Jonathan Moeller's Blog

Let’s take a look back at some ad results for September 2025.

First, the big changes: I am going to give Facebook ads a rest for a while. As I’ve mentioned before, Meta has been shoving all this Advantage+ AI stuff into Facebook ads, and it just doesn’t work. The key for online advertising, especially for books, is to narrow your target audience as much as possible, and the Advantage+ AI stuff goes for a broad audience.

To test that out, I didn’t advertise FROSTBORN with Facebook ads in August, but did advertise in September.

End result? I actually made $20 less from FROSTBORN in September than I did in August, but I also had the advertising expense in September, so I made less overall.

I also advertised CLOAK GAMES/MAGE in August, but not in September. End result? CLOAK GAMES/MAGE made about $200 less, but without the cost of advertising, that meant the profit was still higher.

So I’m not sure Facebook ads are effective any longer. Thanks, Generative AI!

But in the interests of full testing, I think in November I will try one ad campaign entirely with Advantage+ and see how it works. I don’t think it will accomplish anything, but it is worth the trying, and advertising is always a deductible expense.

Meanwhile, Amazon ads did a lot better. Here are some of the campaigns I ran. Remember, for an Amazon ad to be successful, it needs to generate a sale/complete KU readthrough for every 6-8 clicks.

DEMONSOULED OMNIBUS ONE: $2.44 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 1.41 clicks.

HALF-ELVEN THIEF: $19.31 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 2.48 clicks.

HALF-ELVEN THIEF OMNIBUS ONE (48% from the audiobook): $10.13 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 1.26 clicks.

STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION: $24.01 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 0.66 clicks.

CLOAK MAGE: OMNIBUS ONE: $3.64 for every $1 spent (65% of the profit coming from the audiobook), 1 sale for every 0.61 clicks.

SEVENFOLD SWORD: OMNIBUS ONE: $3.47 for every 1$ spent, 1 sale for every 2.42 clicks.

DRAGONTIARNA OMNIBUS ONE: $13.4 for every $1 spent, 1 sale for every 1.2 clicks.

I only had one campaign that lost money, but it only lost a grand total of $1.48, so that was good.

So we can see that omnibus editions definitely do very well with Amazon Ads, especially if they have attached audiobooks. And it turns out finishing STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE made it a lot easier to advertise, who knew?

Though if I really want to kick up HALF-ELVEN THIEF, I need to write another book in the series, which I plan to do later this year.

I’m also running a variety of Bookbub Ads for my permafree books on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, and Apple, and those consistently do very well since it’s a lot cheaper to get clicks for the non-Amazon stores for books.

So that’s where my ads are at for September 2025. I’ll test Facebook ads one more time in November, but I am most probably going to use them a lot less moving forward. So it’s time to think about other marketing ideas. I resisted using Facebook ads for like four years before I started experimenting with them in early 2020, so maybe it’s time after dragging my feet on the idea for five years to start playing with short-form video in 2026, since that’s where all the growth seems to be.

But we’ll see.

As always, thanks for reading, everyone!

-JM

Closing out the week at 86,000 words of CLOAK OF WORLDS, which puts me at Chapter 19 of 27.

You’ll notice the total number of chapters dropped from 28 to 27, but I decided to consolidate two of them. However, that’s not the final number since I’ll need to split up some of the longer ones. So the final count of chapters when the book comes out will probably be in the low 30s.

I think the rough draft will end up around 110,000 words, so hopefully I can reach that by the end of next week.

I am also 8,000 words into BLADE OF SHADOWS.

-JM

Writer Beware talks about how generative AI is causing a new round of super-targeted scammers. They feed your book into the chat bot, which then generates a highly personalized email praising the book and offering “marketing services.” I got a ton of these scam emails after STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE, GHOST IN THE SIEGE, and BLADE OF FLAMES came out, and then a bunch more after MALISON: THE COMPLETE SERIES did well on Bookbub at the end of August.

This is a great article explaining in extensive detail why generative AI is a bad idea that’s probably going to cause a market crash.

