Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 17
February 26, 2025
GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY rough draft done!
I am pleased to report that the rough draft of GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY is done at 106,000 words!
Next up is GHOST KNIVES, a short story that newsletter subscribers will get for free in ebook form when GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY comes out next month.
-JM
February 25, 2025
Fun With Kobo Plus
With the recent change to Amazon USB downloading, a reader emailed to ask if I was going to keep my books in Kobo Plus.
Yes. If a book of mine is on Kobo, it should be in Kobo Plus.
Technically speaking, 86% of my novels are available on Kobo Plus right now.
The thing is, I have 159 novels now, and GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY is going to be #160. So I have the inventory to play around with a bit. Like, for most indie authors, going to Kindle Unlimited or going wide is an all-or-nothing decision. If you have written seven books in one series, you kind of have to put all them in Kindle Unlimited or take all of them wide. Readers are just going to get annoyed if, say, book #1 is in KU and the rest are wide. But for me, if I want to put one series out of the 159 books in KU, I can, which is why DEMONSOULED is on KU right now and actually doing rather well at the moment.
Anyway, just for curiosity, here are my top ten lifetime titles on Kobo Plus. Thanks for reading, everyone!
1.) Frostborn Omnibus One
2.) Cloak Mage Omnibus One
3.) Dragontiarna Omnibus One
4.) Sevenfold Sword: Omnibus One
5.) Dragontiarna: Crowns
6.) Dragontiarna: Storms
7.) Dragontiarna: Legions
8.) Dragontiarna: Warden
9.) Frostborn: The Shadow Prison
10.) Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire
-JM
The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 240: Escaping The Prestige Trap For Writers, Part I – MFA Degrees & Literary Agents
In this week’s behavior, we discuss how seeking prestige can be dangerous for writers, specifically in the form of MFA degrees and literary agents.
You can listen to the show with transcript at the official Pulp Writer Show site, and you can also listen to it at Spotify, Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music, and Libsyn.
-JM
February 24, 2025
Coupon of the Week, 2/24/25
Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!
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:
SQUIRE50
The coupon code is valid through March 14, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we’ve got you covered!
-JM
February 23, 2025
First, second, and third person
Reader Charles writes to ask:
“Hey what POV is your book FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, I think it’s first person.”
FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT is actually in third person limited.
What does that mean?
Third-person limited is when all the pronouns of the point of view character are in third person – “He walked into the room and opened the door” and so forth. First person is written using the first person pronoun. “I walked into the room and opened the door.”
Second person is the second-person pronoun. “You walk into the room and open the door.” That tends to get used more in computer games than in books.
The difference between third-person limited and third-person omniscient is that limited sticks only to the POV of a particular character. Like, in my GHOSTS books, when I’m writing from Caina’s point of view, we’re restricted to seeing things through her eyes. We don’t automatically know what the other characters are thinking. I very often use a rotating third-person limited POV, where we start with one character and switch to the POV of another.
Third-person omniscient ignores that, and switches back and forth between the thoughts of different characters within a scene. There’s nothing wrong with that, and some of the best writers have done it – Agatha Christie and JRR Tolkien, for instance. Like, the famous scene in THE TWO TOWERS when Sam confronts Shelob, it’s in third-person omniscient, and the POV shifts freely between Sam, Gollum, and Shelob.
That said, third-person omniscient is a lot harder to do well than third-person limited, so most writers tend to stick to third-person limited.
So most writers tend to stick to either first person or third person omniscient. Some genres tend towards one or the other, though there are no hard and fast rules. Epic fantasy tends towards third person omniscient, while urban fantasy, romance, and mystery often (but not always) use first person.
-JM
February 21, 2025
CLOAK OF DRAGONFIRE now in audio!
February 20, 2025
Another Fantasy Blast From the Past
Still trying something new:
-JM
Farewell to Kindle offline downloads
Reader Michael asks:
“My online feeds are currently flooded with dire clickbaity warnings about how Amazon is blocking people from downloading Kindle books in a few weeks. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this at some point.”
Michael is referring to the fact that Amazon used to offer the ability to download Kindle ebooks you purchased to your a PC (or Mac), which let you store them offline or convert them to other formats. Not all that many people knew about it, which no doubt is why that ability is going away at the end of the month.
My thoughts:
1.) This isn’t a good thing.
2.) Nevertheless, it will only matter to a minority of users.
3.) If you want files of my books, you can get them from my Payhip store.
To expand upon those thoughts:
1.) My frank opinion is that this is a bad decision on Amazon’s part. Anything that reduces consumer choice and restricts the ability to store data locally is a bad thing. That’s not an ideological opinion, but a technological one. The Internet and the cloud are not infallible and often stop working at inconvenient times. I worked in IT for too long to ever really trust the Internet or the cloud, and remember “the cloud” just means “somebody else’s server” that might get turned off at any point.
This reinforces that when you are buying digital content from Amazon, you’re not actually “buying” it, you’re buying a “license” to view it under certain circumstances.
Additionally, not many people carefully download every ebook they purchase and keep them carefully organized in local storage, but some do.
2.) That said, I suspect not all that many people actually do that. Ebooks really have replaced the mass market paperback in the publishing ecosystem. Mass market paperbacks were intended to be cheap and relatively disposable. No doubt you have noticed that hardcover books tend to last a lot longer than mass market paperbacks. I suspect ebooks have filled the mass market paperback niche for many people, and a lot of ebooks are read once and then only infrequently read again, if ever. So I suspect the vast majority of Kindle users won’t even realize this has happened.
3.) If you are one of those readers who keeps ebooks carefully organized in offline storage, and you still want to download local copies of my books after you buy them, then your best bet is my Payhip store. If you get a book from my Payhip store, you’ll receive both an EPUB and a PDF, and an EPUB is very easy to convert into any format you might wish. Amusingly, Amazon is not removing the ability to sideload content onto your Kindle or the Send To My Kindle service. So you could buy a book from my Payhip store and sideload it onto your Kindle, or email it to the Send To My Kindle service so it appears automatically on your device.
I have to admit this is a reminder of something I’ve known for 20 years – if you buy digital content and want to keep it forever, you have to work at it. I have like 44 gigabytes of MP3 files I’ve been moving from computer to computer for years, and I have a large collection of carefully organized PDFs of computer game manuals and RPG books that I’ve acquired from places like DriveThruRPG.
Of course, if you really, really want to keep a book forever, paper remains the way to go, and most of my books are in paperback.
-JM
February 19, 2025
Question of the Week: Snow Day
It’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics.
This week’s question – if you have work or school called off because of a “snow day” or extreme cold or other intense weather, what do you do with the day? No wrong answers.
For myself, the answer is clearly that I write 10,000 words the first day and then again the second day, because I just had two days where it was too cold to leave the house, so that’s what I did. 
-JM
February 18, 2025
yet another 10k word day!
I am pleased to report that I wrote 10,000 words of GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY yet again, for my 5th 10k word day of 2025!
That brings me up to 93,000 words of GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY. The end of the rough draft is in sight!
Tomorrow will definitely not be a 10k word day because I have to do all the errands I didn’t do on my back-to-back 10k word days.
-JM
