looked at sources for stock images, let's look at a couple of paid sites that can help you use the ad images you have found. Obviously, you can work on them in Photoshop or GIMP or Affinity Photo editor, but those are fairly complicated programs that can take quite a bit of effort to learn. There are websites that now specialize in helping you to create specific ad graphics. I'd say the most valuable one for indie authors is Book Brush. It is a specialized image editing website designed for indie authors. It lets you make things like 3D covers of your books or audiobooks to include as part of an ad, and it also has a variety of ad templates, where you will have ad templates that are the right size and resolution for the various ad platforms, and then you can drop in the elements you need to make an appropriate ad graphic. So if you’re an indie author who just wants to make ad graphics or maybe even some basic covers, Book Brush would be well worth your time to investigate, in my opinion. A second option would be Canva Pro. Amazon has explicitly said in their guidelines they don't like people using it for book covers, but ads are a different game and Canva is reliable for this purpose. It's good for beginners and those starting out. It's quick and easy to reuse. The downside is that since Canva is so popular, people have gotten used to the Canva look and you get bored with seeing those, especially if you've only minimally modified a template, but with some creativity, you can make an ad graphic that looks fairly nice. So that is it for this week. I hope you will find that helpful for finding sources for your ad graphics. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we consider how the Nintendo Switch does the simple things well, and examine how writers can likewise do the simple things well to write excellent books. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 223 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 18th, 2024 and today we are discussing five lessons for writers from the Nintendo Switch, of all things. Don't worry, the analogy will make sense later in the show. Before we get into that, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report that Ghost in the Tombs is completely done and is currently publishing on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. The links are already live on some of those stores. This episode should go out on the same day as my newsletter, so by the time this episode goes out, the book should be available at all ebook stores. If you are subscribed to my newsletter, you will also get a free ebook copy of the short story Ghost Tablet. So that is one of the many excellent reasons it is a good idea to subscribe to my newsletter. You can find the details how to do that on my website right at the top. My next main project now that Ghost in the Tombs is out will be Cloak of Illusion, the 12th Cloak Mage book. I am 31,000 words into that. I'm hoping to have that out before the end of November, if all goes well. After that, I am 11,000 words into Orc Hoard and hopefully that will be out in December, if all goes well. As I mentioned earlier, the audiobook of Shield of Darkness is out, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get that at Audible, Apple, Google Play, and all the usual audiobook stores. We are also working on Shield of Conquest right now, and that is being recorded as we speak. Hollis McCarthy is also recording Cloak of Spears and that should hopefully be out before the end of the year, if all goes well. This week, we're not doing Question of the Week because all my time was going to finishing Ghost in the Tombs, but we will be doing another Question of the Week next week, so watch for that on my website and social media. 00:01:54 Main Topic: 5 Lessons Writers Can Learn from the Switch Now let's go to our main topic for the week, five lessons that writers can learn from the Nintendo Switch. So what can writers learn from the Nintendo Switch? A common complaint I sometimes see among newer writers is that all the stories have been told already, and that there are no truly original stories. Why try writing a mystery novel? Haven't they all been told? Why try writing a romance novel? How many different ways are there for a woman to meet a man and fall in love? Why attempt to write an epic fantasy when there's already Lord of the Rings and Mistborn and Shannara? Haven't all the stories already been told? That is a fair question, but it misunderstands the nature of stories. It's as profound a misunderstanding as saying that just because you've eaten one cheeseburger in your life, there is no need to ever have another or saying that since Pizza Hut makes pizzas, there is no need for anyone else to ever open a pizza restaurant or even to sell frozen pizzas. To dispel this misapprehension, let us turn to the Nintendo Switch. It is not unfair to say that the Switch is one of the most popular game consoles in the world and is likely Nintendo’s second best-selling device of all time. The Switch is also significantly less powerful than its chief competitors, the various Xbox and PlayStation models offered by Microsoft and Sony. For that matter, the Switch has only received moderate updates in the seven years it has been on the market. Its internal components are basically those of a decent smartphone from 2017, yet despite that, the Switch has significantly outsold both the Xbox and the PlayStation over the last seven years. It was a remarkable reversal of fortune for Nintendo. The Switch's predecessor, the Wii U, did so badly that the CEO of Nintendo at the time took a 50% pay cut to help avoid layoffs. One thinks American CEOs could stand to learn from this example, but that's a different topic. So to go from that to the best-selling console of the last seven years is quite a swing of fate’s pendulum. So let us then ask the obvious question: why did the Switch do better than its competitors, especially when it was so relatively underpowered compared to them in terms of hardware? The answer is simple. The Switch did the basics, but it did the basics exceptionally well and doing the basic simple things exceptionally well is often much harder than people imagine. The Switch doesn't have a lot of the more advanced features from the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation ecosystems, but it doesn't really need them. The Switch is easily portable. It has a strong library of first-party titles. The loading speed isn't great, but it's adequate. It has Switch Online for all the old Nintendo classics. You can play it handheld or docked. It's popular enough that developers want to bring their games to the console whenever possible, including some that some that were very technically difficult, like Skyrim or The Witcher 3. All that sounds simple, but it's much harder to do than it sounds, and the basics done well are always a good thing, regardless of the field. In fact, that is traditionally part of Nintendo's design philosophy. Nintendo has a thing they call “withered technology” (another translation from the Japanese would be “lateral thinking with seasoned technology”), which means rather than trying to use cutting edge technology, they use tried and true older technology and think about developing unique experiences with it. In other words, they used well established basic technology to build the Switch (which wasn't exactly cutting edge even in 2017) and then just tried to use that established technology well. So how does this apply to storytelling and writing? This is, after all, a writing podcast and not a video game podcast (even if I do talk about video games a fair bit). The same approach taken to writing can work out quite well. Don't try to be excessively fancy or flashy. Focus on the simple things and do them as well as you can, and that will probably work out better than trying to be flashy or creative in a way that only ends up being off putting to the reader. So when it comes to writing fiction, what are the simple things that you can do well? What is the “lateral thinking with seasoned technology” you can employ with writing a novel? I think there are five lessons we can take here. #1: Understand the genre you are writing in and try to hit the appropriate tropes for that genre. A lot of writers when they are first starting out try to do too much, like a fantasy author tries to write a 12 volume epic fantasy series as their first writing attempt, or someone tries to fuse a bunch of genres and write a book that is simultaneously romance, a magical realism coming of age story, and somehow also a memoir. If you can't clearly state the genre of your book, you're going to have a hard time selling it. You might also have a hard time even finishing it. What do I mean by the appropriate tropes for the genre? That's just a way of saying that the storytelling conventions that readers come to expect in specific genres. For example, in a happily ever after clean romance, the readers will expect no explicit scenes and that the heroine and the love interest will end up together by the end of the book. Romance tends to have a lot of very specific subgenres, but the rule holds for many other genres as well. Epic fantasy readers typically expect a quest, some journeying, and a band of arguing adventures. Mystery readers expect a mystery with an actual solution at the end. Thriller readers look forward to some well executed fight scenes in a secret government building. Some writers dislike the idea of writing to genre tropes but think of it this way: If you go to an Italian restaurant and order spaghetti carbonara, but the waiter instead brings out a steak burrito bowl with a side of French toast sticks and maple syrup, you're going to be disappointed. Are there people who would enjoy a lunch of a burrito bowl and French toast sticks? Almost certainly, but you ordered spaghetti carbonara. The vast majority of people who go to an Italian restaurant are going to expect Italian food. The same thing applies to genres. If you buy a mystery book, you will expect a mystery novel and not an experimental cross genre thing. If you dislike writing to genre tropes, remember that readers only dislike tropes written to genre conventions if it's done badly, but if you do it well, they appreciate it and that could be one of the simple things that you focus on doing well. #2: A protagonist with relatable problems. Another important basic in genre fiction is the protagonist with problems that the reader can find compelling. There's an endless tedious discussion about whether or not the protagonist should be likable or not, and frankly, it often degenerates into the standard Internet discussion about gender politics, whether or not a female protagonist has to be likable when a male one does not. But in my opinion, that discussion completely misses the point. What makes a character relatable, or more accurately sympathetic to the reader, is the character experiencing a conflict or some sort of emotional pain that allows the reader to sympathize with them. Whether their character is likable is less important than sympathy. Let's take two examples from recent television, specifically Disney properties. The characters of Syril Karn and Dedra Meero from the Star Wars show Andor are unlikable but sympathetic characters, while Jennifer Walters from She Hulk is both unlikable and unsympathetic. The difference between them is instructive for writers. Syril Karn and Dedra Meero are both essentially unlikable villains. Karn is a wannabe mall cop with puffed up delusions of his own importance and Meero is working for the Empire’s sinister secret police as a mid-level officer. Yet Karn’s circumstances make him emotionally sympathetic. He is stuck in a dead-end job and living with his cruel mother. Meero is trying to do the best job she can in the secret police and is fighting against her obstinate and clueless colleagues within a cumbersome bureaucracy, something many office workers can sympathize with. Indeed, it's clever how the show sets her up as a strong woman making headway in the male dominated secret police, only to yank away the sympathy when she brutally tortures one of the show's protagonists. By contrast, Jennifer Walters is both unlikable and unsympathetic. She's a rich lawyer who has rich lawyer problems, which is generally not sympathetic to most people. Indeed, she strongly establishes herself as unlikable in the first episode when she lectures Bruce Banner (who in past movies tried to kill himself in despair, was hunted by the US government, held as an enslaved gladiator for two years, brutally beaten by Thanos, and fried his right arm with the Infinity Gauntlet) about how much harder her life has been than his, which is objectively not true. As we mentioned with Karn and Meero, it's very possible for unlikable characters to be sympathetic, but Jennifer Walters is so unsympathetic that the best episodes of She Hulk were the ones where she becomes the unsympathetic comedy protagonist like David Brent from the UK Office or Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers and she suffers the comedic results of her own bad decisions. What's really compelling is when you have a likeable character who has a sympathetic problem. As an added bonus, it's usually easier to write a likeable character with a sympathetic problem. Striking the balance between an unlikable character with a sympathetic problem is often a challenge for even experienced writers. But if the reader likes your protagonist and the protagonist’s problem inspires emotional sympathy in the reader, then that's half the battle. What is the other half of the battle lesson? #3: A strong conflict. I’ve said on the podcast many times before that conflict is central to storytelling. If you have a sympathetic protagonist who has a serious conflict, you've got yourself the potential for a strong book. Another way of saying conflict is “the problem the protagonist must solve, face, overcome.” If the protagonist doesn't have a problem, he or she might as well sit at home playing well, Nintendo Switch. Fortunately, it is easy to think of a suitable conflict for your story, because in Real Life, the potential causes of conflict are sadly infinite, and you can easily apply that to fiction. Like if you write epic fantasy, you could have the conflict be the quest to stop the Dark Lord, or if you write sci-fi, it could be defeating the invasion of the space bugs. Mysteries have a conflict built in for the genre. Solving the crime, finding a missing person, etc. Thrillers tend to be all about violent conflict, but conflicts don't have to be violent or even high stakes to be emotionally significant. It could be a conflict with a rival at work, or not even involve a person at all, like trying to survive the aftermath of a natural disaster. It boils down to that the protagonist must have a conflict and the protagonist must take some sort of action to resolve that conflict. Stories where this doesn't happen tend to become boring quite quickly. #4: A satisfactory ending. The ending is really, really important. You know how a joke isn't funny if it doesn't have a good punchline? A story with a bad ending, unfortunately, almost always turns out to be a bad story that leaves an unpleasant taste in a reader's mouth. What makes for a good ending? The story's central conflict has to be resolved in a satisfactory way, in a way that generates emotional catharsis. In fantasy, the quest needs to be achieved. In science fiction, the space bugs need to be defeated. In mystery, the killer has to be caught or the mystery resolved in a satisfactory way. In romance, the heroine needs to end up with her love interest. Bad endings are ones that don't resolve the conflict or resolve the conflict in a way that feels like cheating to the reader. This can include the protagonist solving the conflict through no effort or struggle or a Deus Ex Machina style ending where the conflict is solved simply because the author wants to hurry up and finish the book. Granted, this doesn't mean that a good ending is a happy one. The Lord of the Rings had a famously bittersweet ending. Sauron is defeated and the One Ring destroyed, but the Elves leave Middle Earth forever, and Frodo is too wounded to return to his homeland, instead choosing to accompany the Elves into the West. There are many other examples. The mystery could have the detective solving the crime, but at the cost of his career and his marriage. The protagonist of a military science fiction story could win the battle but be the only surviving member of his squad. The ending must resolve the conflict in an emotionally satisfying manner that doesn't leave the reader feeling cheated. #5: The fifth simple thing you can do: write clear prose. Writing clear prose that unambiguously conveys your meaning is one of the vital basics for storytelling, and this is harder than it seems. An anecdote from this topic about this topic: back in 2023, Wired magazine ran a hit piece on fantasy author Brandon Sanderson about his Kickstarter. One of the criticisms in the article was that Sanderson's books were written at a sixth-grade level, which is debatable, but that's not the point. The point is the writer of the article and many other people have the profound misapprehension that simple, clearly written prose is somehow easier to write than more dense or complex prose. It's really not, and this fact is easily proven. Think about how many people you know in real life who struggle to communicate through written communications such as emails or text messages. Think how many times you've gotten an e-mail from a manager or client only to have no idea what the person in question is trying to ask for, or even say. Or how much family drama can be created by a badly written text message or social media post that is easily misunderstood. In all of these examples, people failed to communicate effectively through written prose and would have benefited from the ability to write simple, clear, not easily misunderstood prose. Therefore, developing the ability to write clear, transparent prose that precisely conveys your meaning is a useful skill for anyone, not just fiction writers. It just happens to be especially useful for writers of fiction. When writing fiction, it is probably best to remain as clear and concise as possible. So in conclusion, these are the five simple things you can do well to have a good book: #1: Understand the genre #2: Have a protagonist with a sympathetic problem #3: A strong conflict #4: A satisfactory ending #5: As clear of prose as possible All relatively simple things, but if you do them well, I think you are well on the way to writing a good 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 of the podcast on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at four different types of story conflict, and explore three different ways to add them to your stories. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 222 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October the 11th, 2024 and today we are discussing four kinds of story conflict and three ways you can bring conflict into your books. Before we get into that, we will have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects and then do Question of the Week. The good news is that I am done with the first pass of editing on Ghost in the Tombs and I'm ready to start on the second. This is Episode 222 and if all goes well, I think Ghost in the Tombs will be out shortly around the time Episode 223 comes out. So second-half of October, we're on track for that. I am 28,000 words into Cloak of Illusion and that will be my main project once Ghost in the Tombs is published. I'm also 8,000 words into Orc Hoard, the fourth Rivah book, and that'll be the main project once the Cloak of Illusion is done. In audiobook news, Shield of Darkness is now out. You can get on Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, Payhip, and all the other major audiobook stores. That is excellently narrated by Brad Wills. Recording is underway for Cloak of Spears and that should hopefully be out before the end of the year. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:01:22 Question of the Week Let's move on to the Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's question: if you listen to audiobooks, where do you listen to them? While cooking or driving, commuting, or perhaps walking? The inspiration for this question was that I was looking at some old sales spreadsheets from 2020 (that was a fun year, wasn't it?) and I was sure the start of COVID was going to wipe out the audiobook market because a lot of commuting was temporarily going away. Except this turned out not to be the case, and audiobook sales overall actually went up during COVID. So clearly I was wrong about how most audiobook listening took place while commuting. We had a few answers to this question. David said: Mostly while I'm home prepping and eating a meal, sometimes I'm in my vehicle enjoying a coffee while I drive somewhere. Sometimes when I go out to eat by myself, I'll listen on headphones. So it’s when my hands are otherwise busy and it beats listening to music or TV. JLH says: I pretty much only listen to audiobooks while driving. While home, I prefer to read. I'll listen to music when I'm at the gym. Tom says: Anywhere and everywhere. Driving car and tractor, at work, when walking (single earpiece only), and when at the gym. MW says: Usually while driving. I prefer reading and drawing to listening, but those aren't an option when driving my car, so a podcast is usually it. For myself, these days I usually listen to audiobooks when making long road trips by myself where I don't need the GPS to navigate. That's because if I'm going someplace I've never been before and need the GPS to navigate, it is highly distracting to have the audiobook and the GPS cutting back and forth between each other while you’re trying to figure out where you're going. That said, long drives to places where I know I'm going happen less than it did, so I generally listen to audiobooks less than I than I did before COVID. That said, in 2023 through 2024 I listened to the new audiobooks Andy Serkis recorded for the Lord of the Rings and was blown away by how good they were. Definitely recommended. So that is Question of the Week. 00:03:21 Main Topic of the Week: Story Conflicts So now on to this week's main topic: four types of story conflict and three ways you can add those conflicts to your story. So as we all know and as I've mentioned many times before on this podcast and on my blog, a story is nothing without conflict. Conflict is what drives the story. There's a story that when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien probably would have wound up with a 1200 page description of a Hobbit dinner party if C.S. Lewis hadn’t kind of gently urged him to add more conflict and have things happen to the story. I'm not entirely sure if that's true or not, but the point is quite valid that if you want to have an interesting story, you need a conflict. You need the characters to act and respond to that conflict, and that will help drive your story. Most stories also have more than one type of conflict. You can have internal conflict and external conflict and different kinds of internal versus external conflicts. For example, my novel Half-Elven Thief contains three of the four types of conflict we will discuss. I will mention those when I get to them. So let's look at four classic types of story conflict. #1: Person versus internal conflicts. What does that mean? That means the protagonist is facing challenges that test their core values and beliefs and must face their character flaws in order to move forward. There are numerous different types: midlife crisis, a character who has to overcome self-doubt, or a character who is confronted with a strong temptation or an otherwise moral test. There are numerous good examples from fiction. A relatively recent example would be the movie Inside Out, which shows a child trying to handle major changes in her life. She tries to face them by shutting out Sadness in favor of Joy, but finds that accepting all of her emotions is actually what's healthy and the internal conflict in that movie is the character in question learning to accept all of her emotions rather than trying to suppress sadness, and you know, live with sort of false joy. Another very classic example would be Lord of the Rings, where several different characters have internal conflicts. Perhaps the biggest one, of course, is Frodo trying to resist the power of the ring throughout the trilogy. Another big one that decides, of course, the book is at the end when Sam really, really wants to kill Gollum. As the narration in the text suggests, killing Gollum is probably the smartest thing he could do in that moment, but he can't within himself bring himself to strike Gollum. So he lets him go, which turns out of course to be very decisive to the plot. We mentioned before that Half-Elven Thief contains three of the four conflicts types below. Half-Elven Thief does have an internal conflict for Rivah where she has to balance her desire for financial stability and security with her conscience, because, though she's a thief, there are many more ruthless and immoral ways she can make money. She thinks about this throughout the book and the sequels, but never can quite bring herself to do that. The second major type of conflict is person versus others. And what it is a person's goals are being thwarted by another person. This is easily the most common kind of conflict, because in many ways it's the easiest to write. You can have anything ranging from a superhero fighting a super villain, you know, Iron Man versus Thanos. Most of us in our lives aren’t going to hopefully experience conflict on that scale, but that is essentially person versus others in the form of Ironman versus Thanos. It could be not such a severe or violent conflict but a rivalry between, say, two sales reps or two City Council people where they will never come to blows, but they're both competing for the same goals or trying to promote harmony or trying to get someone to collaborate. Examples are numerous. Sherlock Holmes versus Professor Moriarty. Conan the Barbarian versus Thulsa Doom. Batman and The Joker and many other range of potential conflicts ranging from like we said before, super villains fighting each other to smaller and more intimate conflicts where two people are competing for the same goal in a way that won't result in, you know, violence or supervillainy, but is then nonetheless emotionally significant for both of them. And once again, we can use an example from Half-Elven Thief here and in Half-Elven Thief, Rivah's main adversary in the book is Marandis, who is the sort of official of the thieves’ guild that she reports to who hates her and wants to find any excuse to sell her into slavery. She's managed to avoid that so far. So that is another example from Half-Elven Thief of person versus others. #3: The third common type of conflict is person versus environment. And what does that mean? It means the person is facing a conflict based on something that's happening in the environment. Types can include tornadoes, floods, hurricanes (which we are sadly seeing in real life right now), a pandemic, or getting stranded on desert island or a remote alien planet, that kind of thing. A famous example would be the 1995 movie Twister about surviving tornadoes. Twister is a little bit of a ridiculous movie, though I am looking forward to seeing the sequel Twisters, which I actually rented and will watch tonight. In my own books, I have not used conflict based on the environment too often, since I tend to prefer person versus others or person versus internal conflict. Probably the closest thing I have done would be some of the dungeon crawls, like in Frostborn: The Broken Mage where surviving a dungeon is a part of the plot, but in Ghost in the Tombs, there will be some person versus environment and what it will be we shall have to read and find out. #4: The fourth type of conflict is person versus supernatural and what that is, where the protagonist of the story must face a god or supernatural force of evil. Obviously, a fantasy book where someone fights an evil wizard is one of those. It also turns up in horror novels pretty frequently, where the protagonist is haunted by ghosts or haunted by vampires or werewolves, or Cthulhu or something like that. Examples are abundant. Maybe one of the oldest ones is The Odyssey, where Odysseus battles supernatural forces attempting to keep him from returning home. In Half-Elven Thief, once again we have a supernatural threat where Rivah is compelled to steal an item from a powerful wizard, and she has to face that wizard’s powers and find a way to survive them. So with four types of conflict, let's see if we take a look at three different ways to add those types of conflict to your stories. #1: Put your characters in an unfamiliar or hostile environment. For example in my books, in Frostborn, Calliande in Frostborn: The Gray Knight wakes up in a world far different from the one she has known and must act to protect herself and her original quest. There are many different ways you can do that. If you are writing a mystery novel, for example, you could have your protagonist be transferred to another police precinct where no one likes him or her. If you're writing science fiction, the options for hostile environments are abundant, considering that most of space is lethal to humans. There are other genre suitable ways you could do that. #2: Force your characters into making decisions, and if you really want conflict, have them start off by making the wrong ones. This can be a good way to do that, so long as you don't make your character out to be an idiot. People make bad decisions all the time for what they think are good reasons, and if you can convincingly convey that, that is a good source of conflict. An example from my own books in the Dragonskull series, Gareth faces conflict with his parents over his rather ill-considered romantic relationship with Lady Iseult Toraemus. Then he has further conflict when that ends very badly. #3: Have your characters face an external conflict in different ways, which then creates an additional conflict. When two different people face an external conflict, they may undergo a different internal conflict over the problem and decide to react to it in different ways that create additional conflict. For example, in Stealth and Spells Online: Creation in the back story, the protagonist Noah Carver finds out that the game he was working on, Sevenfold Sword Online, was being used for illegal activities. He wanted to blow the whistle on it, but his wife didn't want to lose her job over it, so she immediately divorced him. That led to a new external conflict between the two of them, since they both wanted to deal with the problem in different ways and more internal conflicts for Noah since of course, he is our protagonist. So those are four different types of conflict and three ways you can apply them to the story and hopefully you will find that helpful as you think about writing your own stories and books. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. I reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's special autumn episode, I share samples from four of my audiobooks. Each audiobook is the second book in its series! 1.) Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, narrated by Brad Wills. 2.) Ghost in the Flames, narrated by Hollis McCarthy. 3.) Wizard-Thief, narrated by Leanne Woodward. 4.) Cloak of Wolves, narrated by Hollis McCarthy. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 221 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October, the 2nd 2024 and today we are sharing a second Audiobook Sampler Platter. Back in June in Episode 204, I did not have time to record an episode that week so what I did was I made a quick update and then assembled the samples together of four of my audiobooks, and then patched that together as an episode. People seemed to like that. Once again four months later, I find myself without time to record a full-length clip. So this week, what I'm going to do is put together a second Audiobook Sampler Platter. This time will be 4 samples from the second audiobooks in some of my series, so we will have that coming up later in the show after I offer an update on my current writing projects right now. I’m pleased to report that the rough draft of Ghost in the Tombs is done at about 93,000 words. I have also written a companion short story called Ghost Tablet and my newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of Ghost Tablet when Ghost in the Tombs comes out. So now is a good time to sign up for my new release newsletter. If all goes well, Ghost in the Tombs should be out in the second half of October. I'm also 25,000 words into Cloak of Illusion, which will be the 12th Cloak Mage book and that should probably come out in November, if all goes well. I am 5,000 words into Orc Hoard, which will be the fourth Rivah book and I'm hoping to have that out in December In audiobook news, I'm pleased to report that after some processing delays, Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is finally available at all audiobook stores. It's excellently narrated by C.J. McAllister. You can get it at Audible, Amazon, Google Play, Apple, Chirp, Spotify, and all the other usual audiobook stores. Recording just started yesterday for Shield of Conquests. That will be excellently narrated by Brad Wills. Shield of Darkness, the audiobook of that is done and is currently working its way through processing. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects and now on to our audiobook samples. We shall have four audiobook samples this episode from the second book in four of my different series. The first sample will be Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, the second book of the Dragonskull series (as narrated by Brad Wills). The second audiobook sample will be Ghost in the Flames, the second book in the Ghost series, as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. The third sample will be Wizard Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series as narrated by Leanne Woodward. The final sample will be Cloak of Wolves, the second book in the Cloak Mage series, again narrated by Hollis McCarthy. So those will be coming up very shortly. Before we get to that, I'd just like to say thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and enjoyable. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week with hopefully a full-length episode. And until then, here are our four audiobook samples.

In this week's episode, we discuss eight tips for finishing your first rough draft. You can also get 25% off any STEALTH & SPELLS audiobook at my Payhip store with this coupon code: LEVELING The coupon code will last until October 8th, 2024. You can get the audiobooks here: https://payhip.com/JonathanMoeller/collection/sevenfold-sword-online-audiobooks TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 220 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September 26th, 2024, and today we're discussing eight tips for finishing your rough draft. We also have a Question of the Week and then close out the episode with a short preview of the audiobook of Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling, as excellently narrated by C.J. McAllister. First, let's have an update on my current writing projects. As of right now, I am 82,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs and if all goes well, I'm hoping to wrap up the rough draft for that next week. I am 24,000 words into Cloak of Illusion, and I'm hoping to have that out in November and I’m also 4,000 words into Orc Hoard, which I am hoping to have out in December, if all goes well, though obviously if anything goes wrong, we're probably going to slip by a month or so there. In audiobook news, the recording for Shield of Darkness (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is finished. That just has to work its way through processing and should be up on the various audiobook sites soon, and we're going to start on the recording for Shield of Conquest next week. The audiobook of Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is done. That's narrated by CJ McAllister and that's probably going to be a while before it turns up on Audible and the other sites because, as you might remember from previous episodes of the podcast, I changed the name of the series from Sevenfold Sword Online to Stealth and Spells Online and ACX does not like that, so it's going to take a bit for it to get through processing on ACX. In the interim, it is available on my Payhip store and as of today through October 8th you can get 25% off both Stealth and Spells Online audiobooks at my Payhip store with this coupon code: LEVELING and that is LEVELING. I will include that coupon code and a link to the Payhip store in the notes for this show. Remember that coupon code is valid through October 8th, 2024. So act now if you want to get a copy of Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling and listen to it before anyone else does. 00:02:10 Question of the Week Now on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: do you reread novels that you have previously read? Now, there are obviously numerous reasons to reread nonfiction- research, for example, or double checking on how to do a certain technical procedure. But there seems to be less of a reason to reread novels, so I opened up this question and people had a lot of thoughts on this. In all the times we've done Question of the Week, this is the most comments we've ever gotten. So rather than read them all, which would take something like 20 minutes, I'm going to read some of the more representative ones here. Our first comment is from Mary who says: yes, a lot. I have lost count of how many times I've read The Lord of the Rings. Joaquim says: Sure, I reread novels. When you announced Ghost Armor, I reread Ghost Exile and Ghost Night. Some things were different from my memory. Shane says: I reread books pretty often. I just got my brother into your books, starting with Frostborn, so we've been reading them at the same time and having daily calls to talk about the exploits of Ridmark and his friends. Surabhi says: when I was little, reading books other than those assigned by schools was an alien thing where I live, because books were expensive and people considered fiction a waste of time. My parents are more liberal, so I requested them to give me the Harry Potter series. I never knew another book for years, rereading Harry Potter twice a year. It was my escape, a little dose of magic and friendship in my lonely, backward society life. I've read Harry Potter like twelve times by now, and I rarely ever reread books except for occasionally going back to favorite scenes. It's been a while since I reread Harry Potter, so maybe I will reread it someday. It was what got me into reading and still has a special place in my heart. My next comment is from Michael, who says: yeah, I reread your books while I'm waiting for you to release a new one, which sometimes backfires when I'm only four books into Ghosts when you release the next one…what to do? And I reread Lord of The Rings and my other favorite fantasy novel every year, too. William says: when I was stuck at Club Med for almost week on a family vacation, I ended up reading the first five Gotrek and Felix novels every day (twice one particular uneventful day) since they were what I had thought to pack. Rereading is a lot more optional now thanks to digital publishing. Anyway, out of all your novels, I have reread Cloak Game, Silent Order, Cormac Rogan and Stealth and Spells Online: Creation. JL says: I frequently reread novels I've previously read. It's fun way to go back through a series once the first time glamor and immersion has worn off tiny bit and think about how I would have reacted in certain scenarios. MW says: Yes, I regularly reread old novels. I love new stuff, but I don't just abandon old friends. Shandy says: I constantly reread series. I've reread your Ridmark, Caina, and Nadia series a few times over. Wheel of Time is another one I reread every couple of years or so, and The Man of His Word series by Dave Duncan. Sometimes I want a familiar story and miss old friends. Pippa says: I do reread some of my favorites and some of them multiple times. Daggerspell, the “trilogy” that ended up being 16 books by Katherine Kerr, I’ve reread that at least 10 times over the last 30 years. I've reread Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit many more times than that. I love revisiting the stories again, both because it's comforting to read what I already know so well and also the enjoyment of experiencing new/different things in them as time and experience have changed me. I love your books too, but I'm not sure I'll be able to reread them all for a while yet as I’ve still not finished them all. Rob says: every time you release a new Ghost or Cloak novel, I start from the beginning and work through to the latest. Caroline says: I reread the Malloreon series and the Mithgar series and the Dragons of (mispronounced word). Darla says: I read my favorite books and sometimes find details missed the first time around. I reread Nadia’s and Caina’s books at least twice. Still great stuff. Randy says: yes, some stories and characters (Ridmark, Harry Dresden) are too good to read just once, and some authors (Tolkien, Heinlein, Rowling) are just fun to read. Becca says: I read a lot. My usually reading is often 40% new and 60% rereads. Some of my favorites I reread almost every year. Depending on costs, new books might go down or rereads go up. That is always a challenge because of tight economic times, I'm afraid. Gary says: I generally do not. I am not a fast reader, but I generally retain most of what I read, so rereading stories is usually dull. Bob says: very rarely. I'm usually too busy keeping up with series and reading new books. Barbara says: I reread my favorite books at least once a year. Asimov, Andrew Norton, Anne Bishop, Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, yours, and many others. Bonnie says: I reread your books all the time. Usually it's the last two before the newest comes out. I’ve gone through all Ridmark a couple of times. The Master Reading List comes in handy for where the short stories fit in. Same with Demonsouled. A couple of others I reread are K.F. Breene and C.J. Archer. Mary says: I reread Rosamund Pilcher’s short stories and novels. Michael says: I rarely reread novels unless I read them decades ago and don't remember much about the story. Tom says: I reread several series and could still pick up one and lose myself: Harry Potter, A Song of Fire and Ice, Fable Haven/Dragonwatch and of course, Frostborn. By the way, that is only rereads. I've listened to many series on Audible that I have already read. I actually do that myself because I usually listen to audiobooks while I'm driving and while I'm driving I’ll have an audiobook on, but only if it's something I've already read, because that way I don't have to concentrate too much on it, since while driving, obviously it's best that your attention is on the road. And finally, perhaps the most definitive comment comes from Rick, who says: yes and I'll read them more than two or three times if they're good. I'll often reread a few books back in the series when a new one comes out to refamiliarize with setting and characters. Sometimes I read the whole series again if it's still short. I reread series if I've gotten a few books behind, too. I've read Lord of Rings dozens of times since the first way back in fifth grade and it's interesting how one's perspectives can change over the decades. I don't mean anything drastic, just in viewing characters, motivations, deeds, etcetera, and having a greater understanding thereof. Good novels are like old friends I'm always happy to see. I'm a voracious reader and can burn through a book quickly while having a high rate of comprehension and recall. I can also watch movies I really like multiple times. For example, I've now seen the 1986 movie Highlander close to 100 times since I was 20. I'm 57 now. I've gotten through some hard times that are visiting the words and tales within the covers of my many-paged friends, same with favorite movies. For myself, I don't usually reread novels and I'm usually looking for something new to read. That said, this year I have had a hard time finding something new to read, so I reread a lot of novels from the 2000s/early 2010s that I liked but could recall little else about. I have to admit it was enjoyable to come back to something I previously liked with 20-ish years of additional experience. I could appreciate the nuances and allusions in a way that I couldn't before. I should also mention that when it comes to my own books, I reread them like all the time because of the simple fact of continuity checking, where very often during the writing process I need to pause, open up something a couple books back, and then Control+F until I find what I'm looking for and refresh my memory on what actually happened. So that was Question of the Week. Quite a good collection of comments this week. 00:09:12 Main Topic: 8 Tips for Finishing Your First Rough Draft Now let's move on to our main topic, eight tips for finishing your first rough draft. This is a major hurdle for many new writers and was the reason that things like National Novel Writing Month existed is to encourage people to finish their first draft because that is a major milestone and also for lack of a better term, a major mental hurdle to get over. Because if you've done it once, you can do it again. And finishing that first novel rough draft is getting over that major hurdle and proving to yourself and possibly to others, that you can do it, through proving it to yourself that you can do it probably most (indistinct word) of all. So with that in mind, I thought I would share eight tips that would hopefully help you finish that rough draft and pass that mental hurdle. Tip #1: schedule your writing time. All of us are very busy. Some of us are busier than others, but most people are busy. So for most people, if something isn't scheduled, it's not going to happen. Waiting until you feel like you have the energy or motivation to write means that it's going to be put off a lot. Put it on your calendar like it's an appointment. It doesn't have to be a lot of time, especially at first, but it does need to be consistent even if it's only 15 minutes a day. If you do 15 minutes of writing a day, that adds up over time. Most writers and most even well-known writers have day jobs and have to write either late in the evening or early in the morning to accommodate their work and family lives. Some people even use lunch breaks to write. I did that myself for quite some time. Back in the days when I worked IT support, I'd have an hour lunch break. And so for that hour lunch break I would wolf down my lunch quickly and then pound out as many words as I could on my laptop before it was time to go back to work. And if I did that every workday whenever possible, because sometimes other obligations to precedence but I did that whenever possible and that added up over time. It's not impossible. You don't have to be a full-time writer or have hours a day free in order to write. You just have to squeeze out a little at a time to get a little writing done. Just do it every day. Small efforts over long periods of time can add up to big results. Tip #2: start small. Most people do pretty well with making small changes gradually. You can see a book like Atomic Habits by James Clear for more detail on how to make small goals effectively. Writing for 10 minutes a day is better than waiting for the perfect time to write or waiting to feel ready for some big challenge like National Novel Writing Month (which might be going away because of all the scandals for the organization anyway). Starting with a small daily or weekly block of time gets you into the habit of writing and makes the process easier. Another anecdote might illustrate that. I had my yearly doctor's checkup about a week ago, and the doctor was very happy with me because I was 9 lbs. lighter than I was that time last year. We talked a bit about that and she said that when it comes to making dietary changes, making small, sustainable changes you can actually do is better over the long term than going down some sort of crash diet or exercise program where you lose like 10 or 15 lbs. quickly in a couple of months, but then you can't sustain what you're doing, you revert back to old habits, and then all the weight comes back. That's true of writing as well, where it's better to do small changes consistently over time that add up rather than trying to do some sort of crazy crash program to get results quickly. Tip #3: start with a plan or an outline. Many people claim they can't write using an outline. However, that's the sort of knowledge that, in my opinion, comes with experience, where after you've written a bunch of books and you realize you work better without an outline, that's one thing, but if you're just starting out and you find that you're stuck, it might be a good idea to at least try writing with an outline and see what happens. I do think many people who are just starting out would benefit from at least a loose plan of the main characters, their motivations, conflicts that will happen, and major plot events. You shouldn't get too in the weeds with it. That can be a form of procrastination, like we'll talk about later in the episode, but having at least a rough plan sketched out makes it easier. And it's also a good idea not to think of your book as a single huge item, but as 25 to 30 pieces or chapters. One 3,000 word chapter feels easier to manage than a 75-100,000-word novel. Having at least a rough outline or plan sketched out makes it easier to tackle individual chapters and mark your progress and feel a sense of accomplishment. Outlines make it a lot easier to work when you feel uninspired or stuck. I've often used the metaphor that writing novels is like driving from New York to Los Angeles, which is a very long drive across the entire North American continent, and outlining is like charting out the route you will take before you make the drive. Now you could set out from New York with like no map and just the idea that you're going to gradually work your way west and south until you get to Los Angeles, but you could easily get lost along the way and have to backtrack a lot and make the trip a lot longer and more complicated than it needs to be. With a road map and a trip plotted out in advance, you'll get there much more efficiently. If you get to say, Wyoming and realize that there's road construction or a better route you can take, you can plan around that, which is something an outline gives you when you're writing a book; you have an idea of where you're going, and if you get there and you have a better idea, you can do that, but you have an overall guide to where you're going. Tip #4: don't edit as you go. This is a mistake that many writers make where they will write the first chapter and constantly be rewriting it, or maybe get like the first third of their novel down and are constantly rewriting it and trying to perfect it before they continue onward. Remember, perfect is the enemy of the possible. Write down some notes for future edits if you think of something major that will need revision, but keep going instead of stopping to edit or revise. Often when I'm writing and I come across something factual I want to check later, like you know, the number of miles between, say, Cheyenne, WY and Milwaukee, WI, I'll just write down “look it up later” and then when I get to the editing part of the process, I will look it up and then put it in rather than stop writing to go on Google Maps and look up the distance between Wyoming and Wisconsin. Stopping to research while you write as well is often just as tricky as editing because you get caught in a Wikipedia spiral and waste your time. Another good idea is don't let someone read your book until the draft is done. Having someone read like your first chapter to see how it's doing might seem smart and productive, but it can easily make your self-criticism worse and cause you to doubt yourself. You need a near delusional amount of self-confidence in your ability to complete a first draft and most people are not going to be able to help you with that and can hinder that, which is why I've noticed that very often people who successfully finish their first draft or do something like to return to a previous example, lose weight, when they do so do it in secret, they like start working out and don't tell anyone they start eating less and don't tell anyone or are writing over their lunch hour and don't tell anyone. And then it's only when they have noticeable results that they talk to people about the topic. Tip #5: manage or suppress distractions. This reminds me of a very amusing tweet I saw a couple days ago where someone was arguing that console gaming was better than PC gaming because on console gaming you don't have the constant distraction of social media notifications, emails, or YouTube videos to watch, which made me wonder how bad this person's ability to concentrate was because he couldn't even concentrate on a leisure activity like gaming without getting distracted by emails and tweets and so forth, which makes me wonder what his concentration is like when he's trying to get actual productive work done. However, that is a good point. When you are writing it is a good idea to avoid digital distractions. If this is a challenge for you, there are browser extensions and apps to limit your screen time to just a few designated websites and apps like your word processor. Most phones also have settings where you can silence notifications for a set period of time and limit incoming calls to just your contact list or a designated set of people from your contacts. Digital distractions can be a problem. Space distractions are a potential problem as well in your writing space. If you are writing in the kitchen or living room or the dining room, you may get distracted by other family members or roommates, if you don't live alone. Find a place where you can go without being interrupted and often headphones can be very helpful with that as well as music. Some people claim they need to physically get away from where they live to focus without interruptions. Libraries and coffee shops are great places to do that. One may be preferable over the other, depending of course upon your personal finances and the state of the coffee shops and/or libraries in your local community. Tip #6: adjust your expectations. You shouldn't put too much mental weight on what your first draft is like when it's done. It doesn't need to be a masterpiece. It doesn't need even to be good as a first draft. It just needs to get done. There will be plenty of time to edit, revise, and refine later. Silence your inner critic and just put down the words on the page. You know, write it down on a Post-it note and stick it to your monitor if you need the reminder, but just get the words on the page. Author Shannon Hale has a quote about the first draft that many have found helpful. She said “I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoving sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” This reminds me a bit of a time I moved from an apartment on the ground floor to a third floor apartment in a building with no elevator. As you can imagine, I had a lot of books and carrying something like 20 or 30 boxes of books up three flights of stairs to my new apartment was a challenging amount of work (and a good workout, I have to add), but once the books were in the upstairs apartment, the hard part was done. The easier part was just unboxing all the books and arranging them on the shelves, which of course is still quite a bit of work. It is however, not nearly as strenuous as carrying, you know, 30 boxes of books up three flights of stairs. I've often compared writing the rough draft to carrying those boxes of books up the stairs. But once you have the rough draft done, you get to arrange and fix it nicely and make it look pretty, like taking all those books out of their boxes and putting them on the shelves. Tip #7: beware of writing-adjacent activities that can suck up your time. By writing-adjacent activities, I mean things like research, updating your website/social media, looking at BookTok, and so forth. These things by themselves are not bad and if you are selling your book or want to sell your book, that can in fact be necessary. But they can give you the illusion of being productive when in fact, you're just wasting time. The most important thing is to of course finish the rough draft. If these kind of tasks motivate you or you enjoy them, it's probably a good idea to block off separate time for these tasks. It's not that they're bad, but they're not actually getting any writing done. So if you really find the writing-adjacent tasks enjoyable, probably schedule separate time for them that is distinct from your writing time. Tip #8: treat yourself or in other words, bribe yourself. Bribes work on everyone, not just upset toddlers. Most people respond better to rewards than punishment when it comes to their goal. Find a way to reward yourself for small milestones along the way like finishing a chapter. It doesn't have to be an expensive reward or even a reward that costs money. You could just, you know, go get yourself a coffee after every chapter. But if you wanted to give yourself a reward that wouldn't cost money, it could be something like doing something you enjoy, like going to the library, going to the park, making a new playlist, watching your favorite show on a free streaming site like Tubi or YouTube, calling a friend, or just wasting time on the Internet looking at funny memes for ten minutes. If you are the sort of person who enjoys stationery, you could get yourself some fancy notebooks or fancy pens or some kind of fancy coffee. It's always a good idea to be a bit kind to yourself when rewarding yourself for (indistinct word) task. Compared to digging ditches or, you know, open heart surgery, writing isn't hard, but it's still quite a bit of work, which is why there aren't more finished rough drafts out there, because it can be a bit of a slog at times. So if you follow these eight methods, hopefully this will help you finish that first first draft and get you over the hurdle in your mind of being able to actually finish a rough draft. 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 back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at why I don't set up preorders and I usually don't write prequels. I also share my thoughts about the video game STARFIELD. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 219 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 20th, 2024 and today we are discussing why I don't set up preorders for my books and why I prefer not to write prequels. Before we get to our main topic, we'll have an update on my current writing projects, Question of the Week, then we'll talk about a video game I recently enjoyed, and then we'll plunge on ahead to our main topic. First up, current writing and audiobook projects. I am pleased to report that Shield of Conquest is now completely finished and available. You can get it at all the usual ebook stores. It has been selling quite briskly and has been receiving good reviews. So thank you all for that. My next main project, which you can probably guess if you've been listening to the show for the last few months, is Ghost in the Tombs. As of this writing, I am 62,000 words into it, which I think puts me about 62% of the way through it, because I believe the rough draft will be around 100,000 words. I'm hoping to have that out towards the middle of October, if all goes well. I'm also 21,000 words into Cloak of Illusion. That should hopefully be out in November and I've just started what will be the fourth Rivah book, Orc-Hoard. It originally had been entitled Elven Sorcerer for the fourth Rivah book, but I decided to change the title to Orc-Hoard and that will be out in either December or January, if all goes well. In audiobook news, Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is completely done and currently working its way through processing and the various audiobook platforms. You can get it at my Payhip store right now and it should be available at all the other stores in a couple of weeks. Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling was excellently narrated by CJ McAllister. Recording is almost done on Shield of Darkness, and hopefully we can approve the final version of that next week and then that'll work its way through processing and be available before too much longer. So that's where I am with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:02:00 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is the most annoying video game enemy? Obviously, there is no profound reason behind this question, since we're talking about video games. I happened to be reading an article about the upcoming Starfield expansion, and the comments devolved into a rambling discussion of game design and most annoying enemies, which inspired this question. We had a good range of responses. Reader AM wrote in to say that her greatest video game enemy is her own hand-eye coordination. We've all been there, AM; we've all been there. Justin says: The Legend of Zelda series is a great bunch of video games, but they do have their annoying bits. I nominate the Like Like worm. To get sucked in and spit back out (minus your shield) is incredibly aggravating. I cannot count the number of shields I’ve lost to this adversary. Later versions steal money or health, but for me, you know, the annoyance of having to go back to town to get a replacement shield (while trying to avoid encounters) ranks up there. Legend of Zelda also has annoying characters. Navi is the most so- her cry of “Hey! Listen!” quickly becomes painful. I too remember the Like Like worm from the Legend of Zelda days and that was indeed very annoying. JD says: Cliff racers from Morrowind. Do I need to say more? Juana says: the vampire guarding the sewers in Vampire: the Masquerade-Bloodlines. You have to be maxed out in at least two disciplines to take them out. It's really difficult to get maximum disciplines. Ross says: at least for me, it's Cliff racers in Morrowind. They're so far out ahead of anything else, I can't even think of what I’d put in second place. Morgan says: not sure of all time, but in terms of more recent games, the Zoanthropes in Space Marine 2 are an absolute nightmare, especially when they come in pairs so one is always shielding the other. Jesse says: Seymour in Final Fantasy 10. Only boss I remember that you have to beat five times. Jenny says: that drum boss in Ocarina of Time. William says: Zelda 2 has no shortage of troublesome enemies, like the Iron Knuckles. It’s probably for the best I never had the chance to play it back in the day without save states. Brandy says: The first multiplayer run through Diablo, where you're through the Easter Egg levels and every other flick of the mouse you're screaming “run away, run away!” or “hold still, so I might smite thee!” For myself, my answer would be those stupid Medusa Heads from the Castlevania series. If you’ve played any Castlevania game, you know what I'm talking about. You'll be climbing the stairs and the Medusa Head will somehow come in at exactly the right angle to avoid all your weapons and to knock you off the stairs to your death at the same time. Honestly, a lot of the old school Castlevania Games are much more enjoyable with save states on modern systems. A very strong runner up would be Lakitu from Super Mario Brothers. He's the guy in the cloud who drops all those Spiny Shells on your head. So we had quite a good range of responses this week, thought it appears that the Morrowind Cliff Racer may take the championship. 00:04:49 Thoughts on Starfield Speaking of video games, I actually wanted to talk about Starfield a little bit because I beat the main quest in Starfield this month. By my standards, this is fast. I first started playing Skyrim in 2011, and I finally beat the main quest in autumn 2020 on the Switch version, since that was during the height of COVID and there wasn't much else to do. By contrast, Starfield came out in September 2023, so I beat the main quest in just a little bit over a year. So here are my thoughts on the game. Overall, I would say I really liked it. It does capture the feel of being a competent space adventurer wandering around the galaxy. You can do bounty hunting, pirate hunting, mining, exploring, and a variety of other stuff. Back in the ‘90s, I really liked Wing Commander: Privateer, which had infinite random missions and Starfield kind of feels like an enormously expanded version of Privateer, or like Privateer with a Halo game attached to it, given the wide variety of firearms you can obtain. In the grand tradition of Bethesda Games, you don't even have to do the main quest or any of the scripted side quests. You can just wander around visiting random planets and fighting space pirates forever. Honestly, I probably spent more time playing randomly generated side missions than any of the scripted quests. That said, I very much liked some of the scripted side missions. The Vanguard plotline was the best of them, in my opinion. You have to help the United Colonies find the origins of a super deadly alien predator called the Terrormorph, and at the end there's a genuinely hard moral question: does the greater good justify the means for people in positions of authority? The game also improved quite a bit since launch with new patches. The updates added a city map feature which is massively useful and a Space Car you can use for driving across planetary surfaces, which makes a lot of the game’s missions quite a bit simpler and easy. Now, while I enjoyed Starfield, I concede that many of its critics had a point about its weaknesses. The game relies a lot on procedural generation. Every time you land on a planet, a bunch of nearby dungeons and features are randomly generated. This can get repetitive, though honestly I don't mind that very much. It makes it easier to play the game in bite sized chunks when it's late and I'm tired and I just want to mow down some Space Pirates or something. What is annoying is that sometimes the procedurally generated locations don't match with the procedurally generated quests, which locks you out of finishing some of the randomly generated quests. That was really irritating, though it only tends to happen at very high levels. The game’s main plot revolved around multiverse stuff, and as I've mentioned frequently before, I am not a big fan of the multiverse as a storytelling concept. However, it works better in a video game than in a movie or a book, and Starfield's implementation of it is quite clever. Many games have the New Game Plus concept where you beat the game and then you start a new game, but things are slightly different. In Starfield, when you beat the game, you go to a new universe, you lose all your possessions, but you keep all your skills and knowledge, so you're starting the new game at level 65 or whatever. Additionally, a lot of the quests are subtly altered because your character knows in advance what is going to happen from the previous universe, so you can get a better outcome than you did the last time, which is honestly a kind of a clever game mechanic, which makes it a compelling journey to go from universe to universe and to put right what once went wrong. Anyway, I enjoyed Starfield and I will definitely play the Shattered Space expansion, which comes out at the end of September, but enough talk about video games. 00:08:14 Main Topic of the Week: Preorders and Prequels This is writing podcast, so let's move on to our main topic, preorders and prequels. I have to admit preorders and prequel sounds like a really lame tabletop RPG for indie authors. Like if you roll a 20, your book gets picked up as an Amazon Daily deal for the US, but if you roll 1, your book file gets corrupted and you can't figure out how to fix it. Anyway, the inspiration for this alliterative title was that someone asked me about preorders, and someone else asked me about prequels within 24 hours. So let's start with prequels. Reader Juan writes in to ask about preorders: something I noticed about your books. There's never a preorder option on Apple Books. Is this by design? I know you self-publish so I didn't know if that was a publisher feature or if there's a way to preorder there. If not, no worries, I just know Apple takes a little longer to load the book. Preorders are available to self-publishers, but the reason I don't do preorders is by design. I never do preorders for a couple different reasons, which we'll go through right now. #1: the consequences of missing a preorder date are moderately negative. If you miss a preorder date on Amazon, you get locked out of doing another one for the following 12 months. I'm not sure what happens if you miss a preorder on Apple Books, but I suspect it's about the same level of penalty and this ties directly into reason two. #2 is that life is chaotic and unpredictable, and I absolutely hate making promises I end up unable to keep. Like if I get sick or something in Real Life comes along that I have to deal with immediately, I could easily miss a week of writing time, which would make hitting the preorder date either very stressful or impossible. #3: If I wrote like only two books a year, I might do preorders. That would give me enough of a cushion of time to make sure that everything is ready to go well in advance of the launch date. But I usually write and publish like ten books a year, sometimes more. With books coming out so frequently, organizing that many pre-orders would be a serious headache and sometimes I don't actually decide what I'm going to write next until the day comes and I actually sit down to start writing. Like at the end of 2023, I pretty much decided on impulse to finish writing Half-Elven Thief and had that be my last book of the year in 2023. So with the amount I write and publish, managing the logistics of so many pre-orders would be a serious headache. #4: And finally, reason number four and the most important reason: the worst consequence of missing a preorder is a loss of reader confidence. Without going into details, let's say there's been enough of that in the fantasy genre already, so preorders have too many negatives and not enough positives, at least for my situation. I'd rather just make a good faith effort of having things come out when I can and announcing them via my newsletter. Speaking of which, if you sign up for my newsletter, you get regular free short stories. Now onto prequels. Concerning prequels, reader Danny writes in to ask: May I suggest writing a series of prequels to the Cloak Game series? Shield of Conquest made me hope that it would be a prequel book to the Cloak Game series, a book that speaks about the invasion of Earth by the elves and brings some backstory of the relationship between Kathran Morvilind and Tarlia- a teacher and a student, and the discovery and invasion of Earth, or other back stories that were not developed enough. For example, what about Aiden, brother of Riordan, or Riordan's experience as a Shadow Hunter? Generally speaking, I am not a big fan of writing prequels. I have written a couple of prequel novels out of the 155 books I've written (Frostborn: The First Quest comes to mind) and sometimes I'll do short stories as a flashback. Probably the most recent example of that is Prophecy of the High Queen, the short story that describes the first meeting between Nadia and the High Queen written from the High Queen's perspective. The High Queen uses magic to look into Nadia’s past and her various potential futures, and so the short story bounces all over the place in time. I have also written novels that kind of jump around in time. In Cloak of Iron, the scenes from Lauren Casey's perspective go back to even before the Cloak Game series actually started to set up why Lauren was desperate enough to save her brother that that she was willing to deal with someone like Mr. Shang of the Deathless Society. Or in the very first Nadia book, Games: Thief Trap, where we blur through the first twenty years of Nadia's life in the first chapter. That said, I do write the short stories in mind as bonus materials like the extra scenes on a movie DVD. However, at this point I don't think I would write a prequel novel, and I certainly wouldn't write a prequel series. Why not? It feels like prequels are sort of like procrastinating before you continue on the main story, which is likely what most readers really want. I've noticed some writers (again, without going into details) have a bad habit of writing prequels instead of getting on with the main story. Making yourself continue the main story instead of getting sidetracked by prequels or side quests is difficult, but it must be done for the greater good of the story. Additionally, a big problem with prequels is it's extremely difficult to generate narrative tension because you know in advance that certain characters are going to survive or certain situations are going to play out in a way you've already read in subsequent books. If I did, for example, my Andomhaim series as a prequel series, it would be set in a region of the world we've never visited and with characters we never encountered before, so that way there is a dramatic tension that the reader doesn't know how things are going to end and that will make the book more enjoyable. Also, some things are really better left to the reader's imagination, and that can include back stories. Writing fiction is in some ways an exercise in creating a line drawing and letting the imagination of the reader provide color and shadow. Like, since we've been talking about Nadia, here's someone describing her from a first-person perspective:  "A woman in a dark coat and black jeans sat across from me. She had red-tinged brown hair tied in a loose ponytail and pale grey eyes the color of knives. I thought she looked like she could stand to eat more. That, combined with the eyes, gave her a look of feverish, almost unsettling intensity. I probably outweighed her by a good ninety pounds, but I felt the sudden urge to reach for the gun I wasn't carrying." Now that's just a line drawing, right? Yet every reader will fill in that line drawing with something from his or her own imagination. In the same way, I think it is sometimes (even frequently) best to let the reader's imagination fill in the details of the character’s backstory. Like Riordan- we know he tried to save his brother Aidan and failed. We know that he became a Shadow Hunter and that his first wife joined the Rebels and tried to murder him to score points with her new friends. I could write out a prequel series describing those events, but I think at this point it wouldn't be as vivid as the one that readers have generated in their imaginations. Besides, writing a prequel story would be a distraction from the main story. So that is why I don't set up preorders and I don't usually write prequels. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I review the movies and streaming shows I saw in the second half of summer 2024. The episode concludes with a preview of the audiobook of HALF-ORC PALADIN, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 218 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 13th, 2024 and today we are discussing my Summer Movie Review Roundup, Part 2. Just to note to say that you may hear some odd background noises in this episode. My neighbor across the street is getting his roof replaced. I can't begrudge them that because no one likes a leaky roof, but it is slightly inconvenient because this is the only time today I have to record the podcast. So if you hear the occasional pop in the background, that is the sound of a nail gun driving shingles into a roof. Before we get to our main topics, let's have an update on my current writing projects and then we will do Question of the Week. First up, Shield of Conquest is very nearly done. I am about 2/3 of the way through the final round of editing and if all goes well, it should come out shortly after this episode is available, so be sure to check your favorite ebook retailer and see if it is out. Once that is done, I will be going full speed ahead on Ghost in the Tombs and I'm currently 48,000 words into that, so about halfway through the rough draft, give or take, depends on how long the rest of the book takes and how certain scenes in the final half of the book out. In audiobook news, Half-Orc Paladin is done, and it's now available on all the major audio stores: Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Chirp, Kobo, Payhip, Spotify, and a couple others, and you can get it there. We will close out this episode with a preview of Half-Orc Paladin (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward). 00:01:30 Question of the Week Now let's have a Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite superhero movie? No wrong answers, of course (including “I don't like superhero movies”, but it turns out no one said that, so I guess superhero movies are quite popular). The inspiration for this question was that I was thinking about how superhero movies are such a major part of pop culture. Nowadays when people think of superhero movies, they usually think of Marvel and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there were major superhero movies before the whole Marvel Cinematic approach really got going in the 2000s/2010s and they've been obviously part of pop culture for a very long time, and as you could expect, we had a wide range of responses from this. Our first response was from JD, who says: If I had to pick just one, it would probably be Guardians of the Galaxy. The first film had a near perfect mix of action, drama, and comedy. For me, the best Batman film was the 1966 one starring Adam West. Joaquim says: In the last millennium, when I was a child, we had DC Comics and Marvel Comics. I did like Batman in DC, Spider-man and The Avengers in Marvel. In the movies, I did not particularly like Batman, but I like the early Marvel movies, Avengers 1 and Captain America 2 the most. Mary says: X-Men. Todd says: 1978 Superman. Visually at 15, I believed a man could fly. Juana says: My superhero is actually a couple - The Vision and Scarlet Witch (before they turned Vision into an emotionless thing a while back). What's interesting is that the guy who was in charge of Picard Season 3, which I quite liked, is apparently going to be running a Vision show for Marvel sometime in 2026 (assuming Disney doesn't run out of money first), so it should be interesting to see how it turns out. Stephen says: I know this is random- Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings. I know it was not completely an original storyline, but I liked it a lot. I agree with Stephen. I thought Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings was one of the stronger Marvel movies and it's too bad it hasn't had a sequel. Becca says: The Dark Knight trilogy. Those are the real Batman films for me. Ledger was certainly the best Joker. I do love the happier Batmans, too. I grew up on West’s version of Batman. For me, V for Vendetta is my favorite superhero movie and one of my favorite movies ever. I usually watch it at least once a year. Michael says: Captain America: The First Avenger. Juliana says: Second Captain America. The spy aspect really married well with the superhero genre in this one. I agree with Juliana. I think Captain America: Winter Soldier is one of the better Marvel movies. Roger says: only because we're entering the season, The Christmas Chronicles with Kurt Russell. Andrew says: Deadpool and Wolverine, followed by The Dark Knight trilogy. James says: I know Fox's X-Men get a bad rap generally, but Days of Future Past was amazing. I'd have to go with that, with The Dark Knight, Thor: Ragnarok, and Wonder Woman as runner-ups. Cheryl says: don't really have favorites, but for eye candy, Thor. Catriona says: The original Christopher Reeve Superman. Jenny says: Mystery Men. Jeanne says: Megamind. Randy says: Christian Bale and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight movies are definitely in the top three but Iron Man has always been my favorite. Good story, good pacing, and Robert Downey Junior just nailed playing Tony Stark, in my opinion. Not to mention it kicked off the longest, largest, story movie arc to this day. BV says: Superman 1978. Terry says: Fifth Element. Gary says: Hancock. For myself, I think my favorite superhero movies would be the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale Dark Knight trilogy. Strong performances, great action, and they managed to do something very difficult, namely bring a satisfying end to a superhero story arc. It almost feels like The Dark Knight movies are the “real” events of Batman and all the other comics and cartoons and movies are legends and exaggerations after the fact, like how the whole glittering mythos of King Arthur and the Round Table developed around an obscure Roman British warlord in the 500s AD. Also, Heath Ledger's version of the Joker was amazing. That said, for Marvel movies, which have been kind of the dominant form of superhero movies for the last decade, I think the best one of those would be Captain America: Winter Soldier (in my opinion). 00:05:45 Main Topic: Summer 2024 Movie/TV Roundup, Part 2 And now on to our main topic of this episode, my Summer 2024 Movie Roundup, Part 2. And if this movie roundup has a theme, it's miscellaneous. The reason for that is I did not actually watch all that many movies in the second half of the summer. There was no nefarious reason for that. I was just busy with travel and busy with multiple instances of home repair and busy finishing Half-Orc Paladin and Shield of Conquest. So I mostly watched some older stuff that I found on streaming, especially on Tubi, which has the delightful attribute of being free with ads. As usual, the movies are listed from my least favorite to my most favorite and the grades are totally subjective and based upon my own thoughts and opinions and nothing more substantial than that. So with that in mind, let's start out. First up is The Burbs, which came out in 1989. It's a dark comedy/horror movie satire starring Tom Hanks as Ray, a suburban homeowner with a wife and a son. On vacation for the week, Ray becomes obsessed with the Klopeks, a new family that has moved on to his street. The Klopeks have no interest in maintaining their property and show signs of other odd activities: going out only at night, constant digging in the backyard, and strange noises and lights coming from their basement. Soon, Ray and his two neighbors become determined to find out just what the Klopeks are up to. It was darkly funny, though you could tell that the ending had been rewritten a few times. The movie couldn't decide if it wanted to be a satire of clannish homeowners or to totally validate their concerns, or both. I think it tried for both and couldn't quite get there. Though it does kind of show how much the United States has changed or possibly declined in the last 35 years. Ray and his friends are shown as kind of losers, but they live in enormous, well-maintained houses. It's like how Homer Simpson in the first couple seasons of The Simpsons was shown as a bumbling loser, but yet he could afford to live in a four bedroom house, his wife didn't work most of the time, they had two cars and three children, and all without Homer having a college degree. By the standards of 2024, Homer Simpson lived like a king. Amusing anecdote-one scene in The Burbs was clearly inspired by A Fistful of Dollars, which I talk about more below. Overall grade: C Next up is The Batman vs. Dracula, an animated movie which came out in 2005. In this movie, Batman goes up against Count Dracula. This was probably as dark and gory as something can be while still technically remaining targeted at children. When a robbery goes bad, the Penguin accidentally releases Count Dracula from his tomb and becomes the Vampire Lord's new chief servant. Dracula is fascinated by the modern world, but he's especially fascinated by Batman since for obvious reasons he admires Batman's bat-themed motif. Dracula offers Batman the chance to become his chief lieutenant, which Batman refuses and Dracula takes that personally. He'll get his revenge by turning Gotham City into a city of the undead and taking Bruce Wayne's girlfriend, Vicki Vale, as his new vampire bride. Unless, of course, Batman stops him. It was interesting how neatly Dracula slots into becoming a good enemy for Batman. After all, in the original Dracula novel, Dracula's nemesis Van Helsing was definitely a man of science who brought logic, reason, and scientific method to his fight against Dracula. Batman is also a man of science in the sense that he's a detective, so he does some detective work to unravel Dracula's weaknesses and to build weapons to use against him. Overall Grade: B Next up is Set It Up, which came out in 2018. This is a romantic comedy that reminded me a bit of the more cynical 1940s-era romcoms like The Shop Around the Corner. The female lead Harper works as a personal assistant for a workaholic female sports writer who terrorizes her employees. The male lead Charlie works for workaholic male venture capitalist who also terrorizes his employees. Both their bosses are miserable, demanding people who make everyone around them unhappy. One day, both Charlie and Harper are dispatched to get dinner for their bosses and end up fighting over the last available delivery man. However, in the wake of the encounter, Harper hatches a plan. Both she and Charlie know everything about their respective bosses, so why not manipulate their calendars and schedules so they fall in love? They might be more cheerful, or at the very least they'll be in the office less frequently. Charlie has his misgivings about this plan, but after one more unfortunate encounter with his boss, decides to embark upon Harper's plan. Of course, Charlie has a high maintenance girlfriend who wants him to make a lot more money, and Harper is trying to find a boyfriend, but as per the rules of romcoms, perhaps Charlie and Harper will have more in common than they might think. This had a bit more crude humor than I might prefer but was still enjoyable. It did remind me quite a bit of the more cynical ‘30s and ‘40s movies like My Man Godfrey or the Shop around the Corner. Overall Grade: B Next up is The Bank of Dave, which came out in 2023. This is basically the cynical British version of a Hallmark movie, but with better production values. It is very, very loosely based on the activities of Dave Fishwick, a successful van dealer in the north of England who decides to start a local bank for local people, feeling that the Big London banks have lost sight of that. To do that, he recruits a London lawyer named Hugh to help him navigate a labyrinth of regulation around financial institutions. Of course the big banks dislike this idea and come after Dave hard. Dave is definitely the local Big Man, and it's interesting that humanity’s default mode of government seems to be Local Big Man. However, if one must have a Big Man, one could only hope he is as benevolent as Dave. The movie was pretty funny, though a lot of the humor comes from the UK's class and regional divides, which are rather more pronounced than in the United States. Here in the United States, you can drive for 300 miles and be in the same state the entire time, and the local culture won't change all that much. The cliche is that the US East Coast and the US West Coast look down upon flyover country, but you can drive something like 1,000 miles from New York before you even get to Flyover Country. If you drive 300 miles in the UK, you've probably gone through six or seven regional accents and local traditions. The Bank of Dave does kind of turn into a Hallmark movie since Hugh falls for David’s doctor niece. So basically a romance with the backdrop of British class/regional struggle as comedy. Overall grade: B Next up is Cool Runnings, which came out in 1993. A sports comedy film very (and I mean very loosely) based on the debut of the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team in the 1988 Winter Olympics. When sprinter Derice Bannock is unable to qualify for the Jamaican Olympic team due to an accident, he decides to instead to start a bobsled team to represent Jamaica in the Games. To do this, he recruits washed up former bobsledder Blitzer (played by John Candy) to act as the team’s coach. What follows is a pretty good example of a sports movie. The team must come together and perform while overcoming their own personal challenges and inner conflicts, especially Coach Blitzer, who has to dig deep and overcome his past to effectively coach the team. It's interesting that sports movies tend to follow one of two trajectories. Either the team rallies and wins the championship, or they don't win the championship and nonetheless achieve moral victory by overcoming their internal difficulties in learning to work together. I won't spoil which path Cool Runnings follows. Overall Grade: B Next up is Uncle Buck, which came out in 1989. This is a coming-of-age comedy film about a 40 year old man, oddly enough. I did think this was pretty funny. Bob and Cindy are a married couple with three children living in the suburbs of Chicago, and when Cindy's father has a heart attack, they need to rush to his side. Due to the unexpected nature of the news, they have to find someone to watch the kids while they're gone. In desperation, they turned to Bob's brother Buck, who alternates between working for his girlfriend at her tire company and making money on rigged horse races. While Buck is kind of a loser, he's basically a decent guy, just averse to responsibility and settling down. He quickly steps up to take care of the children, though he conflicts with the oldest daughter Tia, who is in the grips of a full-blown adolescent rebellion. Buck soon realizes that he's come to a crossroads in his life, which is reinforced when Tia runs away to a party for the weekend. Slightly dark in places, but definitely more family friendly than many ‘80s comedies. Overall Grade: B+ Next up is the Adjustment Bureau, which came out in 2011. It is a science fiction romantic thriller based on the Philip K. Dick story, which is a very odd sentence to say, but it's true. Matt Damon plays David Norris, a congressman from New York who just lost the Senate race. Preparing for his concession speech. He meets Elise (played by Emily Blunt) and is immediately smitten with her. A month later, he runs into her by accident on a bus and receives her phone number. However, soon mysterious suited men with unusual powers arrive and burn the paper with the phone number. The men explain to David that they are The Adjustment Bureau, charged with making sure history unfolds according to the mysterious Plan. The Plan says that David can never see Elise again. David of course is not the sort of guy to take that lying down, so he soon finds himself trying to outwit the Time Cops and find Elise. It was interesting that The Adjustment Bureau was very similar to the Time Variance Authority from the Marvel Loki show, so I wonder if they drew on some of the same sources of inspiration. An interesting movie and worth watching. It actually wrestled with the oldest philosophical question in Western civilization: are all things predestined or do we have free will? Or is it somehow both? I have to admit that the scene where Elise dunked David's BlackBerry in coffee was very satisfying to me personally, since I had a lot of support headaches with Blackberries back in the 2000s. Overall Grade: B+ Now, finally the favorite thing I saw in the second half of the summer 2024: A Fistful of Dollars, which came out in 1964. This was the first Spaghetti Western I've seen, which means it's Italian director Sergio Leone’s sort of stylized version of what the Old West was like. Of course, the movie actually ripped off the Akira Kurosawa samurai movie Yojimbo. In fact, it was so heavily ripped off Yojimbo that Kurosawa sued, settled out of court, and received 15% of A Fistful of Dollars’ revenue. Apparently Kurosawa made more from the settlement than he did from Yojimbo. Legal troubles aside, it was quite good and I could see how it heavily influenced many subsequent movies. For example, the Star Wars character of Boba Fett was inspired by A Fistful of Dollars and Boba Fett in turn inspired the Mandalorian. Stephen King's rather disappointing Dark Tower series was inspired by Dollars as well. And there are many other examples, such as the scene in The Burbs I had mentioned above earlier. Anyway, Clint Eastwood plays The Stranger, a mercenary gunslinger who seems to be drifting from town to town without a purpose. He arrives at San Miguel, a US-Mexican border town that is dominated by two crime families at each other's throats, the Rojos and the Baxters. Both clans seek to hire The Stranger for their organizations and the gunslinger begins playing them off each other for personal profit. As mercenary and as ruthless as he is, The Stranger seems to have a core of honor to him. A couple of times he goes out of his way to help people because he can, which sometimes gets him into trouble. Definitely worth watching as a classic film. Overall Grade: A So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (note: transcripts are available from Episodes 140 onward). If you enjoy the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I discuss the origins of my HALF-ELVEN THIEF series, and describe some of the ideas that inspired it. I also talk a little about some of the common scams in self-publishing. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 217 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is September the 6th, 2024 and today we are discussing the origins of Half-Elven Thief. Before we get into that, let's have an update on my current writing projects. I am editing Shield of Conquest. I'm about 40% of the way through the first round of editing, so hoping to have that out in the middle of September if all goes well, but we'll see. I am 44,000 words Ghosts in the Tombs, which I am planning to have out in October and 14,000 words into Cloak of….uh…Illusion. That's how you can tell I've written a lot of books. I can't immediately recall the titles at the drop of a hat anymore. In audiobook news, the audio for Half-Orc Paladin is done and working its way through processing on various sites. It should be up on Audible, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp and all the other major audiobook stores soon, but you can get it off my Payhip store right now since I was able to post it right away. So if you want to get before anyone else, you can do it there. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects (once I remembered all their names correctly, of course). 00:01:16 Question of the Week And now let's go to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite fictional villain? The inspiration for this question was that I saw a writer complaining how hard it is to write a book without a villain. It's not impossible, of course. The conflict of the story might be man versus nature, two people competing in a sporting event, or on equal footing. But it is easier to write a book about a villain and of course really memorable ones often become enduringly popular characters. So as you can imagine, we had quite a range of responses for this one. Mary says: King Haggard in the last Unicorn. Evil, unfathomable, and dangerous. I can't believe he adopted a foundling, at that. Jonathan D. says: If I had to limit it to one, I would go with Megatron. You have to be an iconic villain to still be the main bad guy for 40 years. Honorable mention to Scorpius from Farscape. He was only supposed to be in a few episodes at the end of Season 1 but was so good he became the main villain. Bret says: Voldemort. I like villains to be simple, the embodiment of evil, evil from the moment they were born, never wavering from evil, and with no chance for redemption. But I prefer the villain to be the system and/or human nature. For example, in your Ghost Exile Book One, there are some bad guys, but since it's not known that point that there's a super villain behind the scenes, Caina is fighting the system (like corruption, slavery of Istarinmul) and the bad guys are bad because of human nature in the system, and that's a great book. One of my favorites. Michael says: I am a big fan of Marvel comic books and they both have my favorite villains, Doctor Doom and Magneto, because they are both well written personalities and are perfect examples of people with power who will do whatever evil thing it takes to rectify evil conditions in their lives that they have personally survived. Our next response comes from Becca, who says: I really liked Grand Admiral Thrawn and his use of art. He's an excellent character. Another Timothy Zahn series villain is the Modhri, a sort of hive mind that ends up with lots of different aspects. The books she's talking about are the Quadrail series by Timothy Zahn and they're pretty good. Check them out if you get a chance. It's basically a noir-style train mystery but in outer space. Simone says: Definitely Doctor Evil, because sometimes I also want some “freaking sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their freaking heads.” I have to say I entirely agree with Simone. Sometimes you want sharks with laser beams. Andrew says: John Simms playing The Master in Doctor Who. BV says: Urzo, that villain cracks me up. In fact, the whole crew of villains are characters. Yep, Urzo was something else. Plus he makes me laugh. Martin says: The Watchmaker from Jeffrey Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme series. I think the key to an engaging villain is that they have a capacity to win. The watchmaker matches Rhyme's deductive skills with his own meticulous nature. The question becomes who will make a mistake first and what the consequences will be. You can never be sure who will win. I also enjoy the fact that you only get to read it from the Watchmaker’s point of view without truly understanding him. It's only at the end that things click into place. Jenny says: The best villain is when you feel like, yeah, maybe they have a point, but the whole way they're going about their plan is wrong. Like Thanos- bro had a valid point, but that wasn't the way to do it. Scott says: Mine just so happens to be real Star Wars related, Darth Bane from Legends. He made the Rule of Two that we all know of. He wrecked the Sith Academy and the Jedi. He flew a lizard dragon from one planet to another. He went through so much pain, but he maintained his focus on his goal. The books Scott are referring to as the Darth Bane Trilogy about Darth Bane and his apprentice Darth Zannah and if you get a chance, check them out. They're actually pretty good. Barbara says: Just got to be Davros. You can't get past the Dalek creator, so ultimately evil, really ugly, and the voice is spot on. Terry says: Sticking with Star Wars, Ventris. Read Dark Disciple and her emotional entanglement with Vos trying to take on Count Dooku. Jonathan T. says: Another thing that makes Grand Admiral Thrawn great as a villain is that he is terrifying without being truly evil in the way that Darth Vader and the Emperor were. He is harsh and severe, but also wise, brave, and a good leader. He's even more effective as a morally ambiguous villain because he orchestrates his own removal from the Emperor's corrupt court (with the Emperor’s help, of course) but it allowed him to be untainted by the evils of the Death Star, Alderaan, and more. Furthermore, it allowed men like Pellaeon to redeem themselves under honorable commanders, such that when the time came to reunite with the Empire some 40 years later, the Imperial Remnant was welcomed with open arms and just a few years later were running the very government they had for so long opposed. John says: Lazar from Your Highness. Best evil wizard in a movie and, well, the best wizard in a movie, hands down. He had so much magic, he used it for dumb stuff like making a feast of fish sticks and snorting a fairy. He’d trounce Gandalf, “he who has no nose” and laugh at the Sith. Jay says: Lijah Cuu from the series Gaunt’s Ghost by Dan Abnett. This is a massive series set in Warhammer 40K, mainly from the point of view of regular guards rather than superhuman space Marines. It's been a decade since I've read those books and I swear I just thinking about him makes me want to murder him in increasingly inventive ways. I just hate him so very much. Alex says: Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham's-superb balance of evil and relatable humanity moments. Michael says: Darth Vader for me. Gary says: I like it when a villain can be written so you identify with them. Perhaps you could even wonder if they are really a villain. I have always enjoyed the portrayal of Boo Radley. I'm not sure he would really qualify as a villain, but in fact, that perception plays such a large role in it added a lot to the story. Cheryl says: Loki. David says: Doctor Doom. John says: Murdock from MacGyver. Barbara says: Roland from Ilona Andrew’s Kate Daniels series. For myself, I think my favorite fictional villain would be the already mentioned Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Heir to the Empire trilogy, written by Timothy Zahn. He's an interesting contrast to Darth Vader and the Emperor from the original movies. He's just as capable of being ruthless as they are, but that's not his first choice the way it is with someone like Darth Vader. The Emperor and Vader relied on The Force. Thrawn uses logic and deduction. What he usually does is studies his opponent’s artwork or style of artwork they favor, deduce their psychological blind spots from that study, and then builds attacks around those blind spots that his opponents will not (indeed, cannot see) coming. He takes the remnants of The Empire from the brink of defeat to the verge of total victory during the trilogy. I think it works because while Heir to the Empire is still Star Wars, Thrawn is a completely different kind of villain than Darth Vader and the Emperor while nonetheless being just as formidable. One way to make your characters more sympathetic is to have them go up against a strong, competent villain, which why no doubt is why it's often harder to write a book without a villain. 