Prefer the audio version? Get it on Spotify or Apple, or watch the Full Nostalgia Edition™ below:

Because we can’t have long conversations on the internet anymore, I’m going to be super reductive and say all stories are built on four main pillars:

1. The Plot (The What);

2. The Characters and their Relationships (The Who);

3. The Setting (The Where); and

4. The Tone (The How).

Today, we’re getting into Setting—the Where—and how some absolutely monster juggernauts in fiction have used global culture to flavour their stories beyond characters or tone. You might think the Plot—the What—is the most impactful thing you can write, but no. It’s been said there are only seven basic plots in all of fiction, and while that’s also super reductive, you can probably agree that a heist movie is a lot like other heist movies… except for its characters, setting, and tone.

By the end, you’ll:

1. Know what we mean about cultural fusion in storytelling;

2. Have a system you can use to make this yourself, whether you’re a writer, a games master, or even just want to spot it in the stories you love; and

3. See how I did this, so you can get an in-the-wild book series that has enough ratings to avoid being called a fluke. I’ve left this to last because I hate talking about myself, but we’ve got to do it! So, we’ll do it together.

Tapping Into a (Literal) World of Inspiration

Over the weekend, I decided I wanted to look up a how-to guide for a game that was kicking my ass and ended up falling down the most amazing well of how a piece of art came to be. That game was Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, which re-released two classics in 2013 but has roots almost as old as the world.

The entire history of the Mystara duo is super cool, but the thing that struck me while doing this research was how a very Japanese company, Capcom, got the rights to a very Western high fantasy property, Dungeons & Dragons. What this fusion gifted the world was two games, 1994’s Tower of Doom and 1996’s Shadow Over Mystara, which, despite being older than dirt, still stand up well today. A huge element of this is the cultural welding apparent in the game’s manufacture—the elements of D&D fuse spectacularly well with a distinctly Japanese anime aesthetic.

It stands up so well that George Kamitani, who worked on Tower of Doom, got the bug. Legend says that around 1998, he still itched to make a successor to his work on Mystara, culminating in 2013’s Dragon’s Crown after he started his own game company, Vanillaware. While Dragon’s Crown is one of the most undeniably horny games to be produced, it’s also still carrying the torch for East meets West: we can see how Kamitani loved what he learned about D&D so much that he wanted to keep giving his blend to the world years later.

The creative hybridisation spread with Sword World and Record of Lodoss War, both Japanese properties that give a distinct view into the West’s high fantasy imaginings.

1998’s Cowboy Bebop—I haven’t actually got to the 2021 live action version yet—is a Japanese-meets-Noir space Western. Oh, and it’s got bounty hunters and noodle bars. It was so successful it was credited with being the gateway drug introducing Western viewers to anime in the early 2000s.

What about the other way? 1985’s Thundercats saw United States television producers dipping heavily into the vibe of the anime aesthetic. Not just visually—Thundercats’ art style is an absolute treat—but thematically. You don’t have to squint too hard to see Bushido culture referenced in Thundercats, and it’s this theme the 2011 reboot dives headfirst into. Born in the USA doesn’t mean we have to use guns instead of cool-ass swords, and the Sword of Omens was one of the coolest swords ever gifted to fiction.

We can also see how the tragic misstep of 2020’s Thundercats Roar failed its way to a 2.2 on IMDb. It’s not just the art style to blame, although that’s huge. Roar throws off the trappings of East meets West, the delightful fusion of battle tanks and bushido, and trades it in for bullshit wacky adventures. You lost me at hello.

Also… anyone remember how that initial pilot of ’85’s Thundercats had the Thundercats all hanging about naked on the ship? 80s childhood television was a trip.

Avatar: The Last Airbender blends—or Bends?—elements from Asian and Indigenous cultures to create a world you wished you lived in. Well, not the parts where everyone’s fighting for their lives, but you get me. The Four Nations in the series are inspired by sources including Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, and Tibetan cultures, creating a world that feels familiar while still being fantastical. The creators didn’t just borrow for flavour; they synthesised philosophies, martial arts, and societal structures to create a world that feels both unique and real. Remember that term ‘synthesised’; we’ll be coming back to it.

The Legend of Korra next-levels this. Set decades after Avatar, its Big Deal™ is how the world has evolved. Republic City is described by the creators as what would happen, “…if Manhattan had happened in Asia.” It’s a sort of Roaring Twenties vibe from America and Europe merged with the established Four Nations Asian-inspired world Avatar handed down. There’s Art Deco architecture and 1920s fashion alongside steampunk-inspired technology like satomobiles and mecha tanks. It’s not just vibe; Korra uses its fusion to dredge the lakebed on tradition versus progress, spirituality versus technology, and the social upheavals that come with McMassive industrialisation. In an unrelated note, I don’t think a lot of AI tech-bros have watched The Legend of Korra.

Literature isn’t immune. While it’s not popular to talk about Gaiman these days, his American Gods imagines a world where gods from various mythologies and cultures exist in modern-day America. The Almighty Johnsons riffed on this same prestige in my New Zealand back yard.

Now we’ve seen how it works… how do you do it yourself?

The Cultural Catalyst Framework

Let’s say you want to try this at home. Maybe you’re a writer. You could be a TTRPG game master, too. Hell, maybe you’re in Hollywood and wanting that new spice. Regardless, I’ve got a system for you. Let’s call it… The Cultural Catalyst Framework.

You can tell I’m a recovering IT architect. Architects love frameworks.

There are three phases to our framework: Foundation, Fusion, and Focus.

The Foundation

Step 1: Identify your core theme. To avoid scaring the everliving shit out of your reader, you need a touchstone. Something familiar, a genre or story structure your audience understands. Be specific.

• Not just “Fantasy.” Is it a “Quest-based High Fantasy in the Tolkien tradition?” What about a “Gritty, Low-Magic Sword & Sorcery?”

• Not just “Sci-Fi.” Is it a “Hard Sci-Fi Space Opera?” Maybe you’d prefer a “Dystopian Cyberpunk Thriller?”

• Not just “Mystery.” Is it a “Cozy English Village Whodunnit?” Or maybe a “Hardboiled American Noir?”

Let’s use Hardboiled American Noir. We know the tropes already: a cynical private eye, a femme fatale, a corrupt city, moral ambiguity, jazz music, and rain-slicked streets. If you feel like this could write itself, you’re not wrong. It’s been written a thousand times already. That’s why we want a cultural catalyst.

Step 2: Choose a culture to blend with your theme. It doesn’t matter if it’s historical or contemporary, but what does matter is choosing it for the right reason. If your reason is, “Bro, it’s exotic,” you’re not only stepping dangerously close to cultural appropriation, you’re committing a worse sin: you’re risking reader boredom. Choose something for a thematic or aesthetic reason.

• Thematic Resonance: Is there a philosophical concept that creates interesting friction with your core? For example, the Noir theme of fatalism versus the Buddhist concept of Karma.

• Aesthetic Contrast: Does a culture’s visual language create a striking new look? The sharp, brutalist architecture of the Soviet era would be dope when mixed with the organic, flowing art of the Celts.

• Structural Parallel: Does a historical society’s structure mirror your genre’s needs in a new way? The rigid social hierarchy of Feudal Japan could be your perfect fit for a political court intrigue story.

We’re going to select 1920s Shanghai: The Paris of the East will be our cultural catalyst. We’ve got a rich history of international intrigue, colonial powers, and powerful gangs, and we can create a unique blend by dubstepping Chinese tradition with Western modernity.

Step 3 is important for not cocking this up completely: Do your research. You’ll want something a little deeper than most Wikipedia articles provide because we want our world to feel lived in. You want to be able to answer three elements:

• The Senses: What does it look, sound, smell, and taste like? Think architecture, fashion, music, food, and technology.

• The Rules: How do people interact? What are the social hierarchies, family structures, legal systems, economic drivers, and political factions?

• The Soul: What do your people believe? This could be religion & mythology, their core values, and how they feel about honour, life, death, and justice.

The reason you want to research this is so your world feels authentic, but also so you can tweak this authenticity. We’ll get into this a bit more in our real-world Richard-writes example. Now, let’s get into combining this.

The Fusion

The fun part begins: we’re going to combine the elements from the three steps of the Foundation. To avoid this sounding like a bad copy/paste from Wikipedia into that term paper you forgot about until the night before, we’re going to apply some techniques.

Technique 1: Juxtaposition. This is a fancy term for placing things side-by-side. It’s the simplest method; all we’re doing is taking a part from Culture A and placing it directly into Culture B. The reader’s tension and interest come from contrast. Cowboy Bebop does this: a classic Western-style bounty hunter (Spike) operates out of a ship that feels like a lived-in apartment, maybe eating noodles in a marketplace modelled on Hong Kong.

In our worked example, our Noir detective in a fedora and trench coat walks out of a European-style Art Deco building on the Shanghai Bund and navigates a crowded street market full of traditional Qipao dresses, rickshaws, and the smell of street food. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it, and the detective hasn’t even seen a murder yet.

Technique 2: Synthesis. This is a more complex trick where we’re creating a hybrid. We’re going to merge a concept from Culture A with a concept in Culture B. This is your, “What if?” that leads right to the door of something completely new. Avatar does this by asking, “What if the four classic Greek elements were the basis for a magic system, but the movements and philosophy behind that magic were based on different Chinese martial arts? Holy shit: you get Bending.” Korra, not content to be a mere spin-off, also does this by asking, “What if 1920s American industrialisation and car culture happened in an Asian-inspired setting? Great gadzooks, Batman: you get satomobiles and Republic City.”

In our worked example…

• What if our Femme Fatale is a powerful “singsong girl” from a high-class teahouse instead of our expected nightclub singer, who uses her social influence and knowledge of secrets gathered from powerful men in a way that merges the Noir trope with a specific cultural role from 1920s Shanghai? You get the inside woman, a powerful force that might confound the detective in ways our reader doesn’t expect. You might even get the Noir version of Liara T’Soni after she and Shepard take down the Shadow Broker in Mass Effect.

• What if the classic American Mafia structure was synthesised with the complex codes of honour, ritual, and guanxi—social networks—of the Green Gang? Your mob boss isn’t just a thug; he’s a figure of immense social and spiritual importance.

