The Pulp Writer Show

Jonathan Moeller
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Hosted by Jonathan Moeller (author of the FROSTBORN and SEVENFOLD SWORD fantasy series and the SILENT ORDER scifi series), the Pulp Writer Show discusses how to write, format, publish, and sell your novel. Sometimes there are jokes.

  1. 21 HR AGO

    Episode 291: Generative AI Overhype, William Miller, and the Great Disappointment

    In this week's episode, we take a look at hysteria over AI, and compare it to past religious movements like William Miller's Great Disappointment. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief, Book #1 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store: RIVAH50 The coupon code is valid through March 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 291 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 28th, 2026, and today we're looking at AI hysteria and whether or not AI gives any actual benefits to people. We also have Coupon of the Week, progress updates on my current writing projects, and also Question the Week, where we talk to people about AI. But first, let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is RIVAH50. This coupon code will be valid through March 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook as we exit winter and come into spring, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. I'm pleased to report that the rough draft of Cloak of Summoning is done. It turned out to be just about as long as Cloak of Worlds, maybe a thousand words shorter. I am about 20% through the first round of editing, and I am hopeful that that book will be out sometime in March, probably the first week of March if all go as well. I've also written a short story called Dragon Claw that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook format when Cloak of Summoning comes out, which as I said will hopefully be in early March. I'm also 11,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will be my main project once Cloak of Summoning is published. In audiobook news, the audiobook of Blade of Shadows (as narrated by Brad Wills) is now out at almost all the stores, so you can get it at Audible, Apple, Google Play, Kobo, and the other main stores. Cloak of Titans (as narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is done and is currently rolling out to the stores. I think as of right now, you can get it at Google Play, Kobo, and my own Payhip store, but it should be showing up on Audible and the other main stores before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:01:56 Question of the Week Now let's move on to Question of the Week. For the first Question of the Week of 2026 and this week's question: have you personally derived any benefits or experienced any negatives from the rise of generative AI? And this question was inspired by the topic of this week's post, obviously enough since we're talking about AI. I should note that this is a contentious topic with divergent opinions, and so I asked people to remain civil in the comments and they definitely were, so thank you for everyone for that. Now let's have some opinions on AI before I tell you how AI has positively and mostly negatively affected my life. Joachim says: I have not used AI for private purposes. My Con: My Chromebook might be obsolete rather sooner than later. In my company, we use an AI, which is helpful. It has all the knowledge articles, so you can ask, how do I do this or that? The company's Con: laptop prices are going up. Eddie says: My Cons are much the same as yours. My Pros are using it to create images for tabletop games to help players visualize monsters and NPCs. I have found it effective in turning voice to text meeting notes into meeting minutes and actions. Jesse says: Software engineer here. I have found it helpful when I'm working on something in a language I'm not as familiar with the syntax. As a "how I might do this" learning tool, it's not bad. As a "do this for me/vibe code" thing, no thanks…too much trust. John says: Yes and no. I was in an AI startup that stopped paying me and my team for two months then let us go. We're currently suing them for back pay, but the tech worked and is still working. I also work in ad tech. Devs are trying to get more productive using AI tools. It's hit and miss as far as I can tell, but using traditional machine learning and data science to optimize marketing has worked for decades and still works, but that's not what people consider to be AI nowadays. Also drove across the country last August and used ChatGPT to plan my trip, and that works splendidly. I think John might win here for largest negative in his comment though, to be fair, that's more for business reasons than for AI itself, though I, for his sake, I'm pleased he was able to use ChatGPT to plan his drive across the country and ChatGPT didn't send him driving off a cliff someplace. Jenny says: I'm so over everyone trying to push this "solution" on me. It's like protein enhanced foods. Stop trying to put protein and AI into everything. Just put it where it makes sense or let me choose it. My negative experiences far outweigh anything helpful. Jimmy says: I have quit using Google search. It never tried to find the answer that I asked for. It just returned what it felt like. Its answers usually matched the paid ads it led the list with. Rob says: Okay for meeting notes and rough drafting for job applications, et cetera. Other than that, seems to have limited use for me personally and is a nuisance on my phone, internet browser, et cetera. And finally, Randy says: my biggest Con is that the AI answers that pop up when I'm trying to search range between inaccurate and dangerously wrong. I suspect many people don't realize they aren't reading actual data when they see them. So thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts on that. For myself, I've mostly experienced negative things with AI and a few positive things though to be honest, both the positive and negative things were relatively minor in the greater scheme of things. So I shall list off the Pros and Cons of my experiences with generative AI. I should mention that none of my books, short stories, for sale audiobooks, or book covers contain any AI elements. If it says Jonathan Moeller on the cover and it's not on YouTube, then it is 100% human made. Now, the Pros and Cons. The Pros: Power Director 365, the video editing program I use for YouTube, has an "animated by AI" feature so I've used it to animate some of my book covers for use of Facebook ads with middling results at best. I used Google's Voice AI stuff to create AI voice versions of the Silent Order books and then put them on YouTube because I wanted to understand the technology. I'm not planning to ever do actual audiobook versions of Silent Order since they wouldn't make back any money, so I wasn't screwing a narrator out of work and the voices involved were licensed by Google, so there was no copyright infringement the way there is with companies like Anthropic. That said, I suspect this is less generative AI and simply a more advanced text to speech technology, which has been around forever. I mean, you could do text to speech back on the earliest versions of the Macintosh. I mean, ideally, I would like text to speech to just be a button in your ereader app of choice for accessibility reasons, and then you can purchase the audiobook if the text to speech was too bland. Overall, a lot of people listen to the AI versions on YouTube, but the listeners mostly complained about the synthetic voice and would've preferred a real narrator, unsurprisingly. Now onto the Cons. Facebook ads went from very effective to middling at best on a good day, thanks to their Advantage Plus AI. I am constantly bombarded by AI generated scam emails of several different varieties. I deleted twelve before I recorded this. The price of Microsoft Office went up, the price for RAM and GPUs went up due to data center hoarding them all. The price for electricity has gone up. Windows 11 and Microsoft Office's performance has gone down quite a bit due to forced AI integration. In fact, I got so annoyed at Windows 11, I switched to writing on a Mac Mini, which I suppose was a positive because I like the Mac Mini, but still. Google Search and all Google products in general are much less useful because of AI and the quality of information on the internet (already low) has gone down quite a bit due to the prevalence of AI slop. Admittedly, neither these Pros or Cons are majorly serious to me personally (with the possible exception of electricity prices going up), but the Cons definitely outweigh the Pros. I can confidently say I have derived no real benefit from generative AI, and I suspect a lot of other people could say the same, if they're honest. 00:07:27 Main Topic of the Week: William Miller, The Great Disappointment, and AI Now onto our related main topic this week, AI hysteria, William Miller, and The Great Disappointment. This past week there were numerous articles from and interviews with various AI bros saying that within 12 to 18 months, AI will replace white collar work and humanity must simply adjust. When I read these articles, I wasn't reminded of the Singularity, of AI, of Skynet and the Terminator, or anything technological. Instead, I thought of a preacher named William Miller who died about 190 years ago. William Miller came out of the Second Great Awakening, which was one of the waves of religious vitality and furor that grip America every so often. Miller almost died in combat as an officer in the War of 1812, and saw one of his men killed in front of him, which understandably left a lasting impression. His experiences led him to an examination of mortality that resulted in a fervent Baptist conversion. He also became convinced that he could calculate the date of Christ's return from the Bible and decided t

