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.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction, Writing Updates, and Reader Question
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 158 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June the 30th, 2023, and today we’re going to look back at ad results for June 2023 and see how my ads did for my books this month. And we’re also going to take a look back and review some movies I’ve seen recently this summer. Before we get into all that, let’s say I have an update on my current writing projects and one reader question this week.
First off, I am very pleased to report that the rough draft of Silent Order: Thunder Hand is finally 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 time with a book since Mask of Spells way back in 2016. Delays for this book include getting sick twice, having a wisdom tooth removed, filling out a lot of paperwork, calling skilled professionals with help about the paperwork, check getting lost in the mail, and my laptop died and so forth and so on. But I’m always yammering on about persistence, so it was a chance to practice what I preach. I got the rough draft done in the gaps around all the urgent stuff that kept happening.
Next step is a short story. I haven’t decided on a title yet, but I’ll probably call it Excision, and I’ll give it away for free to newsletter subscribers when Thunder Hand comes out. I do know that the story will take place on the planet of Antioch Three, which if you’ve read Silent Order: Wasp Hand and Silent Order: Royal Hand, you know that Antioch Three is the single unluckiest planet in the entire series, and once the editing is underway, I will share the cover image. I also finally was able to get a new laptop and it’s currently sitting on the desk as I record this, installing every update ever. So that’s probably going to take a couple hours on it yet.
We have one question this week from listener Michael, who says about last week’s podcast episode: Excellent as always, was glad to see it return. Thanks, Jon, and an important question related to the hiatus: Did you successfully get the siding on your house replaced? That is a good question and yes, I did. It was loud and expensive and inconvenient. But it is all done and it looks very nice now and hopefully we will not have any extreme weather events for a while that will require a new roof or new siding or a new anything. Fingers crossed.
00:02:12 June Ad Results
Now, since it’s the last day of the month, let’s take a look back at June and see how my Facebook and Amazon ads performed for the month. For Facebook ads, for the Frostborn series I got for every dollar I spent, I got $4.45 back. For the Ghost series, for every dollar I spent, I got back $5.79. For Cloak Games and Cloak Mage series for every dollar I spent, I got back $5.42 and finally for the Sevenfold Sword series for every dollar I spent, I got back $2.15. So overall a pretty strong month for Facebook ads. I think in July I will stop advertising Sevenfold Sword and then advertise to Silent Order since hopefully Silent Order: Thunder Hand should be coming soon with the final book in the series following in a few months. And given that I’m planning to write a new Caina book in September/October (I already booked the narrator for it), it’s gratifying to see the Ghost series doing pretty well.
Now let’s see how the Amazon ads did. I advertised Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire in both Amazon and US and Amazon UK. And as a reminder for an Amazon ad to work, you need to get at least one sale for every six to eight clicks on the ad. For the Amazon ads, I advertised Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire in both the US in the UK store. And for the US, for every dollar I spent, I got back $7.17 and I had one sale for 0.87 clicks and for Amazon UK, I got back $5.07 back for every dollar I spent and one sale for every 1.65 clicks. So a strong month on Amazon ads as well. I think we can attribute that especially to Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress coming out at the start of June (well, actually, I think was the first week of June) and that helped drive interest to the rest of the series, which would of course help the ads. I’ve talked before about how there’s kind of a chicken and egg problem with Amazon ads sometimes, but this is a nice way to get inside that loop.
I think one of the big challenges of my books is I can only advertise so many of them at once because I have so many of them. As of Dragonskull: Doom of the Sorceress, I have 141 novels, but it’s impossible to advertise all of them at once, especially on Amazon, so I need to pick and choose based on the opportunities available at the time, like BookBub deals or a book coming out in the series that month like with Silent Order, etcetera. And as always thanks for reading those books, everyone.