Technique 3: Reinterpretation. This one’s the most subtle. Take a core trope or character from the Foundation and ask how the new culture would catalyse this into something new. 2011’s Thundercats does this, reinterpreting the privileged Lion-O into first a warrior then a leader through a Samurai Bushido code. He learns respect is earned and might doesn’t make right, despite his upbringing.

Back to our example, a core tenet of Noir is the detective’s lonely, individualistic cynicism. It’s going to change because he’s operating within a Confucianist culture that values filial piety and family connection. His ‘loner’ status isn’t just a personality quirk; now it’s a profound social and spiritual failure, making his isolation actually mean something. Instead of solving the case for money, he might want to restore honour to a family name. His motivation just became cool as hell, man.

We’ve got a Foundation and a Fusion. What’s next, boss?

The Focus

Our final step is where we work out if what we’ve done is cohesive but, more importantly, meaningful. Remember, we don’t want to be boring. Three steps will lead us to victory.

Step 1: Ask Why. Why does this fusion exist in your world? Did one culture colonise the other? Did they meet as equals for trade? Was there a mass migration? This fuels the power dynamics, the conflicts, and the themes of your story. In our example, 1920s Shanghai’s blend was due to trade and colonialism, which is a source of immense narrative tension. We can probably already guess how the victim’s going to end up murdered.

Step 2: Find the Universal Theme. What human truth becomes real through your specific blend? Cowboy Bebop’smix of lonely American archetypes with a diverse, transient solar system gifted the audience a touchstone, giving an understanding of how the characters were trying to find a place to belong while running from their past. Our Noir-Shanghai blend could be a powerful story about the conflict between tradition and modernity, or the loss of identity in a rapidly changing world. Can you see how the femme fatale fits here?

Step 3: The Respectful Appropriation Check. This is the final, non-negotiable gate. This is a big topic, but I’ve got a five-point checklist for you:

1. Am I representing or stereotyping? A stereotype is a simplistic and potentially derogatory shortcut. A representation is nuanced, complex, and gives characters agency.

2. Am I honouring or borrowing? Honouring involves deep research and giving context. Borrowing often means stripping an element (like a sacred symbol repurposed as a tattoo you thought would look dope on your MC’s arm) of its meaning just because it looks cool.

3. Who holds the power in my story? Are the characters from the catalyst culture fully realised individuals who drive the plot, or are they just exotic background decoration for the core culture’s protagonist?

4. Am I stealing someone else’s voice? We want to encourage readers to both learn about the culturally diverse world they live in here on Earth, as well as the one they’re about to visit, but we don’t want to steal minority voices on the way.

5. How am I getting feedback? Find sensitivity readers from the culture you are drawing inspiration from. They can point out blind spots, inaccuracies, and unconscious biases that you—as an outsider!—will 100% have.

Making Something Awesome

I risk being more cringe than Rhys Darby by talking about my own work, but we’ll try to get through this with as little violent shaking as possible. Enter: the Night’s Champion.

Night’s Champion is a trilogy dealing with werewolves, but it’s really a superhero story. It also spawned a sequel trilogy, Dawn’s Warden, which is the what’s-next, but let’s tame our enthusiasm for just a moment. Being a superhero tale means book one’s an origin story, book two’s a dark middle chapter, and book three… well, shit gets real. Night’s fusion of settings uses the techniques I’ve shown.

Let’s start with the Foundation.

• Step 1. This isn’t just “superhero.” This is “Action-meets-myth superhero where werewolves have been hunted to extinction… except for that one guy.”

• Step 2. Werewolf stories, especially around the time I penned Night’s, were all about the vampire crossover. There was a popular TTRPG, World of Darkness, where there were werewolves, vampires, and so on. Underworldhad rocked the cinema world. I wanted to use these as the common cultural ground so as not scare the shit out of my reader, but also blend them with aspects of voudou, Celtic myth, and so on. I felt the aspects of borrowed power from voudou would make an excellent thematic resonance for book two, and there’s an aesthetic contrast in book three when beings of myth—the werewolves—meet Judaeo-Christian powers (the Horsepersons of the Apocalypse).

• Step 3. I did research into all kinds of shit. This was partially enjoyable—rewatching all the Underworld movies is never a bad time, except for the ball-grating experience of Rise of the Lycans. It was also partially educational—while I very much enjoyed skimming over cargo cults when reading Dream Park, getting deeper into this was a good time. There’s nothing bad here, I was either having fun or learning something.

This all meant that by book three, a lot of this (hopefully!) felt authentic. If you want to write a werewolf story about an everliving dark antihero, and remix it with Judaeo-Christian mythology so a protagonist was around and vibing, able to actually see the Crucifixion, well… we can agree that setup probably never happened in Earth’s history, but answering the senses, rules, and soul meant my readers lived through every dark ‘historical’ moment. I was also able to break the rules with confidence in the worldbuilder’s version of, “Hold my beer and watch this.”

Now, what about the Fusion? I used Techniques 2 and 3—synthesis and re-interpretation. They’re werewolves, but they also have a spiritual lineage that’s passed down like a tribal shared memory. The Horsepersons are what we thought they were, except they’re actually real people who have their own lives and care about this world they live in. Vampires are bad, sure, but that’s because they were made that way, and what if one of them didn’t like the cut of his cloth? I like to think there’s no carbon copies of any of the source tropes in the entire trilogy, and you can imagine how—in the Night’s universe—myths handed down over millennia warped and shifted away from what was real. Also, it let me have werewolves that knew kung fu.

Finally, I came to Focus.

• Step 1: The Why of how the werewolves we met in book 1 ended up duking it out with powers right out of the Bible in book 3 is because, in this world, all myths have some truth to them. Things we call fantasy or magic are just systems or tools for the pantheon of legend. They didn’t choose the world, but they still had to live in it.

• Step 2: The universal theme was humanity. I wanted this story to be about the people in it, not the superpowers or the dope-ass special effects Hollywood would no doubt drop in there if they ever optioned the rights to it. The trilogy is about, “What if these really complex types of beings had very human motivations? What if monsters were beautiful on the inside, and beautiful people turned out to be monsters?”

• Step 3: Appropriation is a really complicated topic, but in brief I used both alpha and beta readers both during the writing, and then to tune the final product. It led to things like a dudebro becoming less homophobic, despite how ‘real’ that was in the world at the time, or a complete gender change for a main character—I wanted to be sure there was no hint of power imbalance due to the meat people were made of.

The end result is a series with werewolves and vampires, sure, but there are also zombies, voudou, and the four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, and that’s before Mary Magdalene makes an appearance at the end. The Dawn’s Warden trilogy continues where Night’s left off, bringing in Celtic and other influences. The ‘genre’ lane of these books is superhero, but you’d never know it because of how powerful the cultural fusion technique is.

They don’t look or smell like anything the MCU would put on screen.

So, What?

We’ve covered a lot of ground today. A framework for remixing reality, which can be used as a detector for appreciating it when you see it done well. We’ve talked about the great successes at genre-bending, and we’ve talked about at least one critical fumble. And I’ve given you a toolkit on how to make it work, while showing how I did it myself.

Now I want to hear from you! The world is a massive, incredible spice rack filled with inspiration. The only rule is to be a respectful chef.

• For the writers and GMs: What’s a dream cultural fusion you’ve always wanted to build? Want a remix of Battlestar Galactica with Vikings instead of an Egyptian motif? I’d watch the hell out of that.

• And for everyone: What’s the best (or worst!) example of cultural fusion you’ve ever seen? Was it the awesome multicultural fairy tale vibes of a game like Ravenswatch, or a critical fumble like Thundercats Roar that you can’t forget?

Drop your answers in the comments below. I’d love to geek out about this stuff with you. And if you dig the idea of worldbending, click Like! For more of my hack writer tricks…

Our talk dives into tricks, tools, and mindset that Cassie’s used to continue being one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s foremost speculative fiction talents. It doesn’t matter if you’re a filthy creative or working out how to wrangle 7 jobs and 4 kids, there are some thought-provoking, resonant concepts in this interview.

What’s Inside

• We start off strong with a battle royale between Wellington’s top bakeries, then roll into life, writing, and managing 🔥 without losing your sanity (or your hot cross buns).

• Guild Wars, urban fantasy, and a forum intro: the origin story of two New Zealand authors who met online and became instant mates.

• We navigate neurodivergence and creativity: tools for ADHD brains and burning out (but staying hopeful).

• There’s Cassie’s concept of Editing Your Own Life™: how Cassie uses writing to navigate It.

Feminine rage is real, and it deserves a creative outlet. We use Cassie’s mindfulness-as-activism Substack as an anchor, then talk through the experiences gained and the people she’s met along the way. The best part about this interview is the duo of New Zealand accents; bask in the dulcet tones from our section of the Commonwealth. And we give you Cassie’s burn-out survival kit:

• Walks (sans earbuds)

• Audiobooks + mindless mobile games

• Knitting or tactile fidgeting

• Playlists for mood-shifting

• Creative projects with no reader in mind

It’s all here… from self-reliance to shared resilience, opening up helped Cassie rebuild her life and her art.

Need More Cassie?

Of course you do; the best place to start is her Substack:

Chronically Burnt Out (but hopeful)

A writer learning how to work with what I've got and be happy about it - and sharing my journey along the way

By Cassie Hart

If you want to get her words right into your brain, let me recommend Kotahi Bay’s OG book, In the Spirit, available in read or listen formats: get the book or audio version.

You can read a previous interview with takahē here, or watch a much earlier one here:

If you’re up for more author interviews, hit that subscribe button like it just cut you off in traffic:

But there’s a trap: get too wrapped up in mechanics and you forget to tell a story, or put characters in it.

If you’re afraid your book reads more like patch notes than a novel, you’ve got yourself a problem. If your protagonist spends more time explaining their inventory than actually using it, you might be entering the new genre of spreadsheet fiction.

So how do you write LitRPG that’s engaging, immersive, and doesn’t drown in stats? Let’s pick-a-path to victory.

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on LitRPG: its origins, how to write it, and why it works.

LitRPG is fun until it turns into a wiki page masquerading as a novel. Want to write a game-driven story that readers actually care about? Here’s how to balance mechanics with storytelling.

