PubCrawl Podcast

Seriously... publishing has changed so much in 2021, I need your takes on it!

This podcast has it all: information, critiques, tips, anecdotes, interviews, and personal stories. Kelly and JJ dole out the info while tempering aspiring authors’ hopes and expectations with a dose of reality. Somehow, listeners aren’t discouraged because Kelly and JJ dish out that brutal honesty in a nice way. Love listening to these two and highly recommend them to anyone.

There are a few in-depth episodes about very specific industry aspects (like contracts) that are interesting. I also like their very, very limited query feedback episodes. But honestly, you can find all this advice and more on YouTube by creators who are way more consistent and not so.... ideologically focused. What minimal faith I had left in the podcast- which now hasn’t uploaded in over a year, conveniently AFTER they ask you to support them on Patreon!!!- was obliterated after attempting to read Wintersong. Yikes. I would highly suggest Alexa Donne and Brandon Sanderson’s lectures over on YouTube! IWriterly also covers so industry details.

The hosts are lazy idiots. They purport to host an episode on science fiction and fantasy but muddle through for several minutes saying what “science fiction means to me.” They can’t explain what the two subgenres have in common. They are blissfully ignorant of easily accessible literary analysis of these matters. Both subgenres belong to the macro genre of “speculative fiction,” which is based on the premise of two worlds, one very different from our own. Sci-fi novels _extrapolate_ from the trends in our world to show the consequences. We get ftom one world to the other by the extension of scientific trends. In fantasy the world of the novel is completely separate from ours. Any passageway between them is magical and usually out of the characters’s control. This is a distillation of several standard books like Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. No reason to trust them if they don’t bother to look up easily-verifiable facts. Waste of time.