00:04:36 Main Topic: Movie Review Roundup
Now on to this week’s main topic: reviews of recent movies I have seen. I had a couple of emails asking, hey, when are you going to do another Movie Review Roundup episode? I’m pleased people actually listen to those. So let’s take a look at some of the movies I watched so far this summer/late spring. The first one is Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and I have to say this is the weakest of the three Ant Man movies. I have to admit, lately, Disney and Marvel give the impression of an empire in rapid decline, or perhaps a bus with the wheels falling off. There are any number of theories as to why this is happening: 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 can cannibalize, Bob Chapek’s mismanagement, Bob Iger’s mismanagement, the US cultural war making it impossible to appeal to a fracture mass audience, all the popular Marvel characters died after retiring, Disney’s near infallible gift for alienating its top talent, Disney Plus cannibalizing most theater sales, Disney Plus losing a billion and a half dollars in a year, superhero genre fatigue or overworked visual effects artists getting fed up. Maybe it’s a combination of all those things. Or perhaps none of them, then the real explanations remain mysterious anyway.
All that as 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 secondary villain of the honest but awkwardly earnest FBI agent in the second. Quantumania has Kang the Conqueror as a villain, and he’s super serious and brooding, making him a bad fit for an Ant Man movie. Given the actor who played Kane’s recent troubles, Marvel probably regrets choosing Kang as their 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 CG. You could tell the poor actors were trying really, really hard to emote on the green screen soundstage. 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 teenage 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, once she’s been through some adversity. Overall grade C minus maybe D plus if I’m feeling cranky that day.
Next movie I saw was Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I admit I had my doubts about this, but it was really good. The biggest mistake that a Dungeons and Dragons movie could make was taking itself too seriously since Dungeons and Dragons, if you think about it for more than 5 minutes, is kind of ridiculous. But Honor Among Thieves hits the right balance of tongue in cheek humor without losing a sense of internal logic or suspenseful stakes. The characters often act exactly the way you expect a Dungeons and Dragons party to act, including hilariously bad decisions at times (right up in the first five minutes of the movie no less). The plot is the disgraced bard Edgin, aided by his best friend, the barbarian Hoga, wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter, who has been in the care of her former thieving colleague named Forge. However, it turns out that Forge has been lying to Edgin’s daughter about her father for years, and he has the backing of some seriously dangerous and evil wizards.
Adventures and hilarity both ensue. Some of the amusement comes from the fact that the chief villain thinks she’s in a serious, grim dark fantasy movie, but she’s actually in a comedic Dungeons and Dragons adventure. There is some computer graphics, actually, there is quite a lot of computer graphics because of monsters and dragons and so forth, but it was used quite a bit better than in Quantumania. Like, it made better use of the technology. The characters would be riding through a landscape and they would have a fantasy setting in the background, that kind of thing instead of it being entirely green screen. 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 and Wizards of the Coast have alienated their core audience via sketchy behavior. I don’t doubt the part about sketchy behavior, and I’ve talked about it on this podcast before, but I think the real problem is that Dungeons and Dragons is now more mainstream than it’s ever been, but it’s still not big enough to support a $150 million budget movie. All that aside, Honor Among Thieves was an excellent movie and I enjoyed it. Hopefully it gets sequels with the same team, but that I have to admit that seems unlikely. Overall grade: A.
The next movie I saw was Master and Commander, which I believe was back from 2003 and it was pretty great. It’s based off the Aubrey and Maturin historical novels of Patrick O’Brien set during the Napoleonic War. Aubrey is the captain of the HMS Surprise while Doctor 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 his mission is becoming a dangerous obsession.
The movie manages to capture the grim reality of life aboard in 19th century British warships, such as many amputations, bad food, fourteen year old boys acting as officers because of their birth, et cetera, without wallowing in grim dark the way modern historical fiction often does. It builds to a slow burn when Aubrey at last has a chance to outwit the Acheron’s captain. Honestly, the slower pacing of the movie reminded me a bit of a 1980s movie: slow build up and more leisurely character scenes than a lot of modern movies have, but no shortage of action despite that. Definitely recommended. Overall grade: A.
