Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 78

audiobook milestone!

It looks like this week I sold my 13,000th audiobook through ACX.

Thanks for listening, everyone!

I don’t exactly know how many audiobooks I’ve sold in total, because it’s challenging on a technical level to pull together all the detail, especially with Findaway Voices because FV distributes to so many stores. Like, does a library checkout count the same as a Chirp sale, because a Chirp sale can bring in six times as much money as a library checkout? But it’s a good problem to have.

Check back tomorrow for some new audiobook news!

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 130: Worldbuilding In Urban Fantasy

In this week’s episode, we discuss worldbuilding in urban fantasy settings (specifically in my CLOAK GAMES/MAGE series), and take a look back at how my advertising campaigns performed in September 2022.

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

-JM

New social network!

Because of recent changes at a Major Social Network, I ended up with an Instagram account. For various boring technical reasons, I had never been able to sign up for one before.

(If you are interested in the boring technical reasons, I used to have what Facebook called a Gray Account to run my author page, and Gray Accounts weren’t allowed to use Instagram. However, in October Facebook issued a decree saying that Gray Accounts were now Forbidden, and you have to run an author page through a personal account. Since I had to use a personal account anyway, I might as well sign up for Instagram at the same time.)

If you wish, you can follow me at Instagram here. It will be basically the same kind of stuff I already post on Facebook and my website.

-JM

MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES now in audiobook!

One of my goals for 2022 was to finish the FROSTBORN series in audio. That happened this summer, but I’m pleased to report that we also recorded MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES in audio.

It came to 17 hours long, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills, and you can get it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Apple, Kobo, and Chirp.

I am also giving away free audiobook copies of the first book in the MALISON series, MALISON: DRAGON CURSE. You can get the audiobook of MALISON: DRAGON CURSE for free at Payhip with this coupon code:

7HVZB019KU

The code is valid until October 31st, 2022.

-JM

GHOST IN THE PACT audiobook coming soon

I am pleased to report that the audiobook of GHOST IN THE PACT (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is basically done and should be out later this month.

As always, my newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook short story when GHOST IN THE PACT comes out.

Of course, I’ve been doing this for a long time now, so I have a lot of potential short stories from which to chose. This time around, I think I’ll choose GHOST UNDYING. I looked it up, and the last time I gave it away was with the newsletter for GHOST IN THE SURGE back in 2013.

2013! That’s been a while.

So it’s definitely time for a cover refresh for GHOST UNDYING.

-JM

a short CLOAK OF MASKS excerpt

Today, I am thankful that waiting for a contractor to call back is entirely compatible with writing a book.

Let’s have a short excerpt from CLOAK OF MASKS!

In today’s excerpt, Nadia is dismayed that she’s starting to have a different level of socioeconomic problems.

###

“More interesting than I expected,” said Neil. “The Marshal received an unusual package in the mail.”

I still hadn’t consented to have a security team following me around, but I had taken some extra precautions. The post office routed all my mail and packages to Cloak Corporation’s headquarters now, where they it scanned and checked for explosives and other nasty tricks. My address wasn’t publicly known, but sometimes cranks managed to find it out and send me mail. Most of it was harmless. In fact, all of it to date had been harmless. The most disturbing one was a man who had written to me claiming that lizard people were secretly controlling the Elven nobles and that he could hear their telepathic broadcasts over cell phone towers. Now, while in knew for a fact that lizard people did actually exist, I had never seen one and as far as I knew they had never come to Earth. Neil had backtracked the address, which turned out to be an elderly man who had stopped taking his medications and suffered what the doctors euphemistically called an “episode.” His daughters and his doctor had been massively relieved once he was back on his pills.

That had ended well.

But someone who wanted me dead might try something creative.

-JM

CLOAK OF MASKS progress update

I am pleased to report that I am 53,000 words into CLOAK OF MASKS.

It’s going to be a really busy week, but if all goes well I am hoping to hit 70,000 words by the end of Friday, though that might be optimistic.

Nadia will be the main POV, and Victoria Carrow will be a returning POV character. We’ll also have two new POV characters.

-JM

Halo: Combat Evolved

Once I finished playing SKYRIM on the Xbox, I decided really needed to branch out and try other games. I mean, I bought SKYRIM (for the first time) back in 2011, and I didn’t beat it until 2020 when the Switch version came along.

I settled on giving the first HALO game, HALO COMBAT EVOLVED a try, and I finished the main campaign recently.

I was surprised at how much I ended up enjoying it. A lot of modern games are very much wide-open sandboxes where you can pretty much do anything. HALO CE is a comparatively simple game since there are only so many weapons, you can only carry two guns at a time, and there are only so many enemy types. But chess is a comparatively simple game with only so many pieces and moves, and it’s still quite enjoyable and complex, and HALO CE is much the same way.

That said, the most fun is when you have a tank and can absolutely blast aliens to bits with the main gun.

Also, encountering the original Cortana was amusing. My first experience with “Cortana” was the ill-fated voice assistant Microsoft tried to add into Windows 10. I installed Windows 10 a lot of times, and for a while the setup wizard automatically had Cortana talk to you. So when playing HALO CE, it was funny to have Windows 10 yelling at me about the tactical situation.

It was also amusing that the final mission of the game is basically Mario Kart with machine guns.

Looking forward to trying HALO 2!

-JM

When did smartphones actually become useful?

I happened to listen to a podcast episode where the hosts discussed smartphones, and the first time they remembered using a smartphone and finding it useful.

I do remember the first time I encountered a smartphone and thought it was stupid. It would have been back when I still thought graduate school was a good idea. (Speaking of stupid ideas.)  One of the other students was boasting that he didn’t need to buy textbooks because he had found pirated PDF scans of them online and could read them all on the screen of his Palm Treo. (I think it might have been the very first Palm Treo that could work as a phone.)

