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Progress on DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS has been slower than I would like due to the neverending need for home repairs. But we should still have it on track to come out in October.

Meanwhile, let’s see the cover image for the bonus short story, THE FIRST BARGAIN! Sign up for my newsletter, and you’ll get a free ebook copy of THE FIRST BARGAIN when FURY OF THE BARBARIANS comes out.

-JM

GHOST IN THE THRONE now in audio!

I am very pleased to report that GHOST IN THE THRONE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, is now available!

Available at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Chirp, and Scribd.

At over 15 hours long, GHOST IN THE THRONE is definitely worth your audio dollar (or credit).

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS cover image

Editing is underway for DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS! That means it’s time to share the cover image, which you can see below.

I’m still on track (and hopeful!) that the book will come out in the first week of October.

-JM

Nadia vs Subject Matter Experts!

A reader named PT sent in a very nice letter concerning the depiction of nuclear fusion in Nadia’s most recent adventure, CLOAK OF SPEARS:###I’ve really enjoyed the Cloak Mage series, I purchase them via Kindle to read as I travel for work. However, I have to tell you – if nobody else has yet – that in the most recent novel, Cloak of Spears, you have an error which comes up multiple times. To wit, nuclear fusion generators don’t turn into atomic bombs. *Fission* generators can experience a runaway reaction, as we saw in Chernobyl and Fukushima.  Even then, the likelihood of exploding like a nuclear bomb is extremely slight. More likely, the fission reaction will cause the pile to overheat, burning through the containment vessel, and starts cooling on contact with outside materials. Additionally, a fission generator is not as pure as it needs to be to make a bomb. Atom bombs are made from small, dense materials at 90% enrichment or more. Reactors are 5% or less and involve a lot of material to soak up heat and neutrons. A nuclear explosion is  overwhelmingly unlikely.On the other hand a tokamak fusion generator – or any of the newer generators having some sort of toroidal chamber, is essentially just hot gas. It’s hydrogen fusing into helium under intense temperature and pressure. If you disrupt the containment, at best you have an explosion from igniting the hydrogen in air, but there’s no possibility of a runaway reaction.So if Nadia and crew were to disrupt the electromagnetic containment and/or cooling of a fusion generator, it would cause the physical containment to fail and maybe end in a small hydrogen explosion, that’s all.I tell you this as a Nuclear Chemist who moved into a regulatory compliance and auditing position after [REDACTED] years of making cutting edge research radiopharmaceuticals using both cyclotron and reactor created materials.Perhaps the rest of your readers won’t know, but you and I will. And if there’s any possibility of updating the electronic version – well,  you could do that if you wanted, too.Thanks for your time, can’t wait to see if/how Nadia becomes an archmage!###Here’s the thing – PT is absolutely right. I have absolutely no idea how nuclear fusion works, and even if I spent the next sixth months doing nothing but taking classes on the subject, at the end I would still have no idea how it works.So, you know the real reason I wrote CLOAK OF SPEARS that way – I don’t actually know how nuclear fusion works.But! Henceforth, these three following reasons will be my Official Public Reasons for writing it that way. 1.) For reasons of Public Safety, I did not include actual information on how to blow up a fusion reactor. Obviously!2.) I don’t want to get stopped at the airport. (See reason 1 above.)3.) It’s three hundred years in the future, the technology would all work differently anyway.But there is an important lesson for writers in this – the use of verisimilitude.When writing fiction, something doesn’t have to be realistic, it just has to feel realistic to the reader. Fiction involves a willing suspension of disbelief. If you look at a novel in the most literal sense, it’s a book of nonsense, people who never existed doing things that never happened, often in places like Middle-Earth that never existed. The reader has to suspend disbelief to read a novel, and the easier you can make it for the reader to suspend disbelief, the more he or she will likely enjoy the novel.That’s where verisimilitude comes in – making it feel real.But there is something very important to remember about verisimilitude.You can’t make it feel real for everyone. Someone’s always going to see through the illusion.To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.What causes the suspension of disbelief to break? It happens when verisimilitude fails, and the reader encounters something he or she knows would not work that way in Real Life, like PT and the fusion reactor above.The reason this happens is because every one has something in which they are expert, and it’s impossible for a writer of fiction to be an expert in everything. In the US military, they have something called SMEs – Subject Matter Experts. (It’s usually pronounced “smee”, like Captain Hook’s first officer in PETER PAN.) When the military has a specific concern they need addressed, they bring in a SME. (Of course, the SME may not actually know what he or she is talking about, but that’s a different topic.) A Subject Matter Expert will know the topic inside and out, so it will be very difficult for the writer to maintain verisimilitude for a SME on that particular subject.So, how to maintain verisimilitude? Here are some tips.1.) Do as much research as necessary, but no more. Writers sometimes have a bad habit of going too far down the research rabbit hole. We’ve all read books where it’s clear that the writer did the research, and wants to show it off, so there are pages and pages of unnecessary information about a topic. Infodumping is a bad habit for writers, and totally unnecessary infodumps are an even worse habit. Best to avoid them.2.) So how much research should you do? Just enough to provide the minimum details you need to tell the story. Remember you’re telling a story, not writing a nonfiction book. The research should be in the service of moving the plot forward. You should use only just enough detail to move the plot forward without getting lost in the weeds.3.) Realize you probably can’t fool the SMEs. That’s the reason you should use the minimum necessary amount of detail. It’s not possible to fool an expert, but if you use the necessary amount of detail, you can get by. In some areas of computer technology, I would qualify as a SME, and so it’s hilarious to see crime shows that get key details wrong, like IPv4 addresses that start with 678 or something like that. If you try to go into too much detail, you’ll trip yourself up. Like, for example, say you have the police trying to trace the owner of a website. If you say something like “we did a traceroute on the IP address of 678.45.19.777, which followed the router ping to the data center”, that’s complete nonsense. But if you say something like “the hosting company gave us the mailing address, which was a rental box in Nebraska, and the rental box company gave us the customer’s address”, that makes much more sense, is much closer to how law enforcement actually operates most of the time, avoids tripping you up in unnecessary detail, and it also moves the plot forward, which is the important part.4.) Conversely, if a core portion of your audience consists of SMEs, you’re going to have to do a lot of research.Recently, I was discussing books with a relative, and the books of Jack Carr came up. Jack Carr is mostly known for THE TERMINAL LIST, which was recently adapted into a popular Amazon Prime streaming series. Upon doing a little reading about Mr. Carr’s books, I found out that they frequently contained detailed descriptions of military gear and weaponry.Accurate descriptions of military/law enforcement gear and tactics is a common feature in thriller novels. Indeed, many people with military/law enforcement experience read these books, and so will spot something inaccurate right away. That means writers of thriller novels often have to do a lot of research, because a large portion of the main audience for those books has a considerable amount of experience with the technical details that might turn up.So if you write a genre where a core portion of the audience knows a lot about the topic and expects accuracy about the details, then you’re going to have to do a lot of research and there’s no way around it.I hope these tips will help you with creating verisimilitude in your fiction. Just remember, though – it is impossible to make fiction feel real for everyone, so don’t beat yourself up if you don’t. In the end, that’s why we have different genres. Someone would might find a science fiction book implausible could quite happily read a Western or a crime novel.-JM

