In this week’s episode, we take a look at seven attitude shifts for writers that will make them happier and more productive.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 207 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is June 28th, 2024 and today we are discussing seven important attitude shifts for writers. Before we get into all that, we’ll have an update on my current writing projects and then we’ll do Question of the Week and then we’ll move over to our main topic.
For current writing projects, I am still in the first phase of editing for Shield of Darkness. I’m on chapter 20 of what I think is going to end up being either 27 or 28. A couple of my chapters were quite long, so I need to keep splitting them in half as I edit to not have, like 9,000 word chapters. So things are going pretty well with that and I am hoping if all goes well that the book will be out the second week of July, probably after the 4th of July holiday, because releasing new books on the 4th of July is not a great idea. So hopefully before too much longer, we will have that book out.
I’m also 31,000 words into Half-Orc Paladin and that will be my next book once Shield of Darkness is done and that will hopefully be out in very early August. I’m also 14,000 words into Ghost in the Tombs. I’m not sure when that’s going to come out. I’m very much hoping to have it out before October, but we’ll see how things go in the next couple of months.
In audiobook news, recording for Wizard Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Leveling is underway. I believe both narrators started on recording this week. Spells Online: Leveling will be narrated by C.J. McAllister and Wizard Thief will be narrated by Leanne Woodward and they both did the previous books in the respective series. So if you want a sample, you can listen to the audiobook of Half-Elven Thief and Stealth and Spells Online: Creation.
00:01:50 Question of the Week (note: This section contains spoilers for multiple movies, including Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan)
Now let’s move on to Question of the Week. It’s time for a Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics. This week’s topic: what is your favorite ending to a movie? No wrong answers, obviously. The inspiration for this was that I’ve been editing Shield of Darkness, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a satisfying ending and what does not. Obviously, I want to have a satisfying ending. We had some good comments with this one.
Our first comment is from Justin, who says: I’ll go with an oldie, Casablanca. Rick saves Ilsa, the woman he loves, and puts her on the plane to Lisbon with her husband. He puts morals above love and tells her that she would regret staying with him. Then he and Renault head off to join the Resistance. “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” Archetypes so powerful that you’ve used them. I’d argue that the Gray Knight’s ending with Ridmark, leaving Calliande and go with Kharlacht is a variation on this.
That is interesting because I meant that was not at all in my head when I wrote the ending of Frostborn: The Gray Knight, and I don’t think I’ve ever consciously written anything that I would say had been influenced by Casablanca, though of course I have seen it and it is a great movie, which again shows it’s a very interesting that people’s interpretation of a particular piece of artwork can often have no connection to what the artist intended when he or she created the artwork, but both views are often valid.
Our next come is from Michael, who says: probably the ending to The Illusionist, which is very satisfying or more infamously, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, which often reminds me of a story writing tip you have given in podcasts about good endings not necessarily needing to be a happy one.
Our next comment is from Brandy, who says: the end of Serenity, where Summer Glau is checking everyone and stimming. Then her brother is badly hurt and you see that mental click and all the worry that she’s going to hurt the one she cares about shifts to a feral “I will make this stop” and it’s both feral and beautiful. When they break in, she’s got this look like, yeah, test me. But she’s perfectly willing to continue laying waste. It’s just moving. Honestly having thought about it, go watch Hellsing Ultimate Abridged on YouTube. It’s like a quarterly watch at my house, along a lot of true crime right now because my partner is trying to find an appropriately gruesome way to get rid of a character.
I have to admit I’ve never actually seen Serenity or Hellsing myself, so maybe I’ll put that on the to watch list.
Our next comment is from John who says: Casablanca. Walking off at the end saying “this is beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Becca says V for Vendetta for me, I think. The ending scenes link key scenes, people, and phrases from earlier, then shows everyone from earlier, even those who died, and how they are linked to the change (with the voiceover).
Our next comment is from Jenny, who says: no loose ends, no open to interpretation BS.
Our next comment is from David who says: Son of Godzilla. When he goes back to his son in the snow-powerful.
Scott says: The Mist. What a twist!
Juana says: The Wrath of Khan.
Fred says: Alien: Covenant.
I think it’s interesting that a couple of different people both said that Casablanca and Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan have very satisfying endings (I’m going to assume you’ve seen both those movies, so for next minute, actually next two minutes, if you haven’t seen those movies, skip ahead If you want to avoid spoilers) because neither one of those movies has what would traditionally be called a happy ending.
