Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 62

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 158: June Ad Results & Movie Reviews

In this week’s episode, I look back at how my ads performed in June 2023, and discuss & review recent movies that I have seen.

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

-JM

SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND cover image!

Making good editing progress on SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND, and if all goes well the book will come out later this month!

That means it is time to share the cover image.

-JM

Ad Results June 2023

It’s the first day of July, so let’s see how my book ads performed overall last month.

FACEBOOK ADS:

Frostborn series: $4.45 back for every $1 spent.

Ghosts series: $5.79 back for every $1 spent.

Cloak Games/Mage series: $5.42 back for every $1 spent.

Sevenfold Sword series: $2.15 back for every $1 spent.

So a strong month for Facebook ads. I think in July I will switch off the ads for SEVENFOLD SWORD and advertise to SILENT ORDER instead since SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND should hopefully be coming soon.

And given that I’m planning to write a new Caina book in September/October (I already booked a narrator for it), it’s gratifying to see THE GHOSTS doing so well!

Let’s see how the Amazon ads did! I advertised DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE in both Amazon US and Amazon UK.

AMAZON ADS:

Dragonskull Amazon US: $7.17 back for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 0.87 clicks.

Dragonskull Amazon UK: $5.07 back for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 1.65 clicks.

So a strong month on Amazon ads as well.

I think the big challenge of my books is that I can only advertise so many of them at once. As of DRAGONSKULL: DOOM OF THE SORCERESS, I have 141 novels, but it’s impossible to advertise all of my series at once, especially on Amazon. So I need to pick and choose based on the opportunities available at the time (Bookbub deals, a book coming out in a series that month, etc).

And as always, thanks for reading everyone!

-JM

SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND rough draft done!

I am very pleased to report that the rough draft of SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND is done!

I am not going to lie, this one was hard to write. Not because of the book itself, which was delightful, but because I had so much going on in Real Life. I haven’t had this hard a time finishing a book since MASK OF SPELLS way back in 2016

Delays included getting sick twice, having a wisdom tooth removed, filling out a lot of paperwork, calling skilled professionals for help about the paperwork, a check getting lost in the mail, my laptop dying, etc.

But I’m always yammering on about persistence, so it was a chance to practice what I preach, and I got the rough draft done in the gaps around all the urgent stuff that kept happening.

Next up is a short story (I haven’t decided on a title yet) that I’ll give away for free to newsletter subscribers when THUNDER HAND comes out. I do know that the story will take place on Antioch III, which if you’re read SILENT ORDER: WASP HAND and SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND you know is the single unluckiest planet in the Kingdom of Calaskar.

Once editing is underway I’ll share the cover image.

-JM

Recent movies

I had a couple of emails asking “hey, when are you going to do another movie review roundup?” I’m pleased people actually read those posts, so let’s take a look at some of the movies I watched so far this summer/late spring.

ANT MAN & THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA

I’d say this was the weakest of the three ANT MAN movies.

Lately, Disney/Marvel gives the impression of an empire that is in rapid decline, or perhaps a bus with the wheels falling off. There are any number of theories – the Disney corporation’s massive debt load, the time bomb of the Hulu/Comcast deal, backlash over the company’s embrace of certain political positions, the company losing its creativity and running out of IP it can cannabalize, Bob Chapek’s mismanagement, Bob Iger’s mismanagement, the US culture war making it impossible to appeal to a fractured mass audience, all the popular Marvel characters dying off and retiring, Disney’s near-infallible gift for alienating its top talent, Disney+ cannibalizing most theatre sales, Disney+ losing a 1.5 billion dollars, superhero genre fatigue, or overworked VFX artists getting fed up. Maybe it’s a combination of all of those things, or perhaps none of them.

Anyway, all that is an aside. I think QUANTUMANIA has two problems.

First, the previous two ANT MAN movies worked because they were generally humorous heist movies. The villains were fairly comedic – the corrupt CEO in the first one, the corrupt weapons broker in the second, and the honest but awkwardly earnest FBI agent in the second. QUANTUMANIA has Kang as the villain, and he’s super-serious and brooding, making him a bad fit for an ANT MAN movie. Given the actor’s recent troubles, Marvel probably regrets choosing Kang as the next Big Bad of their movies to replace Thanos.

