In this week’s episode, we examine six business lessons indie writers can learn from the long-running STAR TREK science fiction franchise.
This coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Exile series at my Payhip store:
FALLEXILE
The coupon code is valid through November 16, 2026. So if you need a new ebook this fall, we’ve got you covered!
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 326 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 22nd, 2026 and today I’m discussing six things that indie writers can learn from the long-running Star Trek science fiction franchise. Before we get into that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
First up, it is time for Coupon of the Week, and this week’s coupon code will get you 25% off the ebooks in the Ghost Exile series at my Payhip store. That coupon code is FALLEXILE. As always, you can get the coupon code and the links to my Payhip store in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through November 16th, 2026, so if you need a new ebook to read as we exit fall and head into winter, we have got you covered.
Now let’s have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. I am very pleased to report that Elven-Warlock, the seventh book in the Rivah Half-Elven Thief series, is now available and you can get it at Amazon. It’s also available for Kindle Unlimited, (excuse me, Kindle Plus subscribers because one of the indie publishing news items this week is that Kindle Unlimited has been renamed to Kindle Plus and contains some audiobooks. So you can read more about that in the news.). But for me, Elven-Warlock is now out in Amazon and Kindle Plus and it is doing well. So thank you all for that and thank you all for enjoying the Rivah series.
Now that Elven-Warlock is out, my next main project will be Blade of Rifts. I’m pleased to report I reached the 30,000 word mark just before I started recording this episode. I think the book will be about 100,000 words long, so I am about 30% through the rough draft. If all goes well, I’m very much hoping to have it out before American Thanksgiving at the end of November, if all goes well. We’ll see if I can pull that off or not.
My secondary project is now Cloak of Silver, which will be the 16th book in the Cloak Mage series. I am 1,000 words into it as I record this. It will be my new main project once Blade of Rifts is done and it will probably end up being the first book I publish in 2027, but we’ll see how the next two and a half months go.
In audiobook news, Brad Wills is still working on Blade of Visions and we should have some more updates on that before too much longer. So that is where I’m at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
00:02:32 Main Topic: Lessons From Star Trek
Now let’s move on to our main topic, which has been part of a series, which has been six things indie writers can learn from large media companies. We did Disney two weeks ago. Last week we did Nintendo. This week we’re doing something slightly different, a long running science fiction franchise, specifically the Star Trek franchise. I’m not going to talk about specific plot points for the most part or the creative highs and lows of the franchise. I think everyone can agree that the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Inner Light was among the best of the series along with Deep Space Nine’s In The Pale Moonlight and the episode in Voyager where Janeway and Tom Paris turned into giant lizards may have been among the low points. However, once you have 60 years of Star Trek movies and TV shows, some of them are going to be really good and some of them will be less good, but we’re not going to focus on that. We’re going to instead focus more on the overall business decisions that Star Trek as an intellectual property has made in its 60 years, which are applicable to indie authors in many ways.
#1: Continuity Lockout
One of the most common criticisms of modern Star Trek is that it’s too difficult for new fans to find a good entry point and that even new series rely heavily on references to older ones in a way that make new viewers feel confused or left out. A good example of this would be how The Doctor from Voyager returned in Starfleet Academy on Netflix. While The Doctor is a great character, to fully understand his character in Starfleet Academy, you need to remember him from Voyager in the ‘90s, which was a long time ago.
Another example would be Strange New Worlds, which is considered to be among the best of modern Star Trek, but it calls back to Kirk and Spock and Captain Pike and a lot of other characters from the original series. This can make new viewers feel confused or left out. I talk about the idea of continuity lockout more in Episode 274 of this podcast, which is entitled Avoiding Marvel Continuity Lockout Syndrome since that’s a common weakness of Marvel media properties where that they reference a lot of characters in movies and TV shows that the new viewers may or may not have seen.
As writers, it can be difficult to find a balance between including references to other characters and works without confusing or alienating new readers. It’s important to keep those references in the background and focus on the most important thing, which is creating a solid plot with compelling characters.