    14 min

  2. 16 FEB

    Episode 290: Five Instagram Marketing Tips For Writers

    In this week's episode, we take a look at five Instagram tips for writers, and we also discuss recent Facebook ad changes. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store: CAINA25 The coupon code is valid through February 23, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates   Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 290 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 13th, 2026, and today we're looking at five tips for Instagram marketing for writers. We will also have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects.   So let's first start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Night series at my Payhip store, and that code is CAINA25. The coupon code is valid through February the 23rd, 2026 so if you need a new ebook for this winter, we've got you covered.   And now on my current writing and publishing projects. I'm currently 91,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th book in my Cloak Mage urban fantasy series. I am hoping to finish the rough draft in the coming week, and then it's going to need a fair bit of editing because I've decided to change things and move things around to improve it. So if all goes well, I hope that book will be out in the first week of March, assuming nothing comes up before then.   I am also 8,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, which will be the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and I am hoping that will be out in April, if all goes well.   In audiobook news, Blade of Storms is completely finished and I believe as of right now you can buy it at my Payhip store, Kobo, and Google Play, and it is currently working its way through processing at all the other audiobook stores. Hollis McCarthy has finished recording Cloak of Titans, which is the 11th book in the Cloak Mage urban fantasy series, and if all goes well, my proofer should be able to listen to it this week and then hopefully the audiobook will be available to you sometime in March. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects.   00:01:51 Thoughts on Facebook Ads   Before we get to our main topic, I want to have a brief digression into another part of the Meta empire, specifically Facebook ads and my recent experiences therein. I've mentioned before that I stopped using Facebook ads in October since the Advantage Plus system, which is their AI targeting system, was giving me headaches.   For a brief summary of my experience with Facebook ads. I started using them in 2019, did really well with them in 2020, then Facebook randomly started banning accounts during this craziness of summer 2020. I got my account reinstated, used them less frequently more and more until October of 2025 when I stopped using them altogether because Advantage Plus made targeting so hard. Since then, I've relied mostly on Amazon ads and BookBub ads to good results. However, I've also read various blog posts from people who have been struggling with the Advantage Plus system as well, and they've been investigating it thoroughly as internet marketers tend to do, and they've uncovered something interesting that isn't mentioned at all in Facebook's documentation about the new changes, specifically that Advantage Plus uses the text content of your ad to target it.   Under the old system, it didn't work that way at all. You would select interests that match your ad, usually popular authors in the fantasy genre (like J.R.R Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, George R.R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and so forth) and then you wrote the text of the ad and supplied an image, which was usually called a creative. The creative was like 80% of a successful Facebook ad. You just needed a good picture, more or less. The Advantage Plus system by contrast targets according to the text in the ad. So while you still need a good creative, you need to be precise in the ad text. So for example, you need to write something like this: "Fans of The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, Mistborn, and Game of Thrones will love this free epic fantasy available for Kindle readers." Now, I found the arguments in these blog posts persuasive, so I decided to give it a try. The results are on the better side of okay-ish, I will admit. I didn't lose any money and did make a bit of money. The results were definitely better than I expected, though the ad using Advantage Plus typically only has a shelf life of six to 10 days before it stops working. That said, the old system was still better because the interests were more granular and I could assign them more precisely. I used to be able to advertise Frostborn, Cloak Mage, The Ghosts, and Demonsouled all at the same time because I could target the ads so precisely and granularly. There's absolutely no way I could do that now because the Advantage Plus system is a black box. It basically boils down to "trust us, the AI will figure it out" when it very obviously can't.   So for the moment I will have one Facebook ad in the rotation until Meta changes something and everything breaks. There's no way I'll run as many Facebook ads as I did in 2020, when sometimes I had eight different Facebook ads going at once. Apparently in the last three years, Meta spent around 130 billion on AI, give or take, and what they got for that money is an ad targeting system that frequently doesn't work, and when it does work, doesn't work as well as the old system did. Spending unfathomable sums of money to replace a system that worked pretty well with one that intermittently doesn't work, and then when it does function, doesn't work as well as the previous system seems to be a pretty good summary of the "AI revolution" so far.   00:05:05 Main Topic: 5 Tips for Instagram Marketing for Indie Authors     Now onto our main topic this week, five tips for Instagram marketing for indie authors. Because I'm looking for new alternatives to Facebook ads for reasons I just discussed, I have just started using Instagram as part of my marketing strategy, and many indie authors, especially in the romance genre, have reported a lot of success marketing through Instagram so I wanted to learn more about it and share what I learned. In today's episode, I'm going to focus on marketing through your author account, not paid Instagram ads, which could be a separate podcast topic in the future. Here are five tips that might help you with running an author Instagram account.   #1: Find a strategy beyond book promotion. Like any other form of social media, if all you post is promotion for your books, it'll be hard to gain a following. Before you start posting regularly, you'll have to think about what else you have to offer your audience. Even if you want to keep your posts exclusive to writing, there are other types of posts you can make, like behind the scenes peeks, extra facts about a character, or using the poll/question feature to engage with your followers about the books. Follow other author accounts from writers in your genre to learn about their successes and how they engage with their followers. That said, a warning with that, spending a lot of time looking at posts from engaging with other authors creates a closed loop and doesn't further your goal of getting your books into the hands of your readers. Looking at other author accounts and engaging with them definitely falls into the category of what I've called writing adjacent activities that can easily give you the illusion of progress but not actual progress that I've talked about on this podcast before. Ideally, you should spend most of your time on Instagram with readers, not other authors.   It's also important to find the balance between providing personal content to make readers feel more connected to you and having it drift too far into being a personal account. Most of us have seen author accounts and social media accounts that post far too personal of relationship details or various long types of rants on various topics that I find it hard to believe help sell any books. The balance will be different for everyone, but always keep in mind that your primary goal on your author accounts is to be a space for your brand as an author. In that same vein, posting negative reviews of other books or negative comments about other writers is not a smart idea in the long run. At best, it looks like you're attacking someone else to make yourself look better, and at worst, you can end up as part of one of the many Bookstagram dramas that crop up with predictable and tedious frequency and in the process, you may make yourself some enemies for life. Nobody wants that.   Spamming your books by promoting them in other author's accounts, comments sections, or worse, DMing them is considered bad form and not even remotely effective in the long run.     #2: Your space, your rules. Don't be shy about blocking people or deleting comments, especially from spam accounts. Remember that it's your space, not theirs. The flip side of that is turning off comments altogether will limit your reach on Instagram. Although engagement with other accounts matters on Instagram, not every single comment or DM needs a reply, and it would be a waste of precious writing time to even try. Many authors find a compromise in liking non-spammy, well-intentioned comments instead of replying to each one. Although it's important to post regularly, putting out a public schedule for what you'll post is an invitation for people to get upset when you miss a day.     #3: Captions matter. Although Instagram is about images and video, substantial captions are important for helping people to find your content. The algorithm rewards decent size but not overly long captions with good hashtags, even if people don't read them.