I started out with a mildly negative opinion of LLM-based generative AI tools in 2022 and 2023, but I wanted my opinion to be an informed one, so I’ve experimented with them on and off and read a good bit about them. And as I’ve experimented with them, my opinion has moved from mildly negative to highly negative, and finally arriving at completely anti-AI this year. I never used AI for any of my books, short stories, or cover images. I experimented a bit with using AI images for Facebook ads, but people generally hated them, so I stopped entirely with that. (In fact, Facebook ads have become less effective this year because of all the AI stuff Meta has forced into them, but more on that later.)

So why did I arrive at highly negative? These tools do not actually do what their advocates promise and are hideously expensive to run. The enormous costs and downsides significantly outweigh any benefits.

In addition to the problems mentioned in the second article (cost, false promises, economic bubbles, and blatant lying about capabilities), I think the fundamental difficulty with generative AI is that it’s essentially a cognitive mirror on its users. Like, a Narcissus Machine, as I’ve called it before.

What do I mean by this? In Greek myth, Narcissus was enraptured by his own reflection. LLM based AI is essentially Very Fancy Autocomplete, which means it guesses the most likely response to a prompt based on statistical likelihood. In other words, it ends up mirroring your own thoughts back to you.

So I think LLMs are highly prone to inducing an unconscious Confirmation Bias in the user. “Confirmation Bias” is a logical fallacy where one interprets new information as confirming one’s existing beliefs. I think even highly intelligent people using LLMs are prone to this, because the AI model settles on what is the most statistically likely response to the prompt. Which means that, consciously or not, you are guiding the LLM to give you responses that please you! This is why you see (on the tragically hilarious side) people who are convinced they’ve invented a new level of physics with the LLM or taught it to become self-aware, and on the outright tragic side, people who have mental breakdowns because of their interaction with the LLM.

Grimly enough, I suppose the problem is going to sort itself out when the AI bubble crashes, whether in a few months or a few years. As the linked article mentioned, AI companies have no clear path to profitability save for chaining together infinite NVIDIA graphics cards and hoping they magically stumble into artificial general intelligence or a superintelligence.

The downside is that this is going to cause a lot of economic disruption when it all falls apart.

I know I’m very negative about AI, but 1.) I see hardly any good results or actual benefits from the technology, 2.) lots of technology products are becoming worse from having AI stuffed into them, and 3.) what few good results have come about will not last because the data centers are burning cash like there’s no tomorrow.

-JM

I am pleased to report that I wrote 10,000 words of CLOAK OF WORLDS yesterday, for my 7th 10k word day of 2025!

You can tell it’s been a busy summer/autumn because the last time I had a 10k word day was March 31st.

-JM

In this week’s episode, we take a look at six marketing lessons writers can learn from TikTok. I also answer questions about my new book BLADE OF FLAMES.

You can listen to the show with transcript at the official Pulp Writer Show site, and you can also listen to it at Spotify, Apple Podcasts , Amazon Music, and Libsyn.

-JM

Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week!

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Shield of Storms, Book #1 in the Shield War series, (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) at my Payhip store:

FALLSHIELD50

The coupon code is valid through October 6, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered!

-JM

One of the fascinating (if perverse) aspects of history is how often institutions end up having the exact opposite outcome of what they were intended to do. You can no doubt think of many examples – schools that make their students dumber, military organizations that fail to defend, hospitals that make people sicker, bureaucracies that exacerbate the problems they were created to solve, and so forth. This can apply to social movements as well. Prohibition in American is one of the best examples of that. The temperance movement achieved its goal of banning alcohol in the United States during the Prohibition period, but the backlash and the consequences made it unpopular, and today the idea of nationally banning alcohol in the United States is implausible.

The Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome, the personal bodyguards of the emperor, might be another example of such an institution.

For over a thousand years, people have been asking why the Roman Empire fell. I think that might actually be the wrong question.

The better question is why did the Roman Empire last as long as it did, because it sure almost didn’t.

At the height of its power, the Empire controlled land on three different continents in an area larger than many modern states, and it had to maintain that control without anything resembling modern technology and organization. Travel was difficult and dangerous, even with the Roman road system. The account of St. Paul’s shipwreck in the book of Acts must have been an all too common experience in the Roman Empire, given the number of Roman wrecks on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Messages could take weeks to reach their recipients, and there was no division between civilian and military authority. If the emperors wanted to do anything, they had to use the army to do it, because the army was the only pool of skilled men loyal to the state. Since the Empire never really solved the problem of succession and the transfer of power, it didn’t take long before ambitious men figured out that the man with the largest army could declare himself emperor, and the Roman Empire actually broke into three competing mini-empires and almost fell apart entirely in the middle of the 200s AD.