At the end of Casablanca, Rick doesn’t get the girl, and at the end of Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Spock dies, saving the Enterprise. Of course, there’s a level of happiness to the ending because Spock dies, but he dies saving the entire Enterprise crew from being destroyed by the Genesis device. And in Casablanca, Rick doesn’t get the girl, but she goes off with her husband and escapes. The Nazis continue fighting, and Rick and Renault, the police inspector join forces to be in the Resistance to the Nazis in Casablanca, which in a sense is also a happy ending.
So I think that reinforces yet again, that if you are writing something, you need to have an ending that emotionally satisfactorily resolves the conflicts in the of the story that were raised in the story itself. It doesn’t have to be a happy ending, but does need to be a satisfying ending. And I think I think it’s very fair to say that both Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan and Casablanca have satisfying endings. Also, as Jenny said, you probably want to avoid loose ends and open to interpretation endings, because they really do seem to irritate people.
00:05:44 Main Topic: Seven Important Attitude Shifts for Writers
Now on to our main topic this week: seven important attitude shifts for writers. I decided to talk about this today because actually this I’m recording this on June the 28th and yesterday was the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign season and without, you know, going into too much detail on that, you see a lot of reactions from people that are very gloom and doom and the country is doomed and the civilization is going to fall and so forth, which overlooks the fact that none of us know what is going to happen tomorrow and might be good or bad or maybe a little bit of both.
That got me to thinking about how much of life is essentially mindset. Very often, regardless of one’s circumstances, happiness and contentment can be a choice, even in very extreme and extenuating circumstances, and it can be a choice that you reject if you’re doing quite well. Like in the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible, the writer of the book talks about how a grievous evil he has seen under the sun is that there’s a man with riches and palaces and food, and yet he’s unable to enjoy any of them or derive any happiness for them, because he was not making the choice to, you know, appreciate the good things he had. He did not, in essence, have the mindset to appreciate the good things he had in his life.
I’ve noticed this is very common for writers, probably because writing is such an intellectual activity that takes place significantly inside of one’s own head, even before you start putting down words on the page. It’s very easy to be your own worst enemy as a writer and develop beliefs that limit your ability to be effective or successful. I remember a long time ago when I was in college, I knew a couple of different people who said they didn’t want to try very hard at things because one of them said the world was so evil that she thought the world was going to come to an end by before she was 30 and another one said that due to climate change and pollution, the world was going to come to an end before she was 30 as well. Well, I was the same age as them and I have not been 30 years old for a significant span of time.
They were both wrong. The world has continued on for good and bad, for the significant span of time since we all would have been 30 years old. That is a good example of a mindset being self-defeating and not being in accordance with reality and essentially limiting what you can do because after all, if the world is going to end when you are 30 years old, there’s no point in trying in your 20s and then suddenly you are hitting the mid-40s and upper 50s and like, hey, the world didn’t end 20 years ago.
So with that in mind, here are seven self-destructive attitudes I think both new and more advanced writers should train themselves out of.
#1: the first destructive attitude: I should just sign up for one of those publishing services for writers because I don’t have the time to figure all this stuff out. That is both a bad attitude and a very bad idea in general, because many of these services are predatory and don’t offer very much for the large amount of money they’re charging. It’s better to pay in time than money when it comes to self-publishing. There are a lot of free resources online to help you learn to self-publish.
Good ones include David Gaughran’s newsletter that he gives that away for free. He has several free e-books on self-publishing. Bryan Cohen has what he calls his quarterly 5 Day Amazon Ads Profit Challenge. That is a very good way to start learning the intricacies of Amazon ads. Joanna Penn has a wide variety of free YouTube videos on the process of getting started with self-publishing and I think she has a free ebook on the topic as well. So there are all these free resources that you can use to just commit the time to learning the beginnings of self-publishing and not fork over thousands of dollars to do something.
I mean granted in life, there are areas where it is probably better to hire experts. For example, I recently had to have a large tree taken down near my house because it was diseased and the bark was falling off. It was rotten and I was worried that it was going to fall on the house. Theoretically, I could have broken out my electric chainsaw and done it myself, but that would have been a very bad idea. It was better to hire experts who know what they’re doing to do it safely to bring the tree down. However, self-publishing is not a giant tree that might fall on your house. It is relatively easy to learn the basics and to do so without paying money and you avoid predatory self-publishing companies as you do because you have to be licensed to run a tree removal company, at least in this state. You do not have to be licensed to buy a website and call yourself a self-publishing expert. So for all those reasons, I think this attitude is a destructive and harmful one, and it would be better for you to learn at least the fundamentals of self-publishing before you pay anyone for it.
