In this week’s episode, we take a look at six lessons indie authors can learn from the successes and failures of Nintendo.
This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobooks in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store:
ELVENFALL
The coupon code is valid through November 9, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered!
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 325 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 16th, 2026 and today I’m discussing six things that indie writers can learn from Nintendo, both good and bad, which is kind of a follow-up to last week’s episode, which was six things indie writers can learn from the Disney Corporation, both good and bad. Before we get into that, we will start off with Coupon of the Week and then a progress update on my writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
So first up is Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon code (in anticipation of the upcoming release of Elven-Warlock) will get you 50% off the audiobooks in the Half-Elven Thief series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That code is ELVENFALL. This coupon code will be valid through November the 9th, 2026, so if you need a new audiobook for this fall, we have got you covered with the Half-Elven Thief series.
Now for an update on my current writing, publishing and audiobook projects. I am very nearly done with the first round of editing on Elven-Warlock. The cover is ready as well. If you’re on my website or my social media, you should be able to see it. As soon as I finish recording this podcast, I’m hopefully going to be able to finish up the first round of editing and then start on the second. I believe this episode is going live on the 19th of October and hopefully Elven-Warlock should be out on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited a day or two after that, if all goes well. In any event, I definitely want to have it out the week of the 19th of October.
Once Elven-Warlock is out, my secondary project right now is Blade of Rifts, which will get promoted to my main project and I’m currently 13,000 words into that.
In audiobook news, as we mentioned last week, Cloak of Summoning and Ghost Armor Omnibus Two (both of which are narrated by Hollis McCarthy), are now available at their respective audiobook stores. For new projects, Brad Wills is now recording Blade of Visions and if all goes well, that should be out sometime next month. So that is where I’m at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
00:02:12 Main Topic: 6 Lessons Indie Writers Can Learn From Nintendo
Now let’s move on to our main topic this week, six lessons indie writers can learn from Nintendo. Last week, you might recall, we did the same thing with Disney Corporation looking at lessons indie authors can learn from Disney Corporation, both good and bad. We’re going to do the same thing with Nintendo, which is one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. I thought today about six ways writers can learn from Nintendo’s best and worst corporate decisions.
Admittedly, while there are things to criticize about Nintendo the way there are about Disney, I do on a personal level like Nintendo more than Disney, and I do have a fairly long history with Nintendo stuff. In the ’80s and the ’90s, I had an NES and a Super Nintendo, and so played quite a few Super Nintendo games. I actually beat Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past back in the day. I’m not entirely sure what happened to that Super Nintendo console. My brother told me a while back that he sold it, but I don’t think that’s what actually happened, but it was 30 years ago and I don’t remember what happened, so it really doesn’t matter. So from about 1998 to 2019, I did not play a console game at all. Whenever I played games, it was PC games or nothing.
However, in 2019, to reward myself for publishing my 100th book, which was Dragontiarna: Knights, I got a first generation Nintendo Switch and really enjoyed it. As you know, buying a Nintendo Switch in 2019 was probably a good idea because next year was COVID. So I finally beat a bunch of games on the Switch that I never had the chance to beat the first time around. I finished Skyrim. I beat Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which was a pretty good Metroidvania. I beat Metroid Dread. Then with the Nintendo Online stuff, I went back and played a lot of the old NES games and Super Nintendo games I never had the chance to beat back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I beat the original Marios. I beat Super Mario World, all four of the original Castlevanias from Nintendo and Super Nintendo. I thoroughly enjoyed the Switch.
In 2025 when the Switch 2 came along, I got one when the opportunity presented itself and have been playing it pretty regularly when I have time (which is less and less these days) ever since. So while I didn’t play any console games of any kind between 1998 and 2019, I have used a fair bit of Nintendo devices over the years. So that is my background as I talk about this. If you look at the history of Nintendo, it’s been around for a really long time. I think Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 as a producer of Japanese playing cards. The company’s had quite a few different business ventures, of which the most successful and most famous, of course, is video games. So with that in mind, let’s look at six lessons indie authors can learn from Nintendo, both good and bad.
