Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 5

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When GHOST IN THE SIEGE comes out, hopefully before the end of the month, newsletter subscribers will also get a free ebook copy of the short story GHOST MIRROR.

Be sure to sign up for my newsletter if you haven’t done so already! I give away lots of free stuff.

-JM

GHOST IN THE SIEGE cover image & description!

Time to share the cover image of GHOST IN THE SIEGE, which you can see below!

Meanwhile, here is the book description.

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An invading army. A deadly sorceress. The final stand.

Caina has at last discovered the secret of destroying the Liminal Temple, the gateway the serpent men use to travel from their world to attack Caina’s home.

But she’s running out of time.

As enemy fleets and armies encircle New Kyre, Caina must destroy the Liminal Temple before it is too late.

Yet she has overlooked the most dangerous secret of all.

The Grand Priestess of the serpent men waits hidden within the heart of New Kyre, and is working to bring about the destruction of all that Caina loves…

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 263: Reader Reactions To My LitRPG Trilogy

Last week’s episode talked about finishing my STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE LitRPG trilogy, and in this week’s episode we respond to some of the insightful reader comments the prevoius episode generated. We also discuss the mechanics of putting series numbers on book covers.

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

GHOST IN THE SIEGE rough draft done!

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of GHOST IN THE SIEGE, the 6th and final book in the GHOST ARMOR series, is complete!

Next up is GHOST MIRROR. This will be a bonus short story that newsletter subscribers will get for free when GHOST IN THE SIEGE comes out.

It originally was going to be called GHOST JUDGMENT, but then I remembered that “judgment” is spelled “judgement” in the UK, which means regardless of which spelling I chose, I would get emails about it forever. So, GHOST MIRROR!

Watch for the cover image and table of contents for GHOST IN THE SIEGE in coming days!

-JM

Coupon of the Week, 8/11/2025

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Dragonskull series at my Payhip store:

DRAGONSUMMER25

The coupon code is valid through August 25, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

Series Numbering Question

A librarian acquaintance recently asked (with no small exasperation) why can’t the series numbers be in the book title, on the spine, AND on the cover?

Well, as with so many things, the answer boils down to “it depends.” Specifically, it depends on the publisher and the author, but only if the author is indie.

Like, for my books, they always have the series number on the cover. A random example:

As you can see, this is the fourth book in my HALF-ELVEN THIEF series, so it says “Half-Elven Thief #4” above the title.

Whether or not the series number is on the front cover depends on the publisher or the writer, if the writer is indie. For myself, since I make my own covers, it’s a trivial amount of extra work to make sure the series number is also on the cover. A small publisher or an indie author hiring a cover designer has to specifically ask for the series number on the cover, and they don’t always think to do that.

In terms of the spine of the print edition, it depends on whether or not it is included in the cover design. Typically for a print book you need to make a wrap-around PDF cover, or you use the automated tools with something like KDP Print to create it. The trouble is that space can be at a premium on a book spine, and after you have the book title and the author name, there might not be adequate room left for a series number. For example, a title like STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST takes up a LOT of space on the spine, and combine that with the author name of Jonathan Moeller, and we don’t exactly have much real estate left to work with.

However, for ebooks, there’s really no excuse for them not to be arranged in series order because all the online platforms now have good series management tools.

This is a relatively new development. For a long time Amazon and the other self-publishing platforms didn’t have any series metadata management tools, so we had to take things into our own hands. That’s why for a long time you would see books with titles like “FROSTBORN: THE IRON TOWER (Frostborn Book #5)” because there was no other way in the metadata to indicate that a book was a part of a series.

Obviously this was a problem, so eventually all the self-publishing platforms added series manager tools. So now it’s fairly easy to add ebooks to a series, so on the storefront they should show up in the proper series order.

But for tradpub print books, I expect traditional publishers are not terribly invested in providing series numbers on the spines of print books because it is a layer of (from their perspective) unnecessary work with no return on investment. Remember, most publishers are owned by big international conglomerates nowadays, and from the corporate owner’s perspective the publisher’s existence boils down to a cell in a spreadsheet. So a series will only get new cover art and potentially numbers on the cover if doing so might make the Number Go Up in that particular spreadsheet cell.

A series is most likely to get numbers on its cover and its spine if it’s 1.) finished, and 2.) popular enough to be re-released with new covers.

So, the TLDR answer – it depends if the publisher or the indie author has the resources to add the numbers to the cover.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 262: How To Finish A LitRPG Trilogy

In this week’s episode, I take a look back at the challenges of finishing my STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE LitRPG trilogy.

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

Coupon of the Week, 8/4/25

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobooks in the Malison series (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store:

MALISONSUMMER50

The coupon code is valid through August 18, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

Chip, chip, chipping away – how I finally finished the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy

So it took a long time, but I finally finished the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy with the last book, FINAL QUEST.

