Jonathan Moeller's Blog, page 88

Pacific Rim

I finally got around to seeing PACIFIC RIM, nine years after it came out.  Basically, I wanted to see giant robots punching kaiju, and the movie delivered! The battle scenes were interspersed with characters talking about their feelings. The most memorable character was Idris Elba, who played Marshal Stacker Pentecost, which has to be the coolest name for a character I’ve come across for a while.  Alas, the piloting interface for the giant robots looked like an expensive elliptical machine, which led to the characters shouting dramatic lines while pumping up and down on the ellipticals (I mean, piloting interfaces) which seemed vaguely ridiculous. Marshal Stacker Pentecost is assisted by two Mad Scientists, who by doing Mad Science, realize that the kaiju are in fact genetically engineered bioweapons sent by an alien race, and so they conceive a desperate last-ditch plan to defeat the aliens and save mankind. (This is also the same basic plot of INDEPENDENCE DAY.)  The city of Hong Kong gets destroyed in the movie. Of course, Hong Kong gets blown up a lot in modern cinema, which is baffling until you realize that producers are desperately trying to get the movies past the censors of a Certain Large Unfriendly Government, and these censors are unlikely to respond favorably to any of their own cities getting blown up by space aliens. Overall, I’d say PACIFIC RIM is about the same tier as KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (in which Hong Kong is also destroyed), a popcorn movie in which it’s best to turn off your brain for a few hours and watch giant monsters fight while the human characters cast horrified glances skyward or into the camera.-JM

Xbox time

I recently joked that I was old enough for a midlife crisis now, and then I thought about it and I bought an Xbox.

Other than the Nintendo Switch, which I got in 2019 to celebrate my 100th book (DRAGONTIARNA: KNIGHTS, audiobook version available for free to Audible members), it’s the first traditional game console I’ve used since 1998. I didn’t play any console games at all from 1998 to 2019

The technology has changed just a little since 1998.

Anyway, the reason I got an Xbox is because back in the old days, one of my jobs was doing tech support for college dormitories. I used to get very annoyed when students complained about connectivity problems with their Xboxes and Playstations. Like, college is expensive. You should be doing homework and networking for career opportunities, not playing games.

But, I’m older now. Perhaps less dour. Maybe marginally wiser? Traditionally, a midlife crisis is when you reflect back on your life and try to relive your youth or experience things that you missed out on the first time around. That said, I’m pretty happy with how my life turned out. Like, if Doc Brown pulled up in his DeLorean and offered me the chance to go back and change something, I’d tell him “Nah, bro, I’m good.”

(Also, I’ve seen enough time travel stories to know that if I tried to change something, one of the people who complained to me that Xbox Live was running sloooooooooow would wind up becoming the tyrannical Supreme Leader of the dystopian Imperium of Global Harmony or something.)

That said, I did wonder if I missed out on something in terms of console gaming. Perhaps I denied myself what would otherwise have been an enjoyable and enriching experience, so I got an Xbox Series X.

Brand new game console. What’s the first game I play?

Skyrim. Obviously!

I have to admit playing Skyrim this way is very comfortable.

And I’m going to finish a quest I never played on the PC or Switch – the Imperial/Stormcloak civil war. I flipped a coin and it landed on Empire, so I sided with the Empire. Once I win the Empire’s war for them, it will be onto the Dawnguard expansion.

The Xbox ecosystem is very impressive. Granted, I still remember playing PC games by swapping out a stack of 5 1/4 floppies and very carefully configuring EMM386.EXE, so maybe I’m easily impressed, but still.

Anyway, if you have suggestions for enjoyable Xbox games, please leave them in the comments!

-JM

DRAGONSKULL progress updates

It’s the end of the week, and I’m 33,000 words into DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS.

I’m also 2,000 words into CLOAK OF SPEARS.

If all goes well, I would like to publish CURSE OF THE ORCS in June and SPEARS in July.