#1: A Tale of Two Mario Movies
You might have seen the recent Super Mario Brothers movies in 2023 and 2026. You probably heard of them since they both made over a billion dollars. However, the Mario movies were not always as successful as you go back to 1993 to look at the original Super Mario Brothers movie.
Back then, Nintendo gave the movie’s team complete freedom and did not worry about how the movie could impact the brand. It was something of a troubled production as they tried to figure out the tone, and based on the reviews, the movie didn’t quite get there. There is a small number of people for whom this is one of their favorite video game movies, and it’s sort of a cult classic in that way, but [it] definitely didn’t have broad mainstream appeal the way the 2023 movie did. I think it’s also fair to say in 1993 movie video games didn’t have quite the heft that they do now, that movies were so far more culturally dominant in 1993 than video games were at the time. The idea of a video game company dictating terms to a Hollywood studio the way they can now would have seemed ludicrous at the time.
So Nintendo wisely waited until 2023 to release another Super Mario Brothers movie until they found a partner that matched their creative vision and wanted to create a faithful adaptation. Although it’s fair to say that both movies, both Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers Galaxy, played it a bit safe creatively, it was able to capture what makes the Mario series so much fun and was far more successful and well received than the live action movie from 1993. I think these movies also both performed an important social function in that it was a movie you could bring the kids to and the kids would enjoy it. If you have kids or if you are responsible for watching kids for any length of time, you recognize how valuable this can be.
Now, what can we learn from this as writers, even writers who only dream of having their work adapted into a billion dollar movie? It’s also important not to lose sight of what people like in your work, what make your work successful. For example, a long running series, there’s sometimes a tendency to have the heroes suddenly make wildly out of character decisions or introduce a slew of new characters. I don’t want to name any names because I don’t want to start any feuds on the Internet, but I was reading a long running series about a very popular character whose author suddenly became sort of militantly agnostic halfway through the series. Suddenly all his protagonists were militant agnostics and spent all their time talking about agnostics and so forth. You can see this sometimes in other series where the writer undergoes some sort of personal experience like a religious conversion or gets divorced or has some sort of equally significant and/or traumatic life event and suddenly that’s all they can talk about or that’s all they can preach about, especially if it’s a religious or political conversion experience.
I think if that happens, people should keep in mind the Christopher Nolan quote I mentioned last week that came from Tom Schone’s book, The Nolan Variations, where Nolan said, “I’ve had conversations with friends of mine and they all ask about why I don’t make a film about the things I care about politically and I always say, well, because it doesn’t work. You can’t use narrative to tell people what to think. It never works.” I think that’s a corollary to that lesson about Nintendo where you don’t want to stray too far from what makes your books work and above all, you don’t want to use your books as a soapbox. There are other places you can use it as a soapbox, but your books probably shouldn’t be it.
#2: Take responsibility for your actions.
When the Wii U flopped commercially in 2013, the CEO of Nintendo at the time, Satoru Iwata, took a 50% salary cut for five months. Other board members also chose to take pay cuts. Now, obviously this would not have that huge of an effect on the finances of a company the size of Nintendo, but this gesture was seen as a symbol of taking responsibility for their actions rather than an act that would generate enough money to actually avoid mass layoffs. I think this was a good thing they did. In the modern age, the age of the Internet where the Internet has made public affairs and business and leadership more transparent than ever before, the only way to maintain the authority to exercise leadership is through moral authority. That is why taking those pay cuts was a good thing because it was a symbolic act of taking responsibility for the failure of the Wii U rather than trying to have mass layoffs to prop up the stock price for another quarter as so many American companies, not to name any names, would’ve done.
