The Writers Chair

Dan is considering rebranding his own publishing company, and the reason is a banned tarot reading. At a literary festival last year, a scheduled occult-themed event was pulled because the venue had ties to a nearby church. It got Dan thinking: with the word “devil” in the name Devil’s Rock Publishing, will it become a barrier as he starts selling at more events and eyes talks at schools and colle...

Last year, Dan’s Halloween book sale pulled around 2,500 people to the page. This year it pulled 850. The click-through to authors’ books dropped too, and the sales didn’t follow. It’s a candid opening to an episode that’s less a victory lap and more an honest post-mortem, recorded the day after launching his first solo fiction in three years. This is a solo episode. Dan celebrates the release of...

"If we don't define the canon, someone will define it for us." That line, from Dr. Chesya Burke, became the organizing principle behind an anthology that started as a phone call between two old friends and ended up assembling some of the most influential names in Black horror alongside brand-new voices getting their first-ever publication. Maurice Broaddus is an award-winning Afrofut...

Daniel Willcocks' own nonfiction book got flagged and blocked from Draft2Digital — not because it was bad, not because it broke any rules, but because an automated system decided it looked too generic. The irony wasn't lost on him: a book written entirely by hand, blocked by a filter built to catch AI slop. There was no appeal process. Just a flat rejection email and a trail of customer su...

Jennie Nash once told a three-time New York Times bestselling author to throw out a 500-page memoir she'd spent years writing. It wasn't cruelty — it was pattern recognition. The author's own frustration, the sprawling page count, the lack of a clear intention: all of it was a signal Jennie had learned to read after years of asking the right questions instead of promising the right outcomes. Jenni...

Michael David Wilson had two months to save his debut novel from going out of print. When his publisher decided to discontinue its entire back catalogue, he wasn't about to let his most popular book — and one with a film adaptation in active development — quietly disappear. Instead, he turned the crisis into an event: new cover art, a bonus short story, an exclusive afterword, and a first-ever Kin...

Craig A. Falconer used to believe that anyone writing 10,000 words a day had to be producing garbage. Then a deadline forced his hand: he needed 113,000 words in thirteen days, hit 14,500 words in a single 19-hour sitting, and came out the other side with what his beta readers called his favorite chapters yet. It's a blunt challenge to a belief a lot of writers hold onto — including, until recentl...

Jenna Moreci's YouTube channel almost didn't happen. She scripted ten polished, bleeped-out, professional-sounding videos before posting a single one — and none of them worked. Then, mid–bachelorette party, she posted a raw, unfiltered rant about the worst parts of being a writer. In one week she went from 100 subscribers to 7,000. This episode — pulled from the Activated Authors vault — is a remi...

Jonathan Yanez quit his job, cashed in his 401k, and burned every safety net he had — all before he told his wife. The first month of self-publishing, he made thirty cents. Eight years later, he runs a full-time publishing business with his wife, is fielding calls from the screenwriter behind Dune and Doctor Strange , and hasn't touched alcohol since the same year he walked away from his day job....

A Big Five editor once called Helen Scheuerer to say she loved her manuscript and wanted to pass it up the chain — but it would take four to eight weeks just to hear back. Helen was already close to self-publishing. She said thank you, and walked away. That single moment of arithmetic — weighing months of waiting against the creative control she already had — is the clearest snapshot of a mindset...

Rachael Herron's editor once gave her a note that's stuck with her ever since: "less feely, more stabby." She'd written a thriller with too much heart in it, and had to go back through and strip warmth out in favour of terror. It's a small, funny detail — but it points at something bigger this episode digs into: the tension between writing what sells and writing what you actually love, and what ha...

She took a perfectly good mug out of its shipping-safe box to fit it into a prettier presentation box for her Kickstarter — and broke two mugs before they even reached backers. It cost her $20 a mug to replace them. It's a small, honest example of the kind of lesson you only learn by actually running a crowdfunding campaign, and this week's guest has run three of them, learning something new — and...

In February 2023, Clare Sager was filling out day job applications. Her income had tanked after the post-lockdown "Great Correction," her savings were gone, and going back to full-time employment felt less like a setback and more like a personal failure. That same month, her book A Kiss of Iron came out — and instead of the usual spike-then-crash of an indie release, the sales kept climbing. By Ma...