I am very grateful to everyone who read the trilogy and enjoyed it!

All told, it took about ten months to write STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST, from September 2024 to July 2025 when I finally published it.

What took so long?

Well, a lot of things went wrong. Let’s look back!

Towards the end of 2022, I decided I wanted to try something a little different, so I settled on LitRPG, which seemed promising because it’s pretty popular. For the story, I had an idea for a developer who was fired from a virtual reality MMORPG once he realized it was dangerous, and how he starts playing the game to uncover the proof he needed.

I also had what I thought would be a clever idea – the game would be based on my FROSTBORN books. Like, it’s set 700 years in the future, and some interstellar scout discovered the FROSTBORN books on a wrecked colony ship, and then the evil corporation built the game around them. I decided the game would be called SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE, which meant that was a logical name for the series, right?

So I wrote SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION, and published it in February 2023.

It didn’t do particularly well.

A couple problems because immediately apparent. First, the title was causing confusion. People assumed it was connected to the SEVENFOLD SWORD series and was in some way a sequel to that series, which it wasn’t. Second, people were confused and wondered if the Ridmark Arban and Calliande Arban NPCs in the game world were the actual characters from the FROSTBORN/SEVENFOLD SWORD/DRAGONTIARNA series.

They weren’t, but in comedy there’s a saying that if you have to explain the joke, you’ve already lost. I suppose a parallel conclusion would be that “if you have to explain the characters are NPCs in a game world based on your books seven hundred years in the future” then the concept for the book is probably too abstract.

Second, the book didn’t really appeal to a majority of my regular readers, who prefer epic fantasy from me. Case in point – when I published HALF-ELVEN THIEF in December 2023, in its first month it did 66% of what STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION has done in the entire three and a half years it has been available, and I’m typing this on the last day of July 2025. In its lifetime, HALF-ELVEN THIEF has done 250% more than STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION, and it’s been out for ten and a half fewer months than CREATION. Clearly, a majority of my regular readers prefer epic fantasy over LitRPG.

Despite that, I continued onward and published SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: LEVELING in February of 2024.

It did slightly worse than CREATION.

In 2024, I tried a bunch of things to improve how the series fared. To avoid confusion, I changed the title from SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE to STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE. I redid the cover art, changed the description, all the usual things for improving a series. None of it ever really worked, and I could never quite turn a profit when advertising it.

During these experiments, I realized that I had fundamentally misread the LitRPG market.

The three most popular kinds of LitRPG are:

1.) Portal fantasy. The protagonist falls through a portal and ends up in another world that runs on MMORPG style rules for whatever reason.

2.) Isekai. The character dies and is reborn in a world that runs on MMORPG style rules. You’ll see this in books with titles like I DIED AND WAS REBORN AS A LEVEL ONE HEALER, something like that.

3.) System apocalypse. The world ends and is recreated as a living MMORPG, usually overseen by an all-powerful “game system”, hence the name. The system can be created by gods or powerful space aliens, and is often malevolent. DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, where Earth is destroyed and remade into a MMORPG system as part of a sadistic alien game show, is probably the most well-known example of this particular subgenre.

The problem is that STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE fits into none of these subgenres. I joked that I had tried to write a LitRPG but had landed at a scifi thriller. I mean, “software developer fighting sinister corporation’s evil secret plans” is a scifi cyberpunk story, not a LitRPG. So I was trying to tell a story ill-suited for that particular genre, like attempting to write a cozy contemporary mystery in the format of an epic Arthurian fantasy quest. Like, that idea could potentially work, but it probably wouldn’t.

With that realization, I had three choices about how to proceed.

1.) Leave STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE unfinished and never speak of it again.

2.) Unpublish STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE and never speak of it again.

3.) Find a way to finish STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE in a satisfactory fashion with a single book, because I didn’t want to write a long series that sold poorly.

I disliked options one and two partly for reasons of professional pride, and partly because it’s bad to get a reputation in the fantasy genre for leaving series unfinished.

The tricky part for option three was that I had originally planned STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE to be like seven or eight books, and I was only two books into what I had outlined. An additional, potentially major problem was that the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE books sold badly enough to seriously tank the sales of the month they were released. Like, both February 2023 and February 2024 were some of my weakest sales months in years.

So that meant I needed an outline for the final book that would discard all planned subplots and focus entirely on the main plot. I also needed to write the book on the side and not as a main project, because I knew it would not sell well. Ideally it would come out in the same month as a stronger seller, like one of the SHIELD WAR books.

So, in October of 2024, I started chipping away at what would become STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST at 500 words a day. I would write 250 words before going to the gym in the morning, and then 250 more words after dinner. During the day, my main focus was whatever book in THE SHIELD WAR, GHOST ARMOR, CLOAK MAGE, and HALF-ELVEN THIEF I was writing at the time (as I’ve said before, having five unfinished series at a time is way too many, which is why I’ve spent Summer 2025 trying to get that number down), but I did my 250 words in the morning and 250 words after dinner almost every day.