Sometimes when a piece of entertainment creatively fails, such as a certain fantasy TV show’s eighth and final series, not to name names, there will be endless rounds of excuses and blaming others instead of simply opening up to one’s choices. John F. Kennedy famously quoted that defeat is an orphan and victory has a thousand fathers and that tends to be proven true again and again in the business and entertainment world. But as an indie writer, you don’t have the luxury of blaming others for your choices. It’s the flip side of having complete creative freedom. There are things outside of your control, of course, algorithm changes, technical problems of platforms, it’s the month before a fairly contentious election in the United States, which naturally has a dampening effects on sales as elections always do, but there are many choices for which you yourself alone will be responsible. If you make a creative choice that just doesn’t land, it’s up to you to face it and to change course if it appears to be necessary.
#3: Know when to change course or not to change course.
Nintendo wisely knew when to focus from a console like the Wii U after the failure of the Wii U to a more flexible device like the Switch, and this greatly paid off for them in the long run. However, they didn’t just blindly go into the direction that critics wanted, things like more power or a different controller. Around 2018/2019, you could read any number of op-ed pieces saying how Nintendo was doomed or how Nintendo was going to have to start licensing its games for Xbox and PlayStation and PC and get out of making hardware entirely, predictions that in hindsight seem comical, but no one could see the future.
Nintendo did however, change course in making the Switch more attractive to third-party developers and providing an interesting hybrid product. The Switch wasn’t particularly powerful in terms of hardware power and neither was the Switch 2, but the value proposition of being able to play it on the road and then coming home and popping into the dock and playing that way and having a large library of third party games really made it quite attractive, which is why the original Switch ended up selling around 150 million copies across its life cycle.
Now, as a writer, it can be hard to know when to change course. For example, I had to take a hard look at my sales and downsize my Stealth & Spells Online series, finishing with the final book instead of several more. It was three books instead of these seven or eight I had originally planned.
However, that meant I put more energy into Half-Elven Thief, a new series that converted better with the general audience and has sold well. For example, it sold well enough in 2026 to pay for my health insurance for the year, which if you know if you live in the US is no small feat. I didn’t give up on creating new series, but I did look at what worked and what didn’t work in order to guide my approach to them.
A traditional publisher tends to kill a series if sales of a second or third book in a series isn’t as strong as the first, leaving fans feeling deeply frustrated. They go on to want to only read completed series to avoid this happening. As indie writers, we have the ability to finish out series even if initial sales aren’t what we hope and keep that trust with our readers.
#4: Don’t fear a creative reset.
Metroid Prime 4 was originally supposed to be developed by one studio, but Nintendo was very unhappy with their progress and switched to another studio and started over completely. This was a tough decision to make, and honestly, the final game was probably not as strong as it could have been, and it probably didn’t sell as well as Nintendo wanted, but still led to a game that had reasonably good reviews and reasonably strong sales, even if it wasn’t a blockbuster the way that a new Mario or a new Zelda game would be.
What can we learn from this as a writer? As indie writers, we have the ability to change plans and make decisions based on what’s best for us creatively, not what brings the shareholders more money in the short term. For example, I had the ability to rest Caina as a character and work on other series while I worked out an idea I feel interested about for a new series instead of just rushing one through due to external pressures like a trad pub author might have to. That is where the Ghost Night and Ghost Armor series came from. When I go back to writing Caina books in the second half of 2027, if all goes well, that’s where that idea will come from as well.
#5: Withered Technology Approach
Nintendo has a philosophy that roughly translates in English to “lateral thinking with withered technology”, which means essentially don’t push the bleeding edge of technology, use established technology that is easy to manufacture, but creates an innovative play experience. Neither the Switch nor the Switch 2 are particularly powerful devices. The Switch 2 essentially has about the power level of a decent mid-sized eight-inch tablet, but that’s how Nintendo’s philosophy works. They want to use established technology that is a bit cheaper and easier to manufacture rather than trying to push the bleeding edge of tech, which drives up the cost, especially in these days when the AI data bubble is driving up the cost of storage and memory. This means instead of pushing the bleeding edge of tech, instead they focus on creative, innovative play experiences and interesting experiences with this cheap and already established technology rather than just trying to slap on bells and whistles to the device.