Next movie I saw was Fast X, the 10th main Fast and Furious movie. The Fast and the Furious movies are what you get if the screenwriters take logic out back behind the barn and shoot it. And I mean this in a complementary way. In the first movie, Dominic Toretto and his team were basically seeing stealing DVD players in East LA. 20 years and 10 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 squares 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 charm mask drops. Sadly, Fast X ended on a cliffhanger, so hopefully the sequel will get made. Overall grade: B.
The next movie I saw was John Wick Chapter 4. First things first: Jon Wick books are ridiculously, over the top violent. Director Oliver Stone, who recently made a minor bit of news when he complained about the unrealistic violence in the John Wick movies, which I think is the point of those movies since John Wick is about the fantasy of violence, the way that Hallmark movies are about the fantasy of true love. The reality of violence is quite a bit different from the fantasy I’m afraid. Though thankfully the reality of true love is also quite a bit different from the reality of violence. Anyway, enough philosophical rambling. If you don’t like movie violence, then John Wick is definitely not your cup of tea. But I do think the John Wick movies have achieved something near impossible. They reached the same high level of quality in tone across all four movies. I mean, think about how many movie series you’ve seen where the sequels peter out or the fourth movie isn’t very good or, you know, the first movie and a half were good and then it all falls apart. Not with John Wick.
All four movies are about to the same level of quality, I think. The series has two great strengths: the elaborate fight scenes and the intricate world building of the underworld. In real life, as we all know, criminals tend to do what they want until they screw up and get arrested, or wind up getting killed by their rivals. In John Wick, the criminal underworld is governed by elaborate and byzantine rules with brutal punishment for any infractions. The underworld in John Wick is more like almost like an urban fantasy novel where vampires are hiding in plain sight and they are governed by all these elaborate and intricate rules that keep them from interacting with normal humans too much.
Anyway, 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 finally has a chance to get out from under the thumb of the High Table, the sinister council that could rules over the criminal underworld. But to do it, he will have to face his old friends and defeat them. As an aside, every country John Wick visits must experience a drastic reduction in crime, like every underworld goon and assassin in the country comes after Mr. Wick, and then he kills them all. Like, personally! After John Wick visits the country, it must be impossible to hire an assassin there because John Wick killed them all on his way through. Overall grade: A plus.
And finally, I would say the best movie I’ve seen so far, this summer and late spring would be Across the Spiderverse. And it is an 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, back when I saw the first movie Into the Spiderverse back during COVID (I think it was on Netflix), at first I wasn’t enthused with the idea of seeing the movie. An animated movie about a multiverse? No thanks! But I watched Into the Spiderverse and it was really good. I mean, I think it’s one of the best movies I saw during COVID. So I made the effort to see the sequel in the actual theater. The animation in Across the Spiderverse is not only gorgeous, I think it pushes the limit of what animation can actually do in terms of storytelling.
Like, there’s this…every different universe that the main character has visited is animated in a different style, which I think is more helpful for a multiverse story than a live action. And speaking of multiverses, I suppose it’s amusing that of the four movies about multiverses that I actually liked, three of them were Spiderman movies: Spiderman: No Way Home, Into the Spiderverse, and Across the Spiderverse (the fourth multiverse movie I liked or at least respected being Everything Everywhere All at Once). It is very regrettable that it seems that the working conditions for the animators and the movie were apparently awful. But as we mentioned with Quantumania and the visual effects service, that might be a problem across the film industry as a whole. Which, to be fair, generally has a lot of problems. It doesn’t seem like a great place to work in general, especially with the writer’s strike right now. Though the flip side of that is as I get older and see more of the world, I have yet to encounter anyone who says, you know my profession is respected the exact right amount and I think I get paid the exact right amount, so I don’t think anyone’s happy with their job when it boils down to it. But once again that is a rambling digression.
So, that is it for this week. I hope that if you’re looking for something to watch, this will be a helpful guide and that the ad stuff was interesting. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