DRAGONSKULL and other progress updates

If all goes well, I should finish THE FIRST BARGAIN today, and start editing DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS soon. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of THE FIRST BARGAIN when FURY OF THE BARBARIANS comes out, so be sure to subscribe today!

Meanwhile, I am also 8,000 words into CLOAK OF MASKS, and just about done with Chapter 1 of SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND.

In audiobook land, I think GHOST IN THE THRONE should be out everywhere next week, with GHOST IN THE PACT coming in October. We’re also about halfway through MALISON: THE COMPLETE series. Eventually, the entire thing will be one audiobook, but you can get MALISON: DRAGON CURSE and MALISON: DRAGON FURY as individual titles if you want. (But, of course, I’m reasonably sure that having an audiobook with THE COMPLETE SERIES in the title will make it easy to sell.)

When not doing all that, I’ve been playing the original HALO game (you know, twenty years after it came out). The rocket launcher is fun.

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS rough draft done!

Thank you all for the kind words about my grandmother. They were much appreciated!

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I am pleased to report that the rough draft of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS is finally done! I had originally wanted that to happen back in like, July, but things have been busy.

Next up is THE FIRST BARGAIN, a short story that will take place from Niara’s point of view before her death. Newsletter subscribers will get a free ebook copy of THE FIRST BARGAIN when FURY OF THE BARBARIAN comes out, which will (hopefully!) be in October.

-JM

updates and a brief hiatus

I had planned to get to 80,000 words of DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS by the end of this week, but it didn’t quite work out that way.

I don’t usually talk about anything personal on the Internet ever for any reason, but I’ll make my one exception for 2022.

My grandmother died this week. She was, beyond all doubt, the kindest person I’ve ever known, and probably the kindest person I will ever meet, even if I live as long as she did (which wasn’t quite a hundred, but pretty close). But she has left this defective world for the better one prepared for us by Jesus.

As it happens, I was thinking about her when I got the news – I was rushing to get some stuff done so I would not be late for our regular phone call time.

So it is sad, but not a bitter or an angry sadness.

On a related topic, as well all know, there is a bit of awkward dark comedy that happens every time someone dies. We’ve all been in variations of conversations like this.

