Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 113

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 77: Audiobook Questions From Listeners

In this week’s episode, I answer audiobook questions from listeners, and explain why SEVENFOLD SWORD’s audiobooks were completed before FROSTBORN.

I also answer questions about paperbacks and writing tips.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music. You can also listen to it on YouTube:

-JM

GHOST IN THE LORE rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of GHOST IN THE LORE is done at 93,000 words! That makes it almost as exactly as long as GHOST IN THE RING or GHOST IN THE AMULET.

I’m glad I was able to finish the rough draft this month because I got my 2nd shot last week, and I thought that might knock me out for a while. But it didn’t. I felt woozy and sleepy for a few hours.

Then I ate, like, an entire bag of potato chips, and I felt fine.

Note that I am not a doctor and eating an entire bag of potato chips is most definitely not medical advice.

Next up is GHOST MIRAGE, a short story set between the events of GHOST IN THE TALISMAN and GHOST IN THE LORE. Subscribers to my new-release newsletter will get a link to a free ebook copy of GHOST MIRAGE when it comes out!

Tune in on Wednesday to see the cover image for GHOST IN THE LORE.

-JM

The Super League and Big Brain Energy

Now for a completely different topic: European football! Or as it’s known here in the US, soccer.

I have to admit that prior to this year I knew nothing about European football. To be fair, I’m not interested in American football either.

Then I watched the SUNDERLAND TIL I DIE documentary on Netflix, which is about the various misfortunes that have befallen the Sunderland football team. It was fascinating to watch from an outsider perspective. I don’t know whether the documentary was accurate or not, or if how it portrayed the various figures involved in Sunderland was fair (modern documentaries have a bad habit of putting their thumb upon the scale, much like historical dramas), but it was extremely interesting to watch. English sports culture is very different than American sports culture, but because both the US and the UK speak variants of English, it was more comprehensible to me than, say, a documentary about French or Spanish sports culture would have been.

As unexpected side benefit, when Super League controversy became big enough to make the American news, I had enough context to understand what was going on.

From the outsider perspective I mentioned above (I have no emotional investment), I suspect one of the things that gives European football its vitality is the prospect of relegation to a lower-ranking league and the chaotic nature of the season. Like in the documentary, it’s possible for a team to be at the top of its game only to completely fall apart and and get relegated down two levels in two years. There’s a David vs. Goliath element, and while’s not likely that a scrappy David with defeat a well-funded Goliath, it’s still possible and occasionally happens. You just don’t have that in American professional sports.

That’s also why I suspect American sports viewership has been in decline for years – the NFL and NBA are basically ossified cartels, with all the bloated inefficiency and indifference to customer preference that you get in a business that doesn’t have to compete. Many of their problems can be explained by the lack of a competitor eager to eat their lunch. There have been a couple of high-level court cases which ruled that the NFL didn’t meet the legal requirements of a cartel, but in all practical senses, the NFL and NBA are cartels with control of their markets. I think that drains the season of a lot of its vitality – wouldn’t it be great if, say, the LA Lakers or the Tampa Buccaneers could mess up their season and and get relegated to the Tier Two league? At the very least it would make for amazing television ratings.

This isn’t to say that high-level European football isn’t as corrupt as the NFL or the NBA, (to be cheeky, it seems that “bribery” is the basic business model of the NFL, the NBA, and FIFA), but it has pressures that American football does not which forces it to be more competitive.

I read an article that argued the reason the Super League failed was because it was a cynical and greedy attempt to bring American cartel-style professional sports to Europe. But I suspect the chief reason the Super League was such a failure is because of what my youngest brother and I mockingly call “big brain energy.” Like, you get these smart guys who spend all their time doing clever calculations in spreadsheets, and they have amazing spreadsheets. They can prove anything with a spreadsheet. Absolutely anything! So some big brain guys probably put together a spreadsheet demonstrating that the Super League would make a boatload of money, and everyone agreed that it made sense. Except the spreadsheet didn’t include a column for Actual Reality, and the whole thing blew up in their faces. This happens again and again in all human endeavors, where very clever experts get so wrapped up in their theories that they lose touch with Actual Reality. I have no doubt that we can all think of examples from the last twenty years or so.

A theory (or a good spreadsheet) can be like a beautiful stained glass window…but Actual Reality often takes the form of a thrown brick.

I found the Super League controversy interesting to observe from the outside because it was yet another example of this phenomenon.