Many romance writers excel at having main characters return as secondary ones later in a series without making readers need to read the earlier books in the series to feel invested in the story. For example, in the first book, the main character and her love interest live happily ever after. Then in the second book, they are background characters as the new main character and her love interest try to find a way to overcome their obstacles so they can live happily ever after.
It’s especially relevant to talk about this now because one of the reasons I started on Half-Elven Thief was because I was worried my longer series like the Andomhaim books and Caina were starting to have Continuity Lockout Syndrome, so I thought that would be a good way to introduce new readers to my work and it seems to have worked out well so far.
#2: Forcing Star Trek To Be Big
Another mistake has been to market and consider Star Trek in the same way as bigger franchises such as Marvel, Star Wars, or Disney. In trying to make Star Trek a billion dollar IP, a lot of decisions were made that left the core group of fans disappointed and didn’t bring in enough new fans to justify the massive cost of blockbuster films or expensive streaming series.
The current Star Trek fandom frankly isn’t big enough to prop up an entire streaming service or a new film that would cost hundreds of million dollars to create and market, especially when the new series that have been already on the Paramount Plus platform haven’t necessarily appealed to that core group of fans or brought in a significant amount of new ones.
As writers, it can be tempting to try and write towards publishing trends or try to change your series to make it appeal to as broad a group as possible. Chasing some idea of bigger success or responding to what feels like fan consensus online (but it may just be the consensus of random bots running off a server farm somewhere) can mean that you’re frustrating or neglecting your current fans. It’s not bad to try new things (as we mentioned above with continuity lockout), but it’s important not to lose sight of what makes your work unique.
This is a tricky thing to do, and I do think I threaded that needle a little bit with Half-Elven Thief because while it was a new series with new characters and a new setting and new locations and so forth, it was still epic fantasy, which is what I mostly write so I was able to use a lot of epic fantasy tropes I’ve used in other books and combine them to new effect that people seem to enjoy.
#3: Don’t lose sight of a series’ main focus and appeal.
It’s interesting to note that two recent series that have been more successful with Star Trek fans have been comedies and one wasn’t even Star Trek. Seth McFarlane’s The Orville captured a strong group dynamic and the optimism of classic Star Trek. The animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks managed to do the same thing even though it did have a lot of references to other Star Trek shows.
Although a vocal group of fans want grim and dark approaches to the IP, an even larger group wants the optimism and campy fun of older Star Trek series. Of those two series, I like Star Trek: Lower Decks quite a bit and I’ve seen the entire thing. I think it’s one of those rare parodies that’s such a good parody of the thing it’s parodying that kind of warps around to become a good example of the thing it is parodying. Another good example of this is the comedy film Hot Fuzz about police that starts out as being a parody of sort of over the top police action thriller films, but then kind of warps around to become an actually good example of over the top police action thriller films. Hot Fuzz is one of my favorite movies for that reason.
I think Star Trek: Lower Decks managed to pull that off as well, where it starts off as being a comedy about one of the lesser ships in Starfleet and the collection of misfits who work on it, but it warps around and becomes a very good example of Star Trek as the crew learns to work together and solve their interpersonal problems and fight whatever the big monster of the season is. Of course, since I am not a fan of modern AI, my favorite season is Season 3 when the big bad of the season turns out to be a malevolent AI in grand Star Trek fashion.
Recent Star Trek series have been criticized for being heavy on interpersonal drama and accusations of being too focused on political messaging. Whether that is accurate or not is of course up to the opinion of the viewer. That said, it can be difficult to set aside some of our own tendencies and preferences to focus on the plot as the heart of the story. If the plot isn’t compelling, nothing about your characters or intended messaging is going to stick. Again, we return to that Christopher Nolan quote I quoted in the last two episodes about how you should not use narrative in the service of messaging.
Sermons (regardless of the cause) and stories are different genres of writing and communicating, and it’s a bad idea to use a fictional product (whether a movie, TV show, book, or video game) to push your preferred political message. It’s just not fair to the reader or the viewer, and it’s just not fair to yourself and your opinion because inevitably when you are trying to insert your own opinions into messaging, you end up with doing a disservice to them and presenting sort of a parody or a straw man version of them.