    11 min

  3. 9 FEB

    Episode 289: Using The Universal Monsters To Write Compelling Villains

    In this episode, we look at how the classic black & white Universal movie monsters tap into universal fears, and how you can use that to create compelling villains in your book. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book #2 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: GARETH50 The coupon code is valid through February 16, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 289 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 6, 2026, and today we are discussing how you can use the Universal monsters to write interesting villains. Before we get into that, we will have Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects. First up is Coupon of the Week and this week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Shield of the Knight, Book #2 of my Dragonskull series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills), at my Payhip store. And that code is GARETH50. And as always, the coupon code and the link to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through February 16th, 2026, so if you need a new audiobook to get you through the middle of February, we have got you covered. Now let's see where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. As of this recording, I am 63,000 words into Cloak of Summoning and I am almost but not quite halfway through my outline. So this is definitely going to be a long book and it's probably going to come out in the first part of March because it's long enough that it will take me a while to finish writing it and then to edit and proof it and everything else. So I'm making good progress on it. It was a very productive week, but I am still not even halfway through, so I think it's probably going to be March. I am also 5,000 words into Blade of Wraiths. That will be the fourth book of my epic fantasy Blades of Ruin series, and that will probably be in April, if all goes well. In audiobook news, Blade of Shadows (as narrated by Brad Wills) is done and it is slowly starting to roll out to the various platforms. I think as of this recording, the only place it is live right now is my Payhip store and Google Play, but hopefully by the time I record the next episode, it will be available at even more stores than that. Hollis McCarthy is working on Cloak of Titans and I think she's about halfway or two thirds of the way through recording, so we should be able to get that to you before too much longer. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. 00:02:13 Main Topic: Universal Monsters, Universal Fears, and Creating Villains Now our main topic, which is the Universal monsters and the universal fears and how you can use that to create villains. One idea a writer can use to create compelling villains is to tap into some of the universal fears, and in some ways, those universal fears are embodied by the classic Universal monster movies. I mentioned before that in Halloween of 2025, I saw that a bunch of the old black and white Universal monster movies were on Prime Video. So I watched them for the first time since I was a kid, and I was pleased to see that they held up pretty well for movies that are nearly a century old, especially considering these were some of the very first movies ever made with sound and the filmmakers were kind of figuring it out as they went along. Dracula is a bit uneven because they tried to cram the stage play version of the book into a 70 minute movie, which really doesn't work, though Bela Lugosi's performance as Dracula and Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing really carried the movie and helped define the characters in the public eye, but the others are all good and Bride of Frankenstein is legitimately a great movie, but why have these particular movies lasted so long in the public consciousness? For that matter, why do people keep coming back to new versions and new stories of Dracula and Frankenstein's Creature and all the others? Partly it's because these characters are in the public domain and you can use them without getting sued. True, but there's a lot of stuff in the public domain that doesn't see the light of day nearly as often as these classic monsters. I think it's because the classic monsters tap into the universal (small U) fears or classic archetypes of the things that people fear in real life. It's interesting to note that most of the classic Universal monsters were either originally humans who became monstrous or creations by humans that turn monstrous. Essentially, the monsters tap into archetypal fears and are exaggerated versions of villains and monsters we might actually encounter on a day-to-day basis. What do I mean? Let's expound. First up, Dracula. Count Dracula is in some ways the easiest metaphor to explain. He's an aristocratic vampire that feeds upon people and gives them nothing but evil in return. Perhaps he will pass on his own immortality to some of his victims, but it's a cursed and hellish form of immortality and any vampires that he creates are essentially his slaves, sometimes his mindless slaves. Dracula is the fear of the Evil Elite. This of course, takes many different forms in the modern era, but it is very much alive and well. The various conspiracy theories that the elite of society might be devil worshippers or engaged in sinister cults are definitely Dracula adjacent (and based on recent news reports, it indeed appears at least some of these conspiracy theories turned out to be accurate). More prosaically, "rent seeking behavior" is often characterized as vampirism. Rent seeking behavior is defined as finding ways to extract profit without adding value by manipulating the legal or regulatory environment. The landlord who raises rent by $500 a month for no reason. A software developer who reduces features while raising the subscription price or a financier who manipulates the regulations for an industry while investing in it are good examples of rent seeking behavior that is metaphorically vampiric. For that matter, it can be downright mundane. The middle manager who bullies his employees and then takes all the credit for their work is a very boring and unpleasant, but nonetheless, an all too common example of the vampire metaphor in real life. Frankenstein's monster is a much easier metaphor to explain now than it would've been before ChatGPT went mainstream. There is always a fear that we will be destroyed by the works of our own hands, especially in the last a hundred years since the creation of nuclear technology and gene editing. Probably most famous examples of that in science fiction are The Terminator and The Matrix movies series. However, these days the metaphor for Frankenstein's monster is almost ridiculously easy. We have generative AI to fulfill the metaphor of Frankenstein's monster for us. Karl Marx famously said that history repeats twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Nuclear weapons as a metaphor for Frankenstein's monster was a tragedy but generative AI is a farce. The tech bros sold it as this omniscient mind that could solve all problems and eliminate all jobs. What we've actually gotten is an imbecilic chatbot that makes a lot of mistakes, can't remember anything, can't actually do anything right, inflicts widespread damage to the economy, drives up electricity costs, and makes existing products like Windows 11 and Google search much worse. It's like as if Frankenstein's monster was really, really stupid and wanted you to add glue to your pizza to keep the cheese from sliding off. The Wolf Man, of course, is a metaphor for the potentially bestial nature of man. We all know, of course, or are eventually forced to learn that human beings have a dark side that can come out in times of anger and stress. Civilization is sometimes a thin veneer over the animalistic side of humans. Sometimes the veneer grows even thinner and the dark side comes raging out in riots and wars and mass slaughter. For Larry Talbot, the original Wolf Man in the movie, his situation is even more terrifying. He's a rational man who believes in science and psychology and doesn't believe in things like werewolves. Yet when he is bitten, he nonetheless loses control and transforms into the Wolf Man. He doesn't want to transform and attack people, but he has lost control of himself to the werewolf curse, and so he does. In a sense, all humans are werewolves in that we have a monstrous side that can come out under the right or the wrong conditions. The worst of us embrace that fact, just as in medieval legends, sometimes people would make pacts with the devil to become werewolves. The Invisible Man was originally a science fiction story, which means that the Invisible Man represents a new fear created by science. "Transhumanism" is an idea that eventually humans will merge with machines and evolve and become something new. Naturally, many people think this is a bad idea, and so a new idea has emerged: "posthumans" or humans that have been so modified by science that they are no longer recognizably human. So far, this has remained mostly science fiction, but you can see the glimmers of it beginning in biology and medical science. There's a reason performance enhancing drugs are banned in most sports. Genetic engineering opens up the possibility that corporations could create their own custom humans, essentially their own posthumans. The possibilities for abuse in such situations are sadly endless. So the Invisible Man, like Frankenstein's Creature, taps into the fear of science or more accurately the fear of what horrors science might create. On the surface, the Creature from the Black Lagoon is a monster story about a creature that carries off a pretty

    13 min

  4. 2 FEB

    Episode 288: Five Additional Business Lessons For Indie Authors From Brandon Sanderson's Apple TV Deal