Also, while it is very unlikely that I will become a billionaire, if I do, I am definitely not buying a sports team. Vizzini in THE PRINCESS BRIDE should have included that on his list of classic blunders!

-JM

GHOST IN THE LORE progress update

Passed the 84,000 word mark in GHOST IN THE LORE while preparing the hardcover edition of GHOST IN THE MAZE.

This sounds like a more impressive feat of multitasking than it really is. Once the PDF for the hardcover is ready, you just have to upload it and wait 20 minutes for it to grind through processing. And what better way to spend that time than by pounding out a few hundred more words of GHOST IN THE LORE?

One of my writing goals was to update my paperback editions, and I’ve made good progress. The FROSTBORN series is done, and I just finished THE GHOSTS. Now I’m moving on to GHOST EXILE, and then CLOAK GAMES once that is done.

Barring unexpected difficulties, I do want to finish the rough draft of GHOST IN THE LORE next week. Hopefully by 4/30, but we’ll see!

-JM

WRAITHSHARD: MAGE & KNIGHT now on all stores

I am pleased to report that WRAITHSHARD: MAGE & KNIGHT is now available on all stores! You can get it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, and Smashwords.

If all goes well, I will publish the 4th WRAITHSHARD book on all stores next week, and the fifth and final book in the first half of May.

-JM

Missing audiobooks?

Jennilyn asks:

“I can’t find the last few Frostborn audiobooks. Did you just stop making them after The False King and decide to leave the series unfinished in audio, even though you then offered audio for Sevenfold Sword and Dragontiarna? I don’t understand. I realize contracting out the audio rights is probably complicated, but it makes no sense to suddenly leave off one series midway through and skip directly to the next series. What happened?”

That is a good question, so let’s share with the class!

Here’s what happened:

When I start self-publishing in 2011, I had only a vague conception that audiobooks existed at all, and hadn’t listened to one in years. When someone said “audiobook” I thought of that shelf at the back of Barnes & Noble and Borders with all the CD bundles. Or those wire racks at rural gas stations that held audiobook CD bundles for long-haul truckers, next to the glass cases that displayed CB radio equipment and stereo upgrades. (You could get an audiobook, a coffee, a trucker hat, and a CB radio all in the same transaction!) Producing and shipping physical products myself was definitely not a business I wanted to get into (still isn’t), and so audiobooks weren’t on my radar at all.

Between 2012 and 2016, I started traveling by car more, and I began listening to audiobooks as I did. I realized that the smartphone revolution had changed things. Gone were the days of swapping out a million CDs, which was neither fun nor safe to do while on the freeway. Instead, you just connected your phone to the car speakers or a Bluetooth speaker, and listened uninterrupted for the duration of your journey. This was much more enjoyable.

Later, in 2016 when FROSTBORN started to do really well, I briefly gave some thought to self-publishing audiobooks, but decided it would be too expensive and too much hassle.

However, at the end of 2016, Tantor Audio contacted me about the audio rights for the FROSTBORN series. Specifically, they wanted the first five books. That was a good deal, so I said yes and they came out in 2017. In July of 2017, Podium Publishing contacted me, and was interested in the audio rights to SEVENFOLD SWORD. That also was a good deal and they have a good reputation, so I said yet to that as well. Later in 2019 when I started DRAGONTIARNA, I asked if they would be interested in that series as well, which is why the DRAGONTIARNA audiobooks have been coming out from Podium this year.

In December 2017, something completely unrelated to audiobooks happened – the US tax laws changed. Because of that, I had to change my business structure, and I needed more business deductions. Self-producing audiobooks finally made financial sense, and since Tantor had only been interested in the first five FROSTBORN books, I decided to continue the FROSTBORN series myself. So in summer of 2018, FROSTBORN: THE DARK WARDEN came out.

Fast forward to the present – 11 of the 15 FROSTBORN books are in audio, all 12 SEVENFOLD SWORD, and the first six of DRAGONTIARNA. (To be fair, I still have to write the final DRAGONTIARNA book.) When it’s finished, FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD/DRAGONTIARNA will compromise 37 books, and right now 29 of those books are available in audio! I would like people to be able to start listening to FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT and listen continuously all the way through to DRAGONTIARNA: WARDEN, which will be something like over 400 hours of finished audio.

We’re not there quite yet, but we are closing in on it!