00:07:59 Main Topic of the Week: Origins of The Half-Elven Thief series Now let's move on to our main topic for the week, the origins of my Half-Elven Thief series. This came about because one of the side effects of having been in self-publishing as long as I have, which is a really long time now, is that my email address has been out there a long time, so I get a lot of scam messages. Sketchy book promo sites are a dime a dozen and they spring up all the time and frequently send out cold call emails to authors. I know some of them are operated by the same guy or guys because in their e-mail database, my e-mail address is mistakenly linked to the name of LitRPG author Darren Holtberg Jr. Whenever the scammer guy or guy starts a new promo site with a name like Book Splurge, I get an e-mail address to “Dear Darren Holtberg Jr.” inviting me to the site. I should mention I've never spoken with Mr. Holtberg or read his books and I'm sure he's a fine author who doesn't deserve to have scammers emailing him or I get emails from sketchy book marketing sites that say in exchange for $5,000, they'll make sure your book gets featured in Publisher’s Weekly or something like that. Lately I've been getting a lot of Facebook ads phishing messages claiming that if I don't click on their fake link and fill out their fake form, my Facebook ad accounts gets deactivated. Lately, they've all been coming from Hotmail accounts for some reason, and recently I had a message claiming to be from Facebook Ad Support that actually came from a dress that looks something like Jesus [email protected]. If Jesus Christ, the son of God, Lord and Savior of Mankind wanted to disable my Facebook ad accounts, I am pretty sure he would express his divine will through a method other than a Hotmail account. And if the rather less than divine organization of Facebook wanted to disable my ad account, they don't send warnings. They or whatever algorithm is running them that week just does it. Another recent scam came from a book marketing service inviting me to write a free article for their members about the inspirations behind Half-Elven Thief. It was obviously an automated letter generated by scanning the Amazon sales ranks. I didn't want to write the free article for some scamming book marketing services but decided instead to write it for my site and make a podcast episode out of it. So therefore, here are the origins and inspirations for my Half-Elven Thief series. I first started thinking about what would become Half-Elven Thief in early 2023, and a couple of different ideas went into the series. I'll talk about the business/publishing side of these ideas first and then the creative/artistic ones. #1: Number one, I wanted to try writing shorter, less complicated books because I felt like my books had been becoming more and more complicated and difficult to write lately. Of course, that's not entirely true; my books have always been kind of complicated. Soul of Serpents was pretty complex. I wrote that way back in 2011. Soul of Sorcery was very complicated and that was 2012. But that means I've been writing complicated books for the last 13 years at a minimum, so I wanted to try something different. #2: I also wanted to write something completely new and put it in Kindle Unlimited. Like many indie authors, my relationship with the Kindle Unlimited (KU) program has been fraught because of its exclusivity requirement. There is potentially a lot of money to be made in Kindle Unlimited, but at the same time that also prevents a book from selling on any of the other ebook platforms. I had experimented with putting up some of my older series on KU. What usually happens is that I end up making about 90% of what I would make if I had just kept the books wide. KU’s algorithms also have a pretty strong recency bias. The best way to have a book perform well in KU is to write a series of them and then release them fairly close together. They all tend to reinforce each other then, which of course is obviously easy with shorter, less complicated books. #3: Marvel Lockout Syndrome, which I have talked about on the show before. I also wanted to write something completely unrelated to anything I had written before. By this point, I've written almost 50 books set in Andomhaim, over 30 books with Caina as the main character, and over 20 with Nadia is the main character. Readers tend to be completionists who want to read everything in the proper order, but at the same time you also tend to lose readers from installment to installment. Several dozen books and a character backstory can be daunting obstacles to starting a series. I had been thinking about this for a while and then in 2023 we saw cinematic juggernaut Marvel Studios running into trouble after 15 years of putting out very interconnected movies. Marvel movies used to regularly pull in over a billion dollars, but suddenly they weren't performing at the box office like they used to. As with everything in pop culture, there's a billion different theories about that, and a billion terabytes worth of Internet arguments, but I strongly suspect continuity lockout was a big part of it. For example, The Marvels was the sequel to something like 10 different things with a combined watching time of over 50 hours. That's nearly an entire semester's worth of stuff to watch, and at that point that feels more like homework instead of entertainment. So that was just sort of a crystallization of what I've been thinking about with the problems with really long interconnected series, so I wanted to write a short or self-contained series that would be a good entry point and introduction to my writing for people and yet wouldn't be connected to any of the other very large series that I have written. Those were the business/publishing reasons for Half-Elven Thief. Now let's talk about some of the creative ideas that went into it. #4: I love basic/generic fantasy tropes. My absolute favorite kind of fantasy is what people call generic or traditional fantasy. I want to see a knight, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard going into a dungeon and fight some orcs…maybe an evil wizard and steal their loot or go on a quest where they have to visit several successive dungeons and fight different monsters. Or a Conan style barbarian wandering around having adventures in decadent city-states and occasionally beheading an evil wizard. That's my favorite kind of fantasy story. Of course, in the bad old days before self-publishing, you couldn't sell a book like that because the publishers didn't want traditional fantasy. That's why the original books in the Ghost didn't have orcs or dwarves or anything like that, since I wrote them long enough ago that I was still trying to sell them to traditional publishers. So when it came to Half-Elven Thief, I decided to write a book around some of those traditional fantasy tropes, like a thieves guild, half elves, sinister wizards, and so forth. In that vein, let's move to our next reason. #5: Half-elves. So why is Rivah the main character of Half-Elven Thief, a half elf? The reason came from a semi ridiculous controversy in 2023. Apparently, Hasbro, the owners of Dungeons and Dragons, had decided to remove the terms half elf and half orc from the game since they might be potentially offensive. The usual Internet furor ensued, though the truth was that the game had been modified so you could have characters who were any combination of fantasy races like a character was half elven and half gnome or something. I suppose the larger issue is that Hasbro really wants to turn Dungeons and Dragons into a subscription service like Xbox Game Pass, but that's a different topic anyway. The idea caught in my head, and so I decided that Rivah would be a half elf. #6: Now we go to the sixth and probably biggest creative influence on Half-Elven Thief: failures of leadership. Of course you can tell a story with traditional fantasy tropes, but all stories, regardless of genre, have themes to them. An author’s opinions of his own work is often erroneous, but I think one of the chief themes of Half-Elven Thief is failures of leadership. I thought about that a great deal in 2023 because in 2023 I knew a lot of people who quit the traditional helping professions like the medical field, teaching, law enforcement, and so on. They didn't quit because they disliked the work and not even because the money was bad but because the leadership at their institutions was so inept and even malignant that it turned the workplace into a toxic environment, so they left to seek more lucrative employment elsewhere, which overall is a net loss for civilization, isn't it? We need people to be nurses and teachers and cops, but if they leave not because the work is challenging, but because their managers are grotesquely incompetent narcissists, that is a bad thing. To return to this week's question of the week about villains, one of the reasons Grand Admiral Thrawn on is an effective villain is because he's an effective leader. His soldiers are glad to follow him because he's not egotistical. He's not capricious or unfair, and he cares mostly about results. Unfortunately, in real life, leaders like Thrawn are in fact rare. We have far more leaders like Admiral Ozzel from the Empire Strikes Back, a petty, insecure, incompetent man who Darth Vader finally force chokes to death in exasperation. We've all experienced working under someone like Admiral Ozzel, and even if you're not in one of the helping fields, no doubt we all have had an incompetent or malicious supervisor before and it's remarkable how often incompetent managers turn out to be malicious ones as well. So I was thinking a lot about that, about how incredibly destructive bad leadership can be in the right circumstances. That reflected quite a bit into Half-Elven Thief. So those were the business and creative inspirations that went into the Half-Elven Thief series. Finally, I would like to close with gratitude for how well Half-Elven Thief has been since released. I've tried three new things in the last three years and Half-Elven Thief by far, has gone the best. I'm grateful that so many people have enjoyed Rivah’s adventures. 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 in https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (note: transcripts are available for Episodes 140 onward). If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at 7 things you should not put on a book cover, and also discuss how I used to write tech nonfiction. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 216 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 30th, 2024, and today we're considering seven things that you should not put on your book cover. We’ll also talk a little bit about how I used to write tech books and have Question of the Week. Last week we also had a bit of a problem with the microphone levels. Hopefully that should now be adjusted and the sound should not be bouncing around randomly throughout the episode. So first up, updates on my writing progress. I am currently done with the rough draft of Shield of Conquest, 97,500 words written in 21 days. Right now, I'm writing a companion short story, The First Command. That will be a short story that my newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Shield of Conquest comes out, hopefully sometime in September. I'm also 40,000 words into Ghosts in the Tombs, which will be the next main project after Shield of Conquest is out. I’m 10,000 words into Cloak of Titans, which hopefully will be around November. In audiobook news, the recording for Half-Orc Paladin is done. That will be excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. And if all goes well, that should wend its way through the various audiobook stores and be available soon. 00:01:19 Question of the Week Now let's do Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire enjoyable discussion of interesting topics. This week’s question: what is your favorite movie in the fantasy genre? No wrong answers obviously, but I think it's an interesting question because I suspect fantasy is a lot harder as a genre to bring to film than police procedurals or romantic comedies. Quite a few responses for this one. Mary says: The Princess Bride. Justin says: The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in a category by itself. A faithful (given the constraints) adaptation of the greatest fantasy story of all time. Conan is very good, but The Princess Bride is what I watch over and over again. Barbara says: Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. I know it's animated, but I watch it every chance I get. Even hunted down the soundtrack. It was our go to entertainment when my husband and I were dating and right after we were married. William says: Watching Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits as a child was an impactful experience for me. Personally, I don't really see the need to adapt perfectly good books into movies where you can make a perfectly good original movie instead like Star Wars. Martin says: Lord of the Rings has an epic quality about it and has everything. One of my favorite fantasy films is Stardust. It's a great journey for the characters involved and has a wonderful mix of magic and action. Jenny says: Legend and Labyrinth are iconic to me and Dark Crystal. Lord of the Rings is epic though, I agree. A different Barbara says: Got to be Labyrinth. Bowie was spectacular. Not a fan of Lord of the Rings. Gary says: Lord of the Rings is pretty obvious, but I've always liked Time Bandits. BV says: Hand down, Lord of the Rings and the upcoming movie Shield Knight (which is not terribly likely). Bonnie says: Willow is number one, then the original Dune. Yeah, I know-quite the spectrum. Juana says: Lord of the Rings and Fantastic Voyage. David says: Don't forget Krull. Tom says: Lord of the Rings, then Stardust. Rewatched those so many times. AL says: Willow also had a terrible plot. I think my second choice would be Bright, lol. And then the last Dungeons and Dragons movie. Jeanne says: Without question, Lord of the Rings. Darla says: Geez people, every movie you mentioned makes me want to see them again. There are so many good and not so good fantasy movies. I would say Lord of the Rings plus Rings of Power on Amazon. A really old movie from my brain is Scanners. Although the acting was totally terrible, the concept was intriguing. And finally, Pippa says: Lord of the Rings, then Willow. So yeah, we can see from those answers that Lord of the Rings is definitely the category winner, which agrees with my own assessment. For myself, I think the overwhelming answer would have to be Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. In my opinion, and your opinion may vary, The Lord of the Rings movie set the bar very high, so the trilogy is kind of in its own category. You can watch them 20 years later and they hold up well in a way a lot of stuff from 20 years ago does not. But with that said, I think my second favorite fantasy film would be the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian, since it does a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the original stories and the soundtrack by Basil Poledouris is superb. The Anvil of Crom track is excellent. Also, James Earl Jones plays an evil sorcerer/cult leader named Thulsa Doom, which is of course excellent, although after reading all the comments and thinking about it, I think Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves from 2023 would be tied with Conan the Barbarian in my second place fantasy film. 00:04:38 Reflections on Writing Tech Books Now onto a slightly different topic, how I used to write tech books. I can always tell when the school year starts because suddenly I have numerous orders for the paperback copies of the Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide and the Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide. This happens because some professors have recommended them for their classes because the books are one- low cost and two- a good introduction to the topic. If you've only discovered my writing recently, and by recently I mean within the last six years or so, you might not know this, but I used to do a lot of tech writing. That was in fact my first successful attempt at writing from the Internet, tech blogging back in the second half of the 2000s. When I started self-publishing in 2011, I also wrote a bunch of tech books and Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide and Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide are definitely the most successful of them. Around 2018/early 2019 I stopped tech writing due to lack of time and the fact that fiction turned out to be much more lucrative. That said, I occasionally get snide remarks and people saying well, why paid $0.99 for an ebook? All this information is available for free on the Internet or YouTube. That is true. However, it overlooks the fact that people learn information in different ways. For some people, having the information laid out step by step in a book is the best introduction to the topic. And the books are intended for absolute beginners. Part of the experience of being an absolute beginner is that you don't even know the proper questions to ask, which means it's hard to find research. It's hard to research and find relevant information on the Internet. It's said that experts know what they don't know. If you're a beginner, you don't even know what you don't know yet. That means you don't know what to Google or look for on YouTube. Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide and Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide were intended to give people a good beginning foundation on the topic. And since the books have been out for 12 years, I think I've achieved that achieved that goal. I've gotten many emails from people who found themselves suddenly forced to use Linux. My favorite was from a teacher who unexpectedly found himself teaching a high school computer science class one week before it actually began. They said that the book helped them come to grips with the Linux Command Line. I'm glad that was helpful. I'm glad that the book has helped people, which is why I've kept them at $0.99 for over a decade now. And if you are learning command line for the first time and you're one of the people who bought the book recently, I hope it is helpful. 00:07:00 Main Topic: 7 Things You Shouldn’t Put on Your Book Cover Our main topic this week is seven things you shouldn't put on your book cover. We have talked a lot about book cover design and related topics on this podcast so I thought would be a good idea to take a look at seven things you shouldn't put on your book cover. It is a delicate balance to get a cover that is eye-catching and represents what you want people to know about your book without being either offensive or boring. Studying other covers in your genre is a great start for learning how to make successful covers and to match what people expect to see on a cover. Amazon has a broad “material we deem inappropriate or offensive” sentence in its guidance about inappropriate covers. So how do you know what makes for an inappropriate cover? As a general rule, over my book covers I've avoided any sort of nudity and no weapons pointed at the reader. If you have weapons on your cover, such as swords or guns or whatever, they should not be pointed at the reader. More specific questions you can ask yourself about whether something is inappropriate for book cover are: would someone be embarrassed or nervous to be seen with this book cover on the subway? Thanks to ereaders and phones, you can read whatever you want on the subway or the bus without people knowing what you're reading but if you have a paper book, would you be embarrassed to be seen with this cover in public? Would you have to hide this cover from a grandparent, a former teacher, or a teenager? Is this the kind of cover you would not want them to see? Would a newspaper be uncomfortable printing this cover as part of a story and would a local bookstore not be excited to have this cover in their window for the entire community to see? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you may want to rethink your book cover. And now on to our actual list of seven things you should not put on your book cover. #1: Awards that no one has heard of or bestseller lists besides the New York Times. If your book has won an award that isn't super well known like the Hugo or the National Book Award or the Edgar, etcetera, it shouldn't take up real estate on your cover. It's definitely not worth chasing some of those random tiny book awards that focus on Indies, some of which are more sketchy than others, just to have a shiny gold metal on your cover. If people don't know the award, it's at best confusing and at worst makes it look like the book couldn't win a real award. New York Times is the only bestseller list the average reader would care about, maybe USA Today if you were on it before it ended. And similarly, advertising your Amazon ranking on your cover is cringey and looks desperate, so unless you've won a prestigious award that people who are outside the book world would have heard of, it's probably a good idea to not put any awards on your book cover. #2: Low resolution images and text and font that can't be read in thumbnail. Both too small and too stylized are problems. Test out your thumbnail on both color and an E Ink screens because you want it to be comprehensible and legible in both formats in thumbnail. Low resolution or pixelated images make your book look cheap and low effort, which will be especially noticeable and regrettable in print versions. Never zoom into a JPEG unless the JPEG is high enough resolution to support it. In any kind of photo editing or cover design, you want to work with the highest resolution photos possible because there naturally are more pixels to work with, and then you can do more things with it or zoom in a bit without it becoming appearing pixelated, which is not possible with low resolution images. So you'll want to avoid those for your book cover. #3 of things you should not put on your book cover are images you don't own or AI generated images. Copyright matters. If you don't own the image or a license to use it, you're infringing on someone’s copyright and they can respond legally or send take down notices to the places where your book is sold. Be careful about using Creative Commons sites, since copyrighted work frequently ends up on those sites. Also, many Creative Common photos are restricted from commercial use and/or the artists require attribution. Tread carefully and make sure you understand the conditions for using images with Creative Common licenses. For myself, I source my images either from reputable stack photo sites like Dreamstime.com or I use pictures I've taken myself, or I use images generated by Daz 3D. Because of the way DAS 3D licensing works, you can use any 2D images you generate from their 3D assets. If you generate a 2D image from those assets, you have the right to use it. As for AI generated images, read Amazon’s and the other site’s instructions on the use of the AI carefully before making something with the assistance of AI or wholly by AI. It's possible Amazon and the other bookstores in the future may somehow penalize work created with AI, so it's not worth risking future problems by not disclosing AI use properly. Also, many people feel very strongly negative feelings about AI Art and associate it with books created using ChatGPT. As of right now on Amazon, if you publish a book, there is a check box you have to check saying that no elements of the book or its cover were created using AI. If you don't check that then your book has a little notice once published saying created with the assistance of AI, which can of course turn people off. And I suspect that Amazon added that so that if some point the legal environment turns against AI, they have a quick and easy way to say they're in compliance and getting rid of most of the AI generated content on their site. So for now, I would strongly recommend that you avoid using AI generated images on your cover. #4: The fourth thing you shouldn’t put on your book cover is ineffective review quotes. One or two word reviews on covers like “magical” or “thrilling book” saying nothing about the book and make it look like there wasn't much that was positive to say in the reviews. Conversely, long reviews take up too much space on the cover and end up being hard to read. Someone who isn't well known or a celebrity public figure outside of your genre will look odd or someone who uses a random five star review from Goodreads, like for example Beth from Milwaukee says “I couldn't put it down.” Since the reader likely doesn't know Beth from Milwaukee, it's hard to be excited about her opinion or use Beth from Milwaukee's taste to compare with their own. Many people (often correctly) assume that the reviewer is paid or incentivized to write the review, and that it isn’t sincere. For a public figure/celebrity/author, their review on your cover could be a liability later on if they end up associated with some type of scandal or crime. There is a major scandal going down right now with a major fantasy writer who, it turns out may have been involved in many inappropriate relationships (some of them may have been criminal, though none of this had been confirmed yet), and I bet a lot of people who have this major fantasy author’s blurb quotes on their book cover are kind of wishing they could take it off right now. Another potential pitfall is copyright, because technically anyone who writes reviews owns the copyright to that review. So if you quote, for example, from a random Amazon review, you technically don't have permission to do that unless you actually go out and get permission. So that is something to be aware of with quoting reviews on your cover. It’s generally not worth the hassle in my opinion. #5: So the fifth thing you should not put on your book cover is scantily clad, shirtless, or nude people. Amazon does penalize authors for this, but the enforcement has always been rather inconsistent. The idea is that on Amazon there is what is something that's called “The Erotica Dungeon” where works that feature erotica or erotica style elements on their cover end up and they're not found by general search and you can only get to them through direct links. There's always problems with this, where people who actually do write erotica try to game the system so their books are visible outside of “The Erotica Dungeon” and people who don't write erotica but are mistakenly classified as it end up in “The Erotica Dungeon.” One of the surefire ways to end up in “The Erotica Dungeon” is to have scantily clad, shirtless, or nude people on your book cover. Amazon says book covers are not supposed to contain pornography, which is an intentionally vague warning from Amazon, which means they can interpret it however they want and they need to. Some people find any amount of scantily clad people on a book cover to be gross, awkward, offensive, or embarrassing, even without having to carry the physical book cover around in public or at home. Some people think it makes the book looks like it's from the 1980s or the Fabio era of romance novels, and some people think it means the book is low quality or just erotica. Overall, I found that this tends to get enforced on Amazon when people complain about it, so overall it's best to avoid having scantily clad people in your book cover because it can become a problem for you later on. And in my opinion, in general, it's just in poor taste. #6: The sixth thing you shouldn't have on your book cover is explicit violence/gore. Some people find this a little tricky to define because if you have, for example, on your book cover you have a man holding a sword and he's like making a dramatic pose, is that violence? Not really, no. But if you have the man, you know, driving the sword into someone’s, you know, mouth and blood is exploding on the back of the guy’s head, then that is definitely violence and will lead to your book being flagged. It's very hard to incorporate violence and gore well on your cover and could lead to your book getting flagged. You'll notice that most with thriller or horror stories, which are often very violent. You know, the typical thriller story has, you know, the hero mowing down a bunch of bad guys and horror stories, often are quite violent, especially ones with, you know, serial killers or slashers. But they often don't have scenes from the books on the covers. It's a common convention for thriller novel to have a man with his back to the camera walking towards like the US Capitol, or something under a moody dramatic sky and a horror novel will have, like, you know, an abandoned looking house or a spooky looking forest on the cover or something of that nature. You notice that's not explicit violence. And it's a case where definitely less is more, and being understated is a better idea than being explicit. Anything that shows violence or abuse against children is very likely to be flagged, so avoid that. And then finally, guns on book covers used to be forbidden, but this seems less of a problem now, provided the gun isn't pointed at a person. I've had a couple of book covers where a person is holding a gun, some Nadia ones. Avenging Fire and the Silent Order covers used to have people holding like future guns on them, but so long as the gun isn't pointed at a person or at the reader, then generally you're probably going to be okay. So just keep in mind that sometimes with violence on book covers, less is definitely more. #7: The seventh and final thing that you should not have on your book cover is hate speech. Now hate speech is one of those things that is notoriously difficult to define, especially in the United States with the 1st Amendment and people constantly argue about what it is or what it isn’t or whether something is hate speech or isn't. And of course there's a spectrum to it where someone says something that's very obviously hate speech and can't be construed in any other way to a whole range of other statements that could be interpreted in different ways. But when it comes to book covers, Amazon specifically defines hate speech as “what we determine to be hate speech” and does not give specifics. So that said, it's pretty easy to practically define it as anything that Amazon thinks makes it look bad or could harm their sales across the platform. So if you bear that in mind, it's probably pretty easy to avoid hate speech on your book cover, especially if you're writing about sensitive political topics. And again, that could be an example where once again you don't want to go too explicit, and it's probably fairly easy to avoid putting something that could be construed as hate speech on your book cover. So those are seven things you definitely do not want to put on your book cover. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on 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.

In this week's episode, we take a look at the pros and cons of KDP Print and Ingram Spark, and see which one works best for helping indie authors make excellent print books. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 215 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August 23rd, 2024 and today we are looking at KDP Print and Ingram Spark and seeing which is the better choice for indie authors seeking to make print books. Before we get to our main topic, we will have an update on my current writing projects and the Question of the Week. My current main project is Shield of Conquest and I pleased to report I am 74,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 16 of 23. It helps that I had a 10,000 word day for it this week and another 10,000 word day for last week, which of course really moves the needle forward. I am also 37,000 words into Ghosts in the Tombs, which will be my next book after Shield of Conquest. Then after Shield of Conquest will come Cloak of Illusion and I am 7,000 words into that. So good progress all around. In audiobook news, recording for Half-Orc Paladin is almost done. Hopefully that should be wrapped up next week and then that will be available in audiobook before too much longer. So that's where I’m at with my current writing projects. 00:01:10 Question of the Week Now let's take a look at Question of the Week. I haven't had time to do Question of the Week since July, so let's do one now: If you enjoy reading about history, what is your favorite historical period to read about? No wrong answers, obviously. We had a range of responses to this one. Our first responses from Justin who says: My favorite historical periods are Roman (both Republic and The Empire) and American French and Indian War through The Civil War. The US was blessed to have the leaders that founded it. They were not perfect, but they were very good indeed. What's interesting about that is if you read any biographies about George Washington, you'll find out what he probably wanted more than anything in life was prestige and recognition and I think deep down, he very much would have liked to have been, you know, King George The First of The United States, but at the moment of crisis, he was able to refuse the crown and be only president, be only Mr. President, instead of a king. So that is probably one of the reasons the United States has lasted as long as it has. Our next response comes from AM who says: The 1964-965 World's Fair in New York is a moment when the American corporate optimism of the ‘50s came crashing into the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination and growing civil unrest (some of which was caused by the fair organizer’s policies and decisions as an urban planner in New York City). It introduced both video calls and Belgian waffles to the General American public. It also had a massive impact on pop culture and several of the attractions Disney created for it still exist today: The Carousel of Progress, It's a Small World, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, and the pieces of Ford’s Magic Skyway that are still viewable via Disneyland’s railroad. Our next comment is from Sue, who says: for me, definitely Medieval/Tudor history, although I love all history. I was one of the few of my year at school who chose to study history rather than geography. Maybe that's why I get easily lost in a new place, lol. William says: I have had the feeling that I should read more on the Holy Roman Empire, but all those princedoms and rulers with complex family names makes it a bit daunting. He is entirely right about that. The history of the Holy Roman Empire is indeed quite complicated. Catriona says: I have two. The English Civil War and Medieval British history pre-Norman invasion. Although truth be told, I love history in all respects. I left the UK 20 years ago and have been in Asia ever since, and am in awe of Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, and the history here. Andrew says: The US Civil War. My dad bought a war game in the early ‘80s and got me hooked, followed by Napoleonic Wars. Jeanne says: I've been recently reading a lot on early British history, from the Roman period to the early Medieval period. The history of the British Isles is fascinating because it is made of so many different peoples, languages, and cultures that have all had an influence on modern Great Britain. Barbara says: early English history for me. Anything from William the Conqueror to Richard the Lionheart and Prince John. Richard was popular at the time because of the chivalry, but John was a much better ruler even though he was hated. And John says: Europe 1500 through 1700, also known as “Knights with Guns.” For myself, it's hard to pin down since it will be whatever catches my interest at any given time. Like when I visited the battlefield of Chickamauga in 2022, I went on a long reading spiral about the US Civil War. When I watched Season Four of The Crown, I wound up reading about Thatcher-era Britain to see all the many details that the show got wrong. When I recently read Ghost on the Throne about the Diadochi, the heirs of Alexander the Great, I did a lot of supplemental reading about Alexander the Great and the Wars of the Diadochi as well. Back in 2010, I beat Medieval 2: Total War as the Byzantine Empire faction, so after that I did kind of a deep dive on Byzantine history. All that said, I think two historical periods I read about the most are the second half of the Roman Republic, specifically from the 2nd Punic War to the victory of Augustus and the high Medieval period of Western Europe from about the Norman conquest to the Black Death. I had to laugh when the “how often does your boyfriend think about the Roman Empire?” meme was popular last year because I do actually think about the Roman Republic/Empire a lot, but mostly to mine it for inspiration for fantasy novels. Obviously, the High Medieval period also provides a lot of potential ideas for fantasy books. That said, those two historical periods offer a lot of examples of a fascinating riddle that has no answer: can a good person also be an effective leader who acts in the best interests of his people? Like, Caesar Augustus and King Henry I of England were in questionably very bad men who did a lot of very bad things, yet they're rated among the more effective Roman emperors and English kings because they brought peace and order to their respective realms, whether their realms wanted it or not. Monastic chroniclers at the time said that in King Henry's day, a virgin girl carrying a bag of gold could travel unharmed across England, and while this is obviously a political exaggeration, Henry did in fact impose peace and order on England during his reign. Of course, a bad man can often be a bad leader as well, but I'm afraid one of the unfortunate realities of the human condition is that effective leadership does require a good deal of ruthlessness, and you see a lot of that in both the Roman and in the Medieval periods- bad men who were good leaders and bad men who were also bad leaders. 00:06:33 Main Topic: KDP Print vs. Ingram Spark But this is not a history podcast. This is a podcast about writing and indie publishing, so let's move on over to our main topic, whether KDP Print or Ingram Spark would be better for indies to use to produce their print books. There's an obvious question to ask first: why have print books? There's a couple of different reasons. Some people prefer print books (not as many as they used to), but some people still read print books over ebooks whenever possible. Some people enjoy books both as physical objects and collectibles, and some people enjoy giving books as a gift. Giving a physical book to someone is generally a more satisfying experience than emailing them a code to download the book off their favorite ereader. It is also easier to share print books between people. That way you can read the book and give it to a family member or friend who wants to read it as well without having to purchase an additional copy. It is also an additional source of revenue for indie authors, not a huge source (with certain exceptions). Most indie authors will make more from their ebooks than they will from their print books, but there is potential revenue in print books as well. I checked right before I started recording this podcast and of the money I made from Amazon in 2024 so far this year, about 1.8% of it came from print books. You might say 1.8%, that's not that much. But in this economic climate, I don't think anyone who wants to stay in business should turn away an additional 1.8 percent of revenue. Both KDP Print and Ingram Spark use what's called on demand printing, and we should explain what that is before we go any further. Printing books for self-published writers used to be kind of a nightmarish experience. You might, if you're familiar with the publishing industry at all, might have heard the old joke about how that if you self-publish, you're going to end up with a garage full of books and that did in fact happen to many people. They decided in the 2000s and before that they wanted to self-publish their own books. So they had a contract with the printer and the printer would probably have like a minimum order of like 5,000 copies or something. So you'd have to buy that, and then you'd have your garage full of boxes of books and you'd have to hand sell or find a way to sell all those books one at a time. It was a very unpleasant experience and I'm glad I never tried it, and that I'm fortunate enough to live at a time when the technology has improved quite a bit. Print on demand works that basically it's like one copy is printed whenever you get one order; there's no inventory kept on hand. If you've bought indie books off Amazon, you might notice there's a bit of delay because the book first has to be printed and bound and then it gets shipped to you. This is by contrast to a traditional published book where if say, for example, Stephen King publishes a new novel, there will probably be an initial print round of like 100,000 copies or some equally large number, and then they’ll only print more if those initial 100,000 copies sell out. This is a very inefficient and cumbersome system, so you can see why ebooks and print on demand are much more economical and environmentally friendly, if you are worried about that. That said, it doesn't actually have to be a choice of KDP Print versus Ingram Spark. They in some ways do different things, and as of today, August 23rd, 2024, you can use both essentially. They're not exclusive and you can do different kinds of print books through both. But we'll get to that in a little bit. Another important thing to be aware of as you're going to do print books is to have realistic expectations and mindset about it. I've noticed many new or younger authors have the dream they're going to get their book on a physical shelf in a physical store or library, but realistically that does not make a lot of financial sense for most people. Most authors (myself among them), will sell much more in ebooks than in the time it would take to chase down individual bookstores and individual libraries and try to sell print books to them. Bookstores and libraries are frequently overwhelmed with requests from indie authors, especially local indie authors, wanting to put their books in their stores. They may have created specific policies in response to that demand, and you may want to check their website before trying to get a local bookstore or a library to carry your book. If you do want to get your book into a physical store, it is an uphill battle, and frankly, it's probably not worth the time it would take you to sell to fight that battle. Shelf space in bookstores is both limited and shrinking, especially as bookstores sell more things like toys or stationery/lifestyle items which have a bigger profit margin than books, and you don't have the resources as an indie author to compete against the Big 5 for space on those shelves. Bookstores usually expect a discount of around 35 to 45% off retail as well, which means the higher cost of printing on demand makes this very difficult and gives indies the big disadvantage of getting a book into a bookstore. Now I know it sounds like I just was talking down print books quite a bit, but like I said, 1.8% extra revenue. So most of your print book sales will probably be online and probably from people who order directly, like your readers who most enjoy your book and want a physical copy for their collection or readers who will buy the physical book and give it as a gift to someone they want to give it as a present to. I should note that I've been talking about applies to fiction, but the rules are slightly different when it comes to nonfiction. I should note that my nonfiction book, the Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide across its entire lifetime, fully 25% of its sales have been in paperback. Because that is if people need specific nonfiction in print, especially if it's a technical nonfiction where they can refer back to it like my Linux book, then they will be more likely to order it in print. So that is something else to bear in mind as we now dive into the next section of the show, the difference between KDP Print and Ingram Spark. We will look at the pros and cons for both. For KDP Print (that is Amazon's program for selling print books on their site), the pros are it's obviously the best option for selling print books on Amazon, and it's not uncommon for people to use KDP Print for selling paper books on Amazon and then some other service for selling paper books at other online stores. There are no setup fees and there is a window where you can make changes without a fee. The reporting is either real time or real close to real time and you can see print sales next to ebook sales stats. Like when I was referencing various sales figures throughout the recording of the show, I just paused quickly to check on my KDP dashboard and was able to pull up the figures with a couple of clicks. Pricing is an advantage. Amazon offers the most favorable rate for selling directly on Amazon. In return, Amazon controls the minimum price for the book, kind of like they do for audiobooks, which is usually pretty similar to the cost of printing and shipping. When you set up a print book on KDP Print, Amazon will say based on its size, this is the minimum price. You have to sell at this price and you can't go any lower and then you can set the price however high you want. Usually it's best to set the price so that you get about $3 or so per copy or if you go into expand distribution, that you get dollar per copy of it sold. Expanded distribution, we're going to talk about right now in the con section of KDP Print. There are frequently issues with third party sellers. The problem is that KDP Print offers something called expanded distribution, where if you check that box, your book will be sold through Amazon on a variety of different sites like Barnes and Noble and other physical bookstores that have the online store for a reduced rate. So for example, if you sell a copy of your KDP Print book, you get $3 on Amazon, through expanded distribution you'd get like $1.00. The problem with that is it doesn't always work right. Many of the stores don't always integrate properly with Amazon, so the book will show up, but the cover will be missing or the book just won't show up at all, or some of the stores only update like every month or even quarterly sometimes. So that can be a problem as well. KDP Print, like many print on demand services, does not offer the ability to make books returnable, which is something bookstores expect and want, and most physical bookstores will not take a book that is not returnable. There's a cultural component there as well. Most physical bookstores, especially most independent physical bookstores, do not want to order books from their biggest enemy, Amazon, and will flatly refuse if you ask. Some and even a significant number of libraries are unable to order print books from Amazon or it requires more paperwork or effort for them to do so, and therefore they don't really want to bother. Now let's take a look at KDP Print’s main rival Ingram Spark, which is another print on demand service. The premise for this is that Ingram Spark is much better at Amazon at selling books at non-Amazon bookstores, which of course makes a lot of sense. It's also easier to sell to libraries from Ingram Spark than it is from KDP Print. You do have more freedom in pricing the book, which you have to be careful for because it is possible to set things up so that you lose money with every book sale, which Amazon KDP Print does not let you do for obvious reasons. Opinions may differ, but some people do think the covers and interiors look nicer from Ingram Spark for than they do from KDP, and you can order bulk copies at wholesale prices, which you can't really do on KDP Print. You sort of can- you can order things at the author rates, but Ingram Spark has a bigger discount for that. You can also produce a bigger variety of books through Ingram Spark in different paperback sizes and different hardback sizes. So all that sounds good, but there is a pretty significant list of cons as well. There are set up fees for each title, which there are not for Amazon KDP Print. Additionally, if you make any change to the book whatsoever after it is published, any change at all, whether it's a new cover, fixing a typo in the text, whatever, you have to pay a fee for any change you make in the book after it is published. Unsurprisingly, it is harder to sell an Ingram Spark book on Amazon than it is anywhere else. Some people say (and I have no way of confirming this) that Amazon artificially increases the delivery times for these titles, but it's probably more likely is that Ingram Spark would have to print the book, ship it to Amazon, and then Amazon would have to ship it to the customer, which would add quite a bit of roundabout travel to the book, which is why some indie authors who are very into print sales tend to use KDB Print for any books that sell on Amazon, and they restrict those books to Amazon and sell their wide books at other bookstores using Ingram Spark. So what conclusion can we draw from this? If you only have time to pursue one, go with KDP Print since Amazon is the majority of print sales, especially in the US right now. That's what I do. If I wanted to do more elaborate paperback books, I would probably go through Ingram Spark, but KDP Print is pretty good at meeting my needs. Unless something changes drastically, I will probably keep doing that for the foreseeable future. However, if you have the time and the ability to do both, it is advantageous to do both. You will need separate ISBNs. You get an ISBN from Amazon and an ISBN from Ingram for the edition of the book you do through there. You could do books through KDP Print and have them just on Amazon and then have the books for the other stores, have those go through just Ingram Spark. This is a bit more work, but if you are an author who is very interested in print books or does a lot of business in print books, that may be advantageous for you to pursue. So to sum up, KDP Print is the simpler, easier option and is probably good enough for most indie authors, whereas Ingram Spark offers a lot more options but is more expensive to use and probably requires greater knowledge to use effectively. But remember, if you are an indie author, you probably will still be making most of your money on ebooks so don't stress out too much about the paper books. And as I mentioned before, my Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide, I got 25% of its revenue from its lifetime from the print book, but that means 75% of the revenue still came from the ebook. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we consider whether or not writers should substantially rewrite previously published novels. We also take a brief look at imposter syndrome in writers. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 214 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 16th, 2024 and today we are examining whether writers should rewrite and republish their old books. We'll also take a brief look at the phenomenon of imposter syndrome in writers. Before we get into that, let's have a look at my current writing projects. Now that Half-Orc Paladin is out, my main focus is Shield of Conquest. I am 39,000 words into the rough draft, which puts me on Chapter 9 of 22. I think the rough draft will end up at about 100,000 words or so, but we'll see. I'm still hoping to have that out in September, if at all possible. I'm also 32,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs, the third book in the Ghost Armor series. I am very much hoping to have that out in early October, but we'll see how the next couple of months go. I’m also 4,000 words into Cloak of Illusion, which will be the book I write after Shield of Conquest and Ghost in the Tombs are finished and that will probably be around November or possibly December. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to work on once those three books are done, but in all probability, it's going to be Elven Sorcerer, which will be the fourth book in the Rivah series. In audiobook news, I have quite a few audiobooks underway. Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is currently being recorded by C.J. McAllister. Half-Orc Paladin is already being recorded by Leanne Woodward. Brad Wills is currently recording Shield of Darkness as well, so hopefully we should have updates on those soon and then you can maybe listen to previews of those upcoming audiobooks on this podcast. 00:01:41 Imposter Syndrome and Writers Now on to our first topic, imposter syndrome and writers, which is inspired by a reader question. Surabhi wrote in to ask: “Have you, as a very prolific writer, ever faced impostor syndrome or self-doubt? Do you still do? And what helps you overcome those doubts? I think self-doubt is something most authors go through.” Well, to be totally honest, in my case, not really. Impostor syndrome has not been one of my personal challenges. Whatever my personal struggle bus might have been in life, let’s say impostor syndrome was not among the passengers. I did almost quit writing fiction at the end of 2010, but not out of impostor syndrome. I was just disgusted with traditional publishing and traditional science fiction and fantasy publishing in particular, an emotion that has not substantially changed in the last 14 years. My frustration wasn't one of impostor syndrome. I'd written 10 novels at that point. I knew I could do it, but that it was nearly impossible to break into traditional publishing, and that even if you did, you wouldn't make very much money. I had published two books at that time through small presses. I've mentioned before that the royalties from the second book I published were enough that I could buy a Triple Whopper from Burger King. While that was a very tasty burger, that was not a lot of money. So by the end of 2010, I decided that I was wasting my time and I needed to pursue more profitable enterprises. But right about that time, I discovered self-publishing and things took off from there. But I can pinpoint the exact moment when I lost any trace of impostor syndrome when it comes to writing. It was in early 2012, about 12 years ago now, when I got a letter from the IRS informing me, to paraphrase a bit, that I needed to be paying much more of self-publishing writing income. That was my fault, to be fair. At the time, I was new to the idea of quarterly tax payments and didn't fully understand how they worked and I had messed one up. I sent in the payment with the associated penalty and that was that. The IRS, if you're not familiar with it, is the American federal tax collection agency. It famously has no sense of humor whatsoever and is also very fond of accuracy. So if the IRS was of the opinion that I was a good enough writer that I need to be paying more on my writing income, I sure wasn't going to argue with them. That semi-amusing anecdote aside, let's return at last to our original point. I have to admit that impostor syndrome has never really been a problem for me. I don't present myself as something other than what I actually am. I freely admit when I don't know something, which happens a lot, and I only rarely speak or write without thoroughly thinking it through first. Thinking aloud is something I don't really do. If I encounter something I don't know how to do that I nonetheless have to do, my usual approach, for better or for worse, is to make a good faith approach to muddle through and hope for the best, which can have results ranging from very good to less than desirable, like that thing in 2012 with the quarterly tax payment I initially messed up. I am not a psychiatrist or a therapist, but I suppose the only advice I would offer a writer with impostor syndrome is to never engage in self-denigration, whether aloud or as part of your internal monologue. You shouldn't puff yourself up falsely, but neither should you put yourself down inaccurately. Lying to yourself and others that you're worse at something that you really are is just the same as pretending to be good at something you're not. It's best to view all things as they are, without flattery or inaccurate denigration, even oneself. But it's also good to be kind to yourself. I’ve noticed people will sometimes say things about themselves that they would never in a million years say about someone else. And of course, the opposite is also true, but that's a different problem and a topic for a different podcast. So that is what I have to say about imposter syndrome in writers. 00:05:22 Main Topic: Revising and Republishing Completed Novels Now on to our main topic, which came in when reader AN wrote in with an interesting question. “A possible question to explore is whether it's a good or worthwhile idea to revise and republish completed novels. Does doing this have merit artistically? Financially, it seems ill-advised. To me, it makes sense from a “I want to perfect my magnum opus” kind of way, but financially, it probably does not for the effort involved. Is it possible to have without success by republishing and doing a heavy marketing push? I ask because an author I enjoy republished two novels with extensive edits, including hundreds of pages of new fiction. Some plots were altered. Some characters were completely rewritten and new scenes were even added. I found that I immensely enjoyed the revisions and additions, even though the first editions were already excellent. While I did buy the new editions, it was only because I happened to see a comment on the author’s blog about the rewrites and was curious. It was happenstance, really. I would like to hear your thoughts on this if you have the interest and time.” Well, we are in luck because I do have interest in answering this question because it will make a good topic for the podcast. I should start off my answer by saying that this isn't something I would do. When it comes to my writing, my attitude is that of Pontius Pilate who, while not an admirable figure in any other way, had a good quote: “quod scripsi, scripsi,” In English, “what I have written, I have written.” That said, I have changed minor things (typo corrections, maybe changing a sentence or two if the readers consistently don't understand them, that kind of minor level change). I did change the titles of the Stealth and Spells series because I thought people were confusing them with the Sevenfold Sword books, but I haven't completely rewritten and republished a previously published novel in any substantial way. For myself, at least, I think, it's always better to keep moving forward. If I look back at nearly anything I've written, I always think I could have done this or that better, but that line of thought can be a psychological trap for writers, leading them to endlessly repolish old work instead of forging ahead with something new. That said, what works for me will not work for everyone. I have seen writers rewrite and republish old books. If that is something you want to do, I think you first have to ask yourself the five following questions.  One: Is there sufficient demand? That is, will people be interested in reading a rewritten book or would they much rather have the next book in the series? There are only 24 hours in the day and that means there is only so much writing time. Would your time be better spent writing a new book instead of rewriting an old one? As reader AN said before, a passion project is one thing, but if it's not a passion project and you spend a lot of time rewriting and republishing the book and no one buys it, then that's time that could have been better spent elsewhere. Question Number Two: will rewriting the book annoy readers? It's important to remember that a writer’s perception of his or her work often has no alignment whatsoever with what the readers actually think of the book. In my honest opinion, I think The Tower of Endless World series is probably my weakest books that I've written, but I have some readers who think they're their favorite things and the best thing I've ever written. I'm not going to argue with them because the reader's opinion is the reader's opinion. You could look at one of your books and think it's flawed and you have serious revision. By contrast, as I just said, it could be a reader's favorite of your books. Indeed, it could be one of the reader’s favorite books overall. If you rewrite the book, that could really annoy the readers who like the book, especially if the book in question is a favorite with many of your readers. Question Three: is rewriting the book actually worth your time? We touched on this above, but there's only so much time to write in any given day. Would rewriting the previously published book be the best use of your writing time? Which leads into Question Four: Is the book worth rewriting? Does the book actually need to be rewritten may be a better way of saying that. As we mentioned above, a writer’s judgment of his or her own work is often not in agreement with what the readers think of that book, and writers are notoriously poor judges of their own writing. I suspect that's a reflection of how random writing could be sometimes, like you can plan something for months and carefully execute it, and no one really notices. But then something you threw in at the last minute before the book was published becomes everyone's favorite scene in the book. That's just the nature of art. You can never be sure what will resonate with people. An example: I have a relative who is an amazing cook, but if you compliment her food, she gets angry because she thinks it's never good enough and that she only sees the flaws (which, to be honest, nearly almost always exist only in her mind and nowhere else). Writers often have something of the same relationship with their books, so the book might not be as bad as you think it is and rewriting it might be unnecessary. And finally, Question 5: would you be psychologically better off writing the next book? Writers, like many creative individuals, are prone to certain psychological traps. We already discussed imposter syndrome and two of the other traps are endlessly repolishing old work and procrastination. You see some writers who get caught in the trap of endlessly rewriting and repolishing their first chapter or their first book. Would republishing an older book be an aspect of that? Procrastination is something else to which writers are very prone. It's very easy to catch yourself doing writing adjacent work like updating your website or whatever instead of actually writing down new words. Writing new stuff is always a bit of an expenditure of energy, and the human tendency is to procrastinate when faced with expending energy. That's why at the gym you often see newcomers spending a lot of time fiddling with their playlists or trying to figure out the TVs instead of getting down to business with their workouts. It's also why otherwise successful writers fall into the trap of writing prequels, in my opinion. It's easier to expand upon the established story than striking out in a new direction. Republishing an old book might well be an aspect of procrastination. So let's summarize. To sum up, completely rewriting and republishing an old book isn't something I would do myself. That said, it's not necessarily a bad idea and can in fact be something that is artistically and maybe even financially valuable to you as a writer so long as your answers to the five questions we just discussed are good ones. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (transcripts are available from Episodes 140-214). If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review at your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look back at one of our more popular episodes, which discusses three different methods for starting your novel and introducing the central conflict. The episode ends with a preview of the audiobook of WIZARD-THIEF, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates (August 2024) Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 213 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August the 9th, 2024 and today we are looking back at one of our older episodes, specifically Episode 110: Three Techniques for Starting Your Novel and Introducing the Conflict (from way back in February of 2022). It was one of the more popular episodes, so it seems like a good one to replay. Next week, we will go back to recording new episodes, but I’ve had a lot to do in real life these past couple weeks, so it seems like a good time to rerun some old episodes. If you have 213 episodes of your podcast, what's the point unless you can dig into the archives and rerun an old episode every once in a while? We will return to new episodes next week. We'll also close out this episode with a short preview of the audiobook of Wizard-Thief (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward). So listen for that at the end of the show. Before we get back to our old episode, let's have an update on my current writing projects. Half-Orc Paladin is done and it is available. You can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. People have asked when it's going to come to the other stores and it will once the series is done and all six books are out, which should be sometime in 2025. Now that Half-Orc Paladin is done, I am working on Shield of Conquest as my main project. I am on Chapter 3 of 22, which puts me 11,000 words into it. After that, I shall write Ghost in the Tombs and I'm 31,000 words into that. And after Ghost in the Tombs is done, I will then start on Cloak of Illusion, and I am 1,000 words into that. So if all goes well, hopefully we will have Shield of Conquest in September, Ghost in the Tombs of October, and Cloak of Illusion in November, which pretty much takes us almost to the end of 2024. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects and now we will flash back to February 2022 and talk about 3 techniques to start your novel/introducing the conflict, and then we'll close out the show with a preview of the audiobook of Wizard-Thief, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward.   00:02:06 Re-airing of Episode 110 Begins. Introduction and Writing Updates from February 2022   Hello. Welcome to Episode 110 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 25th, 2022 and today we're going to talk about how to start your book and introduce your conflict. Before we get into that, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. Editing is underway for Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, and I also wrote a tie-in short story to go with it called The First Warlock, which is an origin story for one the new villains introduced in Blade of the Elves. This week I finished Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, started editing, and also finished The First Warlock, and so if editing goes well and all goes well, that should be out sometime in March. I also finished writing Chapter One of Cloak of Shards. That will be my next main project after Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves is published in March. In audiobook news, I am beginning to proof-listen to chapters for Frostborn: The Dragon Knight (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills). So if all goes well, we should be able to listen to Frostborn: The Dragon Knight on audiobook platforms before too much longer. 00:03:22 Reader Question on Services for Physical Book Publishing Before we get into our main topic, we have one question from a reader this week. Steve asks: who do you typically do your physical publishing through, if I may ask? I almost always use Kindle Direct Publishing Print. It's generally the easiest and the simplest to use and offers both paperback and hardback now. Other providers like Ingram Spark offer a lot more options and customization options, but Ingram Spark is definitely harder and more complicated to use than Kindle Direct Publishing Print. And it’s also easier to lose money doing that, since you can accidentally set yourself up with a negative return rate, which Amazon doesn't let you do. Draft to Digital has a print service. I've heard good things about it, but I've never actually used it, so I can't attest to it one way or the other. So if you're just starting out with your first book like I believe Steve is, then probably Kindle Direct Publishing Print is your quickest and easiest option for getting your book in paperback and hardback. 00:04:23 Main Topic of the Week: How to Start Your Book and Introduce Conflict So our main topic this week will be how to start your book and how to introduce your conflict. And of course, there's only one sentence that can start out that topic: “It was a dark and stormy night.” That sentence is perhaps the most cliched opening line in English literature. Of course, the opposite of that is writers who try to make the opening line of their book as shocking and memorable as possible, like for example, something along the lines of “today was the day I died for the seventh time.” If you read websites and Internet groups where writers frequent, you will often see writers agonizing at length about the opening line of their novel. Generally, the agonizing is all unnecessary. The introduction to your story has three purposes, and if you keep those three functions in mind, it will be much easier to both write the opening mind and the rest of the introduction. First, the introduction should catch the reader's attention. Second, the introduction should introduce the protagonist and the leading characters. Third, it should set the stage for the story’s conflict. Let's go through each of these purposes and then share three methods for getting your story off the ground. First, catch the reader’s attention. As we mentioned above, the necessity of seizing the reader's attention and of crafting an interesting opening sentence is a source of much angst in various Internet writers’ forums. That said, it's best not to overthink things. The key is to provide just a little mystery, enough to inspire your curiosity and encourage the reader to continue further into the book. The easiest way to be interesting is not to be boring. That's, you know, easy to say, but difficult to do. There are, alas, numerous boring ways to start a book, and you should avoid them. It is best to avoid descriptions of the weather, like the famous dark and stormy night. Likewise, it is a good idea to avoid starting your book with lengthy descriptions of the scenery or the setting. Writers who are good at writing lovely prose might pull that off. But I'm not one of those writers, and in my opinion, lovely prose is only useful as a vehicle to advance the plot. Like most advice, “don't be boring” is easy to say and harder to do. How do you provide a little mystery in your novel’s introduction? You want to set up a situation where you've inspired just enough curiosity in your reader that they keep reading. The first sentence doesn't have to carry the entire load, but it does help. “After dropping my children off at daycare, I drove to the gas station, loaded my pistol, and walked inside.” This example of an opening sentence might be a bit overdramatic, but it serves to illustrate the point. The narrator is seemingly a responsible parent, dropping his or her children off at daycare before heading to work. Why, then, is the narrator walking into a gas station with a weapon? For many readers, this will inspire enough curiosity to keep reading. Here is the opening sentence from my urban fantasy novel, Cloak Games: Thief Trap (which as of this recording is available for free on all book all ebook platforms). “One of the earliest things I remember is watching the entire United States Congress commit suicide on national television.” Readers have emailed to tell me that this is one of the more effective opening sentences that I have written. It is both a bit of a shock and a mystery hook. Why is a small child watching in the government commit suicide on national TV? If the reader wants to find out why, they will have to read on. Second, introduce the characters. The introduction of the story must also present the main characters to the reader. Obviously, you don't need to introduce all the characters in the book to the reader right away, nor all the details about them. This, in fact, would be a bad idea. The easiest way to introduce any characters in the introduction is to have them engaged in something that reflects their personality and potential conflicts. For example, consider the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The book opens with letters written by Jonathan Harker to his fiancée, Mina Murray. In the letters, we learn that Harker is a new solicitor on his way to Transylvania to conduct a real estate transaction with an eccentric rural nobleman named Count Dracula. This handily introduces the characters of Harker, Mina, and Dracula, and sets up the stakes. Harker wants to establish himself in his profession so he can marry Mina, and he just needs to conclude his business with Dracula. Unfortunately for Harker, Dracula turns out to be far more dangerous than he initially appears. Soon, both Harker and the reader realize that Dracula is in fact an ancient vampire and the book’s conflict begins. Introducing the characters is a good way to segue into setting the stage for the story’s conflict, which we will discuss next. Third, introducing the conflict. The third and final purpose of the introduction is to introduce the reader to the story’s conflict or antagonist. There are lots of fun and exciting ways to introduce the conflict. And I say fun and exciting because this is often where the story starts getting quite energetic. In a fantasy novel, it might be when the hero's village is attacked by orcs. In a mystery story, it's when someone stumbles across a dead body. In a thriller novel, perhaps the hero finds a sinister terror plot that is already well underway. The conflict can also be introduced more sedately. In an action themed book, it is easy to introduce the conflict via sudden violence, the attack of orcs, or sudden murder. Other kinds of stories may not involve so much physical danger. The central conflict of most romance novels, for example, is whether or not the heroine and the love interest will get together and whether or not they can overcome the assorted obstacles preventing them from having a relationship. A romance novel might introduce the conflict by having the love interest antagonize the heroine in some way. Perhaps the love interest is a lawyer who represents the heroine’s business rival or the heroine is a local law enforcement official and the love interest is an FBI agent who threatens to take over her case. Regardless of how the conflict is introduced, the most important part of the conflict is that it must compel the protagonist to take action. If the conflict or the antagonist isn't serious enough to force the protagonist to act, then nothing happens and you don't have a story. It is possible to have the protagonist refuse to engage with the conflict, only to be forced into it later. For example, take a detective story where the main character, a retired cop, refuses to look into an old case. The retired cop's former partner is murdered and the grief over his death drives the protagonist into investigating. Now that you're familiar with the three roles an introduction needs to fill, let's take a look at three different methods of writing an introduction: a prologue, Bildungsroman/a slow build, or in media res/in the middle of things. First, a prologue. A prologue is a short preamble before the main story where you introduce the situation and certain facts about the setting to the reader, facts that your protagonist may not discover until later in the novel. The disadvantage of the prologue is that you will probably need to continue the introduction within the main body of the story, since the prologue is usually not enough to introduce the reader to the protagonist and the main conflict in an interesting way. The advantage of a prologue is that you can show the reader vital facts about the story and obtaining those facts might be a central plot point for the main characters. One of the better examples of a good prologue I've read comes from the mystery novel Field of Prey by John Sanford. The novel revolves around Detective Lucas Davenport's efforts to find a pair of serial killers operating in rural Minnesota. The prologue introduces the two serial killers and shows how they stumble across their preferred method of capturing their victims. In terms of story structure, that means the reader immediately knows who the killers are, even though Davenport and the other detectives do not. The actual plot does not kick off until the first chapter, when a pair of teenagers accidentally discover where the serial killers have been hiding the bodies of their victims. But throughout the book, the reader's advance knowledge from the prologue adds an additional layer of tension to the story, especially when one of the investigators stumbles across the killers without realizing his mortal peril. Field of Prey had an effective prologue, but I have to admit, a prologue is my least favorite technique for an introduction. In the hands of a capable writer, a prologue works, but I've seen a lot of prologues used to dump information on the reader that the writer couldn't figure out how to reveal in the story or to introduce a character who doesn't turn up until 2/3 of the way through the book. If you do use a prologue, you will likely have to combine it with one of the other two introductory techniques we'll discuss during this podcast. That leads us to the second technique, Bildungsroman, which I think I pronounced correctly, but if I didn't, my apologies. The term Bildungsroman is a German word that means education novel and refers to a genre of fiction that revolves around the education and development of a young protagonist. Nowadays, in English, we tend to call these kind of books coming of age novels. As you might expect, books like this tend to be quite leisurely, following the protagonist from childhood to adulthood. I found that Bildungsroman is also a useful shorthand to describe a kind of introduction where the story slowly builds to the conflict. The Lord of the Rings is a good example of a story with a leisurely introduction to the conflict. Frodo doesn't learn that his uncle Bilbo's magic ring is in fact The One Ring until well into the story, and even more time passes before he leaves with the ring to keep it safe. For that matter, the central conflict isn't fully expressed, that the ring must be destroyed and Frodo is the one to do it, until well into the book. It can be tricky to hold the reader's interest during a long and leisurely introduction. A good way to keep the reader's interest is to introduce an element of mystery to a long introduction. In a fantasy novel, the protagonist might have a secret he has to keep from everyone. Perhaps he has magical abilities and is hiding them for fear of persecution, or he’s secretly the heir to a deposed king and the current regime will kill him if they find him. A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, is a good example of a slow introduction, even though the entire book is relatively short. Doctor Watson needs a roommate to help cover his rent, so he moves in with the mysterious Sherlock Holmes. Holmes has many eccentricities, lending an air of mystery to him, and finally Watson learns that Holmes is consulting detective. The actual central conflict of the book (Holmes is brought in to solve a mysterious murder) does not take place until well into the story, but the mystery around Holmes himself helps hold the reader’s interest. That leads to our third potential technique for starting a story, in media res. Now in media res is a Latin phrase that translates to “into the middle of things” in English and refers to the kind of introduction where you immediately thrust the reader into the plot without much in the way of build up. There are many different methods to do this, and in some ways, it is much easier to write than a slower introduction. In a fantasy novel, for example, the protagonist might wake up to find his village under attack by orcs. In a military science fiction novel, the book could start with the protagonist leading his platoon or squadron into battle against the space bugs. I have to admit, this story trope does seem quite common in military science fiction. A contemporary mystery novel could open with the detective standing over the murder victim and starting the investigation that will be the central conflict of the plot. A legal thriller might open in the middle of a high stakes trial, with the judge issuing a ruling that sets back the protagonist case and forces her to pursue a different strategy. The strength of starting the plot in media res is that you can immediately hook the reader with an action scene or some other kind of problem. It's easier to draw the reader's attention with a battle scene or some sort of dramatic sequence than it is with a slower introduction. You can then shift to the next phase of story structure and the conflict once you've gotten through the initial introduction. The weakness of starting in media res is that you're probably going to skip a lot of important information for the plot that you'll need to address later. To return to our previous examples, why are the orcs attacking the protagonist’s village? Or why is the protagonist leading his platoon into battle against the space bugs? The danger is that you might be tempted to engage in massive info dumps later in the book, where characters state obvious things to each other that they already know, like for example, “as you know, Bob, we're both detectives engaged in a murder investigation.” Now people in real life generally do not talk that way, and using infodumps in dialogue or regular prose runs the risk of breaking the story’s air of verisimilitude. The way to avoid info dumps is to use the release of new information as part of driving the plot. As always, the best way to do that is to keep an element of mystery in the story, allowing you to reveal information for maximum dramatic effect. To return to the example of the mystery novel that opens with the detective standing over the dead body, let's say that after the first few chapters, the detective’s superior threatens to pull him off the case. There could be any number of reasons. Perhaps the detective botched a similar case, or the detective's partner was killed investigating the similar case, and the failure haunts our protagonist to this day or the murder has political implications and the detective superior is feeling pressure from his bosses to bury the case. Revealing this information as a complication in the plot rather than an infodump will improve the story. In our example of a fantasy novel where the protagonist’s village is attacked by orcs and the villagers are taken captive, perhaps the human kingdom and the orcs have been at war for centuries. Perhaps the orcs were responding to a human attack, or maybe there is a traitor in the human kingdom who is working with the orcs. Either way, it is better for the protagonist to discover this during the plot rather than explaining it all in the introduction. Starting the story in media res is a great way to kick off the book, but it can be a challenge to not let things slacken after that. Retaining an element of mystery and, of course, complications for a protagonist to face, will keep things moving and interesting for the reader. As a final point, it is possible to open your book with a combination of prologue, Bildungsroman, and in media res, though you might want to wait until you have more experience writing novels before trying something complicated. The harsh advice of “keep it simple, stupid” applies to many areas of life and keeping things as simple as possible is often useful for writing novels as well. So, I hope you have found that helpful and that those techniques will be of use to you as you seek to start writing your own novels and short stories. So that is it for this week. Thank you all for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look back at one of 2022's most popular episodes and discuss how to use dialogue to create distinctive characters. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates (August 2024) Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 212 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is August 1st, 2024 and today we're looking back at one of our old episodes, specifically Episode 120: Using Dialogue to Create Distinct Characters, which I first aired back in May 2022. I am afraid I don't have time to record a new episode this week, so it seemed like a good idea to look back at one of the more popular past episodes and run it again, so that's what we're going to do this week. Before we get to that, let's have an update on my current writing projects. The final draft of Half-Orc Paladin is just about done. There's only a couple more tweaks to do and this episode, if all goes well, goes live on August 5th. I'm hoping to publish Half-Orc Paladin on August 6th, if everything goes well. So hopefully we'll all have that book before much longer. Like the first two in the Rivah series, it will be in Kindle Unlimited, and then once all six books are done in the series (probably next year sometime), then I will take it wide to all the other platforms. In audiobook news, the audiobook of Wizard-Thief is finished. That would be the second Rivah book, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. That is some very good timing because as I mentioned before, Half-Orc Paladin is going to come out shortly and Wizard-Thief is available at all the usual audiobook stores. Once Half-Orc Paladin is done, my main project is going to be Shield of Conquest. I am currently 5,500 words into it. Hopefully, that should come out in September, if all goes well. The two books I write after that will be Ghost in the Tombs and then Cloak of Illusion. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. And now let's have a flashback to May 2022 when we talked about different tips for creating distinct dialogue for your characters. 00:01:57 Episode 120’s Introduction and Writing Updates (May 2022) Hello, welcome to Episode 120 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 6th, 2022 and today we're going to discuss how to use dialogue to help with characterization. I'm also going to talk about something I didn't think I would ever do: buy an Xbox. Before we get into all that, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I am exactly 59,000 words into Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves, and I am definitely going to get to 60,000 before I have to call it a day. I'm also about 3,700 words into Cloak of Spears and that will be the book that hopefully comes out after Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves. I'm hoping to have Blade of the Elves out in June and Cloak of Spears out in July. I am also proof listening to Frostborn: The Shadow Prison the audiobook. I've listened to the first six chapters of it and I'm very excited to have that series complete in audiobook and available for you to listen to, and that should be probably June or July when that's finally done, hopefully sooner. 00:03:03 Thoughts and Reader Comments on the Xbox Now for our first of our topics: the Xbox. I recently joked that it was old enough for a midlife crisis now. I thought about it and I bought an Xbox. Other than the Nintendo Switch, which I got in 2019 to celebrate my 100th book, which was Dragontiarna: Knights (the audiobook book version of which is now free to Audible members). It's the first traditional game console I've used since 1998, and I didn't play any console games at all from 1998 to 2019. The technology has changed just a little bit since 1998. The reason I got an Xbox is because back in the old days, one of my jobs was doing tech support for college dormitories. I used to get very annoyed when students complained about connectivity problems with their Xboxes and PlayStations- college is expensive, and I thought at the time was you should be doing homework and networking career opportunities, not playing games. But I'm older now, maybe marginally wiser. Traditionally, a midlife crisis is when you reflect back on your life and try to relive your youth or experience things that you missed out on the first time around. That said, I'm pretty happy with how my life turned out, and I think I'm blessed to be able to say that. If Doc Brown pulled up in his DeLorean and offered me a chance to go back and change something, I’d tell him nah, I'm good. Also, I've seen enough time travel stories to know that if I tried to change something, one of the people who complained to me that Xbox Live was running slow would wind up becoming the tyrannical supreme leader of the dystopian imperium of global harmony or something, so no going around messing with the past. That said, I did wonder if I missed out on something in terms of console gaming. Perhaps I denied myself what would otherwise have been an enjoyable and enriching experience, so I got an Xbox Series X brand new game console. What's the first game I play? Skyrim, obviously. I have to admit playing Skyrim this way is very comfortable and I'm going to finish a quest I never played on PC or Switch, the Imperial Storm Cloak Civil War. I flipped a coin and it landed on Empire, so I sided with the Empire. Once I win the Empire’s war for them, it will be on to the Dawnguard expansion. I have to admit the Xbox ecosystem is very impressive. Granted, I still remember playing PC games by swapping out a stack of five and 1/4 inch floppies and very carefully configuring emm386.exe, so maybe I'm easily impressed, but still. When I talked about this on Facebook, a couple of people had opinions. William said: the original Halo is the only Xbox game I've ever really played, but the pace is very good and goes well with the sci-fi story. I have tried Halo since it came with Game Pass. So far I've managed to figure out how to run in circles while shooting at the wall and how to accidentally roll the car down the hillside into the stream. Hopefully if I have time to play it more, I will get better at it. Scott says: Elden Ring is currently popular. You may enjoy if you like Skyrim. I play Elder Scrolls Online on PC, however, so I can't vouch for the console experience. I've heard good things about Elden Ring from many different people, and I was considering giving Elder Scrolls Online a try next month after I'm a little less busy. I don't really like multiplayer games because to be perfectly frank, computer games are where I go when I get tired of people and I want to unwind a bit, but I've heard there's a ton of excellent solo content in Elder Scrolls Online, and if you want to, you don't ever have to interact with another human while you're playing the game. I may have to give that a try. Jesse says: Dawnguard was excellent. Dawnguard is one of the expansions for Skyrim, and unfortunately it turns out I won't be able to play it on the Xbox because I finished the Civil War plot line and then I tried to start the Dawnguard plot line. However, there's a bug in the Xbox version of the game where if you find the location of the vampire lord’s castle before you come there for the quest, the quest line breaks and doesn't continue, so I don't think I'll be able to play Dawnguard on Xbox. If I want to play it, I'll probably play the Switch because of my Switch save state for Skyrim. I haven't visited the vampire lord’s castle yet, so I think I'm going to play Dragonborn instead once I have a little more money in game saved up. 00:07:12 Main Topic: Dialogue and Characters Now on to the main topic of this week's show, which comes from a question that Scott asked. It was a very interesting question that got me thinking, which is why it's now the topic of this week's podcast. Scott's question is: “a question on making dialogue for individual characters unique to them. It's very common for all characters to sound so homogeneous that attribution is the only way to know one speaker from another's. Awkward accents aside, what are some techniques that help separate social classes and regions in speech?” I think Scott’s absolutely right- accents aren't a great way to differentiate characters in books. That's different in audiobooks, of course, but that's a whole different kettle of fish. There's this example in HP Lovecraft’s short story of The Color Out of Space of a farmer talking a phonetic accent, and it's so bad in what’s otherwise a very interesting horror story. And everyone should read that story just to read that farmer's dialogue as an example of how not to write phonetically accented dialogue. That said, I've found in my own writing, in my own experience, that varying sentence structure and length and vocabulary are better as a method of distinguishing characters’ dialogues from one another. Like a teenage girl might talk in long, rambling sentences that usually reference the opinions of her friends, while an elderly farmer might speak in laconic sentence fragments. A college professor might have more complex sentence structure with a greater vocabulary, while a human resources professional might talk entirely in business jargon like this: “I'm reaching out today to touch base on performance evaluations.” An actor or a standup comic or performer might talk entirely in motive based language, such as when offering opinion, they'll say “I feel that” or “my feeling is that.” They'll have very emotion-based language. A doctor or accountant might be more clinical in their speech, such as, you know, “the prescription is”, or “the evidence suggests”, or “the numbers say.” Police officers and members of the military will often have their own jargon with a lot of acronyms that can be impenetrable to outsiders or people unfamiliar with that specific kind of culture. So if you're writing characters who are in the military or are police officers, it might be worthwhile to learn the common terms they use and work that into your dialogue. Profanity is a tricky one. It's very easy to distinguish speech patterns among characters using profanity. But profanity often grabs readers, though in one way. I recently had someone complain that Nadia in the Cloak Mage book says “goddamn” a lot. And the truth is I kind of dialed down her profanity. I think that if Nadia existed in real life and was a real person, every third word would be a profanity once she got ticked off and when she got really mad, she’d swear a lot more than she really does in the books, where I do dial it back a bit. When reading dialogue, it's also important to remember that people rarely give direct answers in conversation and frequently go off in tangents, like I just did when I was talking about Nadia and profanity. For that matter, the subtext of a conversation is often more important than the actual words that are actually being said. You can frequently see that at major life events or traumatic life events like a funeral or a mass layoff, where people will spend a lot of time discussing trivialities about the weather or how the drive was or minor matters, rather than the enormous glaring fact in front of them of the funeral or the mass layoff or the other unpleasant event they're at. Now on to examples. Let's imagine a detective is investigating a murder in a bank lobby and asks five witnesses where they found the body. The way that the five witnesses talk can differentiate them from each other and provide insight into their character. In this example are Tanya (a teenage girl), Braden (a teenage boy), Rick (an imperious bank executive), Janet (a candidate for state senator), and Robert (an elderly farmer). So here is what Tanya, the teenage girl said to the detective:  “like, I came inside because I need to withdraw some cash in the stupid ATM wasn't working like again, and oh my God, this dead guy was just on the floor in the middle of the bank. So I texted Zoe and Zoe was like, we need to get this on Facebook Live like, right now. But then Zoe's mom heard what was happening. She told me to call the police, so I called 911 and the guy was like, “what's your emergency?” I'm like, dude, there's a dead guy on the floor.” And as you can imagine, she’d go on in this vein for quite some time. By comparison, this is what Braden the teenage boy would say while mumbling and looking at the floor. “People started screaming. I saw this guy on the floor. He was like, dead. Can I go now? This is what Rick the bank executive would say: “I heard a commotion in the lobby and I got up to see what was happening and the dead body was on the floor. I want to assure you that Mutual Fidelity Credit Banking takes all criminal matters very seriously and cooperates with the authorities to the fullest extent of the law. However, any further questions will need to be referred to our corporate counsel, and I'm afraid I have several other meetings scheduled this afternoon. Good day, officer.” So you can see this is a very distinctive and precise way of speech for Rick the banking executive, while providing insight into his character. Our next response is from Janet, the state senate candidate: “The thoughts and prayers of my family and I are with the victim’s family in this terrible time. This tragedy only further proves that the policies of my opponents are actively harmful for the most marginalized communities in our state. When I'm your state senator, I will proudly stand for all communities.” She pauses. “Wait, is that the victim's parents? I need to get a picture with them for my Twitter.” So you can see, Janet talks very much like a politician. I think her dialogue period pretty much has been copied and pasted from Twitter. And it also provides insight into her character. Our final example is Robert, the elderly farmer, who says to the detective: “Came in. Fellow was on the floor. Poor bastard looked like he'd been shot in the head. Checked his pulse anyway, and then called the cops.” That's all he has to say. So these five characters, as you can see, all talk in very different ways. I didn't use any fancy accents or slang, only a little bit of profanity, but not all that much. But those were five distinct speech patterns, and the dialogue actually provides further insight into their characters. We can see that Tanya likes to talk. Brayden doesn't like to talk. Rick has a high opinion of himself if he thinks he can brush off police officers conducting a murder investigation. Janet, the state senate candidate, is pretty ruthless and willing to exploit someone's personal tragedy for her advancement. Of the five, Robert, the elderly farmer, was the only one who actually tried to help the guy who was dead on the floor. So I hope that is a good example of how to differentiate characters using different vocabulary and speech patterns. When I talked about this on my blog, Grace said, “this is where stereotypes in writing come in handy. Even if you had only given the list of characters at the beginning and attributed each paragraph, I would have been able to guess who was speaking, because in this case each one is a basic stereotype. Obviously, not all characters fall exactly into a stereotype (see Tythrilandria from Cloak Mage), but it probably helps for one appearance characters.” That is true. A longer-term technique, I think, is to subvert the expectations produced by the first impression of characters. Maybe the banker is secretly obsessed with graffiti or the teenage boy shovels the driveways and mows the lawns of his elderly neighbors without payment. Or the teenage girl is massively into Bitcoin mining. That makes for more realistic characters because in real life people often possess many different contradictory qualities, though for characters who have just one scene, you can probably get away with just the initial impression. William asked about this (going off on a tangent like we did earlier): Where did Nadia pick up the habit of swearing a lot? I know Morvilind assigned some rather rough ex-military types to train her. So I guess it might have started there and grown worse issues left on her own and started mingling with criminals in general. It's one of those things no one seems to have pointed out to her and she hasn't self-reflected on it. William is exactly right. That is where Nadia picked up her habit of swearing, because most of her teachers when she was a child were very rough people. And then when she got older and started out going out and doing missions for Morvilind and she met even more rough people. That said, Nadia isn't particularly self-reflective but she does have enough self-control to dial back profanity in appropriate situations, whereas you know, sometimes you meet people in real life who have gotten so much in the habit of using profanity to pepper their speech that they can't shut it off even when it's like grossly inappropriate, like at a job interview or a situation like that. Nadia doesn't have that problem. She is able to switch off profanity on her off as necessary, but if she is really angry then that's when it will come out. So that's it for this week, and I should mention as a final one for this episode, the podcast will be going on hiatus until the middle of June or so. The reason for that is I need to finish Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves. I also need to proof the audiobooks of Frostborn: The Shadow Prison and Cloak of Shards. I also have a ton of real-life stuff I gotta do in May, so I need to prioritize, which means we'll have a break from podcasting until mid-June when things calm down. So thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show this week. I hope you found the show useful. 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 time.