• Missed Part 1? Here it is:

• Next: Overthinking: Is LitRPG Just Escapism, or Something Deeper? – where we get deep and metaphysical on why this genre is so damn addictive:

Balancing Mechanics & Story: Avoiding Spreadsheet Fiction

The core issue is that many writers get too caught up in game systems at the expense of plot. That WorldAnvil you put together to support the story becomes the story, and hard truth time: it’s not really as interesting as you think it is.

The mistake is that some LitRPG books read like you’ve accidentally picked up the game’s wiki instead of the actual story. I get it: stats, skills, and crafting trees are fun to build. But if your readers are wading through 50 pages of skill descriptions before anything happens, you’ve lost them. You should never have to explain any of this shit to them, because, like urban fantasy, they already come equipped with half the worldbuilding done for you. They have an internalised knowledge of what games are and how they work.

It’s worth noting, though, that a growing number of LitRPG works are flipping the script, learning from the older classics and melding familiar game mechanics with layered storytelling that questions the very nature of power and success. It’s these examples that give us our method for not falling into the same spike trap.

The fix is to use stats like seasoning, not the main course. A few lines of skill progression are fine, but don’t let it hijack the story. Readers love personalised and contextual narratives and don’t immediately attach to numbers, so onstead of listing “Strength +3, Dexterity +2,” show the impact: “He swung harder than before, his strike landing with enough force to send the goblin skidding backward.”

And crucially, interrogate yourself like you’re in Guantanamo Bay. Does what you’re doing advance the story? If your character is choosing a skill upgrade, make it mean something for character growth, strategy, or an upcoming challenge. There should be consequences and challenges for every decision, otherwise there are no stakes.

Worldbuilding: Making Game Elements Feel Organic

The world should feel like it exists beyond the protagonist’s UI.

The mistake a lot of LitRPG books make is that they feel like the game world was built five minutes before the protagonist logged in. NPCs exist to hand out quests, towns are just quest hubs, and the world lacks a lived-in feel, almost as if it’s running in screensaver mode.

The fix is to give the world a life of its own. NPCs should have agendas, personalities, and quirks. Maybe the blacksmith’s got gambling debts, or the innkeeper secretly funds a rebellion. This should lead you think beyond the quest log. Make the setting feel alive by including details that don’t directly serve the protagonist’s immediate goals. Use quirks like game bugs in the code to enhance the realism for the players-slash-heroes. And don’t forget that consistency matters. If magic requires mana, don’t let your hero spam fireballs without consequence. If the game’s economy is built on rare loot, don’t let them accidentally break it by farming gold or items and escaping the world’s gravity well and into OP orbit.

Here’s a quick example:

“The town had an item shop. When I entered, the owner wasn’t waiting for me with a ? above her head. She was balls-deep in an argument with her iron supplier about the price. I heard her rage that some new dungeon drop was tanking prices. What should I do? Go Karen my way into her grill or wait it out? I wasn’t the main character in her story. I was just another customer.”

Character Growth & Player Agency: Writing Protagonists Who Aren’t Just Avatars

Your hero needs to be more than just a walking set of stats.

The mistake is that some LitRPG protagonists feel like cardboard cutouts. They exist to gain XP, get loot, and exploit mechanics. They don’t have goals, flaws, or personalities beyond “win game, get stronger.”

The Fix is easy: give them personal stakes. Why is your protagonist here? Are they trapped? Seeking revenge? Trying to protect someone? Their arc should be more than just getting to max level. Their choices should matter. Let them struggle to find the optimal strategy. Maybe the best skill upgrade requires betraying an ally, or the best loot comes at the cost of public trust. Does this provide an angle for a moral dilemma? Flaws make heroes interesting. A protagonist who never struggles, never doubts, and always wins with perfect efficiency isn’t a character—they’re a caricature, a power fantasy checklist.

Some contemporary LitRPGs intentionally embrace these tropes as a backdrop to explore themes of sacrifice and the hidden costs of power, which deepens the narrative in unexpected ways.

Here’s a quick example:

“The +5 Sword of Infinite Destruction made my palms itch when I held it. This could short-circuit my fight with Grondar the Invincible, because we all want to know what happens when the infinite meets the invincible. But… it belonged to the warrior father of Meredith, and I was really hoping to meet her. In the real, you know? Should I keep it? I’d never shake the feeling I’d stolen something that wasn’t mine. And Meredith would know.”

Common Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them

Avoiding the most common writing sins of the genre can be done with a quick checklist.

Avoid info-dumps:

• 🚨 Red flag: “Here’s a 3,000-word breakdown of the game’s economy before the first quest.”

• ✅ Fix: Give players just enough to understand what’s happening. Readers will pick up the rules as they go, just like in real games.

Jettison your OP MC:

• 🚨 Red flag: “By Chapter Two, I had unlocked Ultimate God Mode and one-shot the Demon Lord.”

• ✅ Fix: Struggles create tension. Make power gains feel earned, not just handed out for free. The Demon Lord is a chapter five victory at best.

Stop the repetitive grind sequences:

• 🚨 Red flag: “I spent five chapters farming boars for XP.”

If your protagonist needs to grind, fine. But unless they’re training with a Jedi master or making a Faustian pact, we don’t need to see it.

Example:

“Three days of training later, my legs felt like lead, but my dodges were faster. No more taking fireballs to the face for me, once I could walk without wincing.”

Conclusion: LitRPG Is a Game… Make It a Good One

Writing LitRPG is a balancing act—mechanics should enhance the story, not replace it. Your world should feel alive, your protagonist should have real stakes, and your pacing should keep things moving.

Your TL;DR:

• Mechanics should serve the story, not dominate it.

• Worldbuilding should feel lived-in, not like a backdrop.

• Characters should have goals, flaws, and actual choices.

So, if you’re writing LitRPG, remember: readers aren’t here just for stats and skill trees. They want a great story. Don’t lose sight of it. And if you want to read my painful, cringeworthy first attempt at LitRPG, click below. Warning: I wrote this when I was fifteen, so it will be actively hostile to everything you hold dear as a writer:

[https://bf.parrydox.com/xcja1zlbxw]

Now go forth and write a book that makes people care about more than just the XP bar.

It’s your turn. What’s your biggest LitRPG pet peeve? Too many stat dumps? OP protagonists with no struggle? Rant along with me in the comments. And if you liked this, ring the Like Button of Glamour, or…

If you’re feeling generous, toss a coin to this witcher on Ko-fi. It’s like a posthumous bribe for writing just what you needed.

Continue this series: Overthinking, but Professionally: Is LitRPG Just Escapism, or Something Deeper? Now we’ve talked about how to write it, we can get into why it hits so hard. I’m breaking down what makes LitRPG resonate beyond just wish-fulfilment:

It’s a huge amount of time to invest without getting feedback on how good the book is. There are tools to help, such as writer’s groups, and I’m going to share another: a self-starter you can use without the fear of another human making the You-Fucked-Up face.

The real problem with humans is that, often, they want to make you feel good, or objectively think your feelings are things to be trashed. Getting good human feedback is super hard, because humans in general: a) think they’re good at feedback, but b) are fucking not.

But reviews before reviews are still hugely valuable. We want to get the unbiased take without the existential dread of Goodreads. We want to improve, but without the gut-punch to the ego (especially when it’s delivered by an anonymous keyboard warrior with a vendetta against adjectives who believes your work is the one he’ll sacrifice on that hill of one-star failures).

I’ve got a new series coming out and wanted to build a system for getting decent pre-release feedback for it. The first step was building a system for works that already exist. I decided to take a fresh look at my debut novel, Night’s Favor, to see how it held up all these years later. I wasn’t looking for validation (that ship has sailed), but rather to understand what I’d learned since then and whether that book still kicks ass for the Lord.

I’ll also share the output at the end in case you want to check out what a “successful render” of this looks like.

A Fresh Perspective Without the Trauma

A challenge with relying on human beta readers is time. Humans are slow, man. We want a system that doesn’t move at the pace of someone’s eyeballs. We also want to avoid doomscrolling reviews until we lose all will to live, let alone write. Here’s what I did:

1️⃣ Generated an unbiased review. I fed my manuscript into ChatGPT and asked for an honest critique of its strengths and weaknesses.

2️⃣ Synthesised real reviews. I gathered my Goodreads reviews (including the spicy ones) and fed them into ChatGPT to analyse patterns.

3️⃣ Created a podcast-style review. I asked NotebookLM to combine both of these outputs into a podcast-like analysis, simulating a critical discussion of my work.

The result: a based AI that’s brutally honest about saying your pacing is dodgy but your dialogue slaps.

Diagnosing Strengths and Weaknesses

What I learned wasn’t shocking, just… clearer. The things I’d suspected about my writing (good and bad) were reinforced, but without the emotional gut punch. This process helped me pinpoint where I’d grown as a writer and what still needed work. Also, I found it more fun to listen to two fictional anchors talk about the work than flensing my brain with review doomscrolling.

For any writer looking to refine their craft, this method isn’t about making an AI podcast empire of your own books (tempting, though)—it’s about perspective.

How You Can Use This to Improve Your Writing

If you’re staring at your manuscript, wondering what’s working and what’s not, try this:

1️⃣ Get a structured review. Ask an AI tool (or even a text summariser) to highlight your book’s strengths and weaknesses. Focus on patterns, not one-off comments.

2️⃣ (If the book has already been seen by human eyeballs, if not, skip to step 3) Look for review trends. If you have existing writer’s group or beta reader feedback, feed it into an analysis tool. Even a simple manual review can help—what keeps coming up? Are multiple readers saying your pacing lags but your characters shine? That’s the sauce.

3️⃣ Use summaries for clarity. AI-generated reviews aren’t gospel, but they can highlight areas you may have overlooked. Feed 1+2 into a tool and instruct it to be honest and structured. Think of it like a second opinion after using Google to research that ailment. You suspect cancer, but Google ain’t no doctor, so this can validate or overthrow your diagnosis.

Can This Replace Beta Readers?

Hell, no. AI won’t replace thoughtful human feedback, but since thoughtful humans are rare, this is a valuable first step. AI tends to suck at knowing if plot twists are predictable or understanding emotions, especially when it comes to character arcs. What AI does is help you spot broad patterns in your writing and give you an early sense of what’s working.