Second, there was just way too much CGI. When the Ant Man family gets zapped to the Quantum Realm, everything becomes CGI. You could tell the poor actors were trying really, really hard to emote on a green screen sound stage. Peter Jackson’s THE HOBBIT trilogy fell into the same trap. THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy holds up so well because so much of it was done with practical effects. The same cannot be said for THE HOBBIT or QUANTUMANIA.

One minor point was that Ant Man’s daughter Cassie started out as a very annoying character. That’s just what we need – another teenaged daughter of a rich man come to tell us how to live from a position of smug self-righteousness! She does get better in the second half of the movie, though.

Overall grade: C-, maybe D+

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES

I had doubts about this, but it was really good.

The biggest mistake that a Dungeons & Dragons movie could make was taking itself too seriously, since Dungeons & Dragons, if you think about it, is kind of ridiculous. But HONOR AMONG THIEVES hits the right balance of tongue-in-cheek humor without losing a sense of internal logic. The characters often act exactly the way you would expect a Dungeons & Dragons party to act, including hilariously bad decisions at times.

The plot is disgraced bard Edgin, aided by his best friend, the barbarian Holga, wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter, who has been in the care of a former thieving colleague named Forge. However, it turns out Forge has been lying to Edgin’s daughter about her father for years, and he has the backing of some seriously dark wizards.

Adventure & hilarity both ensue. (Some of the amusement comes from the fact that the chief villain thinks she’s in a serious grimdark fantasy movie, but she’s actually in a comedic Dungeons & Dragons adventure.)

There was some CG, but it was used quite a bit better than in QUANTUMANIA. Like, it made better use of the CGI. The characters would be riding through a landscape and they would have a fantasy city in the background, that kind of thing.

I heard some people argue that the movie didn’t do quite as well at the box office as anticipated because of all the many ways Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast alienated their core audience via sketchy behavior. I don’t doubt the part about sketchy behavior, but I think the real problem was that while Dungeons & Dragons is now more mainstream than it’s ever been, it’s still not mainstream enough to support a big budget movie.

All that aside, it was an excellent movie and I enjoyed it. Hopefully it gets sequels with the same team, but that seems unlikely.

Overall grade: A

MASTER & COMMANDER

This was pretty great. It’s based off the Aubrey-Maturin historical novels by Patrick O’Brian, set during the Napoleonic war. Aubrey is the captain of the HMS Surprise, while Dr. Maturin is the ship’s surgeon and Aubrey’s confidant. The HMS Surprise is sent to defeat a French privateer ship called the Acheron, but the Acheron’s captain outwits Aubrey and escapes. Aubrey sets the Surprise after the Acheron, to the growing worry of Maturin and the other senior officers, who fear that it is becoming an obsession.

The movie manages to capture the grim reality of life aboard a 19th-century British warship (amputations, bad food, 14 year old boys serving as officers, etc) without wallowing in grimdark the way modern historical fiction often does. It builds to a slow burn when Aubrey at last has a chance to attempt to outwit the Acheron’s captain.

Honestly, the pacing reminded me a bit of an 80s movie – slow build, and more leisurely character scenes than a lot of modern cinema, but no shortage of action for all that. Definitely recommended.

Overall grade: A

FAST X

The FAST & THE FURIOUS movies are what you get if the screenwriters take logic out back behind the barn and shoot it. I mean this in a complimentary way. In the first movie, Dominic Toretto and his team were basically stealing DVD players in East LA. Twenty years and ten movies later, they’re flying cars in space, battling international terrorists, and Dom has apparently acquired the superpower of suspending the laws of physics whenever he drives a car.

In other words, glorious, over-the-top spectacle. You don’t come to a FAST movie to contemplate the mysteries of the universe. No, you come to watch our plucky group of ethnically diverse bantering heroes drive cars real fast and flip off the laws of physics while battling megalomaniac villains.