In this week's episode, we offer six tips for working with cover designers to create a great cover for your book. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 211 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 26th, 2024 and today we are discussing six tips for working with cover designers. Before we get to our main topic, we'll have an update on my current writing and audiobook projects and then Question of the Week. I am currently editing Half-Orc Paladin. I'm almost done with the first phase of editing and so we are on track to have the book come out in early August sometime, if all goes well. I'm not sure if it's going to be the first week or the second week of August, but we will see how things go. Once Half-Orc Paladin is out, my next project will be Shield of Conquest. I'm going to follow up on Shield of Darkness right away and I'm about 2,000 words into that. After Shield of Conquest, the next two books I write will be Ghost in the Tombs and Cloak of Illusion. Then at that point, the year will almost be over. 2024 is just flying by, and so then I'll decide what I will work on next once I get to the end of those three books. So Half-Orc Paladin and then Shield of Conquest, Ghost in the Tombs, and Cloak of Illusion. In audiobook news, Wizard-Thief, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward, is done and it is currently working its way through the approval process at Audible and the other sites. You can actually get it at my Payhip store right now if you don't want to wait. Otherwise, it should be on Audible and the other audiobook stores within a few weeks. Recording is also under underway for Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling (and that will be narrated by CJ McAllister again) and Shield of Darkness, which will be narrated by Brad Wills. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:01:45 Question of the Week And now let's switch over to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: if you want to get a coffee, where is your favorite place to go get it? The inspiration for this week's question was that I needed to do some necessary errands and so to bribe myself to do them, I got a coffee to drink along the way. Justin says: I'm hypersensitive to caffeine, so the elixir of life (as my wife calls it) is off limits unless I need to stay up a night or two. Decaffeinated coffee has never managed to interest me. Herbal teas are my hot drink of choice. My wife considers Starbucks coffee burnt but would stop at McDonalds for some. JD says: I was just thinking of making a coffee when I saw this. Whenever I go out for coffee, I prefer to try an independent coffee shop over any of the big chains. I drink black coffee with no sugar and have never enjoyed a cup from any of the big chains. McDonald's coffee isn't too bad. I usually get an espresso from there when my son wants to go. Now I best get around to putting the kettle on. Perry says: Can't stand the taste of coffee. Don't like tea, either. Water or juice for me. Michael says: I have a local coffee guy near me who also happens to be an amazing baker, which means I can get a cookie, too. That's some good thinking. Catriona says: generally at home with my Nespresso machine. Out- well, I moved to Thailand 10 months ago and don't have a car (driving is crazy here and their version of Uber is very cheap), so it tends to be individual coffee shops near shopping centers. Before that home in Hong Kong -Pacific Coffee. Gary says: the best coffee is made at my house. When I am not at home, then definitely Kona dark roast from QuikTrip. Barbara says: Tastings in Subiaco, about 60 kilometers from home. If we have to go to Perth, we always stop at Tastings for coffee, but I can't see anyone not in Western Australia coming that far for a coffee. Bonnie says: never been a fan of Starbucks, has always been Dunkin’ here in Maine, though not going so much with money tight. Now, dark roast from the Ks. Becca says: I only really get coffee to go when I’m visiting my best friend in Tucson. Then we often go to Crema, a nice family-owned place. Tammy says: Farmhouse coffee and ice cream or Tim Hortons when I need something delivered. Jesse says: I used to go to a place called Baltimore Coffee (not actually in Baltimore) and buy unground beans to bring home. Pandemic made me a snob for grinding my own coffee (sorry, “enthusiast”). Cheryl says: my kitchen is my favorite place for coffee. Plain old instant coffee. Jenny says: firstly, Kwik Trip for life. Secondly, iced dirty chai from Scooters or Bigby or Caribou. Jerry says: Kwik Trip is convenient and easy, but every time I go there for coffee, I end up getting a honey bun, doughnuts, or something else I'm not supposed to have. My favorite coffee is when I brew myself with freshly ground beans. I can definitely feel Jerry's pain when it comes to buying snacks one does not need. BV says: a place called Scooters. Mike says: well, I might be older than most and grew up in the Southwest. Dunkin’ was pretty much all there was back then, so you go with what you grew up with. And finally, Juana says: Red Owl. For myself, you heard my answer, one you've heard mentioned already. My favorite place is to get a coffee from Kwik Trip, which is a regional gas station chain located in the central Midwest. Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, and McDonalds are all too complicated for me. I just want to press a button and have acceptable coffee come out of a tube. Kwik Trip meets that need. 00:05:00 Main Topic of the Week: 6 Tips on Working with a Cover Designer Now on to our Main Topic of the Week: 6 tips on working with a cover designer. The reason for this is that if you're an indie author and you're publishing your book, you really want an attractive cover. I have gotten to the point where I do nearly all of my covers myself in Photoshop. However, it took a lot of practice and a long time to get there. I took a Photoshop course during the pandemic in 2020 when there wasn't much else to do and I've been practicing continually since then. Before that, I almost always hired out my covers. The reason I started learning to do covers myself was partly interest and partly necessity because I write so much. I usually publish between 10 and 12 books a year and some of the really good cover designers you have to book out like nine months to a year in advance. If I decide on the drop of a hat to write a book like Half-Elven Thief, it's going to be hard to get a cover for that because you have to schedule so far out in advance. So for myself, it's advantageous to be able to do my own covers to an acceptable degree because I write so much. However, most people don't write as much as I do and don't have time to take a Photoshop class, so it is advantageous to work with a cover designer and it is a good idea to know how to best conduct oneself and work professionally with a cover designer. So with that in mind, here are 6 tips for working with cover designers. #1: Manage your expectations of what a cover will be like. First, it's important to understand that your book cover isn't exactly meant to recreate a scene in the book. It's designed to give readers just enough of a feel what the book is like to want to learn more. With that in mind, being really creative and innovative in book covers isn't always or even frequently rewarded, because readers are comfortable with cliches in book covers because it helps them to know the book is similar to ones they have enjoyed in the past (for example, science fiction book covers with a planet and spaceship on the cover). I've written before and talked before about how my Silent Order series started selling much better once I finally gave up on character-based covers and had covers with a planet and a spaceship in close proximity. It's not that big a deal if things are slightly different on the cover than they are in the book, like a character has black hair instead of brown. Major differences such as Anne of Green Gables being blonde or Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice holding a cell phone are important to avoid, however, unless you're writing a reinterpretation of Pride and Prejudice set in the 1980s or the modern day or something, but that is again part of choosing the appropriate cover for your genre. All the cover needs to do is to communicate the author, the title, and the genre, and it should be done as simply and as attractively as possible. So that is the primary thing to bear in mind when working with the cover designer. The book needs to communicate the author, title, genre, and do it as simply and as attractively as possible. #2: Research covers in your genre before contacting the cover designer. This will help you learn the trends and cliches in your genre and see what types of images, styles, and fonts are successful. It helps the cover designer if you can share a few covers of existing books as examples of font or style that you like. For example, every time I hired out a cover back before I started doing my own, one of the things the cover designer would always ask is pick, you know, 5 to 10 covers whose look you like and that have the style and feel that you want for your book. This isn't to, you know, rip off these covers or to steal their look, but to get an eye for what is considered acceptable conventions for covers within the genre of the book you are writing. #3: How to find a quality cover designer? A random person on Fiverr or your relatives are probably not wise choices (unless one of your relatives happens to specialize in ebook cover design), so you're probably better off seeking out a reputable cover designer. How to find one? Well, cover designers are often credited at beginning of the book or on authors’ websites, if you find one that you like. Reputable cover designers will almost always have an online portfolio or website or be able to provide a link to one where you can look over their work. The best cover designers usually specialize in specific genres. Not always, but this is often the case. Be wary of one who claims to be able to do any genre unless you can see examples of them indeed doing works in any genre. Understand the going rate for cover designers and offer a fair price. There's often a graduated scale where a cover designer’s lowest fee will be for just the ebook cover, but with added things. You can also add in the audio cover or the paperback and hardback covers and sometimes social media images based around the cover and optimized for the preferred resolutions of Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and so forth. Often the cover designers will have their rates listed on their website. Don't try and lowball them. That doesn't work and will make you enemies. Also understand what deadlines are realistic and professional, like requiring someone to have a cover out the next day is not a good idea. As I mentioned before, some of the really good cover desires are booked up for quite a length of time in advance, and so you may need to schedule several months or even a year in advance and make sure you have a clear expectation of how long that's going to take before you reach out. #4: Make it easy for the designer to understand your goals. Often experienced designers will send you over what's called a brief, which is essentially a questionnaire about what you're looking for in the book cover. As you mentioned earlier, this is where you would share sample covers from similar books that are helpful. Specific fonts and style requests are also good to include at this stage in the process. Do not expect your cover designer to read the entire book. For obvious reasons that is not going to work out. Some serious designers do upwards of 500 covers a year and there simply isn't time to read 500 books in a year, which is why you need to be as detailed and precise as possible in the brief or questionnaire stage, because obviously the designer is not going to have time to read the entire book. Specify what you need and any deadlines. This is where you want to make clear what you're paying for in terms of ebook, audiobook, paperback covers, and so forth. Be sure to communicate in writing and be clear and polite in how you communicate with designers. You are essentially hiring a skilled professional to do a job for you, so you want to communicate respectfully and professionally as you would with any skilled professional. #5: Write a good brief. This directly follows into making it easier for the designer to understand your goals. The brief will give basic information such as title, author, desired formats, and some brief information about the genres, characters, etcetera. Keep the information about characters, genre, and plot to a paragraph maximum and be sure also to provide information about any major visuals like swords in the series all emit white fire, make her hair brown hair, etcetera, but expect that it may not be crucial to making the cover. #6: Communicate well. Communicate openly and clearly. I'll just think of how much of the difficulty of the human condition could be avoided if we could all just communicate openly and clearly. In the specific context of cover designing, make sure that you get cost, timeline, and services in writing and seek out specifics on all of these before committing to work on them. If the designer has their own intake form or brief style, fill it out instead of just sending them your own notes. That makes it easy to give the designer exactly the information he or she will need to make the cover and will let you not waste time providing irrelevant information. If the book is part of a series or future series, it's a good idea to share that with the designer, because if everything goes well, that may mean future work. The first version they will send you is not the final offer. You should get a draft version of the cover and usually it will be what you need. If anything major needs to be changed, you might have to renegotiate, but minor changes are usually pretty easy to do. Be sure to explain any changes you need politely and concisely. Don't nag the designer before the agreed upon deadline. You know, sending emails every day asking for progress updates is a waste of everyone's time. Don't check in before the agreed upon deadline. Finally, it's a good idea to trust their advice, especially if they are experienced. New authors in particular sometimes have an affliction where they have the way the cover looks in their head and they want the cover to look like that, but they are they aren't experienced enough to know that making the cover that way would be a bad idea and best avoided. If you're hiring a skilled professional, it's generally best to trust their advice, especially if they have more experience than you do. Unless the designer is suggesting something egregious, like something totally out of character for your genre (which probably is not going to happen), it is best to heed their advice. Be sure to review the cover carefully before finalizing. Check carefully for any typos, make sure your name and the book title are spelled correctly, and make sure that it looks nice in every size. It should ideally look good full size and it should also look good in thumbnail because that is where a majority of readers are going to see the cover- in thumbnail. Two more things to keep in mind. Most cover designers will not use generative AI. Some of them do. A significant majority of them are strongly opposed of it to it because of the unsettled ethical and legal questions around the use of generative AI. If that is a concern for you, you may want to check if the cover designer uses generative AI to source any of the images they will use for the cover. Those who do should be open and clear about it, and those who do, if you request they won't, then obviously, if they're professional, they won't. It's also might be a good idea to check where your designer will source these stock photos for the cover. Very often most book covers are made of combining stock photos available from reputable stock photo sites like Adobe Stock, Dreamstime, Getty Images, and so forth. Those are licensed for commercial use and that's okay. You probably want to make sure that the coverage designer will not source any photos from free photo sites because the often the sourcing of the photos available on free photo sites and not licensed stock photo sites like Adobe Stock and Getty Images is because there are less legal protections for any photos uploaded to free photo sites. So while it's not likely you would get sued if you use a misattributed photo from a free stock photo site, it is within the realm of possibility. Best to avoid that. Finally, one last question to consider, especially for fantasy and science fiction, is if it is worthwhile to pay for custom artwork instead of relying on a combination of stock photos or 3D models from sites like DAS or Unity. You can do that if you want. You're probably not going to make your money back because custom artwork is very expensive. Bear in mind that a cover designer isn't going to provide custom artwork for you unless you pay for it yourself, so that is something to bear in mind. You can probably get by using stock photos, because a skilled designer can combine those and make them look good. So that's it for this week. I hope you found that useful for working with cover designers. 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://thepulpwriter.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I rank the movies and streaming shows I saw in the first half of summer 2024. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 210 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 19th, 2024, and today we are discussing the movies and streaming shows I watched for the first half of summer 2024. Before that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we will go into Question of the Week. So, my current writing projects. I’m pleased to report that the rough draft of Half Orc Paladin is finished at about 81,500 words. Next up, I’m writing a short story called Paladin’s Hunt that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when Half Orc Paladin is out, hopefully in early August. I'm also 23,000 words into Ghosts in the Tombs. I'm not 100% decided what I'm going to write next once Half Orc Paladin is out. I have to make a decision soon obviously, but it's probably going to be either Shield of Conquest or Cloak of Illusion. In audiobook news, the audiobook Wizard-Thief, as narrated by Leanne Woodward, is almost done. It's just got to get through the various approvals at the audiobook sites, so hopefully that should be out in early August. Recording is going to start very soon on Shield of Darkness. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. We have a question about the Shield War series from reader EM, who writes in to ask: I was rereading Shield of Darkness and occurred to me that Connmar Pendragon would have had a much easier time finding his way to Owyllain if he had a Corsair Lord or whatever they called themselves back then, who had the Hidden Eye navigating for him. Am I right and this will be revealed in the Shield Wars series? No, Connmar did not have a Corsair or anyone with the Hidden Eye ability navigating for him, and he basically found his way to Owyllain by accident. At that time, there were people living on the Isle of Kordain, but they hadn't really coalesced around the Corsairs of the Isle of Kordain as their national identity yet. I mean the process was underway but hadn't reached the form it would by the time of the Frostborn series. And while some of them had the Hidden Eye ability, they hadn't quite fully understood what it meant yet, and they hadn't lived on the isle long enough for the mutilations from the dwarven engines to fully take hold. We'll reveal more details about that in Shield of Conquest when I write that as my next book or the book after my next book. 00:02:26 Question of the Week Now on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire enjoyable discussion of interesting topics. This week's question: subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited, Spotify, Netflix, Thrive Market and Xbox Game Pass are an inevitable part of modern life. If you have a subscription service, which one is your favorite? No wrong answers and bear in mind that “subscription services all cost too much and I hit them all with the fiery consuming heat of 1,000 cores of 1,000 suns” is a perfectly acceptable answer as well. Surabhi said: Disney Plus, because Marvel movies are my therapy. Ray says: I only use Bookbub and Google Play. Justin says: I do not use subscription services. I prefer to purchase the books, games, and programs I buy outright rather than rent them. Connectivity can be a problem where I am so being able to read, work, or play without being tethered to the Internet is a good thing. That is something to keep in mind when considering a subscription service. If you have questionable Internet connectivity in your area, that may not be the best choice to sign up for a subscription service that relies on the Internet. Our next comment is from Venus, who says: I can't afford any subscriptions services, although if Barnes and Noble did one for ebooks, I’d consider working something out. I refuse to support Amazon and don't like the fact that apparently books on Kindle Unlimited can't be anywhere else. That is indeed one of the annoying features of the Kindle Unlimited program, which is why only four of my 153 novels are currently on Kindle Unlimited. Barbara says: my husband and daughter subscribe to some streaming services, but I'm not sure which ones. I don't subscribe to any. I don't watch television. I already own the games I play and I purchased my digital books so I don't have to give them back. John says: I think I get by far the most bang for the buck from Amazon Prime, but my favorite subscription service is probably my local weekly seafood delivery service, Sea Forager. Bonnie says: I gave up the ones I had because I don't watch TV anymore and can't afford it. I have Prime, but only really use it for ebooks. If I need background noise, I use local radio. Local radio remains free, so I suppose that is the most cost effective of all the subscription services. Juana says: Kindle seems to have the most content and good price. I looked at the other platforms, too. Becca says: I have Prime and agree it has a ton of benefits. I canceled Netflix because it doesn't work on my TV. Hulu has some great shows (I recommend Crazy Fun Park, an Australian teen show about ghosts and friendships and changes. Surprisingly mature and well-acted). William says: given the sheer quantity of great Star Wars series that Disney produces, theirs is hard to beat. Gary says: Spotify. David says: for value, you can't beat Prime: movies, free shipping, and music. Netflix is very good for original content and Hulu for old stuff. And Joseph says: I also have Prime mostly for the free shipping. Everything else there is just a bonus. I also have Kindle Unlimited. Totally worth it for me as I read daily and read two or three hundred books a year. That is down from 400 to 500 the first couple years of retirement. It is diverse enough that I can always find a good read. For myself, the one I enjoy most is Nintendo Switch Online. I'll pay for a month of Netflix when they have something I want to see and then we'll cancel again after I've seen it.  I used to have Xbox Game Pass, but all I ever actually play on the Xbox is Skyrim, Starfield, and the first three Halo games, so there is no point in keeping it. But Nintendo Switch Online lets you get the classic Mario and Zelda games from the NES and Super Nintendo era. Given that Nintendo's attitude towards the legacy properties tends to veer between complete indifference and wrathful litigation depending upon the month, it's good that Nintendo offers a relatively affordable way to get them legally because at my age, sometimes the best way to relax at the end of the night is to just play a few levels of the original Super Mario Brothers. So that's it for Question of the Week this week. 00:06:26 Main Topic: Summer 2024 Movie/TV Show Review And now let's move on to our main topic: 2024 Summer Movie Roundup, Part 1. Summer always has a lot of movies, so I usually split the Summer Movie Roundup post in two halves and this would be Part 1. I was surprised at the number of sports movies I watched this time, since, as I've mentioned before, I don't usually follow professional sports all that closely. That said, while the NFL and the NBA might not have quite the cultural hegemony they had at their peak in the 1990s and early 2000s, they're still hugely central to American culture. I don't think you can really understand the United States without grasping the central role of professional sports in mainstream culture. I expect there's a similar phenomenon with association football clubs in the UK and many European countries. Besides, one of the abilities of good storytelling is to make you interested in a story about a topic you might not otherwise care about, like athletic shoes. So here are the movies and shows I watched in the first half of summer 2024, ranked from worst to best. As always, the rankings are totally subjective and based on nothing but my own opinions and observations. So first up is Madam Webb, which came out in 2024. Oofffff. This wasn't quite the crime against cinema that the Internet thought it was, but it still wasn't great. Sony has the rights to a bunch of Spider-man adjacent characters, and the company is holding those in a death grip and has been trying to make a Spider-man Cinematic Universe happen for some time, with mixed results. The Tom Hardy Venom movies had been pretty good, the others, not so much. The plot of Madam Webb: cynical and jaded EMT Cassandra Webb works with her partner Ben Parker (later in the Uncle Ben of Spider-man fame) and is almost drowned in an accident. While drowned, Cassandra starts developing precognition and clairvoyant powers. She starts seeing visions of three young women who will be murdered by a powerful real estate developer named Ezekiel. Turns out that Ezekiel has Spider-man powers that also include precognition, and he wants to kill the girls before they someday kill him. The scenes where Cassandra wonders if she is going mad, but gradually starts to realize that she can see the future were actually quite good and cleverly laid out since they did in sort of a time loop where she experiences the event before it happens. That said, this movie could have been an interesting concept, but it didn't really work. For one thing, the dialogue was just clunky. Dialogue is a hard, hard art to master, both in movies and writing novels (as I know first-hand). But Madame Webb didn't get there. Many of the dialogue scenes were just wooden. Additionally, the movie felt padded and drawn out, which is interesting because the runtime was under two hours. Ultimately, I think Madam Webb succumbed to the illness of a shared cinematic universe. It felt like the incomplete prologue to a more interesting movie, and not every side character in the Spider-man mythos needs an origin story. The trick to making a shared cinematic universe is that each movie must stand alone on its own, especially in the beginning, and the stories have to be interesting. Madam Webb, alas, couldn't quite manage either. Overall grade: D- Next up is The Acolyte, a streaming series which came out in 2024. There is quite a furor about this show on social media, but you can't believe most of what you see on social media. To be blunt about it, I've come to believe that social media is designed to induce mental illness in as many of its users as possible in order to increase their time spent on the site, which in turn raises ad revenue. Very cynical. But I suspect that's the basic business model of Facebook and YouTube, which is why you see so much rage-filled clickbait on both sites, since that's what drives engagement and increases revenue, but that's a problem beyond the scope of a movie review podcast episode. Back to The Acolyte. I would say that The Acolyte wasn't the crime against cinema that YouTube thought it was but instead an uneven mixture of some strong points and some weaknesses. The plot: former Jedi Osha has left the Order and is working as a mechanic on a trade federation starship. Meanwhile, a woman who looks exactly like her has started murdering Jedi Masters. Osha is arrested for the murders, but her former teacher, Jedi master Sol, quickly figures out that the murderer is in fact Osha's twin sister Mae, who has been presumed dead for the last sixteen years. Osha reluctantly tagged along with Sol to help track down Mae, which means she needs to delve into the dark secrets of her past and discover who trained Mae to be a Jedi killing assassin. The Jedi assume a renegade member of the Order must have trained Mae because the Sith had been extinct for a long, long time. Or have they? This show did have its strong points. The lightsaber fights looked good and were fun to watch. Lee Junge-jae as Sol, Manny Jacinto as Qimir, Charlie Bennett as Yord, and Dafne Keen as Jecki all gave good performances. In particular, they stole episode 5, which was overall the strongest episode of the series. The design of the Sith Lord’s helmet (dubbed Darth Teeth or Smilo Ren by the Internet) was good. The nods to the old Expanded Universe, like cortosis ore, were nice. There was enough of a compelling mystery -who is the Sith Lord and what actually happened in the twin’s past- that can hook the viewer through to the end of the series. The show also did a good job of showing how complacent and political the Jedi had become, to the point where 100 years later the Jedi High Council would meet with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine every day for thirteen years and completely failed to realize that he was in fact the Sith Master who had been pulling the strings all along. That said, I think the show did have four significant problems. 1: the whole good twin/evil twin thing was kind of lame. Playing identical twins is hard for any actor, and sometimes I had a hard time keeping track of whether Osha or Mae was in a particular scene. I kind of wish the characters had been brother and sister, or at least not identical twins so they had been easier to tell apart. 2: As much as I appreciated the nods to the Expanded Universe, I think it relied too heavily on them and assumed the audience had a high level of Star Wars knowledge, like the weird Force cult where Osha and Mae grew up. In the Expanded Universe, there are all kinds of weird half-baked cults with an incomplete knowledge of the Force that run into serious problems when they encounter an actual Jedi or an actual Sith. One advantage of visual media over novels is that it's much easier to show instead of tell, but I don't think Acolyte explained its premises well. The Mandalorian explained its premises better, gradually exposing the viewer to the Mandalorian's culture as he dealt with the Monster of the Week. Mando gradually learned about the Force and the Jedi, a race of enemy sorcerers, as he tried to save The Child from the Imperial Remnant. By contrast, The Acolyte kind of dropped viewers into the middle of things, didn't bother to explain any ambiguities, and simply assumed they would all understand the references. 3: The problem with the Jedi Order is that its philosophy is essentially stupid. The reason for that is that Jedi philosophy is basically a highly watered-down version of 1970s style Hollywood Buddhism, which is itself a tremendously watered down version of actual Buddhism. The Jedi are basically left with “don't feel fear or anger” and “don't get attached to people” but lack the religious and philosophical underpinnings which would allow those concepts to make sense in actual Buddhism. In real life, eventually we learn that both suppressing anger and fear or allowing it to dominate us is unhealthy. Both anger and fear serve useful functions. Fear warns of danger and anger is a good response when one is forced into circumstances where you have no choice but to fight. Anger and fear make for good servants, but awful masters, but Jedi philosophy completely misses that point. 4th and finally: the show was the wrong genre for the kind of moral relativism it had. Moral relativism worked well in Andor, which was a spy thriller about criminals gradually realizing that they had to fight the Empire and do terrible things while doing it. That worked because Andor was a spy thriller. By contrast, The Acolyte was about Kung Fu space wizards using space magic that literally comes in good and evil flavors. Moral relativism works less well in that kind of setting where there is literally good or evil space magic. So I would say Acolyte was a mixed bag. I admit, if there's a second season, I'll watch it just because I want to see what happens, but given Disney's significant financial woes, that seems unlikely. Overall grade: C- Next up is Unfrosted, which came out in 2024. It is an absurdist comedic retelling of the creation of the Pop Tart breakfast food, told as sort of a parody of corporate biopics like Ford versus Ferrari and Air (which we will talk about later this episode). This movie was silly and kind of dumb, but it knew it was silly and kind of dumb and so leaned into it and therefore worked. Jerry Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, a high-ranking employee of the Kellogg cereal company, which is locked in a bitter rivalry with the Post cereal company for the breakfast market. One day Cabana uncovers everyone at Post is working on something that will upend the breakfast market, a fruit filled breakfast pastry that can be toasted. Alarmed with this information, the CEO of Kellogg, Edsel Kellogg III (played by Jim Gaffigan as a sort of parody of ‘60s era U.S. business executives), launches a crash effort to match Post’s effort. Cabana must recruit a heist style team to build Kellogg's breakfast pastry, including numerous obscure figures from 1960s pop culture. The race is on to build the Pop Tart. Anyway, this was an entertaining movie, but it has no connection to factual accuracy. Also, Bill Burr was hilarious as President Kennedy. Overall grade: B- Next up is The Hit Man, which came out in 2023. It is an amusing cross between a dark comedy and a sort of Hitchcockian thriller. Glenn Powell plays Gary Johnson, a mild mannered and somewhat ineffective philosophy professor. Due to his skill with electronics and microphones, he frequently helps out the police with sting operations. One day, the officer who usually goes in for sting operations gets suspended for beating up some teenagers and having it go viral on viral on YouTube. Gary is drafted at the last minute to go undercover as a hit man and get a suspect to contract his services. Gary does it so well that the Police Department uses him more and more and Gary starts disappearing into his roles as various hit men in a sequence which is quite funny. This works well until Gary meets Madison, a woman who wants him to kill her abusive husband. Gary talks her out of it and starts seeing her, a situation which quickly escalates out of control. It was interesting that the movie went through a sudden genre shift about 1/3 of the way through, from dark comedy to love story, a bit darker than I usually prefer, to be honest, but enjoyable nonetheless if you don't mind the strong language. That said, I watched this right after Madam Webb and the contrast between Webb's clunky and wooden dialogue and the much better written Hitman was night and day. What was interesting was that the movie only cost $8.8 million to make. Given the economic climate, I expect we will see more of this: movies that have to be disciplined about keeping the cost down, as opposed to the enormous 295 million budgets of something like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Overall grade: B- Next up is Boss Level, which came out in 2021. This movie is best described as Groundhog's Day but as an action movie. Former Special Forces soldier Roy Pulver, played by Frank Grillo, is caught in a time loop that repeats the same day over and over again, which always ends with him getting killed by assassins that have been hired to hunt him down. This happened after he tried to reconnect with his former girlfriend, a scientist working on a secret project overseen by the sinister Colonel Ventor, played by Mel Gibson. For a variety of reasons, let's just say at this point in his career, Gibson is very believable in a villain role. At first, Roy succumbs to despair in the time loop, but then decides to spend the endless day trying to reconnect with his estranged son. Eventually, this causes him to rally and fight back against the loop and he realizes that his ex-girlfriend deliberately put him into the time loop because he was the only person she knew who could stop Colonel Ventor’s evil plans for his project, which turns out to be a time machine. I'd say the biggest weakness of the movie is the opening, which is a sort of record scratch “you're probably wondering how I got here” opening I complained about in Episode 203 of this podcast. Also, I think it maybe should have been five to 10 minutes longer. The ending is sort of implied but it would have been far more satisfying to have actually been shown what would happen. But overall, I like this movie. Solid B-level thriller/science fiction stuff. It's interesting to compare this to Groundhog's Day because Groundhog Day had to spend so much time establishing the premise because the plot idea of a time loop wasn't as widely known back then as it is now, whereas nowadays you just say “Groundhog Day loop” and most people will immediately know what you're talking about. Overall Grade: B Next up is Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which came out in 2024. This wasn't quite as good as Ghostbusters: Afterlife, but I still enjoyed it. In this one, Ian Spengler's daughter, her good-natured boyfriend, and her teenage children have returned to New York City to restart the Ghostbusters business. They were bankrolled by original Ghostbuster Winston Zeddmore, who is now a wealthy businessman funding a variety of ghostbusting projects. When one of Zeddmore's employees stumbles across a dangerous artifact holding a powerful ice ghost, both the new and original Ghostbusters must team up to save the day. I really like how the new Ghostbusters films handle the original characters. The original characters are no longer the main focus but they're now mentoring the new characters and providing advice and support. I like this a lot better than the Disney/Lucasfilm approach of the original character as being sad old losers that the new characters must rebel against and then surpass. It was also great that actor William Atherton returned as government apparatchik Walter Peck. Back in the first movie, Peck was an officious EPA inspector who accidentally released a ghost horde upon New York. In the grand American political tradition of tradition of failing upward, he is now the mayor of New York City and still hopes to disband the Ghostbusters. I think the movie's biggest weakness was that it was too complicated and there were a lot of different characters and moving parts to keep track of. Overall grade: B Next up is Inside Out 2, which came out in 2024. It is a terrifying descent into the nightmarish hellscape that has the mind of the average teenage girl. I am, of course joking (though, if you have teenagers, you know that I'm only mostly joking) but Inside Out 2 is a strong follow up to the first movie. In the first movie, the anthropomorphized representations of emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust) tried to control themselves inside the mind of young girl Riley. At the start of the second movie, Riley is now 13 and doing pretty well, but then puberty kicks in. Suddenly new emotions arrive in her head: Ennui, Envy, Embarrassment, and Anxiety. Anxiety in particular runs amuck and seizes control of Riley's mind. As Anxiety starts to send Riley spiraling out of control, the other emotions have to rally behind Joy and find a way to save Riley's mind and sense of self. It is both quite funny and poignant. I can see why this movie cleared a billion dollars. As of early July 2024, is the biggest box office movie of the year so far. Overall grade: A Next up is Ford versus Ferrari, which came out in 2019. This is a biopic of the rivalry between Ford Motor Company and Ferrari in the 1960s, which is an interesting bit of history. In the ‘60s, Ford Motor Company, under the leadership of Henry Ford II (founder Henry Ford's grandson), decided it needed a cooler image, much like how Microsoft bought a bunch of indie gaming studios in the 2010s so Xbox would seem cooler. So Ford Motor Company spent years negotiating with Enzo Ferrari to buy Ferrari's company. At the last minute, negotiations collapsed and Ferrari famously went on a rant insulting Ford as an ugly company that made ugly cars and also called Ford II a lesser man compared to his famous grandfather. This was a major public failure and humiliation for Ford Motor Company, and needless to say Ford II took this very, very personally. He threw a ton of resources behind Ford's racing car project with one goal: beat Ferrari at the famous Le Mans 24 hour race. To pull this off, Ford recruited Carroll Shelby (played by Matt Damon), a former racing driver who turned to race car designing because a heart condition no longer let him race. Shelby needed a driver, so he recruited Ken Miles (played by Christian Bale), a talented driver and mechanic with a combative streak and knack for making enemies. Shelby, Miles, and their team set out to build the GT40, Ford's first proper racing car. Since this is all in the historical record, it's not a spoiler to say that they succeeded in the 1966 Le Mans race. Ford Cars finished in first, second, and third positions, locking out Ferrari entirely from the podium. This was a very enjoyable biopic. All the actors disappear into their roles and give strong performances. The racing scenes all look cool. It is also interesting from a historical perspective to see how the Ford executives had a very bad habit of acting like feudal lords who would dictate their will to the consumer rather than what they actually were, which is merchants who needed to give the customer what they wanted. This attitude was one of several reasons the US auto industry hit very hard times in the 1970s. I'd say the only thing wrong with the movie is that it feels too long, though for the life of me I'm not sure what they could have cut. Overall grade: A Next up is The Last Dance, which originally came out in 2020. I originally watched this back during peak COVID, but after watching Air (which I will discuss shortly), I decided to watch this again to refresh my memory. The Last Dance is a documentary about the Chicago Bulls NBA team and the renowned three-peat champion streak back in the 1990s. I have to admit it is an amusing feeling to have lived long enough that things I lived through are now considered history and have prestige Netflix documentaries made about them. The documentary mostly revolves around the career of Michael Jordan, though it includes interviews with many other people involved in the experience of the Bulls championship run, including brief interviews with two ex U.S. Presidents. The documentary got a lot of criticism for focusing too heavily on Jordan and portraying him in a positive light, especially from the other members of the 1990s Bulls team. Interestingly, I thought Jordan did not really come across all that great on the show. He seemed somewhat vindictive and petty and prone to holding on to grudges for decades. He was presented as the sort of man who is afflicted with an all-consuming competitive streak, who is irresistibly compelled to win at everything he does, even if it's a casual golf game between friendly acquaintances. For that matter, professional basketball players in general all tend to be highly competitive type A personalities who like to win and hate to lose. Getting them all to agree on an account of events beyond the objectively observable facts is probably impossible. Despite that, I suspect the simple fact is that the Bulls would not have won their championships without Jordan. There's no denying that Jordan was probably one of the most famous people on Earth in the 1990s. Honestly, no one can stand up to that kind of scrutiny well, especially after a personal tragedy like when Jordan's father was murdered in the mid-1990s. When Jordan talks about how winning requires complete focus and absolute dedication, I'm afraid that he's right. Winning in the competition at a level like the NBA does require 110% focus, even to the detriment of every other aspect of one’s life. I've heard athletes say that champions have no balance and Jordan himself seems to be a living example of both the benefits and the extremely high personal costs of that. Amusing anecdote: when I originally watched this documentary in late 2020, I texted my brother that he should check it out because I thought he would enjoy it. His response was something along the line said he had seen when it first came out on ESPN and I really ought to engage with the culture more. Overall grade: A Now for the best movie I saw in the first half of summer 2024 and that would be Air, which came out in 2023 and is related to our sports documentary topics. This is a movie about Michael Jordan and his family negotiating deal with Nike about the Air Jordan shoe. I didn't expect to like this movie very much, but it turns out it is quite excellent. As I mentioned earlier, in full disclosure, I have minimal interest in the NBA and while I could tell you the NBA team of the US state in which I currently reside, I think if pressed, off the top of my head, I could probably tell you the name of maybe five other NBA teams. Additionally, I lived through the 1990s and had no money for all of it, and so at the time I really resented the peer pressure around Air Jordan shoes and other sports apparel, because that stuff was always so expensive. As I mentioned, I had no money. All that aside, that shows Air was a good movie because it made me care about a story involving a topic in which I have no interest and perhaps mildly dislike. Anyway, the movie’s plot is set in 1984. Matt Damon (back again) plays Sonny Vaccaro, who was working with Nike’s struggling basketball shoe division. At the time, Nike was the biggest maker of running shoes in the US that had only a minimal presence in the basketball shoe market. Vaccaro has the idea of building a shoe brand entirely around an upcoming young NBA rookie named Michael Jordan. At the time, this was an enormous gamble and had never been done before, but needless to say, it paid off for the company in a big, big way. All the actors gave good performances and the dialogue was sharply written, simultaneously conveying the character of the speaker and moving the plot forward. If you want to learn how to write good dialogue, you could do much worse than to watch Air. I recommend this movie, even if like me, you have zero interest in sports apparel. Perhaps that is one of the functions of art, to give you glimpses of worlds into which you would otherwise never visit. Overall grade: A+ So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you find the show enjoyable and useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we'll take a look at five tips for creating distinctive character voices and viewpoints within your novel. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 209 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 12th, 2024 and today we are discussing five tips for creating vivid characterizations. Before we get into that, we'll have some writing progress updates, a couple of questions from readers, Question of the Week, and then we'll get on to our main topic. So for my current writing projects, I'm pleased to report that Shield of Darkness is out and selling briskly, and you can get it at all the usual places: Amazon, Barnes, and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. It's had a very strong response so far and thank you for that. I'm glad you guys are enjoying the book. Now that Shield of Darkness is out, my next project is Half-Orc Paladin. I am pleased to report I'm currently on Chapter 10 of 16, which puts me at 60,000 words. Yesterday I had a 10,000 word day while I was working on it, my sixth one of 2024. Good progress has been made. I'm hoping to have that book out preferably in early August. In audiobook news, the audiobook of Wizard-Thief as narrated by Leanne Woodward is almost finished. We’ve just got to finish proofing it and that should take place next week and hopefully the audiobook will be out towards the end of July or early August. Once Half-Orc Paladin is done, I have not 100% decided what I’m going to write next. I'm 20,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs, so that could be next or I might write Shield of Conquest or Cloak of Illusion. We will see what I do when I get to the end of Half-Orc Paladin. But right now, I am focusing on Half-Orc Paladin and bringing that to completion. We have a reader question from BV, who asks: I saw an app called Scrivener, and I thought of what Jonathan uses. I'm an old mainframe COBOL/RPG developer and I know that the tech environment can really help. I tried Scrivener way back in 2014 and it was too complicated for me, too much. Granted, the app might have changed since then because 2014 feels to me at least like it was really recent, but it was in fact ten years ago. So for writing, I primarily use Microsoft Word for writing and editing and then I use Vellum on the Mac for the final ebook formatting. That's the way I do it right now. Nothing to say that it can't change. Maybe I might switch to LibreOffice again for writing as Microsoft continues to sort of circle the AI drain and adds more and more useless AI features to its products. 00:02:38 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is your favorite kind of sandwich? This got a lot of responses, as you might expect. Grimlar says: buttered oven bottom muffin, slice of lamb, medium mature slice of cheese, and a coating of salad cream. Justin says: the current sandwich at my house is turkey with provolone, lettuce, and tomato with mayonnaise on homemade sourdough. That actually sounds pretty good right now. Kevin says: bit boring here. Grilled cheese and bacon or BLT with mayo. Easily pleased, Michael says: can't beat a toasted cheese sandwich, which seems to be called a grilled cheese in the US, which has always baffled me. Ham is a good addition as well. I agree with Michael. That is a very good sandwich. Brandy says: old school. Tie between cold Jif creamy peanut butter and Concord grape jam or warm grilled Gruyere and Colby Jack on a good homemade bread (pumpernickel, oatmeal, wheat, or sourdough). Barbara says: Kind of a plain girl: toasted cheese and tomato. Annie says: toasted sandwich: ham, cheese, red onions, and tomato with butter and mayo. Jesse says: Italian sub with hot peppers. Steve says: I'd add some cheese because I'm a cheesy kind of guy and my spicy mustard has a bit of horseradish, too. Bonnie says: Maine Amatoes roast beef Italian (RB, cheese, onion, green pepper, pickled tomato, black olives, mayo, not oil. Jenny says: rare roast beef slices, sharp cheddar, and sourdough bread. I don't lubricate my sandwiches and prefer simple. Otherwise grilled cheese (extra sharp cheddar and gouda) or really anything with ham in there. Nick says: this is just perfect. Just make the beef pastrami. Jonah says: Panini. Genoa salami, roasted red peppers, onions, Jack and mozzarella cheese, good olive oil, and maybe a pesto. Gary says: there are lots of good ones, but if I can only have one, it has to be PB&J (crunchy peanut butter and raspberry jam). Andrew says: An MLT, a nice mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich where the mutton is so lean. I have to admit I did not know that was an actual sandwich. Randy says: hot and juicy pastrami with melted pepperjack cheese, diced red onion, mayo, and horseradish mustard on a lightly toasted sourdough hoagie. Dang it. Now I'm hungry. Craig says: club. Stacy says: grilled cheese. David says PB and J. Judy says peanut butter and grape jelly or a Philly cheesesteak. John says: tie between a really good Reuben or really authentic Philly cheesesteak. Croque Monsieur is a close second. Venus says: funniest sandwich story I ever heard was when my brother ordered a BLT and the waitress asked if he wanted any condiments on it. He said no and received bacon between two slices of bread. When I was younger, I used to eat BLTs that way. Just bacon and bread, though now that I'm older and recognize the benefits of vegetables in many areas of life, I do have BLTS with the lettuce and tomato. Juana says: BLT. For myself, the answer would be I think a sub with roast beef, ham, lettuce, pickles, tomatoes, and a significant quantity of spicy mustard. The inspiration for this question was that I typed it up, it was almost lunch time and I'm hungry. It may have been a mistake to record this podcast before lunch because I am now quite hungry after reading all that, but onwards to our Main Topic of the Week. 00:06:02 Main Topic: How to Create Distinctive Characterizations and Character Voices in a Novel Now on to our Main Topic of the Week: how to create distinctive characterizations and character voices in a novel. We're going to go through five tips for that. I got to think about this because I just finished Shield of Darkness, which was quite a long book, and it had multiple point of views. My previous long series, the Dragonskull series, was mostly a single point of view throughout all nine books. Gareth Arban was the main character and though we started to have more point of view characters come in starting with the fifth book and especially in the final third of the series, Gareth was still the main character and had the most scenes. By contrast, Shield of Storms and the rest of the Shield War series is going to be multi point of view. As of right now, Ridmark Arban, Niara, Lika, and Nikomedes are going to be the main characters and we will have new point of view characters that start introducing in with the rest of the series. The point of view of the different chapters will rotate between them. I'm writing in in what's called limited third person, where you shift entirely to one person's perspective for a scene or chapter. For example, if I'm writing from Ridmark’s perspective, we will see things from Ridmark’s perspective and know what he's thinking. Omniscient third person, by contrast, is when the author jumps from person to person. For example, in a scene with both Ridmark and the Nikomedes, the author will let us know what they're both thinking and will see things through both their eyes. There is nothing wrong with this, as a skillful writer can do it quite well. I think Agatha Christie especially did it quite well, but it's generally easier and simpler to write in third person limited instead of third person omniscient. Of course, third person limited is only easier if you can make each point of view distinctive. You have to write a distinctive voice for each character and it can become a problem if all the characters all sound and think the same way. So how can you create a distinctive voice for each point of view character? There are a couple of different ways that you can do this. #1: Descriptions. When writing from a particular character's viewpoint in limited third person, obviously that character will see things through his or her own personal lens. This is a handy way to differentiate characters. For example, take the laptop I used to write this podcast script. I got it in the summer of 2023 where my previous laptop went to the big recycling bin in the sky and it's an HP Envy with a 17 inch screen, since I'm at a phase of life where I prefer to write with the Microsoft Word window maximized and the screen size zoomed way up. But someone who knows less about computers than I do wouldn't see an HP Envy, they'll just see a silver laptop with a big screen. Someone who only uses Mac laptops would just see it as a big chunky PC laptop and would think of it that way. Firearms are another good example of this. For example, according to the FBI website, the official side arm of an FBI agent is a Glock 19 M semi-automatic pistol, which holds 15 rounds of 9mm ammunition, but many people would not know this. They would see the weapon and think of it as just a black handgun or a black pistol, or may even describe it inaccurately, calling it a revolver or a machine gun. This variation in description would also extend to characters. Consider a woman who works as a school administrator. The school board chairman might think of her as the most reliable employee in the district and describe her that way. The students might describe her as the mean lady who works in the office. One of the teachers might think of her as my best friend. Another teacher might think of her as my cousin’s nasty ex-wife. Which one of these characterizations of the woman are correct? Well, it depends on the particular point of view at the moment, and you can use that description to help differentiate your characters from one another. #2: Dialogue is another great way to differentiate characters from one another. No two people ever really have similar speech patterns. The school administrator in the previous example might always find a way to bring the conversation back around to her cats. A socially awkward computer programmer might start over sharing facts about topics that interest him. A taciturn electrician might only speak when necessary and prefer silence the rest of the time. A lawyer might talk in very precise sentences with every word exactly measured, especially a lawyer who is used to arguing in front of a judge. A common joke is that rather than asking why, the lawyer will always say on what basis? People will also talk about different things. They have favorite topics or are better or worse at handling emotionally sensitive discussions. People also have things they absolutely refuse to discuss under any circumstances and become angry if someone tries to force them to talk about these topics. Dialogue is also a place where it's best not to get too hung up on grammar, since you'll find that most people do not talk in grammatically perfect sentences. People often repeat themselves, respond to a question with another question or an irrelevant answer, and go off on tangents. The trick for writing dialogue is to try and catch a feeling of verisimilitude with the somewhat rambling nature of human conversation in general without getting too bogged down and trying to make it too realistic. You want to keep the story moving forward, after all. #3: Attitudes. Another good way to differentiate between point of view characters is attitude. How do they respond to things emotionally? This ties into both description and dialogue because the character's attitude will obviously influence how they describe things and how they talk. To return to the example of the school administrator above, a student with a cranky attitude might think of her as the mean lady in the office, while a teacher who is in a good mood and enjoys his or her work might think of her as Miss Jones from the school district. The character’s mood will color how they describe their surroundings and how they relate to the characters around them. A character who is in a good mood would simply note a car braking in front of them in traffic and slow down. A character in a bad mood will likely rant about how the jerk in front brake checked them. This leads into the next aspect of character attitudes. How does a character react emotionally to events and other characters? One character might view having to stand in line for a while as a minor inconvenience and turn his or her thoughts elsewhere during the wait. Another character might fly into a rage with impatience and demand to speak to the manager over. The first character might dislike going to restaurants because he or she finds it embarrassing to be waited upon and will get through the experience with stiff politeness. The second character might love going to restaurants and makes all sorts of unreasonable demands upon the waiter. Character attitudes and how they emotionally react to situations and each other is an excellent way to differentiate characters and therefore create unique voice. #4: Knowledge. Another good way to distinguish between characters is their individual knowledge and can also help inform the descriptions. For example, during a recent road trip I was listening to the audiobook of Dark Angel by John Sanford and narrated by Robert Petkoff. In the book, two federal agents Letty Davenport and Rod Baxter are assigned to infiltrate a group of dangerous hackers. Letty is an expert on firearms and violence and very physically fit while Baxter is 60 pounds overweight but an expert in all aspects of hacking and computer crime. He doesn't know anything about guns, but he knows everything about breaking into a computer system whereas Letty has only a surface level grasp of computer crime. She knows what a ransomware attack is but nothing about how to actually execute one or repair one. This is a helpful way to distinguish between the character’s point of view scenes like we talked about with description. As we said, one character might see a firearm and think it’s a black rifle but a character with greater knowledge of guns would immediately identify it as an M16A2. Another character might see a van and just think of it as an old red van, but a character who works as a mechanic would identify it as a 1993 Ford Aerostar. #5: Subtext. Now we come to the great bane and hindrance of human communication, subtext. How characters react to subtext, whether they notice it, imagine it, or fail to detect it at all can help distinguish between character point of views and help create character voice. In this context, subtext refers to an additional implied meaning beyond the actual literal meaning of the spoken words. For example, a woman tells her boyfriend that she hears the Grand Canyon is nice in May. The subtext is that she wants him to plan a trip for them to the Grand Canyon, and the boyfriend may or may not pick up on this subtext. Communication failure of this sort is a common staple of sitcom plots, where many conflicts could be resolved if the participants were capable of communicating clearly. This is something of a cliched example, but we've all had examples in real life where we said something only to have our words totally misinterpreted. For example, say you say, “I don't like fish” and the person to whom you are speaking interprets that as “I hate your cooking.” That might not have been your meaning at all, but the comment was interpreted that way. Or an office manager observes that there are budget cuts. His employees immediately interpret that as impending layoffs when in fact, the manager simply meant that the budget for office supplies and computers has been cut. Subtext provides an excellent tool for distinguishing between characters. One character might completely miss subtext in conversation, while another might imagine subtexts that aren't there at all, like with the fish comment or another character who constantly speaks in subtext and gets annoyed when people don't pick up on their subtle meanings. Hopefully these five tips will help you craft characters with distinctive voices and viewpoints. So that's it for this week. After all that talk about sandwiches, I think I might go look for lunch myself. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I look at six ways indie authors can effectively work with audiobook narrators to produce great audiobooks. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 208 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July the 5th, 2024, and today we're discussing six tips for working with audiobook narrators. Before we do that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and Question of the Week. For my current writing projects, I'm very pleased to say that Shield of Darkness is finally done and published. By the time this episode goes live on Monday, the book should be live at all the ebook stores and you pick it up at your ebook store of choice. It took a bit longer to write this one because I was obliged to take quite a bit of time off during the writing process, but I'm pleased to report it is finally done. My next project will be the third Rivah book, Half-Orc Paladin and I am 35,000 words into that one. I think the final book will end up being around 80,000 words, give or take. I'm also about 18,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs. Not sure when I would do that one. Possibly after Half-Orc Paladin. I might do another book after Half-Orc Paladin first, but we will see. In audiobook news, nothing has changed from what it was last week. Both Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling and Wizard-Thief are currently underway for production, which would ironically tie into my main topic of this week about working with audiobook narrators. 00:01:14 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's topic: your home Internet goes out, which means you can't use the Internet until your Internet service provider gets around to fixing it. What do you do instead? The inspiration for this question was that I wanted to play Starfield, but the Xbox Network services were down and I didn't feel like going through the settings to get the offline mode to work on my Xbox. So I wrote the blog post for Question of the Week instead. We had an interesting range of responses this week. Our first response is from Justin who says: if the Internet is down, I have many things to do. During leisure and recovery time, I can read, play games, and watch movies just fine without the Internet. Most of my computer games are old and do not require connection in order to function. World of Warcraft is the only exception to that, and I keep that around as much to chat with friends and family who play it. If I need to use the Internet (banking, ordering, directions, etcetera), my phone can act as a hotspot and as long as there's phone service, I have slow connectivity. Adrian says: I am lucky enough to live on an island where all the Internet is via fiber network and we have a minimum connection of 500 megabits per second and only have failures once a year at most and our phone network is about to change to 5G. Adrian is quite lucky here, I have to admit, because 500 megabits is very fast. Jonathan D. says: mostly I listen to my son complaining that he cannot watch YouTube videos and then tell him that when I was his age, we only had four TV channels. After that, I would wonder when I became more like my parents. I do have plenty of books, board games, DVDs, and offline computer games if it's a long-term outage. Joaquim says: this would be my day. Over the years we've amassed nearly five terabyte worth of movies and TV shows from tape video recorder, DVD video recorder, and online video recorder. Also, we have a lot of DVDs. My family would rather stream, even if we have it offline already. For music, we have a lot of CDs and MP3s. We would have an outage if a Caterpillar would cut the cable during driveway refurbishing. The last time this happened before smartphones were available, I used a Mini WLAN router as backup. Now I just bought a 5G smartphone, which can act as hotspot for up to 10 devices and has USB tethering for my router. I tested both modes and the speed was quite good. Surabhi says: my data was over for the day, so I read one of your books. I often have these days. I usually catch up on more homework or read some books. Have you watched Oppenheimer yet? I sadly missed the opportunity to watch it in theaters, but I streamed it recently and it was honestly well worth the hype. I read the screenplay before the movie for some reason and it added the experience for some reason. Nolan’s screenplays always make for a nice experience. In fact, I did watch Oppenheimer in the theater back in July or August, when Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods was done, and I published it and finished the Dragonskull series. That was how I celebrated. I took a half day off and went to the theater to watch Oppenheimer and because it was like a three hour movie, you kind of have to take a half day off work to go watch Oppenheimer. I thought it was quite good and one of my favorite movies of 2023. Our next comment is from William, who says: this is also a good reminder to buy physical copies of games you really like. On a side note, I have had very few Internet outages that lasted very long since I switched to fiber, and nowadays you always have your phone for backup Internet anyway, so work can continue. Power outages, on the other hand, present more of a challenge, especially in winter. Becca says: do some gardening or read. Michael says: yeah, as others have said, I just tether to my phone instead if I wanted to use the Internet. If my phone signal is also gone, I just assume a global apocalypse and go hide in bed. Probably a sensible reaction to the situation. Mike says: well, I have books downloaded on my iPad and hundreds of other paper books to read and go outside and see the world. Braq says: I hope on my adventure motorcycle (Triumph Tiger 1200), then I find the nearest back road and a cold clear water stream and I fly fish till the sun goes down. Adeline says: hotspot off the phone, if I need to be online. It's happened before. It'll happen again. If I don't need to be online, I really just read one of your books on my phone, either on the sofa or wander out to the nearest park if the weather is good and read it there. Todd says: there's plenty to do without the Internet. I grew up in the ‘80s. Pet my dogs, read a book, play cards or dominos or another board game, make some tasty food. Work on a hobby. Go for a walk or bike ride. Maaike says: if the Internet goes down, I'll be drawing, painting, reading, or kayaking. Or maybe practicing martial arts or going for a run. Plenty of stuff left to do. Jenny says: my phone becomes a mobile hotspot. Juana says: read. Jesse says: guitar, paperbacks, and the occasional card game or tabletop game. I realized that for me, the question breaks down in two ways: if the Internet goes down while I'm working, or if the Internet goes down while I want to relax. If the Internet goes down while I'm working, it's not necessarily a huge deal. If I'm writing or editing, everything is downloaded locally anyway, so I would just keep on writing and editing until the Internet came back up. If the Internet goes down while I’m uploading an ebook or an audiobook or setting up ads or changing my website, that is in fact super annoying. However, I usually work on multiple books at a time. Right now, I'm finishing up the publishing process for Shield of Darkness, and I'm also writing Half-Orc Paladin and Ghost in the Tombs. So if I'm working on an online task, and the Internet goes out, then I'll switch to one of the books I'm currently working on and make progress with that. If the Internet goes down while I want to relax, I'll read a paper book (I still have lots of those) or watch a DVD. When Oppenheimer came out on Blu-ray (to tie it back to Oppenheimer), Christopher Nolan rather famously said that you should get it on Blu-ray so no evil streaming service could take it away. Obviously, Mr. Nolan had a financial motive for that statement, but he wasn't wrong. So if there is a movie I really like, I will attempt to get it on DVD or Blu-ray. 00:06:14 Main Topic of the Week: Working with Narrators on Audiobooks Now on to our main Topic of the Week: six tips for working with narrators on audiobooks. I decided to do this as a topic because at this point, I have had quite a lot of experience at this. I did my first self-funded audiobook back in 2018, so over half a decade now. You occasionally hear horror stories of indie authors and narrators that don't get along well or the entire thing falls apart and it turns into this mutual cycle of bitter recriminations and so forth. So with that in mind, I thought I would share six tips for how to have a good relationship with your narrator if you are an indie author who is producing audiobooks and how to work well with a narrator and hopefully have a good professional relationship. Tip #1: As with so many things, manage your expectations and understand what the narrator actually does. An audiobook narrator is a skilled professional, and it's not the same thing as reading a book aloud or having AI do it. A narrator has to perform the story and bring it alive (or if you're doing a nonfiction book, read it in a crisp and professional manner) and bring nuance and help to punctuate the story’s emotional beats, which is, as with so many things in life, a lot harder than it looks from the outside. Be wary of doing it yourself or having a friend or relative do it if they don't have experience and don't know what they're doing. Joanna Penn, who is sort of an indie author guru, rather famously does a lot of her nonfiction audiobooks herself. However, I should point out that's not for everyone, and she took a bunch of classes and has practiced really hard to do it. She works hard to pull it off. If it's not something you have a passion in doing yourself and you're not willing to put in the work to become good enough to do it, then it is really better if you hire a narrator. For myself, I would not ever even remotely think of narrating my own audiobooks. If you're listening to this podcast, if you have a regular practice of listening to this podcast, I think we can all agree that nobody wants to pay $15 or spend an Audible credit to listen to me talk and attempt to narrate an audiobook for ten straight hours. Part of the reason for this is that the audiobook community is very savvy and has very high expectations for quality and narration. If the narrator isn't good, if there are technical problems with recording, the reviews will let you know and your audiobook won't sell. The flip side of that is a good narrator isn't cheap. Many audiobook narrators belong to the SAG-AFTRA/The Screen Actors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA has rules for everything. Audiobook narration is no different. If you are a member of SAG-AFTRA and you're an audiobook narrator, you are expected to charge between $200 and $400 per finished hour of audiobook narration. Now this might seem very high if you don't know about the work that goes into it. Like, oh, I'd like to get paid, you know, $350 an hour for work, but quite a lot of work goes into it. There's a lot of preparation for each individual hour. And then based on the way that ACX and Findaway are set up, the audiobook narrator is responsible for producing finished, mastered, and leveled files that will pass the quality standards of both ACX and Findaway and all the individual audiobook stores. This can be very hard if you don't know what you're doing, and many narrators will hire someone to, you know, master and level and edit their audiobook files. If they put the time in to learn the skills, they'll do it themselves. That still is quite time consuming because you’ve got to sit there and edit the files and get out any weird spaces and make sure everything sounds good and so forth. All that said, ACX does offer a program called royalty share, where instead of paying the narrator upfront, you and the narrator split the royalties of the audiobook for the next seven years. The plus of this is you can get the audiobook off the ground for very little cost to yourself if you're an indie author. The downside of this, from the narrator's point of view, is that it's a lot of work that they're basically doing on spec and if the audiobook doesn't sell any copies, and many audiobooks do not sell very many copies, then the audiobook narrator is out of luck. Additionally, a great deal of the very skilled narrators will not do royalty share. They will only work for payment on completion, and if they do royalty share, they will only do it as part of another deal where they're getting paid per finished hour anyway. Because of that, a lot of beginning narrators and narrators who just started out do royalty share. I'm not going to say that you can't find a good narrator doing royalty share because there are good talented narrators starting out doing royalty share. However, it is harder to find a good narrator who is doing royalty share and a lot of the very experienced narrators will have switched to doing payment per finished hour instead of attempting to do a royalty share. If you want a professionally done audiobook, odds are you are going to be paying between $200 and $400 per finished hour. If you are paying more than that (and you really shouldn't be), that means you have hired a celebrity narrator, you know, someone who would be recognizable from a movie or a TV show or whatever, and they're doing your audiobook. If you have a celebrity narrator, you are probably beyond the level of needing to listen to me for advice. So that is our first tip: make sure you understand what the narrator does. Make sure you have a good way of paying for your audiobook and make sure you know the difference between royalty share and payment per finished hour. #2: Our second tip is to do your homework before holding auditions. Typically the way both ACX and Findaway work is you put up the posting for your book, and then you say this is what I'm looking for and then narrators have the chance to audition. Findaway used to have a more guided process for that, but I'm not sure they do that anymore. And for the last couple of times I've looked for a new narrator, I've done it off ACX. I recommend the first thing you do before you write out your posting for your audiobook is to research narrators in your genre. Some narrators specialize in certain genres, but it's not unusual for narrators to work in several genres at once. And now the reason for this is because narrators (and I've had actual narrators actually tell me this is that) find it very helpful. The more specific you can be in your posting for your audiobook auditions, the more helpful they find it. So that to that end, it's a good idea to find short samples of narrators and books that fit the desired tone of your book. The Audible website is very useful for this, because if you've spent any time browsing the Audible website, you can play a sample of any audiobook that's up there, and you'll get a little three to five minute sample of the audiobook and the narrator that you can listen to. I find a good practice to be is when you're putting together an audiobook is to include a list of the kind of narrators and narrator styles you want. The last time I did a posting for a new audiobook, I said I am looking for something a bit similar to the way Michael Kramer narrated Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and the way that Jonathan Davis narrated the Revenge of the Sith novelization by Matthew Stover. Narrators do find that kind of thing very helpful, because that helps them dial in on what you are looking for. It's also a good idea for you as the author in producing this audiobook to know what you are looking for, because some narrators try to have a different voice for characters. Probably one of the more famous examples is Marc Thompson, who does a lot of the Star Wars novels. If you listen to them, like if you listen to his narration of Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn, he does a pretty good impression of Luke Skywalker. He does a pretty good impression of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian and all the other classic Star Wars characters and he tries to give distinctive voices to all the other characters in the book. When you're auditioning narrators, you also have to post a short excerpt of your book in order to give the narrator something to audition with. I found that it's best to keep this under 1,000 words or so. Auditions should not really be more than 5 minutes, I think. Remember, the narrators are doing this on spec. They don't get paid for auditioning and it's good to be respectful of everyone's time and not waste anyone's time. What I usually do is I pick for those 1,000 words (though sometimes it goes up to about 1,500 words) is pick three different scenes from the book. What I try to do is pick a dialogue heavy scene. I try to pick an action scene and then maybe a more emotionally heavy scene to see how the narrator handles each one of these different tones. That would give the narrator something to work with and show off their chops and then they know what I'm looking for, an audiobook that sounds like, you know, these other sample audiobooks I've mentioned. Here is about 1,000 words of the book for you to try it with and give it a try and we will see what happens. It's good to be very clear with what you want when you audition audiobook narrators. I think this is important. Not everyone does this, but I think they should. It's very good to have a specific deadline and a specific deadline by when you're going to make a decision. The last couple of times I've auditioned new narrators, I've said usually something along the lines of, the posting is live now, it's going to be open for a week (which will be the 12th) and I will listen to every audition I get before the 12th. By the time I close the auditions on the 12th, I will make a decision and make an offer by the 14th or 15th. That way no one's kept in suspense and is waiting forever. They know if they haven't heard from you by the, you know 14th or the 15th or the 16th, that they're not going to get the audiobook. I used to reply to every audition I got, but unfortunately that was just not possible. The last time I auditioned a new narrator, we got nearly 100 auditions, and it did take a lot of time to sort through them all, and I'm afraid there just wasn't time to respond to everybody. That said, I think it's also important when you put up the audiobook posting and say this is what I'm looking for, it's also important to be as open as possible during that process, so if narrators have questions for you, you can answer them. I've had narrators during this process email me and say, does this book have like explicit adult scenes or explicit scenes of, you know, violence or cruelty against animals or women or children, or anything of that nature? It's important to be open and you don't want anyone to narrate who's uncomfortable with that. I think being as open as possible during the audition process and answering any questions from narrators is important, but I definitely didn't have time to respond to nearly 100 different auditions, and you may not as well. #3: So we go on to Tip #3 now: actually choosing a narrator from the auditions. If you get a lot of auditions, it may take some time to sort through them all. Like I said before, the last time I held open auditions for a narrator got nearly 100 auditions for the book, and sorting through them would take some time. There are easy ways to eliminate, you know, potential auditions quite quickly, like if you specified an American accent and you got a British accent or if you specified a female narrator and you get auditions from male narrators and that kind of thing. Usually, I’ve found you can narrow it down to about maybe 10 or 12 of the best ones for the for the book, and then at that point you look a little more closely at them. What I usually do is look at how much they charge and how many Audible credits they have (by that mean how many audiobooks they've done). The more audiobooks a narrator has done, the more likely they're able to be reliable and that you can expect confidently that they'll be able to finish the work. It's less of a gamble to hire a narrator who's done 150 audiobooks as opposed to one who has done 3. This isn't to say that you can have a good result with someone who has done 3, but there is a different track record and potentially a different level of expectation there. Also, and this is just Due Diligence 101, it might be a good idea to Google the narrators and look over the search results. Make sure that, for example, they haven't been convicted of serious crimes or are wanted in a different state or expressed strong opinions that you yourself are not comfortable with. Like I said earlier in this episode, you want the narrator to be comfortable working with you and you want to be comfortable working with the narrator. If the narrator is expressing very strong opinions on social media that you happen to find personally distasteful for whatever reason, it might be best to choose someone else. Once you have narrowed it down and found a narrator who has the style you're looking for and the kind of track record in terms of completed credits that you're looking for, that is the time to make an offer. The offer will also include a deadline for when you want the audiobook done by. I’ve found it's best to be a little flexible in that deadline, if possible. Maybe extend it out two or three months into the future. That way if you've chosen a narrator who can't do it right away but it has time in that time space, they can do it. It might also be a good idea to go back and forth a bit and pin down the schedule exactly. Once you have chosen the narrator and you’ve extended an offer and once the narrator has accepted it, this is the point in the process where you do need to get them the book. They obviously need the manuscript of the book if they're going to read it, and I've also found it's best to send a spreadsheet with all the major character names and locations and a pronunciation guide. If you're just doing thrillers or mystery or contemporary romance, you probably don't need a pronunciation guide. You do need a guide for the characters and how they sound. For example, Julia is a middle-aged woman with a raspy voice and a thick Midwestern accent. I write science fiction and fantasy, and I frequently have names like Xothalaxiar, Agrimnalazur, and Seziravorna. Obviously the narrator is going to want a pronunciation guide, so what I usually do is I also read aloud the names in each in the location spreadsheet and the character spreadsheet and send that along to the narrator. #4: Let's move on to our fourth tip, which is understand that narrators all work differently. I've had some narrators who will send me the chapters over right away when they're done, and so then we tend to listen to the chapters in clumps of three to four the time until the book is done. I’ve had other narrators who wait until the entire book is done and send that all over at once, and then we listen to it. It's important to respect someone else's workflow in a way that you are hiring an expert and there's no point in hiring an expert if you don't listen to the expert’s advice. Some narrators may have questions or want suggestions, while others may not have as many. It's always a good idea to answer these questions promptly so that there aren't delays in recording. Again, that's part of maintaining a good professional relationship with someone where if they have questions, you're available to address them promptly and as quickly as is reasonably possible. #5: Now on to our fifth tip: how to be a good collaborator. First, don't micromanage and don't ask for updates before the agreed upon deadlines. When you set up the book through ACX or Findaway, there's a default contract in there, and there's supposed to be a 15 minute sample by the first date and the finished book by the 2nd date. And if it's still not up to the deadline, that's not the time to send pestering emails. If you haven't gotten the book by the deadline, that's the time when you ask if anything is everything's going okay, if there's any questions, and so forth. Don't micromanage before that. Don't micromanage at all, and don't pester the narrator before the initially agreed upon deadlines. Additionally, don't be too picky. The time to be picky is in the audition process. Once you have gotten through the audition process and made your offer, you have hopefully selected the narrator you think will work best with what you want, and that is when you let the narrator get on with it and don't be overly critical. I've heard horror stories where the authors would reject the book because like the Welsh accent wasn't Snowdonia enough. It's before you choose a narrator during the audition process, that's when you're picky. Treat the narrator like a fellow professional and trust their judgment. Be willing to accept their suggestions. If you listen this podcast quite a bit, you know, my vocal performance skills are not necessarily the best, so if someone who has more experience with vocal performance than I do is going to make suggestion, I'm going to seriously consider it. Once you have received the finished audiobook, ideally you are supposed to have listened to it within seven business days, and by then you can either approve it or ask for changes, and ideally you want to do this as quickly as possible because the narrator doesn't get paid ‘til you finish and until the narrator’s paid, you can't post the audiobook and sell it. You should only ask for corrections and changes if you have a very good reason for doing so, like there's something actually wrong, like a sentence was dropped, or a paragraph is missing, or the chapters are in the wrong order and that kind of stuff, you know, the usual kind of glitches and small problems that prop up in any major projects like this. Sometimes the software just derps and a sentence drops out, that kind of thing. You should not ask for changes that are not for good reasons, and by this I mean if you don't like a character's accent or you don't like the pronunciation of something. You should have addressed all of this before, when you sent over the pronunciations and when you sent over the character list and any other information. This kind of information needs to be shared before and the proofing process is not the place to address it. It should have been done before. Be quick when responding to questions, if possible. If you do find things that need to be fixed, like a missing word or a character has the wrong name, that kind of thing, the best way to send that to your narrator is to give a timestamp of where precisely where it is in the chapter. And then probably the sentence before and the sentence after that. That will let them quickly zoom in on any errors in the recording and fix it promptly. So be precise as you can with the requested changes. Give the chapter numbers and time stamps, and probably the sentence before and after that sentence. #6: Our sixth and final tip: once the audiobook is done, be sure to acknowledge the narrator's work. I believe the requirements for ACX or Findaway is that the narrator's name has to be on the audiobook cover, but I occasionally hear stories where the narrator isn't credited, which strikes me as absurd because the narrative put a lot of hard work into this audiobook. It might cost you a lot of money, but it was still a lot of hard work. The narrator should be credited for that. Be sure to make sure that you have read by or narrated by, and then the narrator's name on the cover for the audiobook. Also when you mentioned it on your social media and your website and your blog posts and so forth, you want to say this is the audiobook of whatever as narrated by the narrator. Because the audio narrator, in my very strongly held opinion, does deserve very strongly to be credited for the work on the audiobook. So that is it for this week. Those are my six tips for working with audiobook narrators. I hope you found them helpful. I suppose this episode by its nature is a rather limited episode because of the large mass of indie authors out there, only a small subset of subset of us are currently doing our own audiobooks. If someone is thinking about doing their own audiobooks and wondering about how to approach it, I hope this podcast episode was helpful. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. I remind you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to organize my thoughts for this episode. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven attitude shifts for writers that will make them happier and more productive. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 207 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 28th, 2024 and today we are discussing seven important attitude shifts for writers. Before we get into all that, we'll have an update on my current writing projects and then we'll do Question of the Week and then we'll move over to our main topic. For current writing projects, I am still in the first phase of editing for Shield of Darkness. I'm on chapter 20 of what I think is going to end up being either 27 or 28. A couple of my chapters were quite long, so I need to keep splitting them in half as I edit to not have, like 9,000 word chapters. So things are going pretty well with that and I am hoping if all goes well that the book will be out the second week of July, probably after the 4th of July holiday, because releasing new books on the 4th of July is not a great idea. So hopefully before too much longer, we will have that book out. I’m also 31,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin and that will be my next book once Shield of Darkness is done and that will hopefully be out in very early August. I'm also 14,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs. I'm not sure when that's going to come out. I'm very much hoping to have it out before October, but we'll see how things go in the next couple of months. In audiobook news, recording for Wizard Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is underway. I believe both narrators started on recording this week. Spells Online: Leveling will be narrated by C.J. McAllister and Wizard Thief will be narrated by Leanne Woodward and they both did the previous books in the respective series. So if you want a sample, you can listen to the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Creation. 