    In this week's episode, we look at five business lessons for indie authors from Brandon Sanderson's recent Apple TV deal. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Silent Order series at my Payhip store: CALASKAR25 The coupon code is valid through February 9, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 288 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 30th, 2026 and today we are discussing five additional business lessons for indie authors from Brandon Sanderson in the aftermath of his recent Apple TV deal. Before we get into that, we will have a Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing progress. First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Silent Order series at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is CALASKAR25. And as always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February the 9th, 2026. So if you need a new science fiction ebook to read for this winter, we have got you covered. And now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. Now that Blade of Storms is out and is doing well (thank you all for that), my main project is now Cloak of Summoning, and I am 34,000 words into it as of this recording, which puts me on Chapter 6 of 23 in the outline. I think it's probably going to come out in March because February is a short month and Cloak of Summoning is going to be a long book. So hopefully it should come out early in March. I'm also 1,000 words into Blade of Wraiths, which will be the fourth book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. That will be my main project once Cloak of Summoning is done. So hopefully that will come out in probably April or thereabouts. In audiobook news, recording is very nearly completed for Blade of Shadows, the second book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, and that will be narrated by Brad Wills. Hollis McCarthy is currently working on the audiobook of Cloak of Titans, and I think she's about halfway through. So hopefully we should have some new audiobooks for you to listen to before much longer. And that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:04 Main Topic of the Week: 5 Business Lessons For Indie Authors From Brandon Sanderson Now onto our main topic this week, five additional business lessons for indie authors from Brandon Sanderson. And I think it is objectively factual to say that Brandon Sanderson is probably the most successful fantasy author who is currently publishing. Beyond the sheer number of sales, what many find most impressive about what he's achieved is his company, Dragonsteel Entertainment, that he has been able to create. It consists of Kickstarter campaign work, special book editions, a successful convention, merchandising (including an RPG), and a whole slew of other things. Even for authors like me operating on a much smaller scale, there are a few things to learn from his success at publishing and creating a specialized empire. Now what's amusing is the notes for the show were prepared a couple of weeks ago, but a few days ago, the news was announced that Brandon Sanderson entered into a licensing deal with Apple TV to produce adaptations based on his Mistborn and Stormlight Archive series. As the author himself said on Reddit, "The decision to pick Apple was due to two factors. First, the levels of approvals and control. Apple wants to be a true partner with me and they feel like they really get what I want to do. Second, their track record. Apple does fewer things, but higher quality than some other studios. I find virtually everything of theirs I watch is excellent and creator driven." So that and an impressive degree of creative control he wrung out of Apple for this and if you are at all familiar with the history of movie adaptations, you know that the author getting any degree of creative control does not happen all that often. Usually what happens is the studio cranks out the adaptation that butchers the book and then it disappears into obscurity. So this actually happens to tie in quite well with the original theme of today's episode, which is the Five Business Lessons from Brandon Sanderson. He was able to reach this level of success by following these five business lessons consistently over a period of decades. So we will go into that now. #1: Find a way to meet fan demand and find gaps in the market. Sanderson was ahead of traditional publishing when it came to responding to fan requests for high quality letter bound or other enhanced special editions. By focusing on this gap in the market, he was able to meet a need expressed by his most passionate fans and get an additional round of sales from existing customers who already have the mass market paperbacks or ebook versions. Even in an age with ebooks and audiobooks, physical copies are still important to many readers, partly because they can't be deleted off your ereader. This is even more true of special editions being gifted or displayed like decor. He further cemented the respect of his fans by spending a great deal of time and effort adding elaborate details like gilding and full color illustrations to the premium editions. He listened to fan demand and exceeded their expectations without pricing out or alienating fans by only offering the premium versions. It's also been long been a complaint of readers that they can't buy bundles of the physical book, ebook, and audiobook at the same time. There's a wide variety of reasons it's not easy or even possible to bundle these formats together, but Brandon Sanderson found a way to make it work with books from his largest Kickstarter campaign because he was controlling the production of all three formats. He found a gap in the market by addressing this need and made fans feel like they're getting a more complete experience by getting the formats all at once. #2: Take advantage of an opportunity. One of the most surprising parts of Brandon's largest Kickstarter campaign is how one of the Secret Project books, Tress of the Emerald Sea, took off on BookTok and became popular with readers who haven't read other Brandon Sanderson or even fantasy books before. Tress also gave potential readers who are intimidated by how prolific he is and how long and interconnected the books in his series are a chance to try his writing in a less intimidating way. Dragonsteel responded to this development by commissioning special editions of Tress, Mistborn, and The Emperor's Soul in a Sanderson starter pack on the TikTok shop, which did extremely well. Authors who are prolific would do well to think about entry points in a similar way. What are your "starter pack" books? How can people feel more comfortable trying out your work and sampling from your books in your different genres? For myself, one way I do this is making the first book in almost all my series permafree. This gives people a chance to try my work without making a financial commitment, and usually the second book is $0.99, which is a little bit of a financial commitment, but not very much. And if someone has read the first two books in the series, odds are they are probably going to continue on to the full price rest of the series. #3: Be transparent. Brandon uses weekly update videos and his podcast to update readers on his writing and publishing progress as well as new merchandise releases. If there is a delay or an unexpected development, he can use this outlet to explain what happened in more detail. For example, when there was a delay in the printing of the premium hardcover of Tress of the Emerald Sea, he posted to Kickstarter, social media, and his weekly video to explain what happened and what Dragonsteel was doing to address it. For myself, I include writing updates at the beginning of each of my podcast episodes and also post updates to my website and Facebook page on a regular basis. He also posts a State of the Sanderson every year on his website and YouTube channel that summarizes the status of his various projects in a more collected form so more casual fans can catch up on his news there. This level of transparency builds trust with your readers. Some authors hide from failed promises about publishing dates or future books, but it's better to be transparent when something changes than to act like it never happened or keep giving vague answers. For example, very recently, I'd hoped Cloak of Summoning was going to come out in February, but like I explained at the start of the episode, it's a long book, February is a short month and I've got a bunch of stuff to do in February that's not related to writing, so it's probably going to be early March that the book comes out. #4: Keep creative control. One of the reasons that even during the era of peak streaming, we did not see an adaptation of a Brandon Sanderson book (besides Wheel of Time, which doesn't really count because it mostly belongs to Robert Jordan and the series didn't last long enough to get to the final books in the series that Sanderson authored). It was in part because creative control of the work is important to him. He wants to find a production company that respects his work and is at least reasonably faithful to the original books. As anyone who has been disappointed by a show or movie that was created by people unfamiliar with the work or uninterested in following the original plot knows, that is not as simple of a request as you might think. Like of all the books I've read that have had TV or movie adaptations, I think I can think of only three adaptations that were better than the original book: Goldfinger (because Goldfinger's plot in the movie made more sense