So it’s best, in my opinion, to avoid that kind of a preachiness. That doesn’t mean you can’t have opinions or characters with different political opinions or viewpoints in your work. In fact, that can be a great source of plots and conflict between the characters. But if you do that, it’s best to make yourself be even-handed and fair even to political opinions and views that you don’t care for.
Now, the counter argument to that is that Star Trek has always been kind of preachy. If you look at the original series, they would occasionally have episodes decrying racism or sexism through the metaphor of whatever alien species they encountered that week. But for the most part, those episodes did that pretty well. The message was essentially in service of the story.
Star Trek: The Next Generation did that very well with some of its better episodes, which were often Captain Picard standing firm in the point of principle in the face of Starfleet bureaucracy or some crazy admiral (Starfleet does seem to have a lot of crazy admirals pursuing a bad idea). I think one of the best examples of that is The Drumhead where an overzealous judge starts seeing treason everywhere and then Picard defeats her with a very well-placed Picard Speech.
Another good example would be The Next Generation episode, The Measure of a Man, where Data is put on trial by Starfleet to determine whether he has rights as a sentient being as an android. Now again, you can point out that both of these episodes have strong messages to them, but in the end, the messages are in service to the plot and a source of potential conflict between the characters as they work it out.
#4: Know when to move forward.
One criticism of recent Star Trek is that it seems stuck in its original timeline and hasn’t done well with moving ahead with new characters that aren’t beholden to or related to the original ones. That is a symptom that you see in large corporate IP, which is why you have so many reboots and parallel timelines and so forth because they’re afraid to move past the core group of popular characters to try something new.
For indie authors, this is easier to overcome, though the temptation is there to keep writing the same book with your most popular character over and over again, which is why I started Blades of Ruin because I didn’t want to keep writing about Ridmark over and over again because eventually you run out of stories to tell with the character and the idea becomes stale. So with that said, it’s still set in the world of Owyllain, just a hundred years in the future. So while there are background references, I don’t really start bringing in connections into the larger world until Book Four of that series when everything is pretty well established. So that would be one example of moving forward.
#5: Find your champions.
The original Star Trek series had a strong champion in a producer named Lucille Ball. She was able to use her influence to help get the show started and some argue that the show never would’ve aired or managed three seasons without her. After the show went off the air, the fans kept Star Trek alive through fan conventions, fan magazines, websites, and subreddits.
As writers, you can find your champions through ARC giveaways, making the first book in a series permafree, and advertising your work. Stay engaged with your readers by having a social media presence and providing updates on your work. If you want example of an author who has a strong online presence and provides frequent updates, you can look at Brandon Sanderson’s YouTube channel and his social media as an example. Granted, he does have a full-time team helping him with that, but it’s possible for a writer to do something smaller scale without too much of an investment of time and effort.
Although many writers dread anything related to business or social media, indie authors need to learn how to engage with these parts of being a writer if commercial success is a goal of theirs.
#6: Take time for a creative reset when necessary.
Although many fans were disappointed that there was not a special or a new movie for Star Trek’s 60th anniversary, it could be argued that rushing out one for the sake of celebrating the anniversary would’ve made things worse when there are already concerns about quality. Additionally, given that Paramount was in the process of getting acquired by Skydance while this 60th anniversary passed, it was unlikely there was will within the studio to summon the money and talent to produce a 60th anniversary thing, given that both Paramount and Skydance have a lot of debt and the last thing you want to do when your company is being acquired is to propose an expensive new project.
That said, on a smaller scale, one of the perks of being an indie writer is the ability to let a character or series rest and take a creative reset. I already talked about this in the previous episode of this podcast, but I’ve rested the character of Caina several times. There is a gap between the end of Ghost Exile and Ghost Night and another gap between the end of Ghost Night and Ghost Armor. While I intend to come back to the character in 2027, I last wrote a book with her in 2025, which gave me time to think about new ideas for where I wanted her in the series to go. Sometimes it really is a good idea to put an idea or a series aside for the time and let your subconscious chew on it and come up with new ideas.
Although you might not be a science fiction writer and might not have ever even seen Star Trek, there are still some lessons writers can learn from the history of the Star Trek franchise, and hopefully these lessons will be helpful to you.
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 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 we’ll see you all next week.
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