More importantly, it can give you confidence. So much of what we write goes unread (or worse, gets lost in the void of Amazon’s endless shelves). Getting an outside perspective, even from an AI tool, can remind you that your writing has strengths and that you’re always improving.

If you’ve ever needed a confidence boost (or just a fresh way to see your work), this might be worth a shot. Have you tried anything like this? Let me know in the comments!

If this tip was helpful, consider buying me a coffee on Ko-fi. The AI reviewer doesn’t need it, but I sure do.

PS: The “podcast” output I promised!

From fantasy epics to space operas, from gritty urban crime tales to historical dramas, the core themes that make superhero stories powerful (reinvention, the mask, and the cost of becoming something more) can give any genre a much-needed punch in the narrative gut.

I’m about to unleash some storytelling hacks that will elevate your heroes from oddly-boring-despite-the-great-hair to I-must-analyse-their-backstory-in-a-3,000-word-Reddit-post level. Whether you’re writing romantasy (love triangles, but with swords!) or epic space opera (and yes, using an ion cannon on a capital ship is questionable diplomacy), these tricks will make your heroes more relatable, believable, and most importantly, the kind of protagonist who forces readers to sacrifice sleep just to see what happens next.

Before we dive in, we need a quick primer on what a mask really means, even if superheroes aren’t your thing. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.

The Two Types of Mask

Masks in fiction tend to do one of two things: they either hide who you are or free you to be something more. The MCU often treats masks like glorified witness protection (Spider-Man wears one so Aunt May doesn’t get held hostage again, and Magik wears hers as equal parts armour and escape hatch). Meanwhile, the DCU treats masks like a psychological permission slip: Batman’s cowl lets Bruce Wayne abandon billionaire brunches and punch criminals right in the nuts, while Superman’s emblem isn’t just a symbol of hope. It’s a declaration that he’s choosing to stand for something bigger than himself, every single day.

Both types of masks are powerful narrative tools. They can be a hero’s shield against the world or a way to step into the truest version of themselves. They can multitask, too: Barbara Gordon uses the cowl to reclaim her agency and personal power while shielding those she loves from the repercussions of being Batgirl.

Masks aren’t just for disguise; they’re an advertisement, a manifesto, or a neon sign that says, “I have issues.” At their core, they either conceal identity to protect someone from consequences or redefine identity to push past personal limitations, anguish, guilt, or even morality itself.

TL;DR: sometimes you wear the mask to hide, and sometimes you wear it to become.

The Superhero Blueprint: More Than Capes and Powers

There’s a thing genre fiction sometimes misses: a true hero’s journey isn’t just about levelling up like a well-fed D&D character. It’s about choosing to become something else entirely.

A traditional hero’s journey is about discovery: finding strength, embracing destiny, and maybe dipping into the whole 'chosen one' song and dance. But a superhero’s journey is about reinvention. It’s about looking in the mirror and saying, “You know what I’d look amazing in? Angst and some unresolved trauma.” Our hero leaves behind a weaker, flawed, or even unpalatable self to become the person they believe they should be… but that transformation never comes without cost.

• Peter Parker was already trying to do good before he was bitten. The bite gave him power, the mask gave him freedom, and responsibility came along like an uninvited guest who refuses to leave. No matter how strong he gets, Spider-Man can’t escape the cruel math of heroism: someone always has to suffer, and it’s usually him.

• Natasha Romanoff was a trained assassin before she became an Avenger. The Black Widow’s Avengers-level makeover let her reinvent herself, but deep down, she knows a sleek catsuit doesn’t erase a body count. She’s trying to balance the cosmic scales, but redemption is a tricky currency. Her past is inescapable, and she never fully believes in her own redemption.

• Bruce Banner was a scientist working to better the world, but the Hulk doesn’t exactly believe in peer review. Hulk smashes, and Banner gets in a sook about it later. Deep down, he knows the green rage monster does the things he won’t. Those things, maybe, need to be done, and that’s what really keeps him up at night. Violent, capricious, judgemental, and unreasoned is perhaps the truest self Banner needs to be, and he hates it.

This dynamic isn’t exclusive to superheroes. It’s one of the best storytelling hacks out there: give a character a mask, a moral crisis, and some really bad life choices, and suddenly you’ve got a page-turner.

Reinvention: The Mask We Choose

Heroes across all genres wear masks, literal or metaphorical. Sometimes it’s a cowl, sometimes it’s a persona, and often it’s an elaborate lie they tell themselves to sleep at night. The mask isn’t just for disguise or letting the hero pull off cool stunts without tanking their Tinder profile. It’s a tool for becoming. But, like that stalker ex, the past refuses to take the hint and move the fuck on.

• Geralt of Rivia reinvents himself as a monster hunter, or arguably, he reinvents what monsters are. He could have doubled down on his solid career choice, living a quiet, ordinary witcher life of drinking mutagens and fighting fanged horrors for ungrateful villagers. You might say, “Richard, my dude, but witchers are monster hunters.” The real twist isn’t that he’s fresh out of monsters, it’s that he’s widened his selection of targets to include human villains. This forced reinvention is one that most witchers avoid, but Geralt, against all odds, actually cares.

• Captain Mal Reynolds was once a believer. Then the war broke him, and he decided that if he couldn’t win, he’d at least be the most sarcastic loser in the ‘verse. He reinvented himself as a rogue, a smuggler, a guy who does crime but, like, with principles. The mask slips, though. Mal wants to do good, but only if it involves giving the finger to the Alliance. But those principles keep dogging his heels. He’s an antihero who turns defeat into a way of life, except when it really matters. Then, he refuses to lose.

• John Wick has a complicated mask arrangement. First, he put one on and tried to be a normal, well-adjusted guy. Then some absolute clown killed his dog. The mask shattered, revealing the Baba Yaga. Again. John thought he wanted out of the crime world, but he also kind of enjoys what the mask allows him to be. And for a little while, so do we.

I steal these tricks ruthlessly. My debut novel Night’s Favor might look like an urban fantasy werewolf story, but it’s really about reinvention. Val doesn’t just gain power. He becomes something that rewires how the world sees him. And when hiding isn’t an option, what’s left? In Val’s case, it’s pure nightmare fuel for a guy who used to work in IT. I’m doubling down on these themes in my upcoming follow-up Dawn’s Warden trilogy, because a hero’s journey isn’t about power. It’s about what you’re willing to leave behind to wield it.

How to Use This in Any Genre

If you want to write a hero that resonates, don’t just focus on their abilities. Ask what they have to sacrifice to become someone new. Powers, swords, or space lasers are all winner tools, but the real hook is what it costs the hero to use them.

1. Reinvention Should Cost Something. If your hero gains something, what do they lose in return? Can they ever truly go back?

• In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne doesn’t just disappear for seven years. He trades his rich, powerful life for a one-man war on crime. Hope he wasn’t too attached to dating.

• In Logan, Wolverine wants to move on, but because of the choices he and others made, retirement is… permanent. Turns out, you don’t get to just retire from what you’ve done (especially when what you did isn’t very nice).

If there’s no cost, there’s no transformation. All you’ve done is opened the Player’s Handbook for a level-up.

2. Let the Past Haunt the Hero. Reinvention isn’t a clean break. The past lingers. It tempts. It whispers like a villain monologuing before the final boss fight.

• Peter Parker won’t let people die for the greater good, even if one death would save hundreds. He’s a good man, and good men suffer for it.

• Natasha Romanoff makes ruthless choices because she has to, but that doesn’t mean she gets a good night’s sleep. She’s got enough baggage to start her own airline.

• Mal Reynolds tells himself he’s out for himself, but the moment someone needs him, there he is, doing the right thing, even when people hate him for it. Especially when people hate him for it. It keeps getting in the way with Inara… Mal can’t let himself be happy when injustice exists.

A true hero’s journey isn’t about getting stronger. It’s about fighting the version of yourself you used to be.

3. Let the Mask Crack. At some point, every hero should face the question: Is this really who I am?

• Batman tells himself Bruce Wayne is just a role he plays, but Bruce is just Batman doing an awkward billionaire impression. But Batman yearns for Bruce’s freedom. He’s constantly tested by what could have been. It’s a sacrifice he must remake every time he hangs up his dinner jacket after networking at charity galas.

• Daredevil keeps swearing off vigilantism like a bad habit, only to spiral right back into the crime-fighting chaos. He’s in more dire need of anger management therapy than the Punisher.

• In Night’s Favor, Val doesn’t get a choice—his mask is permanent. The only thing he can control is how he wears it, and it turns out the answer to that is covered in blood.

If your hero never questions themselves, they’re just an action figure with plot armour.

4. Make the Villain a Mirror. A great antagonist doesn’t just confront the hero. They force the hero to confront themselves.

• The Joker isn’t a funhouse criminal. He needs Batman to admit they’re the same.

• Killmonger isn’t a challenger to the throne. He forces T’Challa to question what Wakanda really stands for.

• In Dawn’s Warden, the enemies aren’t villains. They’re reminders of what Isolde could become if she lets the mask own her.

A villain’s job isn’t to be evil-flavoured ice cream. They’re here to make the hero look in the mirror and go, “Oh. Oh no! Am I the drama?” Their job is to poke at the hero’s deepest fears like the therapist version of Chucky.

5. Show the Slips. Reinvention isn’t a straight path. There’s always backsliding, like your gym-focused New Year’s resolution in February.

• Tony Stark swears he’ll change, but oh look, another bad decision just walked in wearing killer heels. Pass the bottle.

• Natasha Romanoff wants to be better, but she still plays the odds like an assassin. She can never get her ledger to black, because she’s paying off her villain’s Amex with her hero’s Mastercard.

• Geralt of Rivia tries to stay neutral, but neutrality is hard when humans are worse than the monsters you’re supposed to fight. At least monsters have pure motives.

The best heroes aren’t the failure-free. They get back up, even when it hurts. They’re the ones who struggle to stay the person they choose to be.

The Takeaway

A great hero isn’t defined by their powers, their weapons, or their K/D/A statistics. They’re defined by the cost of becoming who they are.

• If your hero’s biggest challenge is defeating the big bad, you’re writing an action story.

