The Pulp Mindset: A NewPub Survival Guide

by J.D. Cowan, L Jagi Lamplighter (Editor)

Out with the Old, in with the NewPub!Nobody reads anymore. In an age where audiences consume more art than ever before, books have remained irrelevant to the ever-changing West. Nothing seems to change this unavoidable reality. The industry is over.Or is it?A new frontier has opened where anything goes! We live in a pulp landscape now, a place where the past and present comes together to create a better future. In this book you will learn just what this NewPub world is, how to adapt to it, and change the way you think about everything.The Rules Have Changed!You can do anything! The Pulp Mindset will help you adapt to this crazy climate and become the best artist you can be. Read on and join the revolution!

75 pages, Paperback

Published July 22, 2020

About the author

JD Cowan is a writer with an obsession for stories and Truth. He takes pleasure in looking for Light in the places where darkness grips the tightest.

His works include "Grey Cat Blues", the young adult novel "Knights of the End" and short stories in "Superheroes: The Crossover Alliance Volume 3" by the Crossover Alliance, StoryHack #3, the PulpRev Sampler, and "Paragons" by Silver Empire, and others.

He blogs about stories and entertainment at wastelandandsky.blogspot.ca and can be found on Twitter @wastelandJD for those interested.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gave the reasons why "Old Pub" - the way the book publishing business is now- is being replaced by "New Pub" that harken back to the pulp era of the 1920s- 1930s. Action and writing stuff that readers want to read. Stories where good triumphs over evil. Stories where the reader is satisfied with the ending.

Cowan loathes the idea that stories should be propaganda lessons of the left, where the bad guy wins. he also doesn't condone stories that distort who is the antagonist and who is the protagonist. He says to avoid this lazy writing that is used to shock the reader. He abhors the blurring of morality in today's literature and the over use of adjectives and adverbs that lead to non-stop description.

Instead he advises that action and moving the story forward with cliff hangers. He re-introduces the concepts of wonder and imagination that the current "Old Pub" sucks out of writers. He makes an interesting point that "genres" were created during the last half of the 20th century. He says they cubbyhole authors and reduce their creativity by trying to shoehorn stories to fit into one of these fiction categories.

Bottom line: Hook the reader early and keep the story and action moving it along to a satisfying (and usually predictable) conclusion.

TLDR: Why only three stars? It's long on rhetoric and bloviation and very short on practical advice and the "tips and tricks" advertised on the cover.

[Canais Young · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can recommend this book to a lot of people: homeless men and women who need makeshift toilet paper, bandages, and menstrual pads; stoners who need good rolling papers; birds who need to line their nests with something other than twigs and garbage; hard-line conservatives who need kindling for their annual book barbecue (where books are used for the barbecue because coal is too Satanic, even if it has mesquite or hickory wood chips in it). But I can't recommend this to normal people who want to know how to fix our current culture of stagnation through writing and reading tales of action and wonder.

Why?

Because, once you boil down the repetitive screed of how traditional publishing will crumble and "NewPub" (whatever this means. Making up words doesn't make you smarter) will take over, there's nothing there. It's just the rantings of a malcontent who flunked fifth-grade creative writing class, created a blog about it, then creamed his already stiff-from-semen stains shorts when he discovered that self-publishing is slightly more dignified and put-together now than it was back when it was mostly used to scam up-and-coming authors.

I am upset that I didn't think to refund this, but I'm pretty sure the author can use the money from my ill-conceived purchase to pay for creative writing lessons or a ghostwriter on Fiverr or finally pay rent on his mother's basement since blood banks don't do that "sell your blood for some quick cash" thing anymore and most sperm banks actually have standards on what kind of man can donate for cash.

There are better books about pulp fiction (both the Tarantino movie and the actual genre of violent, surreal, and lurid American fiction) out there: real, how-to guides that explain what made pulp fiction great and how to copy that greatness and update it for modern sensibilities (like James Scott Bell's "How to Write Pulp Fiction" or Jim Driver's "How To Write A Novel the Easy Way! Using the Pulp Fiction Method To Write Better Novels"). Heck, even the books about how to write conventional, commercial fiction (what this "writer" repeatedly dubs "OldPub") make more sense than "The Pulp Mindset".