So there were a lot of reasons the Roman Empire fell apart, and the Praetorian Guard, the bodyguard of the emperors, was one of them. The Praetorian Guard certainly wasn’t the sole reason the Roman Empire collapsed, but the Guard most definitely didn’t help.

In the last century of the Roman Republic, one of the growing problems was that armies were less loyal to Rome and more loyal to their general, who made sure they got paid and received grants of land. To show their prestige and to guard against the danger of assassination from rivals, general began collecting personal bodyguards. Since a Roman general commanded from a tent in a legionary camp called a “praetorium”, the general’s private guards became called “praetorians.” Obviously, the general wanted his best troops as his bodyguards, so becoming a praetorian was a privileged position with higher pay and perks. This practice continued as the Roman Republic split apart into civil wars between the ambitious generals of the First and Second Triumvirates.

The civil wars of the Roman Republic ended with Octavian, later known as Caesar Augustus, as the last man standing and sole control of what we now think of as the Roman Empire. Augustus is remembered as the first Roman emperor, but the office of “emperor” didn’t really exist at the time, not the way we think of it now. Rather, Augustus was essentially a military dictator, but after he won, he went to great lengths to conceal his power under a cloak of legality by having the Senate invest him with various official powers. In modern terms, it would be like if the US was ruled by a military dictator who simultaneously held the offices of President, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader, the governorships of the five most populous states, all while claiming only to be the first citizen among equals. Essentially, Augustus invented the powers of the Roman emperor on the fly, and his successors followed suit.

Julius Caesar famously pardoned his enemies and went around without a bodyguard to show his courage, which ended up getting him assassinated. Augustus was determined not to repeat that mistake, and so after annihilating his enemies he founded a personal bodyguard in what we know today as the Praetorian Guard. That’s a modern term – the praetorians themselves always referred to themselves as the praetorians of whichever emperor they happened to be serving. Augustus seems to have seen some of the potential danger in the Praetorian Guard, and during his reign they were scattered around Italy, with the ones guarding him rotated out every so often. (The praetorians in Italy, when not guarding the emperor, tended to do odd jobs for the government, like policing, construction, surveying, and so forth.) However, Augustus’s successor Tiberius concentrated the Guard in Rome, which made it even more dangerous.

Another problem with the Roman Empire, one that it never quite managed to solve, was the succession problem. Augustus was a military dictator who assembled a sort of ad hoc legality around his position with his various offices and powers. But how would he pass that on to a successor? What if someone else decided that they were the proper successor? Augustus had taken his office by force, so why shouldn’t anyone else?

The Praetorian Guard exacerbated this problem further. Was their loyalty to the office of the emperor, which was tricky because that office didn’t technically exist? Was it to the man himself, or to his heirs? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Guard eventually settled on the most practical answer to the question – their loyalty belonged to whoever paid them the most.

There’s a very high chance that Tiberius was murdered by the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, which means that the imperial bodyguard only made it two emperors before it started killing them. Tiberius’s successor Caligula was famously insane, and the Guard eventually got sick of him and participated in his murder. After Caligula’s death, the Guard declared Claudius as the new emperor, who repaid them by giving lavish donatives. That meant the Guard had gone from protecting the emperors to killing ones it didn’t like and then installing new ones.

After the Senate turned against Nero and he committed suicide in 69 AD, the Roman Empire had its Year of Four Emperors – Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian, who won the civil war and became the new emperor. Each of the potential claimants had their own praetorians who fought against other praetorians. The original Praetorian Guard did not cover itself in glory, as their comfortable life in Rome did not make them effective as field soldiers, and they lost against the toughened legionaries from the frontier armies who came to fight in the civil war.

That said, during the reigns of the Five Good Emperors (Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius) from 96 to 180 AD, we don’t hear much about the Praetorian Guard. The most likely explanation is that these emperors were strong and capable rulers, so the Guard had no reason to turn against them, and therefore any potential conspiracies that would have involved the Guard couldn’t get off the ground.