Given that his eyes looked like he had just been pepper sprayed, this was not a good advertisement for reading a giant textbook on a tiny screen.

Anyway, shortly after that I realized that graduate school was a terrible life choice and went into IT support instead.

But back to the main topic! The first time I used a smartphone and found it useful was in 2013, specifically a Samsung Galaxy S3.

This, I know, was pretty late in the game for the smartphone revolution. There were a couple of reasons I didn’t get a smartphone for a real long time.

Cost, obviously, was a big one.

However, the bigger reason was that, as mentioned above, I was in IT support for a long time, and when you work in IT, new technology is usually a Very Bad Thing. New technology inevitably causes problems. More specifically, when you work in institutional IT new technology 1.) won’t work, 2.) will cost a lot of money, and still won’t work, 3.) will cause numerous unpredictable problems with existing systems, 4.) will expose the institution to liability, and 5.) is probably controlled by a hostile foreign power.

More annoyingly, end users are usually ridiculously excited about new technology and become upset when they can integrate it with existing systems. “Why can’t I use Alexa to read patient records aloud to me?” the end user will demand. Then you’ll patiently explain how this wouldn’t work and would actually violate several different state and federal privacy laws and expose the institution to massive civil and possibly criminal liability. What will happen then is the end user will go away, secretly purchase an Alexa with departmental funds, try to use it to access patient records, and somehow wind up bringing down the entire network in the process.

This will, of course, be your fault.

So if you work in institutional IT support, like I did, you are automatically suspicious of all new technology, and in the 2000s, smartphones definitely fell under the category of Suspicious New Technology.

A significant reason for that is that the early 2000s era smartphone platforms were just not very good. There were two big ones I encountered often – Windows CE/Windows Mobile, and Palm OS. Windows CE/Mobile often came on these clunky PDA-esque devices with slide-out keyboards. They had larger screens, but the resolution was so low that the image quality wasn’t very good, and the keyboards were so tiny and unresponsive that it was nearly impossible to type on them. Palm Treo devices were usually more compact, but they still had tiny screens and it was very difficult to type on the keyboards.

Then, of course, Blackberry came along. It’s almost forgotten nowadays, but for a while Blackberry had a weird cultural penetration & mystique. Like, everyone knew that Important Business Leaders used their Blackberries to send and receive Important Business Emails! Blackberry had such a reputation as a device for Important Leaders that then-President Obama was reportedly dismayed that he couldn’t keep using his Blackberry once he entered office in 2009 since it represented a security risk. So, as lot of end users who thought of themselves as Important Business Leaders (whether they actually were or not) had to get their Blackberries to send their Important Business Emails.

I will say this for Blackberry – their software was significantly better than Windows CE/Mobile and Palm back in the 2000s. Overall, it was a lot less janky, for lack of a better term. That said, if you wanted to use Blackberry with an institutional Microsoft Exchange email server, you had to shell out for a dedicated Blackberry email server to push emails out to Blackberry devices. That was expensive, to say the least. While Blackberry was less of a support headache than Windows CE/Mobile and Palm, it was still troublesome enough to support that I had absolutely no interest in buying a Blackberry device for personal use and I never did.

Of course, by the end of the 2000s and the start of 2010s, the iPhone was starting to spread out from the early adopters. The day the iPhone was released in 2007, the CEO of Blackberry famously said that the iPhone represented no threat to Blackberry, which is right up there with “we will take the enemy capital in three days” and “home prices always go up” in terms of failed predictions. The iPhone first gradually and then rapidly ate Blackberry’s market share, with Android following right along.

Android, of course, came out shortly after the iPhone, and there was a massive series of lawsuits between Apple and Google arguing about whether or not Google basically copied the iPhone and turned it into Android. (It’s easy to forget now, but Google and Apple used to be much more friendly in the pre-smartphone days.) The first Android phones that I encountered in the wild weren’t great. I think the first one I needed to support was the Motorola Droid, which was thick and clunky and not super fast. But – and this is critical – it was a lot easier to use and set up than a Blackberry. And you didn’t need a dedicated email server to push messages to an Android!

Google and Samsung have sort of a love/hate relationship, because Samsung sells more Android phones than anyone else, including Google itself, which means Samsung can (and has) dictated terms to Google in the way that no one else can. However, the very first Android phone I saw and thought “this doesn’t suck all that bad” was the Samsung Galaxy S3 in early 2013. At the time, I still had a flip phone, but it was starting to have problems and it was getting to be time to move on. So I bit the bullet and bought a Galaxy S3, wincing all the while at the cost.

Now we come to the main point of the post – when did I first find a smartphone useful?

It was the very next day after buying the S3. I still wasn’t entirely sure that buying the phone had been a good idea. But I had to go out on a support call that involved visiting a network closet and figuring out which Ethernet ports in the building were live. I brought along my usual notebook and pen so I could take notes on the port map in the closet. But as I stood in front of the rack holding the Ethernet switches, I realized I didn’t need the notebook. I could just take a picture of the port map, and the S3’s camera was good enough and the screen was big enough that I could zoom in and look at the entire map at once. This saved me a lot of time.

So, after nearly a decade of dealing with smartphone related problems, I finally conceded that they could be useful. It just took me like eight years after the first time I saw on in the wild.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS on the B&N blog!

I am pleased to report that the Barnes & Noble blog named DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS one of its five favorite indie books of the week!

In addition to Barnes & Noble, you can get the book at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon DE, Amazon CA, Amazon AU, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Smashwords, and Payhip.

-JM