SUPERVISOR: I am very sorry for your loss, and I’ll go approve your time off for the funeral.

EMPLOYEE: Thank you.

SUPERVISOR: Again, very sorry for your loss.

(long, awkward pause)

SUPERVISOR: (clears throat, fidgets a bit) Though…that one project, we do really kind of need it done at some point, and while I am very sorry for your loss, I do sort of need to know when you might expect to have that project, you know, done, so if you could kind of guess towards an ETA…

Let us spare ourselves that awkward conversation!

Basically, everything I’m working on is getting pushed back a month. DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS is about 70% done, but I think that will be out in October instead of September. So, barring unexpected developments, I think the rest of the year will look like this for books:

September: nothing

October: DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS

November: CLOAK OF MASKS

December: SILENT ORDER: WRECK HAND

Anyway, I will be mostly offline until about September 16th. If you really need to get ahold of me, send a message to jmcontact@jonathanmoeller.com, but there might be a delay of a few days in getting an answer.

-JM

advertising results for August 2022

Yesterday was the last day of the month, so I thought it would be informative to take a look at my advertising results for August.

This first group is for Facebook ads. For Facebook ads, I typically advertise the free first-in-series book, and then calculate the return based on how many of the rest of the series sells. The chart below shows how much I got back for every $1 I spent on advertising.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE – $7.19

FROSTBORN – $3.21

GHOSTS – $3.80

SEVENFOLD SWORD – $4.47

SILENT ORDER – $7.77

So it was a good month for advertising! CLOAK GAMES/MAGE was going strong from CLOAK OF SPEARS yet. SILENT ORDER was also the highest it’s ever been. That was because of SILENT ORDER: RUST HAND, but even if you take RUST HAND out of the equation, SILENT ORDER still did $3.19 for every $1, which is still the best the series has ever done with ads. Clearly, the combination of 1.) releasing a new book, and 2.) changing out the covers had positive results.

Additionally, this month I also pushed to do more with Amazon Ads.

The reason is that an election is coming up in the US, and a Certain Major Social Media Platform previously mentioned in this post tends to lose its mind and start randomly banning ad accounts right and left in the runup. My ad account got randomly banned several times in 2020 and 2021, so it’s good to have backup plans already in place.

That said, Amazon Ads work very differently than Facebook Ads. For Facebook, it’s best to have a single well-targeted campaign for a book. For Amazon Ads, it’s often better to have dozens of campaigns running for a single book. Additionally, you don’t need an image, and the targeting works completely differently. The mindset shift is profound. It’s not like switching from English to Spanish – thanks to Latin and a few centuries of cross-linguistic pollination, Spanish and English do have quite a bit in common. No, it’s more like shifting from English to a language from a completely different civilizational tree, like Mandarin Chinese, where all the rules are totally different.

I do think Amazon Ads is better for beginners. Like, with Facebook, it’s possible to accidentally spend $100 in a day and get nothing in return if you don’t know what you’re doing. With Amazon Ads, it’s much harder to accidentally burn through a giant pile of money. Indeed, sometimes it’s hard to get Amazon to spend any money on the ads at all!

The methodology for Amazon Ads I use (and the one I recommend for beginners) is the one in Bryan Cohen’s book SELF-PUBLISHING WITH AMAZON ADS. It’s a good cautious approach to gradually building up the ads, and the two metrics for ad success I use are 1.) is it turning a profit? 2.) am I getting a sale for at least every six ad clicks? I’ve also found that Amazon Ads don’t work really well with free books or omnibus editions, but instead perform best with full-price first books in the series. The chart below shows how much I got back for every $1 I spent on Amazon Ads, and the average number of clicks it took to get a sale.

CLOAK OF DRAGONS – $2.51, 2.32

DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE – $2.20, 2.8

AVENGING FIRE – $1.54, 2.56

So it was a pretty good month for Amazon Ads.

But as we saw above what really moves the needle is publishing a new book, so back to working on DRAGONSKULL: FURY OF THE BARBARIANS!

-JM

CLOAK MAGE OMNIBUS ONE now in audio!

I am pleased to report that you can now get CLOAK GAME OMNIBUS ONE, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy, in audiobook!

It’s available at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, and Apple.

CLOAK GAMES OMNIBUS ONE combines CLOAK OF DRAGONS, CLOAK OF WOLVES, and CLOAK OF ASHES for over 32 hours of listening enjoyment. If you find yourself traveling this Labor Day weekend and need something to listen to for your journey, CLOAK MAGE OMNIBUS ONE has you covered.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 128: SILENT ORDER, science fiction, and zeerust

In this week’s episode, we discuss the concept of “zeerust” – how something that seemed futuristic in science fiction can become anachronistic and dated.

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

-JM