However, part of the reason the 100s AD were the apex of the Roman Empire is that Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius did not have sons, so they adopted a capable leader as their son and heir, thereby creating continuity of rule. Marcus Aurelius, unfortunately, had a natural son named Commodus, and after he died Commodus became emperor. Commodus was a spectacularly incompetent narcissist, nowadays known as the villain from the movie GLADIATOR. If anything, GLADIATOR toned down Commodus’s brutality, though to be fair to Commodus he didn’t murder his father like the fictional version did in the movie.

Commodus was eventually assassinated, and the Praetorian Guard hit its lowest point soon after. Pertinax became emperor after Commodus, and there was hope he would be a Nerva-type figure, a respected elderly Senator who would adopt a capable heir the way Nerva did with Trajan. However, Commodus had used the Guard as his privileged force of personal thugs, and Pertinax tried to impose discipline upon them. The Guard did not care for that, so they murdered Pertinax and then auctioned off the title of emperor to whoever would pay them the most. Soon after Septimius Severus seized control of the Empire, and he summarily fired all the praetorians and put his own veteran legionaries in their place.

So the Praetorian Guard, which had been intended to guard the emperors, ended up murdering the emperor on a regular basis and sometimes choosing his successor, and even auctioning off the title to the highest bidder.

Septimius Severus was a brutal ruler and held the Empire together long enough to die of natural causes. His sons Caracalla and Geta were his successors, and Caracalla murdered Geta before he was assassinated himself by yet another plot from disgruntled praetorians.

After that the Empire and the Guard declined precipitously. This was the period later historians would call the Crisis of the Third Century, when the Roman Empire fractured into the three competing mini-empires I mentioned above. A depressing pattern rapidly emerged. The Praetorian Guard or the army would kill an emperor and proclaim a new one. The emperor would last until he tried to do something the army didn’t like, such as imposing new discipline, and the pattern would repeat.

The Praetorian Guard was never really reformed, but like so many failed institutions, it gradually became obsolete. Part of the reason was that the Empire was subject to frequent barbarian invasions throughout the 200s. The emperor was required constantly on the frontiers to supervise the defense with the field armies. The emperors developed a different kind of bodyguard called the “scholae palatinae”, a mounted group of soldiers that would accompany him in the field as he moved around the Empire. The constant defensive warfare also resulted in a subtle shift. Rome was no longer the center of power in the Empire, the center of power was wherever the emperor happened to be at the moment. The city of Rome had become in many ways an expensive vestigial relic of another age. Some of the emperors only visited Rome once, some of the shorter-lived ones never even made it there at all, and the emperors certainly did not rule from Rome.

Because of these changes, the idea of the Praetorian Guard, a permanent bodyguard force based in Rome, had become obsolete.

The actual end of the Praetorian Guard came after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, the battle where the Emperor Constantine famously had the vision that led him to convert to Christianity. The Praetorian Guard sided with Constantine’s opponent Maxentius, and since Constantine had no use for the Praetorian Guard and indeed would move his capital to the new city of Constantinople, he simply had the Guard disbanded and continued to rely on mounted cavalry units for his personal bodyguard.

So the Praetorian Guard, after three centuries of frequent treachery and corruption, had come to an end. Amusingly, while the Guard was gone, the title of “praetorian prefect” remained in use in the Empire for the rest of its history, which came to show just how powerful the commander of the Guard could become.

In the end, Praetorian Guard is yet another example of an institution that became a hindrance to the very goals it was founded to advance. That seems to be a curse of any organization, and the only cure is constant vigilance and strong leadership. Two qualities, alas, that are all too rare in any age of history.

Yet you can definitely see why I say history is the best source of material for fantasy writers. You could get like twenty different novels out of the events described above.

-JM

Now closing out the week at 54,000 words of CLOAK OF WORLDS, which puts me on Chapter 11 of 28.

I really appreciate how many of you are looking forward to this book and have been following along with the series, because I gotta say these books just keep getting weirder and weirder.

Like, ten years ago when I started writing Nadia, I thought I was writing a standard urban fantasy with Nadia as the femme fatal thief and Riordan as the mysterious but brooding assassin. They would rob banks and fight wizard assassins and stuff, maybe some werewolves.