And I have good news on that topic! Recording and editing has nearly finished on FROSTBORN: THE DWARVEN PRINCE, and barring unexpected challenges the audiobook should be out on Audible, Apple, and Amazon sometime in May.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 76: 6 Ways Writers Can Handle Criticism

In this episode, we look at six ways writers can learn to handle criticism effectively. I also answer questions about the DRAGONTIARNA and WRAITHSHARD series.

As always, you can listen to the show on Libsyn, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon Music. You can also listen to it on YouTube:

-JM

Arthurian Fantasy?

I had a reader ask why FROSTBORN, SEVENFOLD SWORD, and DRAGONTIARNA all show up as Arthurian Fantasy on Amazon and some other stores.

That is a good story.

First, a definition. “Arthurian Fantasy”, also known as the “Matter of Britain”, refers to tales about King Arthur, his knights, his downfall, and the various myths and legends associated with him.

Way back in 2012, when I was first thinking about what I would write once DEMONSOULED was done, I wanted to decide what category to put my new series into on Amazon. The idea is that if you pick a less competitive category, it’s easier for your book to get into the Top 20 in that category and is therefore easier for readers to find. For example, getting to #1 in Contemporary Romance takes thousands of sales every single day. Getting to #1 in a smaller category, like Industrial Solution Manuals, takes far fewer sales.

The trick, of course, is to pick an appropriate category for your book, because otherwise this will annoy readers. You can see writers who try to game the system. Like, if you look at the top 20 Linux books on Amazon, you will see a list of computer books, but sometimes you will see a romance book with a shirtless dude on the cover, because some writer had the bright idea of putting his or her book into a completely inappropriate category in hopes of getting higher visibility. It’s best not to do that because it generates reader ill-will and once enough people complain (and they will) Amazon will force the book out of the category or maybe delist it.

Anyway, back to Arthurian fantasy. Back in 2012, before Kindle Unlimited, there wasn’t much competition in the Arthurian category. I decided that FROSTBORN would contain Arthurian elements, and that the human kingdom in the book would have been founded by survivors of King Arthur’s realm fleeing to a world where magic existed. So that way I could legitimately claim that I was writing Arthurian fantasy. In fact, several of the major POV characters in FROSTBORN, SEVENFOLD SWORD, and DRAGONTIARNA – Arandar, Accolon, and Kalussa – are descendants of Arthur Pendragon.

So I can claim that FROSTBORN is part of a storytelling tradition that extends all the way back to Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Middle Ages and even earlier, but the real reason is that I wanted the books to have easier visibility.

It worked pretty well, too. For a big chunk of 2016, the FROSTBORN books sat in the top 20 of Arthurian Fantasy for several months, which was nice.

-JM

my first video interview, a follow-up!

Glad so many people found my interview helpful! I would like to thank Tricia, who was an excellent interviewer.

As for why I did it, it was for the same reason I started my podcast and wrote STORYTELLING: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL.

I’ve been self-publishing for ten years now and am working on novel #120, and while there are people who have been self-publishing longer than I have, there aren’t all that many, and there are even fewer people who started that long ago and are still going. So I have a lot of experience at this point, and the podcast and the interview were a good way to share it with people without getting pushy in the process.

Additionally, as I said in the interview, it’s often useful to write non-fiction from a beginner’s perspective because there are always beginners coming into the field who are looking for a place to start. Like, there are always going to be people who are just getting started with the Linux command line, and there are a lot of people who are just getting started with self-publishing. So I hope the interview and the podcast helps them out.

Also, self-publishing attracts a lot of scammers. This isn’t unique to self-publishing – traditional publishing abounded with scams, such as fee-charging agents and shifty vanity presses, and even “legitimate” publishers and agents did a lot of shady things. (One of the most famous examples is FIGHT CLUB author Chuck Palahniuk, whose agency cheated him out a lot of money, and there are numerous other instances like this.) So, I hope resources like my podcast can convince new writers that 1.) you can self-publish for free (minus costs like cover design, editing, and your laptop), and 2.) if someone offers you something like a “publishing package” where they’ll publish your book for you for $699 or $1699, run away.

Finally, thanks to everyone for reading! It’s nice that after ten years and 119 books, I still get emails asking when the next one will come out.

-JM

 

My first video interview!

I’ve now been self-publishing for ten years, so it seemed like a good time for my first video interview!

I did an interview with Amazon’s KDP University@Home, and you can see it below.

Some good questions from the audience! The only thing I would change is that I said “enjoyative” when I meant “enjoyable”. But, really, “enjoyative” feels like it should be a word, so I was advancing the bounds of the English language.

-JM