A few people asked when I want to do another SILENT ORDER book. I would like to, and it’s one of my writing goals for 2022.

That said, SILENT ORDER doesn’t sell as well as my other series. Like, CLOAK OF SHARDS has been out for ten days, and it that time, it has sold 77% more than SILENT ORDER: ROYAL HAND did in its entire first month. For that matter, in April the FROSTBORN series has sold 3.65 times as many copies as SILENT ORDER.

That sounds mercenary, I know, but one of the fundamentals of being a writer is giving your audience what they want, and the numbers show that a lot more people want more DRAGONSKULL and CLOAK MAGE than SILENT ORDER.

But, to be fair, I haven’t done any advertising on SILENT ORDER since September 2021, and maybe it’s time for a cover redesign – perhaps with spaceships instead of characters. So perhaps I’ll try some SILENT ORDER ads in May and see how they perform. I would love to be able to continue SILENT ORDER, so we’ll see how things work out.

-JM

How To Pick Categories

Michael asks:

“Here’s a random question which I can’t remember if you have answered before: how do you pick the categories? And do you swap books between categories sometimes for more exposure?”

He was asking because CLOAK OF SHARDS was briefly #1 for Low Fantasy on Amazon UK. (Thanks everyone!)

So, here is the approach I use to decide what category will have my book on Amazon and the various other stores.

1.) Decide the genre.

This may seem obvious, but it’s a good idea to know the genre in which you are writing before you write the book. This is surprisingly difficult for new authors, who often will write a book that’s a mash-up of different genres and express surprise when it’s hard to market.

Here’s the thing. We can argue all day long about whether or not genres are artificial constructions or not, but readers don’t care about that. Readers are more about finding books that they like. People who like Westerns want to read more Westerns, people who like mysteries want to read more mysteries, and people who like sweet clean romance want to read more sweet clean romance. So, if someone who likes sweet clean romance picks up a book marketed as sweet clean romance but instead finds it’s an explicit novel about a harem romance, they’re gonna get really ticked off. (More on this below.) So it’s good to figure out the primary genre of your book so you can get it to readers who will be interested in it.

Like, for example, CLOAK OF SHARDS. If you’ve read the CLOAK GAMES/MAGE series, you know there are science fiction and alternative history elements in it. But the main genre is urban fantasy, which is why I design the covers to suit the urban fantasy genre and market it that way.

2.) Pick appropriate categories.

Once you know what genre your book is in, you can pick appropriate categories for it.

There are, in fact, multiple categories any particular genre book could enter. Like, FROSTBORN could fit in Arthurian Fantasy, Epic Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Military Fantasy, or Sword & Sorcery. It wouldn’t be outrageous to put the FROSTBORN series into any one of those categories. Depending on the retailer, CLOAK OF SHARDS ended up in Low Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, or Alternative History, and it would be a good fit for any one of those.

Each retailer will have slightly different categories, so it will be worth your time to click around and find ones that look like a good fit for your book.

3.) Choose the least populated of the categories.

Once you have found appropriate categories, it might be worth your time to pick the least populated of them.

This is more useful on Amazon than the other stores, but depending upon the Amazon category, a lower sales rank is needed to get into the top 100 of a category. Like, as of April 25th, 2022 when I’m typing this, the book at #100 in Epic Fantasy on the US Kindle store has a sales rank of #3,279. By contrast, the book at #100 on Arthurian Fantasy has a sales rank of #40,245. The Arthurian category is less competitive than Epic Fantasy, and you can get a slight boost in visibility by ranking in a lower-trafficked category. This isn’t a huge advantage, because if your book is selling well enough to sit consistently at the top of a competitive category it’s probably doing all right, but every advantage helps.

4.) Use appropriate keywords.