For a while, Johnny B. Truant wrote 1.5 million words a year — the equivalent of the full Harry Potter series, plus another half, sitting on a shelf every twelve months. Then it stopped. Not from burnout, but from a slow drift away from the industry itself. When he tried to come back, he found the stories just petered out. This episode is about what it actually takes to restart a stalled creative...

She once deleted a character she genuinely loved — a warm, likeable hippie who was lovely in every scene — because "lovely" was all he ever did. His lines worked better coming out of someone else's mouth, so out he went. It's the kind of ruthless edit that separates a hobbyist from someone with fifteen-plus years and dozens of books behind them, and it's exactly the mindset this week's guest bring...

He finished a 90,000-word manuscript, typed "the end," read it back, and thought: that's shit. Then he threw the laptop to the end of the bed, walked away for a few weeks, and started the entire novel from scratch — no notes, no rescue job, just a clean slate. That book, The Devil's Tree , is now the one he's proudest of. This week's guest doesn't write in a quiet office with a closed door. He wri...

There's a difference between scaring a reader and haunting one — and most horror writers never stop to think about which they're actually doing. Scaring is a jump on page 40. Haunting is the thing that's still in your head three weeks later. This week's guest has built his whole approach around chasing the second one, and it's changed how he writes, drafts, and even decides which books to write ne...

Four years of ebooks, Amazon ads, and feeding the algorithm — and Dan is done with it. Not dramatically. Just honestly. In this behind-the-scenes episode, Daniel and his co-writer R.P. Howley take stock of where Devil's Rock Publishing actually is in 2026: four Twisted Tales novellas out, a charity anthology closing submissions, and a growing suspicion that the readers they've been chasing are act...

Writer's block doesn't exist. That's not a provocation for the sake of it — Jasper Bark will tell you exactly who invented the term (a Freudian analyst who blamed it on potty training) and why the only cure for not writing is, stubbornly, to write. Anything. A laundry list. A page of you yelling at yourself. The words come. This week Daniel sits down with Jasper Bark — author, former freelance jou...

Dan Howarth didn't set out to write a novel about far-right violence tearing communities apart. He set out to write what he knew — the north, the landscape, the idiotic magnificence of men — and the wound was already open. Lion Hearts is the book that nearly broke him during the writing, nearly got him an agent three times, and has now landed him on the 2026 British Fantasy Award shortlist for Bes...

Kayleigh Dobbs turned up to her first horror convention too nervous to speak to anyone, accidentally called Ramsey Campbell "Mr. Ramsey," and somehow came away with a fire lit under her that she hasn't stopped feeding since. Four years later, she has a short story in a Bram Stoker Award nominated collection, heads on semi-regular cake-and-coffee trips with Tim Lebbon, and is a well-revered reviewe...

Dan Soule couldn't read properly until he was 11. He was profoundly dyslexic, functionally illiterate through most of his childhood. He went on to get a PhD in English and linguistics, spent seven years as a university academic, taught writing, quit — and then finally had enough free time to figure out how to write fiction. Horror wasn't the plan. It just kept buying his stories. Dan Soule is a ho...

Jonathan Janz didn't read a single book until he was 14. He'd convinced himself he wasn't smart enough. Then he picked up a Stephen King novel — one King himself doesn't particularly like — and was completely transported. He's now written over a dozen horror novels, been championed by Brian Keene, Jack Ketchum, and Joe Lansdale, and still pumps his fist alone in his office every time he writes som...

Julie Hiner emailed Daniel years ago to ask if she could read one of his short stories on YouTube — in full Gothic makeup, to her own audience, for free. That's how they met. Now they're co-writing a novel together. It's a pretty good case study in what happens when you just reach out to people you admire and lead with genuine enthusiasm rather than an ask. Julie Hiner is an author, storyteller, a...

What if the most important thing you ever do as a writer is something nobody else ever sees? Josh Malerman has 33 rough drafts sitting in a crate behind his desk. Nine are out in the world. The rest — finished novels, written and set aside — are what he considers the real work. Not the Netflix deal. Not the New York Times list. The crate. Josh Malerman is the author of Bird Box , Mallory , Goblin...