In this installment, the son of the evil drug lord from back in FAST 5 (the best of the movies, in my opinion) returns and swears revenge on Dom and his family. Jason Momoa ably plays Dante as an affably deranged psychopath (though when he gets really ticked off, the games stop and the charming mask drops). Sadly, FAST X ended on a cliffhanger, so hopefully the sequel will get made.

Overall grade: B

JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4

First things first – the JOHN WICK movies are ridiculously violent. Olive Stone recently made a minor bit of news when he complained about the unrealistic violence in the JOHN WICK movies. Which is the point, since JOHN WICK is about the fantasy of violence the way Hallmark movies are about the fantasy of true love. The reality of violence is quite a bit different than the fantasy, though thankfully the reality of true love is quite a bit different than the reality of violence.

Anyway, enough philosophical rambling. If you don’t like movie violence, then the JOHN WICK movies are not your cup of tea.

The JOHN WICK movies have achieved something near-impossible – they achieved the same high level of quality and tone across all four movies. The series has two great strengths – the elaborate fight scenes, and the intricate worldbuilding of the underworld. In Real Life, criminals tend to do what they want until they screw up and get arrested, or get killed by their rivals. In JOHN WICK, the criminal underworld is governed by elaborate and byzantine rules, with brutal punishments for any infractions.

JOHN WICK 4 gives the story of Mr. Wick a satisfying ending, with the door open a crack if Keanu Reeves decides he wants to do more of them. In this final installment, Wick has a chance to finally get out from under the thumb of the High Table, the sinister council that rules over the underworld. But to do it, he’ll have to face his old friends.

As an aside, every country John Wick visits must experience a drastic reduction in crime – every underworld goon and assassin comes after Mr. Wick, and then he kills them all. Like, personally! After John Wick visits a country, it must be impossible to hire an assassin there, because John Wick killed them all on his way through.

Overall grade: A+

ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Absolute masterpiece. It maximizes what a superhero movie, an animated movie, and a multiverse story can do. (And I generally don’t even like multiverse stories.)

I have to admit when I saw the first movie, INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE, back during COVID (it turned up on Netflix) I wasn’t enthused. An animated movie about a multiverse? No thanks. But I watched it and it was really good, so I made the effort to see the sequel in the actual theatre.

The animation is not only gorgeous, it pushes the limits of what animation can actually do in terms of the storytelling.

I suppose it is amusing that of the four movies about multiverses that I actually liked, three of them were Spider-Man (Spider-Men? Spider-People?) movies.

It is very regrettable that the working conditions for the animators were apparently awful, but (as we mentioned with QUANTUMANIA) that may be a problem across the film industry as a whole. Which, to be fair, generally has a lot of problems and doesn’t seem like a great place to work in general.

Overall grade: A+

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 157: Return To Podcasting & Reader Questions

In this week’s episode, The Pulp Writer Show returns and answers a lot of reader questions about Frostborn, The Ghosts, and writing in general!

A preview of the audiobook of DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES (as narrated by Brad Wills) is included at the end of the episode.

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

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES now available in audio!

I am very pleased to report that DRAGONSKULL: BLADE OF THE ELVES is now available in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills.

You can get it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, Chirp, and Payhip.

Good preview for DRAGONSKULL: CROWN OF THE GODS, which I should be able to start writing in mid-July if all goes well.

-JM

SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND progress

A good way to realize that you’re out of shape is to babysit an energetic 3 year old child at a park for several hours.

Relative: Wow, Jon, you’re sweating a lot.

Me (wheezing): Yes, I’m aware, thank you.

Anyway! I returned the 3 year old child in question safely to his parents, so all ended well.

In other good news, I am now 58% of the way through SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND.

-JM

We Just Gotta Suck It Up

It’s time for that doleful yearly tradition (though it tends to happen every few months) – new author freaks out about a bad review, and then the Internet falls on his or her head.

This time, the freakout involves BookTok, a subset of the TikTok video social media app, which manages to combine the least-desirable features of YouTube and Twitter and somehow make them worse. To sum up, a BookTok person gave a new author a mostly favorable review, but complained that the ending was predictable. The author took this personally and shot back, which resulted in the traditional Internet Rage Pileup and the author’s book contract getting canceled. Granted, at least this time the author didn’t attack the critic with a wine bottle (that happened once), or show up at the critic’s house.