Some of the retailers – specifically, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Smashwords – let you use keywords when setting up your book description. (Google, being Google, just generates search results out of everything in the book description and the available sample pages.) For Amazon, the keywords you pick can result in your book ending up in different categories. Like, you can’t just pick “Arthurian Fantasy” from the listing of categories, but if you select “Historical Fantasy” from the categories and then put “Arthurian” as one of your keywords, your book will be in the Arthurian category. This can be a bit convoluted, but since it’s easy to vanish down the Amazon keyword rabbit hole, it’s best not to overthink it and put your book in the most competitive relevant category you can find.

Which leads us to the fifth point, which is also a warning.

5.) DO NOT CATEGORY STUFF.

This is when an author puts their book in a completely wrong category in an effort to get greater visibility. Like, for example, say you’re browsing a very obscure category of books on Amazon. Say, Industrial Fabrication Manuals. Most of the books in the category look like manuals for industrial fabrication processes, but you notice that the #1 book in the category has a cover with a shirtless man and a title like RAVISHED BY THE HIGHLANDER or PURSUED BY THE BILLIONAIRE.

What’s happened is that an author has put a book into a completely inappropriate category to get a bestseller tag. Like, RAVISHED BY THE HIGHLANDER might have a sales rank of #750,000 or so, but in the Industrial Fabrication Manuals category, that’s more than enough to get an orange #1 bestseller tag, and the author of RAVISHED BY THE HIGHLANDER can boast that he or she is a bestselling author!

Needless to say, it’s best not to do this. It always backfires in the end. If you see a book that’s sitting at the top of an egregiously wrong category, it will quickly accumulate negative reviews. For that matter, once enough people complain – and they will complain – Amazon will eventually remove the book from the category or maybe even delist it entirely. The other retailers will also respond to complains of this nature with varying degrees of alacrity.

Obviously “Industrial Fabrication Manuals” is something of an extreme example. Where this usually catches people up is romance writers like the example mention above, “spicy” romance writers who put their more explicit books in a category that tends to favor less explicit romance.

All that said, while it is important to get your book in an appropriate category, it is not super important to get it into the exact right one. You can get some readers off organic book discovery on the various sites, but there are more effective ways to get new eyes on your books – making the first tone free, newsletter short stories, box set sales, and so forth.

-JM

Nadia vs. the Black Swan

Simone wrote in with a comment about CLOAK OF SHARDS:

“Hi Jonathan, just finished Cloak of Shards, it is wonderful, thank you! I am also going to use the expression you coined, “black swan event” We live in interesting times, so I have referred to those situations as “when frosen turkey falls out of airplane right onto your head”, but “black swan event” is just so much more sophisticated!”

Thanks! I am glad you enjoyed CLOAK OF SHARDS. Though I expect a frozen turkey landing upon one’s head would qualify as a black swan event.

Anyway, the specific bit we’re talking about is this spoiler-free section from CLOAK OF SHARDS:

###

“You saved us all. Not Tarlia, not the nobles, not the Wizard’s Legion, not the police, you. Do you know what a ‘black swan event’ is?”

“No.”

“An intellectual named Taleb came up with the idea right before the Conquest. To put it in normal-people language, it’s a massive event that comes out of nowhere and can’t be predicted.”

###

I should mention that I did not invent the concept of a black swan event. A statistician named Nassim Taleb coined the idea about twenty years ago.

So what is a black swan event? According to Wikipedia:

“The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.”

That definitely describes the conflict that Nadia faces in CLOAK OF SHARDS – what turns out to be the central conflict in the book isn’t what she or anyone else excepts to happen. (Except, of course, for the instigator of the conflict.)

Of course, the last twenty-one years or so of Real Life have seen a flock of black swan events shooting past, and they’ve had big effects on our lives. This has definitely influenced the way I’ve been writing the CLOAK MAGE books. Like, in the CLOAK MAGE setting, Earth has been essentially stagnant for the three hundred years since the Conquest. Then the events of CLOAK GAMES: MAGE FALL happened, and Tarlia realized that there were going to be big changes to human and Elven civilization even if she did nothing, so she had better try to steer them in a non-destructive direction.