    12 min

  5. 26 JAN

    Episode 287: Five Lessons Learned From My Ten Bestselling Books Of 2025

    In this week's episode, I take a look back at my ten bestselling books of 2025, and consider five lessons learned from them. This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, Book #1 in the Dragonskull series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store: DRAGONSKULL50 The coupon code is valid through February 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 287 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 23rd, 2025, and today we are discussing five lessons learned from my 10 bestselling books of 2026. We'll also have Coupon of the Week and an update at my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store. And that coupon code is DRAGONSKULL50. And as always, links to my Payhip store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes of this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February 2, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this winter, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I am very nearly done with Blade of Storms, the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I am probably just going to stay inside and finish it this weekend because it is very cold. It is winter, but it looks like this week we are having super winter and I'm in the part of the US where we're not getting any snow thankfully, but it is in fact -20 degrees [Fahrenheit] outside, which makes it a good time to stay inside and work on Blade of Storms. So hopefully it will start going live by the time this episode goes live or shortly thereafter. I'm also 16,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. And if all goes well, that should be my main project soon. It might come out before the end of February, but it will probably slip to March, the way things are looking. In audiobook news, we're very nearly done with the audiobook of Blade of Shadows (as excellently recorded by Brad Wills) and hopefully that should start getting through quality assurance on the various audiobook platforms before too much longer. Hollis McCarthy has started working on Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage urban fantasy series. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:09 Main Topic of the Week: 5 Lessons Learned from My 10 Bestselling Books from 2025 And now let's move on to our main topic this week, five lessons learned from the top 10 of my bestselling books from 2025. I have this growing pile of tax paperwork on my desk and that got me to thinking about what were my 10 bestselling books of 2025 because all the sales data is now in so I can parse it and look back and see which books of mine sold the best in 2025. I thought it'd be interesting to look at my 10 bestselling ebooks, audiobooks, and paper books for 2025 and see what percentage of them or what rather what percentage of book revenue came from new stuff published in 2025 and old stuff that I had published previously and then I would take a look at five lessons learned from that. So with all that in mind, let's take a first look at my ten bestselling ebooks of 2025 and what percentage of my book revenue for 2025 came from new books and from my backlist. So first up, my 10 bestselling ebooks of 2025: 1. Shield of Deception 2. Shield of Battle 3. Shield of Power 4. Ghost in the Assembly 5. Ghost in the Corruption 6. Cloak of Worlds 7. Blade of Flames 8. Ghost in the Siege 9. Blade of Shadows 10. Cloak of Illusion   And for my total ebook revenue for 2025, 29.3% came from new books and 70.7% came from things I published prior to 2025. So let's look at the 10 bestselling audiobooks of 2025: 1. The Ghosts: Omnibus One 2. Cloak Mage Omnibus One 3. Ghost Armor Omnibus One 4. Dragonskull Omnibus One 5. The Ghosts Omnibus Two 6. The Ghosts Omnibus Three 7. Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One 8. Ghost Exile Omnibus One 9. Cloak Mage Omnibus Three 10. Frostborn: The Shadow Prison: Frostborn, Book 15   So for audio, for my total revenue, 11.92% of it came from things that were newly published in 2025 and 88.08% came from things that had been published prior to 2025. Now my top 10 selling print books: 1. The Windows Command Line Beginner's Guide - Second Edition 2. The Linux Command Line Beginner's Guide 3. The Ubuntu Beginner's Guide 4. Frostborn: The Gray Knight 5. Shield of Storms 6. Frostborn: The Master Thief 7. Shield of Darkness 8. Shield of Deception 9. Frostborn: The Shadow Prison 10. Frostborn: The Eightfold Knife In terms of the percentages of my total print revenue, 5.57% came from things that have been published in 2025, but a whopping 94.43% came from stuff I published prior to 2025. So those are the numbers and the sales percentages. Let's see what lessons we can learn from looking at this data. And so I thought of five lessons. #1: My efforts in 2025 to focus up and focus on finishing series and then shift to just working on three series at a time really paid off. For instance, my three bestselling ebooks for 2025 came from the Shield War Series (Shield of Deception, Shield of Battle, and Shield of Power). So very clearly it was a good idea to focus on that and it was also a good idea to focus on doing a new epic fantasy series like Blades of Ruin because Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows were number, let's see, number seven and nine on that list respectively, and that was after they were published only in the last quarter of 2025. For that matter, I think people were very excited that I finally managed to get back to the Cloak Mage series because Cloak of Worlds was the sixth bestselling book of the year, even though it came out in I believe October and Cloak of Illusion was a year old and it was still one of the 10 bestselling books of 2025 just because people were that eager for me to get back to the Cloak Mage Series. Wizard Assassin, the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, didn't make the list, but the reason for that is very obvious. It only came out on December 23rd and if it had become one of the 10 bestselling books of 2025 in the remaining, what was it, eight days of 2025 at that point, that would've been nothing short of astonishing, but it sold very well. And I think when I do podcast episode for this at the end of 2026, then some of the Half-Elven Thief books will definitely be on the list. So my strategy of focusing on just three series at a time and having the big epic fantasy series like Blades of Ruin be the main series, and then I alternate between Cloak Mage and Half-Elven Thief every other month does seem to be the right strategy. #2: The second lesson I think I learned is that it's good to have all your books in print if possible, but if you have nonfiction books, it's especially good for them to be in print because as you remember from the top 10, my top three bestselling print books of 2025 were The Windows Command Line, The Linux Command Line, and The Ubuntu Beginner's Guides, which are all nonfiction books I wrote a very long time ago and put into print. If I remember right, Linux Command Line and Windows Command Line, both were from 2012, which is a disturbingly long time ago at this point, but they remain my two of my top three bestselling print books of 2025. Obviously it's good to have all your books in print because you'll notice that several of my older fiction books and even one of my relatively newer fiction books (Shield of Storms) were all in the top 10 bestselling print list. But nonetheless, if you have nonfiction and you're selling nonfiction, I strongly recommend you get your nonfiction books into print because I think people are more likely to buy a nonfiction book in print than they are a fiction book. For fiction, it's only your absolute favorites that you get in print these days. I think the majority of what used to be the mass market paperback market has switched over to ebooks. But if you are reading nonfiction, trying to learn how to do something (and all three of these books are technical books), it's more likely that you're going to buy the print book but you keep it as a reference. So if you have a nonfiction, it's definitely a good idea to put it into print. #3: I think the third thing I learned is that audiobook bundles very definitely pay off. You notice that of my top 10 audiobooks for 2025, 9 of the 10 were audiobook bundles, and I think we see the influence of Audible on the audiobook market there. If you're familiar with Audible, you know that most Audible subscription plans give you a credit every month (or more than one credit every month), which means that Audible listeners are very length conscious because they want to get the most audiobook possible for their monthly credit. So they're more likely to spend their monthly credit on the Ghost Omnibus One rather than getting Child of the Ghosts, Ghost in the Flames, and Ghost in the Blood individually because it's a much better bargain. There's much debate online in the indie author space about how much influence Audible has over the audiobook market, and many people argue that Audible has too much influence over the audiobook market, but the reality remains that Audible has a lot of influence on the audiobook market. And so consequently, the longer the audiobook, the easier it is to sell. So if you have the opportunity to do audiobook bundles, it might be worth doing them. I think you'll find that selling an audiobook bundle is significantly easier than selling an individual audiobook. The best way to promote the audiobook is to promote the ebook