00:01:50 Question of the Week (note: This section contains spoilers for multiple movies, including Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan) Now let's move on to Question of the Week. It's time for a Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's topic: what is your favorite ending to a movie? No wrong answers, obviously. The inspiration for this was that I've been editing Shield of Darkness, so I've been thinking a lot about what makes a satisfying ending and what does not. Obviously, I want to have a satisfying ending. We had some good comments with this one. Our first comment is from Justin, who says: I'll go with an oldie, Casablanca. Rick saves Ilsa, the woman he loves, and puts her on the plane to Lisbon with her husband. He puts morals above love and tells her that she would regret staying with him. Then he and Renault head off to join the Resistance. “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Archetypes so powerful that you've used them. I'd argue that the Gray Knight’s ending with Ridmark, leaving Calliande and go with Kharlacht is a variation on this. That is interesting because I meant that was not at all in my head when I wrote the ending of Frostborn: The Gray Knight, and I don't think I've ever consciously written anything that I would say had been influenced by Casablanca, though of course I have seen it and it is a great movie, which again shows it's a very interesting that people’s interpretation of a particular piece of artwork can often have no connection to what the artist intended when he or she created the artwork, but both views are often valid. Our next come is from Michael, who says: probably the ending to The Illusionist, which is very satisfying or more infamously, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, which often reminds me of a story writing tip you have given in podcasts about good endings not necessarily needing to be a happy one. Our next comment is from Brandy, who says: the end of Serenity, where Summer Glau is checking everyone and stimming. Then her brother is badly hurt and you see that mental click and all the worry that she's going to hurt the one she cares about shifts to a feral “I will make this stop” and it's both feral and beautiful. When they break in, she's got this look like, yeah, test me. But she's perfectly willing to continue laying waste. It's just moving. Honestly having thought about it, go watch Hellsing Ultimate Abridged on YouTube. It's like a quarterly watch at my house, along a lot of true crime right now because my partner is trying to find an appropriately gruesome way to get rid of a character. I have to admit I've never actually seen Serenity or Hellsing myself, so maybe I'll put that on the to watch list. Our next comment is from John who says: Casablanca. Walking off at the end saying “this is beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Becca says V for Vendetta for me, I think. The ending scenes link key scenes, people, and phrases from earlier, then shows everyone from earlier, even those who died, and how they are linked to the change (with the voiceover). Our next comment is from Jenny, who says: no loose ends, no open to interpretation BS. Our next comment is from David who says: Son of Godzilla. When he goes back to his son in the snow-powerful. Scott says: The Mist. What a twist! Juana says: The Wrath of Khan. Fred says: Alien: Covenant. I think it's interesting that a couple of different people both said that Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan have very satisfying endings (I'm going to assume you've seen both those movies, so for next minute, actually next two minutes, if you haven't seen those movies, skip ahead If you want to avoid spoilers) because neither one of those movies has what would traditionally be called a happy ending. At the end of Casablanca, Rick doesn't get the girl, and at the end of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Spock dies, saving the Enterprise. Of course, there's a level of happiness to the ending because Spock dies, but he dies saving the entire Enterprise crew from being destroyed by the Genesis device. And in Casablanca, Rick doesn't get the girl, but she goes off with her husband and escapes. The Nazis continue fighting, and Rick and Renault, the police inspector join forces to be in the Resistance to the Nazis in Casablanca, which in a sense is also a happy ending. So I think that reinforces yet again, that if you are writing something, you need to have an ending that emotionally satisfactorily resolves the conflicts in the of the story that were raised in the story itself. It doesn't have to be a happy ending, but does need to be a satisfying ending. And I think I think it's very fair to say that both Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan and Casablanca have satisfying endings. Also, as Jenny said, you probably want to avoid loose ends and open to interpretation endings, because they really do seem to irritate people. 00:05:44 Main Topic: Seven Important Attitude Shifts for Writers Now on to our main topic this week: seven important attitude shifts for writers. I decided to talk about this today because actually this I'm recording this on June the 28th and yesterday was the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign season and without, you know, going into too much detail on that, you see a lot of reactions from people that are very gloom and doom and the country is doomed and the civilization is going to fall and so forth, which overlooks the fact that none of us know what is going to happen tomorrow and might be good or bad or maybe a little bit of both. That got me to thinking about how much of life is essentially mindset. Very often, regardless of one’s circumstances, happiness and contentment can be a choice, even in very extreme and extenuating circumstances, and it can be a choice that you reject if you're doing quite well. Like in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, the writer of the book talks about how a grievous evil he has seen under the sun is that there's a man with riches and palaces and food, and yet he's unable to enjoy any of them or derive any happiness for them, because he was not making the choice to, you know, appreciate the good things he had. He did not, in essence, have the mindset to appreciate the good things he had in his life. I've noticed this is very common for writers, probably because writing is such an intellectual activity that takes place significantly inside of one's own head, even before you start putting down words on the page. It's very easy to be your own worst enemy as a writer and develop beliefs that limit your ability to be effective or successful. I remember a long time ago when I was in college, I knew a couple of different people who said they didn't want to try very hard at things because one of them said the world was so evil that she thought the world was going to come to an end by before she was 30 and another one said that due to climate change and pollution, the world was going to come to an end before she was 30 as well. Well, I was the same age as them and I have not been 30 years old for a significant span of time. They were both wrong. The world has continued on for good and bad, for the significant span of time since we all would have been 30 years old. That is a good example of a mindset being self-defeating and not being in accordance with reality and essentially limiting what you can do because after all, if the world is going to end when you are 30 years old, there's no point in trying in your 20s and then suddenly you are hitting the mid-40s and upper 50s and like, hey, the world didn't end 20 years ago. So with that in mind, here are seven self-destructive attitudes I think both new and more advanced writers should train themselves out of. #1: the first destructive attitude: I should just sign up for one of those publishing services for writers because I don't have the time to figure all this stuff out. That is both a bad attitude and a very bad idea in general, because many of these services are predatory and don't offer very much for the large amount of money they're charging. It's better to pay in time than money when it comes to self-publishing. There are a lot of free resources online to help you learn to self-publish. Good ones include David Gaughran’s newsletter that he gives that away for free. He has several free e-books on self-publishing. Bryan Cohen has what he calls his quarterly 5 Day Amazon Ads Profit Challenge. That is a very good way to start learning the intricacies of Amazon ads. Joanna Penn has a wide variety of free YouTube videos on the process of getting started with self-publishing and I think she has a free ebook on the topic as well. So there are all these free resources that you can use to just commit the time to learning the beginnings of self-publishing and not fork over thousands of dollars to do something. I mean granted in life, there are areas where it is probably better to hire experts. For example, I recently had to have a large tree taken down near my house because it was diseased and the bark was falling off. It was rotten and I was worried that it was going to fall on the house. Theoretically, I could have broken out my electric chainsaw and done it myself, but that would have been a very bad idea. It was better to hire experts who know what they're doing to do it safely to bring the tree down. However, self-publishing is not a giant tree that might fall on your house. It is relatively easy to learn the basics and to do so without paying money and you avoid predatory self-publishing companies as you do because you have to be licensed to run a tree removal company, at least in this state. You do not have to be licensed to buy a website and call yourself a self-publishing expert. So for all those reasons, I think this attitude is a destructive and harmful one, and it would be better for you to learn at least the fundamentals of self-publishing before you pay anyone for it. #2: Our second destructive attitude is: I should focus on building sales and a following for my first book before I bother starting the next one. I think this is a self-destructive attitude because it's what I call the decorating the bathroom before you've done dug the foundation of the house problem. If you want to have a writing career, or if you want to be a writer, actually doing writing needs to be the foundation of that. But writers tend to procrastinate and channel themselves into sort of writing adjacent activities, like working about their work on their website, or trying to build social media followers or building their newsletter or the other kind of things that can be important and useful for selling books but are nonetheless less important than actually writing the next book. I say that's like worrying about how your bathroom will be decorated before you've even dug the foundation of your house. You should really dig the foundation of the house, build that house, and then worry how the bathroom is going to be decorated before you start worrying about that. It's also very rare for a writer of any genre to have massive success on a first book. Everyone thinks about these debut novelists who released their first books and were big hits. However, if you look at the overall population of writers, these people are vanishingly rare in terms of percentages, like lottery winners. They just got lucky and found an agent who believed in the book, who passed it on to an editor who believed in the book, and the publisher believed in the book and decided to put a big marketing push behind it. That was enough to turn the book into a hit. This can happen to you, but it's about as likely as going to the gas station, buying a lottery ticket, and becoming a billionaire. It's probably not going to happen, and you're better off putting in the work yourself. So with all that in mind, if you're worried about the sales of your first book rather than getting your energies too diverted on the various writing adjacent tasks like newsletters and social media and websites and so forth, perhaps writing the next book might be a better use of your time. #3: The third self-destructive attitude we're going to talk about is “Ads and marketing aren't for me.  My book should stand on its own merits.” I recently heard of someone who attended a training session about ads where one of the other attendees refused to do any ads for their book but were frustrated that their sales had stalled. The person in question simply did not see the causal connection between these two events. It's a very cruel and very real fact that plenty of great books are never read because people never find them. It's important not to view ads as something dirty or shifty or uncouth. If you feel that way, you're probably doing them wrong. Ads are just a simple way to connect people with books that they're excited to read. It's as simple as that. You want to use ads as a tool where you will find the right reader for your specific book. It is intimidating to learn how ads work. I'd say Facebook is the most complicated and Amazon is the least complicated, but that's just matters of degree because they're both pretty complicated. There are free programs like Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad Challenge for learning how Amazon ads work for writers, and this includes forums for asking questions and getting more help. As with just learning the basics of self-publishing, there are a lot of free resources and good resources out there that you can use to give yourself at least a basic competency with ads. That would be very helpful for your writing career. #4: Our 4th self-destructive attitude: It's a waste to spend money on ads. This can be true, with the caveat it's a waste to spend money on ads if you don't know what you're doing. It is very easy to aimlessly spend large amounts of money on Facebook and Bookbub ads. While it's much harder to aimlessly spend money on Amazon ads, you can do it. Taking the time to learn how these ads work and then starting out slowly and gradually building up the budgets is crucial to not wasting money. Amazon, Facebook, and BookBub’s daily limits make it easy to budget how much you are spending on ads. Another reason people often think it's a waste to spend money on ads is because their targeting is way too broad. Like you hear about people saying Facebook ads don't work, and then you dig into their story a bit more and it turns out they set their category to “books” and that's it. They're just targeting everyone who liked books. That is indeed a waste of money, because with advertising in general and book marketing in particular, the more specific you can get your targeting down, the better you will do. This is most easily demonstrated in romance, where it's common for romance readers describe books as like, you know, a slow burn, enemies to lovers, sweet romance with a happily ever after ending. Which is like four different story tropes, but that's very commonly how romance authors talk about books. So if you wrote a book like that, you can dial down the advertising enough to target people who are just interested in that kind of book through comp authors or interests, then your ads have a much higher chance of being successful, so bear that in mind. It's only a waste to spend money on ads if you don't know what you're doing, and if your targeting isn't right. #5: The 5th destructive attitude is: if that my book wasn't successful right away, I'm a failure as a writer. No one ever does anything right the first time and you should beat yourself up over it. Additionally, many books do well after a re-edit, title change, or cover change. It's possible your book just needs one of those. I mean, I've written 150 novels and I still have that kind of thing.  I originally called my LitRPG series Sevenfold Sword Online, but that confused people with because they thought it was attached to the Sevenfold Sword series. Earlier this year I retitled it to Stealth and Spells Online, and it's done quite a bit better since that title change. The reality is that most first books don't sell well. It doesn't mean that you should give up. The solution is to keep writing. Keep reading books in your genre and keep learning what readers want to read. It's important to keep experimenting and keep trying new things. I'm currently reading a history of the Dune series as a franchise. Based on Frank Herbert's earlier career, you would not predict that he would have written one of the classics of sci-fi literature. In fact, what he was originally writing about that turned into Dune was a nonfiction article about how the state of Oregon was trying to control the sand dunes in the eastern part of the state and keep them from overrunning other lands. That was what Dune originally was, a nonfiction article about sand dune management and then he wasn't able to sell that article. He rewrote it into a fictional short story and it gradually turned into Dune. There's a joke that every overnight success takes 10 to 20 years to prepare, and it definitely seems to have been true in Frank Herbert's case. If you keep on writing, perhaps that will be true of you as well. #6: Self-destructive attitude number six: it's not worth self-publishing because people won't respect my book unless it's traditionally published. I always love this one because the prestige of being traditionally published is great. But do you know what prestige doesn't do? Pay bills! Would you rather have the prestige or the money and full control of your works? Like earlier this episode, I mentioned that I had to pay some people to bring a tree down in my yard. Can you imagine walking up to a bunch of guys and with chainsaws and telling them, hey, I'm going to pay with the prestige of being traditionally published, but not actual money? That would not work out very well. I have in fact been traditionally published a very long time ago and let me tell you, the money of self-publishing is so much better than the prestige of being traditionally published. Full control of your work and money, in my opinion, is much better than prestige. Additionally, if you do get the prestige of traditional publishing, you are paying for it quite a bit. Traditional publishing has been providing their authors with increasingly less editing, marketing, and creative control and are prone to giving you increasingly restrictive contracts in return. Royalties may take a very long time to arrive and more realistically, never arrive at all as many books don't pay out past their initial advance. Traditionally published authors are taking on an increasing amount of the workload of marketing and find that their books are often filled with typos because less attention and staffing are being provided to the editorial departments. Prestige is really the main thing that traditional publishing is still offering, and there's also the problem that that many people in traditional publishing are unethical. I mean obviously self-publishing has its fair share of scammers as well, but remember, traditional publishing is supposed to have prestige. Prestige doesn't keep out the scammers. Recently there was a meltdown on Twitter where a literary agent posted that she just read a great book and she liked the idea but she didn't like the author and so she thought about giving the idea of the book to another one of her authors to write for her. I suspect she was saying that jokingly, but it didn't come across that way and so all of literary Twitter fell upon her head. She followed the predictable course of deleting all her social media accounts and then getting fired from the agency from which she worked. If you talk to experienced traditional published writers off the record, very often they will admit that literary agents are often very sketchy people. So if you are self-published, one of the big advantages is that you don't have to deal with that. #7: The seventh and final most self-destructive attitude: I need to quit my day job to be a real writer. The answer to that is no, you don't. Just a few examples of authors who kept their day jobs: Franz Kafka worked in an insurance company, Anthony Trollope was a postal clerk who wrote for 2 hours in the morning every day before he went to work, and Toni Morrison was an editor. I don't think anyone in their right mind would claim that Franz Kafka, Anthony Trollope, and Toni Morrison were not real writers. Real writers usually still have a full-time job. The reality is that very few writers earn an income on their own larger than a salary and work benefits would be or if they do, they're not able to sustain that level of income over the span of their career. In an Author’s Guild survey from a few years ago, even full-time authors were reporting a median yearly income of $20,300. There's nothing wrong with not being a full-time writer and nothing wrong with just doing writing as a side hustle that you enjoy. Now you might think this is hypocritical. Jonathan Moeller, you yourself are a full-time writer and have been for the last eight years. For my part, I didn't actually want to become a full-time writer at first. I found that I was obliged to do so because I needed to move for family reasons. It did work out in my case. And to be fair to myself, I have definitely hustled doing that. I mean, in the last eight years I've written like 80 new novels and at least half a dozen complete series in that time. Most days I am writing from about 7:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon with breaks for lunch and exercise and so forth. Then there's all the business stuff on the side and then audiobooks as well. So you can be a full time writer, but it is definitely a lot of work, which is what I've been doing for the last eight years. By no means should you consider yourself not to be a real writer if you also have a full-time job. If I had not been obliged to move for family circumstances, I probably would have kept my full-time job until my employer ran out of money (which would have been a real possibility a few years ago). So there we are, seven self-destructive attitudes that I think writers would do well to remove from their minds. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to research and pull together a list for this episode. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at different pricing tiers for selling ebooks, and discuss the pros and cons of each. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 206 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 21st, 2024 and today we are discussing ebook pricing and the pros and cons of different ebook price points. Before we get into that, we will have an update on my current writing projects and some discussion about Question of the Week. First up, my current writing projects. I am pleased to report that I have finished the rough draft of Shield of Darkness. It came in at 111,000 words, which I wrote in 31 days. It’s amusing to look back. The book before that in the series, Shield of Storms, was 6,000 words shorter, but I actually wrote it in 35 days, but that was over December and January and I had taken an entire day off for the Christmas holidays back at the end of 2023. Next up, I will be writing a short story called Disciples that ties into the Shield War series and my newsletter subscribers will get that for free when Shield of Darkness comes out in ebook form, so it's a good time to sign up for my newsletter. After Shield of Darkness is out and published, my main focus will then be Half-Orc Paladin, and I think I'm 25 or 26,000 words into it (I'm not entirely sure off the top of my head). That's where I'm at with my current projects. Good news: the rough draft of Shield of Darkness is finally done. 00:01:20 Question of the Week Now let's move on to Question of the Week. This week's topic: what is your favorite food to eat while traveling? The inspiration for this question was the fact that I traveled somewhere around 1,200 miles in the last week before recording this episode. As you might expect, we had a range of answers. Justin says: nuts. Almonds, peanuts, or mixed nuts, roasted and salted. High in sodium, but non-perishable and high in protein. Like nuggets and fries, you can drive while eating them. Another advantage is the ability to easily put away uneaten nuts for later. And finally, no whining from vegans about the evils of consuming meat while in airport lounges. I have to admit I haven't had that personal experience yet, but I can see how that would be a plus. Our next comment is from Surabhi, who says I'm South Asian, so my award goes to samosa and Pani Puri. I'm pretty sure I pronounced that wrong. Our next comment is from Jesse, who says: hot dogs with pepperjack, jalapeños, and mustard. Weirdly cures most of what ails you. Scott says: sunflower seeds pass time for a for a time consuming or passing the time snack. Beef jerky is a choice for me also. The hardier and saltier, the better. John says: tacos as long as I’m west of the Mississippi and South of Dallas. Burger and fries otherwise. If I'm rolling cheap, I'll pack an ice chest to make sandwiches and chips. Juana says: I like to eat different regional foods, like a candy called cherry mash with chocolate and nuts covering cherry nougat. It used to be available in Kansas only. They don't serve a BLT above Tennessee or sweet cold tea in Maine. Michael says: well, I too am a fan of McDonald's. I usually go for the cheeseburger meal with fries and a Diet Coke. Usually consistent and my innards tolerate them well. Also driving friendly. The Diet Coke does tend to clear out the slight grease from the fries and the burgers- cleanses the palate, so to speak…fine dining at McDonald's. But if I'm near Philly, I always defer to a cheesesteak with fried onions. Alton says: don't eat a whole bag of baby carrots. You won't eat them for years afterwards. Good advice for us all! Juan says: be a foodie. I enjoy finding your remote mom and pop places in towns I drive through and enjoying the atmosphere. Sometimes the food is amazing, sometimes food is bleh, but I get to sit in a quaint spot in some obscure town and read a book, scroll Facebook, or just people watch. You could say that I’m more a “experience the travel” than a foodie person, I guess. I rarely eat in the car. I look for excuses to get out of the car. Typically for me is a 5 hour drive to a particular military installation a few times a year and stopping at different rural towns on the way. Todd says: Jack-in-the-Box breakfast sandwiches, especially when it's not breakfast hours. So if they serve them all day, I know my order is made fresh and it's reasonably healthy. Then I ruin any concept of healthiness with a big old Dr. Pepper. Roger says: bacon, brie, and cranberry mini baguette with rocket/arugula. Gary says: I like tacos from food trucks, pop-ups, or little family-owned shops. Hotel desk clerks know a surprising amount of places to get such things. Michael says: chocolate. John says: burritos. Around the West Coast, In and Out. And Bonnie says: I haven't traveled any real distance in years, occasional work trips under 150 miles. It’s usually a large Dunkin’ coffee and sausage, egg, and cheese wrap. For myself, I think my favorite food to eat while traveling is the McDonald's Chicken McNuggets and fries. I know objectively that McDonald's Chicken McNuggets and fries are not super healthy and I try to avoid fast food in general in my day-to-day life, with varying degrees of success. For that matter, there are far superior fries and nuggets over those obtained at McDonald's. However, McDonald's fries and nuggets offer several advantages to the weary traveler. I can eat them in the car without taking my eyes off the road or getting my hands messy. I don't need them with the dipping sauce. In the airport, I can eat them in the waiting lounge without making a huge mess. So for me that lands in the sweet spot of convenience, flavor, and not making a huge mess in the car while eating it. 00:05:09 Main Topic of the Week: Ebook Pricing Now on to our main topic this week: the topic of ebook pricing, which is often a very sensitive topic, especially among newer indie authors. Newer indie authors will sometimes have spent years or a year or a considerable amount of time writing their book, and they feel they should charge accordingly. Like, this was a year of work. Why should I not charge you $9.99 for it or $14.99? A new Stephen King book is $14.99, so why shouldn't I have that price? If I put a year of work on this or more, then why shouldn't I charge for it accordingly? After all, you can go to, you know, Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts or wherever get a coffee for $5. Why shouldn't the book cost more than a coffee since it's more work to produce the book than the coffee? I think that is thinking about ebook pricing the wrong way. You want to think of price as a marketing tool, not a statement on the worth or quality of your book. Some people will have checked their absolute favorite book out of the library and paid nothing for it and that doesn't mean the book is without value. I think you will want to price your books to move. Look for various options for promotional prices as part of your overall marketing strategy. Having a permanently free ebook isn't the instant guaranteed success it used to be, but it still works and we'll talk about that a bit more later in the episode. How you price the first three books in the series is crucial for later books. Don't disappoint the reader with a giant price price hike like $10 between books one and two in a series. Give them a reason to get further into the series. For myself, for my long series, what I'll usually do is set the first book free, set the second book to $0.99, and then after that, the rest of the books in the series will probably be $4.99. The reason I do that is because if you read the first book for free and get the second book for $0.99, then by the end of those two books you have a pretty good idea whether it will be worth your time and money to continue with the series. Charging the same amount as Stephen King or James Patterson for your book is not great marketing for a new, unknown author, or even for a relatively successful indie author. Stephen King and James Patterson can get away with charging that because they are Stephen King and James Patterson. I am not Stephen King or James Patterson and I'm pretty sure you are not, too. It's best to look at what the best-selling indie authors in your genre are charging and price closer to them when possible. People will very rarely pay premium prices (i.e. over $10.00) for fiction that is not from best-selling trad pub authors and even traditionally published authors have seen resistance to pricing over $15.00 for their books. I noticed about a lot of new books from the Bane science fiction and fantasy publishing house tend to be around the $9.99 mark or even the $8.99 mark, which is much more palatable. One thing to note also is that nonfiction readers are less price sensitive, especially in specialized or technical topics. Those readers are looking for a book that meets a need, so they're more concerned about finding a quality book on the exact topic than how much the book costs. Reviews matter more than price in this case. For example, a nonfiction guide about hiking the Grand Canyon full of instruction, maps, and so forth can command a much higher price than memoir about someone who hikes the Grand Canyon because the memoir is less interesting to that particular kind of reader than someone who needs any nonfiction book about the Grand Canyon. So for the next part of this episode, let's look at the pros and cons of the different tiers of pricing and for the sake of this episode, we've organized pricing into 5 tiers. The first tier of pricing is of course free. The purpose for that is obviously much easier to write a free book. It exposes the book to a greater audience than it might have otherwise. Since storage space is abundant, people don't hesitate if something looks interesting if it’s free because you don't have to worry about hoarding ebooks the way you have to do about hoarding paper books. That said, free has several substantial cons to it as well. You're obviously not making any money off a free book unless the book is free temporarily for promotional pricing or the book is perma-free to promote a longer series and entice people to read future books. For a recent example from my own experience, Silent Order: Omnibus One was very recently free on BookBub and the only reason I did that is because it's the first three books in a 14 books series and I've seen excellent read through from that to paid books in the rest of the series, so it was a good marketing experiment that paid off. But if the only book I had was Silent Order: Omnibus One and there weren’t 11 follow up books in the series, then making Silent Order: Omnibus One free would have just been a waste of my time. The second pricing tier is at $0.99 to $1.99. The pros of this include that $0.99 is a price point where for a lot of people, it would be an impulse buy. They don't think about it very much. It's a good price point for promotions such as BookBub and other book promotion sites like Bargain Booksy, Book Barbarian, and so forth, where if you lower your book to a temporary sale price like $0.99, you can advertise it much more effectively because as we said, $0.99 really is an impulse buy for many people. There are a couple of cons to this, too. The Amazon payouts for this price range are not as favorable. If you set your book to $0.99 on Amazon, you will get only 35%, whereas if you set it between $2.99 and $9.99 you'll get 70%, which we'll talk about a bit more shortly. Some readers feel like books in this price range suggests that the book will be low quality. Again, that's a matter of taste, but if you are temporarily promoting your book, you can get good results for $0.99. One thing to also note as well is that just because Amazon has a 35% rate, some of the other retailers do better. Google Play and Barnes and Noble will give you 70% of the $0.99 price point so you can do literally twice as well in terms of revenue from them and I believe Kobo gives you 45% of a $0.99 book. So you can make more money from them off of the other retailers as opposed to Amazon. One note of caution from my own experience: I wouldn't bother with the $1.99 price point. It seems to be sort of the halfway point between $0.99 and $2.99, where people just generally do not like buying things at the $1.99 price point, at least ebooks. I've had better luck with both $2.99 and $0.99 than I have with $1.99. So that is something to bear that to bear in mind, that I've never had much luck with $1.99 price point. That moves us up to our third tier of pricing, $2.99 to $4.99. The pros: over $2.99 is the more favorable Amazon payout range because then you get 70% of the sales price as opposed to 35%. Because of that, $2.99 is still a pretty common price for this reason, especially for the first books in many series. This price is still less than the smallest size Frappuccino at Starbucks, much less than a gallon of gas, so it is a price range that most readers accept. For myself, most of my novels now are at $4.99. For a while, for like 10 years practically, I kept them at $3.99, but when inflation started getting really bad towards the end of 2021 and through 2022, I moved everything up to $4.99 and I really haven't had many problems with that. I think we're at the sweet point between what is a fair price for the book and a price that the readers also accept as fair, which is an important Venn Diagram to master if you are an indie author. The cons of $2.99 to $4.99 are that the price is too high for promotions like BookBub. If you want to do a BookBub feature deal for your book, you are better off applying at $0.99 or free because BookBub is about discount books, not full price books. If your full price is $2.99 or $3.99 or $4.99, it's going to be hard to sell a BookBub, so $2.99 to $4.99 is generally a good regular price for your ebooks and then only go lower if it's part of a special promotion or if you want to make the first book in the series free. Now on to our 4th tier, $5.99 through $9.99. The pro is that you are still getting good payout rate from Amazon at this price point; you're still in the 70% range, which stops at $9.99 and readers are generally comfortable paying this range if they are already fans of the author and series. I haven't tried to go above $4.99 for my individual novels, because I don't want people to feel like I'm trying nickel and dime them. But I do know indie authors who do, and that it basically comes down to a personal decision if you feel comfortable doing that and your readership would support paying the higher price. The con is of course it's difficult to get new readers and do promotions at this price tier. If you want to do a sale where you make like the first book of your series free, you're dropping down to $0.99. As we mentioned earlier in the show, the jump in price from free or $0.99, to for example, $7.99 might be jarring enough that it will turn off readers and discourage them from buying the books later in the series. Now we come to the fifth and final tier of pricing, $10 and up. Pro is that the readers often accept this price tier for specialty nonfiction or technical books, especially if they are long books with a lot of images, maps, and details. I am thinking about things like RPG source books, travel guides like I mentioned earlier, technical nonfiction that involves a lot of diagrams and maybe like, pictures of engine parts. However, there are a lot of cons with pricing your ebook over $10. The biggest one is that you will only get 35% from Amazon. So if, for example, you set your book at $9.99 and sell it, you'll get about $7.00 depending on the sales tax and size of the ebook file and so forth. But if you set the book at $15 instead of $7.00, you will receive only $5.20, give or take, depending upon conversion rates. So it makes much more sense to price your e-book at $9.99 if you want to go that high instead of raising the price into around $14.99 or $19.99 because you will actually be making less money. You're selling fewer copies and getting paid less per copy, which is not a recipe for success. It also sets expectations sky high, because if you're paying that much for something, you want it to be perfect and it will repel all but the most devoted continuing readers, especially for fiction. If you're writing very specialist nonfiction, you might be able to get away with it, but you will sell fewer copies and probably not make as much per copy. So those are the pros and cons of the five different pricing tiers we're talking about. My thoughts on book pricing have evolved a little bit over the years, but not very much. I think overall if you are an indie author writing genre fiction, the best recipe for commercial success remains to write a long series and then make the first book free, the second book like $0.99, and then the rest of the books in the series to whatever the usual price for the series you set is (whether it's $2.99, $3.99, $4.99, or $5.99). Though to be honest, I would not price an ebook novel $5.99 myself. Your circumstances may vary. If I was starting out today, my advice to a new writer would be basically to do that: write a series and make the first book free, make the second book $0.99. and then keep writing books in the series. For myself, I don't think I would write another series with more than nine books in it because you get a little drop in read-through from book to book. I think Cloak Mage with Nadia is the last series I'm going to write with over nine books in it. I think ideally in the future, my length for a series would be 6 to 8 books and then once the series is over, I start over with a new series and then eventually once I get enough books out in the series, make the first one free, the second one $0.99, and the rest full price. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping to pull together through research for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (transcripts are available for episodes 140 to the present). If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at my SILENT ORDER science fiction series, and answer twelve of the most common questions from readers about the books. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 205 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June the 14th, 2024 and today we are doing a question and answer session on my Silent Order science fiction series. Before we get to that, we will have an update on my current writing progress and then Question of the Week. My main project right now is Shield of Darkness, a sequel to Shield of Storms and the second book in the Shield War series. Progress has not been as quick as I would like, but there still has been progress and as of this recording, I am about 84,000 words into the rough draft. It really helped that I had a 10,000 word day on June 12th. That really propelled things forward. I'm not entirely sure how long the rough draft is going to be. I think it's probably going to end up around 120,000 words, maybe 115,000 words. We'll see when get there. But I'm still hoping to have it out in July, sometime after the 4th of July. After that is done, my next project will be Half-Orc Paladin, the third book in the Rivah series, and I'm currently 24,000 words into that and I think that one will be around 75,000 words (give or take) once it's done. I’m also 9,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs, but that will come out later in the year. In audiobook news, I’m pleased to report that the collection Tales of the Shield Knight, which contains sixteen stories from the Sevenfold Sword and the Dragontiarna series, is now out in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get that at Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books at the moment, and should gradually be making its way onto the other audiobook stores as it gets through processing. Be sure to subscribe to my new release newsletter because sometimes I will give away individual audio short stories for free from that collection in my newsletter. 00:01:50 Question of the Week Now let's move on to Question of the Week. Our Question of the Week segment is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: if you read mystery novels, what was the first mystery novel you ever read? No, wrong answers obviously, and as you'd expect, we had quite a few different responses. Justin says: A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I was 12. I had chicken pox and was confined to my room. I begged my father for something to read, and he handed me a massive book, The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Two days later, I asked for other books by him. I'm still not a fan of mysteries, but Doyle was a great author. Our next comment is from Ray, who says: Hardy Boys, also Sherlock Holmes for school. As an adult, the first I recall by choice were the Father Blackie Mysteries by Andrew Greeley. Our next comment is from Jake who says: can't remember. It had to be back in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. But I agree with you, it's great to diversify in reading. Someone gifted me a copy of Water for Elephants. I would never have read that by choice, but I'm glad I did. Our next comment is from Jeff, who says: Tom Swift books and Hound of the Baskervilles. Tom Swift was even science fiction-ish with their far-out inventions. Our next comment is from Jonathan (not me), who says: the Hardy Boys Hunting for Hidden Gold. The reprinted Flashlight edition was my first mystery read for me by my mom when I was about 8. This would have also been my first mystery that I read independently. When I was 10 through 11, I read the original Hardy Boys While the Clock Ticked. I was too young to know about the different editions of novels until much later, but I was always dissatisfied with the Flashlight version because it lacked the ending that I remembered. It was years later that I discovered the history of the series, which led to me finding and purchasing all or most of the original novels. Our next comment is from Becca, who says: Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys in early grade school. No idea which one, but I had quite a few of them. First adult mystery series was probably middle school and was The Alphabet Series by Sue Grafton and the Joe Grey series by Murphy. My mom really encouraged me to read pretty much anything and everything. Wish you would write more mystery books. They're so great. Thanks, Becca. I am glad you liked the mystery books, so I don't think too many other people did, which is why I have not written more of them. Our next comment is from Justin who says: first mystery novel was The Hardy Boys in grade school. Michael says: not my first, but I really like the Pendergast series by Lincoln and Child. Worth the read if folks haven't tried. John says: The Three Investigators series by Alfred Hitchcock. I don't know where I got the first one. My mom probably got it at a yard sale or something, but I was hooked. Was able to check out the others in the series for my school's library. I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade. Juana says: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Our next comment is from Ann-Marie, who says: Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, and The Boxcar Children. Jeremiah says: Sherlock Holmes. Andrew says: As a young’un in grade school, I read The Mystery of the Green Ghost. It has stuck with me all these years. As a little more mature reader, I got a hold of The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Quite entertaining indeed. My own answer to this was I think it was Tell No One by Harlan Coben. This was way back in 2001 and I had a long car ride coming up. At the time I didn't read anything except fantasy and science fiction, but I got Tell No One as a present and I didn't have anything else to read while in the car. So I started reading Tell No One during the ride. The book is about an ER physician whose wife was murdered eight years ago. Then one day out of the blue, the physician gets a message that could only have come from her. Suddenly people show up to kill the physician and he finds himself on the run from the agents of a sinister billionaire. I was definitely hooked, and I've read mysteries and thrillers on and off since. I think this was good for me long term since I ended up a writer and it's good for writers to read widely in different genres. You always tell what a science fiction novel, for example, was written by someone who has never heard anything but science fiction. Additionally, when I wrote out the Question of the Week, I did not have Hardy Boys in mind because I was thinking of them as you know, books for children and I was thinking about adult books, but I did indeed read a bunch of The Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, but it was that was long enough going out that I can't clearly recall the plots of any of them, I’m afraid. 00:06:04 Main Topic: Silent Order Question and Answer Time (Note: Some Spoilers for the series in this section) Now on to our main topic of the week, Silent Order question and answer time. Why talk about this now, about a year after I finished the Silent Order science fiction series? Well, the reason for that is Silent Order Omnibus One had a very successful Bookbub feature deal at the end of May. Silent Order Omnibus One was briefly the number 2 free ebook on Amazon US and the number 1 free ebook on Amazon UK. So thanks for that, everyone. As you can imagine, this resulted in a lot of new eyes on the series, which inspired many reader questions, which is funny because I've been getting most of the same questions about the series and its particular idiosyncrasies for about seven years now. So let's have some answers below. First, some basic facts about the series. I published the first five books in September and October of 2017. It ended up at about 14 books, and I published the 14th and final book in September of 2023. All books are available on all ebook platforms. I've dabbled with Kindle Unlimited for it in the past, but not anymore. It's available wide and will remain so. There are also six tie-in short stories to the series that I've given away for free to my newsletter subscribers at various times. Now, with the basic facts out of the way, let's proceed to the most common questions from the last seven years of Silent Order. Question #1: Why do the characters still use kinetic, chemically propelled firearms 100,000 years in the future? By this question, people are usually wondering why at times the characters in the Silent Order are using, you know, traditional guns that fire metal bullets as opposed to like blasters or lasers or plasma cannons or whatever. And the answer is, not to be flippant, but why wouldn't they? People forget that firearms technology has been used for military applications, at least in the West, for at least nearly 700 years. Cannons were used in the 100 Years War and the 100 Years War started in 1337. Firearms technology has been refined and improved considerably since then, and no doubt it will continue to receive refinements and improvements in the future. Additionally, chemically propelled firearms offer many advantages over more advanced weaponry like lasers, rail guns, blasters, or particle weapons, especially for handheld levels of weaponry. A chemically propelled firearm doesn't require electricity or a power source and can't be disabled by an EMP. It's also more durable and rugged than a more advanced weapon, which would almost certainly require delicate electronic components. In fact, some models of firearm can famously be exposed to harsh conditions and continue to function. There's just no way you could do the same thing with a laser. Some devices, some machines are just the apex of their technological niche. Despite all the advanced weaponry available in the 21st century, soldiers still carry combat knives because in a situation where you need a knife, it is the best tool for the job. I suspect chemically propelled firearms dominate their niche in the same way. Question #2: Why isn't the technology in Silent Order as advanced as I think it should be? Well, they do have faster than light travel, artificial gravity, inertial absorption, anti-gravity lifts, shields, plasma weaponry, and ion thrusters. You can't exactly order any of that stuff off Amazon today. Medical technology is rather more advanced as well. The average human lifespan in Calaskar and other “developed” worlds at this time period is about 160 years due to advances in genetic engineering and better understanding of mitochondrial DNA. Cloned replacement limbs and organs are common medical procedures. When a replacement limb can’t be cloned, installing a cybernetic one is typically a one day medical procedure. In the back story of the series, there are five very large Terran empires that rose and collapsed before the start of the series, which is about, as I've said, 100,000 years into the future. Those Terran empires each tended to have more advanced technology in certain areas than is common at the start of the series. One was a lot better at genetic engineering, another built super advanced sentient AI (more on that later) and so forth. When the particular empire fell or disintegrated into smaller successor states, there was some technological backsliding, and some of the more super advanced technology was lost. Question #3: The protagonist Jack March has the same initials as the author, Jonathan Moeller. Was that deliberate? Oh no, it wasn't. One of the original inspirations for the series were the James Bond books, so I chose a name that was the opposite of James Bond. After all, March is kind of the opposite of Bond in the sense of movement versus stasis and stagnation. In the original books, James Bond was always a sort of self-destructive alcoholic who gets somewhat worse as the series goes along and he doesn't have much in the way of character development. By contrast, I wanted March to have much more character change and growth. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that gave Jack March the same initials as me until three or four years into writing the series. The obvious is only obvious in hindsight, alas. Occasionally people say March is an authorial self-insert, but I guarantee you that he is not. If he were, he'd be a cranky middle aged former IT worker who doesn't like to go out very much. Question #4: Why doesn't March sleep with any of the beautiful women he meets in the first four books? Because he didn't want to. Like I said, he's sort of the opposite of James Bond and doesn't like unprofessionalism like that on the job. Also, by the time the series starts, he's old enough that casual flings no longer interest him and ultimately, he would really rather be on his own. It isn't until he meets a woman who truly understands him that this starts to change and the woman understands him because she hates the Final Consciousness just as much as he does. Question #5: Why do the characters still use phones? Well, they're not “cellular telephones” in the way that we think of them. They're more like personal handheld telecommunication and computing devices that are significantly more powerful than anything available today. That said, words sometimes long outlast the original purpose. The word mile originally came from the Latin language and described the distance a Roman soldier could cover with 1,000 steps. There is no longer a Roman Empire or Roman legionaries, but the term remains in use. There's a good chance that the word phone will outlast our current civilization and continue to refer to a telecommunications device just as miles still refers to a unit of distance, even though it doesn't have anything to do with marching soldiers or the Roman Empire. Additionally, phone was the simplest word available and using a sci-fi ish term like a mobile data pad or personal communicator or handheld computer just seemed a bit try hard. I used the metric system for distance in the series because the majority of Earth's population uses it today, so I assume it will eventually win out over time by pure weight of numbers. Question #6: Why does March work for repressive government like Calaskar? Whether or not Caesar is repressive depends on one's perspective. I expect someone from the 1850s or even the 1950s United States would find the Calaskaran government rather liberal and shockingly egalitarian. But many people from 2024 America would probably find it repressive. That said, I think Calaskar is better described as conformist. If you don't criticize the king or the official doctrines of the Royal Calaskaran church, you can say pretty much anything you want, and Calaskar doesn't have anything like the social problems of the 21st century United States, though that is partly because dissidents are eventually encouraged to leave and seek their fortunes elsewhere. Some of Calaskar’s neighbors like Rustaril and the Falcon Republic were originally Calaskaran worlds that split off due to ideological differences. Rustaril opted for a form of socialism that led to its stagnation and ongoing decline, while the Falcon Republic is more hyper-capitalistic and libertarian and therefore very unstable, albeit with a cloned army that steps in and takes over when things get out of hand. Calaskar claims that its government combines the best aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, though opinions differ among the characters in the books whether or not this is actually true. However, the series is mostly written from the perspective of Jack March, and he doesn't much care about everything we just discussed in the previous paragraph. He primarily works for the Silent Order, which is a Calaskaran intelligence agency that answers only to its own leaders and the King. The ultimate mission of the Silent Order is to monitor the elite and upper classes of Calaskaran society, whether political, business, or entertainment elites. If they start acting in a destructive way that will harm Calaskar and civilization, the Silent Order either discredits them, sabotages their careers, or arranges an accident (depending on how severe the particular elite’s brand of corruption is). Obviously, many people would have severe moral qualms about arranging the fatal extrajudicial accident of a corrupt government or judicial official. Since March's own home world of Calixtus was betrayed to the Final Consciousness by its elite classes, he has no problem doing this kind of work. For March's perspective, Calaskar opposes the Final Consciousness and has been the primary rival to the Final Consciousness for some time, which is good enough for him. The fact that life on Calaskar is vastly better than anywhere ruled by the Final Consciousness just reinforces his decision. Question #7: Was this series inspired by the computer game Starfield? I have to admit I LOLed at this question. I started writing Silent Order on New Year's Eve in 2016 and the final book in the series came out in early September 2023. In fact, if I remember it, Starfield came out like two or three days after I published the final Silent Order book. So I can confidently say that the series wasn't inspired by Starfield in any way. That said, I would say that the video games which did help shape my thinking about the books were Wing Commander: Privateer, TIE Fighter, and Master of Orion 1 and 2. All those games were from the 1990s, of course, so I suppose I'm dating myself. Question #8: What actually did inspire the Silent Order series? The video games I mentioned above, for one. Also, the original James Bond books. When I started thinking about writing a science fiction series, I decided that I wanted to do a spy thriller, but in space. The Final Consciousness was sort of the idea of cybernetic space totalitarians. James Bond originally went up against SMERSH and then SPECTRE in the books, but March would go up against the covert agents of the sinister cybernetic Final Consciousness. There are also Lovecraftian themes in the books, as is gradually revealed throughout the series, that the Final Consciousness is in fact controlled by cosmic horrors from another universe. Believe it or not, the various malfunctions of ChatGPT also helped inspire some of the later books. I had established way back in Silent Order: Iron Hand that a true AI always goes homicidally insane. So when I actually did have to run an AI supercomputer character from one of the later books, I based its behavior on some ChatGPT and Bing Chat’s more hilarious public meltdowns, though if I had waited a little longer and based it on Google's AI, the AI supercomputer character could have suggested that the protagonist add glue to their pizza cheese or perhaps eats are real small rocks a day for minerals. The day I wrote this paragraph (which was June 10th, 2024), Apple announced they're adding a bunch of AI stuff to both the iPad and iPhone, and no doubt more AI will soon reach meme status on the Internet. Needless to say, my opinion of generative AI in general is quite low. Question #9: Have the covers for the series changed? They look different on Goodreads. Not only have the covers changed over the last seven years, they have changed a lot. The covers went through five different iterations. At first I did them myself in GIMP and then I tried a couple different variations. During COVID I took a Photoshop class which I admit leveled up my cover design skills significantly, so I tried some character-based covers but they never had the results I was hoping to see in terms of sales. Then in 2022, I saw a Penny Arcade comic that made a joke about how science fiction readers want to see book covers that show spaceships and planets in close proximity. And while this was a joke, I realized it was nonetheless true, so I redid the covers to the current look that features spaceships in close proximity to planets, and the series has sold the best overall with the new set of covers. Science fiction writers take heed: the readers want to see planets and spaceships in close proximity on their covers. Question #10: Why aren't there audiobooks for the series? In all honesty, it would just be too expensive. At a rough back of the envelope calculation, I think it would take about $30,000 U.S. dollars to bring the entire series into audio, and it would take years to see that money back. Plus, I think the series would end up at about 85 hours long, give or take, and that's like 2 full work weeks just to listen to the audiobook for proofing. So to sum up, it would cost too much and I don't want to take on another project of that magnitude at this time. Question #11: What is your favorite book in the series? Silent Order: Eclipse Hand, for reasons unrelated to the plot. I read an article in 2017 saying that the iPad was a better productivity computer than a Linux desktop, and I thought that was just nonsense for a variety of reasons. So I wrote, edited, and did the entire cover on a Ubuntu Linux desktop for Silent Order: Eclipse Hand just to prove a point. I work less with Linux now than I did back in 2017, though given how bad Windows 11 has gotten with all the AI integration, I might go back to writing on a Linux desktop at some point. Even though it's my favorite book for reasons other than plot, I do quite like the plot of Eclipse Hand as well. The basic idea was something that's been knocking around inside my head for a while, so I was glad I was finally able to get to write it down. And now our 12th and final question: Weren't they originally only supposed to be nine books in the series? Why are there fourteen? Yes, I had planned to stop at nine because the Silent Order books never sold quite as well as I had hoped. However, there were enough dangling plot threads, specifically the mystery around the Pulse weapon of the Final Consciousness, that I was persuaded to continue and bring the series to a more epic ending than it had in book nine. I started working on book 10 in late 2019, but then COVID happened and derailed things for a while. At the end of 2021, I was able to pick it up again and in 2023 I decided would be my “summer of finishing things” and I pushed on to the final book in the Silent Order series. Hopefully it was a suitably epic ending. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who read through to the end of the series, encouraging me to continue with it. The years 2020 through 2023 were frustrating ones for a variety of reasons (and I'm sure everyone listened to this had their own frustrations in those years as well) and one of the ways I tried to reduce those frustrations was to put Silent Order on the side for a while, but I'm glad I persevered and continued on with the series, even if it took me a while. Now that it is finished, I can look back on it with a sense of pride for all the hard work that went into it. But mostly what I feel when I look back at it is gratitude for all the readers who read the books and enjoyed them. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A remind you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts (note: transcripts are for Episodes 140 to the present episode). If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's special summer episode, I share samples from four of my audiobooks. 1.) Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, narrated by Brad Wills. 2.) Ghost in the Serpent, narrated by Hollis McCarthy. 3.) Half-Elven Thief, narrated by Leanne Woodward. 4.) Stealth & Spells Online: Creation, narrated by CJ McAllister.

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven bad ways to open your novel and how to avoid their pitfalls. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 203 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 31st, 2024 and today we are looking at seven bad ways to start your novel. Usually here we have Coupon of the Week. Unfortunately my Internet is currently down as I'm recording this, which means I can't get to my Payhip store and I can't create a Coupon of the Week. So we will resume with Coupon of the Week in June when I start recording new episodes. So now let's move directly to my current writing progress on my current writing projects. I am 38,000 words into Shield of Darkness, which currently puts the Chapter 7 of 24. I have 24 chapters in the rough draft outline, but that will probably increase because I’ll have to split a few of the longer ones in editing. I had hoped to have that out in June. That doesn't look like it's going to happen because I have a lot of home repair to do in June and a couple of multi-day commitments where I won't be able to do any writing. So I think we are looking more likely for some time after the 4th of July in mid-July is when that book will come out. I am also 20,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, which will come out after Shield of Darkness comes out. I am also 6,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs, which will come out sometime this fall, if all goes well. In audiobook news, we are done recording Tales of the Shield Knight, which will excellently be excellently narrated by Brian Wills and that will be a collection of the various short stories I wrote to accompany the Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna series. That is all done and should hopefully start appearing on various audiobook platforms before the end of June. 00:01:44 Question of the Week Now before we get into our main topic, let's go to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics, and this week's question: what was the first smartphone you ever used, and what was the first time you decided a smartphone was useful and not a waste of money? And we had one response for this one. Our first response is from Justin, who says: my work issued me a BlackBerry in 2004. Some folks considered them a first smartphone. I considered it a pain. They figured with that they owed me 24/7 and demanded an answer within 5 minutes to any email. I stopped that by asking how much they were paying me to reply outside of work hours. Then I was brought in for a work reprimand for not replying to an urgent e-mail sent during the day. My defense was that I was driving back from a remote site. When asked if I should be using the device while driving (already a no-no back then) or should I pull over and check every time I got a message, my boss decided that just maybe I wouldn't get in trouble that time, anyway. So far, I was not a fan. In 2011, we switched from Blackberries to Samsung with the first Galaxy S. I was unsure about the change, but the increased battery life and ability to put the phone in my shirt pocket won me over. What made it a true useful tool was when I installed the flashlight app on it. Working in a prison made it a pain to bring in a flashlight. You had to have paperwork and disassembled at every checkpoint to show that there's no contraband being smuggled in. The phone got a sticker and was blessed to pass security scrutiny thereafter. The flashlight was so handy. Now it's part of the OS, but then it needed a separate program to run. Yeah, smartphones have definitely contributed to the erosion of work/life balance, in my opinion. I used to do a lot of support for BlackBerry devices and they were a huge pain. I wasn't terribly upset to see the iPhone and Android displace BlackBerry and you know, sort of push it out of business because those phones, from a support perspective, let me tell you, were a big pain. For myself, it was in 2013 when I got my first smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. I hadn’t wanted to get a smartphone, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find non-smartphones. So I finally bit the bullet and moved into the new technology. At the time, I usually resented it since I just wanted another flip phone. When did I find it useful for the first time? I remember that incident distinctly. I was working in IT support at the time, and the next day I had to go activate some network ports in another building. The building in question had been built in the ‘90s before Wi-Fi, and so every room had something like a billion Ethernet ports in it. But network switches are expensive, and even though the building has a little like 500 Ethernet ports, only 48 of them could be active at any one time, since that was how many ports the network switch had. So when anyone moved offices, an IT support minion (i.e. me) had to go over there and move the active network ports in the network closet. I used to take a notebook with me on those kinds of calls so I could write down the port numbers and then match them up to the appropriate ports in the switch closet. But as I was doing this, it occurred to me that I didn't have to write down the port numbers. I could just take a picture of them and then look at the picture on my phone. This was much more efficient than writing down a bunch of port numbers and that was the first time I saw a smartphone as a useful tool instead of just an expensive toy. The inspiration for this week’s question was a recent email I got from a reader complaining how the characters in the Silent Order science fiction series still use phones even though it's far in the future. 00:05:03 Main Topic: 7 Potentially Bad Openings for Your Novel Now let's move on to our main topic this week, seven potentially bad beginnings or openings for your novel. It is important to try and have the opening of your novel be as interesting as possible, and sometimes writers overdo it a bit when they'll start the novel with a sentence like, “today, I will tell you about the time I died for the fifth time” or something like that where you can be try and be so interesting that it becomes overwrought and actually kind of annoying to read. The flip side of this is you definitely don't want your opening to be boring or do anything that would turn off the reader, because while the ending of your book is important, the opening is also important because that will be what draws the reader in and hopefully compels them to read more and then go on and purchase any sequels. So with that in mind, let's go through seven of the potentially worst openings for your novel. Number one: being vague or mysterious to the point of being confusing. Confusion is bad. It's easy to confuse or baffle readers if you are not careful. The setting, characters, and what's happening all can't be a mystery at the beginning or the reader will have nothing to orient them in terms of what's happening in them in the book, or even what genre it is. It would be best to establish a very strong setting and character first and then have them learn what's happening and feel disoriented alongside the reader, which can work for a vague or mysterious beginning, especially if it's part of some action. You don't want your reader to be confused, but it is sometimes a good idea to have your protagonist be confused, since that will hook the reader and pull them in. For example, let's say we have a convenience store clerk who's coming to work, and as she does, she sees her boss turn into a bat and fly away. This has never happened to her before, and she's immediately baffled and wondering whether she's has a brain tumor or she just saw something supernatural or science fictional happen, and that can and that kind of set out can be a good way to hook the reader and draw them further into the story. The second bad way to start your novel is with nothing. In other words, nothing is happening or things are happening too slowly. Philosophical musings and/or emotional reflections are not a good way to start a book because they're not connected to the plot or character yet and on their own in fiction, they don't mean anything. Your reader has picked up the book to read a fictional story, not your opinions on various philosophies or political platforms or whatever. They don't have any emotional significance or connect to the plot until they're connected to a character in some way, and so you need to establish your characters in your settings and something of the plot before you can have a more philosophical considerations showing up. Something needs to be happening in the beginning to draw in reader interest, like for example with the convenience store. This could also be a way to show, not tell about the characters and setting. With our convenience store clerk, we could have her wake up, look at her credit card bills trying to figure out ways to make more money. That lets us know that she might be in debt and might be having financial troubles and she could be worried about paying to fix her car or finding a better apartment. And so then she's worried about these things when out of the blue, her boss at the convenience store turns into a giant bat and flies away. That helps us establish proper context and character and then since she'll feel realistic and grounded after all that , it may be all the more shocking when she sees something outside of her everyday life. The third bad way to start a novel is what's called an info dump. That is, when in a fantasy or science fiction setting, the writer dumps all of his or her world building onto you right away or if you are writing like a thriller or a historical novel, the writer dumps all of his or her research on you right away. You don't need to give readers all your world building, historical research, or other such research before moving ahead with the plot. Parcel out your world building slowly throughout the book. This can be done in a way to build tension or mystery to keep interest. Remember, the reader generally doesn't need to know more than is necessary to move the plot forward. No matter how much research you do, no matter how much information you require or world building you do, only put enough into the book to move the plot forward. Anything else will just it bog down. The fourth bad way to start your novel is with a cliche, and by cliche we mean starting the novel with “it was a dark and stormy night.” I also strongly recommend not to start your novel with the description of the weather, since that's often lazy writing and sort of a crutch to, you know, sort of for the writer to warm himself up. Don't start with an intro that turns out to be just a dream or a prophecy or something that will be retconned later. Don't start with the character waking up and getting ready in the morning unless you make it interesting. This can work if you do it right, but sometimes it can be clumsy to sort of start where it's like a TV show where there's a record scratch, the screen pauses, and the character says “you might be wondering how I got here” and that can work. However, it's best to only do that if you can do it well and you can do it in a way that's interesting. The fifth bad way to start your book is with a line of dialogue. While this can be done well, it can be a hook to draw on readers, but it's hard to do and it's very easy to annoy or confuse the reader. It can be good for an in media res situation where the character is an intense situation, but you should only do it if it's very clear who is speaking and what is going on. The sixth bad way to start your book is in a way that is stylistically not representative of the rest of the book, such as starting with an omniscient narrator and then switching over to first person for the rest of the book or a book starts with an action scene and the book that is otherwise not very action oriented or starts with a long historical tangent in a book that is very action oriented. And finally, the seventh way to start your book in a bad way is the prologue. Or more to the point, an ineffective prologue. I used to write prologues from time to time, but I personally don't care for them and really have come to consider them extraneous. The kind of information that is included in prologue can usually be better parceled out throughout the book in a way that pulls in the reader and draws your interest. Prologues that don't match the first chapter or immediately tie into the first chapter’s action can annoy and lose the reader. A prologue needs stakes to be interesting, and prologues need to be short and ideally some kind of cliffhanger that gives weight or tension to what you're about to introduce. The absolute worst kind of prologues (in my opinion) are those that introduce a character who disappears and does not reappear for like 200 or 300 pages into the book, by which time the reader has likely forgotten all about that character. So those are several ways to open your book that are less than effective and hopefully that will help you with your own writing to write introductions and openings to your book that are interesting and hold the reader's attention. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven ebook stores that failed, and what lessons indie authors can learn from them. This coupon code will get you 25% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: TALONS OF THE SORCERER (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGTALONS The coupon code is valid through June 4th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 202 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 24th, 2024, and today we're looking at lessons from seven defunct ebook stores. We also have updates on my current writing projects and Question of the Week. Before we get into that, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the audiobook of Dragon Skull: Talons of the Sorcerer (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SPRINGTALONS, spelled SPRINGTALONS and of course, as always, we'll have that and the links in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through June the 4th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. As I mentioned last week Cloak of Titans is out and selling very briskly on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. The response has been very strong and so thank you all for that, and I'm glad so many of you are reading and enjoying the book. Now that Cloak of Titans is out, my next project is Shield of Darkness and I am pleased to report I am 18,000 words into it as of this recording. If all goes well, I'm hoping to have that out before the end of June, though that might slip to July depending on how much I need to do in real life in June. After Shield of Darkness is out, my next project will be Half-Orc Paladin, the third Rivah book. I’m about 17,000 words into that, and I'm hoping that will come out in sometime in July, if all goes well. After that, I will be writing the third Shield War book and then Ghost in the Tombs. I will start on Cloak of Illusion, the sequel to Cloak of Titans, after Half-Orc Paladin is done and out. In audiobook news, we are almost done with Tales of the Shield Knight, the Sevenfold Sword/Dragontiarna short story collection that will be narrated by Brad Wills. The collection will be available for sale on all the usual audiobook stores. I will be giving away individual audiobook short stories from time to time to my newsletter subscribers. So that is something to look forward to and if all goes well, we are planning to record Wizard Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling in audiobook in June. That's still somewhat tentative, but it should be happening. 00:02:24 Question of the Week Let's move on to Question of the Week. Question of the Week is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics, and this week's question: should a book in a long running series start with a little summary of what's happened in previous books? Like, you know how a streaming TV series will often have a previously on section of the start of the show? It's usually a little thirty second montage of key scenes and whatnot from the previous episodes. I got to wondering about this because I was talking with someone who was reading Cloak of Titans, which is the 11th book in the Cloak Mage series and overall the 23rd Nadia book and the reader in question couldn’t remember when the character of Doctor Spencer had first appeared in the series and wished the book had included a little previously on summary in the style of a streaming show. So I put this up for Question of the Week and we had a wide range of opinions on this topic this week. Our first response is from Mike, who says: as for my opinion, if it's the show that is in episodes of at least weekly schedule, I usually either just fast forward through that previously on segment or if it's supported by the service I'm watching the show on, I use the skip it feature. I can almost see the use of it if there are very long (as in a year or two) episodes between the previously on feature. Justin says: info dumps may be necessary sometimes (for example, Star Wars), but should be avoided otherwise. Show, don't tell. I personally find prologues describing past events and characters off-putting. A compromise would be a glossary in the back a la Tolkien. That way the people who want more information or need reminders can indulge themselves without forcing people like me to go along. I have to agree here with Justin about prologues. I don't really like them and stopped doing them, except in very rare cases. My least favorite kind of prologue is one that starts a very long book and references a character who doesn't show up again for like 250 pages. Our next response is from Mike, who says: I think if the summary is brief and concise, it is absolutely worth it. I remember with the Lord of the Rings Tolkien did it, but they were not brief or concise, but I'm glad he did it. It also depends on how far apart each book in the series is as to how much information is needed. Kirsty says: I think it depends on how quickly each new book is published. With your books, I don't need a reminder as you write them fairly quickly and not enough time passes for me to need one. However, some authors take longer. This is fine. I have no problem waiting, but when there's several years between books, for me a short reminder at the beginning would be useful. Gary says: personally, I skip over rehash sections in series books. Keith says: a previously on section at the beginning of the book, would be much preferred over the myriad flashbacks throughout the book explaining things that readers of the series should already know. Don't get me wrong, I'm hooked on almost all your book series, but I find myself skipping over repeated discussions and descriptions about events of previous books just to get to the good stuff. That is an interesting dilemma for a writer. It's kind of like a chess fork. A chess fork is a movement situation in chess where you find yourself in a situation where no matter what happens, you're going to lose a piece next turn. You just have to choose which one you're going to lose. And there's something similar with writers for that in how much you reference background events. If you reference background events, people don't like that will get annoyed, but if you don't reference the background events, the people who want to read up on them and be reminded of what happened will get annoyed. So basically, as with so many things in writing, you just get to do what you want and accept that some people will be annoyed. Our next response is from Jesse, who says: I've seen this somewhat frequently in a lot of the fantasy novels I've read. It does really help when said author releases 1-3 books a year in a given series. To your credit, I typically haven't had time to lose all details by the time your next book hits for any given series (minus the Silent Order gap), so well done. Our next response is from MacKenzie, who says: oh boy, having just finished Wheel of Time (ran through the whole thing back-to-back and I have thoughts), to me as a reader, if you need to remind me about characters, then something is wrong. Either the character is insufficiently memorable, there are too many characters to efficiently track, or they are appearing too infrequently. In reading through Jordan’s behemoth, I can pick out instances that fall into all of the above columns. If it wasn’t the fact that I'm a completionist, I would probably have abandoned the project in the final quarter. There is a sweet spot in balancing plot complexity and cast size is undeniably challenging for an author, but that's what separates the ones that keep buying from the ones I let go. Our next response is from Kevin, who says: I would find a brief summary useful, especially when there has been a long period between books. However, this would only really come into play for those of us reading a long series as it is being written. Alternatively, a dramatis personae might be of use to refresh one's mind. Matthew says: with the speed you bring out books (kudos, by the way), people will flow from one to another. If there's gap or natural stopping point in the narrative, I would do no more than two page summary. Michael says: just enough to set the stage with the basis for this story. Hints to previous adventure can be included at appropriate points where they support the actions in the story (and maybe invite readers to check out those books). Cheryl says: yes, books should have a brief summary of the previous book, especially if it’s been a year or so since the last book. Juana says: I like a roundup of events. Susan says: I would love a brief summary of the previous book. I read so much that I need refreshing if it's been a while. If I'm reading the whole series at one time, the summary could be skipped. A different Michael says: I don't think so. I would hope people really a long running series would be familiar with the ongoing storyline. So usually when I talk about Question of the Week, I always say there is no right answer, and that appears to definitely be the case here, where there is a wide range of opinions on this. For myself, I suppose it depends on how well written and concise the “previously” summary at the start of the book would be, and if the author can find a way to frame it in a humorous or entertaining manner, that is probably the way to go about it. 00:08:08 Main Topic: Seven Lessons from Defunct/Diminished Ebook Stores Now on to our main topic this week, seven lessons from defunct or heavily diminished ebook store’s platforms and what to learn from them. The point of this came about when I was thinking about how I've been self-publishing for 13 years now and how I have in fact outlasted some of the stores where I used to sell my ebooks, which is kind of a milestone for longevity, I suppose. Now the point of this episode isn't too gloat about how I outlasted various ebook stores that went out of business. I don't want to do that, but it is to show the lessons that can be learned for indie authors and perhaps businesses in general, from ebook stores that have gone out of business for whatever reason. It may surprise some people learn this, but Amazon was not the first to market for ebooks. They had both predecessors and competitors that no longer exist or exist as a shadow of their former selves. In these failures, there are some valuable lessons about selling ebooks. You can see this in other areas of technology as well, where Apple did not invent the MP3 player category with the iPod or they did not invent the smartphone category with the iPhone. There were numerous devices in both spaces beforehand. It's just the iPod and the iPhone were such a compellingly packaged products that they came to eventually dominate their niches for a time. So the best lesson learned from all this is that direct sales and DRM-free ebooks provide both you and the reader a measure of stability that even many large companies cannot. The first defunct ebook we'll talk about is Sony's ebook store. People may not remember this now, but Sony did have an ebook store and they had an ebook reader device that came out several years before the Kindle. I did know some people who absolutely swore by their Sony ebook reader. Their ereader device was innovative and made people interested in ebooks. Amazon later rolled out the Kindle, which was a much more user-friendly device. Buying ebooks through Sony was a clunky process compared to the one click shopping on the Kindle Store. The Sony store closed in 2014 and its purchased content for users transitioned over to Kobo. What lessons can we learn from this? First is to make it as easy as humanly possible for consumers to buy and receive their ebooks and that being first to market is not a guarantee of success, and you need to match the innovations of your competitors. The next defunct ebook store is Diesel, which was an independent bookstore that launched in 2004 and closed in 2014, and their stated reason for closing was not being able to keep up with larger competitors such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, and others entering the market. And again, we can see kind of the same lessons from Sony there, where being first to market doesn't mean you're going stay king of the market and that it is also important to change your business as business conditions dictate. Our third default ebook store we're going to talk about is Oyster, which some of you may remember. It was shut down in 2016 shortly after being acquired by Google, which has a regrettable tendency to run some of these acquisitions into the ground. Oyster’s business model was to be a Netflix for ebooks. They were praised for this business model and they had a very nice and easy to use website. The lessons to learn were: one, you need to have a great interface to have a great customer experience, and two, it showed the demand for temporary access to ebooks, foreshadowing the future success of the library app Libby. Subscription services are still in the ebook space today, with the two biggest ones being Amazon's Kindle Unlimited and Kobo’s Kobo Plus, which is interesting because I wonder how they'll continue because we'd see how subscriptions are suffering quite badly in the media streaming space for TV and movies, where these services keep getting more and more expensive and generally worse to use with more limited content and a lot more ads. So it'll be interesting to see if ebook streaming services can continue because unlike movies or TV shows, ebooks are much cheaper to produce and stream. Our fourth one is the physical bookstores Borders. Not maybe people know this nowadays, but borders did have its own ebook store for a while, which opened in 2010, but then they switched it over to Kobo branding in 2011. Unfortunately, Borders later went out of business, though Kobo survived that. Granted, Kobo took a few knocks for that, especially in the US, because when Borders went out of business, a lot of people in the US thought Kobo went out of business too, which was not the case. Kobo is still alive and well today and does seem to be very dominant in Canada compared to Kindle. The main lesson learned here is that working with a partner provides some flexibility and saves on costs of maintaining your own platform. And since the platform was already run on Kobo on the back end, the switch was not particularly rough on customers. The lesson for Kobo was that they didn't want to be too dependent on a partner, which is why Kobo in general has tended to work with a lot of different companies over the years. The next ebook store that closed that we should mention is Microsoft. Microsoft did have an ebook store for a while. You could buy epubs through the Microsoft Store and read them in your Microsoft Edge browser. However, it closed in 2019. When the platform closed, purchased books were no longer available. This was darkly satisfying to many people because they could remember Microsoft's attempt to run a music store in the ‘90s and the early 2000s with their Plays for Sure DRM. Eventually Microsoft abandoned its music service and the customers lost access to all their purchased music tracks, which was a considerable scandal at the time, and some people are still quite bitter about this for obvious reasons. The lesson to learn is that ebooks and other digital content aren’t truly owned if you can download, save, and store copies of the files. I sell DRM-free copies on my Payhip store to give readers the ability to do just that. Perhaps another lesson is that it's good not to 100% trust Microsoft, as many unfortunate laid off game developers have learned in the past couple of weeks. The final ebook store is an interesting case because it's part of Amazon. It was the Kindle store in China. For a while, Amazon did have a Kindle store that it tried to run in China, which closed in 2023. It failed for many reasons. One of the main ones was by the time Kindle devices came to China in 2013, there was already too much competition in market, and Amazon couldn't get a foothold. Local culture in China seems to frown upon paying for ebooks and paying for ebooks is not a norm there because piracy is the standard. Another thing was that it is very difficult for a variety of reasons for foreign authors to sell in China, since they have to meet the approval of local government censors and not many books written by foreign authors would pass these standards of the Chinese government. So the lesson learned here is that success doesn't transfer across borders, especially if you're not looking carefully at local market trends and especially given that relations between the US and the Chinese Government are not necessarily at a high point at the moment, and the two countries seem to be moving more and more economically away from each other, so that is also something to bear in mind if you want to sell ebooks in China. So those were seven ebook stores that have failed in the 13 years that I've been doing self-publishing. And so hopefully there are lessons that self-publishers can learn from each of those situations. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.  