If you are a writer, there is one rule, and one rule only, you must follow with bad reviews:

Never, Ever, Ever Respond To Reviews.

In other words, you just gotta suck it up and move on.

I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been doing this for twelve years now, and I’ve gotten every kind of bad review under the sun. Here are just a few of the negative opinions that people have either 1.) written in bad reviews, 2.) or taken upon themselves to email to me personally or send via Facebook Messenger.

-The book is badly written.

-This book is an insult to the English language.

-I hate the main character.

-The main character had no flaws.

-The main character had too many flaws to be believable.

-The main character was too self-loathing.

-The main character really should have been more self-loathing.

-My wife is an English teacher, and she was laughing at how bad this book was.

-This book was Christian propaganda.

-This book was anti-Christian propaganda.

-There is too much profanity.

-There is not enough profanity.

-The book was too long.

-The book was too short.

-Things that happened in previous books were referenced in this one.

-Somehow the author insidiously wrote this book to deliberately insult me on a personal level!

-I am annoyed that the main character was not meaner to his children.

-I am recently divorced, and I hate this book because the main character reminds me of my ex, who was the literal embodiment of the devil and the ultimate source of all evil in the cosmos.

-The main character’s romantic choices were WRONG!!!

-I emailed the author detailed criticisms of this book and he never responded! Clearly he hates his readers!

-Too much violence!

-Not enough violence.

There was also, for a while, a guy writing like 3,000 word reviews on his blog about how much he hated my books. He stopped eventually –  I hope he found a girlfriend.

So for all the stuff listed above, I only very rarely responded, and only when it was something simple and factually incorrect that I could easily point out – like someone complaining that the book wasn’t available on Google Play when it really was, that kind of thing. Overall, though, I avoid responding to anything remotely negative.

And to be fair, after twelve years of self-publishing, I don’t feel the need to respond. I don’t feel much of anything at bad reviews, other than a moment of vague annoyance like when you see someone driving inattentively. Like, when you’re a new writer, bad reviews really do sting. But I haven’t been a new writer for a long, long time now. DRAGONSKULL: DOOM OF THE SORCERESS was book #141, and after one hundred and forty-one books, I can’t even remember what I actually wrote half the time, let alone the opinions people might have had about it. (By the time I get to book four or five in a series, I have to spend a lot of time searching the previous books with CTRL+F to remember important details.)

I am always grateful when someone enjoys the book, and indifferent when someone does not.

But for the newer writers who haven’t yet written so much they can’t remember everything they’ve written, here are some tips and tricks to help you deal with bad reviews.

Tip Zero: If you’re just starting out, maybe you should write under a pen name. I didn’t, but I’m told for people who do it’s a useful elemental of psychological compartmentalization – all the bad reviews are for Pen Name, not for you.

Now on to the rest of the tips.

1.) You aren’t obliged to have an opinion about a bad review.

Social media creates the illusion that you have to have an opinion about everything. This is especially true on Twitter, where everyone has a Hot Take about the latest events of the day. Like, there’s a news event of some kind, whether serious (war in Ukraine) or trivial (celebrity says something dumb), and then many social media users feel the need to express an opinion about it. But what is most of that if not indulging in the vice of gossip? It’s talking about people you’ve never met and with whom you have no relationship.

That learned reflex, I think, transfers to some writers who have meltdowns over reviews. Someone posted a bad review of my book! I need to share my opinion about it!

But you don’t. In fact, I think training yourself not to share every opinion you have on social media is a skill many people would find beneficial.

Just because someone didn’t like your book doesn’t mean you’re obligated to respond to it. Indeed, you don’t even need to have an opinion about their opinion.

To quote the Book of Proverbs: “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.”

2.) Don’t respond to negative emails.