    15 min

  6. 19 JAN

    Episode 286: Office Setup For Writers

    In this week's episode, we offer four tips for setting up a comfortable and productive home office space for writers. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store: DRAGONTIARNA25 The coupon code is valid through January 26, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 286 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 16th, 2026 and today we are discussing office setups for writers in terms of computers and furniture and so forth and how do you do that in a way that is maximally comfortable and maximally beneficial to overall joint health. We will also talk about Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. So first up, let's start with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragontiarna series at my Payhip store and that coupon code is DRAGONTIARNA25. And as always, links to my Payhip store and the coupon code will be available in the show notes to this episode. And this coupon code will be valid through January the 26th, 2026. So if you need some new ebooks to read as we head into the winter, we have got you covered. Now for an update on my current writing and publishing projects. The rough draft of Blade of Storms, the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series, is now done at about 90,000 words. It's time to start editing. It might actually be a little longer once I'm done editing because I was thinking about it on the treadmill this morning and I think I may need to add some scenes to some of the chapters, but we'll see when we get there. I have also written a short story called Talon Depths. That is a tie into this book. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of Talon Depths when Blade of Storms comes out. So this is an excellent time to subscribe to my new release newsletter if you haven't already. I am hoping to get it out before the end of January, but we'll see how the next two weeks go; it might slip to the first week in February. I'm also 13,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the ... Yeah, it'll be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. It'll be my main project once Blade of Storms is published. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is currently recording Blade of Shadows, the previous book in the series, and is about one third of the way through. So if all goes well, hopefully we'll get that out and available to everyone sometime in February or March, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at on my current writing and publishing projects. 00:02:17 Main Topic: Home Office Setups for Writers and Remote Workers Now let's move on to our main topic, home office setups for writers and remote workers. This isn't as trendy of a topic now as it was six years ago during the peak COVID times, but I still want to talk about setting up a home office as a writer or a remote worker. Even people who don't work remotely can benefit from thinking about changing their writing environment to better suit their needs and having the right setup for you makes a huge difference in your productivity and comfort. The wrong setup can make you feel drained, stressed, and distracted, and can potentially contribute to carpal tunnel syndrome or shoulder troubles or other related joint or posture problems as people, for example, can find out if they spend all their time sitting on the couch working on their laptop. I have been a full-time writer for almost 10 years now, and during that time, my work from home setup has evolved quite a bit. I thought that I would discuss the specific things I've changed and why. Our transcriptionist for the podcast also thought this was a really interesting topic, and so she will also share her remote work setup, which is quite a bit different than mine. And then to close out the episode, I will give four general tips for writing and working from home, which is something I know a little bit about at this point since I've been doing it for 10 years. So the basics: what is my office set up? I work from a sort of ad hoc U-shaped desk that I've assembled myself out of bits and pieces. The center part, sort of the bottom of the U is a piece of a glass top wraparound desk that I originally bought at Shopko [(a now defunct Wisconsin-based big box store)] back in I think like 2006. I've carried it with me through every apartment and residence since. I lost half of it a while back, but I still have the other half and it's a glass top desk. My monitor is sitting on an Amazon Basics riser atop it. It has a keyboard tray for the keyboard and it is where I do most of my main writing and editing. And in fact, this month I've written 50,000 words of Blade of Storms on that setup. So it is working quite well for me. The sides of the U are two white plastic contractor tables I've picked up. The one on the right is the one I use for ... It has the keyboard and monitor and the mouse for my graphic design computer because I have two different computers, which we'll get to in a bit. And it has the keyboard, the mouse, and the monitor riser for that. The other side, the table on the left, I try to keep as empty as possible for when I need to do paperwork. It turns out when you're self-employed, there's a surprising lot of paperwork you have to do on a regular basis. So whenever I need to do paperwork or read documents or that kind of thing, I try to keep that side of the desk as empty and as clean as possible. And it also looks nice to have it empty, though at the moment it's not empty because I have a growing stack of tax paperwork since it is tax season. As I've mentioned before, I use two desktop computers. I have a Mac Mini that I use for writing and editing and the keyboard and mouse for that are on the central computer, sort of the bottom of the U. And I have a Dell XPS tower that I use for graphic design, 3D modeling, and other multimedia things such as podcasting. I am literally recording this podcast on that computer right now. Both of the computers are actually sitting next to the U on an old kitchen cart that I think I bought back in like 2005 and again, has been moving with me from a residence to residence over the past 20 years. The reason for that is I didn't want to put the desktop computers on the desktop because that takes up a lot of space and I didn't want to put them on the floor because that's a good way to get a lot of dust into a computer and pretty much truly shortens its life. So what I ended up doing was I put this kitchen cart next to the bottom of the U-shaped desk and I put the desktop Dell computer and the Mac Mini on the kitchen cart and that keeps them off the floor, keeps them off the desk, and it's worked pretty well. And that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years, keeping a computer on that. How has it changed over time? Originally I just had one Windows computer that I did everything on. I did writing, I did editing, which was fine in 2016 when I started doing this full time because back then I didn't do my own covers. Back then I didn't do any graphic design. I didn't have the podcast and so my computing needs were a bit more limited back then. However, as you know, since then I've started doing my own covers. I have this podcast; I occasionally do YouTube videos and so I found it helpful to have a separate computer to do that, partly because when I render 3D models into 2D images for cover images, that takes up a lot of processing power and depending on the size of the render, it can take like 20 minutes. And so you have 20 minutes where the computer's processor is maxed out, which is not a comfortable experience using Microsoft Word while that is happening. So I decided eventually it would be best to have a separate writing and graphic design computers. And that's worked pretty well for the last year for me. For my chair, I have a very basic office chair I got from Amazon Basics, which is because it gets kind of hot in here in summer, and so I didn't want a big office chair. And so instead I just have one with the basic cushion, basic armrest, and sort of a net back in a plastic frame. And that has the twofold benefits of not getting too hot and then because it's not got a great back, it's got an excellent way of forcing me to have good posture while I type, which is probably why I haven't developed any serious back or shoulder problems in the 10 years I have been a full-time writer. So I realized that my office setup might seem a little bit idiosyncratic, half a glass top desk from Shopko from 20 years [ago] to contractor folding tables and an old kitchen cart that holds the computers, but it's worked pretty well for me for the last 10 years. And honestly, it's preferable to buying like a really expensive heavy computer desk and paying twice as much for something that I'd like half as much. So that's what I do. And our transcriptionist thought this was an interesting idea for an episode. So she thought she'd share her setup since it's quite a bit different than mine. She does more traditional office type tasks such as working in spreadsheets, checking audio files against documents for things like this podcast transcript, and entering data into various websites. Her computing needs are far less intense than mine, but she has done a lot more specific things customized to her physical office space than I have, namely the setups of her desk. She does not have a dedicated office, but has found a way to carve out space in her living room for both a sitting and a standing desk. The sitting desk has dual monitors at a desktop computer, and this is used for the more data and writing intensive tasks like transcription work. She has a standing desk with a laptop and a second monitor for more reading-based work that doesn't require as much data entr