Some of the plot of CLOAK OF SHARDS is Tarlia trying to get ahead of events, but for more details, you shall have to read and find out.

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 118: Sources of Writing Success

In this week’s episode, I discuss a reader question about the sources of writing success. I also answer questions about the CLOAK MAGE and GHOSTS series.

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

-JM

DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS and CLOAK OF SPEARS underway!

Now that CLOAK OF SHARDS is out, the question people have is when the next book CLOAK OF SPEARS will be coming out.

In July, if all goes well – I’ve started on Chapter 1, and am now 1,000 words into the book.

However, my main project right now is DRAGONSKULL: CURSE OF THE ORCS, the fourth book in the DRAGONSKULL series. I am currently 13,000 words into it.

If all goes well, I would like the book to be out in June. I had really hoped for May, but as I look at the long (and ever-lengthening!) list of stuff I have to do for Real Life in May, getting CURSE OF THE ORCS out in May seems very unlikely. So I am planning to publish it in June.

Meanwhile, thanks for reading CLOAK OF SHARDS. The book is off to a very strong start!

-JM

The Batman

I finally got around to seeing THE BATMAN.

My favorite version of Batman is the one from the Christopher Nolan movies, but this was pretty good – I would give it a solid B.

It’s basically Batman as a 1940s-style noir detective navigating a world of corrupt local politicians, cops, and organized crime. Things take a turn for the worse when an insane serial killer who calls himself the Riddler starts killing corrupt politicians and leaving little puzzles for Batman to solve at the crime scenes. Batman teams up with Selina Kyle, a freelance thief who has her own reasons for targeting the Gotham City mob.

However, the Riddler has a lot bigger plans than just offing a few corrupt officials, and unless Batman figures out the final riddle, a lot of people are going to die. This version of the Riddler is a very 21st century-style villain – a madman with a vast, anonymous Internet following that thinks he’s on to something.

Poor Jim Gordon is, once again, the only honest cop in Gotham, though that saves him from showing up on the Riddler’s radar.

The movie is definitely a darker version of Batman, but Batman is a pretty dark character – as Lucius Fox said in THE DARK KNIGHT, Batman’s a “vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands.” Not the activity of a psychologically balanced person!

I did like how this was a more “grounded” version of Batman, one who deals with very realistic and modern problems instead of one who spends his time fighting aliens and space wizards. And if you took out the superhero elements and made Bruce Wayne into a private investigator instead of a costumed vigilante, this totally could have been a 1940s private eye film, complete with genial yet ruthless crime lords, corrupt local officials, and femme fatales. Philip Marlowe would have fit right in.

So, if you like 40s style crime movies, I think you would definitely enjoy THE BATMAN. Granted, the movie is about 30 minutes too long, but I still think it’s worth seeing. Especially on streaming, where you can pause for bathroom breaks.

-JM

CLOAK OF SHARDS now on all platforms!

As you might have guessed from recent posts, CLOAK OF SHARDS is now available at all platforms!

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

CLOAK OF SHARDS had a really strong start, and got to #1 in its category on Amazon UK. Thanks for reading, everyone!

###

A destroyed cult. A creature from the Shadowlands on a rampage. And I’m the next target.

I thought I would help the Family of the Shadow Hunters track down a renegade cult of Dark Ones worshippers.

Instead, whatever nightmare the cultists summoned killed them all, and now it’s on the run.

If I don’t find the creature, a lot of people are going to die.

Starting with everyone I love…

-JM

The Pulp Writer Show, Episode 117: Four Lessons From Eleven Years Of Self-Publishing

In this week’s episode, I take a look back at four lessons learned from eleven years of self-publishing.

I also answer reader comments and questions about advertising and the DRAGONSKULL series.

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

-JM