Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 6

Question of the Week: Favorite Book of 2025?

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topic.

This week’s question: what is your favorite book of 2025 so far? No wrong answers, obviously.

The inspiration of for this question was that June 30th was the halfway point of the year, which natural inspires both reflection and some mandatory bookkeeping.

For myself, I think it would be THE ICARUS CODA, by Timothy Zahn, which wraps up his excellent ICARUS scifi mystery series after twenty-five years.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 261: Audiobook Sampler Platter, the Fourth Course!

In this week’s episode, we have a preview of four of my audiobooks, each of which is the fourth in its respective series.

1.) Ghost in the Razor, narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

2.) Shield of Deception, narrated by Brad Wills.

3.) Orc-Hoard, narrated by Leanne Woodward.

4.) Ghost in the Storm, narrated by Hollis McCarthy.

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, 7/28/25

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Ashes, Book #3 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store:

ASHES50

The coupon code is valid through August 19, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

GHOST IN THE SIEGE underway

I’ve had a lot to do in Real Life, so I haven’t posted much these last two weeks.

But! Now that SHIELD OF POWER and STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST are out and concluding their respective series, I’m 2/3rds of the way through my Super Summer Of Finishing Things.

What’s next?

I am 36,000 words into GHOST IN THE SIEGE, which will be the sixth and final book in the GHOST ARMOR series. I think the book will be about 100,000 words long, so that means I’m about 36% of the way through it, give or take. Hopefully GHOST IN THE SIEGE will be out in August but it might slip to September.

I am also 3,500 words into BLADE OF FLAMES, which will be the first book in my new epic fantasy series later this year.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 260: Knighthood & Chivalry

In this week’s episode, we take a look at how the meaning of words can shift and evolve over time, and the challenges and opportunities that can create for writers.

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, 7/21/25

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

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

MALISONJULY25

The coupon code is valid through August 12, 2025. So if you need a new ebook this summer, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

A New ChatGPT Scam

I’ve mentioned before (perhaps to ad nauseum) that I don’t really like generative AI. Overall, I think it’s as bad for the mind as meth is for the body.

So today I’m going to share about an exciting new scam for writers courtesy of ChatGPT.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of extremely detailed emails praising my books. That’s nice, except the emails are always written like a corporate memo and maintain numerous detailed references to stuff that happened in a specific book. If I email back, suddenly I’ll get an elaborate pitch for various book marketing services.

Scammy book promoters selling dubious marketing services, alas, are nothing new in the indie publishing space. But the twist with this one is the scammer feeds the text of your book into ChatGPT (or possibly Claude), which then generates both a summary and a letter praising the book, including the specific details and plot points.

So it’s kind of like very personalized spear phishing.

Now, I’m old and cynical (in indie author terms, I’m almost but not quite primeval), so there’s no way I’m signing up for random book marketing services from a stranger on the Internet.

But! New writers very much want validation more than anything else in the world. That’s why you occasionally see a social media storm about a newish writer who gets a bad review, flips their lid, and then endures a pile-on as they become Internet Main Character for a day. So I suspect new writers would be very vulnerable to a letter flattering their book, and will end up spending money on “book marketing services” that provide no real benefit.

That said, I will admit this is a clever scam. I suspect that generative AI like ChatGPT is essentially a Narcissus Machine – it spits out whatever you want to see or hear, so you sit there gazing at essentially the reflection of your own mind like Narcissus enraptured by his reflection in the pool. (This is likely why you occasionally encounter people who think that they’ve taught sentience to ChatGPT, or mentally ill people who think that they’ve attained higher consciousness and ChatGPT is telling them the secrets of the cosmos.) So rather than using the Narcissus Machine on himself, the scammer is weaponizing the Narcissus Machine at someone else in hopes of selling the target dubious marketing services.

Clever. Morally bankrupt, but clever. Unfortunately, I suspect this model of scamming can be applied to more lucrative fields of fraud. Some high-level medical or tech executive is going to get talked into giving up information by a scammer creating a ChatGPT girlfriend for him.

So, I suppose there’s no grand conclusion here, but two points.

1.) Be very wary of any email you get.

2.) I keep hearing how generative AI will lead to amazing scientific advances and the curing of chronic diseases. What we actually seem to have gotten is raised power bills, mass layoffs, badly coded applications, questionable image memes, and a supercharged tool for scammers. So I remain dubious about the benefits of generative AI, mainly since they have yet to materialize.

-JM

STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST now available!

I am pleased to report that STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: FINAL QUEST, the final book in the STEALTH & SPELLS trilogy, is now available!

You can get it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, and for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

###

This time a game over means permadeath.

Noah Carver is still playing Sevenfold Sword Online, trying to prove that the game’s malevolent creator plans to use it to turn humanity into enslaved cybernetic horrors.

But Carver’s running out of time and options.

Unless he finds the proof soon, a lot of people are going to die, starting with Carver and his friends…

-JM

Question of the Week: Delivery?

It’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire interesting discussions of enjoyable topics!

This week’s question: do you get food delivery? Like, do you ever have pizza delivered, or perhaps a sandwich from a place that does delivery, or do you use some of the various delivery “services” that have sprung up in the last ten years like DoorDash, GrubHub or UberEats?

No wrong answers, obviously, since everyone’s circumstances are different.

The inspiration for this question was a massive online discussion I saw about the etiquette of tipping DoorDash drivers, and since I had never used DoorDash or a similar service, I realized it was yet another massive technological/cultural shift I had missed, and was so curious about it.

As you might have guessed, the answer is no, I don’t get food delivery. It might have been over twenty-five years since I last had a pizza delivered. I did occasionally when I was a teenager and in college, but when I moved into the adult world, I never did.

The reasons were 1.) I was extremely broke, and 2.) at the time, I lived near a university campus, so if I wanted fast food, I could get a bunch of stuff within walking distance. If I wanted fast food on a workday, I could just go through the drive-thru on my way home.

Anyway, the habit of never ordering delivery solidified, which is probably just as well, because services like DoorDash and UberEats look massively expensive even before the question of tipping arises.

These days, if I wanted fast food or a pizza, I would go get it myself, or, more likely, persuade myself that it would be better to stay at home and eat vegetables and lean protein.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 259: Comparison Is The Thief Of Joy

In this week’s episode, we look at five ways writers can avoid the self-destructive mindset trap of “comparisonitis”, and five ways that comparing oneself to other writers can be useful.

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