    13 min

  7. 12 JAN

    Episode 285: 5 Amazon Ads Tips For Indie Authors

    In this week's episode, we share five tips for effectively using Amazon Ads for indie authors. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Sevenfold Sword series at my Payhip store: SEVENFOLD25 The coupon code is valid through January 19, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 285 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 9th, 2025 and today we are discussing five tips for Amazon ads for authors. We will also have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing and publishing projects. So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. First up is Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Sevenfold Sword series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is SEVENFOLD25. And as always, the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store will be available in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through January the 19th, 2026. So if you need a new ebook for this winter, we've got you covered. And now for an update on my current writing and publishing and audiobook projects. As of this recording, I am about 68,000 words into Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in my Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I think the book will be about 100,000 words, give or take, so that means I'm 68% of the way through. And I'm really hoping I can finish the rough draft by the end of the week of the 12th, if all goes well. So hopefully finishing up the rough draft by the 16th or the 17th, if all goes well, but we'll see if I can get there or not. I am also 9,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th book in the Cloak Mage series. Hopefully that will come out a month or so after Blade of Storms. I'm hoping Blade of Storms will come out in January, but it might be tight. And then Cloak of Summoning will come out the month after that. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Shadows, the previous book in that series and Hollis McCarthy will start recording Cloak of Titans, the 11th book in the Cloak Mage series, at the end of this month. And a few people asked if Wizard-Assassin was going to have an audiobook. It will. Leanne Woodward will record it in March, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. 00:02:12 Main Topic of the Week: 5 Tips for Amazon Ads for Indie Writers And now let's move on to our main topic of the week, five tips for Amazon ads for indie writers. And let's not beat around the bush here. Amazon ads for writers can be extremely difficult to figure out, especially when you're just starting out. The advice you'll find online can be contradictory or confusing, and it doesn't help that books tend to act very strangely in terms of advertising compared to other products. A while back, I was chatting on Facebook with someone else who does Amazon ads, and he mainly does cosmetics reselling, and he was shocked by how much a click for an ebook would cost compared to a click for say like a six pack of shampoo or whatever. And that's just the nature of the market category that ebooks are in. Because of that, the advice you'll find online can be contradictory or confusing. Some Amazon ad experts insist that you devote at least an hour or even two a day to managing your ad results and then have intricate formula-filled spreadsheets for doing so, while others advise you to set them and forget them. Advice about the bids and spending vary wildly. It can be very easy to get overwhelmed or overspend starting out, but that doesn't have to be the case. I will say that compared to Facebook ads or BookBub ads, it is a lot harder to accidentally lose a lot of money on Amazon ads because regardless of how you configure your Facebook ads or your BookBub ads, Facebook in particular will cheerfully spend your ad budget and give you nothing in return if you haven't configured or targeted your ad correctly. By contrast, an Amazon ad that doesn't work tends not to display and therefore doesn't spend any of your money. So when I'm talking ad platforms for beginners, I tend to recommend that beginners start out more on Amazon ads just because it's much harder to lose money, but it's not impossible, which is something to keep in mind as we get into that. I'm not going to get into the individual specifics of how to set up Amazon ads today, since there's many other people out there who provide that information and probably do a better job than I would. That said, I'm going to just focus on broad principles based on things I've learned instead of providing a specific step-by-step guide for the topic. So without further ado, here are five lessons I've learned about Amazon ads for writers in the last eight or nine years that I've been learning them. #1: Do your research before you start. It can be tempting to dive in right away, but before you spend a single cent on Amazon ads, you should take the time to learn how the bidding process works and how keyword and category ads work. You should also familiarize yourself with other books and trends in your categories. Your book and its ad copy should feel like it belongs with the others in your category and genre. For example, having a neon pink, high heel boot, and flowers [on a cover] in the political thriller category doesn't match the colors since most political thriller books tend to have a solitary dark figure walking in the opposite direction of the camera and many, if not most of the books in the genre have that kind of cover design. Optimizing your book cover for the category before you start doing ads can make a huge difference in the ad results you see. And this is true on many levels as well since when indie authors ask, "Why isn't my book selling?", the number one thing to fix in like 90% of the cases is a bad cover that looks like it was done in Canva or was slapped out of an AI like Copilot or ChatGPT or something that is immediately off-putting to the reader because it's not attractive. You should also make a set budget before you start out and make sure that your daily budgets for your campaigns reflects that budget instead of using whatever daily budget or bids that Amazon suggests for your ad campaigns. Amazon likes to suggest pretty high suggested bids in daily spending limits, which isn't a great use of money if you're just starting to learn how the ads work. And as always, in business it is very, very, very good advice and a very good idea not to spend money that you don't actually have. #2: Targeting is everything. We've all seen baffling book results when browsing on Amazon. For example, once when I was searching for space opera books, a book on visiting Wisconsin Dells as a tourist showed up as a sponsored result in my search, which is insane because I was searching for space opera books. Sometimes an author will choose to advertise in too many categories or choose ad keywords that don't represent their book well. That's the most likely reason why you see things like that Wisconsin Dells book in search results that don't match it. I've told this story before on the podcast, but our transcriptionist once was taking a class on Amazon ads and heard someone say that they wanted to advertise their gritty memoir in every possible category because everyone should read their book. And I think that is a small-scale example of hubris because someone shopping for children's picture books or Spanish language technical manuals is very unlikely to buy that book. Someone looking for a romance novel might be actively annoyed if they start reading that gritty memoir expecting a happily ever after love story and might leave a negative review since they didn't get the book content that they expected. One of the foundational principles of book marketing is that your book is not in fact for everyone. Your book is for a subset of the reading population. The key to successful advertising is to find a way to advertise that book to the subset of the reading population that would actually be interested in reading your book. There's a reason that when you are publishing your book through Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon wants you to pick three categories for your book and that is in part because they know books do their best when they're paired with other books in the specific topic or genre. It's not a bad thing to focus your desired audience for a book when marketing it. In fact, ad targeting will save you time and money and help people to find your book. Your goal isn't to find every possible reader for your book. It's to find the readers who are most likely to be interested in your book in the subset of the reading population that I was talking about earlier. The more focused that your category targeting is, the better this process will be. For example, picking romance as a category is so broad and so competitive that you might not get any traction at all on a small bid. Choosing a more targeted category like "Amish romance" or "clean and wholesome romance with a happily ever after ending" that is more targeted is better both for helping readers to find your work and for getting good results on your ads. #3: Start small. My best advice is to ignore Amazon's suggested bid amounts and start out with a small per click bid and daily budget. It may take a few weeks to see results using that method, but it's best to start small and gain some understanding of Amazon ads before you spend lots of money that you may not be able to earn back. Some smaller categories like children's books and technical manuals actually do pretty well with very small bids. Aggressive bids make more sense when you have the data to know that they're going to work well and reach the exact audience that you want to see them. As a new author, it's not your best bet to chase the bigges

    13 min

  8. 5 JAN

    Episode 284: Why is WIZARD-ASSASSIN in Kindle Unlimited?