• If your hero’s biggest challenge is fighting who they used to be, you’re writing a hero’s journey.

The best stories (whether fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction, or even horror) aren’t all cool fights or flashy powers. Ironically, that shit bores audiences to tears; it’s how Disney turned the golden goose into an ordinary goose. The best stories are about reinvention, sacrifice, and the masks we wear to survive.

At the end of the day, the most compelling heroes aren’t just the ones who win. They’re the ones who change.

What do you think of using the superhero genre’s tricks to make better heroes? Let me know in the comments. And if this piece made you want to put aside the spandex for existential suffering, consider supporting me on Ko-fi:

A good friend of mine wrote me recently with a reader question: “Why, since you’ve plotted out your latest series, don’t you release it right away as a single book?”

It’s actually a great question, and as Saff and I were batting this one across the Internet, I thought I’d write up our discussion – lo, here it is (…also, I did an interview with Saffron back in the day – it’s at the bottom of this post ICYMI).

What’s the problem, exactly?

Let’s say you’re an author and you want to write a new series. You’ll sit down and draft out the plot, and depending on whether you’re Stephen King (a notorious discovery writer) or James Patterson (almost criminal in his pursuit of plot clarity at the outset), that will be “vague idea of how it ends” to “I know what flavour gum the antagonist is chewing in chapter 12, because it’s pivotal to how the hero disarms the bomb in chapter 34.”

The plot is a series of events our hero(es) go through from the opening to the closing credits. The big question that prompted this discussion was, “Well, if you know how the plot unfolds, why is it 3 books? Why isn’t it just one book?”

If you’ve already got the plot, why not write it down and call the job done?

This is a great question. Ignoring things like writer preference (some might like chunking up, some might like the Yellow Pages edition…) and marketability (there is evidence trilogies sell better than almost anything else), what we’re really talking about is the difference between plot and story.

What do we mean by plot and story?

Plot is a series of events or activities. Story is the lived experience of the characters undergoing the plot.

Plot is actually the easy part. You can hop onto ChatGPT right now and ask it to generate a plot for you. Arguably, all the world’s plots are already known. While there are mechanical components to an interesting plot, it’s the tip of the iceberg.

The real sauce is the story. This is where your plot breathes through the lives of your characters. The plot defines that Michael and John fall in love, but the story lets it happen. They get to talk to each other. Go on dates. We learn what kind of martini Michael likes, and that John loves dogs. We feel John’s heart flutter when he gets a txt, and how Michael has an “it’s complicated” relationship status on Facebook that is confusing for both of them.

A writer can bullet-point these out for you, but it’s got no life. If it did, we’d be able to buy the Cliff Notes summary of every novel and get all the feeling from it that reading the novel provides. But Cliff Notes never promised to make you laugh or cry. They tell you what happened, but not why or how.

And that why+how is what takes your plot outline from a few text boxes in Aeon Timeline through to a 80,000-word novel, or trilogy.

Do you have an example?

There’s a great movie called Long Shot. In it, Seth Rogan’s Fred and Charlize Theron’s Charlotte get into a relationship (and if you think this is a spoiler, we’re starting to understand the difference between plot and story).

It starts out innocently enough. Fred’s been fired by The Man™ and Charlotte is running for Prez. She hires him as a punch-up writer, because a) he’s a good, powerful writer and b) because she quite likes the cut of his jib from knowing him when they were teenagers. Cue the most outstandingly long shot in romance movie history, which is part of the movie’s superb charm.

During the ‘discovery phase’ of their rediscovered friendship, Fred asks Charlotte about herself (what she likes, that kind of thing). During this scene we learn she knows a) everything that happens in Game of Thrones, but b) has never watched an episode. She gets summaries from an aide, so when she’s doing cocktails with the Sultan of Brunei or whatever, she can vibe on the plot and make it sound like she knows what the story is about.

Fred is dumbfounded, but Charlotte doesn’t understand the problem. This is because Fred likes stories; Charlotte only needs the plot.

Or does she?

Later in the movie, Charlotte watches the GoT episode where a (very cool and loyal) dragon dies. She watches the series up to the point, and then as the scene unfolds, she cries, because it is poignant, and hard to experience. It is beautiful, and shows all the colours of the soul.

She finally understands story. Story is what makes life worth living. It’s the thing that brings joy, or tears. It’s what makes us mad, or drives us to great effort.

While plot is the skeleton, it’s the story that adds all the parts made out of meat. Think of plot as the boring outline of your IKEA furniture, just a set of parts and a hard-to-understand instruction sheet. The story? That’s the colourful, messy process of actually putting it together, like the time Michael and John tried to assemble a bookshelf and ended up with a wine rack. It captivates readers and makes your narrative unforgettable. You can let the plot be the scaffold, but it’s the story that brings the party.

There’s a saying that I particularly like:

The world is full of stories, and sometimes they allow themselves to be told.

PS: I promised more Saffy

Here you go!

Support the human engine by tipping me a coffee:

A friend and I recently chatted about the challenge of writing a new world without giving people a lexicon up front. There are some people who love the shit out of a good infodump, but they are not terribly common. My friend was asking me this because they thought I’d done some fairly epic world building in the Blade of Glass series, but didn’t think it felt like I’d given them a private wiki.

My advice on this comes in three parts.

1. Leverage the familiar.

2. Give information as and when a character would experience it, and leverage this to create anticipation.

3. Pretend like the reader already knows everything anyway.

Let’s start with something … familiar.

The Familiar

There’s a scene in Nights Favor that’s a semi-riff from a police procedural. Our hero is in a police interrogation room, double mirror and all. This scene leads to a pretty epic shootout involving another werewolf and our hero is trying to save a) himself and b) cops while this happens.

We’ve all seen a million police procedurals and could finger-paint the interior of an interrogation room without ever seeing one. I don’t have to do any worldbuilding at all for this scene to exist in your mind rent-free. It’s already familiar to you.

Let’s choose a harder example. In Blade of Glass, the Feybrind (one of the three main races) can’t speak. They use sign language. I don’t have to explain what sign language is to you or how it works. What I’ve done is create a non-verbal race and leverage something you already know, and now that’s taken root in your mind.

There are other examples you can use for familiarity. If you want elves and orcs in your world, go with God: that’s familiar enough that you don’t need to explain very much. The excellent The Grey Bastards by Jonathan French does this well; his heroes are orcs, and so he doesn’t need to tell you what an orc is. All he has to do is tell you how his orcs are different; you’ve already got the rest before you even open the book.

Okay: so we know what the familiar is like. How does a character experience things and why is that important for worldbuilding?

As and When

I read a story a while ago where the main character was an orphan, they were a secret agent, they were based in another country, they’d had a traumatic vehicle accident, and they were unlucky in love. The bad part of this is that it all arrived in the same paragraph.

The problem with this approach is it’s not how people interact with the world (usually). People don’t sit there with all those things going on in their head in a single moment. We (mostly) experience things in a linear manner as and when they’re important to us.

Now, let’s use a scene from Blade of Glass to describe how we do this and create anticipation for what’s to come. Here is a flashback scene where Geneve meets her tree, and Israel.

“This is your tree.” The big man stood beside the sapling, hand on the slender trunk, and looked down on Geneve. The timbre of his voice was chocolate rich, which she knew because she’d talked to him before, but this time it held something deeper, more insistent. This tree was important.

Geneve looked about the field. It lay inside tall stone walls that protected everything inside. The ground was turned earth, tended with exquisite care. She’d noticed that as the big man led Geneve down broad, worn steps to the flat ground. Her tree sat with hundreds of others in the field. They were well-spaced, so the sun’s light could reach them all. Some were broken, as if by lightning, but no charring marked the wood. Other slots where trees should be were empty, the earth turned and ready for planting.

The big man had brought her here through a keep. Outside was nothing but rolling grassland. The keep stood on a small hillock. It was visible for klicks in every direction. The stone was white, without the staining she’d expect of marble left to the elements. This structure shone like new.

She couldn’t remember from where she’d come, or what she was doing, but her clothes smelled bad and had rips. Her hands were smudged with old dirt. Geneve couldn’t remember if the rest of her was dirty.

It was the not knowing that was bad, not being dirty. She was certain she’d been dirty a lot, and never died from it. But everything prior to the cart ride here was gone from her life and reaching for the memories brought nothing. No pain or discomfort, just an absence of anything.

The tree looked like it might fill a part of that gap. Geneve put her hands on hips. “So?”

The big man’s face cracked, the stern facade allowing the smallest glimmer of a smile through. He fingered his necklace, a small stone crystal set in a length of silver chain. “So, you will break it one day.”

“Why would I break my own tree?” Geneve took a cautious step forward, because she didn’t know the big man at all. He was impressive in the way a huge rock might be if it could talk, all bedecked in gleaming steel armor, a golden sun on his breastplate. A black sash carrying the weight of three gold bars crossed his heart. A sword was scabbarded at his waist but worn in a rear-draw style. Geneve knew the blade was glass without knowing how she knew. She’d seen it, perhaps, before her memory was gone. Geneve felt like there should be blood on his armor, but it was clean like it’d been freshly forged.

She put her hands on the tree’s young bark. It was smooth, without the knots and whirls time would bring. It was younger than her, and she didn’t want to break it.

“The tree grows as you grow. When you’re ready to live here forever you will come to this field. You’ll break this with your bare hands.” He crouched before her. “All Knights do.”

Geneve bunched her hands into tiny fists. “I don’t think I can do that.” She glanced at the tree again, as if seeking moral support. “I don’t think I want to.”

“It’s just a tree.”

“It didn’t do anything to me.”

He laughed, stood, and gestured with a sweep of his arm. “These trees mark time. In ten years, you’ll undergo the Trials. Your tree will be strong and wide.”

“What about your tree?”

He raised an eyebrow. “My tree isn’t here. I was a Novice at a different Tresward.”

“I mean, did you break it?”

“That seems a curious question.” He frowned, like he felt he’d explained this part already. “I’m a Knight. I passed my Trials.”

“So many things could happen to a tree.” She frowned right back at him, this strange, large man, with his armor, sword, and glittering necklace. “Lightning. A fire. Thieves and bandits.” She rubbed her arms, which goose-bumped in memory. It wasn’t chilly inside the keep, but outside the touch of the southern winds brought cold. Geneve didn’t know why she wore only a shift without winter warms to keep her soul inside her body. “Thieves steal wood all the time.”