#2: Our second destructive attitude is: I should focus on building sales and a following for my first book before I bother starting the next one. I think this is a self-destructive attitude because it’s what I call the decorating the bathroom before you’ve done dug the foundation of the house problem. If you want to have a writing career, or if you want to be a writer, actually doing writing needs to be the foundation of that. But writers tend to procrastinate and channel themselves into sort of writing adjacent activities, like working about their work on their website, or trying to build social media followers or building their newsletter or the other kind of things that can be important and useful for selling books but are nonetheless less important than actually writing the next book.
I say that’s like worrying about how your bathroom will be decorated before you’ve even dug the foundation of your house. You should really dig the foundation of the house, build that house, and then worry how the bathroom is going to be decorated before you start worrying about that. It’s also very rare for a writer of any genre to have massive success on a first book. Everyone thinks about these debut novelists who released their first books and were big hits.
However, if you look at the overall population of writers, these people are vanishingly rare in terms of percentages, like lottery winners. They just got lucky and found an agent who believed in the book, who passed it on to an editor who believed in the book, and the publisher believed in the book and decided to put a big marketing push behind it. That was enough to turn the book into a hit.
This can happen to you, but it’s about as likely as going to the gas station, buying a lottery ticket, and becoming a billionaire. It’s probably not going to happen, and you’re better off putting in the work yourself. So with all that in mind, if you’re worried about the sales of your first book rather than getting your energies too diverted on the various writing adjacent tasks like newsletters and social media and websites and so forth, perhaps writing the next book might be a better use of your time.
#3: The third self-destructive attitude we’re going to talk about is “Ads and marketing aren’t for me. My book should stand on its own merits.” I recently heard of someone who attended a training session about ads where one of the other attendees refused to do any ads for their book but were frustrated that their sales had stalled. The person in question simply did not see the causal connection between these two events. It’s a very cruel and very real fact that plenty of great books are never read because people never find them. It’s important not to view ads as something dirty or shifty or uncouth. If you feel that way, you’re probably doing them wrong. Ads are just a simple way to connect people with books that they’re excited to read. It’s as simple as that. You want to use ads as a tool where you will find the right reader for your specific book.
It is intimidating to learn how ads work. I’d say Facebook is the most complicated and Amazon is the least complicated, but that’s just matters of degree because they’re both pretty complicated. There are free programs like Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad Challenge for learning how Amazon ads work for writers, and this includes forums for asking questions and getting more help. As with just learning the basics of self-publishing, there are a lot of free resources and good resources out there that you can use to give yourself at least a basic competency with ads. That would be very helpful for your writing career.
#4: Our 4th self-destructive attitude: It’s a waste to spend money on ads. This can be true, with the caveat it’s a waste to spend money on ads if you don’t know what you’re doing. It is very easy to aimlessly spend large amounts of money on Facebook and Bookbub ads. While it’s much harder to aimlessly spend money on Amazon ads, you can do it. Taking the time to learn how these ads work and then starting out slowly and gradually building up the budgets is crucial to not wasting money. Amazon, Facebook, and BookBub’s daily limits make it easy to budget how much you are spending on ads.
Another reason people often think it’s a waste to spend money on ads is because their targeting is way too broad. Like you hear about people saying Facebook ads don’t work, and then you dig into their story a bit more and it turns out they set their category to “books” and that’s it. They’re just targeting everyone who liked books. That is indeed a waste of money, because with advertising in general and book marketing in particular, the more specific you can get your targeting down, the better you will do.
This is most easily demonstrated in romance, where it’s common for romance readers describe books as like, you know, a slow burn, enemies to lovers, sweet romance with a happily ever after ending. Which is like four different story tropes, but that’s very commonly how romance authors talk about books. So if you wrote a book like that, you can dial down the advertising enough to target people who are just interested in that kind of book through comp authors or interests, then your ads have a much higher chance of being successful, so bear that in mind. It’s only a waste to spend money on ads if you don’t know what you’re doing, and if your targeting isn’t right.
#5: The 5th destructive attitude is: if that my book wasn’t successful right away, I’m a failure as a writer. No one ever does anything right the first time and you should beat yourself up over it. Additionally, many books do well after a re-edit, title change, or cover change. It’s possible your book just needs one of those. I mean, I’ve written 150 novels and I still have that kind of thing. I originally called my LitRPG series Sevenfold Sword Online, but that confused people with because they thought it was attached to the Sevenfold Sword series. Earlier this year I retitled it to Stealth and Spells Online, and it’s done quite a bit better since that title change.