In this week's episode, I look back at the movies I saw in Spring 2024 and rate them from least to most favorite. To celebrate the arrival of CLOAK OF TITANS, this coupon code will get you 25% off any of the CLOAK MAGE ebooks at my Payhip store: MAYTITANS The code is valid through June 3rd, 2024. So if you're looking for a new book to start the summer, we've got you covered! PODCAST 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 201 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May 17th, 2024, and today we are looking at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Spring 2024. Before we get to anything else, let's do Coupon of the Week. To celebrate the arrival of Cloak of Titans, naturally, this coupon code will give you 25% off any of the Cloak Mage ebooks at my Payhip store. That coupon code is MAYTITANS spelled MAYTITANS and of course, as always, the coupon code will be in the show notes for this episode. This code is valid through June 3rd, 2024, so if you're looking for a new book to start the summer, we've got you covered. Now for an update on current writing and publishing projects. I am pleased to report that Cloak of Titans is done and it is now out. It should at all the ebook stores and get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. It looks like it's off to a good start, so thank you everyone for that. In audio news, Ghost in the Veils is out, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. As of right now, it should be available at Audible, Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and my Payhip store. It should be showing up on Google Play, Spotify, and Chirp shortly. Now that Cloak of Titans is done, my next big main project will be Shield of Darkness, the second book in the Shield War series, picking up from Shields of Storms earlier in the year. I spent the last couple days writing the outline for that, and if all goes well, I should start on it on Monday the 20th or Tuesday the 21st. It depends on what the weather is, since there are some things I'd like to do outside if the weather is good, but anyway, that will be my new main project. Hopefully that will be out before the end of June. My secondary project right now is Half-Orc Paladin, the third book in the Rivah series, and I am currently about 14,000 words into that. That should come out fairly quickly after Shield of Darkness is done, so probably mid to late July for that book. 00:02:10 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's question is inspired by the various comments whenever I post the picture related to grilling: specifically, what is your favorite thing to grill? And we had a variety of responses this week. Our first response is from Justin, who says: my favorite thing to grill is a well marinated sirloin. Garlic, pineapple juice, soy sauce, and herbs in a Ziploc bag for two to four hours, then on a hot grill for a couple minutes per side. Yum! Alas, nowadays it’s mostly chicken legs and pork loin sliced up for chops. Even the cheapest hamburger meat is getting to be too expensive to buy on a regular basis. Sadly, this is definitely true, and I've seen that myself. Our next response is from ABM, who says: is it even camping in the Midwest if you're not grilling a pudgie pie over a fire? For those unfamiliar with this regional delicacy, either sandwich or pie fillings are put between bread in the special sandwich shaped iron before it goes over the fire. It really puts the grilled in grilled cheese sandwich. Jenny says: steak, but only because I have a charcoal grill now. I used to use gas. I think it is better because I find it to be slower and tastier. Bonnie says brats and burgers were my favorite when Hubby was around to grill. Gary says: a pork loin is one of my favorite things to grill. I prefer smoking stuff over grilling. Grilling and barbecue are definitely two different things. There is nothing better than a dry rub pork shoulder smoked for about 10 hours and then shredded. Mark says: we love good old-fashioned burgers and lately have been adding teriyaki grilled chicken thighs to the cooking plan. John says: Chinese style plum sauce ribs. Family recipe. Country style ribs, which is just pork butt cut onto thick strips, marinated 3 days. Catriona says: Lamb chops and sausages. A different Mark says: ribs are my favorite, followed by barbecued chicken. Jesse says: spicy Italian sausages for the most part. Michael says: I find the grilling post interesting because over here in the UK, we tend to call it barbecuing and the term itself is a barbecue. Grilling is what you do under grill in your oven indoors. But regardless, I would say hamburgers! Joseph says: Porterhouse and lobster tails on charcoal grill. Second would be shrimp, scallops, and fish fillets of any kind on charcoal. Breakfast on the griddle, pork and chicken on the smoker all year round. Jonathan says: steak and nothing but steak. A third Mark says: prisoners. I hope he meant that tongue in cheek. For myself, I think it's a good old-fashioned burger. I find half the battle in terms of flavor is to spend ninety seconds melting cheese onto the burger in the final phase of grilling. Toasting the bun separately also helps a great deal. It is remarkable how proper cooking can improve the flavor of many foods. Like, I had eggs for lunch. Eggs by themselves are kind of bland, but if you add some ham and cheese and some pepper to the eggs, it really tastes quite a bit better. I suppose the realization that food tastes better when you prepare it properly is the foundation of five and a half thousand years of cooking and civilization. 00:05:15 Main Topic: Spring Movie Roundup And it's now titled for my Spring Movie Roundup for 2024, our main topic of the week. As usual, everything is sorted from least liked to most liked, and just a reminder that my opinions are in no objective or qualified and are based solely on my own taste and whether or not I like something. The least favorite thing I saw this spring would be Hot Tub Time Machine, which came out in 2010. This is one of the very rare movies I didn't finish. It was just too stupid. Like sometimes if I don't like movie, I'll start playing Starfield or Skyrim or something with the movie still playing in the background, but Hot Tub Time Machine was too stupid even to merit that treatment. I don't object to crude humor on its face. Indeed, much of the absurdity of the human condition comes from the various indignities to which human bodies are inherently subjected. There is something both hilarious and egalitarian in the fact that an emperor and a peasant have to relieve themselves in the same way, and many jokes have made use of that truth. You can get away with a lot of crudity if you're actually funny. But the Hot Tub Time Machine movie, just threw crudeness on the screen in lieu of attempting actual humor. Besides, crude humor ultimately is to storytelling as garlic salt is to cooking: best used sparingly. Anyway, the protagonists were all unlikable. I simply got annoyed enough with movie that I gave up around 40 or 50 minutes into it. Overall grade: F Next up is Wish, which came out in 2023. I did not see that in the theater. I saw it when I turned up on Disney Plus a few months ago. I liked the animation and the voice acting was good, but the movie just did not make a lot of sense. Like there's this wizard-king and people give him their wishes, but then they forget what they wish for, and he does this to prevent civil unrest, or so he says. The protagonist gets mad that the wizard-king isn't handing out free stuff in the way that she likes, so she wishes really hard and then a magic star falls from the sky to help her. This upsets the wizard king, so he switches from using good magic, which is apparently blue and sparkly to evil magic, which is green and sparkly. I guess that that color makes all the difference. Then everyone in the Kingdom sings at the wizard-king until he turns into a mirror. I have to admit that made even less sense as I spoke it aloud. There are movies that don't make a lot of sense but work because it's like a dream or a magic trick since the movie suspends the viewer's disbelief during the tale, and it's only afterward that you realize it didn't make much sense, but that by then it doesn't matter because you're entertained. Unfortunately, Wish doesn't even make sense while you're watching it, and a benevolent wizard king who hoards wishes sounds a lot like the Disney Corporation. It would be hilarious if Disney made Wish as a parody of themselves, but I think their interpretation happened by accident. Overall grade: C-, maybe D+ if I'm in a really bad mood. Next up is Green Lantern, which came out in 2011. This turned up free on Tubi, so I gave it a watch. It was interesting because all the pieces were there to make it a great movie, strong cast with good performances, reasonable CG computer graphics for 2011, and a potentially compelling plot. However, it didn't really gel. I suspect Ryan Reynolds works better as a comic actor than a dramatic one. Additionally, the movie relied way too heavily on a lot of ponderous infodumping to explain the elaborate mythology of the Green Lantern Corps. The classic axiom of fiction writing is to show don't tell, and since movies are a visual medium, it's especially true in movies. The problem was that Green Lantern spent a lot of its runtime telling instead of showing, but I suspect the studio didn't want to take a lot of risks with a movie that cost $200 million to make in 2011 money (before a lot of inflation). Additionally, the movie leaned a little too heavily into its CG. So overall, I would give it a grade of C-. Next up is Avatar: The way of Water, which came out in 2022. The Avatar films are visually beautiful, but they're also profoundly misanthropic, which is sort of a “it would be better if humans were all dead” strain of environmentalism running through it. It's also unfortunate how the movies portraying “living in harmony with nature” as morally upright, because in real life, living with nature means dying before the age of 30 of sepsis, dysentery, various contagious diseases, endemic local warfare, and starvation, often all at the same time. Basically, the history of civilization is five and a half thousand years of humanity trying to find ways to get screwed less by nature. Of course, then we're getting into profound philosophical questions. Do you believe that humanity is made in the image of God with a soul, or is humanity particularly simply a particularly clever breed of destructive chimpanzee? Obviously one’s worldview will diverge profoundly based on how you answer that question, which, let's be honest, is a rather deep philosophical/religious discussion for a movie about blue space elves made by the director of Terminator. On the other hand, maybe I'm just overthinking it and in the world of Avatar, the Na’vi are blue space elves and the humans are just space orcs. Anyway, incoherent philosophical questions aside, the movie is visually stunning, the apex of computer graphics. It's what you get with a $400 million budget overseen by a perfectionist director who directed three of the four top-grossing movies of all time. The plot is a straight continuation of the previous movie. The humans have returned to reconquer Pandora, including a clone of the charismatic Colonel Quaritch from the first movie. It's up to Jake Sully and his family to unite the squabbling Na’vi forest and water clans to fight off the invaders. Unlike the first movie, Way of Water is not a self-contained story, but helps tee up the third movie, which is definitely happening since this one made like two and half billion dollars. I also admire James Cameron's unswerving devotion to the Papyrus font, even after two Saturday Night Live sketches about it. Overall grade: B Next up is The Cutting Edge, which came out in 1992. I watched this because I was told it is considered a classic in some corners. Since it was also free on Tubi, I decided to give it a watch. It's basically the ideal form of the very popular enemies to lovers romance story trope. Olympic hockey player Doug suffers a head injury that damages his peripheral vision, which means he can't play hockey anymore. Meanwhile, Kate is a spoiled and demanding figure skater who alienates every single potential partner, thereby ruining her chances of winning Olympic gold. Kate’s coach Anton seeking out a partner willing to put up with Kate's difficult personality, tracks down the desperate Doug and convinces him to give figure skating a try instead of hockey. As you might expect, sparks and conflicts immediately fly when Doug and Kate meet, and they must learn to overcome their initial mutual dislike (and their obvious mutual attraction) to win the Olympics. Enemies to lovers romance tends to follow a very specific story structure, and this movie nails it perfectly. The actors all did a good job with their parts. Fun fact, Anton was played by Roy Dotrice, who narrated the A Song of Ice and Fire audiobooks. Even more fun fact, the movie was written by Tony Gilroy, who also wrote several of the Jason Bourne movies and created Star Wars: Andor, which are about as totally different from The Cutting Edge as you can get. This man has some range. Overall grade: B. Next up is Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which originally came out in 2021. After the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot didn't work for a variety of reasons, it seemed that Sony they settled on a different tactic, instead decided to continue the original continuity of with the new movies, which in my opinion was a smarter choice. Single mom Callie is having a rough time with her teenage children, Trevor and Phoebe. Callie is out of options when her estranged father dies and leaves her a farm on the outskirts of Summerville, Oklahoma. With no better options at the moment, Callie and the kids pack up and move to Summerville and the bored Trevor and Phoebe began poking into their relics of their grandfather's life. However, it turns out that their grandfather was Egon Spengler, one of the original Ghostbusters, and he had moved to Summerville to keep an eye on a dangerous supernatural threat. With Egon dead, the threat is waking up once more, and it's up to Phoebe and Trevor to finish their grandfather's work and save the world. This was a very well-constructed comedy/horror action thriller. Admittedly, it starts a bit slow in the same style as the original Ghostbusters movie from 1984, but overall, it works. There's a gradual sense that something is increasingly wrong in Summerville. Unlike Green Lantern, this movie doesn't do a lot of infodumping, but instead uses the much better storytelling technique of gradually revealing the worldbuilding as the kids start to investigate the mysteries around their family and their new town. Phoebe and Trevor had the right combination of teenage brattiness and curiosity and Callie was believable as a single mom who had made some questionable life choices and was trying to hang on as best she could. Paul Rudd was also good as an incompetent summer school teacher/seismologist who has nonetheless figured out that something strange is happening in Summerville. The movie leaned a little too hard into to nostalgia, but I liked it. Overall, grade: B+. Next up is The Sign of Four, which came out originally in 1987. I finally had a chance to watch the Jeremy Brett version of the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Sign of Four. Brett was, in my opinion, the best Sherlock Holmes actor of all the actors who have played versions of the character. Amusingly, I think Mr. Brett would have made a good Grand Admiral Thrawn, which is funny because one of the inspirations for Thrawn was of course, Sherlock Holmes. But unfortunately, Brett died two or three years before Heir to the Empire was even written. Anyway, back to the main point. In The Sign of Four, Miss Mary Morstan calls upon Holmes and Watson asking for Holmes's help in unraveling a strange mystery. Her father disappeared soon after returning to England from India, and once a year since then, she has received an extremely valuable pearl in the mail. Her mysterious benefactor wishes to meet her at last and Morstan wants Holmes’ advice as to what she should do. Naturally, there's quite a bit more going on beneath the surface, and Holmes soon finds himself investigating a case involving a pair of eccentric brothers, a one-legged man, a deadly assassin, and treasure that seems cursed to bring misfortune to whoever obtains it. All of the performances were excellent, though given the state of 1980s sound technology, I definitely recommend watching the movie with the captions on. The only thing that I didn't like was that the adaptation removed the fact that Morstan and Watson get engaged at the end but given that the actors wanted to deemphasize Sherlock’s cocaine use (the original story has the famous line “for me there still remains the cocaine bottle”), that's probably why it was cut. Overall grade: A-. And now for the favorite things I saw in spring 2023 and for the first time, it came out to a three-way tie. The first of my three favorite things was Fall Guy, which came out this year, in 2024. I didn't intend to go see this initially, but then I saw the hilarious Saturday Night Live opening Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling did about Barbie and Oppenheimer, and I decided to give it a shot. This is a romantic comedy action thriller and it nails all those genres excellently. The protagonist is a highly regarded film stuntman named Colt, in love with an assistant director named Jody, but Colt is seriously injured in an accident. In the aftermath of the accident, Colt abandons his career and breaks up with Jody. Eighteen months later, the producer of a big budget science fiction epic contacts Colt. It turns out that his ex, Jody, is directing the movie and her career is riding on its success. So he goes to do the stunts for the movie to help her out. However, things soon take a turn for the worse when the movie’s egotistical lead actor disappears, and if Cole can't find him within 48 hours, the studio will shut down the movie and destroy Jody's career. What follows is a romantic comedy that remains funny and turns into a pretty good thriller movie. The running joke about seeing the unicorn was great and there's a bit with Colt crying in his truck that becomes absolutely hilarious. Definitely recommended. It's really regrettable that this movie apparently didn't do well in theaters, but I predict it will have a long and healthy life on streaming. Overall grade: A. The second of my three favorite things is Clarkson's Farm: Season Three, which also came out in 2024. This show has stumbled into a genius formula: display the extreme difficulties of the modern farmer through the lens of an unsympathetic comedy protagonist in the person of Jeremy Clarkson. Like, Jeremy Clarkson is not a terribly sympathetic figure because he's very rich and unquestionably prone to quarrelling because he got fired from one of his old jobs for punching a dude. But by having him run his own farm and deal with all the many, many headaches and heartaches of farming, he becomes a sympathetic figure because he suffers through the same things as every other farmer: failed crops, bad weather, badger-spread diseases, animals dying, government red tape, and so on. And it also demonstrates how hard farming is. If Clarkson's farm loses a lot of money, it doesn't really matter to him because he can rely on his media career. But that isn't true for most farmers, obviously, and Clarkson himself and the show go out of their way to point out that fact again and again. Anyway, if you're not familiar with the concept of the show, in 2019 Clarkson decided to run his farm himself rather than hiring a professional manager and since he was under contract to produce a show for Amazon, he figured he could make a documentary and get paid for working on his farm. In the first season, Clarkson was shocked when a year's work on his farm brought in a profit of about $150. In the second season, he battled local government to open a restaurant on his farm. In the third season, the team continues. Clarkson attempts to raise pigs and find new ways of making revenue from the farm. The show manages to be both entertaining and educational about the difficulties of farming at the same time. Definitely worth the watch. Overall grade: A. And now for the third of my three favorites: Dune Part 2, which came out in 2024. As a writer of novels, I really, really hate to admit it, but I think Dune Part 2 improved somewhat on the original book. This is rare in film adaptations, but it does happen. Goldfinger the movie is better than Goldfinger the book in my opinion, since Auric Goldfinger’s plan makes much more sense in the movie than it does in the book and the movie also has James Bond's climatic showdown with the deadly Oddjob. The Godfather movie is pretty close to the Godfather novel, but it's tighter because it does omit some needless subplots that honestly I thought the author threw into the book to pad out the length. So as a writer, it really does pay me to admit this, but I think some of the changes to Dune Part 2 are an improvement over the book. It's a bit tighter, a little less deus ex machina. The novel Dune, beyond all doubt, is a very weird book. It's also very dense, with multiple interlocking themes. You can honestly say that Dune is about ecology, religion, politics, declining empires, the cyclical nature of history, oil-based politics, social dynamics, and of course, truly enormous quantities of mind altering drugs. Any movie adaptation would probably have to take just one of those themes and lean hard into them since there won't be enough time to address all of them. The director, Denis Villeneuve, chose to go with the mostly political themes. Anyway, I think Dune Parts One and Two combined are probably the best possible adaptation that could be made of the seminal (but still very weird) science fiction book. Various parts from the novel have been omitted, altered, or emphasized, but that's necessary in adaptation. The trick is to do it in a way that preserves the spirit of the original work, and I think Dune Parts One and Two have done it well. Part of the problem with the 1984 version of Dune was that the ending totally subverted the message of the book, which Frank Herbert himself said several times was “beware of charismatic leaders.”  Dune Part 2 most definitely does not subvert the message of the book. Indeed, Paula Atreides's final line in the movie is downright chilling. Part 2 picks up in the second half of the story when Paul joins the Fremen and embarks on his gradual transformation (or perhaps descent) from the son of a destroyed noble house to the blood drenched warrior prophet Muad'Dib. All the performances are good, the effects are excellent, the desert shots are sweeping, and you could tell Hans Zimmer and his team enjoyed cutting loose with the soundtrack. Overall, I think Dune Parts One and Two are probably the best possible adaptation of the Dune book in movie form, which is probably was the other problem with the Dune 1984, since there was just one movie and Dune Parts One and Two required over five hours of very expensive big budget movie to tell even a condensed adaptation of the complicated original book. Overall grade: A. So that's it for this week. On my writing podcasts this week, we talked about grilling and movies, so next week we will try to have a more writing themed topic. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I celebrate the 200th episode of The Pulp Writer Show by asking readers which book of mine they read first. The episode also has a preview of the audiobook of GHOST IN THE VEILS as narrated by Hollis McCarthy. To commemorate the occasion this coupon code will get you 25% off EVERY SINGLE ITEM at my Payhip store: 200THEPISODE That's right, the coupon code will get you 25% off every single ebook or audiobook on my Payhip store, and it's good through May 20th, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read or listen to, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT Audio file Episode200.mp3 Transcript   00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 200 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 10th, 2024 and today we are celebrating the 200th episode of this podcast by taking a look back at how people have found my books. We’ll also close out the show with a preview of the upcoming Ghost in the Veils audiobook. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. To celebrate the 200th episode of this podcast, we're going to have a special coupon code that will get you 25% off every single item at my Payhip store. That coupon code is 200THEPISODE, which is spelled 200THEPISODE and the coupon code and the link to my Payhip will be included in the show notes for this episode. That's right, the coupon code will give you 25% off every single ebook or audiobook on my Payhip store and is good through May 20th, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read or listen to, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on current writing projects. The rough draft of Cloak of Titans is done, and I am about 2/3 of the way through the first editing pass. If all goes well, I am hoping to have that out before the end of May. I've also written a short story called Blood Walk and newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of that short story when Cloak of Titans comes out. So this is an excellent time to sign up for my new release newsletter. You'll get 3 free epic fantasy novels when you do. Once Cloak of Titans is published, my next main project will be Shield of Darkness, which will hopefully come out towards the end of June or the start of July. I am also about 11,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, the third Rivah book, and I will make that my main project after Shield of Darkness is done, so that book will probably come out before the end of this summer, if all goes well. 00:01:57 Main Topic/Question of the Week And our Question of the Week is also this week's main topic. It's a question that I can't answer myself, but I asked because I wanted to talk about it for this episode of the podcast, and the question is, which book of mine did you first read, and how did you come across it (since Cloak of Titans will be, I believe, my 152nd novel)? I expected a wide range of responses and we got them. Our first response is from Roman who says: first one was Demonsouled. I looked for free books when I downloaded the Kindle app for my new iPad and have read everything you've written since. I guess your plan of giving away the first book for free worked on me. That is why I give those books away for free. Our next response is from Dave, who says: I found Child of the Ghosts on BookBub. The title was intriguing. It was also free. I now have an extensive Jonathan Moeller collection on my Kindle Library. Our next response comes from Joachim, who says: Ghost Omnibus One and Ghost Exile Omnibus One were $0.99, so I purchased both. I continued with Ghost Exile, backfilling the Ghost stories later. You would not be able to answer your own question obviously, but would you be able to answer us the following question: what was the first fantasy book you published? That would been Demonsouled back in 2005, when it was traditionally published and later I got the rights back and self-published it for the first time in 2011 and then later made it free. Our next response is from Mark, who says: I found Child of the Ghosts on Kindle. Sam says Frostborn: The Gray Knight. I was looking for a new fantasy series to read after I finished the Codex Alera. Came across it while scrolling through Amazon and thought, huh, why not? Little did I know all these years later I would have an addiction to your novels. Well, there are worse problems to have. I agree very much. Our next response is from Tarun who says: read Child of the Ghosts first on the Kindle web app. Todd says: Child of the Ghosts. Caina is a great Ghost nightfighter. Mary says: Frostborn. I forget why. That seems entirely appropriate, because I wrote Frostborn 11 years ago now. Yes, eleven years ago now, because I wrote it in 2003, so I can barely remember writing it at this point, let alone how someone might come across it. Our next response is from Justin: Demonsouled. Free book offer. Steve says: Iron Hand. If I remember right, it came up as a suggestion on the Kindle app. Sara says: Frostborn. It was $0.99 and then after I finished that series, Child of the Ghosts on a 99 cent deal. Thuvia says: Thief Trap-finished it on September 14th, 2016. I don't recall how I found it, but maybe BookBub? I know the book covers amused me since they're nothing like how Nadia dresses. I have since changed the Cloak Games and Cloak Mage covers, but the original covers definitely did not reflect how Nadia dresses in the series. Our next response is from William, who says: Iron Hand, which I discovered through William King's blog when you posted your blog post on how to write and publish an ebook at no cost using free software. I remember that blog post. That got a lot of traction, especially because I've written an entire book, Silent Order: Eclipse Hand, in order to prove that point. Our next response is from Kermit, who says: the Ghost Omnibus. I was researching the next fantasy author I wanted to read because David Eddings had died. I came across your Ghosts series and decided to try it. Ann-Marie says: Child of the Ghosts. The title caught me. It was part of Kindle's recommendations for things I should try next. I was also getting off of a mystery genre binge so I wanted something different to dive into. I love Caina. She's so cool. Whoops, forgot to add Goodreads says I read it back in July 2017. Kevin says: the first books of yours were The Frostborn Omnibus One on the 21st of April 2017. I came across it on Amazon search while looking for stuff to read in the car whilst waiting for my son to come out of school. It was £0.99, so throw away money really and worth look. Since then I have, amongst others, read a further 103 books of yours to date. So it seems that making Frostborn Omnibus One $0.99 turned out to be a really good idea. Our next response is from Lee, who says: Frostborn the Gray Knight was the first ebook I picked up to read. I started because of the book description. Since then I have read almost every book you have published. Perry says: Demonsouled with the original public domain cover art (the best of the covers, in my opinion) searching for books to add to my Kobo. And I stumbled across Smashwords. I searched for free fantasy books, and your books were near the top of the results. This was just shortly after you started self-publishing. I originally grabbed a whole slew of your books there. I have since purchased and continue to buy your ebooks through Kobo. I get points for being a VIP plus a free book every year from a select list. All your short stories I buy on Kobo as well. Audiobooks I get through your Payhip store. Ah, that takes me way back because way back. In 2011 when I started self-publishing, I couldn't afford cover art of any kind, so what I had to do was look for classic artwork scenes that were in the public domain since you can reuse public domain art freely. You do in fact see a lot of traditionally published books that have old like Renaissance or Baroque paintings, for the cover. That was the original covers Demonsouled and Child of the Ghosts, public domain artwork from the 19th century. Our next response is from Lauren, who says: Child of the Ghosts on Smashwords, but I read primarily through Kindle these days. Nadia is my favorite, but I hope to use the Ghost and/or Demonsouled settings one day in our group's tabletop RPGs. Our next response is from Jesse, who says: Frostborn Omnibus One. I was sitting in an IHOP and I had just finished the last ebook in my queue. Google Books suggested it. It was a dollar for three and half books, so I figured why not? Still had half a plate of food to go. I have subsequently bought and read pretty much everything of yours is readily available and actively tracking all the series. Good stuff. I'm glad that worked out because that is one of the better stories I've ever heard of what happens in an IHOP. Our next comment is from Becca, who says: Demonsouled, when it first came out on Kindle. I can remember waiting eagerly for each book in the series. Still one of my favorites. Thank you for all the writing! Rhion says: Demonsouled. I just finished a bunch of Quantrell and Peloquin books and it popped up under suggested reading on KU. Since then, I've read quite literally your entire fiction bibliography, which is just ridiculous. Our next comment comes from Jonathan (a different Jonathan than me) and he says: first book I actually read was the Frostborn Omnibus, the first three books plus The First Quest all bundled into one. I got them on Google Play because I got a gift card for Christmas and I think the omnibus was on sale. So I couldn't resist getting four whole books for cheap, which of course led into the rest of the series and to Sevenfold Sword and to Mallison and to Dragontiarna. Mandy says: I read the Frostborn prequel and found it on the freebie list on Amazon at the time. I read everything released in that universe, as well as the Demonsouled series and am now working my way through the Ghosts series. Our next comment is from Randy, who says: Child of the Ghosts was my first. I was desperately searching for new authors and it was one of about a dozen free novels I picked up several years ago. Caina’s story was so good I finished in one sitting. After I devoured what was available at the time for the Ghost books, I moved on to Frostborn. Then I found you also wrote science fiction. I've read all the different series to date and I haven't been found wanting yet. Well, not true. I'm always wanting the next book. That's why I'm working hard on the next book. Our next comment is from Martin who says: I started with the Gray Knight. I instantly loved it and the rest of the series, at least what was published at the time. When I ran out of them, I looked you up and read the Demonsouled books. After that, moved on to Caina and only recently I moved on to Nadia. I also find they have a lot of readability. Our next comment is from Lauren, who says: Child of the Ghosts, after the third book in the series was out. Found it when searching for a new read on Amazon. Was hooked from there. Marta says: I'm sure it was a Bookbub deal. I think it was the Frostborn Omnibus. Jacob says: The Gray Knight. Came across it after looking for a new series to read after I caught up on the Half-Orc series by David Dalglish. Barbara says: Demonsouled or Child of the Ghosts. It's been so long. I'm not sure which was first. Having been the one to write those books so long ago, I totally understand where she's coming from. Our next response is from Cheryl, who says: the first Ridmark Arban book. Can't remember the name, may have been The Gray Knight? That is entirely correct. It was, in fact Frostborn: The Gray Knight. Our next response is from JKM who says: the first Ghost book and I cannot remember where I came across it. John says Demonsouled on Kindle. Amazon suggested to me way, way back. I picked up a used printed copy I discovered at my local fantasy and science fiction store, Dark Carnival. Shortly afterwards gave it to my son, who enjoyed it as well. That is a deep cut, because Demonsouled was originally published in 2005 in hardback and very quickly went out of print. So I'm impressed that John managed to find one of those copies still floating out there in the used book market. Cathy says: Frostborn Omnibus One. I saw the $0.99 price and thought if I don't like it, I'm only out a dollar. Once I finished it, I started looking for other books by you and have read almost every series you've written. Michael says. I think it was Ghost in the Flames. It was early 2010s (2013 maybe?), and I just discovered the joy of self-published fantasy authors on the Kindle store. As soon as I read it, I was hooked. Bonnie says: Frostborn omnibus. It was cheap, looked interesting, so I gave it a try. Then Tower of Endless Worlds- totally hooked and now I have all the books! Michiel says: Demonsouled. It was free, so I gave it a go and started collecting everything you wrote since then. Jason says: I honestly can't remember. I think it might have been the first Caina omnibus with an Audible audiobook that I played in my car while driving to work. Then the second and I ran out of audiobooks, so I had to start reading them myself. Phillipe says: The very first Caina book, been hooked since. Susan says: Demonsouled. I was searching for something to read, and it sounded good. I have now read everything and am patiently waiting for more. Melinda says Child of the Ghosts. It was free and I was broke and bored. That is why I give away the free books: to entertain people who are broke and bored. Our next comment is from Juliana, who says: the first Ghosts book. Judy says: Child of the Ghosts. I was on Google Play and was recommended. Tom says: The Frostborn Omnibus One, on sale on Amazon. The rest is history. Justin says: The Gray Knight was a suggestion based on what I read on Apple Library. Ashley (who I believe is in fact engaged to Justin) says: My first book was also The Gray Knight and Justin was the reason I started reading this series. So thanks for the recommendations, Justin! James says: Demonsouled on Kindle way back when. It was free and a good name. I mean how Demonsouled isn’t a band name yet, I have no idea. The rest, as they say, is many, many series later. I fully understand. Our next comment is from Juana who says: Frostborn: The Gray Knight. It was in a BookBub offering. Shandy says: I was in a book hangover and saw your Frostborn series on sale on Google Play Books. Omnibus got me and like 100 plus books later, safe to say I'm a fan. Beverly says: Demonsouled. It's been so long. I don't know what led me to get it. Most likely just window shopping for next read and I thought it'd be something I would enjoy. Andrew says Frostborn series. Suggested by Kindle. I've read most of what you've written since. Just can't get into Demonsouled, so don't know why. I've got those books. Just doesn't click. Christopher says: Demonsouled. I got the first book free on my Nook, like I found most of my favorite authors. I also read another one of the first book free ones at the same time, but I didn't like it. I don't remember something about a tower and magic. Then I read the Frostborn series. You were far enough into it that by the time I started I was playing catch up as you released books. I may have had to wait a week or two for the last book to come out. Then I started Cloak Games. That is still in my top three favorite series of all time. Probably top two with Spinward Fringe by Randolph Lalonde. I have read pretty much everything you've written by now. David says: Thief Trap. Found via Facebook ad. Venus says: Thief Trap. Found it doing a search for free urban fantasy on my Nook. So those are some of the first books of mine that people have read and the ways in which they found them. I think we can safely say that giving away the first book in your series for free turned out to be a very good idea. I would like to take a moment to thank everyone who has read any of my books as, as you probably guessed, have been doing this for a long time. Demonsouled was first published in April 2011 (for self-published, rather); it was initially published in hardback way back in May 2005. So I clearly have been doing this for a long time and I am very grateful to everyone who has read a book or listened to an audiobook or come along for the ride. I'm also very grateful to everyone who has listened to this podcast over 200 episodes. And here's to more interesting episodes in the future. 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 with transcripts (transcripts are available from Episode 140 onwards) on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe. Stay healthy and see you all next week. And now let's close out the show with a preview of the audio book of Ghost in the Veils, as excellently read by Hollis McCarthy: Caina gazed at the wrapped bundle in the back of the wagon. Thankfully, no blood had leaked from it. Though perhaps she shouldn’t have worried. Only a few people in Malarae would have recognized the dark green liquid as blood. The wagon itself was nothing remarkable. A bit old and worn, though none of the planks had rotted and the wheels were in mostly good shape. A pair of placid draft horses pulled the vehicle, the animals well-accustomed to the noises and smells of the Imperial capital. The only thing unusual was the bundle resting in the back.It was almost the precise size and shape of the corpse of a grown man. To be fair, it was a corpse. Just not of a grown man. Or a grown woman. Or indeed anything human. Caina didn’t know what it was, but she intended to find out. “Will there be anything else, Countess?” said her seneschal, a Saddaic man named Talzain. He wore the formal black clothes of a Nighmarian servant. Combined with his wan complexion, the outfit always made him look a bit corpselike. “No, thank you,” said Caina. “I should be back in time for dinner with Lord Kylon and Lady Kalliope.” “Yes,” said Talzain. He cleared his throat. “That ought to be…interesting.” “You have a gift for understatement,” said Caina. Kylon and Kalliope had their own errands in the city. When Kalliope had fled New Kyre with her children ahead of the Cult of Rhadamathar, she had taken some money and baggage with them, but she had been forced to leave it behind at the Wrecked Warship near the ocean harbor of Malarae. Fortunately, the innkeeper had kept all of Kalliope’s baggage on hand. Partly because Anastasios was an honest man and partly because he feared the vengeance of Kalliope’s father. Lysikas Stormblade had a formidable reputation, even among the Kyracians living in Malarae. So Kalliope had gone with some of Caina’s servants to retrieve her baggage and buy such things as Nikarion and Zoe might need. Kylon himself was keeping watch over the twins. Caina suggested that he take them riding to see the city, and he agreed. The children, in awe of the father they had never known they had, had made no protest. Ardakh, Sethroza, and the other Cultists were still out there, but if they tried to attack the children in Kylon’s presence, they would regret it bitterly.

In this week's episode, we take a look at some ergonomics and health tips for writers and other sedentary workers. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGFURY The coupon code is valid through May 25th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 199 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is May the 3rd 2024 and today we are talking about ergonomics for writers. Before we get to our main topic, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on current writing projects, and then Question of the Week. First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SPRINGFURY. As always, that will be in the show notes with a link to the Payhip store. This coupon code will be valid through May the 25th, 2024, so if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Next up, updates on my current writing projects. I am almost done with Cloak of Titans. I'm currently at 98,000 words. I am hoping to wrap it up after I finish recording this episode (either this afternoon or tomorrow), and so we are well on track to having the book out before the end of May, if all goes well. I am also 8,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, which will be the sequel to Wizard-Thief and Half-Elven Thief, and the third book in the Rivah series. That will probably be out towards the end of July because once Cloak of Titans is done, I want to go full speed ahead on Shield of Darkness (the sequel to Shield of Storms from earlier in the year and the second book in the Shield War series). If all goes well, the next couple of books I publish will be Cloak of Titans, Shield of Darkness, and Half-Orc Paladin. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is recording the anthology of Tales of the Shield Knight for me. We’re about 1/3 of the way through it, I think and making good progress. I'm looking forward to sharing that with you all. I just got the notification that the files for the audiobook of Ghost in the Veils (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) were uploaded, so just a little more proofing and then that should hopefully be available to you as well. So lots of good things to look forward to. 00:02:07 Question of the Week Now it's time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is the board game that you've been playing the longest? Board games have many advantages in the modern age. They don't require electricity, they don't need to be charged, and they also have a pleasingly tactile feel that you just don't get from tapping a screen. Sometimes you learn a game when you're a kid and sticks with you ever since. We have some interesting answers this week. Our first answer is from Jesse, who says: I have to say Labyrinth. Played it as a kid a lot with siblings. A year or two ago, my kids got it randomly from a relative, and now it's back. The real precursor to Mario Kart in terms of learning to hate your friends and discovering life is unfair. For myself, I only started playing Mario Kart with my siblings when I was already well into middle age, so we thankfully avoided squabbling over that. If we had played Mario Kart when we were kids, we definitely would have squabbled. Back to Question of the Week. Michael says: I don't really play them anymore, alas. I played chess in school but only so I didn't have to do physical education class. I used to look at the board and immediately resign and then just sit and read a book instead until the teacher wandered over. It used to annoy my opponents who took the game seriously. So congratulations to Michael for devising a chess stratagem that did, in fact get him what he wanted. MacKenzie says: hands down, chess. I may be awful at it, but it's definitely the record holder. Mark says: checkers, because my mum is good at it. Adelaide says: Scrabble for me. Venus says: backgammon. My mother taught me to play. I don't know how old I was. She never let me win. Every time I beat her it was because I had a better game that day. David says it's probably Shoots and Ladders, followed closely by checkers. Grace says: I no longer play the same board games I did as a kid so the ones that I play now with friends. I've played I think Arkham Horror and Quacks of Quedlinburg the most. Both are fun, though Arkham Horror, we've won all of two times. For myself, I think the board game I've been playing the longest is chess. I first learned to play when I think was I was ten and I've been playing on and off ever since. Amusingly for a post about tactile board games, I recently discovered chess.com and I like its large supply of chess puzzles, which are kind of like bite sized chess when I don't have time to play a full game, which is most of the time. However, last night I did have a bit more time to play and so I was able to play six games against actual human opponents on chess.com in about 40 minutes and I lost six times in a row. So it's a good thing I enjoy the game because there's definitely room for improvement. 00:04:45 Main Topic: Ergonomics for Writers Now on to this week's main topic, ergonomics for writers. And let's start this with a disclaimer. I am not a health professional. I am not a doctor. I'm not a nurse. I'm not an ergonomics specialist. For medical questions, you should seek medical advice and verify anything I say with the opinion of actual medical professionals. When starting a new movement or exercise routine, it's a good idea to start gradually, both for reasons of health and to prevent burnout or getting overwhelmed. So that is your disclaimer. I am not a medical professional. But I don't think you have to be a medical professional to notice that desk jobs have a serious problem, and that includes writing. If you're sitting for a long period of time, that can cause a host of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, potentially diabetes, etc. Sitting for long periods reduces your energy levels and can be detrimental to your mental health. Sitting for long periods in the wrong position can make joint, wrist, and back problems worse and cause pain. As an example, back in the old days when I did IT support, I was talking to a coworker who said that he was having back problems and so I made, you know, sympathetic noises and told him I hope he felt better. Then about an hour later I was walking down the hall and I happened to walk past his desk and I saw that he was using his laptop by sitting at the very edge of his chair, and his back was bent at like 45° angle to type on the keyboard. And I was like dude, this explains your back problems. So thankfully he improved his posture a bit after that. If you do have a job such as being a writer where you are sitting for long periods of time, how can you sit in the most healthy way? Changing how you sit is a relatively quick thing to do that will reap long term rewards in terms of potentially avoiding back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain and so forth. Make sure that your chair and desk are set in the correct positions. There are lot of diagrams available to show you, that demonstrate how to have an ergonomic desk set up. You want your elbows to be at a 90° angle. You want your wrist to be neutral or supported. You don’t want them to be bent like T Rex hands. Your back and neck should not be leaning forward. The top of the monitor should be around eye level for neck health and in fact I have my main desktop monitor on this monitor stand I got off Amazon Basics just for the purpose of raising it to proper eye level. You want your knees so your legs are not pulled underneath your chair or resting on your chair casters, since this stresses knee joints. If your legs aren’t long enough to go comfortably to a flat position when sitting normally, footrests work well and aren't very expensive or a large book will work, too. For your eye health, you want to look away from your monitor occasionally to reduce eye strain. Another good solution for the health problems that sitting too much causes is moving. You can have walking breaks where you get up and move for at least a minute every hour. This is an excellent time to get some water to drink or to use the bathroom. Fitness and smart watches or a cheap kitchen timer can be used to remind you to get up or stand. It might be a good idea to pace while taking a phone call, since you're going to be on the phone anyway and if it's not a video call, there's no reason not to stand up and walk around a little bit, so long as you're not irritating your officemates. Sometimes it's a good idea to take a brief walk daily. Some people who work from home use a walk around the block at the beginning of the day and the end of the day to mentally transition away from the workday in the absence of a work commute. Some people have the kind of work where they can do it while on a walking pad (like a low power treadmill) and an adjustable standing desk combination. This setup is a bit more expensive and can cost about like $350 USD for a basic setup and just like standing desks, they don't work for everyone. If you already have a treadmill, you can get a desk attachment for it for around sixty U.S. dollars. The transcriptionist of this podcast has used a walking pad/standing desk combination for about six months now and finds that it helps with afternoon energy crashes. She usually uses it for webinars, Zoom meetings where she don't need to be on camera, and tasks that involve more reading than typing, such as research for these podcast episodes. She can type while she walks, so long as she keeps her pace to under about two mph. She says the key is to think of walking as a supplement to working and not expect it to be the same as walking on a treadmill at the gym. For myself, I've mentioned before that pretty frequently that I use the Pomodoro technique while I’m writing where I'll write intensely for 25 minutes and then take a 5 or 10 minute break. That's also an excellent time to stand up and move around or if you’re me, drop and do some push-ups to help keep carpal tunnel syndrome at bay. Another potential thing to think about is strength training/mobility. People tend to be scared of strength training because they're afraid of injuring themselves, but they really shouldn't be so long as they, you know, do the forms correctly. Strength training, as the name implies, strengthens muscles that support your joints and becomes even more important as we get older, since the human body tends to lose muscle mass as we get older. As little as two sessions of strength training a week have been shown to lead to fewer injuries and greater longevity. Strength training is important in the sedentary job like writing since we don't have tasks to build muscles already built into the workday. Writing is a lot of things, but it's not particularly great for building physical strength. Having a consistent strength routine also means that your body can instantly adapt to challenges like shoveling heavy snow or helping to carry a person in an emergency or getting the bag into the overhead bin on the plane without having to ask for help. As people get older, that kind of thing gets harder to do otherwise. In the case of shoveling, it can put a lot of strain on your heart, so it's best to prepare for these kind of life challenges with consistent strength training. There's a lot of strength training that doesn't require a lot of money or a gym membership. Body weight and resistance band strength training are beginner friendly and free or inexpensive. And as I mentioned earlier, you can totally do push-ups for free with no equipment. Another potential strength training exercise that may work for you is resistance band training. That's great for those who travel often or live in a very small space, such as a typical modern urban apartment. Latex or cloth bands that provide resistance for body weight movements can be found quite cheaply on most major retailers. Some are in the shape of a loop, while others have attached handles. Resistance band training includes exercises for those who are unable to stand at all or for long periods of time. Another good technique is dumbbell only strength training. Dumbbells can actually be used for lower body exercises like squats as well as well as upper body exercises. They are relatively inexpensive compared to a full barbell or strength machines and they don't take up a lot of space, which again is useful if you're living in a small space or place where space is constrained. Sample routines with video demonstrations abound on YouTube, if you’re not sure where to start. Otherwise, you can find online training programs from companies like Street Parking or CrossFit Linchpin for about $20.00 USD per month, and they have structured training routines that have been scaled down to work with just dumbbells. Sitting correctly and moving often sounds like things that shouldn't matter to someone in a job that relies on the mind but physical health and a strong mind are strongly intertwined. People in intellectual jobs, I've noticed, tend to think of themselves as a mind that happens to have a body attached, especially people who are very often heavily into the sciences and engineering. But it's really, I found, the opposite. We are essentially a physical body that happens to have a mind attached to it and the better shape you can get your physical body and physical health into, the clearer your mind will be. I mean, just think about how hard it is to think clearly when you have chronic pain or chronic illness or some kind of medication you have to take to manage those things that interferes with your thinking, gives you cloudy thoughts. Truth is, this has been known for centuries and still confirmed by endless research studies. The Romans had a Latin phrase, “mens sana in corpore sano”:  a healthy mind in a healthy body. That sums up how interconnected the goal of both are. Ideally, when you're a writer, you want to prolong your career and increase your energy levels by spending at least a small time each week moving and strengthening the body. Sitting correctly also goes a long way towards preventing back and joint pain, which can definitely hurt your productivity and cause problems in other areas of your life as well. Finally, the most important thing with any exercise program is consistency is more important than perfection here. Start small and keep going. I've often said in this podcast, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible, and this is definitely true with exercise as well as writing. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. Once again, a word of thanks for my transcriptionist for helping me pull together the research for this episode. As you might have guessed, she has a strong interest in physical fitness for people who sit at a desk and work a lot. A reminder you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at seven popular movies about writing & writers and take a look at what they got wrong. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGORCS The coupon code is valid through May 20th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 198 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 26th, 2024 and today we were talking about seven of the most inaccurate movies about writers. Before we do that, we will have writing updates, Coupon of the Week, and a Question of the Week. So let's start with Coupon of the Week. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Curse of the Orc (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SPRINGORCS and that's SPRINGORCS. As always, that coupon code will be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through May 20th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing projects and audiobook projects. I'm currently on Chapter 16 of Cloak of Titans. I'm not sure how many chapters it's going to end up being. My number keeps changing, but I think right now it's 25. I am over halfway through the book and I'm hoping to be past the 70,000 word point by the end of the day, if all goes well. I’m hoping to still have that out before the end of May. I am also 5,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin, which should come out this summer. After Cloak of Titans is out, my next main project will be Shield of Darkness, which I know many people have been asking about, so hopefully it will not be too much longer until I start on Shield of Darkness. In audiobook news, Hollis McCarthy is almost done recording Ghost in the Veils, and we should hopefully have that available to listen to sometime in May. Brad Wills is currently recording the anthology Tales of the Shield Knight, which will contain over 15 of the Shield Knight short stories that I wrote for the Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna series, and that should also hopefully be out sometimes toward the end of May or possibly June. So that is where I’m at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:01:58 Question of the Week/Update on Starfield from Previous Question of the Week Next up is Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics. This week's question: what is the first fantasy novel you remember reading? After all, if you're hanging around the website of Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, there's a non-zero chance that you enjoy fantasy books. So it seems like a reasonable question, and it was indeed a reasonable question because we got a lot of responses. Our first response is from Justin, who says: believe it or not, the first fantasy novel I read was The Hobbit. My older sisters had pooled their money to buy the paper version of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I saw them reading it, and since my sisters were for once not being nasty to each other and reading together, it had to be good. After they finished The Hobbit, I asked to borrow it. It was allowed to read it as long as I didn't leave the room and wash my hands first. I was eight. Our next response is from Mary, who says: I remember my first reading of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It was by no stretch of the imagination my first fantasy novel. Our next comment is from Stuart, who says: Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings. When I was younger/preteens, I loved adventure books like Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators. I didn't really read much in the coming years, until one day it was raining outside and being bored, I made a nuisance of myself when my older brother was trying to watch TV. He finally snapped, told me to shut up, threw Pawn of Prophecy at me, and told me to read that. The rest, as they say, is history. I went from adding Eddings to Feist and Gemmel and then on to Jordan, etcetera. I will always have a soft spot for David Eddings books, though. So it seems the common themes here will be a sibling rivalry inspiring love of fantasy literature. Our next response is from Grace, who says: does the Magic Treehouse series count? If not, Chronicles of Narnia. Leanne says Dragonriders of Pern. Boy, did I want a dragon! Melinda says Piers Anthony's Night Mare. I was in 6th grade and my friend gave it to me for my birthday. Cheryl says: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. From then on, it was full steam ahead, Feist, Eddings, Tolkien, Irvine, and now most of the fantasy/sci-fi authors that are currently publishing on Kindle. David says: probably The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Kevin says: many, many moons ago it was the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula Le Guin. Then I wandered into TV and films in the sci-fi genre for a number of years, forsaking the written word. My imagination was recaptured more recently, about a decade ago, a decade ago, when a friend lent me a copy of Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind. Alan says: I've been through most of these mentioned so far though the years but my first introduction to once he was Edgar Rice Burroughs, like Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Pellucidar, etcetera. Then on to Tolkien. Randy says: for me it was The Hobbit.  Went on a family vacation with my uncle and his family. I was introduced to The Hobbit. My uncle will read just about every night to my cousins, and as we're all sharing the same room, my sister and I began hearing the story. We got home. I asked my dad if I could read his copy. 50 some odd years later, I'm still devouring as many books as I can. Mike says: I am not sure which one it was, but I believe it was either The Hobbit or The Sword of Shannara. Diana says: The Gunslinger. I said what I said. Venus says: A Wrinkle in Time or Dragonsong. I know that the Pern books are actually science fiction, but I don't recall any of the science stuff that first time I read it. It was the first Pern book I read. The first epic fantasy I recall reading was Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Gary says: I couldn't give you a title or author, but I definitely remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books in the fantasy genre as a young reader. Tom said: Not 100% sure, but this is my best guess. It would be The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Ah, the Chronicles of Narnia. What a series. Juana says: I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Catriona says: The Hobbit after listening to the BBC Radio play adaptation in the ‘70s. Pippa says: Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. I've reread them lots too and I've never tired of them. Perry says: Do the Iliad, Odyssey, and Beowulf count? For modern fantasy, would be a toss-up between The Hobbit and The Belgariad. Joy says: the Thomas Covenant series. My boyfriend at the time was into sci-fi and fantasy novels, so I borrowed it and was hooked. A different Glenn says: either Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey or the Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia A. McKillip. I love them both in the same summer while visiting my dad and cannot remember which one came first, but I got hooked on fantasy fiction that summer. Mandy says: The first time I remember reading the left an impression was the Dragonlance Legends series. My favorite fantasy series is Discworld. Gary (a different Gary) says: First one I remember is the Elfstones of Shannara. Also, the Dragonriders of Pern and Crystal Singer series. John says: Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. I was nine years old. It created a lifelong love of fantasy for me. Darla says: A Wrinkle in Time, The Faraway Lurs, and The Runaway Robot were some of the books I read as a kid. Later it was Lord of the Rings and The Dragonriders of Pern and I continue reading to this day. Andy says first ever was the Deverry series by Katherine Kerr. It was a very intense read for 14 year old on an 8 hour drive on a family trip. Sue says David Eddings- all his series, and Anne McCaffrey, Dragonrider series. Brock says Lord of the Rings. Susan says: probably Lord of the Rings, but it’s over 50 years ago. I can't really remember. Edward says The Legend of Huma by Richard A. Knaak. Michael says. Now there's a question! Probably The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or one of the other Narnia books, all of which are obviously epic. And finally, Judy says the White Mountains by John Christopher or anything by Dr. Seuss. So I think we can see it's safe to say that if you have a small children between the ages of eight and 10 and you want to get them into fantasy literature, the best places to start would be either The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, or perhaps the Dragonriders of Pern. For myself, the very first fantasy novel I ever read was Magician Master by Raymond E. Feist. What got me into that book was The Betrayal at Krondor computer game, which of course was a classic. After I finished the game, I did some reading. Remember this was way before the Internet, so you couldn't find out anything you wanted whenever you wanted and I was astonished to realize that Krondor was in fact based off an actual novel series. So I got Magician Master and started reading it. Fun fact, years later I realized that Magician Master was in fact the sequel to Magician Apprentice and went back to read the first book. So that was this week's Question of the Week. You may remember that last week's Question of the Week was what new Xbox game I should try. Many people had excellent suggestions. I think I'm going to go with Starfield from all the suggestions last week. The reason for this is that Starfield reminds me a great deal of Wing Commander Privateer from the ‘90s. If you remember, the Wing Commander series of PC games, they’re basically Top Gun but in space. Privateer took the basic flight gameplay mechanic but changed it so you're an independent privateer captain and you had to make your way through the Gemini sector as a mercenary, a merchant, a pirate, a bounty hunter, or some combination of them. You had to buy your own equipment and weapons and find a way to turn a profit in your jobs, since you had to pay for everything. If you played the main plots, you got involved in conspiracy involving a lost alien relic, but you don't have to do any main plot at all. You just fly around the galaxy making credits, fighting pirates, and trading. Starfield basically feels like someone took Wing Commander Privateer, and then added on a Skyrim-esque role-playing experience for when your character is on the ground. I know it got middling reviews, but I'm enjoying the game so far. Perhaps because, at least to my eye, it feels like a massively updated version of Wing Commander Privateer. 00:09:43 Main Topic: Seven of the Most Inaccurate Movies About Writers Now we're 10 minutes into the show and still haven't gotten to our main topic, so I think it's time we should finally do that, which is Seven of the Most Inaccurate Movies About Writers. I decided to do this because I noticed that whenever a novelist or a writer of fiction turns up in a movie, the depiction of it tends to be grossly inaccurate. That's hardly unique to writers. The joke among the military officers, former military officers, and law enforcement officers is that whenever the military or law enforcement turns up on TV, you can have a good drinking game by counting all the inaccuracies and things that they get wrong. So why should writing be any different? I think the difference might be that writing is kind of a more aspirational career, where it's the sort of career that people tend to daydream about, like going off and becoming a writer and so they tend to get a lot of things wrong about that. So with the help of my transcriptionist, we pulled together a list of seven of the most inaccurate movies about writing. There's actually a couple of Hallmark movies on here, and this isn't to bash on Hallmark movies. I think Hallmark movies tend to be about the fantasy of romance in the way that a show like Law and Order is about the fantasy of law enforcement and criminal justice, or a movie like John Wick is about the fantasy of violence or a game like SimCity is about the fantasy of managing a large city. The reality is of none of these things are nothing like the way they're portrayed in fiction, but instead, Law and Order is about the fantasy of what we would like the criminal justice system to be like and John Wick is kind of like, you know, a revenge fantasy of what we imagine we would do if someone actually shot our dog. So with that in mind, let's look at seven of the most inaccurate movies we found about writing. The first one is called Winter Love Story from Hallmark in 2019. It kind of deserves the 22% it got in the Rotten Tomatometer. The plot is a debut writer who wrote a memoir is appearing on a book tour of a famous fantasy author in order to boost her sales. They travel around visiting charming bed and breakfasts with plenty of time to talk about their feelings. The fantasy writer has a dog that he really loves a lot. The movie really revolves more around the dog more than the books. Now, why is this a bad movie about writing? For one thing, it has an unrealistic view of book tours, namely that a debut writer who is writing a memoir (which is a notoriously hard to sell genre) would be given such a lavish book tour paired with an author outside her genre. Cross-genre of sales promotions here in the real world tend not to work terribly well, because someone who wants to buy an 800 page fantasy novel about dragons is probably not going to be super interested in picking up a new writer’s memoir are about her failed dating life. The movie also has an unrealistic view of book marketing and the involvement level and commitment of traditional publishing staff. If traditional publishing marketing staff is marketing 50 plus other writers, they're not going to follow your whimsical book tour and give tons of advice and coaching along the way. Book tours really don't sell very many books in general, to the point where Brandon Sanderson, who is probably the top selling fantasy author in the world right now, stopped doing book tours in 2020 when COVID came along (because you know, everyone had to stop doing book tours). But after all the various restrictions lifted, he found that he really wasn't interested in resuming it because of the physical drain of traveling and it turned out it had no impact on sales whatsoever. Finally, the movie touts the very false belief that the skill of giving heartfelt, heavily autobiographical speeches is the essential skill in marketing your work. Honestly, if you want to sell books, you would have better luck learning how to use Amazon ads or Facebook ads effectively, but I expect that would not make for a very good Hallmark movie. The second movie we're going to talk about is Lost City from 2022, which I actually saw shortly after it came out because it turned up on streaming (I think it was on Prime). I thought it was actually pretty funny, but it was not terribly accurate about the business of writing. The plot is that a romance author is struggling to finish her book. While she's on tour with her famous cover model, she gets kidnapped and the cover model must turn into an action hero and rescue her. The plot very heavily borrows from the 1980s movie Romancing the Stone, which is also about a writer. The scenery in the movie is fantastic and Daniel Radcliffe plays the villain, this insane billionaire who kidnapped Sandra Bullock's character to help find lost treasure and their reactions were pretty funny. It's not a great movie about writing. Even the romance and romantasy (which is a combination of romance and fantasy) authors topping the best seller list right now (as of April 2024) do not have press tours that are more like a fan convention with a budget for sparkly jumpsuits and lighting effects, etcetera. Cover models do not get a lot (or even any) of promotion, attention, or respect from publishers. The cover model is given top billing on the tour along with the author, which just doesn't happen. One side note, what is probably realistic is the publisher trying to discourage tangents in full academic jargon by the author on her history related research interests. You will often find if you're reading a book that involved a lot of research on the part of the author, that the author is going to put that research into the book (whether the reader likes it or not). Our third movie is called Alex and Emma, which came out in 2003. The plot of this movie is that an author with writer’s block has debts to a loan shark he must pay in 30 days or else the loan shark is going to get nasty. He hires a stenographer to help him church out a book and since it's a romantic comedy, you can probably guess what happens next. This movie was apparently very loosely inspired by the story of Dostoyevsky writing The Gambler/meeting his wife but is also apparently heavily inspired by the movie Paris When it Sizzles. Even with multiple sources of inspiration, it still received terrible reviews for an incoherent, unsatisfying plot. And why is this a bad movie about writing? For one thing, it treats writing a book draft in 30 days as a near impossible feat. Not to toot my own horn, so to speak, but I'm going to write the rough draft of Cloak of Titans in under 30 days. If all goes well, it will be well over 100,000 words. There's also once again the cliche that writing already must be autobiographical and reflect what's currently happening in your life in order to be good. If that were true, all my books would be about the adventures of a middle-aged IT guy, which would be kind of boring compared to epic fantasy novels. And another thing that's unrealistic is that the struggling writer gets a $125,000 advance from the publisher, but the publisher won't help him replace a computer when it gets destroyed by a loan shark’s posse. Computers were, of course, quite a bit more expensive in 2003 than they are now, but still they cost a lot less than $125,000. So that part definitely didn't make sense. Our 4th movie is Not Another Happy Ending, which came out in 2013. A writer becomes successful but has writer’s block when she's happy. Her publisher has to figure out how to make her unhappy so she can write again but falls in love with her in the process. And why is this a bad movie about writing? If following around most the successful writers in order to inspire them was the actual job of publishers, a few certain well known fantasy series might have at least one more book by now than they actually do. So we'll just move on from there. The fifth one is a movie that gets made fun of a lot and rather deservedly so: Eat, Pray, Love, which came out in 2010. The plot of this, obviously, is that a reader gets divorced and goes on a journey to Italy, India, and Bali in order to “find herself” and gain writing inspiration. Why is this a bad movie about writing? So many reasons! First, there's a sort of a cliche in poor taste that writers can't be great unless they leave their spouses, that their marriage is preventing someone from devoting themselves to great writing. Although the one thing you say for Eat, Pray, Love is that it's a gender flip as opposed to the way these things usually are in movies where it's the male writer who is being held back by his wife. The reality is that people with stable home lives are more likely to be productive than people without them, and this is true across all fields of endeavor, and not just writing. Another bad cliche is the idea that you need to bankroll a year of travel to luxury destinations in order to find inspiration to write isn't realistic or accurate, and in truth very, very, very, very, very few writers can actually afford this luxury. This type of thinking leads people to believe they need to go on expensive retreats in order to be a “real writer”, when in reality many famous writers rarely traveled. Examples: Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, I think J.R.R. Tolkien spent most of his post-war life entirely in England, etcetera. For myself, I do most of my writing either on my couch or while sitting in a $40 office chair I bought off Amazon Basics. That is definitely a cliche that you do not need to travel in order to write. In fact, travel can get in the way of getting writing done, which was one of the Brandon Sanderson’s stated reasons for why he doesn't go on book tours too often anymore. Our 6th movie is As Good as It Gets, which came out in 1997. The premise of this movie is that a crabby, ill-behaved writer with some mental health challenges has a series of unexpected interactions that inspire him to become a better person. And why is this an inaccurate move about writing? First, there's a cliche that writers need to use a typewriter because a computer isn't as artistic or special. I know there are writers who insist on writing things longhand and or insist on using the typewriter and they have their reasons, but it's my belief that that is in fact very inefficient, and you should probably write on whatever method is most efficient or easy for you. And if you are writing for publication and profit, that means writing on a computer. If you don't like to type, you can dictate. There's also the idea I don't like that the idea that the reading public/critics will forgive terrible behavior or prejudice because of how brilliant you are. This is a fallacy you see across many professions where a brilliant doctor, a brilliant scientist, a brilliant politician, a brilliant writer, or whatever feels they have a license to act like a total jerk because they're so good at what they do. In reality, that often causes a lot of problems and ends up destroying the person's career. So that is a bad cliche, and one that if you're listening to this, I urge you not to put into practice in your daily life. Our seventh and final movie is another Hallmark one called A Novel Romance, which came out in 2015. In this story, a male romance writer who uses a pen name meets a female book reviewer who is unaware of his true identity even as they grow closer. Will pressure from his publisher to reveal his true identity hurt their budding romance? What did this movie get wrong about writing? First, there's the idea that pen names are somehow deceptive or shocking, especially in the romance genre where it's very common for a single writer to have multiple pen names. A professional book critic would consider it a very strong possibility that someone is writing under a pen name, which makes you wonder how competent the book critic is as a book critic. Publishers do not send limos to the airport for writers traveling to their personal vacation homes. If a writer is rich enough to have a limo and a personal vacation home, the writer is probably paying for it him or herself. The publisher is not. Most writing is not done on a legal pad while staring out onto the water next to your very expensive boat. Your agent, even a very nice agent (if such a thing exists) will not fly across the country multiple times in order to give you romantic advice. And finally, an author’s pen name reveal would not be front page tabloid news. So those are just some of the things that movie got wrong about writing. So there those are 7 movies that are very inaccurate about what being a writer is like, and the point of that was not to pick on those movies (with the possible exception of Eat, Pray, Love, which deserves to be picked on) but to point out that the way they referenced what being a writer was like was often quite inaccurate, even if the movies themselves may or may not have been enjoyable for their intended audience. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found it useful and a word of thanks to my transcriptionist help me to pull this list together because she's definitely seen more Hallmark movies than I have. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at direct selling for indie authors, and compare the pros and cons of Payhip and Shopify as platforms for selling direct. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and a Reader Question Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 197 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 19th, 2024, and today we are talking about the pros and cons of Payhip and Shopify for direct sales by authors. Before we do that, we will do Coupon of the Week and some updates on my current writing projects. I have some questions from readers and will discuss what I did to celebrate publishing my 150th book. First up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SPRINGELVES, spelled SPRINGELVES. As always, the link and the coupon code will be in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through May the 14th, 2024, so if you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have a look at my current writing and audiobook projects. Wizard-Thief, as I mentioned in last week's episode, is done and is out on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited and is selling quite strongly. Thank you very much for that. Now that it is out, my main project is Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage series. As of this recording, I am about 34,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 7 of 24. I think the final book length will end up being about the length of Cloak of Embers, which was about 110,000 words. Once Cloak of Titans is finished, my next project will be Shield of Darkness, so I will finally be getting to the second book in the Shield War series, which will be a follow up to Shield of Storms from back in January. If all goes well, I think Cloak of Titans will be out in the second half of May, maybe towards the start of June. I'm hoping to have Shield of Darkness out shortly after that, probably towards the end of June. I have also started working on the sequel to Wizard Thief, which is Half-Orc Paladin. That will come out after Shield of Darkness is done, hopefully not too long after Shield of Darkness is done. So that will probably be around the middle of July or so. So that is what I'm working on for books for the next couple of months. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Ghosts in the Veils. That will once again be recorded by Hollis McCarthy. I have Brad Wills working on the Tales of the Shield Knight anthology, which once it’s in audiobook, I’m going to sell it as a bundle on Audible and Amazon and all the other usual audiobook stores. I will also be giving away short stories individually for free from that collection in my newsletter, so that is once again a very good reason to sign up for my new release newsletter. Leanne Woodward has agreed to narrate the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, Wizard Thief. If all goes well, that will probably happen in June. And also in June, CJ McAllister will be narrating the second book of the Stealth and Spells Online Series, formerly known as Sevenfold Sword Online. So that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. Now we have one question from a reader that is not connected with our other segments. It's from Robert who asks about the Half-Elven Thief series: is this series available in paperback? I'm pleased to say that yes, it is. Both Half-Elven Thief and Wizard-Thief are available in trade paperback. Probably the cheapest place to get them is on Amazon, but I have expanded distribution for them so you should be able to buy it online from a variety of other stores. 00:03:43 Celebrating Book #150 As I mentioned previously on the show, Ghost in the Veils was my 150th book. Thank you for reading, everyone. Quite a few people asked how I wanted to celebrate, the implication being that I wanted to take a trip or something like a cruise, that sort of thing. However, with all respect to the cruise industry, if I wanted to catch norovirus, I could do it much closer to home for far less expense. However, I have established a precedent for celebrating major book milestones like this. Way back in 2019, Dragontiarna: Knights was my 100th book and to celebrate that milestone, I got a Nintendo Switch, which was the first dedicated video game console I had used since 1998 or so. Given that six months later COVID started, that turned out to be a wise purchase because suddenly I had a lot more time for video games. I got to beat a bunch of games I never had time to finish otherwise back in the ‘90s, like Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 3, the original Castlevania trilogy for NES, the Super Nintendo Castlevania games, Super Metroid, and I finally finished Skyrim. It wasn't all a retro nostalgia trip because I did finish a few newer games on it as well, like Metroid Dread and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. I recently had one of those numerically significant birthdays that are divisible by a large number, so I commemorated that occasion by getting an Xbox. It is a fine game console, but the problem with the Xbox was unlike the Switch, using the Xbox monopolizes the television. I finished the original Halo trilogy on Xbox and Skyrim again, but the whole Xbox monopolizes the television thing was kind of a difficulty for finding time to play it. But then a new device came to my attention: portable monitors. Obviously, most monitors are portable depending on size, but this new sort of monitor is basically a laptop LCD panel with a kickstand. It runs off a USB-C connection for power and you can connect a device to it with a USB-C or mini HDMI. Overall, these portable monitors tend to weigh about as much as an iPad in a case. They were basically intended for business travelers, since they fit easily into a laptop bag and then you can have a dual monitor set up with your laptop while you're on the road. However, it also connects just fine to an Xbox. If you can hold a laptop comfortably in your lap, then a portable monitor is about one third of that total weight. I moved my Xbox over next to the couch, connected it to a portable monitor, and have been using the Xbox that way. It is really quite exceedingly comfortable. Since I've beaten Skyrim a couple of times now, I need to decide on a new long-term game, which is why Question of the Week will be what it is shortly. So the “too long; didn't listen” version was celebrated my 150th book with a sub-100 dollar portable monitor off Amazon. It's really quite enjoyable and thank you for coming along for all 150 books. 00:06:35 Question of the Week It quite naturally segues into our Question of the Week. This week's question: what Xbox Game should I play next? No wrong answers, obviously. The reason I asked this particular question is because I keep defaulting to Skyrim or Halo when I play an Xbox game and would like to try something different. My leading candidates so far are Starfield, Witcher 3, and Dragon's Dogma 1. As you might have expected, this inspired many comments. LG says: I'm glad to hear you’re an Xbox player, too. I like to separate my work/study computer from my gaming space, so having the controller plus TV in another room works well for me. Revenant 2 is my new favorite game. It jumped forward in my “to play” list when Halo Infinite's campaign wasn't personally feeling right. This game has got fantastic narratives, brilliant variety, exciting exploration, and frequent boss fights, it’s souls-like but forgiving, the level/combat/gear systems are great, and there's a totally viable offline/single player mode. Justin says: We are a Nintendo family. Not quite 30 years ago, the PlayStation came out. Amid whining, I had the kids vote on what platform we would stick with. There is no way our entertainment budget could handle more than one. The most complaints have been missing out on the Metal Gear franchise, so that's my vote. Malcolm says 150 books. What an amazing feat. Congratulations. I feel like I've been on the journey with you, having read every book you have written and every series. I particularly enjoyed any book with Ridmark and Calliande and like Dragonskull, the next generation of Arbans. I also thoroughly enjoyed all the Demonsouled books, wasn't so keen on the Cloak and Ghost crossovers, but still a good read. Whatever you do, enjoy this landmark. Have fun. To answer the question, I do not usually play video games, but one that did catch my attention and play through all of them is the Dragon Age games. MacKenzie suggests Red Dead Redemption. The graphics hold up remarkably well. It's astoundingly clear for a Rockstar game and has an amazingly authentic feel to it. I'm not even a huge Western fan, but there's something extremely relaxing about riding out of town into the desert to hunt varmints. I think that is probably why so many people will go hunting in real life. Michael says: Starfield is a great game, but no modding yet on Xbox. Perry says: I haven't owned a console in over a decade, nor have I played any of those games, but my preference would be for Witcher 3. James says: How does Baldur’s Gate 3 not make the list? Best game I've played maybe ever. David says: Fallout 4 was fun. Mark says Witcher. Starfield, I found to be slow to start with. I play Skyrim over and over again. I kind of do that as well. You can always mod Skyrim if you have the anniversary edition and haven't already. Robb says any car racing game. Juana says Witcher 3. Martin says Witcher 3. Becca says Witcher 3. So there are many votes there for Witcher 3. William says Hogwarts Legacy. Jake says: I honestly can't recommend any games, no matter what platform they come in. Xbox, PlayStation, Atari…just not worth it anymore. So I'd skip the games and write a book, maybe continuation of the Silent Order series. That's my vote. Thank you for that advice, Jake, I suspect it might be a little self-interested, but I appreciate that. Next one is from Michael, who says next Xbox game is called: buy a PlayStation. Barton says: only played Witcher 3 out of those, but it was engrossing. Bobby says Starfield and Hogwarts Legacy are both enjoyable as well as Jedi Survivor. And finally, Jim says: Child of the Ghost. Wait…not a game….yet. Thank you everyone, for all the suggestions. I think what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to try Starfield because that comes with Game Pass and I have Game Pass already. If I don't like that, I will I probably start Witcher 3 because I got that one was on super sale like last year for something like 10 bucks and so it's been sitting in my account and I haven't played it. But if I try Starfield and don't like it, I will switch over to Witcher 3. If I don't like Witcher 3, maybe it'll be time for Baldur’s Gate 3. 00:10:40 Main Topic: Shopify vs. Payhip for Direct Sales for Writers But as much as I enjoy video games, I enjoy writing more and this is not a video game podcast. This is The Pulp Writer Show, so I think we should segue over into talking about an actual writing topic. This week's topic is comparing Shopify and Payhip for direct sales or as a direct sales platform for indie authors. And before we dig in, I should have a disclaimer. As you may know from my frequent mention of it on this show, I use Payhip quite a bit and that's how I do my direct sales. That said, I am not sponsored by Payhip. I don't get any stuff from this, whether financial benefits or an affiliate program, that kind of thing. I haven't used Shopify, but we did look into it quite a bit for the show and any opinion I express on this podcast is my own and not influenced by either Shopify or Payhip in any way. All right with that out of the way, let's dig into the topic. First off, why do direct sales? We should probably define that first. Direct sales is when an indie author sells a book using an ecommerce platform like Payhip or Shopify or Gum Road or a bunch of others without going through one of the big stores like Amazon or Apple or Google Play. So why do this? You get a greater cut of the profit than through ebook stores, whereas on a platform like Amazon, you max out at 70% of the sale price is what you get as the author. On direct sales platforms, you can potentially get nearly everything minus credit card fees and platform fees, which is higher than any of the other stores offer. You get paid faster. If you make a direct sale from the author, the author gets the money almost instantaneously, depending on their payment setup. Freedom/control. This is the big one. There is a lot of freedom in doing your own direct sales. It is a lot of work, but then like all forms of freedom, it is often quite worth it. It's much easier to run sales or issue coupon codes, as you know if you listen to the show regularly. Every week I give out a different coupon code for a discount on my Payhip store. It's also very good for people who want to sell online courses or memberships, which is not something I'm interested in doing. People who are interested in doing that usually need to employ an online sales platform such as Shopify or Payhip rather than trying to sell it on something like Amazon or eBay. There are a couple of things to note about trying direct sales. There is quite a bit of learning curve since you have to set up the store yourself and that involves a lot of clicking and uploading and so forth. You also need to learn about things about like Value Added Tax, shipping, file delivery services, etcetera. And if you are selling in the United States, you also have to be careful you comply with whatever these sales tax laws are for your jurisdiction or for where you're selling in the United States. Direct sales don't count towards ranking on other platforms, if that's something that's important to you, if you want your book to be a number one category bestseller on Amazon, direct sales will not help with that. It does take a bit of time to set up and maintain, and it also takes time for readers to get used to it and will not likely be a large portion of your sales, especially at first, since users tend to stick to the platform where they already have built up a library. This is one of the reasons why the Steam game platform is so dominant, because it's been around for a long time and a lot of the users have very big Steam libraries, so they're not super keen on jumping to a different distributor. Readers will need a carrot not a stick to get them to try a new platform, which is one of the reasons why I do those coupon codes all the time. So now to the actual nitty gritty of Payhip versus Shopify. We can sum it up quite neatly by saying it this way: Payhip is primarily designed for digital products. Shopify is primarily designed for physical products, but both are capable of selling either physical or digital products. Shopify allows for greater analytics and customization, while Payhip has a great basic service that keeps the costs low. So in terms of pricing, which costs more? Payhip pricing has three tiers. There is the free tier, which you pay obviously $0 per month and then Payhip takes 5% of each transaction. There is the middle tier, where you pay $29 USD per month and Payhip takes 2% of the transaction. Then there is the top, most expensive tier, which costs $99 USD per month and Payhip takes 0% of the transaction fee. Obviously, you would only consider that tier if you were making more than $1,200 USD a year in direct sales. Shopify does not have a free tier. At the basic tier, it costs $39 USD per month and Shopify takes 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction. At $105 USD per month, Shopify takes 2.6% + $0.30 USD per transaction. At $399 USD per month, Shopify takes 2.4% + $0.30 USD per transaction. We can see that with Shopify, you are already going to be paying more out the door. If you're just starting with direct sales, it might make more sense to start with the free tier on Payhip and then look at more costly options on either service as your needs grow and if you need the additional, more expensive features. So let's look at the pros on Payhip. The biggest pro on Payhip is low bar to entry in both terms of cost and in terms of technology needed to create a basic storefront. I've been doing direct sales on Payhip since 2021, and it's a very simple platform to use. There's a little bit of a learning curve, but it's not a huge one compared to something like WordPress or Adobe Photoshop. As we mentioned, the lowest tier plan is free but with a 5% cut of sales. The Pro plan, the top tier that we mentioned earlier, is $99 USD but then there are no transaction fees. It can handle UK/EU Value Added Tax automatically unlike Shopify because Payhip is based out of the UK, so that is built into their platform. Payhip also has some handy features that Shopify doesn't or that Shopify doesn't offer without like a plug-in app, that kind of thing that Shopify offers: settings for selling online courses, memberships, affiliate marketing, and a referral system. When I have had to contact Payhip about some sort of tech issue, I've always found their customer support to be very fast and responsive. As I mentioned before, I'm not being paid to say that. That is just my own personal experience. The pros for Shopify are basically for more advanced users, I think. $29 USD a month for the lowest pricing plan and then plus a cut and plus a transaction fee, that can add up if you have a lot of transactions. I think Shopify is really aimed more toward more advanced users than someone starting out with the basic ebook store on Payhip. However, to be fair, you do get a lot of stuff for that money. Shopify has an advanced website builder feature with more customization options on the pages. It has much more advanced SEO and analytics tools than anything Payhip offers. It is very useful if you're selling physical products. It also offers features to support delivery of physical items, such as customized shopping options based on location. More third-party apps or third-party payment options are available through Shopify (for example, Amazon Pay or Apple Pay). Shopify does offer a lot of customization and it does have a pretty good app store, where if there's a feature that Shopify doesn't have, there's a pretty good chance you can find one of the apps in their store that will sort of offer bolt on functionality for the new feature that you are looking for. So, in conclusion, if you want to do direct sales as an indie author, should you use Payhip or should you use Shopify? And as so often in these cases there is no right answer, there is merely the tool that is best suited for your needs as an indie author and a small businessperson. If you want to be able to heavily customize the site, Shopify offers more options for that than Payhip. If you are primarily selling digital products like I am, then Payhip offers better value, because you can just go with the free tier and still make more money than you would selling for the same price off Amazon. Since I don't really at this time have any interest in selling physical products online, Payhip it is. That said, if you do want to sell printed books or your own merchandise direct, then Shopify is the way to go. But if you don't have any of that kind of stuff and you still want to keep your shop costs low, then Payhip is probably the better option for you since you can use their free tier. So that is a look at Shopify versus Payhip and if you are thinking about direct selling as an indie author, I hope you have found that helpful. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a word of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to pull together all the research for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes of the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. SPRINGELVES The coupon code is valid through May 14th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT  