The big man nodded, rolling the jewel at his neck between large, strong fingers. “No lightning strikes here. The Three,” he held a palm to the heavens, where the moons would shine in the night, “keep it safe. To set fire to a tree, a villain would need to get past a fearsome collection of fighters sworn to protect them.”

“It could still happen.”

“It could.” He nodded. “Do you know why we need people like you?”

Geneve bit her lip. She was tiny compared to him. Five years old, skinny, knock-kneed, uncertain, and hungry. “I’m not like you at all.”

“That’s right. We need all the difference we can find. The Vhemin roam, hunting people. The Feybrind hide in their forests and ice plains, ignoring us. Royalty wants control of everything, including the fires of desire inside people’s hearts.”

She thought about that. Vhemin seemed an old threat, well-used in her hearing. She’d never seen one and didn’t think they were real. Feybrind were amazing, and she’d known one, but couldn’t remember when, or how. If she was amazing like them, she might take herself away, too. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Difference left us. We need to remember it for ourselves.” The big man spoke like he was reciting something he’d heard from someone else. “The Tresward hold the Light for our allies and against our enemies.”

“How do you hold light?”

“With your heart.” The big man offered her another smile. “Are you hungry?”

Geneve nodded so much she thought her head might pop off. “I haven’t eaten in…” Her voice faded away, remembering—grr!—she couldn’t remember. “I think it’s been a long time.”

“Do you remember who I am?” At her head-shake, he crouched again, taking off his gauntlet. Underneath was a hand like any other man’s. Callused, a little paler than the dark honey-brown of his face. Strong, though. She could see how a hand like that could hold up the very world. He held it out to her.

She took it in her small one as best she could, wrapping her hand around two of his fingers. “Hello. I’m Geneve.”

“Hello, Geneve. I’m Israel.”

Blade of Glass, Chapter One

Despite being cleverly called Chapter One, this is actually the second chapter after The Prisoner. Now, let’s see what we learned that this tree was important, it was inside a cool fort, they’re are monsters called Vhemin, and that Israel is cool. We also learn what Geneve was like as a kid (skinny, knock-kneed), and that Feybrind (ref: above) are awesome. There are Tresward, and something called the Light.

All of this is experiential, as the character is following this train of thought. There’s more to come, though. Exactly what are the Vhemin? Why does this fort exist? Does Israel have a job other than being a cool dude? What becomes of Geneve after Chapter One? How does the Light work? Are the Tresward for good or ill?

We don’t learn those things yet because they haven’t experientially happened to Geneve, but we’ve build expectation they’ll be answered, which drives anticipation of the next worldbuild components.

There’s one other element we can use to create a richer world. It’s a cheap trick, but like all cheap tricks, it often works when nothing else does. Like, when you just haven’t had the runway to tell the reader what they need to know.

The Reader Knows It

I mean, they don’t, but let’s pretend.

In Chromed: Upgrade, the first chapter is a kick-ass scene in a cyberpunk bar. During this scene, one of our main heroes, Mason, uses something called a lattice.

Now, it would be a total dick move as an author for me, during the scene where the lattice is being awesome, to press pause and explain what a lattice is. But if I’ve done my job right in the scene, you can work it out. It’s intrinsic to Mason, and the person he’s in a tussle with gets it, too.

If I pretend you know it… well, you don’t, but you might feel like you do, and within just a few more pages, you will definitely grok it.

Now, you can’t do this with everything. I read a Charlie Strauss novel that did this with, like, everything, and I felt like I’d been concussed by the end of the first chapter. But you can do it with a few things, and before you know it, the lie becomes truth, and the reader knows it.

Never go off the grid. That was the rule. It kept Mason alive. If you had to, make sure you had a weapon and backup. Apsel’s reach stopped where link coverage ebbed away to a gritty residue.

Mason had a weapon, but backup was a long ride away. You’re fifty percent there. Stop complaining. Get inside.

Seconds was the kind of bar nobody would go twice. An old chipped door, the auto sensor broken, the sliders sticky with beer or blood. Mason shouldered it aside. The interior felt warm. Humidity stuck like a bad odor to the air. In its better days, it would have hosted over a hundred, the pump and beat of music making their own statement.

Today, fewer than a dozen people were nursing drinks, telling themselves the usual lies. He eyed a woman by the bar, working what magic she had left on a john, her use-by date well passed. The john looked no better, a long, stringy guy with fewer teeth than he’d been born with.

Neither were worth credits or paperwork.

He wasn’t here for hookers or their clients. Mason was here for the promise of a lead. Most people would call it a rumor, but he’d spent enough time off-grid to know where truth lay among the grime.

Mason’s optics scanned the bar, picking out the mods. Seconds wasn’t the kind of place you went into blind. His first pass gave him nothing to cry about. Bionics done on the cheap, a knife where a laser would be best, out of fashion chrome making the wrong kind of statement. Nothing here was mil-spec.

Green neon flickered behind the bar, as tired and listless as the patrons. The bartender watched him, one chromed arm working a dirty rag over a dirtier surface. His eyes were underlined with a smatter of hanzi, the logograms giving off a soft phosphor blue bioluminescence. A couple of teenage ganguro girls were making out in a dark corner, the pastel of their eyeliner garish with the green from the bar. Mason’s audio brought him the whisper of their bright clothes as they rubbed against each other.

Carter said this was the place. Someone had come in here, dropped credits into the old terminal on the back wall, and made a play to buy company assets. Mason brushed rain from his jacket, then made his way to the bar. His tailored clothes said cash and syndicate. No one got in his way.

Not yet.

Mason’s overlay highlighted the bartender. No ID. No link. His optics showed a ghost who worked down here because up there was impossible. An illegal, like all the rest.

“Hey.” Mason put a grainy photograph on the bar. A side shot of a man, orange mirror sunglasses on, greasy hair over a face gone soft and ugly. Carter had uplifted it from the terminal. “Know this guy? He’s a buyer.”

The bartender didn’t look at the photo, his gaze touching the bottles stacked up in front of the flickering neon. The dirty rag paused. “I never heard of that mix. Been making drinks a long time now.”

Mason tapped his finger on the photo. “It’s a popular drink. Exactly the thing you’d get in this part of town.”

The bartender shrugged. “Drink like that, might be expensive.” The rag resumed motion, his chromed arm picking up the green light and pushing it around the bar top after the rag.

Mason saw the hanzi under the bartender’s left eye flicker, the glow stuttering. He pressed greasy notes down on the bar next to the photo. “I understand. Maintenance. Got to keep the kitchen in working order.”

“Exactly.” The rag stopped moving again. Mason caught a reflection in the chromed arm as a man walked in from the street. A sharp gust of night air followed him in, the faintest hint of sewage mixing with the acrid scent of rain. The bartender nodded to the newcomer. “It’s killer out there.” The photo and the money vanished, whisked away by the bartender as if they’d never been. He moved further down the bar, filling a cocktail shaker with dirty ice.

The newcomer sat next to Mason, a hint of Davidoff cologne washing off him. “Mind if I sit here?”

“It’s a free country.” Mason didn’t turn, taking in the expensive suit cuffs out of the corner of his eye. Tailored sleeves went with the cuffs. Might be an exec out for some fun at the people’s expense.

Might be syndicate trouble.

“That’s the biggest lie I’ve heard this week.” The man shook water from his coat, throwing the heavy jacket over a vacant barstool. “Hasn’t been free since they invented the credit card.”

“You don’t seem to be suffering.”

The man gave a quick laugh. “Business is good. What can I say?”

The bartender pushed a tumbler in front of Mason, the ice nestled in around a rich amber liquid. Algae in the drink sparked a bright pink, flecks of light flashing in amongst the amber and ice. “Your drink.”

Mason nodded his thanks, taking a sip. The liquor was rougher than he’d expected. He coughed. “Christ.” He saw a splash of white as he set it down. A scrap of paper was stuck to the bottom of the glass. A note for my eyes only. Money spoke a universal language.

The man next to him gestured to the bartender. “Whatever he’s having.”

“You really don’t want to do that.” Mason grimaced. “Last time I order the house specialty, that’s for sure.”

“I can handle it.” The man counted notes on the bar. “These throwbacks need to get linked. I hate cash. It’s too dirty.”

“At least it’s quiet.” Mason took another swallow, then glanced at the stranger’s tailored cuffs. He looked back down into his drink, reading the address written on the note. “It’s probably as good a place to die as any.”

A heartbeat of silence followed as pressure built in the air. Mason felt his lattice react, its prediction routines making his hands grab the bar’s edge, heaving him over the top. A blast wave hit, tossing him against the wall. Mason’s perception of time slowed as overtime flowed over him.

The fibers in his jacket stiffened to take the impact. Glass and liquor rained on Mason from the shattered bottles above the bar. His optics flickered as they adjusted contrast, first to the flash of light then the dancing shadows. A single neon filament above Mason stuttered out the last of its life in refracted green before the bar went dark.

“I’m glad you appreciate your situation.” The man’s voice came from the other side of the bar. “No offense. Like I said, business is good.”

“None taken.” Mason planted his feet against the bar, bracing himself in the narrow space. He pulled his Tenko-Senshin sidearm from under his jacket, the whine of the weapon soft in the darkness. The nose of the weapon tracked the man’s footsteps as if it had a mind of its own. “Reed Interactive?”

“Good guess, but no. Metatech. Apsel?”

“Yeah.” Mason listened for movement. Careful. Metatech means mil-spec bionics. Keep him talking. “What are they like?”

“Metatech?” The man paused. “They sure as shit provide better backup than Apsel Federate.”

Mason’s smile glinted in the darkness. “What makes you think I need backup?”

The man laughed as he made for the door. No hurry in it, like he did this kind of thing on a daily. “Buddy? You look fucked to me.”

The door squealed a complaint as it opened, followed by a distinctive thud as Mason’s opponent tossed in a grenade. Get up, Mason. Move!