[Wednesday · Rating 5 out of 5]

Repetitious but invaluable info

The author has no love for the dying OldPub industry and says so over and over. Ignore the repetition and mine this book for the golden info he provides on how to carry Pulp writing skills into the present and incorporate them in you own indie mindset and toolbox. He makes sense. More than that, he emphasizes wonder and imagination... Something missing from 95‰ of other books on writing skills. He presents a path forward that's unique and necessary to at least consider if you're an indie author.

[J.D. Kessey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Useful if you want to dig into pulp writing.

[Benjamin Espen · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the most part, I review fiction, but since this book is about the current state of adventure fiction, it makes sense to discuss it. Major changes are underway in fiction publishing, especially in fantastical adventures marketed mostly to men, and JD Cowan is here to propel us forward with The Pulp Mindset: A NewPub Survival Guide.

Cowan is here to offer advice on how to recover what has been lost. What, exactly, has been lost? A world were people, and especially men, read for pleasure. Marilynne Robinson wrote in The Death of Adam, that part of the reason that literacy was so important in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was that Protestantism prioritized reading the Word of God. I’m not averse to that thought, but looking at the data, nearly universal literacy [outside of groups explicitly marginalized] was present in all of Europe and most of its diaspora more than a century ago.

In late nineteenth century America, many of the bestsellers were written by women, for women. But there was a healthy market for adventure fiction for men as well. The dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and pulp magazines sold well for a long time, roughly until the middle of the twentieth century, when fiction marketed towards men went into a long decline. The Pulp Mindset isn’t primarily about the reasons for this decline, although Cowan has an illuminating series of posts on that subject that I have in the back of my mind as I review.

What The Pulp Mindset is about is: what do we do going forward? I say we, even though I am not a writer of fiction, which seems to be the primary intended audience, because I am broadly in support of Cowan’s mission to add more escapism and fun into fiction. Cowan’s prescription for doing so is to write more like authors from the Pulp Era: fast-paced action, good guys and bad guys, and above all entertain the reader.

Since I have been on a quest to familiarize myself with the Pulp Era, and also with the authors listed on Gygax’s Appendix N, I can verify that I do tend to find fiction written in the 1920s and 1930s both more exciting and more fun. Neither I nor Cowan would claim that you can’t find a good book written after that, but I would say that the proportion of fiction written that is both exciting and fun has gone down since the Pulp Era.

One of the few practical pieces of advice that Cowan gives to aspiring writers looking to restore fun to their fiction is to never violate the reader’s trust.

The rules are actually very simple. In fact, there’s only one really big law no writer should ignore: Don’t violate the reader’s trust. You can deliver plot twists to your audience; you cannot promise them an action story and then deliver a non-fiction account of dolphin riding in Florida. Give them what they came for. Subversion is not a synonym for “good” and it is about time that becomes common knowledge once more.

…

Unfortunately, many modern writers (especially in OldPub) cannot help showing how brilliant their twists are, which leaves their potentially exciting stories limp and flat with nothing to them but said shallow table flip.

…

Do not risk trying to fool your readers by deceiving them with flashy twists that undercut the beginning of the story. It will not end well for you.

The emphasis that Cowan puts on this can be expanded upon by looking at a related phenomenon in fans: excessive fear of spoilers. I’ll illustrate this with a recent tweet from Brandon Sanderson, perhaps the last beneficiary of the system Cowan calls OldPub.

Sanderson is giving a sneak peak of a new book of his coming out this year. He is doing his fans a favor, and also ideally gaining new fans by giving away some of his work for free as an advertisement. Yet, he feels compelled to undercut this goal by warning his readers to be mindful of actually talking about this work to people who aren’t familiar with it.

There is something special about the first time through a book you really enjoy. I wouldn’t want to take that experience away from anyone. I do question whether a book that could truly be ruined by loose talk about what happened in Chapter 2 is in fact an enjoyable book at all. The style of writing Cowan warns against, I suspect, is the root of the problem. If the only really interesting thing about your book is the clever twist, then yes, I suppose it can be ruined by spoilers.