In this week's episode, I answer a reader's question about whether or not I will use KDP's new Virtual Voice program to create AI-narrated audiobooks. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: SHIELD OF THE KNIGHT (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGSHIELD The coupon code is valid through April 30th, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Update Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 196 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April the 12th, 2024 and today we are talking about whether or not I will use Amazon Virtual Voice to produce audiobooks. Before we get to our main topics, we will have Coupon of the Week, some writing updates, and then a few random questions from readers. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This episode will go live on Tax Day in the US, so let's have a discount on an audiobook. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills, at my Payhip store. That code is SPRINGSHIELD and that is SPRINGSHIELD again and that of course will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through April 30th, 2024, so you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I am very nearly almost done with Wizard-Thief. I'm hoping to finish up edits shortly and actually publish it on either April the 15th or April the 16th. So when this episode goes out, I may be publishing it literally as you are listening to this. This book, like Half-Elven Thief, will be available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. Next up, my next main project after Wizard-Thief is published, is going to be Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage series. It's not the end of the series; I'm planning that there's probably going to be about 15 books with four more after this one. But we are going to be blowing up a lot of the subplots in this book. So while this is not the end of the series, it will definitely have the feel like the end of a lot of plot arcs. I'm 22,000 words into it, and if all goes well, I'm hoping it will be out sometime toward the end of May and will be available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Ghosts in the Veils and if all goes well, that should be out sometime toward the end of May. So those are the updates on my current writing projects. 00:02:09 Reader Questions and Comments/Question of the Week Before we get to the Question of the Week, let's have a couple of unrelated questions from readers. Cameron wrote in to ask: I'm just interested in knowing how the name Calliande came about and does it have any meaning? I originally thought up the name Calliande because I wanted a unique and distinctive sounding name for the character, and so I was looking at various French and Welsh names that started with C and were about that length. I was rearranging the letters and swapping the vowels out and I came across that name and I thought, you know, that works, we're going with that. Amusingly, when I first wrote Frostborn, in my head it was pronounced Callian-DAY. But then when I did the first couple of Frostborn audiobooks from Podium way back at the end of the 2010s, Steven Crossley, the narrator pronounced it Calli-AND and ever since then, because that's where the direction he went, the official pronunciation has been Calliande and that's been the way it's been pronounced in all subsequent audio appearances of that character. Our next question is from Scott, who asks about a screenshot of the PC game Pillars of Eternity I posted on Facebook the other day. Scott says: that's on my Steam Wish List, but I haven't gotten to it yet. What do you think of it? I like it. I am enjoying it. I've had it since 2014, but I've decided the time has finally come to buckle down and finish it. If you played the original Baldur’s Gate back in the ‘90s or Knights of the Old Republic or Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment back in the ‘90s, then you will enjoy Pillars of Eternity. It's definitely worth playing. It's also an old enough game now that should work on most systems, and if you have Xbox Game Pass, the game’s owned by Microsoft now, so you have Xbox Game Pass so you can play it as part of your subscription on your Xbox. Now it's time for Question of the Week, which we ask to have interesting discussions and maybe find out some good suggestions for things we might not have thought of otherwise. And so this week's question: if you listen to podcasts, what podcasts do you listen to most frequently? No wrong answers, obviously. MacKenzie says I have four podcasts on consistent subscription: The Art of Manliness, The Black Pants Legion, A Delta Green actual play podcast (content warning for very dark humor), and of course The Pulp Writer Show. Thanks, MacKenzie. Maaike says: currently just one, Kick in the Creatives posted by Sarah Busby and Tara Roskell. Through them I discovered a few more, but I haven't really found the time to really listen to them just yet. I don't know whether I can write or not, but I do know I can draw and paint, so that's what I'm focusing on. Thinking of doing NaNoWriMo though to see how my writing is. It's definitely worth trying NaNoWriMo just for once for the experience so you can see how you enjoy it or not. Michael says only two regularly, The Pulp Writer Show (thanks, Michael!) and the Legend of the Bones, which is an epic, gritty D&D solo play narrative where the dice rule. Perry says The Pulp Writer Show (not sure if you've heard of it) and The Self-Publishing Show (currently on episode 33 of 400 plus). Anne Marie says Cabinet of Curiosities by Aaron Mahnke. Jesse says: mostly Critical Role. Justin says: I didn't start listening to podcasts until I went full time with my current job in 2021. I listen to a bunch now, but most of my regular listens are The Glass Cannon Network, What Culture Wrestling, What Culture Gaming, and Adeptus Ridiculous. It's interesting how I actually haven't heard of most of these podcasts, which I guess goes to show how diverse and widespread the podcast ecosystem is, where if you have a podcast that can be very famous in a specific niche, it might be like THE podcast in that niche, but anyone who's not familiar with that particular subject of interest may have never heard of the podcast. For myself, I did not really start listening to podcasts until 2019, which is when I started listening to some of the self-publishing ones. In the past few years. I have also discovered retro video game podcasts. In that time, I've mostly listened to The Sell More Books Show and the Remember The Game podcast about retro video games, which is quite funny (but it does have some foul language, so if you check that out, be aware of it). 00:06:40 Main Topic: Amazon Virtual Voice Audiobooks Now on to our main topic of the week: Amazon Virtual Voice audiobooks. This was prompted by a question from Reader PML, who wrote in to ask: several of my favorite authors have opted to use AI Virtual Voice to release some of their older titles in audio format. I emailed you a while back hoping for more audio releases for Caina and Nadia. You indicated that audio publishing is expensive and you preferred to release the titles that were not short in length. I totally understand, but I wondered if you have considered releasing your back titles using Virtual Voice. The performance is not bad and I would really enjoy listening to all the books featuring Caina and Nadia. I don't know what the pricing scale is, but it's probably quite a bit less than a live reader. So thank you, PML for that question and for listening to all those audiobooks. If you are not familiar with the term, Virtual Voice is Amazon's new program for creating AI narrated audiobooks. Will I be using Virtual Voice to turn some of my older titles to audiobooks? No. Why? So there's three levels to my answer here. One, is it ethical to use AI for audiobook narration? Two, is AI narration good enough for audiobook narration? Three, does this help visually impaired listeners? I should mention that I have in fact experimented quite a bit with AI narrated audiobooks. Part of the reason I did this was because I wanted to understand the technology so I had an informed opinion about it. Google Play beat Amazon to the punch about two years ago, and I experimented with turning the Silent Order series into audiobooks with their technology, since I don't think the Silent Order series sells well enough to support audiobooks. After that experiment, I didn't think the AI generated audiobooks were good enough to sell in good conscience and just because you're selling something doesn't mean anyone will buy it. More on that to come. So instead, I put those AI narrated audiobooks on YouTube for free. That said, I did turn on AdSense for the audiobooks, so I made a satisfactory, if small bit of money from YouTube ads in 2023. Overall, the response from people who listen to those audiobooks seemed to be that they loved the story (thanks, everyone!), but they hated the artificial voice. Like if they had actually paid for it instead of listening to it for free on YouTube, I could just imagine the complaints. I think a lot of the authors who create Virtual Voice audiobooks and audiobooks using similar products from Google Play or other companies will be disappointed by the response they get for those audiobooks. Like I've said before, audiobooks are basically self-publishing on hard mode. But if you're coming to the market with an AI generated audiobook, it will be even harder to sell than one voiced by a human who knows what he or she is doing. So with that sort of background in mind, let's go on to the details for the answer to my question. One: is it ethical to use AI for audiobook narration? Ethics in AI is a bottomless quagmire of an Internet discussion. Overall, in my personal opinion, I think AI technology creates vastly more problems than it solves and is really nothing more than a very fancy autocomplete. I also suspect there's a bit of a speculative bubble to AI technology like there was with cryptocurrency and NFTs. For a while, all the Galaxy Brain influencer people thought crypto and NFTs were the future, and then the bubble burst and a significant portion of everything connected to crypto and NFTs turned out to be a big old scam and all the Galaxy Brains migrated over to touting AI. I suspect a lot of the AI technology rushed out now has the same speculative bubble effect and when the bubble bursts, some companies are going to be out billions since they spent all that money building infinite crap generators. A lot of people are rushing to shove AI into stuff because it's trendy and not because it's useful, like how (this is a 100% true story), the Washington State Lottery decided for whatever reason to put an AI image generator on its site, which it had to pull down hastily when that image generator started creating deepfake nude images of its users. It is also amusing how some of the really pro-AI Galaxy Brains like to say that the US needs to develop AI or else the Chinese will get it first, as if having an infinite crap generator to make deepfake nudes will somehow determine geopolitical dominance in the 21st century. But all that said, I don't think AI is going to go away. The US courts seem (so far at least) consistent in their opinion that AI is in plagiarism but isn't copyrightable, and there's a wide range of useful activity in the not copyrightable but not plagiarism space. This might change if something gets all the way up to the Supreme Court or if Congress passes some legislation on that or the EU  puts out new regulations that the companies have to follow because the EU is such a big part of their market. But for now, that seems to be the position. AI can do useful things that crypto and NFTs can't. Like for example, suppose you're applying to 40 different jobs and you can use ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot to crank out 40 different customized cover letters for your job applications. Given how messed up the job market is at the moment, I could hardly blame someone for doing that. And you see examples of people using generative AI not to create artwork, but to handle data processing type chores (like the cover letters) in clever ways that don't seem to cross any moral or ethical boundaries. So I suspect everyone will have to examine their own consciences and decide where their own line is for generative AI. For me, I decided I'm not going to sell anything that I didn't make myself, or in the case of an audiobook, was made by a human I hired. If I'm selling something, it was 100% written by Jonathan Moeller or 100% narrated by a human I hired, and the cover image doesn't include any AI generated art elements. This is also true of books and stories I give away for free, like my permafree series starters. That's where I've decided my line is going to be with AI usage. I have used AI images for Facebook ads, since ads are low resolution anyway and you often have to change out the image every week or so. Ad images are essentially disposable, and I've heard people say AI art is also disposable, so why not use the disposable products of AI art for ad images? Number two, is AI narration good enough for audiobook narration? All of my criticisms of AI aside, AI voice or Virtual Voice isn't a new technology. It's just improved text to speech synthesis technology and text to speech has been around since the late 1960s. The AI part just makes the synthetic voice sound closer to an actual human voice than the more obviously artificial tones of older technology. It's also pretty good at imitating the real human voice by now, which is why you can go on YouTube and see comedy videos of President Biden trying to make his way through Skyrim or something. Is this AI narration good enough to support creating a paid audiobook? Well, kind of, sorta. It's good enough now that it creates a near perfect imitation of a human voice. The trouble is that the voice is so perfect that it triggers the uncanny valley effect, which is when you encounter something that almost seems human but isn't. It's also really bad at emotion. The best narrators make it sound like they're telling a story, and that means varying the emotion of the voice at appropriate times, even if you're not trying to create a distinctive voice for each character. Text to speech simply isn't very good at that. That's part of the reason I won't use Virtual Voice. I don't feel the end product is of high enough quality to sell. Give it away for free on YouTube? Sure. But sell? Definitely not. It would be good enough for very dry nonfiction things like legal casebooks, geological and oil surveys, that kind of thing. A nonfiction book that required varied emotion like a war memoir, for instance or comedic travelogue would not work at all well with AI narration. And finally, number three: does this help visually impaired listeners? While I don't want to use AI nourish and create paid audiobooks, I would like to see the technology become more ubiquitous and more integrated with ereader apps and operating systems. I think the mission of technology is to help us overcome or ameliorate the inherent frailties of the human condition. That is the best and most ethical use of technology. So I would like to see AI narration eventually become just a button in the ereader app for visually impaired listeners. Like you hit the read aloud button and then the computer reads to you in a voice of your choosing. You'll still have the option to buy a human narrated audiobook if available, but the option to have the device read to you would be there if you want or need to use it. We're already kind of there, technology-wise. All the major operating systems for computer and mobile have read aloud functions. It's just not implemented consistently across the platform and the voices aren't always very good. I won't use Virtual Voice or AI narration to create any audiobooks for sale. Unless something drastically changes in the field, I don't think I'm going to change my mind on that, though of course anything is possible. In the spirit of full disclosure, as of right now (as of this recording on April 12th 2024), I have agreements with four different narrators to produce four different audiobooks, so I think I am literally putting my money where my mouth is. 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 back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at the pros and cons of some of the most popular writing software, and a share a preview of the new HALF-ELVEN THIEF audiobook narrated by Leanne Woodward. I'm hoping to start on SHIELD OF DARKNESS soon, so let's look back at some of the DRAGONSKULL audiobooks! This coupon code will get you 25% off the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: SPRINGSQUIRE The coupon code is valid through April 23rd, 2024. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we've got you covered! Transcript   00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 195 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is April 5th, 2024 and today we are talking about the pros and cons of different types of writing software. We also have an update on my current writing projects and as usual, Question of the Week. Before we get into that, let's do Coupon of the Week. For this week's coupon, I'm hoping to start on Shield of Darkness soon. So let's look back at some of the Dragonskull audiobooks. The following coupon code will get you 25% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire at my Payhip store and that is SPRINGSQUIRE. Again that is SPRINGSQUIRE and that will be in the show notes. This coupon code will get you 25% off Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. This coupon code will be valid through April the 23rd, 2024. If you need a new audiobook for spring, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing projects. The rough draft of Wizard Thief is done. It came to about 74,000 words, which means it is about 15,000 words longer than the first book. I suspect no one will complain. I am now writing Thief’s Favor, an ebook short story set in the world of Wizard-Thief. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of Thief’s Favor when Wizard-Thief comes out, hopefully before April is over. I am also 19,000 words into Cloak of Titans and after Wizard-Thief is published that will be my main project and then once Cloak of Titans is done, it'll be back to Ridmark and Andomhaim with Shield of Darkness. In audiobook news, the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief is done, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward. You can get it at all the usual audio bookstores, Audible, and all the others except for Google Play. For some reason, they seem to be having slow uptake on audiobooks for the last couple of weeks, and hopefully that should be cleared up soon. Otherwise, you can get Half-Elven Thief, as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward at all the usual audiobook stores, and we will include a sample of the audiobook at the end of this podcast episode. So hang around for that. 00:02:13 Question of the Week Now, for this week's question of the week, which we do have interesting discussions on my blog and Facebook page. This week's question of the week was: what was the first musical album you ever purchased with your own money? No wrong answers, obviously. The idea for this week's question arrived because over Easter weekend I helped someone set up a device for ripping LP records to MP3. This was an interesting experience because it was in fact the first time I had ever attempted to use an LP record in any form, since by the time I became interested in purchasing music (more on that at the end of the segment), the LP era was well and truly over. Or was it? I thought it was amusing that vinyl outsold CDs in 2023 because as I learned firsthand, when I was setting up this LP ripper, vinyl is so much more cumbersome and fragile than either CD or streaming. Anyway, we asked people what their first album they purchased with their own money was and here are some of the answers. Malcolm says War of the Worlds LP vinyl. Justin says Rush, A Farewell to Kings on cassette tape. In the mid ‘90s, my daughters found my box of cassettes, a legacy of my military days, and it immediately became theirs. ABM says my first album (well in this case, CD) was Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt. Chris says Grand Funk Railroad, Survival. I’m that old, lol. Bonnie says Chicago Transit Authority and K-TEL Hits of the Month. Had “Cover of The Rolling Stone” on it. Brad says Jaws 1975 and that set me on the path of being a lifelong fan and rabid collector of film music. Venus says: my last day of 8th grade, I bought Annihilator-Alice in Hell and Metal Church-Blessing in Disguise. Same day, same store, same transaction. Cheryl says my very first purchase at the age of 14 back in the ‘60s was an album by the Walker Brothers from a secondhand shop. The first new album was Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stones, 1971. Tom says the Trainspotting soundtrack. Pamela says the Letterman 1968 Going Out of my Head. Michael says the soundtrack for Mad Max-Beyond Thunderdome, a musical feast of Jean Michel Jarre crossed with Tina Turner. On cassette tape, naturally. Scott says Guns and Roses, Appetite for Destruction. Brandy says Sisters of Mercy, Vision Thing. Rhion says I grew up in a college town and by age 4 I had a full, green milk of LPs from the discount bin. By five, I had four. I had my own personal collection and my own stereo because my uncle would go to dorm dumpsters at the end of the semester to grab stereos, et cetera, to refurbish. My first purchase was Oingo Boingo's Only a Lad and my second was Men at Work. They were $0.75 each. I remember because it was $0.25 over my budget. I had to ask for a quarter from my uncle. And finally, John says Leonard Nimoy Sings at a garage sale for twenty-five cents. It had The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins on it. Oh dear. If you have never seen The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, which is a song about Bilbo Baggins sung by Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame, once you've finished listening to this podcast episode, go to YouTube, search for The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins and watch the music video of Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. It is hilarious. Thanks to everyone for their comments for Question of the Week. For myself, my answer for what the first musical album I ever purchased was a bit odd because it was, I suspect it was later than most of the people who mentioned this and the reason for that is I have a very odd relationship with popular music because for some reason I almost always have a hard time understanding song lyrics. Song lyrics usually sound like either monotonous droning or warbling to my ear. I don't know why. My brain just works that way. One of the few exceptions is Johnny Cash, who I can usually understand on the first try without any difficulty. Because of that, I've never really connected with most popular music, whether way back when I was a teenager or in the modern age. To this day, I still gravitate towards the soundtracks of computer games and movies that I like. So the first soundtrack I deliberately purchased with my own money was part of a computer game collection, specifically, the Quest for Glory collection, which came out in 1997 and that came with a CD of Quest for the Glory 5: Dragon Fire soundtrack, which I wanted. I already had all the Quest for Glory games on CD or in some cases floppy disk, but I bought that collection just so I could have the soundtrack CD. 27 years later, I still have it and I listened to that soundtrack while working on the final scenes of Wizard-Thief. 00:07:12 Main Topic: Pros and Cons of Writing Software Now let's venture into our main topic of the week, the pros and cons of the best writing software. I got thinking about this because a few years ago I was at the gym. Usually when I'm at the gym, I go on the treadmill and I bring a tablet with me with an ebook and whether I'm running or walking or whatever, I will read on the treadmill. While I was doing this, an elderly gentleman came up next to me on the next treadmill and asked if I knew of any word processing programs that would work on an Android tablet. Boy, did I have answers for him. I started to describe the various pros and cons of different writing software, and he very quickly got bored, made a polite excuse, and wandered away. However, this is a writing podcast with people who are interested in the business of writing, and so I thought it would be a good topic for this week's show because if you ever want your book to be read by other people, if you're not just, you know, handwriting it in a journal for your own emotional satisfaction, then at some point you will probably have to convert your book to a digital file and you will need a software program to do that, and if you're really serious about writing, you will probably need a word processor of some kind or a similar program. So the first one we're going to look at is one that many indie and traditional writers swear by. It's called Scrivener, and it is a program specifically designed for writing books or novels. The pros: it is designed specifically for writing. It has features for outlining, breaking documents into chapters, and tracking writing goals, etc. It has a one-time cost of $60.00 US instead of a subscription, which is increasingly rare nowadays since everything seems to require a subscription instead of a one-time price. And as an added bonus, they offer a free trial so you can try it out and see if it is to your liking. They offer a student discount, where if you buy it with a valid.edu address, you should be able to get a discount. So now here are the cons. The learning curve on Scrivener is pretty high. For basic writing, for something like Microsoft Word, you just open up Word to a blank document, start typing, and if you just want to do that, then the program will definitely meet your need. Scrivener is a bit harder to learn and you would probably benefit from watching a few tutorial videos on how to use it beforehand. I personally do not use Scrivener, though I don't object to it obviously because I know many indies and tradpub writers who know what they're doing swear by it, but for me it is kind of overkill and I don't use it. If you are thinking about Scrivener, it's probably good to ask yourself, will you actually use the extra features? Because my own writing process is pretty simple. I just type out an outline in one Word document, and then I type out the rough draft in a different Word document, and I don't need fancy outlining software or something like that for my process. That's not to say you can't use fancy outlining software, or that the software isn't good. You might remember last year on podcast I had an interview with Troy Lambert of Plottr, which is a very excellent program designed to help you outline your novel but if that's not something you're interested in doing, then Scrivener will probably be overkill for you. Scribner is probably best for people who take extensive notes on their work, especially if they're trying to organize research based on the chapters where it's needed. It may be best for the kind of people who enjoy curating Notion and Trello accounts and they're able to think about their book in a visual way. It is also good for people who extensively revise blocks of text within a chapter or move chapters around a lot. If that sounds like your writing process, and it sounds like something would be good for you, then it is definitely worth giving the free trial of Scrivener a try. Now let's move on to a more general word processing program and one that probably many people out there are familiar with: Google Docs. That is part of the Google suite of office software. You can do PowerPoint-esque presentations, spreadsheets, and documents in Google Docs. The biggest pro of Google Docs is that it's free. All you need to do is sign up for a free Google account and then you have free access to Google Docs and can start typing. It is very easy to use between multiple devices since it runs primarily in a web browser. If you are using one computer, you can close out and open a web browser on a different computer and use it that way. There are dedicated apps for both Android and iOS devices. It's very easy to share between multiple people and accounts and collaborate in real time, and this is honestly its biggest advantage over Microsoft Office besides the cost. Autosave also works extremely well. However, like everything else in life, there are cons. One of the cons of Google Docs is that it gets really slow with large files. I did try to write a book in Google Docs once and I tried a couple of short stories. The short stories are fine. If you try to write a novel in Google Docs, I found that starts to get really slow after about the 25,000 word mark or so. For obvious reasons, since Google Docs is an online service, it is very hard to use without an Internet connection. Perhaps the most important con of all is to be sure to back up to an additional location. If you lose access to your Google account for whatever reason, that means you lose access to all your files, including the book you were working on in Google Docs. So if you're using Google Docs, it's a good idea, it's in fact an excellent and imperative idea, to download your document every so often and save it in another location. Now let's move on to probably the most common word processing software on the planet as of this recording, Microsoft Word. Full disclosure, that is what I use most of the time. In fact, my podcast notes are in a Microsoft Word document. The pros are that you've probably already heard of it and many people are familiar with this product through work or school. If you've had an office job, you've probably used Microsoft Word at some point. And if you have gone through the modern educational system, there's a very good chance that you used Microsoft Word or Google Docs in school. Another advantage is that it's very easy to find online tutorials from Microsoft Office products. Another advantage is that Word is essentially the industry standard for publishing, which makes it a lot easier to share with the editors, translators, beta readers, etcetera. There are a couple of cons, though. Microsoft, like many other software companies, has been switching heavily to the subscription model, so I believe they still sell individual licenses for Office where it's a one-time fee, but then it's tied to a specific computer forever. If you want to really use Office, you have to get a Microsoft 365 subscription, which is often kind of a bummer if you are on a limited budget, which is why it's good there are free options like Google Docs available. Another con of Microsoft Word is that the program is, at this point, 41 years old. The first version of Word was released in 1983. Obviously, it has changed a great deal since then but feature after feature has been built up and piled onto Word to the point where in all honesty (this is as someone who uses Microsoft Word pretty much every single day for the last 15 years), it has a monstrous maze of overlapping and interlocking features. There's a common meme about how if you try to move a bullet point half an inch in Word, you'll start hearing sirens and explosions outside and your entire document will be messed up. This is not far from the truth. For just straight typing, Word is fine, but for more elaborate stuff it quickly becomes a big headache. Another con is that the real time collaboration features like Google Docs has are definitely lacking, and you really can't do that well with Word. If that's not something you do, it's not something you need to worry about but if you do a lot of collaboration, that is something to keep in mind. Again, in full disclosure, I could sit here for the next two hours and talk about the various bad experiences I've had with Microsoft Word, but the fact of the matter is, I've written 150 novels and I've written most of them in Microsoft Word. So it is right now the program I use to write. So on to the next writing suite of software. I wrote most of my books in Microsoft Word, but the ones I haven't written in Word I've written in LibreOffice, which is a free office suite that you can download for free. It doesn't require an Internet connection once it's downloaded. So let's go to the pros. It's free and open source. The interface kind of sort of looks like Microsoft Word, so if you are familiar with Word, the learning curve is not terribly steep. Some think that LibreOffice is faster than Word. Depending on how your system is configured, LibreOffice can be quite a bit faster than Word, having used both. LibreOffice is probably the best for privacy advocates, especially for those who are concerned about Microsoft and Google storing their work in their cloud services and possibly training various AIs on it. For myself, that's not something I worry about a great deal, because all my stuff has been pirated extensively for years, and as we all know, most of the big AIs out now were trained on pirated data, which they're getting sued about now. From my point of view, the horse is already out in the out of the barn for this, so there's no point in worrying about it. LibreOffice also has the advantage of being interoperable with most file formats. By default, it saves in what's called the open document format, but it is mostly cross compatible with the Microsoft Office formats. The cons aren't quite as many as Google Drive in my opinion, because it doesn't have to be online. Even though the user interface is very similar to Word, it's not identical and some people don't care for it. LibreOffice also has no built-in cloud storage functionality like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, so if you need to store your documents in the cloud somewhere for backup, you have to piece it together with another storage option. Though this is the other side of one of the pros, because LibreOffice does not require an Internet connection in order to work once you have it downloaded. So those are the pros and cons of some different writing software. Which one you pick is up to you and your particular writing needs. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A quick word of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me pull together the research for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on the official website at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week. And now let's close out this week's episode with a preview of Half-Elven Thief, as narrated by Leanne Woodward.

In this week's episode, we take a look at eight pieces of writing advice from famous writers. I also discuss why I decided to change the name of my SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE series to STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE. To celebrate the release of GHOST IN THE VEILS, let's get caught up with some of Caina's older adventures in the GHOST NIGHT series. This coupon code will get you 25% off any of the GHOST NIGHT ebooks at my Payhip store: SPRINGNIGHT The coupon is valid through April 16th, 2024. So if you're looking for some spring reading, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 194 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 28th, 2024 and today we are talking about eight pieces of writing advice from famous writers and what I think of those pieces of writing advice. So it should be an interesting show. Before we get to our other topics, let's have Coupon of the Week. To celebrate the release of Ghost in the Veils, let's get caught up with some of Caina's older adventures in the Ghost Night series. This coupon code will get you 25% off any of the Ghost Night ebooks at my Payhip Store:  SPRINGNIGHT and that is SPRINGNIGHT. And of course that will be in the show notes, along the link to the Ghost Night ebooks on my Payhip store. This coupon code is valid through April 16th, 2024, so if you're looking for some spring reading, we have got you covered. Let's have an update on my current writing projects. As we mentioned with the Coupon of the Week, Ghost in the Veils is done, it is out, and selling briskly. Thank you for that, everyone. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. The reviews so far have been good, and it's been selling briskly. So thank you everyone for that. Now that that is done, my next main project will be Wizard-Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and I am in fact almost done with that. I'm on Chapter 11 of 12 though it might turn out to be 14 chapters in the edit. I would in fact be finishing it tomorrow, but I am taking the weekend off for Easter so hopefully I will get the rough draft wrapped up in the first week of April and the book out and available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited before the end of April. After Wizard-Thief is out, my next two main projects will be Cloak of Titans (I am 17,000 words into that) and then Shield of Darkness, the sequel to of the sequel to Shield of Storms from earlier in the year. In audiobook news, the Half-Elven Thief audiobook is done and I'm pleased to report it was narrated excellently by Leanne Woodward (the first book she has narrated for me). That should be available in the next couple of weeks at all the audiobook stores. Recording will start in a few weeks for the audiobook version of Ghost in the Veils, and that will also be excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. 00:02:20 Question of the Week/Title Change to the Sevenfold Sword Online Series Before we get to our main topic, we will do Question the Week and then an update on my books formerly known as Sevenfold Sword Online. Our Question of the Week was: what is your all-time favorite video game, like the one you keep coming to back play at to play again and again across decades? No wrong answers obviously and we had some good comments on this. Todd said, well, this is an easy one. Diablo and then Lands of Lore. Patrick Stewart really did give the King Richard character gravitas. Sam says Final Fantasy 14, an MMO with an amazing story and an amazing community. Justin says World of Warcraft, though I'm not very good at anything but the Auction House and Conquest of the New World, a DOS turn based strategy game I've played for 30 years now. For myself, I think I might be one of the few people who have played computer games in my generation who never played World of Warcraft. I spent a lot of time supporting it and fixing computers that broke when they tried to run World of Warcraft, but I never actually have played it. Pamela says, I play Lord of the Rings Online every day with my husband. I occasionally go back to Age of Empires. Ross Logan says Morrowind, though TIE Fighter is pretty solid also. For myself, I have played both TIE Fighter and Morrowind and thought they were both great, great games. Jay says XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. John says, played the old Wizardry series in the early ‘80s fanatically. I've played Eve Online since 2006, but lately I just refuel alliance stations. Also used to play a lot of the real time strategy Warcraft and StarCraft games, Age of Empires, Homeward, and also the first Diablo. Becca says the Mass Effect trilogy for me. Michael says, I spent a lot of hours on Skyrim, played it on PS3, 4, and 5, but spent even more time on Final Fantasy 14. They keep adding more DLCs with the newest one and the whole new storyline coming at the end of June. Ultimately, the whole Final Fantasy franchise has been my favorite ever since about 1990. I can relate with Michael there because I have played Skyrim on PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, but I've only actually beaten it on Switch and Xbox, never on PC. Brandy says all the Diablo games I don't have the hand eye coordination or computer to play much these days. My partner is much more game-oriented, from tabletop to 40K to Fallout, and Franken Fallout. I read a lot, which I suppose works out. As a writer, I support that! Jason says Dragon Quest 9 on 3DS is my ultimate going back to game. I'm waiting for port remaster, aiming to be able to play it somewhere than other on that tiny 3DS screen. Justin says Elden Ring. Before Elden Ring came out, it was probably Diablo 2. Yogi says Skyrim, can't get enough, want a new version come out. Had to get into New World to satisfy that need. Mike says I have not played as much over the last few years, but I enjoyed the Diablo series. A different Michael says, some epic answers here already. Morrowind is my all-time favorite, but not because I keep going back to it. In fact, the opposite. The game moved and impressed me so much that I've never played it again as to not dim the memory with repetition. Also, the old Infocom text adventures, Zork III in particular. For games I keep going back to, probably Master of Magic, Medieval 2: Total War, and Lord of the Rings Online. Rhion says, Master of Magic. I still have my DOS diskettes for it! For myself, I think it comes down to a toss-up between two titles. The oldest one is Master of Magic from 1994, though I think the remake from 2022 is a worthy successor. Admittedly, the 2022 remake took a bunch of patches to get there, but in the original form from 1994, the game also required many patches, so it's just continuing the legacy of the original game. The newer one is Skyrim, which as I mentioned, I've been playing on and off since 2011 and even though I finally beat the main campaign during COVID in 2020, I still keep coming back to the game. Though if we are measuring by the length of time I've been coming back to the game, Master of Magic wins since I first played that in 1994 and Skyrim was first in 2011. A semi-important announcement: I have decided to rename the Sevenfold Sword Online series to the Stealth and Spells Online series. The motivation for this decision came from the many, many, many emails I have received asking where Sevenfold Sword Online fit in between Dragontiarna, or Sevenfold Sword, or if the Calliande Arban NPC in the books will turn out to be the real Calliande Arban from Frostborn. And the answer to all these questions is no, of course not. Sevenfold Sword Online is something totally different than the Frostborn epic fantasy series. It's a LitRPG series with many science fiction elements. The premise is that 700 years in the future, an evil corporation made a virtual reality MMORPG game based on my Frostborn books and a former developer sets out to expose the evil corporation from within by playing the game. It's not part of Frostborn or the other Andomhaim series, but all this confusion is not the reader's fault. It's my fault. By naming it Sevenfold Sword Online, I think I set the table wrong, so to speak. What do I mean by setting the table wrong? Imagine that you sit down to a meal. The tablecloth is the red and white pattern traditionally associated with Italian restaurants. On the table you see a shaker of garlic salt and another of Parmesan cheese. Next to your plate is a pizza cutter, and in front of it is a basket of garlic breadsticks. Your beverage is in one of those red plastic cups that Pizza Hut had back in the ‘90s. Naturally, you're expecting the waiter to bring out a pizza. Instead, the waiter brings out a plate with carne asada tacos and lime and jalapeno tortilla chips. You're going to be very confused. Why is there a pizza cutter next to your plate if you're having tacos? I mean, they could potentially be the best tacos in the history of Mexican cuisine, but it's still weird because you sat down and everything indicated that you were about to get a pizza. By naming the LitRPG series Sevenfold Sword Online, I think I set the table wrong and created incorrect expectations that it was actually part of the main Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, and the Shield War series. It probably also kneecapped sales for the series, since people assumed it was part of Sevenfold Sword. Therefore, Sevenfold Sword Online has been renamed to the Stealth and Spells Online series. Hopefully this will be a better indicator of what kind of book it really is. Now after talking about all of that, I really want some tacos. 00:08:58 Main Topic: Eight Pieces of Advice from Famous Authors So let's look at eight piece of advice from famous authors and see what I think about them and if I agree with them or not. The first one is from Robert Cormier, who says “the beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” I would definitely agree with that. For instance, when I published Ghost in the Veils, I forgot that in the first book I said that Calliope’s eyes were green and in the second book her eyes were suddenly dark and reader Juanna pointed that out. So I made sure to go back and quickly change the color of Calliope’s eyes to the correct green color in Ghost in the Veils. But you know, a little annoying to make that mistake. It's not a big deal, whereas if you make a mistake in brain surgery, that is pretty much a one and done situation. Our second piece of writing advice is from George Orwell, who of course wrote 1984 and Animal Farm and other classics of dystopian fiction. He says, “writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” I think that applies more to authors who are traditionally published than indies, because I've never found writing a book to be objectively painful. It helps to have perspective. I mean, I used to spend eight hours a day unloading trucks. That got painful, especially when it happened to be 100° out in the summer. By contrast, when I write a book, I'm sitting in my office chair pressing buttons on a keyboard. That is objectively less painful, and I suppose the like the mistake I mentioned earlier about Calliope’s eye color would have been more painful if it was traditionally published and I couldn't just change it myself as opposed to if it was traditionally published and then, well, that's it. It's going to be that way forever now. So I think that writing in general is less painful for indies than it is for the traditionally published. Our third piece of writing advice is from Margaret Atwood. She says, “If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.” That is also very true. As we mentioned earlier, you definitely don't have to worry about your rough draft being perfect. You just got to get it on the page and then I would also suggest you don't have to worry about your final draft being perfect. You have to worry about being good enough and get it to the point where it is good enough because perfection does not exist in this world. Our fourth piece of advice comes from Stephen King, who says, “Good fiction almost always starts with the story and progresses to theme. It almost never starts with the theme and progresses to story.” If you swap out the word story for conflict, I definitely agree with that because I know some writers tend to worry a great deal about what is my book going to be about when I think instead they should be worrying about what's the conflict in my book going to be and how is that conflict get resolved? Our fifth piece of radio advice is from Elmore Leonard. He says, “Cut all the parts people will skip.” I agree with that very much. The tricky part is learning what the parts that people skip are going to be. So overall you want your book to be not boring and you want to cut out as many of the boring parts as is physically possible to do so. Our six piece of advice is from Neil Gaiman, who says simply, “Finish things.” That is very good advice because I've noticed that a trouble many new and starting out face is actually finishing the books and I often say that when a new writer says, do I need to be working on, you know, my website or my mailing list or my social media or all that? I say no, the best thing to learn how to do is to finish a book, because that is a skill that will serve you well for the entirety of your writing career. If you can't finish the book, then there's no point in having the social media and the website and the mailing list and all that. So learning to finish things is the vital skill for any writer. Our seventh piece of writing advice is from Harper Lee, who said, “I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent, he would be wise to develop a thick hide.” There is also good advice, especially considering she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, which when it came out engendered a fair bit of unfair criticism for her. It is definitely important to have a thick hide when you are a writer. We've all seen the news reports of a writer who gets a bad review on Goodreads and flips out and melts down on Twitter. Or, in the worst cases, drives across the country to confront the reviewer in person. That is always a bad idea, do not do that. The trick to deal with any kind of criticism, especially online criticism, is to just not respond to it. The Internet criticism cycle tends to have a very short attention span, and so if you just wait it out, eventually some other bright shiny object will capture people's attention and that will be that. So the best way to cultivate a thick hide in the in the era of the Internet and Twitter and social media and all that is to learn to not to respond to things. Our eighth and final piece of advice comes from Kurt Vonnegut, who says, “No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they are made of.” That ties in with our earlier talk about conflict and that is how you indeed see what your characters are made of and how you find the bones of your story. What is the conflict and how will the conflict test and put the characters to the trial and how will the characters grow, develop, and change as a result of the trial to which they have been subjected? If you want your characters to have a happy ending, they have to suffer for it first. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to pull together the quotes for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, many with transcripts. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at what makes a book's ending disappointing or unsatisfying, and offer tips and tricks on how to avoid that. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE WINDS as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE WINDS for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SPRINGWINDS The coupon code is valid through April 12th, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, you can listen to the epic conclusion of the GHOST EXILE series! TRANSCRIPT Spoiler Note: Please skip 11:50-12:53 if you would like to avoid a summary of the ending of the TV series Breaking Bad.   00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 193 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 22nd, 2024 and today we are talking about how to avoid unsatisfying endings, specifically how to avoid unsatisfying endings while writing your novel. Before we get into all that, we will first have Coupon on the Week and some writing progress updates and then our Question of the Week. So first up, Coupon on the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Winds, as excellently narrated by House McCarthy. That is the epic conclusion to the Ghost Exile series. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Winds for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SPRINGWINDS and that is SPRINGWINDS and of course the coupon code will be in the show notes as always. This coupon code is valid through April 12th, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, you can listen to the epic conclusion of the Ghost Exile series. Now, for an update on current writing projects. I am very pleased to report that as of this recording, Ghost in the Veils, my 150th novel, is now complete. By the time the show goes live, you should be able to get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Payhip. So I'm very pleased that's done, and that's out, and I hope you all enjoyed the book. Next up, now that Ghost in the Veils is done, my main project will be Wizard Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series. I am about 42,000 words into that, so about halfway through and if all goes well, I hope that will come out towards the end of April. I am also 14,000 words into Cloak of Titans and that will be my main project once Wizard Thief is finished. In audiobook news, we're currently proofing the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief. That will be narrated by Leanne Woodward and if all goes well, that should be out sometime in April. I'm looking forward to sharing that with you all. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:02:08: Question of the Week Let's go into our Question of the Week. This week's question is what apps and services do you use to listen to music? No wrong answers. Justin says: on my PC, I'll generally use YouTube. The Brave browser removes the ads so I don't have to listen to them. For when I’m away from my PC, I stuffed 128 GB chip in my phone and copied my MP3 files over to it. The basic Android music app handles the music, no problem. When driving, I'll sync the stereo to the phone with Bluetooth. It will play music, navigate, and do hands free calling. I tried connecting to it directly but it seems I can either connect the sound or the charger. Doing both makes for horrible static. Joaquim says: I like to buy MP3 files or CDs. When buying CDs, I try to buy AudioRip CDs on Amazon, else I rip them myself. All MP3 files are on a USB stick which I use in the car audio. At home, I use my laptop with an external Sound Blaster G6 and Sennheiser headphones. I use VLC media player on the laptop. My next comment is from Barbara, who says: Years ago, I purchased the Microsoft Zune because after my research, I determined I got more bang for my buck with it than the Apple product. I still have the Zune, which I haven't used in a while. I also have the app on my computer and that's what I use listen to my music. Unfortunately, I'll be replacing this 10 year old computer at some point and may have to find a different program. That's interesting because about 14/15 years, I used the Zune Desktop Music player as my preferred music player on my PC because I thought it worked better and was faster than any of the alternatives. But I have not thought about that in years, to be honest. Our next comment is from Randy who says: iPhone, iPad, Intel Mac Book Pro, and an Apple Music family subscription. I also have a two terabyte library of purchased music that I keep on a couple of different portable drives, backups because I should think about rewriting my vinyl collection down to MP3 again. I personally thought it was very impressive. Two terabytes because my music library is a mere 59 gigabytes by comparison. Juana says Pandora and Amazon Music. Michael says: I stream from YouTube Music, sadly. Oh well, good to support small independent companies. ( Original response had emojis here to indicate the last sentence was a joke/tongue in cheek). Brandy says: I listen to Pandora or iHeart radio stations from places where I've lived. It probably dates me, but I like either music with limited to no commercials but similar genre groups (and I refuse to give money to Apple if I can help it) or just a straight radio station. Both I leave on the background while I'm reading, cooking, cleaning or painting, etcetera. Jacob says iTunes for the longest time. Then I made the switch to Spotify using a phone, PC, and TV. Jesse says desktop Rhythmbox on Ubuntu for MP3s. If I'm using Pandora, Pithos or Pianobar. Back when I did a lot more Linux stuff, personally I used Rhythmbox a lot on all my Ubuntu computers, so good to see it still being used out there. Elizabeth says: I'm a Spotify gal. It's got almost anything I could look up. It's got some great rain and classical playlist for sleeping. Jake says: I use iTunes on my phone and computer. Finally, Bonnie says: old fashioned FM radio. Hard to beat free, I have to admit. For myself, I use iTunes for PCs, and I prefer to buy MP3 files and music whenever possible. Since I work on my PC for most of the day while writing or editing, that's what I usually use for listening to music. When I'm away from my computer, I use an iPod touch I got in 2021, and when that little device finally dies, I'm going to be very disappointed since Apple doesn't make them anymore and I will have to choose a new service for my portable music playing. I have played Spotify on my phone a bit, but I still prefer having the actual files. Very good discussion, I thought, on this week's Question of the Week. 00:05:50 Main Topic: How to Avoid Unsatisfying Endings for Your Novel So now let's move on to our main topic this week: how to avoid unsatisfying endings for your novel. I've said it before on this podcast and on my various websites, but I think the ending is a lot like the punchline to a joke. The ending ties everything together and makes what happens before makes sense. If you don't have a satisfying ending to your story then that is like a joke with a bad punchline. People just get annoyed by it. People will remember the end of the series (even a very long series) more than the entire rest of the series, and it will ultimately determine how they feel about the entire series. The most famous recent example, I think, is the Game of Thrones show, with Season 8 ending in a way that many people did not enjoy. In many ways, I think the ending of Game of Thrones with Season 8 sort of killed the show’s pop culture dominance. I mean, for a while when the show was at its peak, that was the show to watch. It was the example of prestige television and it was all a lot of people could talk about, but the ending just, you know, really ruined that and sort of subverted and undid the rest of the show. It destroyed the show's popular culture dominance and really led to reduced merchandise sales and tie in games and may be a factor why George R.R. Martin will probably never finish the series because of how badly the show turned out. This is a reminder that a bad ending will make the reader cheated and worse yet, make them feel mocked for ever caring about the characters at all. The Game of Thrones shows is a good example of that. With that in mind, let's look at some of the common problems with endings. One is bad writing. To some extent, bad writing can be subjective. One person's bad writing is another person's brilliant prose. However, there are certain structural things with bad writing and bad plotting that can lead to an unsatisfying ending. For one thing, there are examples where the author doesn't know what the ending is and hasn't been able to figure it out, so it sputters out or ends weakly, or dodges any sort of final battle and event, and it just sort of fizzles out at the end. No one enjoys reading that. Another example of bad writing is a twist that doesn't fit the logic of the book or doesn't make sense. It is possible to do a surprise ending that's satisfying, but it has to be written in a way that resonates with the rest of the story and if you look back at the rest of the story, there is foreshadowing that accurately leads to this ending. If the twist ending comes totally out of left field and makes no sense whatsoever, that is going to lead to some unsatisfied readers. Another big problem is an unfinished series or abandoned cliffhanger, which is why readers have trust issues with unfinished series. With every single series I've written, whether Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, The Ghosts, Cloak Games, or Silent Order, I frequently have people email me every single time a new book comes out to tell them when the series is finished because they only read finished series. Some of that is the fault of publishers who will sometimes kill a series after the second book and leave it permanently unfinished if the second book doesn't meet their sales expectations. Some of this is the fault of certain high name writers who've had every opportunity and all the money in the world to finish their series, yet just can't seem to get around to it. This is a good example of why you need to have a satisfying ending and not leave things hanging. Another good example of bad writing is a good ending that is undone or awkwardly avoided in order to stretch it out to another book or relaunch the series. You have a happy ending. Everyone lives happily ever after, and then you change one of the characters suddenly so that the series can continue. That is something to avoid and to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes from one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, the supreme gift of the artist is the knowledge of when to stop and that includes writing long series. Another potential problem is a confusing ending. Even a well written ending can be a problem if it's confusing. Ambiguous endings can leave the reader, especially casual ones, feeling confused or feeling like they missed something or are disconnected from the characters. Introducing new characters or plot threads too close to the ending so the ending feels crammed, or like it doesn't focus on the main characters or plot, can also be confusing for the reader. Themes and character arcs need to be clear throughout the book, and those need to be resolved with an equal amount of clarity. One potential reason for a confusing ending is things are left unresolved and that can inspire dissatisfaction in the reader. So when you reach the end of your story, it's good to have as much resolved as possible, even if you want to leave something open for the sequel. Another potential problem with the ending is if the ending is too unhappy or too dark. Depending on the genre and the kind of book you're writing, the time to put your characters through hardship and tragedy in order to develop them is in the middle of the plot, not abruptly at the end. If you want your characters to be happy in the end, true, they do have to suffer for it and earn it, but depending on the kind of book you're writing, having them end the book while being miserable and defeated is probably not the best way to go about it. Ambiguous or bittersweet or sad endings have a much higher burden to be extremely well written, and that's one of the reasons tragedy was seen as the highest form of playwriting in Ancient Greek and Elizabethan cultures. A sad ending for the sake of simply having the sad ending isn't as original or edgy as many writers think it is. That said, unhappy endings can work if it fulfills the character arc or set themes of the book, especially if these are well established throughout the story. I think the ending of the TV show Breaking Bad probably is an excellent example of this, because Breaking Bad is the account of mild-mannered chemistry teacher Walter White degenerating into a ruthless drug lord. The series ends with Walter White killed in a shootout while rescuing his former protege and then he dies surrounded by his beloved meth manufacturing machines. By any stretch, this is a very grim and relatively unhappy ending, with the protagonist getting shot to death but it works because it resolves the themes of the story, where White essentially chose this life of violence, and so he brought upon own head. In a sense, it's not happy so much as it is satisfying in that he got to go out on his own terms, defeating his enemies and freeing his former protege from being imprisoned. Another potential good way to have a satisfying unhappy ending is if it moves the other characters to a happy ending or resolution. In other words, the death is not pointless. In the play Romeo and Juliet, obviously Romeo and Juliet both die at the end, but their deaths permit their feuding families to reconcile and put aside their generations-long feud that has caused so much suffering. So while their deaths were tragic, they were not pointless and wasted. Let’s go to the opposite side of an unsatisfying unhappy ending. An unsatisfying, unearned, or abrupt happy ending can be just as unsatisfactory. A forced happily ever after that doesn't feel earned, is rushed at the end, and not explained can be very unsatisfying. One recent example I can think of is a while back, I saw the movie My Man Godfrey from 1936. It's a good comedy movie, a good progenitor of the screwball comedy genre, but I think the ending is kind of weak because the main character and the main female character kind of get together at the end, so it would go well, it's the end of the movie, so I guess they should get get together and get engaged. They seem very ill suited for each other and spent most of the movie bickering, but it was just, you know, the genre convention that the male lead and the female lead were going to get together at the end of the movie. So I think that's one flaw and one unsatisfying part in an otherwise very good movie. Deus Ex Machina is also something to avoid because it leaves the reader feeling cheated or like the suffering of the characters didn't matter. An unearned ending where there are dire consequences throughout the book, but they don't show up, feels, you know, like a cheat where the characters got away with something that they shouldn’t have been able to get away with. Another unsatisfying example of a happy ending is if it all ties up too neatly, where everything just falls into place for no particular reason. Happy endings are generally the most satisfying when they're earned, when the characters really have to suffer and strive and struggle to get to them. So both unhappy and happy endings have their own pitfalls, though in general I do think happy endings are usually easier to do unless you really know what you're doing. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to pull together with the research for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I rate the movies and TV shows I shaw in Winter 2024. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE PACT as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE PACT for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: MARCHEXILE The coupon code is valid through April 5th, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, we’ve got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 192 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 15th, 2024, The Ides of March, which we’re traditionally told to beware, and today we are looking at my Movie and TV Review Roundup for Winter 2024. Before we do that, we will do Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing projects, and our Question of the Week. So first up, Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Pact, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook for Ghost in the Pact for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon: MARCHEXILE and that is spelled MARCHEXILE. As always, the coupon code will be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through April the 5th 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook on this Ides of March, we've got one ready for you. So an update on my current writing projects. I am about 56% of the way through the first edit of Ghost in the Veils. That means the book should be on track to come out before Easter (which is at the end of March this year), if all goes well. I'm also 40,000 words into Wizard Thief, so hopefully that will come out before too much longer after Ghost in the Veils. I’m 11,000 words into Cloak of Titans. So that is where we're at with my current writing projects. 00:01:19 Question of the Week Now on to our new feature: Question of the Week. This week's question is inspired by the fact that I've spent a lot of the last few weeks setting up my new computer and getting it configured properly. So the question is: what is the first computer you ever used? No wrong answers, obviously. Joachim says his first personal computer was an Atari 1040 ST with 1 MB of RAM. I participated in the “religious war” with the Amiga 500 users, which was better and looked down at the MS-DOS PCs, which only has 640 kilobytes of RAM. Justin says: my first computer was a Timex Sinclair. It had two kilobytes of RAM and I forked out $50 for the 16 KB RAM extender module. The manual that comes with it says you will never need this much memory. I use a cassette tape recorder/player to record more programs and it ran a 300 baud. Todd says his first computer was in 1994. I purchased a 486 DX 2 8 megabytes of RAM for use in school. I believe the hard drive was about 250 MB. The monitor weighed a ton. I wrote a bunch of machine code and played Wolfenstein 3D like crazy. Tarun says in 1993 it was a 386 with four megawatts of RAM with Windows 3.1. I played a lot of Prince of Persia and got bad grades in school. Then the computer was locked up. In my educational defense, I did do some Pascal programming. AM says: my first computer was an Apple IIe at school. Getting to play Number Munchers or Oregon Trail on it was some kind of behavioral reward (and a very effective one at that). William says his first computer was a Macintosh SE in my parent’s home office, though “using” is an overstatement since all I did was play a few simple preinstalled games. I also have fond memories of playing the original King's Quest with said parents and something like a Compaq Portable. Rich says Commodore 64 with cassette drive. Didn't have cassette the first day. Spent the whole day punching in code for a blackjack game. My sister walks into the room to turn the computer off, erasing everything. That is a bummer. Juana says: a Gateway. My whole family came to gawk at it, and me setting it up! It had 120 megabytes of RAM. Twice what was the ones that used in the college computer lab! I thought I was set for life. Venus says Commodore Vic20. We played Radar Rat Race and Mom gave us a stack of computer magazines and tape recorder, so we played every game that was in the magazines at the time after we typed in the programs and saved them to the tapes. You are the first person outside my family that ever heard also had one. More on that later. Cheryl says: we got our first computer in the early ‘90s: an Amstrad with an AWA printer. I was doing courses for work, so I needed something to print the assignments, but we also played games on it: Wolfenstein, Lemmings, and Stock Markets. They're the only ones I can remember. Craig says: Apple IIe. I'm oldish. With dot matrix printer and handheld modem, dial-up Internet access, the one you had the dial phone into the holding cradle after you called it in. Tracy says: at college we used the TRS80s. I think she may win the award for oldest computer mentioned in this topic. And Perry says: IBM PC clone at school, a friend’s family had a Commodore 64. Our first family computer was a Commodore 128. For myself, I had the same first computer as Venus earlier in the thread. That would be a Commodore Vic20. It had 20 kilobytes of RAM and the Word file for the rough draft of Ghosts in the Veils, which I'm editing right now, is 355 kilobytes in size. So to load the Microsoft Word document of Ghosts in the Veils in Microsoft Word format, I would need about 18 different Commodore Vic 20 computers. That's like 1 computer per chapter and a half. So it is amusing to see how computer technology has changed quite a bit over time. 00:04:56 Winter 2024 Movie/TV Review Roundup Now to our main topic. We are inching closer to spring, so I think it's time for my Winter 2024 Movie Review Roundup. I got a Paramount Plus subscription to watch the Frasier reboot and since Paramount owns Star Trek and the Frasier reboot was only 10 episodes long, I ended up watching a chunk of modern Star Trek this winter. This was a new-ish experience because the last new Star Trek I watched was Star Trek Beyond way back in 2016. That was only eight years ago, but it's been a very eventful eight years, you know? I did watch a lot of Star Trek back in the 1990s. If you had held a gun to my head and demanded, you know, if I consider myself a Trekkie, I would say no, because I think Gene Roddenberry's socialist/utopian vision for the Federation that he put into Star Trek is fundamentally kind of goofy. The shows and movies were at their best when they stayed away from it or subverted it, like how the Federation can only be a utopia because Starfleet seems to have a Black Ops section that does all the unsanctioned dirty work and regularly runs amuck. Or like how Starfleet seems to have an actual mad science division that cooks up all kinds of nasty stuff. So anyway, these are the movies and shows I watched in Winter 2024, and as always, my ratings are wholly subjective and based on nothing more rigorous than my own opinions. We will go through these in order from least favorite to most favorite. So the first movie I watched was Now You See Me, which came out in 2013. Last year, I compared Adam Sandler's Murder Mystery movie to a C- student, but a fun C- student who everyone likes for his great parties and goes on to have a successful career as a regional sales manager. By contrast, Now You See Me is the sort of moody art student who always wears a black porkpie hat and thinks of himself or herself as deep and complicated, but in fact, they're just confusing. This is an apt comparison for this movie. Anyway, the plot centers around four sketchy magicians who are recruited by a mysterious organization called The Eye to carry out a series of high-profile heists using stage magic. I have to admit, that concept sounds even more ridiculous as I said the previous sentence. Anyway, after the first heist, the magicians become fugitives from the FBI but keep carrying on shows, sometimes staying ahead of law enforcement. The trouble is that nothing they do makes very much sense, and it all falls apart if you think about it for more than two seconds. Additionally, the movie overall feels very choppy since they rushed from scene to scene very quickly. The actors all gave very good performances that were entertaining to watch, but honestly, that was about the only thing the movie had going for it. Overall grade: D- Next up is The Marvels, which came out in 2023. This movie was logically incoherent, but actually rather charming and funny. It kind of reminds me of those ‘70s or ‘80s style science fiction movies that don't make much sense, though The Marvels was much lighter in tone than anything that came out in the science fiction space in the ‘60s or ‘70s. The movie got a bad rap because it didn't make back its budget, and apparently Disney rather shamefully threw the director under the bus. But to be fair, the budget for The Marvels was an enormous $274,000,000. To put this into context, the top three movies of 2023 (Barbie, Super Mario Brothers, and Oppenheimer) combined had a total budget across these three movies of $350 million, and together they grossed something like 15 times more than The Marvels did. Anyway, the plot picks up from the end of Ms. Marvel when Kamala Khan, Captain Marvel, and Monica Rambeau discover that their superpowers have become entangled. This means that if two of them use their powers at the same time, all three of them switch places randomly. This makes for a rather excellent fight scene earlier in the movie when the three characters don't know what's going on and are randomly teleporting between three different battles, much to the frequently amusing confusion of all participants. Once things settle down, Captain Marvel and her new friends realize that an old enemy of Captain Marvel is harvesting resources from worlds she cares about. So it's up to them to save Earth from this old enemy’s vengeance. I have to admit, the plot of the movie didn't actually make much sense, but it was overall much funnier than Ant-Man 3 and Secret Invasion. The best thing about the movie was Kamala Khan and her family. Kamala, Monica, and Captain Marvel also had an entertaining dynamic together and the planet of space musicals was also pretty funny. I think the movie's biggest, unconquerable weakness was that it was the 33rd Marvel movie. There are all sorts of theories of why the movie didn't perform at the box office: superhero genre fatigue, everyone knew it would be on Disney Plus eventually, the lasting effects of COVID on movie theaters and the movie business, Disney throwing the director under the bus, Disney inserting itself into the US Cultural Wars, etcetera. All those reasons are subjective and subject to personal interpretation. What I think is objectively quantifiable is that The Marvels is the sequel to a lot of different Marvel stuff: The Avengers movie, Wandavision, Captain Marvel, the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Secret Invasion, and Thor: Love and Thunder. That's like 50 to 60 plus hours of stuff to watch to fully understand the emotional significance of all the various characters in The Marvels. 50 to 60 hours of watching sounds like almost an entire entire semester's worth of homework assignments at this point. As someone who has written a lot of long series, I know that you lose some of the audience from book to book. I think that's ultimately why The Marvels didn't make back its budget. The Marvel movies as a series have just gone on too long and are just too interconnected. Ultimately, I am grateful to The Marvels. Realizing and understanding the concept of Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome helped me decide to write something new that wasn't a sequel or even connected to anything else I had written, which eventually led to Rivah Half-Elven and Half-Elven Thief. Overall grade: B- Our next movie is My Man Godfrey, which came out all the way back in 1936. This movie is considered the progenitor or one of the progenitors of the screwball comedy genre. A homeless man named Godfrey is living in a trash dump in New York, though despite his circumstances, Godfrey remained sharp and quick on his feet. One night, a wealthy woman named Cornelia approaches him and offers $5 if he’ll come with her. Godfrey is naturally suspicious, but Cornelia assures him that she only needs to take him to a hotel to win a scavenger hunt by finding a forgotten man, which was a term President Roosevelt used to describe people who have been ruined by the Great Depression and then forgotten by the government. I have to admit, Cornelia immediately reminded me of the way the more obnoxious YouTubers and TikTokers will sometimes pay homeless people to participate in dance challenges and suchlike. King Solomon was indeed right when he said that there is nothing new under the sun and what has been done before will be done again. Anyway, Godfrey is offended by Cornell's imperious manner but after he sees Cornelia bullying her kindly but none too bright younger sister Irene, Godfrey decides he'll go with Irene so she can win. A grateful Irene offers him a job as the family's butler. At his first day at work, Godfrey very soon realizes the reason the family has gone through so many butlers: they are all certified certifiably and comedically insane. In addition to these other problems, Cornelia is harboring a massive grudge against Godfrey for losing the scavenger hunt and wants payback. Wacky hijinks ensue. Fortunately, Godfrey has some hidden depths that he will need, which include being much smarter than his employers. Admittedly, this is not hard. 1936 was towards the second half of the Great Depression in the United States, so obviously the movie has more than a bit of social commentary. The characters joked that prosperity is just around the corner and wonder where they can find that corner. The rich characters are uniformly portrayed as some combination of frivolous, clueless, or malicious. I think the movie was pretty funny, if sharply so, but the big weakness was that the male and female leads were so clearly unsuited for each other but got together at the end of the movie simply because it was the end of the movie. Still, it was definitely worth watching because you can see how this movie influenced many other movies after it. I definitely recommend watching it with captions if possible, because while human nature has not changed in the last 90 years, sound technology has in fact improved quite a bit. Overall grade: B. Next up is Charade, which came out in 1963. This is a sort of romantic comedy, sort of thriller that has Audrey Hepburn playing Regina, an American living in Paris who is in the process of getting divorced from her husband. When she returns to Paris, she learns that her husband was murdered in her absence and it turns out that he was in possession of $250,000 he stole from the US government during World War II. Regina had no idea about any of this, but the US government thinks that she has the money stashed away somewhere. It turns out that her late husband also betrayed the men he worked with to steal the money and they're convinced that she has the money as well, and they're going to get it from Regina regardless of what they have to do. Regina's only ally in this mess is a mysterious man calling himself Peter Joshua (played by Cary Grant), who may or may not be one of the other thieves operating under an assumed identity. I liked this movie, but I think it had two structural problems. First, Regina wasn't all that bright, though she did get smarter as the movie went on, probably out of sheer necessity. Second, it had some severe mood whiplash. The movie couldn't decide if he was a lighthearted romantic comedy or gritty thriller, though finally snapped into focus as a pretty good thriller in the last third of the movie. Amusing tidbit: Cary Grant only agreed to do the movie if Audrey Hepburn's character would be the one chasing his character in their romance, since he thought their age gap would be inappropriate otherwise, because he was so much older than Hepburn at the time of filming. Overall grade: B+ Next up is the new Frasier series from 2023. I admit I had very, very low expectations for this, but it was considerably better than I thought it would be. My low expectations came partly because the original show was so good. Some seasons were stronger than others, of course, but the show had some absolute masterpieces of sitcom comedy throughout its entire run. Some of this was because I think the 2020s are a much more humorless and dour age than the 1990s, so I had my doubts whether the new show could be funny at all. Fortunately, my doubts were misplaced. The new Frasier is actually pretty good. It's interesting that the show's generational dynamic has been flipped on its head. In the original show, the pretentious Frasier lived with his working-class father. 20 years later, it's now Frasier who lives with his son Freddie, who dropped out of Harvard to become a firefighter and consciously rejected his father's love of intellectualism and cultural elitism. The inversion of the original dynamic works quite well. It has some moments of genuine comedy because, like his father before him, Freddie is more like his father than he realizes. The show also avoided the pitfall of bringing back legacy characters that Disney and Lucasfilm stumbled into with Star Wars and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Disney brought back legacy characters like Luke Skywalker and Indiana Jones but made them into sad, old losers. Frasier, by contrast, while frequently an unsympathetic comedy protagonist who brings his own misfortunes onto his own head, is most definitely not a sad old loser. He's famous, respected, and wealthy enough that he can afford to buy an apartment building in Boston at the drop of a hat. If you know anything about the United States, you know that the East Coast is the most expensive area of the of the country. Despite that, he remains the same well-meaning buffoon that he always was, the sort of man who, as a colleague aptly says, always goes that extra, ill-advised mile. There's a story that when Ricky Gervais was advising the creators of the American version of The Office, one of his chief pieces of advice was that Michael Scott could not be as incompetent as David Brent was in the original UK version of the show. American culture, Mr. Gervais said, was generally much less forgiving of incompetence than British culture. I thought of this as I watched Frasier because all the characters were in fact extremely competent at their jobs. Even Frasier himself, when he finally gets out of his own way, is a very good psychiatrist and teacher. Anyway, the show was funny and I think it deserves a second season. We'll see if that happens or not. Overall grade: A- Next up is Star Trek: Lower Decks Seasons One through Four, which came out from between 2020 and 2023. As I mentioned earlier, I ended up subscribing to Paramount Plus for a month after I watched Frasier, so I decided to watch Star Trek Lower Decks, since I'm forever seeing clips of that show turning up on social media. Lower Decks is a pitch perfect, affectionate parody of Star Trek from the point of view of four relatively hapless ensigns on the Cerritos, one of Starfleet’s somewhat less prestigious ships. We have the self-sabotaging rebel Mariner, the insecure and ambitious Boimler, the enthusiastic science girl Tendi, and cheerful engineer Rutherford, who nonetheless has a dark and mysterious past that he can't remember. Season Four also adds T’Lyn, a Vulcan whose mild expressions of carefully measured annoyance make her a dangerous loose cannon by Vulcan standards. The show is hilarious because it makes fun of Star Trek tropes while wholeheartedly embracing them. The ensigns run into a lot of insane computers, random space anomalies, rubber forehead aliens, and other Star Trek tropes, including the grand and venerable Star Trek tradition of the Insane Admiral. Starfleet officers always seem to go off the deep end when they get promoted to Starfleet Command. The senior officers are also varying degrees of insane and drama generators. Starfleet, from the point of view of the Cerritos crew, is a vast bureaucratic organization that veers between ineffective idealism, blatant careerism, and whatever crazy project the Insane Admiral of the Week is pursuing. Yet since American sitcom characters have to be competent (like we just talked about above with Frasier), when the crisis really kicks into high gear, the Cerritos crew can pull itself together and save the galaxy with the best of them. I did like how the show grows from an affectionate parody to its own thing, with all the characters experiencing struggles and personal growth in their arcs. I liked it enough that when the 5th season of Lower Decks comes out, I'll subscribe to another month of Paramount Plus (assuming Paramount Plus still exists and hasn't been brought up by Warner Brothers or Skydance or something). Overall grade: A- Next up is Predator, which came out in 1987. When Carl Weathers died in early February of 2024, I realized I had never actually got around to seeing Predator. So I did and I’m glad that I watched it. Predator was an excellent blending of thriller, science fiction, and horror. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, who commands a team of operators who do Black Ops work for the CIA. Since it’s 1987, the CIA is up to its traditional shenanigans in Central America and Dutch is dispatched to help out his old friend Dillon (played by Carl Weathers), who has been ostensibly assigned to rescue a Pro-American cabinet minister from rebel guerrillas in the jungle. Since this is the CIA, naturally there is more than the mission than is apparent on the surface. However, the mission quickly becomes irrelevant when Dutch and his team realize they are being hunted by an unknown creature with capabilities unlike anything they have ever seen before. It turns out the creature is the Predator, an alien hunter who comes to Earth and takes human skulls as trophies. Soon the movie turns into a death match duel between Dutch and the Predator. The movie did a very good job of showing the Predator’s capabilities such as stealth, heat vision, and his shoulder laser without explicitly spelling them out for the audience. It was a very well put together piece of storytelling and it is of course the source of the famous Internet meme of a muscular white arm gripping a muscular black arm and also Schwarzenegger's famous line of “Get to the choppa!” Also to quote a famous Internet meme, if you had a nickel for every future governor of a US state who is in this movie, you would have two nickels, which is not a lot, but even two is pretty weird, right? Overall grade: A. Now for the favorite thing I saw in winter 2024. That honor goes to Star Trek: Picard Season Three, which came out in 2023. Honestly, this was so much better than I thought it was going to be. I thought I would watch one or two episodes and then give up. Instead I watched the whole thing in like two days over the New Year's holiday. I watched the first episode of Picard Season One way back in 2020 was free on YouTube, but I didn't like it enough to subscribe to CBS All Access (or whatever the heck it was back then). The first episode also seemed more ponderous and dour in the sort of 21st century realistic prestige television snooze fest than I really wanted to watch. But Season Three of the show got high reviews from people whose opinions I generally respect when it came out in early 2023. Since I had Paramount Plus for a month because of Frasier, I decided to give it a go. I'm glad I did. How to describe the plot? You may remember that back in summer 2023, I watched the Battleship movie. Battleship is objectively a bad movie, but it does have one interesting subplot that would make a good movie all on its own. When space aliens imprison most of the US Navy, a bunch of retired veterans take a decommissioned battleship out to war to save the day. This basically is the plot of Picard Season 3. The plot kicks off when Doctor Crusher contacts Admiral Picard after they have not spoken for twenty years. Apparently, Picard had a son named Jack with Crusher that she never told him about and mysterious assailants are trying to kidnap Jack. On the original show, Picard and Crusher definitely gave off the vibe that they probably got romantic whenever they were alone in the elevator together. The fact that Doctor Crusher got pregnant with Picard’s son is not all that surprising. Picard had always been adamant about his desire not to start a family and given that any son of the legendary Captain Picard would be a target for his equally legendary enemies, Crusher decided to keep the boy a secret. Picard, understandably, is shocked by the news, but teams up with his former first officer, Captain Riker, to rescue his son. Jack has an extensive Robin Hood-esque criminal history, so it seems that his misdeeds might have caught up to him. It turns out that deadly weapon is locked in Jack’s DNA and the people pursuing him aren't merely criminals but powerful enemies intent on destroying Starfleet and the Federation. Jack Crusher's DNA will give them a weapon to do it, which means it's up to the crew of The Enterprise to save the galaxy one last time. This was ten episodes, but it was very, very tightly plotted, with not many wasted moments. Sometimes you see movies that seem like they should have been streaming shows, and sometimes streaming shows seem like they really should have been cut down to movie length. But Picard’s Season Three does a good job of telling a tense story that we've been impossible either in a movie or the old days of network television. The show very quickly plunges into the crisis and keeps moving from new tension to new tension. The gradual reveal where Picard at first feels guilty that he has to ask his friends to help rescue his estranged son and ex-girlfriend like he's living his own personal version of some trashy daytime TV show, only to slowly realize that something much more dangerous and much, much bigger than his personal problems is happening, was put together well. The show was also another good example of how to bring back legacy characters right. All the characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation are older and have been knocked around by life or suffered personal tragedies, but none of them are sad old losers like in a Disney or Lucasfilm project. The new and supporting characters were also great. Seven of Nine returns as the first officer to Captain Shaw, a by the book officer who thinks Picard and Riker are dangerous mavericks. He has a point. Shaw turns out to be extremely competent in a crisis. Amanda Plummer was great as Vadic, a scenery chewing villain who has very good reasons to hate Starfleet and the Federation. Vadic’s love of spinning directly in her command chair was a great homage to Amanda Plummer's late father, Christopher Plummer, who played a villain with a similar tic way back in Star Trek VI in the ‘90s. It is also great how the show wrapped up some of the dangling plot threads from the ‘90s, like Picard’s strained relationship with his former mentee Commander Ro Laren or the brief return of Elizabeth Shelby, Riker’s former First Officer. A few people have complained that Worf is now a pacifist, but he's a Klingon pacifist, which basically means he'll attempt negotiation before cutting off your head, but he is still probably going to cut off your head. Less Conan the Barbarian, more serene Warrior Monk. I think Data had an excellent ending to his character arc, which started with his character’s very first appearance way back in the ‘80s and Brent Spiner did a good job of portraying Data's fractured personalities and then how they achieved unity. I'd say the weakest point of the show was how consistently dumb Starfleet command is. The plot hinged around Starfleet gathering its entire fleet together for a celebration and then putting all those ships under a remote control system, which seems both exceptionally stupid and very convenient for the bad guys. But to be fair, this is Starfleet, an organization whose high command regularly spits out insane Admirals and also has an unsanctioned Black Ops/Mad Science division that it can't control, so it definitely fits within the overall context of Star Trek. I mean, that's like half the premise of Lower Decks. And if you've ever worked for a large governmental, military, healthcare, or educational institution, you understand. We all know that working in a large institution under leaders who are either insane or dumb isn't exactly an anomaly in the human experience. I mean, the Roman Empire circa 190 A.D. was the most powerful institution on the planet and the Empire's maximum leader liked to spend his time LARPing as a gladiator in the Coliseum. Anyway, the emotional payoff at the end of Picard Season Three was very satisfying, and how the show wrapped up a lot of threads from Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager was pretty great. It's like the people who were in charge of Season Three of Picard watched the Star Wars sequel trilogy and thought, you know, we can do better and then they did. Overall grade: A So those are the movies and TV shows I watched in Winter 2024. If you're looking for something to watch, hopefully one of them sounds like it will catch your interest. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform or choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at six of the worst pieces of writing advice on the Internet, and explain why you shouldn't listen to them. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE THRONE as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE THRONE for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SPRINGTHRONE The coupon code is valid through March 29th, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, we’ve got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 191 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 8th, 2024, and today we are talking about bad writing advice. In fact, we're talking about the worst writing advice, but more on that later. Before we get to any of our other topics, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Throne, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Throne for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SPRINGTHRONE and that's spelled SPRINGTHRONE. Of course the coupon code, as always, will be in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code is valid through March 29th, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, we've got one ready for you. Before we get to any of other our other topics, let's first have an update on my current writing projects. I am 81,000 words into Ghost in the Veils, which puts me on Chapter 19 of either 21 or 22. I'm not entirely sure because I think I reused some numbers in my outline, which is obviously something we will fix before we get to the final draft. I am hoping to finish things up next week, if all goes well with the rough draft and then we will be on track to hopefully have the book out before Easter. I'm also 37,000 words into Wizard Thief, the second book in my Half-Elven Thief series and if all goes well, that will be out in April. I'm also 9,000 words into Cloak of Titans, and if all goes well, that should be out in May, I believe. And then after I write that, that's when I'll start working on Shield of Darkness, the Second Shield War book. As I mentioned in the previous episode, the audiobook of Shield of Storms is now available. It's definitely available on Audible, Amazon, and Apple. It's on my Payhip store. It's on Kobo. I believe it is on Nook Audio. Processing is going rather slowly for the other stores, which is unfortunate, but since most of these sales will probably come from Audible anyway, it's not that unfortunate, but hopefully it should be available on all the other stores before too much longer. 00:02:16 Question of the Week Now we’re going to have a new topic that we're going to do every week as part of the show. It's called Question of the Week. I could hardly claim this is an original idea. I noticed that many blogs and many podcasts do a question of the week feature, but it seems like a good one to add to our show and website here. So this week's Question of the Week (the very first Question of the Week, as a matter of fact): If you listen to audiobooks, what apps do you use? Of course, there are no wrong answers. We had a variety of good answers to this question. Reader JL says: I use Audible. Paid for one year in advance. Use the credits unless the cost of the Audible book is less than the cost of the credit. I've noticed that sometimes this is the case if I bought the book or have it out in KU. That is true. Amazon has this feature called WhisperSync, where if you've bought the ebook you can sometimes get a discount on the audiobook if you buy it directly rather than using an Audible credit. Reader Joachim says: I use Smart Book Player on Android. I only use audiobooks in MP3 format. Reader Adam says: Audible, Graphicaudio.net, direct purchases from authors and/or Kickstarter rewards, Google Play Books, mostly DRM free downloads. Preference is direct from authors or a service which allows downloading titles for archival purposes. I should mention if you buy any of my audiobooks through Payhip, the fulfillment is through Book Funnel, which does allow you to download the MP3s to keep them for archival purposes if you're offline or you don't have access to your phone or computer. Doug says he uses Audible and he just finished Shield of Storms and is now listening to Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation. Tom says he uses the Audible annual 24 credit subscription. That's like 2 credits a month. I realize that’s common for people who work in jobs like construction or industrial jobs where they can listen to audiobooks the entire day, and so therefore will go through quite a few of them. Venus says she listens to Libby or Nook, mostly Libby. If your library has access to Libby or a similar listening service, you can get audiobooks that way. And finally, Bonnie says: Truthfully, I've tried Audible, but I am not a fan of listening to books. Would rather do the reading myself. So as you can see, there are a range of options and opinions when it comes to listening to audiobooks. For myself, I use a combination of the monthly credit from Audible and discount audiobooks from the Chirp daily e-mail. If you do listen to a lot of audiobooks, it might be worthwhile to subscribe to Chirp, because then you could get some bargains on audiobooks in genres that may interest you. 00:04:55 Main Topic: The Worst Writing Advice from the Internet Now on to this week's main topic: the worst writing advice you can find on the Internet. The reason I wanted to do this episode was the same reason I started this podcast. I've been a writer for a long time. Ghost in the Veils is going to be my 150th book, and so I've gotten more experience than I'm not going to say everybody, but I do have more experience than many writers. I decided the podcast would be a good way to share some of that experience in a way that isn't pushing it on people or charging for expensive courses or anything like that. The advice is there if you want to listen to it, and if you don't want to listen to it, that's just fine too. However, the flip side of this coin is that there's a lot of really terrible writing advice out there, like just plain bad writing advice that’s more destructive than helpful. To cover that, I asked for our transcriptionist to do some research for me and pull together some of the worst writing advice she could find on the Internet and then we would talk about it here. She found six particularly bad pieces of writing advice that we would debunk. The first piece of worst writing advice is that writing talent is innate. If you can't be a success right away, there is no point. This is just plainly false. Almost anyone can improve at any skill, and writing is no different with a sustained commitment over time. It just takes practice. A good way to debunk this is to look at the early works of famous writers like Jane Austen, to show that their writing improved over time. Or if you dig heavily into J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, you'll see that the first initial drafts of what would become Lord of the Rings were not super great. By the time The Lord of the Rings actually came out, Tolkien had improved a good deal as a writer. Many authors have a rough first book or even rough first series and then go on to greater success or greater acclaim because they just practice and get better. With practically anything, practice will improve and writing is no different in that regard. After all, if you have a favorite author and you look at his or her first book and then compare it to his or her latest book, odds are you will notice a significant improvement in skill and that will be true for anyone. Number two: you need an MFA (that's a Master of Fine Arts degree) to be good enough to write a book. This is something I could rant about for a significant length of time because I think there are serious criticisms to be made of the way higher education is funded in the United States and serious criticisms to be made of the ways the student loan program works, but that's rather off scope for this podcast, so instead we're going to focus on why you don't need a Master of Fine Arts degree to be a writer. MFA programs tend to lean heavily towards poetry and literary fiction (literary fiction being, you know, fiction that isn't genre fiction, like, you know, mystery, science fiction or fantasy). The stereotype of literary fiction is it tends to be about creative writing professors having affairs with one another and while of course this is a cliche, there is a measure of truth to it. MFA programs tend to be a very homogeneous group of people who value a very specific type of writing/style. Genre fiction is often looked down on and “commercial” is used as an insult by many instructors in MFA programs, which is all well and dandy, but if you're writing literary fiction, commercial fiction has a better chance of being able to pay your taxes and your mortgage. An MFA credential does not guarantee results and employment prospects and is extremely expensive unless you get into a funded program. We mentioned the problem of student debt a little earlier and if you go into a MFA program, you’re going to have a lot more student debt. There's also the opportunity cost of spending two years learning to write in an MFA program. Finally, to illustrate the point, think of your top ten favorite writers and look up how many of them have a Master of Fine Arts degree. The percentage will probably be fairly low. So overall, I would not recommend going into an MFA program if you want to be a writer. The third piece of terrible writing advice is to only write when you feel inspired. This is bad because writing if you, even if you enjoy it, is still a form of work, and if you only do work when you feel like doing work, it's never going to get done. It's good to remember that progress is always better than perfection, and this type of thinking feeds into procrastination. Steve Jobs very famously said when he took over Apple again at the start of the 21st century that real artist ship and the correlate to that would be real writers publish. A good example to look at is athletes in various phases of training and competition. They don't train when they feel inspired. They create a plan and stick to it in order to meet their goals. The structure that comes from plans makes it easier to define your goals and track your results, so it's a good idea to try a disciplined approach to writing, I think and try and write as much as you're able, whether it's 500 words a day or 1,000 words a day, rather than waiting for you to just get inspired. This is true for pretty much any field of work and also writing. The fourth piece of bad writing advice is to only write what you know. If this was actually good advice, then all books would be about writers trying to write and maybe household chores and tax preparation. This would be terrible advice for fantasy and science fiction writers, if taken at face value. Writing using your own knowledge and experiences can make your book more engaging, but think of it as a starting point or way to add texture to your story, not a rule. That said, if you want to write about something you don't know about, you don't actually have to become an expert in it. You just have to know enough to fake it. Remember, as we've talked about in a previous episode of the show, your book doesn't have to be realistic. It has to feel realistic. We want not realism, but verisimilitude, where it feels realistic. You can make it feel realistic with a lot less research than you can to become actually an expert in something. Only writing what you know is a very good way to limit your writing and get less writing done than you would otherwise. The fifth piece of bad writing advice we found was to write based on what's trending so the book will basically market itself. This is a bad idea, because by the time you finish and the book is ready to sell, the market may have already grown tired of the trend and moved on to dystopian mermaid stories or something else. Readers also have a sense when a story is rushed or written in a different way. It's much better to write something that you're excited to write. It's also important to realize that not all categories are equally lucrative or easy to market, though. A book on soil testing methodologies is unlikely to make anywhere near as much money as a romance, for example. The sixth and final piece of bad writing advice we're going to talk about this week is that there is no point in writing now that AI is taking over. Go do something else. A good example of why this is bad advice is the game of chess. Recently I got back into playing chess on a regular basis. I've known how to play the game since I was like 10, I think, which is an increasingly long amount of time ago, but I haven't played in a while. I got back into it after a gap of several years and I was baffled and somewhat surprised to see that there's actually like chess influencers now. I mean, everything else has influencers. I mean, they're like, you know, stationery influencers and video game influencers and packing material influencers. I was astonished to see that there are chess influencers and that they are in fact photogenic young people who post Instagram pictures of themselves playing chess. They have live streams of themselves playing chess, and they get into feuds with each other like every other group of influencers on the planet. Where this relates to writing/AI is that for decades now, it's been literally impossible for a human to defeat a properly configured computer at chess. It can't be done. If you have a chess program that's configured to make maximum use of its resources, it will beat even the best human player every single time and the end result of this is no one cares. The chess community continues on having all its influencers, rivals, and feuds and playing the game because as one of the chess influencers himself said, watching a human play a computer at chess is like watching a human try to arm wrestle a hydraulic press. You know who's going to win. It's boring. No one cares. Everyone goes back to the humans playing each other at chess and the chess engines are there for people who want to play, you know, bots on the Internet. And I suspect that is going to be the case with AI writing. You may get to the point where AI is able to spit out a novel, but it will be like a computer playing chess. It's like, yeah, that's nice, but no one actually cares. Even if AI became a major source of fiction, there would still be many readers out there, given the negative anti-AI feelings that are very prevalent on the Internet, who would prefer fiction written by humans as a preference, just like there are viewers who hate special effects heavy movies like Marvel movies and seek out movies using a lot of practical effects or physical stages. The final weakness with this advice that there is no point in writing now that AI taking over is that legislation regarding AI and copyright is still marked with uncertainty. If you can't copyright the product of an AI engine, there's no point in trying to sell it. So for all those reasons, I don't think that AI is an excuse not to write and that it will probably end up like being a chess engine. Any chess computer can defeat a human, but that really doesn't matter very much. So there we are, six pieces of bad writing advice that you can safely ignore. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com, often with transcripts. Speaking of which, a big thank you to my transcriptionist for helping me to research this episode. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at techniques for ensuring accuracy and verisimilitude in your novel. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE SEAL as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE SEAL for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SPRINGSEAL The coupon code is valid through March 19th, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, we’ve got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 190 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 1st 2024 as I'm recording this and today we are talking about how to create the feeling of accuracy in fiction. Before we get to that, we will do Coupon of the Week and give you an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Seal as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Seal for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: SPRINGSEAL and then is SPRINGSEAL and that code will also be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through March 19th, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to leap into spring, we've got one ready for you. Now for an update on current writing and audiobook projects. I am as of this recording 48,000 words into Ghost in the Veils, which puts me on Chapter 10 of 22, so almost halfway there. I’m hoping to get to 50,000 words by the end of the day, but we will see what happens. I am also 33,000 words into Wizard Thief, the second book in my Half-Elven Thief epic fantasy series and that is hopefully going to come out fairly quickly after Ghost in the Veils is done. I am also 5,000 words into Cloak of Titans, which will be my next major project after Ghost in the Veils and Wizard Thief are done. In audiobook news, Shield of Storms is now available, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills. You can get that at the moment at Audible, Amazon and Apple and it should be turning up at the other stores fairly soon once it gets through quality assurance. You can in fact get it at my Payhip store at the moment as well. I'm also pleased to report that Half-Elven Thief did well enough to merit an audiobook and recording for that will be going underway through the month of March. So hopefully if all goes well, the book will be available sometime in April. 00:01:56 Main Topic: Accuracy and Fiction Let's get right into our main topic: the importance of accuracy and fiction. Before that, why do we want our fiction to have some degree of accuracy to it? The reason for that is fiction doesn't have to be realistic. However, it has to feel realistic. It's called verisimilitude, the sensation of something that feels real, regardless of whether it is actually real or not. This is important because it ties into a concept called suspension of disbelief. We all sit down to read a book of fiction, a novel, a fantasy novel, a science fiction novel, mystery novel, whatever. We know that the book isn't real and that nothing in it actually happened. However, what we need to do is suspend our disbelief of what's happening in the book, which is necessary in order for us to enjoy what is happening and it is much easier to keep a sense of disbelief if your book has good verisimilitude, if it feels real. The example I always used to cite this is that if you live in the United States and probably the UK as well, you know they are constantly having problems with the phone scammers primarily targeting older people. One of the famous ones had a person saying that the person in question was late on back taxes and if they did not pay immediately, the IRS would send the sheriffs to arrest them for back taxes. This is implausible for several reasons. One, the IRS, if you owe back taxes, does not start the process by a phone call. It starts by a letter. Two in the United States, sheriff is an elected position, and so if anyone was going to be doing arresting, would that probably not be the sheriff, that would be the sheriff's deputies. And three, even though the sheriff's deputies do have arrest powers, generally, they do not make arrests for back taxes. So right away we see that this scam phone call is implausible for a number of reasons and can be immediately disbelieved by anyone with basic knowledge of either U.S. law enforcement or the way the US tax system works. Now imagine someone did this in a thriller novel or a mystery novel. There's a scene where the IRS sent sheriffs to arrest someone for nonpayment of back taxes. That doesn't feel real if you have any knowledge of the topics, which breaks the verisimilitude, which destroys the suspension of disbelief. The reader will either give up on the novel or hate-read it to the end and leave a bad review. For fiction, you don't have to do as much research as you would for nonfiction, but it is a good idea to do enough research that you can create verisimilitude, the feeling of reality, that won't jar the reader of the book and destroy suspension of disbelief. So why research? Research is not just for historical fiction. Any part of fiction, even a contemporary romance that touches on real life, has details that can benefit from check fact checking and areas are jarring to readers and can take them out of the story and make them give up on the story entirely in some cases, which comes from not having enough verisimilitude to maintain the suspension of disbelief. Additionally, certain genres have extremely high standards for factual accuracy, such as military fiction, historical fiction, or medical mysteries, etcetera. The example I always use for this is Jack Carr’s The Terminal List, which, as a thriller has a lot of military oriented people using a lot of military oriented equipment. I believe Mr. Carr has said in several interviews and podcasts how he spends a lot of time researching all this because his audience tends to be people with expert knowledge of various military weapon systems or law enforcement procedures and they will immediately spot any factual errors and email him many times about this until the end of time. If you're writing in one of those genres, it really does behoove you to do a lot of research. Other genres tend to be a bit more forgiving, such as fantasy and romance, as long as the world has a strong internal consistency. Additionally this is where we get into realism versus verisimilitude. Readers will allow a certain amount of blurring facts if it moves along the story. For example, how long a lab work can take in a police thriller. It's a common plot device where in real life, police and forensic labs typically are backed up for months but in fiction, you can have your detective or your detective’s boss pull some strings and move things along. It's also important to note that plausibility is more important than accuracy. For example, to the best of my knowledge, there is not a Starbucks kiosk at the Milwaukee County Zoo in Milwaukee, WI. But doesn't it feel completely plausible that there would be one since many American zoos do have coffee kiosks? So if you happen to mention in passing that there's a Starbucks kiosk at the Milwaukee County Zoo, that kind of plausible, if inaccurate detail most likely would not jar your reader out of the story. Factual error is often much worse if the plot depends on it. For example, a wrong fact in jury selection in a comment made in passing is less jarring than if it’s the main plot point or if, for example, you're a legal thriller and your protagonist wins using evidence or tactics that in real life would get them thrown out of court or cause a mistrial, or even disbarred. Televised legal dramas are occasionally quite bad at this, where the lawyers win cases using tactics and legal techniques that would get them in enormous quantities of trouble. But if you're writing a legal thriller, the audience tends to be more knowledgeable than average about that kind of thing. So it is a good idea to do research. Some small facts that may seem insignificant can matter a lot to a reader, because they can stand out even to a non-expert. For example, in the United States, most of the states in the country are subdivided into administrative units called counties, which is why we talk about the county sheriff and how counties elect sheriffs and commissioners and so forth. However, in the state of Louisiana, they don't have counties, they have parishes. So if you're writing a book set in Louisiana, and you refer to a county in Louisiana that can jar the reader of the book if they have any knowledge of Louisiana. Another example would be you describe the final section of the baseball game as a quarter instead of an inning. Baseball doesn't have quarters like American football or American basketball does. Baseball has innings, so it's little technical details like that can be something to watch out for because you can trip up on them pretty easily. However, the flip side of this is you can use this as a technique where a factual error becomes an important plot point if you do it deliberately. For example, you can have in a police thriller evidence was stored outside of normal procedure in a way that would break the law in real life because it turns out someone actually was being bribed and the law actually was being broken. A more benign example, someone makes up a call number for the library book and it turns out to be gibberish because the person made it up on the spot, so you don't need the accurate number for the library book. Deliberately working in factual errors like this, so long as you include them in a way that you know what you're doing and it is important for the plot, can be a really neat technique where the reader will feel validated if they spot this error and then it turns out to be important later on, like someone came claims to be from Louisiana and talks about growing up in New Orleans County, only for someone to realize that New Orleans and Louisiana do not have counties. So here are some specific examples of things you may want to research in your fiction to avoid common errors. Number one: location. Distance is a major source of factual error. Movies famously ignore how long it takes to drive across Los Angeles, especially in traffic. You have movies where someone you get from one end to LA to another in like 20 minutes, which if you do it at 2:00 AM, that might be possible, but any other time during the day it's going to be traffic gridlock, and you're going to spend a lot of time in traffic. It takes much longer than 20 minutes to get from one end of LA to another. Another thing to watch out for is languages. A prominent example is Brazil. The dominant language in most of Central America and most of South America is Spanish, so people tend to assume that the dominant language in Brazil is Spanish. It's not; it's actually Portuguese. Many people in Brazil do speak Spanish because all their neighbors speak Spanish, but the main language in Brazil is not Spanish, it is Portuguese, so it's very jarring when shows have police or military officials in Brazil speaking Spanish when they should really be speaking in Portuguese. So that is the kind of detail to watch out for. Location details can also be jarring to people familiar with the location, but not necessarily the general audience. For example, in 2023, Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee closed. I'm pretty sure it's 2023. If you have a book set in Milwaukee in 2024, a person cannot be a student at Cardinal Stritch University because it no longer exists. And in fact, the date of that is probably something I should have researched (Transcriptionist’s note: it closed at the end of their spring semester in 2023). Another famous example was a couple years ago, there was a Christmas holiday movie on the Roku Channel that depicted someone driving to Wisconsin from The Twin Cities and in the drive, the main character drove past a mountain range. I don't know if you've ever been to Minnesota or Wisconsin, but both of them are famously fairly flat and have no mountain ranges anywhere within the state. So that is something a little bit of research or effort would have avoided. Another good thing to research is specific procedures for the military and law enforcement, legal and scientific procedures if you're writing that kind of book. These are often highly specific and detailed and therefore you may have to do more research as a result if you're, for example, writing a legal thriller that revolves around the specific procedures and arcana of the American legal system. People will accept a certain amount of glossing over the more technical details for dramatic tension and avoiding lulls in the plot. Where it feels wrong, and unearned, is if procedures are ignored entirely or warped beyond recognition. Here are some examples from fiction of processes warped beyond recognition. The English department of a major university are awarding tenure based on a competition with other professors. That is not how that works. There's not a tournament of tenure that you can participate in to win tenure. Another example would be a soldier getting out of court martial because he had a heartfelt conversation about bravery with his or her commanding officer at the bar the night before. That is not how any of that works. At that point in the process, the court martial will be well out of the commanding officer’s hands and the soldier in question’s fate would be decided by the court martial. Another example from fiction would be a surgeon receives an award and promotion after convincing her husband to let her perform a risky new procedure on him. That, again, is not how any of that works. Surgeons are not allowed usually (save in cases of, you know, extreme emergency) to operate on family members because they can't be objective. Additionally the surgeon in question would be in all kinds of questions with the Ethical Review Board and if things go really badly, they would end up losing their license and may even face criminal liability. So obviously these are things you want to research. A third and final thing that is sort of broader category is that you want to focus on specific details for things you are researching based on the kind of novel you're writing, like you're writing a legal thriller, you will want to spend more time researching the specific legal details of the story you're writing. If you're writing like, for example, a historical novel about the British peerage, for example in Downton Abbey, the Earl of Grantham is named Robert Crawley, but he is always referred to as Lord Grantham, not Lord Crawley, because he's the Earl of Grantham. Very commonly, historical romance novels are known for not getting this correct, and it often irritates more knowledgeable readers. If you're writing historical fiction, another thing you might want to research is hairstyles, because hairstyles vary widely across historical periods. The final thing to keep in mind is the need to balance your research with the story. We've all read books where it was very clear that the author did a lot of research and was going to share it with us, whether we like it or not, because we'll have info dumps that go on for pages and pages. Too many details and facts are boring to the reader and rarely makes sense in the context of the story. An example would be a character explains 6 or 7 paragraphs explaining local politics to someone who's lived in the town for 20 years. You want to avoid the cliche of “as you know,  Bob” information dump. Having someone familiar with the particular profession review your work might be helpful, but unless they're a true expert, they're not going to catch everything. Remember that readers pick up a fiction book to be entertained and not taught. Facts when done correctly, add verisimilitude to the story, help with the suspension of disbelief, and make stories more interesting. And finally I'd say that you want to make a good faith effort of being as accurate as possible, but don't stress too much over it because I find as I'm writing my 150th novel at this point (I speak with a little bit of experience here), that no matter how much research you do, no matter how careful you are, it's just not going to work for everyone and someone is either going to point out something you got wrong or something that doesn't work for them, which is a matter of interpretation. I'd say focus on writing the best story you can and focus on being as accurate as you can, but if you have to pick between the two, focus on writing the best story you can. Though, bear in mind that if you have to make your legal thriller revolve around something that could not possibly happen in real life, then you are not writing the best story that you can. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a quick word of thanks to my transcriptionist who once again helped me pull together the research for this episode. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes of the podcast, often with transcripts at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I discuss why I decided to return to the character of Caina after twenty-nine novels. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE INFERNO as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE INFERNO for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERINFERNO The coupon code is valid through March 14th, 2024. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 189 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 23rd, 2024 and today we are talking about the return of Caina Kardamnos. Before we get to our main topics, we will have Coupon of the Week and then an update on my current writing projects. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Inferno, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Inferno for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERINFERNO and that is WINTERINFERNO. The coupon code is valid through March the 14th, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums and weather, we've got one ready for you. So now for a progress update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is out at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, since I have found that LitRPG books tend to do the best while they're in Kindle Unlimited. It is going a little better than expected, which is nice, and if you want to check out the book, you can read it at Amazon. My main writing project now is Ghost in the Veils, hence The Return of Caina Kardamnos title for this episode and I am 25,000 words into it, which puts me on Chapter 6 of 21. I am also 31,000 words into Wizard Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series and that should come out after Ghost in the Veils. I'm also 3,000 words into Cloak of Titans, the next Nadia book. So the order these will all come out in is Ghost in the Veils needs to come out first because it has recording slot scheduled for the middle of April. So it needs to be done and out by then. I will finish Wizard Thief after that and then Cloak of Titans. In an audiobook news, the recording and proofing for Shield of Storms’ audiobook is done, and it's currently working its way through quality assurance on the various platforms, so hopefully it should be available on your audio platform of choice before much longer. 00:02:07 Reader Comments and Questions Now, before we get to our main topic, let's have a few questions and comments from listeners and readers. Reader NK asks: Hi, I would like to know what LitRPG is. Haven't come across it before and also do we need to complete reading the Sevenfold Sword series before Sevenfold Sword Online to better enjoy this story? In answer your question NK, LitRPG is generally defined as a story that uses the conventions and structures of online role-playing games like MMORPGs. They can be either fantasy or science fiction or blend a bit of both. Typically in these stories, either the protagonist is magically zapped into a game world or is playing the game while trying to balance some sort of crisis in both the game and real life, which is the approach I took for Sevenfold Sword Online. In answer to the second half of your question, Sevenfold Sword Online isn't actually connected to Sevenfold Sword. The premise is that it's 700 years in the future and that an evil corporation has built a hit virtual reality MMORPG using the books of a long dead author (i.e. me) as source material for the setting. In hindsight, I wish I had made the setting completely unconnected to anything else I had written, because it seems to confuse some readers, but too late now I suppose so, hopefully that will answer your question. Now we have a question from reader Justin. For context for that question, I recently had to get a new desktop computer after my old one died and this is in fact the first podcast episode I am recording using the new computer. So if it sounds really weird, I blame the computer, or more accurately, I probably should blame Windows 11. But anyway, with that in mind, here is our question from Justin: Good luck to you with your new computer. I switched to laptops for my computing needs. The lower power draw and portability are handy when you're going off grid. I'm used to you working on three series at once. You put that up a notch. Is this to reduce burnout and possibly writer’s block? In answer to that question, the reason I got a desktop was because I do a lot of cover design and graphic design, which is not always the greatest on laptops because that needs a lot of processing power, a lot of RAM, and perhaps most importantly, a lot of storage. In answer to the writing question, the only thing that's changed is I'm not doing a Ridmark and Andomhaim book every other month. I am going to keep writing Ridmark and books set in Andomhaim but I’ve been writing a Ridmark/Andomhaim book every other month pretty much since summer 2013, so I'd like to change it up a little bit and do more of other things. So while I am going to continue the Shield Wars series and I am going to write Shield of Darkness soon, I'm not going to start writing it until after Cloak of Titans is done, if you remember my order of projects from earlier in the show. I don't feel at risk of burnout or getting exasperated with writing. I just have been writing Ridmark and Andomhaim setting for so long that while I would like to continue writing that I would like to write more of other things as I go along. 00:05:08 Main Topic: The Return of Caina Kardamnos Now to our main topic: the return of Caina Kardamnos. As I mentioned earlier on the show, I'm now 25,000 words into Ghost in the Veils, which puts me also at chapter six in the second book of the Ghost Armor Series, the immediate sequel to Ghost in the Serpent from late 2023. I have to admit that when I finished Ghost in the Sun in the Ghost Night series in 2021 (I believe that was), I thought I was done with Caina. The reason for that was I just didn't have any idea of what to where to go or what to do with the character after Ghost Night. Part of that, I admit, was that Caina had become powerful and influential and I am cynically suspicious of people like that and wasn't sure I could write someone like that as a protagonist. Though that was less a concern as I went on since writing Ridmark and Tyrcamber, and Dragontiarna and then Dragonskull and the Shield War gave me a good bit of practice. So I finally had a good enough idea to return to Caina as a protagonist, and I think it was a confluence of four different ideas. The first idea was perhaps the most obvious one: what if Caina found out she had stepchildren? There are lots of potential story dynamics with stepchildren, but I thought the most interesting setup would be if Kylon had children he didn't know about and the mother Kalliope Agramemnos had kept them secret from him, except Kylon loves Caina and Kalliope is in awe of Caina. So Caina, out of necessity, becomes the linchpin holding this family together, since neither Kylon nor Kalliope can stand each other. There are a lot of potential character arcs and conflicts that can be generated in the inherent tension of that situation. The second core idea came from medieval nobles. If you've read any histories of medieval Europe, one of the main themes of the Middle Ages is that men primarily wielded the political and military power. But some women, by sheer force of will, charisma, tenacity, and cunning came to wield great power themselves. There are in fact quite a few examples. Probably the most famous one nowadays would be Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was married to two different kings and the mother to two more or three (depending on how you count and if you include Henry II’s eldest son, Young Henry, as the actual king or not). She kept her son Richard on the throne of England during his captivity after the Third Crusade and she was one of the chief architects of his release. Had Eleanor lived longer, and her son John listened to more of her advice, probably King John's reign would have been more successful and he would not be remembered primarily in the United States as the cowardly Prince John from that one animated Disney movie with the anthropomorphic animals. Perhaps the most successful example is Margaret Beaufort, who basically engineered her son Henry VII’s ascension to the English throne at the end of the Wars of the Roses, and then served as one of his primary advisors for the entirety of his reign. In fact, she even outlived Henry VII by a year and then lived long enough to advise her grandson Henry VIII for the first year after he became king. A less successful example and contemporary with Margaret Beaufort, would be Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI and mother of his heir. Margaret of Anjou was one of the driving forces behind the Wars of the Roses but lost everything when her husband and son were killed and she died in poverty in France while her enemy Edward IV ruled in England. Blanche of Castile was her son Louis IX’s regent when he went on crusade. Countess Matilda of Tuscany helped force the settlement in the Investiture Controversy and the Holy Roman Emperor, the southern dukes of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Pope all wanted Matilda as their ally. Perhaps the most striking example would be Sichelgaita of Lombardy, wife of the rapacious Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard. Guiscard started out as a penniless, landless knight and ended up conquering Sicily and a lot of Italy. He was known as greedy, cunning, and ruthless. His eventual tomb had the epitaph “Here lies Guiscard, the terror of the world.” It seems that Sichelgaita was in every way suited to be the wife of a freebooting warlord like her husband. Guiscard fought a lot of wars and Sichelgaita usually donned armor to battle alongside him. At the Battle of Durham in 1081 Guiscard’s troops started to break and run while fighting the soldiers of the Byzantine Empire. Sichelgaita rode after the fleeing troops, berating them for their cowardice, and evidently the prospect of her displeasure was so fearsome that Guiscard’s troops turned around and won the battle. It should also be known at this point in her life, Sichelgaita was in her forties and had borne Giscard eight children, so clearly a very resilient lady. So now that Caina is powerful and influential maybe historical events like these can provide inspirations for plot lines. Caina would still occasionally put on a shadow cloak and go out and break into places because this is, after all, a fantasy novel. The third idea was that someone must be in charge. I mentioned earlier that I had misgivings about writing protagonists with power and influence, but I've come to realize that is an incomplete view. The thing about power and influence is that someone is going to be in charge. It's just human nature. No matter how something is organized, someone must be in charge and bear the burden of leadership, and hopefully it will be someone with an eye on the greater good. I've thought about this concept a lot in 2023. I know several people in 2023 who, after much agonizing, left some of the traditional helping professions like medicine and education not because of dislike of the admittedly stressful work, but because the leadership was so stupid and so malicious as to create an unsustainable work environment. Like a leader can be stupid and well-intentioned, and a leader can be malicious and clever and an organization can still function, but stupidity and malice together are unsustainable. Alas, the contemporary United States and United Kingdom have no shortage of malicious and stupid leadership, but that's beyond the scope of the podcast about writing. So in the end, someone is going to be in charge, someone is going to have to wield power and influence. Hopefully it is someone who will act in the name of the greater good (I already did some of that with Caina in Ghost in the Council towards the second half of the Ghost Night series). That can make, in my opinion, for in a compelling protagonist. Fourth and finally, fantasy creatures. Way back in the 2000s when I was originally trying to sell the first Caina novels, all the agents and publishers fulminated on how they didn't want to see any novels with traditional fantasy creatures like elves and orcs and dwarves and serpent men and so forth. So when I wrote the kind of books I wrote them without any of that, which continued when I moved into self-publishing, though I was always a little sore about that, even years later. Now I think I have a firm enough grasp on the setting that I can introduce some traditional fantasy creatures into the Caina books, hopefully in a way that makes sense within the context of Caina 's very well-established world. So those four ideas came together for Ghost in the Serpent, and we shall hopefully see more of them in Ghost in the Veils. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. Our reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com and many of them now have transcripts (note: Episodes 144-189 currently have transcripts). If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at different models of ereader devices and try to determine which is the best one. I also reflect on the experience of watching the Super Bowl for the first time in several years. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE RAZOR as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE RAZOR for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERRAZOR The coupon code is valid through March 1st, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we’ve got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 188 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 16th 2024 as I record this, and today we are looking at the best ereader devices. I also talk a little bit about what it was like to watch the Super Bowl for the first time in like 20 years. Just a little word of warning, there is some fairly substantial construction noise going on the street outside that may intrude in the background. Additionally, yesterday the computer I use for recording for received a Windows Update that messed it up rather severely, and the processor is constantly maxing out, which means it makes a loud fan noise. So if you hear hissing noise in the background, that is what is happening. I just haven't had time to fix it yet, so between the construction noise and that hissing noise, we are going to have an adventuresome podcast today. Before we get to our main topics, let us do Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is going to be for the audiobook of Ghost in the Razor, as excellently narrated by narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Razor for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERRAZOR. That is WINTERRAZOR and that will be included in the show notes. That coupon code will be valid until March 1st, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got one ready for you. Now let's have some updates on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, the second book in my LitRPG series, is now out and you can get it at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. After a year’s worth of sales data from the first book, I have concluded that LitRPG really does seem to perform best in Kindle Unlimited and audio so that is where it's going to go. It's currently in Kindle Unlimited and hopefully we should have audio in a few months, but we'll see how that works out and remind you that it’s at Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. I'm not sure how long the series is going to be. I am leaning towards making it a trilogy and wrapping it up with the next book, but we will see how Leveling performs for the first 30 days it's out in the marketplace and maybe it would merit becoming a longer series, but if it sells at the level I expected it to, I think it will probably be trilogy. My next big project will be Ghost in the Veils, the second book in the Ghost Armor series with Caina, and I am 8,000 words into that, putting me on Chapter 2 and hopefully that will come out towards the end of March. It does need to come out before April because that's when I have a recording slot scheduled for it, so it does need to come out by then, so it's going to come out by then. I'm also about 26,000 words into Wizard Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and hopefully that will come out fairly quickly after Ghost in the Veils comes out. I am also writing the outline for Cloak of Titans, which would be the eleventh Cloak Mage book, and that will be my main project after Ghost in the Veils and Wizard Thief are out. In audiobook news, recording is underway for Shield of Storms, and hopefully that should be out in March sometime, but we will see how things go. 00:03:17 Reader Comment Before we get to our main topics, let's have a comment from a reader. James says: having just finished the Dragonskull series while waiting for Cloak of Titans, I thought how great it would be if there’s a short story about Gareth’s return home with Niara would be. His mother's reaction would be precious. Just starting on the Sevenfold Sword series. I love all your books and you have totally taken over my Kindle. Thanks, James. I am glad you have enjoyed all those books. In answer to your question, that is a fairly major part of the plot in Shield of Storms, where Gareth and companions return home. Just the difference is in the Shield War series, Gareth and his friends aren't the main characters. They're supporting characters and Ridmark is one of the main characters.   00:03:57 Thoughts on the 2024 Super Bowl Now let's talk about something a bit uncharacteristic: The Super Bowl. I did something I haven't done since the early 2000s, and I watched the entirety of The Super Bowl last week. The reason I did that was that some family members wanted to watch it, and I had no objection. So I watched The Super Bowl. Though to be fair, when I say watched, what I really mean is I had it on in the background while playing Icewind Dale on my iPad for the most part, along with some Skyrim on my Switch. I admit that when I was younger and more insufferable, I would make a point of refusing to watch The Super Bowl. Then I realized such an approach was self-defeating. Professional football is no better or worse than any other form of recreation. Additionally, connecting with people socially is not among my strengths, and very often sports discussions are the low hanging fruit of easy social engagement. That said, I don't exactly pay close attention to professional sports, so here is what I found interesting about The Super Bowl as an outsider, so to speak. I think an observer completely unfamiliar with American culture and professional sports, upon watching The Super Bowl, would conclude it was a 3 1/2 hour block of commercials infrequently broken up by two-minute clips of football. That said, the Christopher Walken commercial was the funniest one and also the one with Dunkin' Donuts. The NFL may not be a cartel in the strict legal definition of the term, but we all know it's totally a cartel, which is a pretty sweet position to be in because you have massive corporations like Apple and Verizon shelling out big bucks. So it's the Apple Music Halftime Show or the Verizon Pregame Show or whatever. I do think from an objective viewpoint that it is rather surprising that football became the predominant sporting event in America. And I think the reason has to do with the football commissioners rather foresightedly seeing the potential of broadcast television in the 1950s and the 1960s. American football, if you look at it from the outside, is this really weird mutant form of rugby with a lot of arcane terminology and non-intuitive rules, and compared to soccer or basketball, it's just a very slow and plodding game. There's 15 seconds of action and then everyone stands around for two or three minutes. It's time for a commercial break, brought to you by Verizon. Soccer and basketball are much faster paced If American football is the imperial system, then European football/soccer is the metric system that everybody else in the world uses. I suspect to really appreciate American football, you have to get into it as a child and grow up with it so all the weird rules become second nature, which is probably why the NFL embraced Taylor Swift so much this year, which did annoy some long-term NFL fans who are not fans of Swift's music. I don't really have an opinion on Taylor Swift one way or another, since I mostly listen to computer game soundtracks, that is my preferred musical genre. But like I said above, I think to really appreciate American football you have to grow up with it. Football doesn't quite have the cultural hegemony it had in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. It's still massively popular, but more and more parents are keeping their kids away from playing it because of the danger of long-term head injuries or because of all the many sketchy things the NFL has done over the years. Though, to be fair, it's not like FIFA is a paragon of business ethics either, so you have more young people who don't grow up with it and therefore can't be bothered to pay attention. But Swift is popular with the young people, and the NFL desperately wants more of the young people watching the games. I don't think the Super Bowl or the NFL season is scripted in advance, but I can definitely see how people come to that conclusion, partly because the NFL's broadcasts are so slick and media savvy that they feel like they should be scripted. I think it's mostly because the human brain has this tendency to see systems and order where there is in fact, nothing more than chaos. Though this year's Super Bowl game was so dramatic, with the Chiefs squeaking out a win in overtime, that it feels like it should have been written in advance. Finally, are football and professional sports the modern “bread and circuses” like they had in the Roman Empire? Maybe. But if they are, is that necessarily even a bad thing? If you look at history, every large civilization has had games and public spectacles as part of the maintenance of social and public order. Some aspect of human psychology really seems to require it. There's lots to criticize about the NFL, but it's certainly better than a lot of the stuff the Romans got up to or early medieval tournaments, which were mock battles that sometimes escalated into actual battles that turned into actual local wars. Perhaps modern professional sports or a more efficient and usually more bloodless method of public spectacle. So I don't really have any grand conclusions here, just observations from an outsider’s perspective made while watching the Super Bowl and mostly playing Icewind Dale on my iPad, though I am pleased to report that in Icewind Dale during The Super Bowl I defeated an ogre with a bunch of Level 1 characters and my thief and my cleric both leveled up during the game. When I talked about this on my Facebook page, my readers had some good comments, so I thought I'd read a few of the few of few of them here.   00:09:11 Reader Comments on the 2024 Super Bowl Our first comments from William, who writing from the perspective of someone in the UK, says: I've seen the Super Bowl described as one of the great shared cultural experiences of the US and one of those times you can enjoy American football even if you're not really into the sport otherwise. It's one of those times you get together with family acquaintances you have few, if any common interests with. I think that's true and that's some good insight there. An opposing comment comes from reader named Mary, who says: I grew up breathing NFL. My sons played football through high school. As an adult, I watched consistently until I moved to an area without many services. Went four years without TV. Ordered a new streaming device and service. I hoped to bring some of those great memories forward. My goodness, what a disappointment. The commercials are heavily pharma-based or bad food. Gambling is another frequent advertisement. You're correct, the advertising is the point. I spend most of my free time reading, a much more immersive experience. Cancelled my service today with relief. So we can also see that the emphasis on ads during The Super Bowl and I think during regular football games as well, really does turn off some viewers. I definitely approve of reading as someone's main form of recreation, though I admit that might be a bit of self-interest on my part. 00:10:24 Main Topic: Best ereaders for 2024 in the US Now let's continue on to our main topic: the best ereaders available for 2024 in the US market. A couple of notes before we start. This is not sponsored. There are no affiliate links here. I'm not getting paid for anything I say here and these are just my opinions and research we are talking about on the show today. Because technology changes so quickly, I want to emphasize that this is current information or current information to the best of my ability as of February 2024, and since I'm based in the US, this mostly applies to the US market. It's definitely a good idea to do your own research when you're buying an electronic device, especially regarding specs, and especially if you have very specialized needs. The information was pulled together with a lot of help from my podcast transcriptionist by combing through user reviews and looking at testing from popular magazines such as Consumer Reports, Wired, PC Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and similar magazines. So I suppose we should start with the obvious question. Why have a dedicated ereader when you can easily read ebooks on your phone or tablet? An ereader does have several advantages that you don't get with a phone or a tablet. For one thing, it's lighter. It's easier to use with one hand, which, depending on the size of your tablet or phone, may be impossible. It also helps with eye strain if you're using a dedicated grayscale ereader. It doesn't have a backlight or it has a much weaker backlight than a tablet or phone will have, and therefore it is generally easier on the eyes, though that can vary from person to person. And it can also help you to focus on reading and minimize distractions, because if you're reading on a tablet or a phone, you might get a lot of notifications coming in from text messages or emails or social media and all that, all of which can pull you out of the book you are trying to read. So if you are a serious reader and you don't mind reading ebooks, it can be definitely worth your while to have a dedicated ereader. So let's look at the most popular model of ereader, which of course in the US and several other countries is the Amazon Kindle. In general, Kindles are superbly integrated with the Amazon ecosystem, but they generally don't work well with non-Amazon or non-Kindle products. I've run into that a few times myself on my Payhip store (which hopefully you will visit soon to get your discounted copy of the audiobook of Ghost in the Razor). I often have to include several different kinds of file formats to work with whatever generation of Kindle people might be using. Additionally, if you use your local library’s ebook service and they use Libby, not all Libby books are available for Kindles. A couple of times I've run into that, where I want to check out an ebook from Libby and it turns out that it's not available for Kindle, which is kind of disappointing because then you have to read it on your phone, which defeats the purpose of this episode. For specific Kindle models, the Kindle Oasis seems to be the high end one, and because it has the strongest backlight, it is considered generally best for reading at night. The Kindle Paperwhite seems to be overall the best reviewed and most popular model. It is lightweight. It weighs less than half a pound and it is waterproof. It has strong reviews from many review publications like Wired and Good Housekeeping and has a major fan following. Finally, the perhaps most esoteric Kindle ereader would be the Kindle Scribe. It's the biggest one, designed for note taking. So that's something that interests you that might be worth investigating, though it would be harder to hold the Kindle Scribe with one hand. After the Kindles, probably the most popular model of ereader in the US is the Kobo family. I'm a big fan of Kobo. Most of my books are available on Kobo, and most of them are also in Kobo Plus, their subscription program. In general, Kobos are best for people who do a lot of side loading, which involves taking ebook files and loading them manually onto your device and people who want a lot of customization. The one weakness of Kobo is that we're not entirely sure how well it will work with the various library services. The OverDrive app is being retired in favor of Libby and Kobo relies heavily on OverDrive because Kobo's parent company, Rakuten, used to own OverDrive for a while until they sold it off. So with OverDrive going away in favor of Libby, it's sort of an open question how well Kobos will integrate with library services in the future. Additionally, it's important to note that audiobooks and magazines from Libby are not presently available for Kobo devices. Hopefully that will change in the future, but that is the case right now. For specific models of the Kobo, Eclipsa is considered the best for people who like to take notes and annotate the actual pages, and it has the feature where you can convert handwriting to type text and then export those notes to Dropbox. The Kobo Clara model is the budget option that still has waterproofing, which is different from the Kindle base model, which doesn't. The Paperwhite does. I don't think the Oasis has waterproofing, but the Kindle Paperwhite does. If you are one of those people who likes to read in the bath and you drop your ereader, hopefully it will survive the immersion till you get it out of the water. Clara does have that waterproofing feature. The most popular model seems to be the Kobo Libra and it's best for those who are not locked into the Amazon ecosystem or another specific vendor. It has a very loyal cult following. It has physical page turn buttons, for those who prefer that feature, and it is highly regarded for its screen clarity. It also has very good battery life, which again is one of those strengths of ereaders over phones and tablets, which tend to be charging every other day, especially because the Libra settings allow you to easily shut off the Wi-Fi, dial back the lighting, and so forth to extend the battery life. So Kindle and Kobo are the big ones, but there's a couple others we should address. One of them is the Nook Glowlight, which is the current ereader available from Barnes and Noble. The tricky part with Barnes and Noble is that while they do have ebooks, it is not really a priority for the the company's current management, which has chosen to focus primarily on physical bookselling and which has apparently kept Barnes and Noble from going bankrupt. So good thing. But they're not hugely as interested in ebooks as they used to be. The Glowlight is best for those who have a lot of Barnes and Noble gift cards to use, since that's a popular present or who already have a lot of ebooks from Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately, it does not integrate very well with public library software like Libby. It can be done, but it is a lot of work and not nearly as easy as it is with the Kindle or the Kobos. And there are complaints of system problems like it's difficult to set up or prone to freezing. Another popular but niche ebook reader is the Onyx Boox Tab, which is a tablet with a color E ink display and the picture quality resembles color newspapers (for those of you who are old enough to remember when newspapers had color pictures). It has a loyal cult following, especially with comics and manga readers, and it has good note taking features. However, the big weakness is it is expensive and costs around $600.00 USD. Now, while we've mostly focused on dedicated ereaders, the truth is that tablets can in fact be very good ereaders if you know what you want and you know what you want to use them for. The advantages tablets have over ereaders is that they are more versatile than ereaders. And if, like nearly all of us, you are on a budget and limited what you can spend, which, let's be honest, is true of everybody, it may make more sense to buy a device that can do many things instead of an ereader which can do just one thing. Tablets are also good for those who aren't committed to a single source for their ebooks. You can easily download apps for all of the main ebook stores on an iPad. You can have the Kindle app, the Barnes and Noble app, the Kobo app, and a bunch of library services such as Libby and Hoopla, and you can enjoy them all on one device. Tablets are also good for those who enjoy reading manga or magazines often because if you have a color display, you can see the illustrations that come in a magazine or an ebook that has a lot of color illustrations, like a technical manual or a history book that has a lot of color plates, and the larger screens minimize the need for constantly zooming text. This is something I have done myself. I have a Kindle Fire HD-10 and I also have a bunch of various PDFs I bought from the Pathfinder company from a Humble Bundle and it's a lot easier to read PDFs in color on a Kindle Fire than it is on a dedicated ereader because you can move around the page easily. The screen is big enough you can see most of the text. You can see all the illustrations in color. It's really nice. So let's take a look at the specific families of tablets and nowadays, for all practical purposes, there are three major tablet families. The first and the most successful one is the iPad. Everyone knows what the iPad is. It's the best device for those who want to use it for web browsing, media use, and ebook reading. The iPad Pro models are rather overpowered for normal reading and web browsing and media use. They're also quite a bit more expensive. The base model iPad is the cheapest it's ever been. I think as of right now, as of this recording you get a base model iPad for about $329, which while a lot of money, is still significantly cheaper than has been in the past. And it also is a very capable device that can do everything we've listed above. The second major family is the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is generally well regarded and is the iPad's chief competitor, and it gets high reports for reliability and performance from all the reviews. You get access to the full Google Play Store so you can install a bunch of apps and you can get all the different ereader apps and all the different library apps on Samsung Galaxy Tab. The third major tablet family is Amazon Fire tablet line. I have one and I'm quite happy with it. It's better for those who play games or watch videos heavily, since it's very strongly tied into Amazon's media ecosystem. So it does make a pretty good portable video player if you are tied into Amazon's Prime Video ecosystem. It's not as convenient for sideloaders, and the biggest weakness of the Amazon Fire is that you only have access to Amazon's curated App Store. You don't have access to the full Google Play ecosystem, which is a lot bigger and more vibrant than Amazon's App Store. Very often you will find popular Android and iOS apps that are available for regular Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy or for the iPad are just not available on the Amazon Fire. So I'd say overall that's it’s biggest weakness. It is possible to install the Google Play Store on the Amazon Fire, though, it does take a bit of finagling, and given the rumors that that Amazon is planning to develop its own operating system for its Fire tablets, that option may go away in the future. So that is something to bear in mind. And I thought it would be interesting to wrap up the show by sharing what I personally use for ereading and what my podcast transcriptionist personally uses for ereading, since she did most of the research for this episode and helped me pull it all together. The transcriptionist’s favorites that she likes are the Kindle Paperwhite for outdoor reading. It's easier than eyes on the eyes than the tablet screen. She prefers the iPad for magazines and books with lots of color photographs, like cookbooks. For myself, I do most of my reading on a Kindle Oasis that I bought before COVID broke out in 2020, which, given the amount of reading I did during COVID, turned out to be a really good investment. After four and a half years, it's still going pretty strong and I'm hoping to keep on using it for several years to come. For a tablet, I have an iPad that I use pretty regularly. I do some reading on it when I have some with a lot of photographs, though for most color reading I have a Kindle Fire 10 that I got for editing because in my final stage of editing my books, I use it to read the book aloud to catch anything weird and hopefully fix any lingering problems, but it's also really great for viewing full color PDF files because you can load the PDFs on the Kindle Fire and then they show up in your library. It's very easy and convenient and smooth to read them on the Kindle Fire HD-10. So that is what I personally use for ereading. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes of the show with frequent transcripts on https://thepulpwritershow.com. Speaking of transcripts, I'd like to once again thank my transcriptionist for helping me to do the research for this episode. So if you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at tips & tricks for avoiding procrastination while writing. This week's coupon is for the ebook of DRAGONTIARNA OMNIBUS ONE, which you can get for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERDRAGON The coupon code is valid through March 2nd, 2024. So if you're looking for a very long fantasy book to read, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 187 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 8th, 2024 and today we are looking at tips and tricks to stop procrastinating so you can get your writing done. We'll also have Coupon of the Week, updates on my current writing projects, and a few questions and comments from readers. First off, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the ebook of Dragontiarna Omnibus One, which you can get for 50% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERDRAGON. That is WINTERDRAGON and that will also be in the show notes for this episode, along with the links. The coupon code is valid through March the 2nd, 2024. So if you're looking for a very long fantasy book to read, we have got you covered. Now for updates on my current writing projects. The rough draft of Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is done and I have made good progress on the editing. I am very confident (well, mostly confident) that I will be able to get the book out before the end of February. So watch my websites and listen to this podcast for future updates. I've also written a short story called Damage Per Second that is an accompaniment to the book and newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of the short story when Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling comes out later this month. I am also on Chapter 2 of Ghost in the Veils, which I think puts me at 5,500 words or thereabouts and that will be my main project as soon as Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is done. I am also 25,000 words into Wizard Thief, which will be the sequel to Half-Elven Thief and that hopefully will come out before too much longer after Ghost in the Veils is done. In audiobook news, recording for Shield of Storms is underway. We've listened to some chapters of it and it's looking good, and hopefully that will be out in March sometime. Now a couple of comments and questions from readers. Our first comment is from Cyril, who asks: Have just read all the books in the Silent Order series. Could not put them down. The storylines followed from on from book to book and did not jump about all over the place, backwards and forwards like some of the writers do these days. Any more thoughts on sci-fi books in the future? Will try some of your other works but my main interest is sci-fi. Keep writing. Thanks, Cyril. I'm glad you like the books. In answer to your question, I am not presently planning any new science fiction books, but neither am I saying no to the possibility after I wrap up some of my current ongoing series. Maybe the next series will be a science fiction one. We will see when I get there. Our next question is from Alice who asks: Hi. I love your books but have dyslexia and so listen via audio. So I was wondering what of your books are in audio and what of them you have planned to have done an audio. I just hate starting the series to find out half of it is not in audio. Thanks, Alice. In answer to your question, the completed series that I have an audio would be Frostborn, Sevenfold Sword, Dragontiarna, Dragonskull, Malison, The Ghosts, and Ghost Exile. All those series are complete. Some other ones are ongoing, but they are not complete yet and won't be complete yet for a while. So if you want to listen to completed audiobook series, the ones I just listed off are the best place to start. 00:03:32 Main Topic: Avoiding Procrastination Now let's go on to our main topic this week, which is something I've noticed many writers struggle with, not with just writing, but in many areas of life: procrastination. Why do people procrastinate when they should be writing? And what can we do about it? What can we do to address that? It's a very common, writerly trope that at last I will have two free hours available to write, so it's time to start vacuuming the carpet or to clean the kitchen or to do laundry or do anything except get the words down on paper or the word processor. So let's take a look at why writers procrastinate and what we can do to address those problems. So first off, we need to understand the root causes of procrastinating. Procrastination is generally a short term reward that doesn't feel like a reward. It should feel like you're giving yourself a break, but you're not actually removing the cause of the stress, so you're not actually solving the problem. What will actually make you feel better is the achievement of doing something, even if it's an incremental gain or a small improvement. So what causes people to seek out this short term break in the form of procrastination? One of them is our good old friend perfectionism, also known as the Nirvana Fallacy, where if something cannot be made perfect, there's no point in attempting it, which overlooks the fact (since it's a logical fallacy) that forty percent of a good thing is better than 0 percent of a good thing. Another way people tend to lean on the Nirvana Fallacy that way is if I can't write X number of words per day, there's no point in even doing it, whether that number is, you know 1,000 or 5,000 or whatever. But that overlooks the fact that you know 500 words or 3,000 words or even just 1,000 words or 100 words is still better than 0. Another root cause of procrastination is fear of failure, where people think they won't be able to finish a book or write a good book, so they should wait until they could or they can't market a book or make a billion dollars from one, so they shouldn't bother writing one (which again, is the Nirvana Fallacy right there) or the belief that everything you write is trash, so you just re-edit what you've written over and over again rather than writing new words. This is just something that has to be overcome emotionally. Every writer at any point of any project they've ever written will at some times feel that what they're writing is complete nonsense and they should stop. You just have to learn to ignore this feeling and keep moving. Another root cause of procrastination is the siren call of side quests or busywork, where you can get caught up in planning or outlining or creating series bibles or doing research for your book, or buying software or supplies without a clear plan to actually use them, or reading about writing, watching Tik Toks about writing. All these things give you the illusion of writing, but they don't actually get you anywhere. Some of those activities may be necessary and you may have to do them, but they are not helping you get words down on the page. For example, in a couple of weeks I'm going to have to take an entire day to get my tax paperwork organized and sent into the accountants for tax season. That's going to be a very busy day. That's going to be some work, but it doesn't count as writing and it is very easy to fall through the trap of seeing all these various side projects or support projects for writing as writing, but they're not actually getting any writing done. For this kind of thing to avoid it, it's best to set a clear time limit for these types of activities and do not count them as part of your writing time or writing progress. Now let's look at a couple of different strategies to address these root causes and to defeat them or at least circumvent them. One common tactic is to break down a large and complicated task into smaller pieces. Start with a very small word count that can be done quickly and feels easy like 50 or 100 words, not something larger. There's this book called Atomic Habits by a guy named James Clear that explains the process of breaking down goals into very small pieces and I've seen that strategy work very well for some people. So if you want further details on it, that book would probably be a good place to start. Another useful technique is to change your expectations, or just do it. For example, no editing as you write, no going back and trying to fix what you just wrote. Just get it all down on the page as fast as you can and when the rough draft is done, that's when you go back and edit. Some find the exercises of morning pages from the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron helpful, where you do three pages of stream of consciousness writing every day with no editing, no filtering, no self-criticism. Just get it on the page and then move on. It's also a very good idea to avoid writing adjacent activities during writing time, such as outlining or research or answering emails or social media. All those other various things that can be necessary but sometimes turn into a time sink. Another useful technique is to build a focused environment for your writing. Now, what does that mean? You may want to pick a spot with no physical distractions, such as a spot with no TV, definitely no video games, maybe a place where a lot of people don't walk by (like the spare bedroom in your house), or if you're writing at a university or in public, maybe like a library carrel or a quiet floor of the library away from the main floor. You also want a spot possibly that's away from clutter where you're not seeing other chores you have to do, like bills to pay or laundry to do or that kind of thing. For some people, being around ambient noise or being around other people does actually help them work. This is really not the case for me. I have written large quantities of all my books in coffee shops or doctor’s waiting rooms or other waiting rooms, as I wait to pick people up or to meet people. But it's not something I seek out and I only do it when circumstances compel me to do it. I would rather be writing quietly at my desk with no one around. However, not everyone works that way, and some people actually do derive energy from being around other people who are working. So you could go to a busier area of the library, like a chair or table on the main floor or a coffee shop and write there along with many other people who derive enjoyment from doing that. One key part of building a focused environment is managing tech distractions. While writing, you may want to turn off the Wi-Fi because that reduces the temptation to just, you know, casually check something on Wikipedia and then get caught in a Wikipedia spiral for the next half hour. You may want to create a phone setting that allows calls or messages only from certain contacts to come through. Sometimes when people write they want to turn their phone off, but they don't because they're worried an emergency call from, you know, a friend or family member might come in. So there are options where you can configure your phone to only let messages from your contacts through while blocking you from getting on, you know, Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or any of the other social media time sinks. There are a variety of different phone and browser modes that can be set to limit certain apps or sites or notifications and so forth, because phone addiction is definitely something people struggle with when procrastinating and writers are no different. Another method of battling procrastination is with routine and planned times for writing. It can be helpful to pick a specific time every day and stick to it. If you're going to do this, it's best if you pick a realistic time. Just don't decide right, I'm going to get up at 4:30 in the morning every day and write, because you're probably not going to if you're not already getting up at 4:30 in the morning anyway. If you try that, you'll probably get up at 4:30 once or twice, get too tired to continue, and that will be that. It's probably better to pick a different time in the day. Mornings and lunch breaks tend to work well for a lot of people, since people generally have less willpower as the day goes on and many people have very tiring jobs where they just want to get home, eat some dinner, and then watch some Netflix and go to bed. For myself, I used to write quite a bit on lunch breaks back in the day and that can be a very useful tool for getting some writing done. Time blocking or the Pomodoro Method can be very helpful. I use Pomodoro a lot when writing my books lately, pretty much since oh, like 2019 or so. The Pomodoro Method is where you set a timer and then you spend 25 minutes working on your task to the exclusion of everything else. You take a 5 minute break, then you do another 25 minutes of working on your task to the exclusion of all else with, you know, Wi-Fi off and everything, and then you take a 10 minute break and repeat until you are done or you run out of time and have to do something else. I have found Pomodoro to be very helpful, to the point where on my desk I have a dedicated tomato shaped timer because Pomodoro is Italian for tomato. If your brain works like mine, Pomodoro might be very helpful. Another useful way to avoid procrastination is accountability. You can find an accountability partner in a writers group or find a friend to text your daily word count to. Generally family members, spouses, and romantic partners tend not to work out terribly well as accountability partners for a variety of reasons, so you may be better off using a friend or someone from a dedicated writers group. Writing groups can be helpful. It depends very strongly on the nature of the group. Some of them are very helpful. Some of them have the typical toxic dynamics you often find in a dysfunctional small group, so if you feel a writing group is not right for you, there is no reason to stick around. But there's a variety of different ways you can find writing groups. Many of them meet online or on Facebook. And the final way to avoid procrastination is, if possible, make the task pleasant. Find an environment you enjoy writing in: comfortable, good lighting, comfortable chair, or a chair to enforce a good posture (if you prefer). Some people even set up a separate writing desktop in Windows 11 with its own special background and settings to make them more focused for writing and to remove the habit of, you know, just checking Facebook or Wikipedia or the news for a few minutes. It's often a good idea to pair writing with a task you enjoy, such as drinking coffee. If you have a walking desk or treadmill, you can very often walk slowly and write at the same time. Many people enjoy that and also it's good for physical health as well. If you do enjoy walking and you're willing to dictate, Kevin J. Anderson has an excellent book called On Being a Dictator where he describes his method of using dictation to get his writing done, where he'll take long walks near his house, dictate into a digital recorder, and later pay a transcriptionist is to transcribe it into a Word document so he can edit it. Finally, perhaps one of the most effective techniques for avoiding procrastination is bribery. We all know bribery makes the world go round, whether we admit it or not. Build in a reward, like for 10,000 words, you get a break. Or if you have a streak for X number of days, you can get a treat like new pens or a new notebook or a game or something like that. So it's often a good idea to build in rewards for tasks you might otherwise put off. So those are all our tips and tricks for avoiding procrastination, and I hope you will find them helpful. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a quick thanks to my transcriptionist, who helped me gather all the data for this episode. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at five book marketing tactics that readers hate, along with five ones they usually enjoy. I also take a look at my advertising results for January 2024. For this Coupon of the Week we're doing one of my older books, specifically the entire TOWER OF ENDLESS WORLDS series. If you use this coupon at my Payhip store, you can get 50% all the ebooks on the entire series: WINTERTOWER The coupon code is valid until February 22nd, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 186 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February the 2nd, 2024. Today we're going to talk about five marketing tactics that readers hate. We'll also discuss my ad results for January 2024 and have an update on my current writing projects and have it a reader question or two in the mix. As a side note, this is the first time ever I am recording this podcast on Windows 11. I finally upgraded my desktop computer to Windows 11 in an effort to solve a driver problem that I've been having. It was something with my video driver where it had stopped receiving or the manufacturer had stopped putting out updates for Windows 10 but Windows 11 drivers were available. I've been putting that off for like two years, but I finally thought, well, nothing else has worked. Let's try and upgrade this desktop to Windows 11 and I'm pleased to report that it seems to have in fact fixed my video driver problem, so I am pleased with that. Hopefully it won't totally screw up the recording of this podcast, but I can see the file increasing in size as I record this, so I assume that it is in fact being successfully recorded. First up, let's do Coupon of the Week and this time we're doing Coupon of the Week for one of my older series, specifically the entire Tower of Endless World Series now that we finally have those up on Payhip. The problem was I had created those ebooks way back in 2012 when the software wasn't quite as nice, so I wasn't happy with the formatting, so it was a side project over a week or two to rip apart the formatting and get them all uploaded and you know looking nice, but that's done. If you use this coupon at my Payhip store you can get 50% off the ebooks in the entire series and that is WINTERTOWER and that will be WINTERTOWER, again, that's WINTERTOWER and you can find that in the show notes, along with links to the ebooks on the store. This coupon code will be valid until February 22nd, 2024. So if you're looking for something to read, we have got you covered. Now here is where we are at with my current writing projects. I am almost done with the Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, the second book in My Sevenfold Sword Online Lit RPG series. I just have a couple more scenes to write in the last chapter and then I need to write the epilogue and then the rough draft will be done. It will be about 90,000 words or so. I haven't decided if it's going to be a long series yet or not, because as I've mentioned before on this show, the first book did not do as well as I'd hoped, and with a year's worth of sales data, now I think it's pretty conclusive the market for LitRPGs is pretty much entirely in Kindle Unlimited and audiobook. So I'm hoping to have a audiobook for this soon after it comes out and I'm going to see how the book does and after the first 30 days I will decide whether it will be a trilogy with everything wrapping up with the third book, or if it's going to be a longer series, if it's viable to continue writing it, or if I should just wrap it up with the trilogy and move on. So that will be determined within 30 days after the book is out. After Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is published, my next main project will be Ghost in the Veils and I'm actually 2,000 words into that. That will be the second book in my Ghost Armor series and that will hopefully be out before April because April is when the recording slot for that to become an audiobook is scheduled and I really, really need to have it done by that. I'm also about 22,000 words into Wizard Thief, which is the sequel to Half-Elven Thief back in December and that will come out sometime after Ghost in the Veils, probably not that long after Ghost in the Veils, because I'm pretty far into that book. Since I mentioned before December 2023 was my best month ever for self-published audio, I should probably mention where I'm at with audiobooks. Right now, recording for Shield of Storms is underway and hopefully that should be out sometime in March, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at with my current writing projects. 00:04:10 Reader Question Now we have a reader question this week from Nico, who asks: Hi, Jonathan. I have read several of your books on Audible (I suppose means he's listened to several books on Audible). Now I'm starting the Frostborn saga. Some time ago I committed a mistake and read the Dragontiarna saga without reading the previous sagas, now I'm starting Frostborn, but it is constantly mentioning Ridmark’s, previous adventures and I cannot find any books of this and I really don't want to make the same mistake as Dragontiarna. Well, first thing, thanks for listening, Nico. I'm glad you're enjoying all those audiobooks. I think what Nico is asking is what is the proper order to listen or read the Ridmark and Andomhaim stories because it seems like he started with Dragontiarna and then went back to the older series. I have to admit, when I wrote these I had in mind that they would each be stand alone and readers could read the series or whatever order they like, but I found in practice after almost 11 years of doing this, that that is not the case and people prefer to read everything in order. The proper order of the series is first the Frostborn series, second the Sevenfold Sword series, third the Dragontiarna series, fourth the Dragonskull series, and now fifth the Shield War series, of which Shield of Storms is the first book. Anything that Ridmark mentions about his previous adventures early in the Frostborn series is not something I've actually written. It's all like a back story to his character at that point that I haven't actually written, whereas if you're reading from Ridmark's perspective in Shield of Storms, and he mentions his previous adventures at that point, there's a good chance that this is referencing events that happen like Frostborn or Dragontiarna or Sevenfold Sword. As I mentioned, I did intend for each of these series to be entirely stand alone, but in practice it actually hasn't worked out that way. Though I am grateful that people keep reading them. 00:06:08 January 2024 Ad Results Now, since it's the start of February and we're a couple days past the end of January, let's see how my ads did for January 2024 because, like it or not, if you're selling something online, digital advertising is an inescapable part of your business model for most people. As usual, I advertised on Facebook, Bookbub, and Amazon. We'll go through that list in that order. First up, my Facebook ads. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $4.22 for every dollar I spent and 8.5% of the profit came from the audiobooks, which was a big improvement from past months. For the Ghost series, I got back $4.36 for every dollar I spent and 15% of the profit came from the audiobooks, probably because there's a lot more of them. Next up is the Bookbub ads. I've only been advertising Frostborn there, though I might expand that to include the Silent Order series in February and March. For Frostborn, I got back $6.14 for every dollar I spent, with a whopping 49.9% of the profit from the audio. So I very nearly made more from the Frostborn audiobooks than I did from the ebooks in January 2024. Now on to Amazon ads. I tend to target Amazon ads for individual books rather than series. In this case, Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire got back $2.05 for every dollar spent, with 44% of the profit coming from the audiobook. Sevenfold Sword: Creation, which I've been advertising in preparation for Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, got back $2.46 for every dollar spent, with 46% of the profit coming from the audiobook. Half-Elven thief, which currently has no audiobook, got back $3.27 for every dollar spent and finally, Silent Order Omnibus One back $15.60 for every dollar spent. I strongly suspect this was an anomaly due to Silent Order: Iron Hand having a big spike in free downloads for the month of January. So once again, we see that having audiobooks makes it a lot easier to generate a profit on ads, especially if you have a completed audiobook series. Of course, as we all know, the effort and money to get to a completed audiobook series is immense. I suspect that's why AI audio is so alluring to people. Of course, in my opinion, it's a false allure, since I suspect the vast majority of listeners have gone from passively to actively hating AI audio and will actively avoid it, save for circumstances like it's the night before your econ or biology final and you have to drive 12 hours, so you might as well have your phone read the PDF file of your textbook aloud to you, that kind of thing. People do seem to be a bit more forgiving of AI audio in certain nonfiction scenarios like that. But overall, it seems like the listener base for audiobooks still strongly prefers human narrated audiobooks. If you are thinking about doing AI narrated audiobooks, probably should proceed with caution there. So as always, thanks to everyone who bought or listened to my books in the month of January 2024. Since we were just talking about ads, that seems like a good way to segue to our main topic this week: 5 marketing tactics that readers don't like. 00:09:29 Main Topic: 5 Marketing Tactics Readers Don’t Like As I mentioned earlier in the show, online marketing is an inescapable fact of selling things online. If you are selling anything online, be it books or cosmetics or machine parts or nails or anything else, at some point, you're probably going to have to do some online advertising. However, the point of advertising is not to annoy people. The point of advertising is to introduce your product or service to people who would benefit from using your product, your service, people whose lives would be better for having you as your product or service. As authors, we want to introduce our books to people who will read them and enjoy them and have you know, perhaps the troubles of their lives momentarily lightened as they are able to read a book and enjoy an adventure story and take their mind off their troubles for a little while. That is the purpose of online advertising: to get your books in front of the audience that will appreciate them. Now where this goes wrong is if you are using marketing tactics that are annoying. We can all think of examples of very annoying marketing tactics. In the Internet age, the pop up ad is one. If you go on the radio, the ads where the guy talks really fast about used cars and then he has a long disclaimer at the end. On TV or Internet videos, those ads for a pharmaceutical product that sounds like the villain from a Doctor Who episode in the ‘70s like Vondacraz, and how the end of the commercial if you take Vondacraz, there's a list of like 40 seconds of side effects, ranging from horrible tortures to death. Those commercials are also annoying. For books specifically, there are different things you can do in marketing that turns out to annoy your readers, which again is defeating the purpose of advertising. The purpose of advertising is to get your book in front of the audience that will benefit from or enjoy from reading the book. It's not to annoy the reader. Annoying the reader is a failure of advertising. So with that in mind, we would, we're going to take a look at five marketing tactics that readers don't like and then five ones that they do like. So let's start with the five marketing tactics readers don't like, number one among them is when every Tweet/post/newsletter from an author is an ad or promoting the next book. You can all think of examples like that, where you go on an author’s Twitter feed or Instagram feed or Facebook feed and it's nothing but a wall of links advertising in their book. There's no interesting content there, nothing amusing, not even, you know, funny memes. It's just an endless wall of text of links leading to the book and that is both boring and annoying. If you follow an author on social media and then their feed is nothing but “buy my book, buy my book, buy my book” it’s very quickly going to be annoying and you're going to unfollow that author pretty quickly. A subset of this problem is where the author doesn't actually engage with readers on any of these platforms. I get a lot of Facebook comments on my Facebook page and I try to at least like all of them and you know respond to them when appropriate. And so I try to keep up with that. I'm not perfect but you know, I make good faith effort doing it. But if you never engage with anyone on your social media platforms, then what's the point of having a social media platform? Frequency and aggressiveness of promo is also a huge turn off for readers. Aggressive, in your face sales tactics might work in a very limited number of fields, though I can't think of any of them, and they definitely don't work in books and selling books. If you get too aggressive, that is a huge turn-off for readers and they will go elsewhere. So that is also something to avoid. Our second marketing tactic that readers don't like our book marketing/ blurbs that don't work. What do we mean by that? One thing is book marketing or a blurb that gives away too much of the plot. Like if you're advertising a murder mystery and the ad gives away the ending, there's really no point in reading the book now, is there? So you will want to avoid that. Another thing is low energy copy where the book description or the text in the ad is just boring and drags and this is clear evidence that copywriting is a distinct skill from writing interesting fictional prose. So this is why doing a little bit of copywriting and practicing it and maybe taking like a, you know, short course online course on it isn't necessarily the worst idea for an author. Too many cliches strung together as a substitute for book copy, like for example “a sparkly friends to lovers, cozy fall young adult romance for fans of the Gilmore Girls, Happily Ever After guaranteed.” That is just a string of cliches joined together, and that is also boring ad copy. Finally lazy ad copy that doesn't actually reflect the desired audience but just tries to grab the latest buzzwords like “Game of Thrones meets Harry Potter meets The Hunger Games.” What does that even mean? Game of Thrones and Harry Potter and Hunger Games are all very distinct books that are very different from one another. The only remotely tenuous connection between Game of Thrones and Harry Potter is that both had magic, though the magic of Game of Thrones is way different than the magic in Harry Potter and Hunger Games isn't fantasy at all. It's basically dystopian science fiction. So you can see how joining together those different books into “Game of Thrones meets Harry Potter meets Hunger Games” is a very ineffective marketing tactic. The third ineffective marketing tactic is poorly targeted ads/poor category choices, like a nonfiction book with ads targeted for genre fiction. This used to be a fairly serious problem on Amazon where someone would have the bright idea of putting their, for example, their romance novel in a very specific nonfiction category like custom woodworking. Amazon has a lot of little niche nonfiction categories like that, where there are a lot of specialist nonfiction that tends not to sell very much and only a few people who are interested in their specialist nonfiction. So what happened is like this romance author would put his or her book into specialist woodworking and then, you know, sell 2 copies there and you’re number one in the category. Then this author could go around boasting and saying, “hey, my book is number one in its category in Amazon,” even though it's in totally the wrong category and it's in a category of again specialist nonfiction where you only need to sell like you know two or three copies in a week to get to #1. Amazon eventually cracked down hard on that. So if you are publishing your book now, you'll definitely want to make sure it is in categories that at least correspond somewhat with reality. This is also important in advertising because very often new authors, when they try to advertise, will be like, well, I want to advertise my book to everyone who's interested in books, and that is way, way too broad. The number one rule of thumb in digital advertising is that the more narrowed down you can get on your audience, the better your results are going to be. I write epic fantasy for the most part, and when I ever has my epic fantasy books on Facebook, I try to narrow the interest down as much as possible to like you know, people who have read George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, J.R.R Tolkien books in the United States and then I will use a very specific audience like that. Where this can really go wrong is if you are advertising your book to totally in the wrong audience, like for example you have written a really dark and gritty horror thriller and you're advertising it to an audience that enjoys reading happily ever after clean romance. The disconnect will be immense and you will, at best you'll just waste your money and at worst, you'll waste a bunch of money and get a lot of negative reviews. So that's why it's important to dial down your audience in your digital marketing as much as possible, as specifically as possible, because you're much, much more likely to get a better result. The fourth ineffective tactic we'll discuss today is relying on things that used to work but are now obsolete or way less effective than other things a writer could do instead. Add most of these tactics are the expectation that the reader will be the one making the effort, which is a bad idea. You want the process of buying your book to be as smooth and frictionless as possible, to use another common ecommerce term. One example of something that might have worked once but doesn't anymore is book signings as a beginning/niche author. I've never done an official book signing in the (how long has it been now?) in the 13 years I've been an indie author and the 11 years I've been working on Ridmark books, I have never once done an official book signing and I do not think the lack of that has hurt me in any way because it's such an ineffective way to sell books. It's an enormous amount of energy to travel around, haul your books around with you, set the table, network with bookstores and so forth, and at best, you might sell one or two copies. Now, this is different for, you know, really big name writers like, you know Stephen King or Nora Roberts or Brandon Sanderson. They can do a book signing and expect to have a reasonable number of people. But even still it's still a lot of work because, you know, both Stephen King and Nora Roberts are both over seventy I believe, and not that interested in doing a lot of travel anymore. And even Brandon Sanderson, who isn't even yet 50, even after COVID did a lot less traveling, and now just has his yearly convention in Utah. I think it's called the Dragonsteel Convention, where his fans can come and, you know, do the book signing experience and the convention experience. and he doesn't have to travel around the country, because that is definitely something exhausting to do. I'd say book signings, except for very specific and very limited circumstances, are generally a waste of time. Another thing that used to be effective, but is not anymore in the year of our Lord 2024, would be blog tours, where you go around to different people's blogs and give interviews and such like. Blogs are still out there. People still read blogs. I have a blog on my website I post on pretty regularly with writing updates. But as for marketing and selling books, it is really just a waste of time. You might sell one or two if you're lucky, but that would be too much work. Another one that used to work but probably doesn't anymore is giveaways with complicated rules and multiple steps. Amazon has been in a lot of lawsuits involving its software patent on one click shopping. The reason Amazon is Amazon/has grown to such size and success is because it's made e-commerce experience as seamless as it can be, which is a lot harder to do than it looks. You can buy a ton of stuff on Amazon and all you really need to do is just click that on the Buy Now button and so long as your credit card on file is current, Amazon will ship you a bunch of stuff or send you Kindle ebooks or music or whatever to your digital account and then you're good to go. In fact, that's one of the rules for people who are setting up their e-commerce sites. You need to make the experience as smooth and seamless as possible because the more steps there are between the person deciding to want to buy the book and actually making the payment, the more likely they're going to say “this is too much hassle” and drop out. The one exception I'd say to this is when you're setting up your newsletter, you do need to send a confirmation e-mail and this is automated with most mail providers. You do need to send that confirmation e-mail for what's called double opt in, because the European Union says we have to with the General Data Protection Regulation that they did a couple of years ago, so that would be a necessary step of extra complication that basically boils down to “the government says you have to.” But other than that, you should try and make any sales or any giveaways you do as seamless as possible. Another thing that may have worked once upon a time but does not is Kindle lockscreen ads. If you have a Kindle e-reader or Kindle Fire tablet, you'll know that when you power it up, you usually have an ad on the lockscreen for a book or something and you can tap on it and go to the book. I have never heard of anyone having good success with those. And I strongly suspect the reason is because they're annoying. I mean, when you pull out your Kindle, you want to go read whatever book you're currently reading. You don’t want to get distracted with whatever else it is, and you just want to swipe the Kindle lockscreen ad either way, as fast as possible so you can get to your book. So Kindle lockscreen ads are also something I would review avoid. The fifth and final ineffective tactic I would say is too many advanced reader reviews. They can come across as inauthentic or sponsored. For a while, some authors were doing with their advanced readers  something saying “Hey, here's your advanced copy of the book. Be sure to leave your review, and here's some sample text for you can copy and paste for your reviews.” Doing too much of that comes off as inauthentic and it seems like you might just be as well hiring bots to leave reviews for your books, so it's probably best to avoid that. 00:23:31 Five Marketing Tactics Readers Tend to Like No, we don't want to be all negative here, so let's flip the coin around and come to five marketing tactics that readers tend to like. Number one: behind the scenes about the process of writing (typical day) or steps to put out a book. I do this pretty frequently on my Facebook and website where I'll say you know, this week I wrote X number of words of Sevenfold Sword Online or today I worked on making the cover for this book or listened to the audiobook proof or did this or that related to writing. That usually is a good engagement because the main reason most people ( if you are an indie writer), the main reason most people come to your website and social media is to find out when the next book is coming. And so if you talk about how you're working on the next book, that is pretty good social media content right there. Number two: humor and genuine engagement with the audience. Humor is subjective, so a low hanging fruit content for humor would be memes. I do enjoy a good Star Trek or Star Wars meme and you know, post them every so often, not every day obviously, because that would get excessive. But occasionally when I can't think of anything else to say, I fall back to a good old Star Wars meme. I do try to reply to comments. It's a good idea to do that. I don't get every comment because there's a lot of them. But if you make a good faith effort to reply to them, and you know at least engage with people, that is good. One thing I definitely do is when I have a new release day and post a link to the book, I do try to reply to everyone and thank everyone who says they bought the book that day. It does take a bit of time to do that, but since someone is spending actual hard currency on your book, it seems only proper to thank them for doing so. Number three would be bonus content like cut scenes or bonus chapters or scenes from alternate character perspectives, or extra information about the books that way. The way I implemented that is the short stories I've written where a lot of the short stories, in fact most of the short stories are not vital to the main plot of the books, but are sort of like DVD extra scenes and then I give them away to my newsletter subscribers, which is very good for newsletter engagement and people do very much enjoy the free short stories because people always like free stuff. Number four would be eye-catching covers and ads that fit the genre well. That is something that either comes with practice if you do your own covers or you need to pick a good cover designer and explain exactly what you want. Your book cover (when you have a book cover) has three missions and has to convey them all in under a second. And it has to..in under a second, a reader should be able to look at your book cover and see what the title is, what the author is, and what the genre is. If your cover meets all those missions and it looks decent, it is a good cover and it's meeting the mission of a book cover. If it doesn't do any of those things, it's time for a rethink. And finally, the fifth and perhaps best marketing tactic of all is word of mouth, where people hear about your book within communities they already engage in regularly and are intrigued enough to go take a look at it. This is something you can't force. People have tried. It usually doesn't work, or if they get away with it for a little while it, tends to backfire. But word of mouth is a huge thing, and it's something that can only happen organically and over time, where people recommend your book to their friends or their other members of their online community on Facebook groups or Reddit or whatever. So there you have it: five marketing tactics that readers hate, and five marketing tactics that readers tend to like. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and a quick word of thanks to my transcriptionist, who, in addition to transcribing in this episode, also help me pull together the research for it. I'll remind you that you can listen to all the back episodes on the show on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