For indie authors, we can apply this both on the business side and the creative side. On the business side, we can push ahead with new distributors, ad settings, sales opportunities, and other business changes, or you can have the luxury of sitting back and watching how they work for others. For some things we might want to rush ahead and try it right away, but we have the luxury of getting to make these types of decisions for ourselves.
In terms of creativity, there is sometimes a compulsion among new writers that they have to try and be as unique and original as possible, which often happens to the detriment of the plot and the characters. However, there’s nothing wrong with using an established plot. I mean, most romance novels have a plot of a good woman meets good man. There’s an obstacle separating them. They work around the obstacle and then they live happily ever after. Ideas generally are not original, with very few exceptions. The execution of them is the hard part and a well-worn idea such as a romance novel trope or a detective trying to solve a crime or a fantasy hero going on a quest or a space marine fighting space pirates, all these well-worn tropes live and die in the execution, not the originality of the idea itself. So there’s nothing wrong with using familiar plots and then just trying to put them together and put your own spin on them or in the words of Nintendo to put your own “innovative play experience” on them.
#6: Don’t rush too fast to give up on physical formats.
While Sony and Microsoft abandoned physical games, Nintendo’s sales of physical games remain a major part of their overall sales and there are no announced plans to phase them out. Back earlier this year when Sony announced they were giving up permanently on physical media, Nintendo, a few weeks after that said in sort of a very generic formal corporate speak that they had no intention of giving up on physical media. There are a lot of sort of incredulous articles about that, but you know, pay attention. They’ve probably sold about 25 million Switch 2s as of now. I think the last documented sales number was from June where it was like 23.8 [million] or something like that. So it’s probably 25 million by now. That’s 25 million Switches with physical cartridge slots, and before that they sold 150 million regular Switches with cartridge slots. That’s a huge market that they don’t want to abandon.
Additionally, it also works out to their advantage because if Sony and Xbox are retreating away from physical media, there’s a lot of space in physical media electronic stores that can now be given over to Nintendo. In these days of very unreliable streaming services that can go out of business or yank content at a whim, having physical media is more popular than ever, and that applies to games as well.
What can indie authors learn from this? Although print is not my bestselling format, it continues to go steadily along, especially for my technical books. I checked before I recorded this, and as of today, print sales on Amazon are a total of 2% of my sales. I know you might say only 2%, but the flip side of that is would I want a 2% reduction in sales? No, I would not. So it is many streams of income that add up to a river.
I often refer to the physical media as “holiday gift editions” because their sales tend to spike around the Christmas holidays. As a writer, it’s important not to neglect this format. Gone are the days when indie writers have to buy their own print copies and store boxes of them in the garage. Print On Demand services like KDP and Ingram Spark abound and the process for uploading books to these services has a lot of documentation out there and takes less time than you might expect.
So to conclude, although the odds of your book being adapted into a Nintendo property are extremely slim, there’s still much to learn from their business decisions and their respect for their core fans. Whatever criticisms could be made of Nintendo, it’s clear they focus on providing value to their customer. Nintendo Switch Online is one of the cheapest of the online video game subscriptions, and honestly, I think it’s the one that provides the most value for dollar because it gets you access to such a big library of old Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Game Boy games.
I think that is a lesson indie authors can learn: focus on providing value to your readers and bear in mind some of the lessons we’ve seen here. One thing I should mention, this is not sponsored by Nintendo or anyone in any way. I don’t take sponsorships for anything. I only talk about a limited selection of topics on the podcast or the Internet, but when I do talk about them, I want to be able to give my honest opinion without any sponsorship dollars influencing anything. So everything you have just heard is my honest opinion.
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the backup episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy, and we’ll see you all next week.
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