The reality is that most first books don’t sell well. It doesn’t mean that you should give up. The solution is to keep writing. Keep reading books in your genre and keep learning what readers want to read. It’s important to keep experimenting and keep trying new things. I’m currently reading a history of the Dune series as a franchise. Based on Frank Herbert’s earlier career, you would not predict that he would have written one of the classics of sci-fi literature. In fact, what he was originally writing about that turned into Dune was a nonfiction article about how the state of Oregon was trying to control the sand dunes in the eastern part of the state and keep them from overrunning other lands. That was what Dune originally was, a nonfiction article about sand dune management and then he wasn’t able to sell that article. He rewrote it into a fictional short story and it gradually turned into Dune. There’s a joke that every overnight success takes 10 to 20 years to prepare, and it definitely seems to have been true in Frank Herbert’s case. If you keep on writing, perhaps that will be true of you as well.
#6: Self-destructive attitude number six: it’s not worth self-publishing because people won’t respect my book unless it’s traditionally published. I always love this one because the prestige of being traditionally published is great. But do you know what prestige doesn’t do? Pay bills! Would you rather have the prestige or the money and full control of your works? Like earlier this episode, I mentioned that I had to pay some people to bring a tree down in my yard. Can you imagine walking up to a bunch of guys and with chainsaws and telling them, hey, I’m going to pay with the prestige of being traditionally published, but not actual money? That would not work out very well.
I have in fact been traditionally published a very long time ago and let me tell you, the money of self-publishing is so much better than the prestige of being traditionally published. Full control of your work and money, in my opinion, is much better than prestige. Additionally, if you do get the prestige of traditional publishing, you are paying for it quite a bit.
Traditional publishing has been providing their authors with increasingly less editing, marketing, and creative control and are prone to giving you increasingly restrictive contracts in return. Royalties may take a very long time to arrive and more realistically, never arrive at all as many books don’t pay out past their initial advance. Traditionally published authors are taking on an increasing amount of the workload of marketing and find that their books are often filled with typos because less attention and staffing are being provided to the editorial departments.
Prestige is really the main thing that traditional publishing is still offering, and there’s also the problem that that many people in traditional publishing are unethical. I mean obviously self-publishing has its fair share of scammers as well, but remember, traditional publishing is supposed to have prestige. Prestige doesn’t keep out the scammers.
Recently there was a meltdown on Twitter where a literary agent posted that she just read a great book and she liked the idea but she didn’t like the author and so she thought about giving the idea of the book to another one of her authors to write for her. I suspect she was saying that jokingly, but it didn’t come across that way and so all of literary Twitter fell upon her head. She followed the predictable course of deleting all her social media accounts and then getting fired from the agency from which she worked. If you talk to experienced traditional published writers off the record, very often they will admit that literary agents are often very sketchy people. So if you are self-published, one of the big advantages is that you don’t have to deal with that.
#7: The seventh and final most self-destructive attitude: I need to quit my day job to be a real writer. The answer to that is no, you don’t. Just a few examples of authors who kept their day jobs: Franz Kafka worked in an insurance company, Anthony Trollope was a postal clerk who wrote for 2 hours in the morning every day before he went to work, and Toni Morrison was an editor. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would claim that Franz Kafka, Anthony Trollope, and Toni Morrison were not real writers. Real writers usually still have a full-time job.
The reality is that very few writers earn an income on their own larger than a salary and work benefits would be or if they do, they’re not able to sustain that level of income over the span of their career. In an Author’s Guild survey from a few years ago, even full-time authors were reporting a median yearly income of $20,300. There’s nothing wrong with not being a full-time writer and nothing wrong with just doing writing as a side hustle that you enjoy.
Now you might think this is hypocritical. Jonathan Moeller, you yourself are a full-time writer and have been for the last eight years. For my part, I didn’t actually want to become a full-time writer at first. I found that I was obliged to do so because I needed to move for family reasons. It did work out in my case. And to be fair to myself, I have definitely hustled doing that. I mean, in the last eight years I’ve written like 80 new novels and at least half a dozen complete series in that time. Most days I am writing from about 7:30 in the morning to 5:00 in the afternoon with breaks for lunch and exercise and so forth. Then there’s all the business stuff on the side and then audiobooks as well.
So you can be a full time writer, but it is definitely a lot of work, which is what I’ve been doing for the last eight years. By no means should you consider yourself not to be a real writer if you also have a full-time job. If I had not been obliged to move for family circumstances, I probably would have kept my full-time job until my employer ran out of money (which would have been a real possibility a few years ago). So there we are, seven self-destructive attitudes that I think writers would do well to remove from their minds.
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A quick note of thanks to my transcriptionist for helping me to research and pull together a list for this episode. A reminder that you that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. 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.
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