December 2023 was my best month ever for my audiobooks, so I thought I would take a look at the best places to (legally) get free and low-cost audiobooks. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE HUNT as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE HUNT for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERHUNT The coupon code is valid through February 13th, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we’ve got one ready for you! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 185 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 27th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about how to find low-cost audiobooks. Before we get to our main topic, let's have Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Hunt, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Hunt for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERHUNT and that is WINTERHUNT and that will obviously be in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through February 13th, 2024. So, if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got one ready for you. So that is Coupon of the Week. Now let's have a current update on my present writing projects. I am pleased to report that Shield of Storms, the first book in the new Shield War saga set in my fantasy realm of Andomhaim, is complete and it is out and published. You can get it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords, and my Payhip store. Initial sales and reviews are positive, so thank you all for reading. A few people have asked when the audiobook is coming and recording should start for that on January 29th (Monday). So realistically, probably around March for the audiobook to be available. Now that Shield of Storms is out, let's have a look at my next couple of projects. The next book I publish will be Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, and I am about 2/3 of the way through it. In fact, I think I might be closer to 70% of the way through it and so I am hoping to have that done before too much longer. I've had a year’s worth of sales data with the previous book and I think I've pretty definitively established that the LitRPG market is pretty much Kindle Unlimited and audio so Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling will be in Kindle Unlimited and hopefully in audiobook before too much longer, if all goes well. We will see how that goes. After that is done then I will write Ghost in the Veils, the sequel to Ghost in the Serpent and the second book in the New Ghost Armor series. I think that will probably be out towards the end of March or the beginning of April. It's scheduled to be recorded as an audiobook in April. So, I definitely want to have it out before that happens. I am also about 19,000 words into Wizard Thief, the sequel to Half-Elven Thief in December, and that…lately I've been adopting a model for writing where I have a main project that takes up 80% of my time and then do like 10% projects that I work on in the morning when I have my coffee. By the time I get done with Ghost in the Veils, I will probably be like halfway through or maybe even 2/3 of the way through Wizard Thief. So hopefully it should be out before too much longer after Ghost in the Veils is published. So that is where I'm at with all my current writing projects. 00:03:08 Main Topic: Legal and Cheap Ways to Get Low-Cost Audiobooks So let's move on to our main topic this week: legal and cheap ways to get low-cost or free audiobooks. So why talk about that this month or this episode? Well, looking over figures, it looks like December may have been my best month ever for my self-published audiobooks, which I'm very happy about and now very grateful to all of you for. But as we all know, the economy is not good and it is not likely to improve anytime soon. So, budgets are tight for many, many people and so I thought it would be a good way to take a look at the free and legal ways to get free and low-cost audiobooks because obviously it's fairly simple to pirate audio books. I don't endorse that, and there's also always a measure of risk with that, because very often pirates will use fake pirated material to distribute, like, you know, malware and cryptocurrency scams and that kind of thing. I remember a long time ago, back when I was doing tech support, I had a university student come to me very concerned that her computer had gotten a virus, and so I asked, how did do you think this happened? She said, well, I had to watch this movie for class, so I didn't want to pay for it. So I Googled where to watch a pirated copy of this movie online and I clicked on the first link I got and my computer is now filled with viruses. I don't know how this happened. This was not, needless to say, the most mysterious case I ever had to deal with when I was doing tech support back in the old days. So piracy, aside from the moral and ethical implications, can also carry a measure of risk. By contrast, the methods that we're going to talk about today are legal and should have no risk of infecting either your phone or your computer with various forms of malware or cryptocurrency scams. So let's look at the best way to get free audiobook titles and the best way is the one of the most old fashioned ways: your local library system. I should note what I'm about to say applies strongly to the US, since that's obviously where I live, and that I'm most familiar with how things work here, so obviously things will probably work differently in different countries if that is where you live. In the US, there's usually two ways you can get audiobooks from the library. The library will either use a service called Libby, which is sort of a friendly user interface on top of a service called OverDrive, or the library will use something called Hoopla. Not all libraries will have Libby or Hoopla, though many of them will have some sort of service like Libby or Hoopla that provides ebooks or audiobooks. Be sure to check your local library's website to see if your library subscribes to these resources and to learn more about them. One thing, if your library uses Libby/OverDrive is that there will probably be a wait list for newer titles or titles that suddenly get popular (like the the biography of Oppenheimer that inspired the Oppenheimer movie in the summer of 2023). It's not uncommon for a big release or very popular book or audiobook to have a wait list of a couple hundred people, though obviously if you're looking at older or less popular titles, the wait list will sometimes be shorter or no wait at all. Selection will also vary wildly by library. The trouble with a lot of these ebook subscription platforms for libraries is that they're very expensive because the library’s essentially a captive market for the vendors. Libraries have to subscribe to the Libby platform and then buy additional titles for their patrons. And if you're familiar with the way the publishing industry works at all, you know that library editions are usually much more expensive than regular consumer editions. For example, a book that might cost a library like $9 in print can cost like $85 on Libby for a copy that expires after 26 checkouts or a similar level of set checkouts. That's often why libraries will only have one or two copies of a very popular title, just because it's so expensive. If they just bought copies for everyone who asks, it would rapidly deplete their budget. The checkout and limits are set by the libraries and not Hoopla or OverDrive, so they vary from library to library. Like one library might have four checkouts per patron per month or another library system might allow ten simultaneous checkouts and ten items you can join the wait list for at the same time. It can vary quite a bit from library to library. So as the saying goes, your mileage may vary, but if you are looking for a low-cost way to listen to audiobooks and read ebooks, then the best place to start is probably your local library system. Now let's move on from free to subscription products. Something new that's come up recently is that Spotify is offering audiobooks. They bought Findaway Voices a couple of years ago and basically imported Findaway Voices’ audiobook catalog into their platform, which includes quite a few of my audiobooks. And for a Spotify premium subscription, you get access to a library of audiobook titles included in the cost of an existing Spotify Premium subscription. It comes out to 15 hours a month per individual Premium account or per family account, and depending on your audiobook listening needs, one fifteen hour audiobook might tide you over for the entire month worth of commuting. It is important to note that this does not include all audiobooks available on Spotify. Not all of them are available for this fifteen hour a month subscription and that Spotify does also offer what are called a la carte audiobook sales, where you just buy the audiobook on top of the subscription cost that you're already paying. So, if you're already paying for Spotify for your music listening, as apparently quite a few people do, this could be a fairly cheap way to listen to audiobooks on top of your Spotify subscriptions, as you're paying for that already anyway. Another subscription option is Kobo Plus Listen where you pay about $8 US a month to access a collection of about 100,000 audiobook titles, and for an initial $2.00 a month you can throw in the entire Kobo Plus collection of ebooks. Kobo’s audiobook platform is relatively new, so it tends to have fewer frontlist and bestseller titles. Quite a few of my audiobooks are on there and I think the vast majority of my ebooks are in Kobo Plus as well. So, if you're looking for a low-cost way to listen to audiobooks, that could be a good way to do it. Another option is a platform called Everand, which you may also know as Scribd, because that's what it used to be called until a couple months ago. For some reason, they decided to change their name from Scribd to Everand. Whenever companies do this, it's often very confusing and you always suspect that they paid too much money to an MBA consultant for some bad advice, but that is a tangent and let's not dwell on that. Everand has a slightly lower cost than Audible. It's $12.00 a month versus $15 for the lowest tier of the Audible subscription plan and that also includes ebook access. However, it's not a truly unlimited subscription. There seems to be a limit that isn't advertised based on reports, and it's apparently frequently very frustrating to power users. In fact, back when Everand was still Scribd a couple of years ago, there was a bit of a minor kerfuffle where they started limiting romance power users because romance readers are famous for reading so many romance books and listening to so many romance audiobooks. And so they deliberately dialed that back and throttled it and it was a bit of a problem. Audible also has what's called the Audible Plus lowest tier for their Audible subscription. For $8 a month, you can subscribe to Audible Plus and then you can listen to anything that's in the Audible Plus catalog, which does rotate fairly frequently, and things tend to move in and out of it. For a while, the first Dragontiarna Publisher Pack, which would be Dragontiarna Books One and Two, was in Audible Plus, and that did do a good job of driving sales to the rest of the series, but only the first audiobook was in Audible Plus, so it's kind of a loss leader for Podium to do that. Now onto some low-cost a la carte options, where you’re just paying for the audiobook rather than subscribing. I have to admit my favorite low-cost option is Chirp. If you're familiar with Bookbub at all, Chirp works basically like Bookbub. Every day you get an email listing the low-cost and discounted audiobooks in genres that you indicated you like when you signed up for Chirp. There's no monthly costs, no recurring fees, anything like that. You just get email every day with a list of audiobooks that are currently on sale for a low cost, ranging from like $0.99 to $4.99 (depending on the title), which is usually a pretty good deal. So, if you're looking to stack up on some low-cost audiobooks, Chirp is a good way to go about it. And if you don't mind a bit of a plug, another good way to get low-cost audiobooks is to listen to this podcast. If you will remember from the start of the show, I have Coupon of the Week for Ghost in the Hunt for 75% off, which comes to about…ah, the audiobook will cost you about $3.00. So listen to this podcast and watching for the coupon code is also a good way to get discount audiobooks, since I do use audiobooks for Coupon of the Week pretty frequently. Finally, if you want to listen to some free public domain audiobooks (this is where the book has been in the public domain, and therefore anyone can make an audiobook of it for any reason), check out a website called LibriVox. That is https://librivox.org and it has a large collection of public domain titles which are all read by volunteers, but the quality may vary depending upon the equipment and technical competence of that particular volunteer, but they are free. If you can't find something you want to listen to at the library for free, this might be a good substitution. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I'd like to once again thank my transcriptionist for pulling together the research for this episode. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, we take a look at why readers quit on a book, and what writers can do to avoid that. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of GHOST IN THE MAZE as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of GHOST IN THE MAZE for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERMAZE The coupon code is valid through February 3rd, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter chill, we’ve got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello everyone. Welcome to Episode 184 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 19th, 2024 and today we're going to talk about why readers might give up on a book. Before we get into that, let's have our Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Maze as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Ghost in the Maze for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: WINTERMAZE and that is WINTERMAZE. That will be in the show notes along with the link to my Payhip store and the audiobook. This coupon code is valid through February 3rd, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter chill (and it is very cold today), we've got you covered. Before we get to our main topics this week, let's have some updates on my current writing projects. The rough draft of Shield of Storms is done. It was 103,000 words and I am currently editing it. If all goes well, I am very much hoping to have it out either the last week of January or the first week of February (though as I look at my calendar app here, it turns out that it happens to be the same week), so hopefully it will be out sometime around that. I am also 2/3 of the way through Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling, the second book in my Sevenfold Sword Online LitRPG series. That puts me at about 62,000 words of a planned 90,000. So if all goes well, that should be coming out very shortly after Shield of Storms. I am also about 14,000 words into Wizard Thief, the second book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and that will come out later this spring because I will need to write Ghost in the Veils first before I finish Wizard Thief. So after Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is done, Ghost in the Veils will be my next major project and we do have recording slots scheduled for both Shield of Storms and Ghost in the Veils, so hopefully those will, when they are done, be in audiobook form before too much longer. 00:02:07 Main Topic: Why Readers Don’t Finish a Book Without any further ado, let's get to our main topic. I thought this week it might be interesting to discuss why readers don't finish a book or why they give up on a book and don't finish it. For me, that is a professional interest obviously, because I want people to read my books and enjoy them and you know, get to the end and then buy the sequel. So I thought it would be interesting to dig into why readers might not want to finish books. As I mentioned before, I have a transcriptionist working on my podcast now, and I'm very grateful for her help. She also did some research among various reader groups to find out why readers might give up on a book. So the first interesting thing to look at is an old Goodreads survey back from 2013 discussing why a reader might not finish a book and it was interesting to break down the numbers. 15.8% will give up after fewer than 50 pages if they don't enjoy the book. 27.9% will give up between 50 to 100 pages. 7.6% will try to make it to 100 pages before they give up on the book. 100 plus pages, people will try to get through is 10.6% and 38.1% of people will finish a book they start, no matter what. Though as an indie author, our interest is in making sure that people like the book enough to buy the sequel, which is not likely to happen if they are getting through the book as a grim slog because they always finish the book, no matter what. So what are some reasons that people will give up on a book or if they grimly grind through to the end because they started the book, what would be reasons they didn't enjoy the book, even though they are committed to finishing it? It turns out the number one reason people give up on a book probably will not shock you: it is that the book is boring. There's not enough action, not enough things are happening to draw the reader in. This is far and away the most common reason that people will give up on a book. Of course what constitutes boredom will vary from person to person obviously, but here are some common themes that we found: the book has too slow of a start or the book has too much info dumping or description at the beginning, the writing is just too confusing/dense, and the pacing is too slow or not enough is happening or action is not flowing. Observant listeners might notice might have noticed that all these things kind of play into each other and they're in fact a bit interconnected. Too slow a start can occur if there is too much info dumping or there is too much description, or the pacing is too slow, or not enough is happening. There is a reason that many writer’s workshops and advice to writers recommend that new writers begin in media res, because it is much easier to hook the reader and hold their interest and then bring them in. That's another reason why writers often spend a lot of time analyzing and obsessing over their story’s opening sentence because they want to make it as interesting and compelling as possible to bring the reader in. So, as an experienced writer (I feel safe in saying that since Shield of Storms will be my 148th novel), what do I do to try and get the reader’s interest? First of all, never ever start with the weather. There's a reason “it was a dark and stormy night” is a cliche. The weather is boring unless it directly impacts the plot in some way. Like just off the top of my head, let's say you're writing a thriller novel where the police are about to stop a drug bust with the Coast Guard on a ship, except the hurricane is coming up and it's raining. That is one of the few times the weather would be relevant to the beginning., but it's a good idea to avoid the weather. Too much info dumping or description at the beginning is also something to avoid and you want to avoid this by parceling out just enough information to pull the reader's interest. It's always good to leave, you know, a few more cards in your hand, so to speak, in terms of plot reveals and to pull in the reader’s interest. It's good to start with action or if not action, since not every genre of fiction lends itself to, you know, shootouts and sword fights and battling wizards and so forth, is also good to start with something that would be emotionally significant to the character, like the main character gets laid off or a long lost family member shows up or something that would be or like the main character’s, you know, son or daughter gets expelled from high school, something emotionally significant that will draw the reader in. And if you can end the first chapter with not so much a cliffhanger, but a bit of a plot hook to continue pulling in the reader, that would be good to do. So, those tips and tricks will hopefully help you avoid a boring beginning to your book, and hopefully a boring book altogether. The next most common reason people gave up on a book was that they simply were not enjoying it. This can be incredibly subjective for many reasons, and so you know, one man's enjoyment is another man's unendurable tedium. However, there are common things that you can avoid to keep people from not enjoying your book. One thing to avoid is not meeting genre expectations, where the more specific of a genre you are writing in, the more people have certain expectations. If you're writing a clean romance, for example, people will become very annoyed if you have explicit sex scenes throughout the book or for some reason you decide to put explicit violence inside a clean romance book, or if you are writing a urban fantasy novel and there is no one using magic and no fantastic creatures, that will very quickly turn the readers off. There are other common plot devices that people dislike, such as contrived misunderstandings or people who behave stupidly to service the plot. The common example of this is the hero suddenly doing something very dumb in the second act to advance the plot or the villain, who has previously been shown as very intelligent, suddenly doing very stupid things to allow the heroes to overcome him. Another thing that people really tend not to like is explicitly graphic violence, especially against women, children, or pets. However, this is once again an area of subjective taste. The audience of people who find those things off-putting and disturbing is perhaps thankfully, quite larger than the sort of audience that prefers to read that kind of thing. So if you do write graphic violence like that, you are automatically cutting yourself out of a significant portion of your potential audience. People also strongly dislike characters who are either blandly good robots or completely unlikable. This is tricky and comes with experience because you don't want to make your characters perfect with no flaws whatsoever. Only God is perfect and that does not apply to human beings, who all have a varied collection of flaws, so it can be tricky to have a character or protagonist who is compelling to the reader, but also has flaws in a believable way and the flaws aren't convenient to the plot, so to speak, which ties into an earlier point. A significant portion of people do not like love triangles, which is funny because there's also a significant portion of people who do like love triangles, though I have to admit I did have a love triangle in the earlier books of the Frostborn series. It goes back to about 2014 now, and so ten years later, I still occasionally get angry emails about this love triangle I wrote to the Frostborn series ten years ago at this point. So that would depend on the kind of genre you're writing in and you would want to make sure that if you want to read love triangle, it might be in a genre that expects that sort of thing, like certain genres of romance. Some readers also find false accusation plots incredibly stressful or anxiety provoking to read. I think this might be a case of being sure that is something that would work in the genre you're writing in, like in police procedurals, private detective fiction, and sometimes thrillers, false accusation plots are a standard trope. Like, you know, the private investigator gets hired by someone who believes they or they or a relative have been falsely accused of a crime and so the private investigator has to solve that. So that is again something to be aware of in the genre you're writing. A subset of the audience doesn't like depressing or overly dark fiction, especially if they are not expecting that tone based on the book’s cover and or jacket copy. That is again would tie into last week's episode, which I think was Episode 183 (Transcriptionist’s Note: Yes, it’s Episode 183) where we talked about how when the important things of cover design is that the cover needs to match the genre and tone of your book in general. So if you're writing a book that's very depressing or tense, it's good to have a cover that will accurately reflect that, but that's another discussion. And one thing that many readers dislike is sex scenes and profanity, though this is a very much a “your mileage may vary” topic. Some reader readers will stop reading the minute any of those things come up, so no matter what you choose to do, you're going to annoy someone. I occasionally get annoyed emails from Cloak Mage readers who dislike how much Nadia swears in those books when she gets upset, but the thing is, in my head I actually dial it down quite a bit because I feel like If I was writing in a more realistic way, Nadia is the sort of person who swear just a lot, especially if she gets annoyed or is angry about something. I actually dial it down from the way she sounds into my head to the way it turns out on the page so truly, your mileage may vary with this topic, and you may as well write what you think will work best for your genre because no matter what you write, it's going to annoy somebody. Another thing that will get a reader to give up on a book is weak writing. And again we've entered the realm of subjective taste about what weak writing may or may not be, but there are some common themes. One thing that annoys people is bad world building and this can be if you're writing a fantasy novel, it can be the world doesn't make sense, if aspects of it are contradictory, or it seems too modern or too pointlessly anachronistic. World building also applies to contemporary fiction, especially crime and thriller fiction, where if you have obvious errors of fact in like how police agencies work or how firearms work or the process of investigating a crime. Anyone who knows anything about those things will spot those errors and probably get turned off. Another thing many readers dislike is overly abstract or conceptual language or a book that is unnecessarily difficult for the sake of appearing clever or important. Aspiring literary fiction writers can fall into this trap quite frequently. People really dislike spelling and grammar mistakes or bad editing, though, to be fair, mileage can vary on this quite widely. Some readers, they have no interest whatsoever in typos. Some will absolutely lose their temper if they find a single typo in a book. So it behooves us as writers to try to have the best editing possible of our books. The thing with this though, is sometimes you will get emails from readers pointing out spelling errors or grammatical errors and it turns out according to the actual rules of grammar they're actually wrong. I've had this several times where someone would e-mail me complaining about a sentence or a spelling and I check it out and it turns out no, I actually was correct, they were wrong, and it turns out they were, you know, taught that way, you know, 50 years ago in 3rd grade and they learned it wrong back then because their teacher didn't know the proper rule and just has stuck in their head ever since. So this is an aspect of being a writer where you'll have to answer with diplomatic tact or not at all if someone emails you complaining about your book’s grammar. Another thing readers dislike is characters who haven't been developed enough to understand their motivations or their actions don't match up with what has been established previously. This will tie back in further to a reason people don't enjoy the book, where characters will act against their previously established nature to advance the plot or the villains suddenly becomes stupid. Another thing people really dislike is clunky political or social commentary of current issues, especially random monologues from characters to express their opinions on a matter. This is something best avoided regardless of your opinion on any contemporary social or political topics. For one thing, it will alienate a significant portion of your audience. Another thing, it's very difficult to do well, and for a third point, it will age your book quite drastically and take readers out of the book. I actually know a very good example of this I can use is the sitcom 30 Rock from the late 2000s and the early 2010s. I think the show's final season or second to last season was running during the 2012 election between President Obama and then former governor and now currently Senator Romney. And so one of the characters on the show was supporting Obama and another was supporting Romney and they tried to have some comedy based off their interactions and their opposing support for these presidential candidates. And the trouble is, it was kind of funny at the time but it's been 12 years since that. It is now very dated. And, you know, the world has moved on to new controversies and new elections several times. Former President Obama is now a former president who occasionally makes former presidential announcements. Mitt Romney is a senator from Utah. And so these jokes from 12 years ago about the election are very dated and just kind of clunky and not funny anymore. So it's good to keep that in mind if you want to comment about contemporary messages in your fiction, it can have many, many drawbacks and can easily backfire and alienate a significant portion of your audience. There's a great quote associated with the movie business that no one really knows who it was really attributed to, but I think it applies to writers as well: If you want to send a message, call Western Union and keep it out of your fiction. A couple of random things as well. since we've covered the big things. Sometimes the print is too hard to read or the reader dislikes the font. This obviously is more of a problem for print books than for ebooks, where if you're reading an ebook you can usually change the font and the size of the font. So if you are making your own paperbacks, as most indie authors do, it's a good idea to pick one of the standard fonts, you know, one of the basic boring fonts that aren't going to annoy the reader who is reading your book. Another thing that can really annoy people is if your ebook is poorly formatted and doesn't render properly on a device, and this generally happens when someone is formatting an ebook and doesn't know how to do it, or they try to get clever with really fancy formatting and forget that it doesn't work universally across all devices, which is why it's usually a good idea to try and keep your ebook formatting as simple as possible, because that reduces the chances that something go wrong on the way a book renders on a particular device. So that is a good roundup of things that may stop a reader from finishing a book. However, if someone dislikes your book for any of the above reasons, remember that all taste is subjective and that no matter how good of a book it is and no matter how well written your book is, there's going to be someone who dislikes it because you can't please everybody. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful and enjoyable. Quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist who did all the research. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at how to make a bad book cover, and things that you should avoid on your book's cover. I also take a look back at my top 10 bestselling books of 2023. This week’s coupon is for the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of CHILD OF THE GHOSTS for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024, so if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we’ve got you covered! Reference links to books mentioned in the show. The Fellowship of the Ring: https://www.tolkienguide.com/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=BREM+US+PB+FOTR My Brilliant Friend: https://www.amazon.com/My-Brilliant-Friend-Neapolitan-Novels/dp/1609450787 TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 183 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 12th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about how to make a bad book cover. We'll also take a look back at my top 10 best selling books of 2023. Before we do that, let's have this week's Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon is for the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. You can get the audiobook of Child of the Ghosts for 75% off at my Payhip store with this coupon code: JANGHOSTS. That's JANGHOSTS and that will be included in the show notes with a link. The coupon code is valid through January 31st, 2024. So if you find yourself needing an audiobook to break up the winter doldrums, we've got you covered. Let's also have an update on my current writing projects. As of right now, I am 97,000 words into Shield of Storms, which puts me on Chapter 18 of 21, though the final draft will probably have a slightly different number of chapters as I move things around. I am hoping to get to 100,000 words before the end of the day when I finish recording this. We'll see how the rest of the day goes. Once Shield of Storms is out, my next book will be Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am 59,000 words into that and I will finish that up and have it come out relatively quickly after Shields of Storms is released. I'm also 12,000 words into Half-Elven Thief, but that will be a ways off yet because once Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling is finished, I want to write Ghost in the Veils first so I can make its recording slot in April. In audio news, as I mentioned last week, the audiobook of Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation is out, as excellently narrated by CJ McAllister and you can get that at all audiobook stores.   00:01:51 Top 10 Ebooks, Audiobooks, and Print Book Sales for 2023 As I mentioned before, I wanted to take a look back at my top ten books and audiobooks of 2023, and I did that because it's time to start figuring out taxes for 2023, which means checking paperwork, making sure your books are balanced, making sure all your receipts are properly organized, filing for 1099s, and all the other various little chores that go into preparing to file your taxes, at least in the United States. It also means finding out the top 10 bestselling books of 2023. So to start with, here are my Top 10 bestselling ebooks of 2023. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that 2023 was the year of the Dragonskull series: #1: Dragonskull: Talons of the Sorcerer #2: Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock #3: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #4: Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods #5: Cloak of Dragonfire #6: Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians #7 Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire #8 Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #9 Dragonskull: Blade of the Elves #10 Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So basically my best selling ebooks of 2023 were the Dragonskull series plus Cloak of Dragonfire. This bodes well for both Shield of Storms, which is a direct follow up to Dragonskull, and Cloak of Titans later this year. Audio, of course, has become an increasingly important format, so here are my Top 10 bestselling audiobooks across all platforms for 2023: #1: The Ghosts: Omnibus One #2: Frostborn: The Shadow Prison #3: Frostborn: The World Gate #4: Frostborn: The High Lords #5: Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince #6: Frostborn: The Dragon Knight #7: Frostborn: Excalibur #8: Frostborn: The Gorgon Spirit #9: Frostborn: The False King #10: Frostborn: The Dark Warden   So for audio, 2023 was nearly almost entirely the year of Frostborn, but people still really like the big omnibus audiobooks like The Ghosts: Omnibus One. Paperbacks for me are a much smaller sales channel than either ebooks or audiobooks. I sell more in both ebook and audio than I do in paperback, but as it turns out, it's really easy to run the report of bestselling paperbacks. So with that in mind, here are my Top 10 bestselling paperbacks of 2023: #1: The Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide #2: The Linux Command Line Beginner’s Guide #3: The Ubuntu Beginner’s Guide #4: Frostborn: The Gray Knight #5: Frostborn:  The Eightfold Knife #6: Sevenfold Sword: Champion #7: Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight #8: Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress #9: Malison: The Complete Series #10: Dragonskull: Curse of the Orcs   So those were my top 10 bestselling paperback books of 2023. I don't really write about technology very much anymore, and I stopped shortly before I started recording this podcast in 2019. I enjoyed writing about technology quite a bit, but there are only so many hours in the day and the money is just a lot better for epic fantasy fiction, and there's less research involved, too. That said, I'm glad that people are still finding my tech books helpful enough to buy. My all-time favorite review of the Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide came from a math professor who said he hated the book, but he couldn't find a better introduction to the Windows Command Line environment, and so he still recommended it to his students. So thanks for reading those books, everyone, and as I said before, I'm still working on Shield of Storms, so hopefully we'll have a new book very soon. 00:05:34 Main Topic of the Week: What Makes a Bad Book Cover? So let's move on to our main topic this week: how to make a bad book cover (from which we hopefully will learn how to make a good book cover). Since I started doing my own covers and spending a lot more time with Photoshop in 2020, obviously this is something I have given a great deal of thought to over the last four years and throughout the entire time I've been self-publishing. So I thought it would make an interesting topic for a show. Let's start off with some specific examples of a bad book cover. One of the most famous ones is The Fellowship of the Ring cover by Barbara Remington, which Tolkien famously did not care for (I’ll include a link to it in the show notes, so you can follow if you're curious). It just looks very ‘60s, very psychedelic, and just not at all related to anything connected to what the Lord of the Rings is actually about. Another fairly well-known example of a bad cover is the original cover of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which is a 1950s story about a woman coming of age in the poor outskirts of Naples. But if you look at the cover (especially the cover linked in the show notes), it looks like kind of a romance novel or a story about a wedding. It doesn't at all reflect what the book is actually about. So as we strive to make good covers, one that will draw readers into books, what should we keep in mind? I think there are to start with three key points to keep in mind when preparing a book cover or consulting with your cover designer about what you would like your book cover to do. First, taste is highly subjective and that leads directly to the second point, which is you're not going to be able to make a book cover that everybody likes, just as you are not going to be able to write a book that everyone likes. The point is to write a book that your audience that you have in mind will enjoy and the cover by extension will be a sort of a guide that can help your audience find the book and let them know that this is the kind of book they would like, that the cover will telegraph in essence, that this is the kind of book that particular reader would like. Three, the main thing is to provide key information about the book, namely the author and the title, easily and quickly with a quick preview of the book through the design of the cover. You want, when you look at a book cover, to immediately in a fraction of a second to be able to grasp the three important points: the name of the book, the author of the book, and the genre of the book. Those should all be immediately apparent when you look at the book cover and anything that gets in the way of that is not a good design element for a book cover. So with that in mind, what shouldn't a book cover do and what design elements do you massively want to avoid on your book cover? First of all, you should avoid bad fonts or fonts that are hard to read. It's important to remember that in a book cover, two of the three things that it needs to convey at a glance are the author name and the title of the book. And if you have bad typography on your book cover, that will sink you. In fact, you can almost get away with having a bad looking image for your book cover, so long as the typography for the author name and the title is suitable. So what constitutes an unsuitable font for a book cover? Colors that are hard to read and shall we say overly artistic or overly stylized fonts that are difficult to read. You know something like wingdings or some really overly complicated font with too many flourishes. You want the font to be able to be easy to read. You want the font to be a color that is easy to read and is visible against the rest of the cover. You don't want the font to be too small either, because then that will make it difficult to read. That ideal is even once in a thumbnail on the Amazon website that you can still pretty easily get the author name and the title. You also will want to avoid design elements that clash. We can all think of examples of badly Photoshopped covers where there's like a Photoshop picture of a horse or cowboy or a Scottish Lord or something that is very badly Photoshopped in and doesn't look at all good. Part of that is avoiding images that are poor resolution. If any element of your cover looks pixelated, it's time to have a rethink and choose different elements. This can be a problem if you're getting stock photos from free stock photo sites, which is not the best idea because just because the site says the stock photos are free and licensed for commercial use doesn't mean that they actually are, because there's not really much of a safeguarding process. You're better off using a reputable stock photo site where you pay for credits and then keep a record of what you use. And that way, if there's any legal challenges or troubles you can say, well, the stock photo I got off iStock Photo in 2019. Here's the record of it and then you would be good to go. Even if you have good images, it's important to make sure that the image matches with the genre of the book. If you have an image that does not match the appropriate historical time period of the book or the fantasy aesthetics, that won’t work. For example, you have a Regency romance book set in 19th century England and the woman on the cover is wearing a leather jacket and jeans, that would immediately be a bad cover design element. To return to the topic of The Lord of the Rings, you have a cover of the Lord of the Rings where Aragorn is dressed like a Wall Street broker and Frodo is wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and a backward baseball cap, that would also be a poor choice for cover design. You'll also want to avoid major inaccuracies on the cover. This is not hugely important but it can significantly annoy a subset of readers. Like for example, a cover of Anne of Green Gables where the Anne on the cover is blonde when in the book Anne quite famously has red hair (and in fact it's a plot point, if I remember right). You probably don't want to include ad copy on the cover because that is a waste of valuable real estate. Now granted, if you get, like an endorsement from like a major celebrity or some sort of significant author in your field, it's probably a good idea to put the blurb on your cover then. Like, if you are writing a mystery and say you get, like blurbs from like John Sanford or Harlan Coben or Karin Slaughter or other, you know, major mystery writers, you know, that's probably good idea to put that on the cover. However, if you're picking quotes off Goodreads or Amazon or something to put on your book cover, that's probably not a good idea. And you may not, in fact, actually have the right to do that based on U.S. law, because technically I believe the copyright for the review belongs to the person who wrote it. So that is something to avoid, you know, taking quotes from reviews from Amazon or Goodreads or TikTok or something, though you can probably make an exception if you like, get a major figure in your genre to endorse your book. Finally, you would also probably want to avoid the default templates provided by Canva or Amazon. If you self-publish a book on Amazon and you don't have a cover, you can use one of the premade ones that Amazon provides. But to be honest, these are not very good and they don't look very good, so it's probably best to avoid those if at all possible. You'll also want to avoid book cover design elements that can actively irritate people. One of those is photographs of people, especially if it’s just a stock image. Generally, if you want a stock image to look good as a book cover, it needs to go through Photoshop quite a bit. It needs to, you know, make sure it matches the colors of the background. You might need some color adjustment. You might need some shading. You might need to apply a couple of masks to it to make it look properly good. This is actually one of the reasons why I started using DAZ 3D modeling because it's very hard to find a long string of stock photos with the same character you can use for book covers, whereas with DAZ, as you can generate a character who looks like how you want the character look and then use that over and over again in different poses and so forth and different shadings and different enhancements in Photoshop to keep consistent look across all the covers, which is what I've done for the Caina Ghost series and the Nadia Cloak Mage series, which would be a lot harder to do with stock images. Something else that really tends to annoy people is shirtless men or women in overly revealing outfits. From a purely a publisher’s perspective, this can get you in trouble. If you have a book cover that's showing a little too much skin, the various retailers might reject it or you will be able to run ads on the book, or the system will automatically sort it as erotica, which would limit its visibility on the store and therefore its sales potential. One trend from the 2000s and 2010s that used to be popular but now no longer is, is stock photos where the character’s head is chopped off and you sort of just see them from the neck down on the cover. That was very popular for a while in the 2010s. It is not popular now and people might complain about your cover if you have that on there. You may also want to avoid images are too abstract or too bland. I'm thinking about, like a lot of modern literary fiction covers have just random color swirls on the cover (it doesn't look good) or the rereleased versions of Robert Jordan’s covers for the Wheel of Time. They used to have this really beautiful fantasy artwork on them. Now it's just a vaguely faded symbol from the book. It just doesn't look good compared to the older ones, and I think there was a mistake on the publisher’s part. You will also, in my opinion, very much want to avoid AI art. There's a couple of good reasons for this. One is that a very significant subset of the population absolutely hates AI art, refuses to have anything to do with it, and will not buy anything that uses it. Every time a major company like Wizards of the Coast or Microsoft or somebody uses AI art in some sort of advertisement, there is an immediate backlash on social media and you will want to avoid that. More practically, the copyright status of AI art is still a massively open question. As of this recording, which is January 12th, 2024, there are many lawsuits underway to determine whether or not AI generated art and text is in fact a form of copyright infringement, and as of right now, the question is unsettled. A couple of months ago, Amazon started adding a check box to the KDP Publishing forum where you need to disclose if your book uses AI elements, and I strongly suspect part of the reason they did that was in case there's like a Supreme Court ruling in the US or a major piece of legislation that drastically changes the legality of AI generated art and text. Then they have an easy out to immediately wipe all that stuff off the store and say, well, we do our due diligence about this. You can't sue us. So for all those reasons, I do think it is a very, very good idea to avoid any AI images in any book covers or audiobook covers or anything you sell for right now.   00:17:39 What Should a Book Cover Do? So let's move on from the negative to the positive. What should a book cover do? As we mentioned earlier in the show, the book cover has three missions. At a single glance, it should convey the author name, the book title, and the genre of the book. It is in fact fairly simple to convey a genre in a book. It's just the hard part is making it look good. Like for example, if you have a book with a dragon on the cover, obviously that's going to be fantasy. If you have a book with like a spaceship flying near a planet, that is going to be a science fiction book. In fact, I redid all the covers in my Silent Order series to be a spaceship flying near a planet after I read a joke about that in a Penny Arcade comic where one of the characters of comics says they only buy books with spaceships and planets on them, and I realized that would probably be the best way to convey what the Silent Order series was about. And in fact, sales did go up after I changed all those covers. Other examples would be if you see a man and a woman looking longingly at one another, that's going to be a romance novel. If the character is wearing a long coat and has his or her back to the camera walking down a dark street, odds are you've got a mystery. If it's a highly edited photo of like the US Capitol or the White House or something, and the title is something like, you know, Patriot Fury, you're probably looking at a thriller novel. So there's lots of conventions to convey what genre book is and the best way to learn them is, you know, to read a lot and to look at a lot of different book covers, which is in the modern age, very easy to do as you scroll through Amazon or Apple or whatever. The text should also be as easy to read as possible, especially in thumbnail or smaller images, so you may have to make the text what feels like slightly ridiculously large, but so long as it's reasonably easy to read, then you'll have achieved the mission of the text. And if possible, you want to hint at the plot without telling the story. A good example of that would be like an urban fantasy book where the cover shows a woman wearing a leather jacket and you know, magic glowing things glowing around her hand. So that hints at what the plot is going to be about or like a thriller novel where you see a woman in like a tank top and combat pants holding a combat knife and a pistol that hints that is going to be a thriller novel and she'll be, you know, fighting for her life. Finally, the last point is fairly subjective and hard to do, but, if possible, you want to balance uniqueness with being familiar enough where people understand the genre at a glance. You don't want to copy someone else's design for many good reasons, but you want to have one that both expresses the genre of the book yet somehow is a little bit unique and that is something you try to strive for, if possible, with the book cover. So that's it for this week. I hope those tips were helpful. I would just like a minute to thank my transcriptionist. As you might have noticed on The Pulp Writer Show website, we now have transcriptions of the newer episodes and she helped me pull together the research for this episode, so thank you for doing that. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found this show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we'll see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look back at my ten favorite scenes to write in 2023. I also discuss how my advertising efforts fared in December 2023. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 182 of the Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 5th, 2024, and today we're going to talk about the favorite scenes I wrote in 2023. We also have an update on how my ads did for my books in December 2023. This is the first episode I'm actually recording in 2024, so Happy New Year to everyone. If you are listening now, however 2023 treated you, I hope 2024 treats you even better. Before we get to our main topics, let's have an update on my current writing projects. My main project right now is Shield of Storms and I am 71,000 words into it. I'm hoping I can get that out in January. It might slip to February. We will see how the rest of the month goes. My side projects right now: I am also working on Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I am 55,000 words into that. That will come out after Shield of Storms, so February or March depending on how long Shield of Storms takes to write. And I am 8,500 words into Wizard Thief, which is going to be the sequel to Half-Elven Thief from December. Not sure when that one's going to come out. I have to write Ghost in the Veils first because I have a recording slot scheduled for that in April that I really need to meet, but so it will probably be late spring, if all goes well. In audio news, the audiobook for Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation is now available at all the usual audiobook stores except Apple, and it should be showing up there later. It's narrated by CJ McAllister, comes to just under 10 hours long, and it's a very good audiobook and worth the listen. So if you have spare credit to or some audiobook money to use, I recommend giving that a chance, and that is where I'm at with my current writing projects. Before we get to the main topic, let's see how ads did in December 2023. Advertising in December is always tricky, both for authors and regardless of what business you're in because every consumer facing business in the world is dumping a ton of money into ads for Christmas and so the cost gets all screwy. But I'm pleased to report some good results for December. First, let's see how the Facebook ads did. For the Ghost series, I got back $4.82 for a dollar I spent, with 16.7% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, I got back $6.42 for every dollar I spent, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. For Malison and Dragontiarna, I got back $1.82 for every dollar spent. For Silent Order, I got back $1.98 for every dollar spent. I think for January, I will shut off the Facebook ads for Malison and Dragontiarna and Silent Order and let them rest until the next time and get a Bookbub for one of them. Next up, let's see how my Bookbub ads did. As before, I advertised Frostborn on Bookbub and for Frostborn I got back $6.52 for every dollar spent, with 37% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. Complete series of audiobooks seems to do really well on Bookbub. I need to expand my targeting data for the platform so I can advertise Ghosts there as well, and maybe urban fantasy and perhaps science fiction at some point. Finally, let's look at my Amazon ads. This month, I advertised Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, Cloak Games: Omnibus One, and Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation on Amazon ads. I'm not entirely sure how Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation did, because the audiobook came out and I'm not entirely sure what the per sale rate for that is going to be, but I think that ad doubled its money, but I'm not entirely sure. For the ones I am sure about, here's how they did. Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire got back $3.06 for every dollar spent, with 18% of the profit coming from audiobook. Cloak Games: Omnibus One got back $3.63 for every dollar spent, with 22% of the profit coming from the audiobook. So, overall I think it is safe to say that my December campaigns went pretty well. So thanks for reading the books, everyone and hopefully we'll have more books to come very soon. 00:04:15 Favorite Scenes of 2023 (SPOILER WARNING FOR REST OF PODCAST) Now our main topic of the week: my ten favorite scenes that I wrote in 2023. First, I should note very strongly that this podcast episode will have spoilers for every single thing I published in 2023, so stop listening right now if you're not caught up and you want to avoid spoilers. That said, I thought it would be interesting to look back at 2023 and talk about some of the favorite scenes to write from the past year. As an added bonus, when I prepared this list, it turned out to be 10 scenes, which is convenient since all the news sites from their top ten articles in December and January anyway. Reminder: spoilers, and there are spoilers after this point. And here are my favorite scenes of 2023, in no particular order. Number One: when Nadia bursts through the roof with Delaxsicoria in Cloak of Dragonfire. That was a fun one to write. I used to joke that I originally intended Nadia's character arc to be a bad person, reluctantly and against her will slowly turned into a good one. But what her plot arc actually turned out to be was Catwoman slowing turning into Gandalf. Exploding through the roof of an athletic complex to save the day while riding a dragon was definitely one of the more Gandalf-esque things that Nadia has done. The scene immediately after that where Nadia, Delaxsicoria, Varzalshinpol, and Tarthrunivor all chase Ferrunivar through the skies of southern California was pretty great as well. Number Two: Caina deduces who Kalliope Agramemnos is in Ghost in the Serpent. I have to admit, for a while I knew it was likely that Caina would have stepchildren she didn't know about since she's married to Kylon, who used to strive to be a model Kyracian noble and Kyracian nobles in general tend to regard abstinence as something to be avoided at best, and a disgraceful vice at worst. Not their most admirable character trait. But for a while I didn't know how to write that situation in a way that would be interesting. If the mother died and Caina was left to raise the stepchildren, that would be lazy writing. It would also be lazy writing if everyone got along. There is an apocryphal story that for a while in the 2000s, all these newly remarried middle-aged screenwriters kept pitching sitcoms where a screenwriter, his new younger wife, and his ex-wife all lived in harmony together. The studio executives, who as a class are not always known for their firm grasp upon reality, always rejected these ideas because they knew a majority of the female half of the audience would absolutely hate it. So a scenario where Caina, Kylon, and Kalliope all got along seemed likely equally lazy writing. But what if Kylon and Kalliope couldn’t stand each other? And Kylon had further grievances against Kalliope because she had never told him about the children? But Kalliope ends up being in awe of and a little frightened of Caina? So the dynamic is that Kylon and Kalliope can’t stand each other, but Caina keeps the peace between them? I thought that might turn out to be pretty interesting to write and Ghost in the Serpents sold enough that I think people agree with me. It's also interesting to write because this is happening while Caina is one of the few people who know how dangerous the Cult of Rhadamathar really is. But more about that to come in future Ghost books. Number Three: Delaxsicoria tells Nadia not to be so hard on herself in Cloak of Dragonfire. The unlikely friendship between Della and Nadia has been fun to write throughout the Cloak Mage series and side stories. From Della’s perspective of course they would be friends – Nadia caught the murderer of her uncle, and Nadia is wound up tighter than a spring and doesn’t relax very much. Nadia, of course, is a little baffled by this, especially since she doesn’t really have any interest in music, which is Della’s great passion. So they have a great dynamic, and we’ll see more of that in future books. Number Four: Sir Telemachus and Niara kill Mharoslav in Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock. This was fun to write because Mharoslav always got away from or at least got the best of the heroes in their previous encounters, including nearly killing Telemachus in the process. Telemachus decided that he would sacrifice himself in seeking vengeance against Mharoslav and save his friends in the process. Then he met Niara. Niara comes from the General Patton school of warfare – dying for your country is a fine thing, but it’s way better to make the other jerk die for his country. Her utter loathing for all wielders of dark magic played into that as well, allowing her to show the way for Telemachus to defeat Mharoslav at last. Number Five: Myotharia versus Xothalaxiar in Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress. I have to admit Myotharia was originally going to die in the final battle of Dragonskull: Fury of the Barbarians, but she was such a great character that I felt I could get more narrative mileage out of the poor woman. I always knew from the beginning of the series that Niara was going to have to fight Xothalaxiar for the final time, and Myotharia lost everything to the urdmordar. So I realized that having Myotharia join the fight against Xothalaxiar would give her a sort of emotional catharsis, and help set Niara onto a path other than seeking her own death in battle. Number Six: Thunderbolt. I lucked out with Thunderbolt’s character in the Silent Order series. I charted out the rest of the Silent Order series way back in 2021, which is when Thunderbolt was first mentioned in Silent Order: Royal Hand. I originally envisioned her as the sort of classic Star Trek Evil Sentient Computer, the sort of computer Captain Kirk would have to talk into a logic loop every other week. But then in 2022 and 2023 ChatGPT and Bing Chat came along, and they were terrible! For a while, the various insane ramblings of ChatGPT and Bing Chat regularly made the news. So when it was time to write Silent Order: Thunder Hand, I based Thunderbolt’s personality off some of ChatGPT’s more hilarious public meltdowns, though I left it ambiguous just how insane Thunderbolt actually was and how much of her behavior was just screwing with people to put them off their balance. By the end, Jack March definitely suspected the latter. Number Seven: The Battle of Calaskar. The entire Battle of Calaskar sequence in Silent Order: Pulse Hand was fun to write because I’ve been thinking about it for ages, since I’ve had a clear endpoint for the Silent Order series in my head for a while. I liked how it was able to bring back Admiral Stormreel, the Navigators, the Calaskaran Navy, and a bunch of other elements from the series for the Grand Finale. Number Eight: Gareth Figures out the Dragonskull. I also liked the final confrontation with Azalmora in Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods. Azalmora was such a self-controlled and intellectual villain that I wanted her demise to be intellectual, a sort of a moment of revelation that kills her. When Gareth figures out the nature of the Dragonskull itself and the way the xortami twisted it with their dark magic, he’s able to use that against Azalmora, and in her final moment she understands the true nature of the Dragonskull, albeit briefly. Number Nine: Riordan MacCormac vs Michael Durst. This was a fun scene to write in Cloak of Embers. Durst had been an arc villain over the last few books. He proudly considered himself a monster, but then he had the bad luck to start working for Maestro, who was just as evil as he was but without any of his self-destructive indulgences. So it was little wonder that Durst found himself dragged into Maestro’s orbit, even if he didn’t realize what was happening. (The scene where Durst goes to kill Maestro and instead she talks him into doing exactly what she wants was also pretty great to write.) Even if Durst didn’t want to kill Nadia, Riordan would still have fought him to the death, because Durst represents a rejection of self-control and responsibility, something Riordan finds utterly abhorrent. And unlike Durst, Riordan knew that a moment of reckoning was coming, which was why he practiced and trained so much with Sir Trandor, while Durst simply went begging to the Dark Ones for power, so the final showdown between Riordan and Durst was quite fun to write. And finally, Number Ten: Rivah and the Magister’s Tower. When I plotted out Rivah’s heist of Ramarion’s tower in Half-Elven Thief, I didn’t get too detailed in my outline as to what the inside of the tower would look like. I just knew I wanted it to be as weird and freaky and unsettling as possible, with a lot of Evil Wizard Stuff cluttering up the place. Several people have told me Rivah’s venture into the tower was their favorite part of the book, so I think I succeeded. So those were my ten favorite scenes that I wrote in 2023. Thanks for reading, everyone. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoy the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

In this week's episode, I take a look at the movies and TV shows I watched and enjoyed in winter 2023. TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Brief Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 181 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is December, the 22nd, 2023 and today we're going to talk about the movies I saw in Winter 2023. Careful listeners might notice that I am recording this on December 22nd, which is actually only a day after I recorded Episode 180, which I recorded yesterday. The reason for that is it is the last Friday before Christmas and New Year's today, and I think I'm going to take most of the days between now and New Year's off and spend time with family and hopefully do other fun things. So this episode I was just recording a couple episodes in advance and I believe this episode is going to go out on January 1st, 2024. So if you're listening to this, I hope you have a Happy New Year and however things went for you in 2023, whether good or bad, I hope they are better in 2024. Just a quick update on my current writing projects, since I am recording this episode the day after I recorded Episode 180, not much has changed. I am 40,000 words into Shield of Storms and I hope to have that out in January, which would be later this month (if you are listening to this in January). I am 51,000 words into Sevenfold Sword Online: Leveling and I'm hoping to have that in February. I am 4,000 words into Half-Elven Thief and I'm not sure when that's going to come out. One additional bit of news since yesterday, it looks very likely we will have an audiobook of Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation sometime in January, if everything goes well. So watch and listen for additional news on that. Since I don't really have any other news since I recorded last week's episode yesterday, let's get into our main topic, which is the movies and TV shows I watched in Winter 2023.   00:01:54 Main Topic: Winter 2023 Movie and TV Reviews As always, I will discuss them in the order that I like them from least liked to most liked and as always remember my opinions about this are subjective. I am not a filmmaker. My opinions are often very, very idiosyncratic and just what I happen to think of a particular piece of work. First up is The Crown Season 6, which came out in 2023. The performances were superb, the actors were excellent, the set design and cinematography was excellent. Everyone involved in the show was at the top of their field and did an amazing job. And I still just didn't like this because it felt a bit ghoulish. For one thing, as The Crown has gone on, it's become less historical and more of a messy soap opera with an increasingly casual relationship with what really happened in the events it describes. For another thing, as I mentioned, I found the show's fixation on Princess Diana’s death to be rather ghoulish. I am old enough to remember her death in 1997, and even then when I was much younger and stupider, I thought the American media's obsession with her death was weird and disturbing, especially since the media fixation on her was the direct contributing cause to her death. If the media hadn't been willing to pay vast sums for photographs of her, the paparazzi wouldn't have chased her and history would be different. A while back I knew a history professor who said that history only starts between 20 to 30 years ago and anything that happened within the last 20 to 30 years wasn't history yet, it was still journalism. I think that is part of what bothers me about Season Six of The Crown. Most of the people involved in the story are still alive. Writing historical fiction about people who have died, who have died is one thing, especially if they've been dead for centuries or even millennia. Only God may judge of the dead, so what those of us among the living think about them is quite irrelevant. But making up fiction about people who are still alive, even if they are major public figures who have unquestionably made some bad decisions, somehow seems libelous, especially since there have been so many articles in both the UK and the US press detailing all the things that Season Six of The Crown got wrong with the historical record. So to sum up, the show is extremely well done, but I cannot help but feel that it's like excellent work done in a bad cause. Overall Grade: D. Next up is Shazam: Fury of the Gods, which came out in 2023. The first Shazam movie was actually pretty good, definitely in B or B Plus territory. The sequel, alas, was quite a bit weaker. It reminded me of watching a really cheesy sword and sorcery movie from the 1980s: fun to watch mostly, but quite dumb. Following up from the first movie, Billy Batson and his foster siblings are now part of the Shazam superhero family and are handling their powers about as well as you would expect inexperienced teenagers to handle phenomenal cosmic powers, except it turns out that the wizard who gave Billy and his family their powers actually stole those powers from the Greek Titan Atlas and Atlas's daughters are ticked off about this and want those powers back. Since this is a superhero movie, let's just say they're not going to settle this dispute in probate court. The product placement for the Skittles candy in this movie was just over the top. In fact, an entire major plot point hinges on a teenage girl’s love of Skittles. One hopes that Mars Incorporated, owner of the Skittles brand, really coughed up for that. Helen Mirren chews a lot of scenery as the chief daughter of Atlas, though she does have a very funny bit with a dictated letter. This isn't her first time in an over-the-top fantasy movie. She played Morgana in Excalibur back in the 80s, though her costume this time covers quite a bit more than Morgana’s various outfits did. The movie also leans way too heavily into the rest of the DC movie universe. I'd say it's enjoyable to shut off your brain and watch all the sparkly fireworks and the scenery chewing, but it’s not very good. Overall Grade: D+. Next up is Clue, which came out in 1985. Big swing and a miss, but definitely a miss nonetheless. I tried to watch this about ten years ago, but the version I watched then didn't have any captions and all the characters talked too fast for me to understand. But I have a much better TV than I did ten years ago and the caption situation has improved, so I gave it another go. This is a dark comedy version of the popular board game Clue. All the classic Clue characters, Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, and so forth are summoned to Mr. Boddy’s mansion during a dark and stormy night. Mr. Boddy gloats says he has been blackmailing all of them, distributes the classic Clue weapons of the pipe, the knife, the wrench and so forth, and then promptly turns off the lights. When the lights come back on. Mr. Boddy has been murdered. Mr. Boddy, to be blunt about it, doesn't seem to have been all that bright a bulb. Anyway, madcap hijinks ensue as the guests try to figure out who the killer was. Three alternate endings are included with the movie, which have a different killer in each one. There were some very funny bits in the movie, but overall it really didn't work and it had some oddly heavy-handed commentary about the Red Scare. Tim Curry was pretty great in it though. Fun fact: he did an excellent turn as Darth Sidious in what was then the final episodes of The Clone Wars animated series, and he also played Arl Howe, one of the chief villains in Dragon Age: Origins, which was one of the last video games I had time to play through all the way before I spent the next fourteen years writing like 147 novels. A remake of Clue has been in production hell for like the last ten years. You just know that Hasbro wants to include Clue in their cinematic universe where Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlett team up with Optimus Prime and GI Joe to fight Megatron and the Monopoly guy or something. Overall grade: C Minus. Next up is Murder Mystery, which came out in 2019. This was unquestionably a dumb movie, but it was a fun, dumb movie. Like it's a C Minus student, but it's a sort of C Minus student who everyone likes, throws great parties, and goes on to have a very successful career as a regional sales manager. Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston play Nick Spitz and Audrey Spitz, a New York City cop and a hairdresser. Nick has failed the detective exam multiple times and has gotten stuck in a rut, and Audrey really wants to go to Europe so Nick takes her to Europe and they promptly blunder into a ‘40s screwball style comedy about the murder of a wealthy European oligarch and his squabbling heirs. A lot of the comedy comes from the good-natured, but boorish Spitzes contrasted with the sophisticated, wealthy Europeans who promptly decided that Nick and Audrey would make the perfect scapegoats to take the fall for the oligarch’s murder. Wacky hijinks follow. I do have to respect how Adam Sandler uses his movie productions as an excuse to travel to exotic locations with his friends. Overall grade: C Minus. Next up is the sequel to Murder Mystery, the aptly named Murder Mystery 2, which came out in 2023. It's the sequel to the first Murder Mystery and pretty much everything I said about the first one still applies-dumb, but fun. Overall grade: C Minus. Next up is Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny from 2023 and ah, I was very ambivalent about this movie. To be fair, it was better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It had some stuff that was really good and some stuff that just annoyed me. The opening sequence with the train during World War II was great- classic Indiana Jones stuff. The Nazis try to time travel to change World War II is a well-established trope of science fiction, but the twist this time is the villain thinks he understands how the time travel device works, but it turns out that he actually doesn't was pretty good. The car chases were excellent as well, both in New York and Tangiers. That said, the legacy protagonist now is an old loser getting lectured by a more competent younger woman story trope was in full force, and it's a really annoying story trope. Disney seems to just adore the story trope: the Star Wars sequels, Secret Invasion, and now Dial of Destiny, and I suspect a majority of audiences agree with me and don't like it, which is probably one of the significant reasons the Disney Corporation lost a metric gigaton of money this year. Top Gun Maverick was a much better example of bringing back a legacy protagonist. Indy also has this oddly out of character speech where he says he doesn't believe in magic, which is rich considering he has literally seen The Ark of the Covenant melt Nazis, the power of The Holy Grail turn another Nazi to dust, and space aliens. So I would say that Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny was half a good movie and half a weak one. Overall grade: B Minus. Next up is the Barbie movie, which came out in 2023. I saw Oppenheimer in the theater in August after I finished working on Dragonskull: Crown of the Gods and a couple months ago I did finally get around to seeing Barbie. Greta Gerwig is clearly a genius because she figured out how to take the existential anxiety of the modern American woman and convert it into $1.44 billion at the box office. If we could work out how to apply the same principles to generating electricity, we would have limitless clean energy, flying cars, and World Peace. Though I suppose the phrase modern American woman really is a facile generalization. Anyway, I really wasn't in the target demographic for this movie. That said, it is quite funny. It's a fantasy comedy that's a bit surrealistic in places. The set design is superb and done with very little computer effects. Apparently so much pink paint was used that it actually caused a nationwide shortage. As many reviews said, Ryan Gosling almost stole the movie as Ken, which was amusing on a meta level because he's played so many grim action heroes. In the third act, the movie really does beat the viewer over the head with the message. But what else can you expect from a Barbie movie in 2023? The funniest line was “How can she call me a fascist? I don't control the railways or the flow of commerce.” The joke about Proust Barbie not selling was pretty funny as well. Maybe if the Barbienheimer meme continues, in the sequel, Proust Barbie can fall in love with Oppenheimer Ken, and they have grim conversations about existentialism and science. Overall grade: B Plus. Next up is Muppet Treasure Island, which came out in 1996. This is a loose-ish adaptation of the classic novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, with many Muppets filling the roles of the characters from the book and Tim Curry playing Long John Silver. Like in the book, young Jim Hawkins acquires a treasure map leading to the buried treasure of a ruthless pirate captain and sets out on an adventure to find it. However, many of the dead captain’s former associates likewise want the treasure, so Hawkins and his allies must outwit their foes. This wasn't quite as good as Muppet Christmas Carol, but still quite enjoyable and funny. Overall Grade: A Minus. Now for the runner up of the best thing I saw in winter 2023 and that will be Loki Seasons One and Two, which came out in 2021 and 2023. I liked the first season of Loki, which came out back in 2021, but it was very obviously the first half of the story so I didn't write anything about it. However, I've seen the second season and the completed Loki show is very good. As I've written before, I don't really like multiverse or time travel stories because the stakes are either too vast or utterly meaningless. Time travel stories are a lot like homemade lasagna: if it's not excellent and not prepared by someone who knows exactly what they're doing, you're going to regret eating it. However, Loki leads hard enough into the concept, and the stakes that the show actually works. Like, I think the key question that every time travel story needs to answer at some point is why the time traveler doesn't just go back in time over and over again until she he or she fixes the problem, like remoting a saved game until you finally figure out how to beat the final boss. If you can time loop indefinitely, why not do it infinitely until you get the perfect outcome? Loki actually comes up with good answer to that question that isn't “because the plot requires it.” Anyway, the show starts with the version of Loki who escaped with Tesseract from Avengers Endgame getting captured by the Time Variance Authority. The TVA is basically the time cops. They guard the flow of The Sacred Timeline and prevent any alternative timelines and realities branching off from the main one. The events that make it out of The Sacred Timeline are determined by the Timekeepers, three mysterious figures who rule the TVA from the shadows. Loki manages to ingratiate himself to his captors, soon realizes that the TVA isn't all what it appears or claims to be, and discovers that big trouble is coming. The show had some good character development for Loki and managed to wrestle with what is in fact some profound philosophical questions. Is there a choice between determinism and free will? Must we choose between either brutal tyrannical order or destructive chaos, or is there another way? On a more prosaic level, some reviews said that the finale of Loki bound Marvel to using Kang The Conqueror as their next major villain, which would be a potential problem due to the actor’s ongoing self-inflicted legal troubles. That said, I don't think that assessment is correct. In my opinion, the ending resolves the story while leaving things wide open for whatever Marvel wants to do (or can afford to do, given Disney's financial woes) next. Overall, Loki was the best non-Spiderman thing Marvel has done since Endgame. It also achieved one of the rarest feats of all in superhero movies: an emotionally satisfying ending to both the story and a long character arc. Overall Grade: A. Finally, the best thing I saw in Winter 2023 was The Shop Around the Corner, which came out in 1940. It is a romantic comedy starring Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Kravlik and Margaret Sullivan as Miss Novak. Mr. Kravlik is the top salesman at Matusek’s, a store owned by the somewhat erratic Mr. Matusek, who kind of reminded me of a marginally brighter Michael Scott. One day Miss Novak comes into the shop and fast talks her way into a job as a sales clerk. Both she and Mr. Kravlik immediately take a dislike to each other, which is ironic because Mr. Kravlik and Miss Novak have been unwittingly corresponding with each other anonymously and falling in love over the last few months, which was something people used to do in the pre-Internet age before Tinder and Match.com. However, big trouble is on the horizon because one of the sales clerks is having an affair with Mr. Matusek's wife and Mr. Matuszek mistakenly blames Mr. Kravlik, who is in fact the most loyal of his employees and the only one brave enough to disagree with him. The movie was both very funny and had a real degree of tension with dramatic stakes. It's a cross between You've Got Mail (which was partially inspired by this movie) and the UK version of The Office. It's a very tight movie, not a single line of dialogue or shot was wasted and the layout of the shots was nearly perfect. In the modern mind, we tend to think of black and white movies as being sanitized and saccharine, but that overlooks that the 1950s and the 1940s were in fact very different periods in American history. Movies from the ‘40s really do have this hard, sometimes cynical, edge to them, without indulging in pointless nudity, graphic violence, or nihilism the way that modern movies often do. Like at one point in the movie, Mr. Matusek tries to shoot himself in despair, only for a teenage boy to stop him. That's dark stuff for romantic comedy. Of course the teenage boy is hardly traumatized by the experience. He definitely leverages the event to get himself promoted from delivery boy to sales clerk. I enjoyed this movie thoroughly. I do recommend you watch it with captions if possible, since sound technology has come a long way since 1940. Overall Grade: A+. So those were the movies that I saw and enjoyed in Winter 2023 and later this year, I will do a roundup of stuff I saw in Winter 2024. So that is it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. And once more, have a Happy New Year! Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.