Now ten years and twenty-four books later, we’ve got clone soldiers, cyborg wizards, anti-dragon battle mechs, fire giant main battle tanks, reform-minded Elven nobles, and dragon pop stars. Among other things. And we even went to Mars in one book!

I am also 4,500 words into BLADE OF SHADOWS, which will be the next main project once CLOAK OF WORLDS is done.

-JM

Since BLADE OF FLAMES is the first book in a new epic fantasy series, it has generated more than the usual amount of questions. For convenience, I will answer them all here.

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1.) Is BLADE OF FLAMES set in the world of Andomhaim/Owyllain from FROSTBORN, SEVENFOLD SWORD, DRAGONTIARNA, DRAGONSKULL, and THE SHIELD WAR?

Answer: Yes, it is set in Owyllain. Specifically in the Year of Our Lord 1588, so eighty-eight years after the end of THE SHIELD WAR.

2.) Is Ridmark the main character?

Answer: No, the main character is named Talembur. I have written 43 books with Ridmark as either the protagonist or one of the protagonists, and across those books Ridmark has gone from being an angry young man to a grandfather, so it was time to do something different. The poor man deserves a break!

3.) Is Talembur secretly Ridmark in disguise?

Answer: No.

4.) Is Talembur secretly [various character theories]?

Answer: No, Talembur is a new character.

5.) Do I need to read any other books before starting BLADE OF FLAMES?

Answer: No. That was one of my intentions in writing it. You can read BLADE OF FLAMES without having read any of the other Andomhaim books, since all the major characters in BLADE OF FLAMES are new, and we’re in a part of Owyllain we’ve never visited before.

6.) Are there any recurring characters in BLADE OF FLAMES?

Answer: Exactly one. Well, two, technically, depending on how you look at it.

7.) Will other recurring characters return in future BLADES OF RUIN books?

Answer: Yes. But we shall have to read and find out after I write them.

8.) The opening is very similar to FROSTBORN: THE GRAY KNIGHT, isn’t it?

Answer: Yes, for reasons that will become clear. Without any spoilers, let’s say that similarity is a significant plot point.

9.) Is there a dog in this book?

Answer: Yes, people like dogs, so there is a dog in the book.

10.) Does the dog die?!?!?

Answer: He does not.

11.) Seriously, does the dog die?!?!?

Answer: I promise that the dog does not die.

12.) How many BLADES OF RUIN books will there be?

Answer: I am planning for twelve, though that my change if I have a good idea that requires an extra book or if I think I can consolidate it down.

13.) Will there be BLADES OF RUIN audiobooks?

Answer: That is the plan if all goes well. Brad Wills has signed up to narrate the series.

14.) Are you still going to write Rivah books?

Answer: Yes. After I publish CLOAK OF WORLDS, hopefully sometime in October, I will start writing the next Rivah book, ELVEN-ASSASSIN.

15.) Are you still going to write Caina books?

Answer: Eventually. I need some time to think about where they’re going to go next. I’ve done this before – there was a two-year gap between GHOST IN THE SUN, the end of the GHOST NIGHT series, and GHOST IN THE SERPENT, because I wanted to think about what to do next. At this point in my life, I don’t want to have any more than three unfinished series at one time, so we’ll see what I want to do next when either BLADES OF RUIN, CLOAK MAGE, or HALF-ELVEN THIEF are done.

16.) Seriously, Talembur is secretly Ridmark, isn’t he?

Answer: In 1884, retired Civil War general William T. Sherman was approached about running for President. He point-blank refused, famously stating “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected”, though this usually gets paraphrased to “if nominated, I will not run, if elected, I will not serve.” He really meant it, and refused to get involved in politics for the remaining years of his life.

I’m not sure if writers have an equivalent of a Sherman statement, but if there is, this is it: Talembur is a new character and not secretly a character who has appeared before in the Andomhaim/Owyllain books. I cannot be blunter than that.

-JM

I am pleased to report that SHIELD OF POWER, the final book in THE SHIELD WAR series, is now available in audiobook, as excellently narrated by Brad Wills!

You can listen to it at Audible, Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon AU, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Payhip, Chirp, Storytel, and Spotify.

-JM