    In this week's episode, I explain my reasoning for putting my new book WIZARD-ASSASSIN in Kindle Unlimited, even though the majority of my books are wide and will remain so. I also examine the phenomenon of British Christmas chocolate boxes. This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store: FROST25 The coupon code is valid through January 12, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this winter, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and British Christmas Chocolate Boxes Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 284 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January the 1st, 2025 and today we are discussing why Wizard-Assassin is in Kindle Unlimited. We'll also talk a bit about British Christmas chocolate boxes, something I just learned about recently. We will also have a Coupon of the Week and an update on my current writing and publishing projects. But first off, Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year's holiday, whatever form that may take for you and I hope that 2026 turns out to be a great year. Now, let's move on to Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 25% off all the ebooks in the Frostborn series at my Payhip store. That code is FROST25. And as always, the coupon code and links to my store will be available in the show notes. This coupon code is valid through January the 12th, 2026, so if you need a new ebook series to dig into this snowy winter, we have got you covered. Now an update on my current writing and publishing projects. I said I wanted to take the week off between Christmas and New Year's and I mostly did. Played a lot of video games, saw a lot of family, ate a lot of good food, but I do get a bit bored. So I did get some work in and I'm currently at 35,000 words of Blade of Storms, which will be the third book in the Blades of Ruin epic fantasy series. I think the book's going to end up about 100,000 words or so, maybe a little more, maybe a little less, so that means I'm about 35% of the way through the rough draft. So that's good progress and it's back to full speed now that the New Year's and Christmas holidays are over. I am also 5,000 words into Cloak of Summoning, which will be the 14th Cloak Mage book. I'm hoping that Blade of Storms will be out in January and Cloak of Summoning will be out in February. In audiobook news, Brad Wills is working on recording Blade of Shadows, the second book in the Blades of Ruin series and Leanne Woodward has signed up to record Wizard-Assassin, the fifth book in the Half-Elven Thief series, and she's hoping to start work on that in March, if all goes well. So that is where I'm at with my current writing and publishing projects. And now for a brief digression into the subject of British Christmas chocolate boxes. Now, I'm grateful for all my readers, but I am surprised by how many UK readers I have. Mathematically, it is surprising because based upon which statistics you read, the UK has about 25 to 20% of the total population of the United States. So do you think that the UK book sales would be only about 20% of my US sales, but that isn't the case? In December of 2025, the US made up about 58% of my sales, but the UK did 34. I think the reason for that is that fantasy is generally a more popular genre in the UK than it is in the US. Like numerically speaking, the US probably has more fantasy readers because of the larger population, but the UK population's overall percentage of fantasy readers seems higher. Of course, maybe I'm completely wrong since the US and the UK are very different places, even if they both speak English. Anyway, that was a long-winded introduction of saying that before I started self-publishing in 2011, I knew practically nothing about the contemporary UK. I couldn't have told you if the UK was on the Euro or the Pound. However, in the 15 years since, I've absorbed a fair few facts by osmosis. One of them is Christmas chocolate boxes. I didn't know about this until recently, but apparently Christmas chocolate boxes are very popular in parts of the UK, with frequent debates about the best brand, quality, et cetera and this has been a tradition going back almost to the 1930s and the 1940s. Now, this was only an abstract fact I knew for a while, but a nice person got me a Quality Street chocolate box for Christmas. That's the brand name, if you're not familiar with it, Quality Street, which I suppose is better than Cheap Street. It was pretty good. There are apparently great debates about which chocolate ones are best, but honestly, I think I like the red cherry flavored ones the best. I know not everyone feels this way, but I do like that sort of artificial cherry taste that it has and that sometimes turns up in other things. So all in all, it was pretty tasty and [an] interesting way of experiencing a different culture. 00:04:28 Main Topic: Why is the Half-Elven Thief Series in Kindle Unlimited? Now onto our main topic this week: why is the Half-Elven Thief Series in Kindle Unlimited? Now with the release of Wizard-Assassin recently, the fifth book in that series, a few people wrote in to ask why Half-Elven Thief was in Kindle Unlimited (KU) and not wide and on all the other ebook stores. Short answer: business of publishing reasons. The "too long; didn't read" answer: of my three unfinished series, I determined that one of them needs to be in Kindle Unlimited and Half-Elven Thief drew the short straw, so to speak. What I've realized over the years I've been self-publishing is that if you have a new book that does well in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon puts its thumb on the scale for the book in a big, big way. More eyeballs get on the book. It stays higher in the rankings for a lot longer than it would otherwise, and therefore more people read and buy it. More people get email or app notifications about it. A new Kindle Unlimited book that does well even has a halo effect on the rest of my backlist, even for books that are not in Kindle Unlimited. Blade of Flames and Blade of Shadows had their best days in a couple of weeks in the days after Wizard-Assassin came out and even Stealth & Spells Online got a boost. And of course, the price for this buffet of algorithmic bounty from Amazon is that a Kindle Unlimited book must be exclusive to Amazon. Now, a lot of writers get really mad about this fact, but the truth is that this is how retail works and in fact is how retail has always worked. Like for example, let's say you go to Walmart, Target, Costco, Tesco, or some other big box store and see a big display of Tide detergent towards the front of the store and near the registers. It's partially there because the store thinks it will sell, but it's mostly there because Procter & Gamble paid big bucks to have Tide detergents featured at the front of the store. This is even frequently true when the big box stores send out emails with discounts and coupons for this and that, though there is more of an algorithmic component to that than in traditional brick and mortar retail, since it's very often the case that, for example, from Target, no two customers will get identical offers. Now, admittedly, compared to the kind of draconian contracts between a big box store and an industrial conglomerate like Procter & Gamble, Kindle Unlimited by comparison is relatively mild. Amazon doesn't charge anything for it, and the term is only three months if you want to take your book out of it. The exclusivity requirement is probably anti-competitive, but the US government can't even rouse itself to do something very popular like changing Daylight Savings Time, so there's no way it will address a more complicated and more obscure issue like ebook exclusivity anytime soon. Of course, traditionally in US antitrust law, you only get in trouble for raising consumer prices and Kindle Unlimited is objectively a very good deal for heavy readers. And for that matter, exclusivity is fairly common in retail arrangements, which is why you occasionally see things like special edition holiday themed body wash available only at Target or something like that. Or in the book world, this happens as well, which is why Barnes & Noble sometimes has B&N exclusive hardback editions of various books. So that's just the reality of Kindle Unlimited since the program settled into more or less its current form around 2015 or so. To deal with it, indie writers typically settle on one of four strategies. #1: they go all in on Kindle Unlimited. #2: they ignore Kindle Unlimited, perhaps as a point of ethics and protest of Amazon. #3: they split the difference with Patreon, and #4: they split the difference with publishing windows. Strategy #1's big, big drawback is that book revenue becomes entirely dependent on Amazon, and Amazon's algorithms occasionally go berserk and start banning accounts at random. A smaller but still significant drawback is that you cut yourself out of every market that Amazon doesn't address, which means if your Amazon sales tank, there's no fallback position. Strategy #2 is much more viable across the long term, and I did it for a lot of years, but it does mean you are operating under a permanent handicap on Amazon, which remains the largest bookseller in the US and the UK. The most successful example I've seen in strategy #3 is with indie author Lindsay Buroker, who first offers her books to her Patreon subscribers and then puts the series on Kindle Unlimited. Once the series is complete, she takes them out of KU and puts them on all the other retailers and starts a new series that is first up on Patreon and then on Kindle Unlimited. I've thought about doing something like this myself, but I'm not ready to commit to the extra work Patreon would require and the Andomhaim and Cloak Mage books have such large audiences built up on the other retailers that switching them to KU would be a massive ru

    12 min
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About

Hosted by Jonathan Moeller (author of the FROSTBORN and SEVENFOLD SWORD fantasy series and the SILENT ORDER scifi series), the Pulp Writer Show discusses how to write, format, publish, and sell your novel. Sometimes there are jokes.

Information

  • Creator
    Jonathan Moeller
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    292
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright Jonathan Moeller
  • Show Website
    The Pulp Writer Show