I kept chipping away at it.

Finally in July 2025 I was very nearly to the end of the book, and after I published SHIELD OF POWER, I decided I was far enough along to make FINAL QUEST the main project. Turns out I really was pretty far along, since I only needed to write 3,000 more words to finish the book! Two rounds of editing and some new scenes later (I added a bunch of stuff since I thought the original ending was incomplete), and I published the book in July 2025.

It turned out pretty well. People seemed to like the ending and find it satisfactory, at least those who read it. FINAL QUEST sold slightly better than its predecessors, but SHIELD OF POWER generated sales in its first three days equal to what FINAL QUEST did in its first two weeks.

So I’m grateful for everyone who read the trilogy, but I’m glad to be done. Like, I’ve been kinda sad when I’ve finished my other series, but with this one I’m just relieved to be done and that I don’t have to think about it any more.

It’s easier to promote a finished trilogy than an unfinished series. Probably I’m going to make the first book free every three months, run some ads to it while it’s free, and that will be that. I just signed up with CJ McCallister to do the audiobook version of FINAL QUEST, so eventually I’ll probably have a STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: THE COMPLETE TRILOGY audiobook since audiobook bundles always do well.

Amusingly, I realized that I essentially followed my own advice. I always say on the blog and the podcast that you can finish a novel if you just keep chipping away at it, and small efforts add up over time. FINAL QUEST turned out to be about 117,000 words, and I mostly got there 500 words at a time.

Do I regret writing STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE? No, but obviously if I had to do it all over again, I would do some things differently.

Will I ever return to LitRPG?

Probably not. I listed all the popular subgenres of LitRPG above, and while I don’t have anything against any of those subgenres, I don’t have any particular interest in writing a story that revolves around those tropes. For all that my books tend to be escapist, I always need to have at least a touchstone of reality in them so they make sense to me. Characters like Wire, Admiral Winterholt, and Alexander Maskell could definitely have their Real Life (even contemporary) equivalents.

LitRPG tropes in general seem to be about a flight from reality. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it’s not something I’m really interested in writing. I mean, I designed the Andomhaim setting around people who traveled from sub-Roman Britain to a world where magic is real, so that way I could make real world historical references. I think, if pressed, I could write a pretty good novel in the genres of epic fantasy, science fiction, mystery, thriller, and romance, but I’m not at all sure I could write a good book in the LitRPG subgenres I listed.

Maybe I’m just too old for it – I don’t think I encountered an MMORPG for the first time until I was twenty-four or twenty-five, and I’ve never seriously played one, so it definitely wasn’t a formative experience for me the way it was for many LitRPG authors. (In fact, if I remember right, my first serious encounter with an MMORPG was at work, with an IT support ticket about network throttling complaining about how long a World of Warcraft update was taking to download.)

So that is how I finally finished the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy.

And once again, thank you for reading the STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE trilogy!

-JM

Top 10 for 2025 (So Far) by Format

I now have complete sales data for the first half of 2025, so I thought it would be interesting to go see my top 10 ebooks, audiobooks, and paperback books of 2025 so far.

Let’s start with ebooks!

Ebooks:

Shield of DeceptionShield of BattleGhost in the AssemblyGhost in the CorruptionCloak of IllusionShield of ConquestShield of StormsShield of DarknessFrostborn: The Iron Tower (Frostborn #5)Ghost in the Tombs

No surprises there – most of the top 10 are books I’ve published this year or in the same series as ones I published this year. The only exception in FROSTBORN: THE IRON TOWER, but that’s because FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE had a Bookbub earlier this year that pumped up the latest books in the series.

Audiobooks:

The Ghosts: Omnibus One (Unabridged)Cloak Mage Omnibus One (Unabridged)Ghost Armor Omnibus One (Unabridged)Dragonskull Omnibus One (Unabridged)Half-Elven Thief: Omnibus One (Unabridged)Cloak Mage Omnibus Three (Unabridged)The Ghosts Omnibus Two: The Ghosts Collections, Book 2 (Unabridged)Ghost Exile Omnibus One (Unabridged)The Ghosts Omnibus Three: The Ghosts Collections, Book 3 (Unabridged)Cloak Mage Omnibus Two (Unabridged)

No surprises there. The people love audiobook omnibuses!

Print:

The Windows Command Line Beginner’s Guide – Second EditionThe Linux Command Line Beginner’s GuideThe Ubuntu Beginner’s GuideShield of StormsFrostborn: The Gray KnightFrostborn: The Eightfold KnifeChild of the GhostsHalf-Elven ThiefCloak of IllusionFrostborn: The Shadow Prison

If you are publishing nonfiction, it is clearly a good idea to do a paperback.

Thanks for reading and listening to the books, everyone!

-JM