Fictional Influence

Cairo Smith won one of Hollywood's biggest screenwriting awards, wrote English adaptations for Netflix, Disney, and Paramount, and had the representation and the meetings most writers spend a decade chasing. Then he read a few self-published novels, realized indie fiction was speaking to his life in a way the front table at Barnes & Noble wasn't, and walked toward the door. In this conversation he...

Brian McCoppin’s a cloud and AI consultant by day, and a Tang Soo Do instructor and author by night. With books sold in more than 12 countries, he specializes in Christian supernatural action fiction, a corner of the market most people assume doesn't exist, where the demons wear senators' faces and a small-town pastor learns he's been drafted into a war nobody around him believes is real. In this...

Neal Asher has been writing science fiction for Pan Macmillan for 25 years and published 40-plus books, but before any of that he was hauling coal sacks in the rain and fishing typewriters out of skips. In this episode, the man behind Gridlinked and the Love, Death + Robots episodes "Snow in the Desert," "Bad Travelling," and "Mason's Rats" talks about clawing up every rung of the publishing ladde...

Nick Nethery spent a career as an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer before he wrote fiction full-time. His debut started with a working observation that unexploded ordnance looks completely different depending on which country built it, which spiraled into a better question: what would a weapon look like if it came from something that wasn't human? In this episode he argues that technical a...

Matthew Bockholt spent years in video games and marketing before he ever wrote a novel full-time — and it shows in how he thinks about the work. While most indie authors are great storytellers and shaky prose stylists, he treats writing like a skill you drill, not a gift you're born with. In this episode he makes the case for killing the phrase "rules of writing" entirely, explains why genre stopp...

Jason Hunt founded Sci-Fi4Me in 2009, right after the sci-fi channel became "SyFy," and has spent 17 years covering science fiction, fantasy, and horror through reviews, commentary, and his interview show Live from the Bunker . In this episode, he joins us to break down what makes an author pitch an instant yes, why so many writers sabotage their own marketing, and how the Hugo Awards went from a...

Spotlight on Indie SFF's founder — a Catholic novelist with nearly 50 books across 16 years who keeps her platform persona separate from her author byline — joins Kristin to talk about the curated referral site she launched last summer after the indie sci-fi space made it clear that authors with her convictions weren't welcome. This conversation covers the long road from Kindle's original gold rus...

Jared Christman is a writer, musician, and filmmaker who came up in the Victory Records era of metalcore, escaped the 360-deal grinder, and "fell ass-backwards" into making a feature film when three music videos turned into one. In this episode, he joins to discuss his 400,000-word fantasy debut, why he believes power reveals rather than corrupts, and the through-line connecting Ripley in Aliens t...

Riley C. Bolt is a 12-year Army intelligence veteran turned indie author who writes the kind of action thrillers Hollywood used to make before it forgot how. In this episode, he joins to discuss why the special operations community looks nothing like the Hollywood super-soldier myth, how to build a female protagonist men will actually read, and why "three times is enemy action" was all the market...

Michael Morton is a retired Air Force officer, civilian Space Force employee, military sci-fi and fantasy author, and editor at Canon Publishing. In this episode, he joins to discuss his unconventional path to publishing, the craft principles that actually move the needle, and how a small press operates from the inside — including Canon’s firm stance on AI, scheduling realities, and what separates...

J. Manfred Weichsel is an indie author, editor, and New York background actor writing the kind of books the “write to market” gurus would tell you not to write — Menippean satires set in pulp-fantasy worlds, with covers spicy enough to get him banned from Amazon’s direct catalog. In this episode, he joins to discuss why classical satire is the antidote to the AI slop tsunami, why “tropey writing”...

Jonathan Shuerger spent five years as a Marine Corps Crypto Logic Linguist studying Arabic and tracking ISIS targets in real time. Now he writes intense military-grade dark fantasy, runs a YouTube news show for authors, and brings the full Intel toolkit to the problem of selling books. In this conversation, he explains why most authors are speaking to an echo of themselves, why Kickstarter is for...