This also supports Cowan’s assertion that genre fiction in general has abandoned its audience in lieu of a captive fanbase that will simply consume any new item from a given IP. If you can’t talk about a new book or watch a trailer for an upcoming movie outside of a special forum reserved for spoilers, then you aren’t going to attract any new readers or watchers. And the sales numbers back this up. Genre fiction sells really poorly, especially compared to the Pulp Era.

I’m not going to pick on Sanderson [too much], as I have read his books and liked them, but pulpy his books are not. Will Wight also writes fantasy adventures with detailed magic systems, but writes faster, and has more interesting things happen in a single chapter than Sanderson does in whole books. And his sales are possibly as good, or better, than Sanderson, even though Wight self-publishes. Wight isn’t associated with any of the pulp restoration movements that I know of, but seems to have independently come to much the same conclusion as Cowan for what works now.

Cowan also recommends fully embracing that adventure fiction is low art. He defines low art as:

Low art deals with visceral and tangible goals and stakes, while high art deals with ephemeral and heady concepts…If you wish to be a pulp writer, you must master the craft of low art creation.

…

If you’re reading a book by Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor, you are not there to be greeted with fast-paced stories of heroes shooting villains and rescuing space princesses. This sort of fiction exists for an entirely different reason than the pulps.

This is a pretty good way of looking at it, although it is of course true that many works of fiction blend the two to some degree. John J. Reilly used to define hard science fiction as a story that left the reader usefully instructed in some principle of physics or biology after reading a story that otherwise closely resembles a Western. A lot of the changes that happened in the mid-twentieth century to science fiction were attempts to change the mix of high and low art in the field by deliberately changing the balance from action and adventure to science and social reform.

Granted, this isn’t exactly what most people mean by high art, but it was definitely about ephemeral and heady concepts over the visceral. And if you want an excellent example of what it looks like when a pair of authors shift the balance between low and high art in the middle of the series, take Gods & Legionnaires by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole.

The book was divisive among the Galaxy’s Edge fans, with many complaints that the dream-like Gods section, a retelling of Van Vogt’s Centaurus II in the Galaxy’s Edge universe, was too hard to understand, and didn’t feature enough action. Cole and Anspach only did this once, and got away with it, but I don’t think they would have gotten as popular as they are if the whole series was like this.

I loved Gods & Legionnaires, but I also admit that my tastes are unusual, and looking back in history, as Cowan has done, should provide a cautionary tale for trying to shift the balance too much in this direction. I think there is a real temptation, a pull from authors who want to do something challenging, and a push from clever reviewers like me who love that kind of thing, but it seems off-putting to the broader audience.

That broader audience is whom Cowan is trying to serve, and in my own small way, I am too. I think aspiring authors might find some interesting inspiration from Cowan’s work, which after all mostly serves as a signpost to the successful story tellers of the past. What has worked before can work again, if you know about it. This work could be the catalyst that makes that possible.

I was provided a copy of this book by the author.

[Eric Postma · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Pulp Mindset
By JD Cowan
Sick and tired of social messaging invading every aspect of life? Want stories that don’t tell you you’re a horrible person because you aren’t part of whatever the preferred protected class of the month is? Or maybe you’re just tired of 1000 page monstrosities of fiction that just plod along and never seem to go anywhere. Or perhaps you are tired of all the stuff you grew up with being regurgitated and mangled beyond recognition? Well, you’re in luck. The spirit of the pulps of days of yore is back and business is booming. There are scores of new authors making use of the digital environment to operate independently of the stodgy gatekeepers at the big publishing houses who are doing the unthinkable: putting the story and the audience first.
What makes these new authors tick? Better still, how does one get to be one of them? What does one need to do to get into the right frame of mind? Those are the mysteries that Mr. Cowan unlocks in this short, informative and inspirational book. He takes the reader back to the heady days of the dawn of pop culture, the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s. In those short, and inexpensive magazines were stories of high adventure, unfettered by the rigid rules of the genre specific hall monitors of modern publishing. Heroes were genuine heroes, villains were villains and not tragic figures who didn’t get hugged enough. There was imagination and wonder and people ate it up. And while those magazines have largely gone by the wayside, they formed the basis for the blockbuster movies of the present day.
The literary world has stagnated and Hollywood is as well, running the fumes of yesteryear. Rejuvenating them requires a return to the pulp mindset, adapted for the modern world. Instead of spending months or years writing one book, the modern pulp mindset means working hard cranking out high quality shorter works in weeks instead of months. The characters are clearly drawn and the action keeps moving, and the more stories come out, the more the author grows.
Don’t worry, Mr. Cowan doesn’t just talk about mentality or reminisce of days gone by, he tells you how to get the skills necessary. He lays out the authors that best represent this attitude gives the reader a solid plan to build the necessary writing skills, skills that are needed to retake a culture run amok with peacocks and scolds.
If you are tired of the modern day drivel and are ready to take up the pen in battle against the hordes of preening orcs dominating our cultural institutions, then this book is definitely for you.