Mason rolled over the bar. He hit the kitchen door as the grenade exploded, throwing him into a stove so grimy it looked like a movie prop. He fell hard, then pushed himself upright. His optics flickered in the darkness — goddamn EMP — then switched to thermal, the intense bright square of the Tenko-Senshin’s energy pack outlined against the blue-black of the floor. Mason felt the cool calm of the hard link as his palm gripped it.

Only an amateur would rely on an EMP grenade against a syndicate asset. Top-shelf bionics barely noticed. An amateur, or someone who really does have backup. You got what you came for. Time to go.

“Mason?” The link flickered into life, Carter inside his head. Her deep, husky voice was tinged with a hint of concern.

“Now’s not a good time, Carter.” Mason went back to the kitchen door. A couple of tables burned, shedding sooty smoke. The heat from the flames scorched the center of his vision with white, so he switched back to visual light. “I’m busy.”

“That’s what I’m calling about.” She paused. “Don’t go out the front.”

“You checking up on me?” Mason looked through the door’s cracked window. The jumble of wreckage was unrecognizable. A mess of plastic and wood veneer nestled atop bodies. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“They used energy weapons. The signature is quite clear from sat telemetry.”

“Plasma?”

“Looks like.”

“Jesus. You get cancer from those things.” Mason pushed the snout of the Tenko-Senshin ahead of him.

“No.” Carter sounded annoyed. “You get burning from those things. The fire would kill you, and you would hurt the entire time you were dying. You were lucky. And careless.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re not going to be alive long enough to get cancer.”

“Like I said, now’s not a good time. You can list my failings later.”

“Why not just go out the back?”

“Two reasons. First, they’ll be expecting that.” Mason stepped through the kitchen door, his feet crunching on broken glass.

“The second reason?”

“The bartender gave me an address. He’s in here somewhere.” Mason paused. “What, no snappy comeback?”

“It’ll be expensive.” Carter sounded doubtful.

“Put it on my tab. Did I miss a budget cuts memo?”

“I’ll call a medivac.” The link went dead.

Mason stepped over a body flung from the center of the plasma strike. He looked at it as he passed. Not this one. The radius of damage was from Mason’s spot at the bar. His overlay plotted a line on Mason’s optics, showing the point of origin.

A booth, no different from the rest. No sign of the ganguro girls who’d been there, the booth black and empty. A fluorescent light stuttered to life, then went dark as sprinklers kicked in. Muddy water trickled from the ceiling for a moment before dying out. Loose drips of dark water stuck to the ceiling nozzles.

Mason found the bartender sprawled backward against a broken table. His chrome arm was gone, the stump smooth and pale. Cheap work. No anchoring. Or maybe the guy didn’t want to get that close to the metal. Mason scanned as he knelt. His HUD told the violent story of the bartender’s injuries. Burns. Lacerations and bruising. “Hey.”

The bartender coughed, the sound ragged and wet. “I tried to … doesn’t matter. Did you get the address?”

“I got it.” Mason nodded to the door. “It’ll keep a few minutes longer.”

The bartender grabbed Mason’s arm. “You don’t understand. They’re killing us.”

“Killing you?”

“The rain. Your buyer. That’s what’s for sale. Don’t you know?” He coughed again.

Mason stood. “Who was it?”

“What?”

“Who did you lose to the rain?”

The bartender looked at him, firelight playing across his features. The blue had faded from the hanzi, leaving gray marks like scars. “My brother.”

Mason nodded. “Try not to move. A medivac’s coming.”

“I can’t afford that.” The man’s eyes turned pleading. “Just leave me here. I’ll be okay.”

Mason looked at the Tenko-Senshin, the weapon’s hum a gentle touch in his hand. He moved toward the door. Before he stepped into the street, he glanced back. “It’s on the house.”

“Which house?” The bartender slumped back. “Who’m I gonna owe for this?”

Mason didn’t reply as he walked outside into the hissing rain, the door yawning behind him.

Chromed Upgrade, Chapter Zero (“Off Grid”)

There we have it. My three rules to delivering worldbuilding without infodumping.

And if you want to know how Mason got a Tenko-Senshin, well, that’ll take a few more chapters.

TL;DR:

• macOS: Vellum + Mac Notes. Optional: Aeon Timeline.

• Windows: Word + OneNote + Atticus. Optional: Aeon Timeline.

• Browser-based: You can probably get away with just Atticus, but if the rough edges bother you, consider augmenting with Google’s Docs, Keep, and Drawings.

Wait, I thought this was about Vellum, Atticus, and Scrivener… WTAF are the other tools for?

Good catch. Let’s consider writing as workflow. For example, your workflow might start with an idea, then an outline or timeline, a draft, editing, and finally production.

I’ll focus on Vellum, Atticus, and Scrivener here, but my workflow relies on a good notes app, and a great timeline tool. Unless you can keep a word bible in your skull, you’ll need a notes app. If you’re an outline (rather than discovery) writer, you will benefit from a timeline/plot tool like Aeon Timeline. I touch on both briefly at the end.

Constraints!

A factor for me is whether the tool provides a perpetual or subscription license. Perpetual licenses are those you buy once for eternal access, and subscriptions are (generally) lower-priced, but carry a monthly or yearly fee. Once you stop paying for a subscription service, you lose access to the tool (and often, the data inside it).

I have a strong preference for perpetual license models, so I’ve focused on tools supporting that. I’ve got a couple call-outs at the end if you want to investigate subscription-based software. My cost profile for our perpetual license tools (as of November 2023, in New Zealand dollars) looks like:

• macOS NZD$505.98: Vellum $409.99 + Mac Notes (free) + Aeon Timeline $95.99.

• Windows NZD$529.99: Word $185 + OneNote (free) + Atticus ~$249 + Aeon Timeline $95.99.

• Browser-based NZD$249: Atticus ~$249. Brace for a few imperfections.

If you’re really into compilation pain and want to go with Scrivener, that’s $99.99. I used to use this exclusively (no Word, Vellum, etc.) and it totally can be done. It also turned me into an alcoholic because compilation is a fuckoff; I don’t recommend this, and we’ll get into details below.

Regardless of platform, you’ll get some free cloud storage for things like backups; both Apple and Microsoft offer 5GB free. If you’re browser-based, Google’s 15GB of free storage is pretty sweet and should allow you to scale Docs across quite a few books before you hit a price barrier.

Let’s Compare

Most authors will spend the largest chunk of their time in their writing software, rather than outlining, notes, or production. Writing software needs to be frictionless, slick, and just fucken work. It shouldn’t crash or be riddled with bugs.

Here’s the comparison table; I’ll break this down below (it looks a lot better in the YT video!).

That’s a wonderful eye chart. What’s it mean?

I kicked off this analysis after hitting the production cycle of my latest series, and (once again!) jousting with Scrivener to export the manuscript. Scrivener’s “Vellum export” template just doesn’t work, and I decided I wasn’t up for this kind of heartache anymore.

I spent time with Vellum, Atticus, and Scrivener for writing, editing, and production. Let me lay some nuance on y’all.

• Vellum. Vellum is the “just works” option out of all that I’ve tried. 180g markets this as an eBook production suite, but it’s very capable as an all-around writing suite as well. There’s something quite special about seeing your ebook output as you write it. Equipped with Word export so you can share your book with your editor, you can also re-import the edits which can cut down your production time. I’ve found Vellum’s online documentation the best of them all, and the company provides great by-email support if you need it. The software gets regular updates. It has sped up my production cycle tremendously, and has given me zero pain. EDIT 11/11/2023: Vellum just released re-use of back matter! This is similar to my favourite Atticus feature of Master Pages (below).

• Scrivener. Before there was Vellum, Scrivener was the bad boy we all relied on. I’ve been using this on Mac since the before times, and was an early adopter of their Windows version. Scrivener is weirdly powerful, and if you’ve ever wondered if it can do something, the answer is yes. It’s got some rough edges though, most notably in the compilation stage, which is a bit of a nightmare and requires a doctorate in molecular engineering to get right. There are some weirdisms across the platfrms as well; for example, writing on the go using the iOS edition isn’t seamless, because smart quotes suck in the iOS edition, and it requires Dropbox for cloud sync, which is quite limiting. While this software has helped me write a lot of books, I’ve moved to Vellum because compilation in Scrivener is a cancer, and I believe they see how they do compilation as a differentiator, so are unlikely to change it. Support is good; they have an active forum and I’ve been able to get answers from community and company reps on there in good time. The docs are comprehensive too, although … wordy. It has an inbuilt notes function (we’ll touch on this below).

• Atticus. I really want to like this! The company’s been aggressively releasing updates to close the feature gap with other suites, but it’s not quite there yet from a glitches point of view. It makes a great first impression, with a slick UI that closely resembles what you get in Vellum. The rough edges get tiresome from a writing perspective though, like smart quotes being ruinously fiddly, and em-dashes causing quotation issues. The performance isn’t great either, with the editor being a little sluggish. Automatic backups and two-factor authentication aren’t there yet either. However, it’s got some neat innovations – a thing I really like is the ability to create master pages (like front or back matter) you can replicate across all your books. Want to change your socials? Do it once and have it replicated everywhere. As far as a replacement to Scrivener or Word goes, it’s not quite there – but as a cost-effective replacement for the production side of Vellum, assuming your input copy is clean, it’s a good piece of kit. The support team is great, and they are open to feature requests to add to their roadmap, and there’s a robust set of online documentation. This is one to watch, as if they can fix the bugs and glitches, it will kick ass.

• Word. I mean, this is ol’ faithful, right? As an editor, it’s fine! For ebook production, you need something else like Vellum or Atticus. I don’t think Word is great for progress tracking, and on macOS, you can’t use the Navigation Pane to move sections around (a deal-breaker for me). Startup is a little slow, and it is by no means stable – this is easily the crashiest software of any in this list (macOS or Windows both). It does have a nice browser-based version assuming you use OneDrive, but there are some odd limitations like a million-character limit (I wrote a book longer than this, that one time!). It’s unsuitable for eBook production, but it’s a fine authoring suite. Coupled with Atticus, it’s a great answer for Windows users. Support’s a bit iffy, though; while Microsoft Learn and other support articles are generally good, other formal support is dire. There are many online forums including the Microsoft Communities site to get help, but the Psychic Hotline can often be more accurate.

A note on … notes.