Generally, I try to respond to all reader emails, unless its negative and I don’t want to engage. Sometimes you get emails or Facebook messages from someone, and you can tell they’re just spoiling for a fight. Especially if you get an angry email complaining about the book on Monday, don’t respond, and then an even angrier email arrives on Wednesday complaining that you still haven’t responded.

Arguing with people over the internet is almost nearly always an enormous waste of time. If it’s a concrete problem that’s within my power to fix – corrupted file, reader can’t find the book, and so forth – then I’ll respond. Otherwise, it’s just not worth the energy, and getting into an argument over the Internet is always more of a time and energy sink that you might anticipate.

3.) Don’t engage in reader-oriented spaces.

Generally, I think it’s best for writers to stay out of reader-oriented spaces, especially if the writer’s work is being reviewed or discussed in that space.

What do I mean by reader-oriented spaces? I mean a place like Goodreads, that’s devoted to book reviews, or a YouTube book reviewer’s comments section, or the feed of a BookTok video creator. Those areas of the Internet are devoted to readers discussing books, and it’s never a good idea for an author to inject themselves into the conversation there. It’s especially a bad idea of the writer’s book is the one actually being discussed. because that sort of discussion can spiral out of control very quickly.

So, if you’re a writer, it’s best to avoid Goodreads and BookTube/BookTok. If you really must engage there, it’s probably wisest to create an account under a different name and never, ever mention your books.

4.) Read the other reviews

If a bad review really gets under your skin, it might be worthwhile to read the other reviews the person in question has posted. This is easy on Amazon or Goodreads – you just click on the reviewer’s name, and you’ll see their profile page along with all the other stuff they’ve reviewed.

Often you’ll discover that the reviewer just hates everything. Or you’ll see that the reviewer dislikes something you like, or likes something you don’t, which gives you an easy way to discard their opinion.

On a more serious note, you’ll sometimes see that the reviewer is in chronic pain and bad reviews are a way of lashing out. A while back a study found that many of the high-volume Internet reviewers are homebound and frequently dealing with high levels of pain. Like, if you click on the reviewer’s profile on Amazon and see that they’re also reviewing adult diapers, compression socks, orthopedic shoes, and back braces (sometimes reviewed in excruciating detail), they’ve probably got a lot of other problems to deal with. Which shows once again that it is best not to engage with bad reviews, because you can never tell what someone else might be going through.

5.) Delete or block as necessary.

Bad reviews are one thing, but if someone makes a nuisance of themselves on your social media pages or keeps emailing you, go ahead and block them.

I haven’t done this all that often, but I have done it. It’s not something I’ll do right away. Sometimes online writing lacks nuance, and you can completely misinterpret what someone was saying. Or there are technical difficulties. Once I had a Facebook comment along the lines of “I hope your head gets chopped off”. Five minutes later, the second half of the comment came through “because it makes up for what you did to that character, LOL LOL LOL . Great book! Looking forward to the sequel!” (The original version had many more spelling errors, alas, and I had to read it a couple of times to figure out what the commentor was actually saying.)

But if someone is consistently unpleasant I’ll just block them. Accepting that bad reviews exist is a necessary state of mind for a writer. Tolerating bad comments on your own social media and website is not. The block button is there for a reason!

6.) Plod onward.

The best writing advice is to keep writing. If you do that long enough, eventually you will build up a much thicker skin to criticism. You will learn not to take any bad reviews personally and move onward.

There are few substitutes in life for sheer plodding persistence.

Hopefully if you are a new writer, these tips will help you learn to handle bad reviews without a public Internet meltdown.

-JM

Follow Up To The Summer Of Finishing Things

After I posted my plans for the summer yesterday, I had many questions along the lines of “when are you coming back to series X?”

So, after I finish the DRAGONSKULL and the SILENT ORDER series this summer, I plan to spend a while cycling between Caina, Nadia, and a new epic fantasy series set in the world of Andomhaim. I haven’t 100% decided what the new epic fantasy series is going to be about, but I have some time to think about it yet.

Anyway, there will definitely be at least one more Nadia book this year, and hopefully two. Depends on how fast I write.

Meanwhile, I just passed the 30,000 word mark on SILENT ORDER: THUNDER HAND.

-JM