Alec Cizak has been running Pulp Modern since 2011 and champions a simple but apparently radical idea: writers should be judged on the quality of their work, full stop. That stance, along with a vocal commitment to free speech, made him a target around 2020, when a coordinated smear campaign accused his publication of platforming rapists and pedophiles. Rather than apologize or disappear, he calle...

Kaylena Radcliff is a speculative fiction author, managing editor of Christian History Magazine, homeschool mom, and wife of a church planter. She is also quietly doing what the Christian fiction market keeps insisting can’t be done: writing dark, honest, theologically grounded stories that don’t end in despair and don’t require a sanitized world to feel safe. In this episode we get into why the C...

David Badurina is an author, music producer, showrunner, and what he calls a multimodal storyteller — someone building an entire creative universe across fiction, concept albums, visual media, and now anime, without asking anyone’s permission to do it. He ran a brick and mortar martial arts school for 12 years before going fully independent, and that experience shapes everything about how he think...

Every year conservatives complain that Hollywood hates them, point to a handful of companies as proof that right wing art is thriving, then wait for a billionaire to fund the revolution. Every year nothing changes. This episode is the reality check that conversation never gets. We go through what the Daily Wire, Angel Studios, and Taylor Sheridan are actually doing — and why none of them are disco...

Seth Ring has written 46 books, built a seven figure indie author business without an agent or a traditional publishing deal, and cracked the code on how to move readers from free content to a loyal paying ecosystem. In this episode he breaks down exactly how he did it, and what most indie authors get wrong before they ever get started. We dig into what LitRPG actually is and why it has captured a...

Traditional publishing isn’t just an American problem anymore. Gatekeepers have gone global, and authors in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are starting to feel it too. In this episode, I sit down with Nicholas Sheppard, AKA Echo Chamberlain, a traditionally published literary fiction author from New Zealand navigating the painful transition to indie publishing. Nicholas has 80,000 YouTube subs...

The Twitter Crush is available in its entirety on Amazon and wherever books are sold: https://buy.bookfunnel.com/i2x75bx6hv Web novels are not fan fiction. They are not Wattpad cringe. And they are definitely not a niche hobby for teenagers. They are a $34 billion industry growing at 15% year over year—and most traditional authors aren’t even paying attention. In this episode, we tackle the elepha...

Phil Marshall is not your typical tech founder. He’s a former surgeon, a sci-fi author, and the founder/CEO of Spoken, an AI-powered audiobook platform built to break the two biggest gates in audio publishing: cost and complexity. Today Phil joins us to discuss the economics of audiobook creation, why multi-voice and full-cast audio has been inaccessible for almost everyone, and how Spoken’s model...

E.J. Free is not your typical “Christian author.” He writes young adult fiction for boys, and he does it without sermonizing or softening reality to fit a Hallmark mold. In this (partially rescued) interview, we dive into why so much Christian fiction feels narrow, why excellent writers struggle to get into Christian bookstores if they’re not the “right kind” of Christian, and what modern publishi...

Joshua Lisec is not your typical ghostwriter. With more than 110 books written across business, politics, health, and memoir, he has built a six-figure “ghost publishing” model that doesn’t just produce books, but also engineers commercially viable ones. In this conversation, Joshua breaks down why most authors write the wrong book, how he uses the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to decide what a client...

Hans Schantz is not your typical author; he is a literal scientist with a background in antenna technology who believes modern physics took a wrong turn over a century ago. Today he joins us to share how he uses his Hidden Truth series to reintroduce the lost principles of 19th-century electromagnetism to a new generation, effectively using alternate history to teach real-world physics. We also di...

Is a traditional publishing deal actually the finish line, or is it just the beginning of a different struggle? In this episode, Kristin sits down with thriller author and editor K.T. Carlisle to answer just that. Before becoming a successful indie author, K.T. worked inside a prestigious literary agency, before seeing behind the curtain on what really happens to your query letter, who actually re...

Most authors dream of finishing one book a year; John Van Stry wrote twenty in two. The bestselling sci-fi author joins Kristin to explain how he transitioned from defense engineering to indie publishing by systematizing his creativity and treating the craft with an analytical mindset. John also explores the specific strategies that turned his backlist into a seven-figure business, including the “...