One of Scrivener’s selling points is the integrated notes function. Scrivener documents can hold character bios, images, maps, and so on. The challenge here is they’re not shared between Scrivener documents, so you will either need to have a separate Scrivener document just for notes, do a lot of copy/paste, or embrace the winds of change and use a notes suite.

Having tried both approaches, I find Scrivener a bit fiddly as a dedicated notes suite, and would recommend either Mac Notes (macOS) or OneNote (Windows). You can get away with OneNote on macOS, but I’ve found the Mac version of OneNote plagued with sync issues; it’s just a bit slow and buggy, and I’ve had situations of lost data and other fuckery that make it hard to recommend off Windows.

Both Mac Notes and OneNote have credible phone versions (assuming you’re on iOS for Mac Notes). I do a bit of brainstorming on the go so this is a neat feature I use a lot. It also lets you do things like keep your notes open on an iPad while you write on your computer; this alone makes separating note-taking out of Scrivener or other writing tool worthwhile.

What about Aeon Timeline?

If you haven’t played with Aeon Timeline, you probably should. It’s kind of like the easy-to-use, polite, and handsome edition of Microsoft Project. It’s got some neat features that benefit authors, like Scrivener integration if you’re still wanting to die on that hill, freeform brainstorming (a little like Scapple), and some really slick visualisations.

I’m more of a discovery writer than an outline writer, but I still use Aeon Timeline because it’s so damn good. It’s great for debugging your stories (e.g., write the story, then retroactively use it to ensure continuity and timeline consistency). The support team here is also great, and there’s a good online docs section.

It works on macOS, Windows, and iOS, so you’re covered no matter where you go. It’s a fraction of the price of something like Project, and won’t make you hate yourself in quite the same way. I’m a big fan.

Two subscription-based alternatives

If you don’t want to chunk out a bunch of coin up front and/or prefer a predictable monthly cost for your writing tools, let me suggest two options for you.

• 4thewords is a brilliant gamified browser-based tool for writers. It’s $4/month, and has a sweet UI, many production options, community competitions (e.g., NaNoWriMo), and is just generally rad. I recommend you check this out as your first port of call. Check out the walkthrough video 👌🏼

• Ulysses was a winner of the Apple Design Award. macOS only, sadly, but it’s kind of like what Scrivener should be like – deleting the excruciating compilation phase while preserving all the other features. $5.99/month gets you in there.

Bear in mind with both tools you’ve got a bit of a lobster trap problem for your documents.

And that’s that. Hopefully this has helped you decide which software is best for you, based on what you need and which platform you’re on. Now go out there and kick ass with your story!

If you this post saved you time, sanity, or money, consider buying me a coffee!

A bunch of people in the author community espouse the value of permafree* book one in a longer series. The basic argument is:

1. There’s no friction to reader attachment, thus you’ll get a higher readership. This is testable.

2. While less people as a percentage of book one readers will read next-in-series (as speculative “purchasers” can come from outside your genre lane), the volume of readers will drive greater success overall. We can test this for science. We can also talk about the shit-show of also-boughts and how that makes advertising painful.

3. You gain exposure on other storefronts, other than the mighty Zon. We can test this too!

TL;DR: none of the promised gains worked for me, but I did see a massive spike in book 2 & 3 piracy. Let’s see how this happened.

* Permafree means a book that is permanently free, as opposed to a time-limited promotion. Amazon don’t generally allow permanently free books, but will often price match titles when free on other retailers like iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

The Method

I conducted two back-to-back 3-week tests with my Night’s Champion series. The first book released about eight years ago, and is well-loved by a lot of people; it has pretty good read-through (70%/50% books 2/3) despite initial hard fails of marketing (the back of these books until recently never mentioned they were a series, or where to get the next one. To those 70% and 50% readers respectively: I love your dedication).

• Night’s Favor was available on Amazon, iBooks, and Kobo (now on B&N, but not during the testing period).

• I advertised on BookBub (for iBooks and Kobo) and AMS (for Amazon). At the time, Facebook was doing weird shit with my ads, so I wanted to delete errors from the prospectus. The ad spend was about $10 per retailer, per day, for the permafree test. I dropped BookBub ads when the title returned to paid, and dropped the AMS spend to $5/day (I really want to see what kind of organic traction the other stores produce).

• Blasty was used to monitor available title uploads across various piracy sites.

• I used my ARC team and Booksprout to distribute review copies to garner social proof. I’m a Pro Author on Booksprout, providing watermarking in case of piracy, so we can see if copies came from that service. My ARC team are scrupulous about not distributing my works outside the huddle; I’ve never seen evidence of a single one sharing a read, except for my SiL giving my BiL an advanced copy that one time. We still need to talk about this.

• I monitored next-in-series purchases using the various dashboards on the retailers.

So, What Happened?

During the permafree run, something like 7,000 copies of Night’s Favor were downloaded across all stores. Most of these came from Amazon, where the book ranked in the top 10 for werewolves for a couple weeks. The book got a lot of downloads. I think we can say with confidence there was a decent sample size to test next-in-series sales.

During the Free Period

• I sold almost zero of books 2 and 3. Let’s call it 30 copies across all retailers. If you’re doing pocket math, you can probably see the ROI problems here. You can also work out the percentage of what 30 from 7,000 looks like.

• Amazon and BookBub gobbled my ad dollars like a heroin junkie on the needle. Amazon kept trying to get me to up my spend, because as it turns out ads offering free products do okay!

• Getting iBooks and Kobo readers to click your fucken ad is a nightmare. Them actually downloading it is harder still. Amazon customers seem more acclimated to free books, and/or my social proof on Amazon is greater. Who knows. Downloads for permafree on iBooks and Kobo dropped to zero (0!) after the ads stopped; those retailers appear to have poor discovery services at play.

• The overall ROI for this campaign was heavy negative according to my Readerlinks dashboard. I spent vastly more dollars shipping my book and “discovering readers” than I ever earned back in series sales. It’s not even close. Not the same ballpark. Not even the same sport. Probably not the same planet.

During the Paid Period

• I sold a continuous stream of books 2 and 3. While the numbers aren’t amazing ($5 ad spend a day, most of it unused!), it conformed to the 70/50 numbers I’d previously seen. I think it’s closer to 75 copies across all retailers during the three-week trial.

• Book 1 is $3.99 in the crowded urban fantasy/supernatural thriller genre, but maintained an almost-neutral ROI on its sales alone.

• This means books 2 & 3 sales were total profit, netting me positive ROI on spend.

• iBooks started selling organically on book 1, despite no ads driving readers to that storefront. Do Apple devalue free, or is some other algorithm at play? Who knows.

Analysis

Usual caveats about small sample size and selector bias apply.

I sent out an email to my readership mentioning my theory about free books languishing on Kindles the world over, and got a fair few emails in response with agreement. Readers collect free reads, but don’t prioritize the consumption of those books. It’s not about when, but if: they seem to leave free books on their ereaders for an age, and eventually delete them without reading. Even 99c presents a purchase barrier, meaning discount readers are more likely to read your book and then get the next in series. I think the mindset looks like this:

• Free: I’ll click and download, because free books are good! I probably won’t read it.

• Deep discount (e.g., 99c): If the cover is nice, and the page looks like it’s remotely me, I’ll give it a spin. I may nope out after a few chapters, but I might also get lucky.

• RRP: I will only buy this book if it looks like it’s in my lane. Conversion is much lower on book one, but books 2 & 3 are better.

There’s an interesting effect for also-boughts and algorithms too. Amazon particularly recommends books on “Customers who bought this also bought this other thing…” below the book details. Free books are wildly polluted by all manner of shit here. While careful ad crafting helps, your supernatural thriller might get also-boughts from, say, paranormal romance. Trust me when I tell you that a paranormal romance reader will get an … unexpected journey reading Night’s Favor.

There are some things that skew these views, such as incumbency. I believe there are successful authors making bank with book one of a series permafree, but they have such an established readership getting effective data is hard. I also believe some lower-rank authors get good traction with book one free (maybe a starved niche?), but it didn’t happen that way for me.

Having tested permafree, it appears to be a spectacular loss leader for ad spend and gaining readers. Our initial bullets and the results:

1. Higher readership: nope. People don’t read the free books they have, and on retailers outside Amazon discoverability is miserable; you will pay, and keep paying, for every “sale” you make.

2. Greater success overall: nope. I made 3-4x the revenue with a positive ROI on ad spend with book one as paid. I managed to give myself the gift of kack-fest also-boughts, meaning I’m now retraining Amazon’s AMS system for the right readers.

3. Retailer exposure: hard fail. I only started selling books 2+ on iBooks after book 1 became paid. Kobo is a wasteland regardless.

What About Piracy?

Yeah, that’s what I opened with. Remember Blasty? I sure do.

This is a typical report from during and post the free period.

Yeah, I want to see those blasts. What do they look like?

HOLY SHITBALLS. It’s pages of people pirating book 2 in the series. That is, people got the first book for free, presumably read it, liked it, then went and pirated the everloving hell out of it. Not only did permafree not make me sales of books 2 and 3, it encouraged file sharing and piracy of those titles.

During the paid cycles, the results from Blasty are more measured, a smattering across my catalogue overall. It seems permafree readers feel entitled to keep reading a series for zero dollars, and will go out of their way to do so. Paid readers are far less likely, based on my admittedly small sample size, to do this: they’re accustomed to paying money for things. I dunno, maybe they had parents who taught them stealing was bad.

Where Did The Piracy Come From?

While extensive testing is fairly difficult if you have finite time (and my time is very finite), I couldn’t find evidence of Booksprout copies on pirate sites. They appear to be from Kobo and Amazon. While there are more Amazon copies in the wild, the distribution feels roughly right based on initial downloads; I don’t think one retailer’s customers are more likely to be thieves than another.

I think this exposes a mindset rather than customer base.

What Does All This Mean?

For you? Dunno. But for me, it means permafree is not a good idea. It doesn’t solve any of the challenges I have, all while increasing piracy of my catalogue. This doesn’t sound like winning!

If you’re a permafree author and having success, I’d love to hear from you about how. Data-driven specifics, not, “Umm, I think…” I’d especially like to hear how your back-to-back testing’s gone between free and paid, because I haven’t seen much evidence of that.

And now, back to you.