[Erik Waag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pulp Mindset is a quick, fun read… a rant perhaps, but fitting in talking about pulp.

JD does at times seem to rant, and repeat himself. For this I forgive him. This is not an academic work as much as a call to action and a guide to the landscape of new publishing. And it does inspire. He does provide a few writing tips – the broad strokes – that new pulp authors should get familiar with. Guides to writing specifically must be found elsewhere.

He provides an understanding of the field. The history of pulp, why its magic worked, and the forces and players that eroded the audience-first (or in our case reader-first) mentality that has crippled modern entertainment. He also provides a bibliography of the kinds of pulp from which pulp writers might read for inspiration, and of guides to writing with pulp in mind itself.
Although JD warns us not to apply advice from screenwriting manuals, JD’s work and STORY by Robert McKee carry a similar message, particularly in its introduction. Many of the same forces that corrupted storytelling in Hollywood are the same that have eroded what JD calls OldPub. I have read older fiction, from the 30s to the 80s, and so I didn’t understand this until recently. The rot we see in movies is, now, impossible to not see. It should also now be obvious from a look through the NYT bestsellers, and the things popular authors are saying on social media, that fiction in the mainstream is just as bad. I disagree with him that OldPub is dead, but I can’t deny is sickly and declining rapidly, and that the hard working self publishing author with the right ideas can capitalize on this greatly.

This is a quick and practical guide for us. Indie, PulpRev, NewPub, Ironage, Independent writers or whatever kind of label you prefer, will find this short work useful.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a new era, and JD Cowan sees it

It's crucial to point out that this book is not a "how to" writing guide, but an essay describing an industry in transition. Cowan is one of my favorite bloggers and pop culture observers, and his thesis here is the "OldPub" literature and legacy publishers are on their way out, and the way forward for writers involves reacquiring the skills, techniques, and audience-centric mindset of the pulp era.

This is interesting, because it's not a call for old-timer stories per se, but understanding the core things that made them work, that made them sell with million-plus magazine circulation. Action, adventure, thin if any genre boundaries, and a moral take with a payoff (which is not the same thing as a "morality tale"), are cornerstone attributes. Wonder and definite movement in the story. In other words, it's a complete repudiation of contemporary literature, the over-use of subversion, and the attitude of "author as auteur."

I gave it 4 instead of 5 stars because I wish Cowan had included some analysis to clearly back the "OldPub is dying" contention. I want to believe that's true, but when I look at things like the latest 2020 Dragon Awards results, I wonder if some of that is wishful thinking. Still, the mindset shift he advocates in this book, as well as a revitalization of American short fiction in general is needed, and would be welcome. What he outlines, I think is a legitimate path to success that may produce more satisfying, fulfilling work in the process.

[M.H. Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have liked a few more tips for writing in the pulp style, but overall good information on the thought process of pulp writing.
I want to read this guy's fiction now!!

[Sablehawk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a pulp writer, but the theory and practice is good reading. It is an excellent field for those who want to write good, fast, enjoyable books. Focus on the customer.

[Justin Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gets you thinking

A good book for any writer wanting to try and make it in the indie publishing world, definitely worth a read.

[A.B. Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A refreshing take on the publishing environment for pulp writers, and an excellent read that motivated me no end.

[Michael Marpaung · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise and gets straight to the point. A must read for 'aspiring writers'.