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 Cock, his psychological rural horror novella about a killer cockerel (yes, the title is the joke, and the book is far darker than the pun suggests), and breaks down what he’s learned launching it. That includes why he sat on finished books for years, why he’s moving towards direct sales and in-person events, and what’s actually working for discoverability in a market where organic reach has all but dried up.

He also shares the upcoming events he’s booked for 2027, an update on the Hatching Season charity anthology for Mind, and the early results of his Facebook ad tests on the Twisted Tales series. The through-line is a practical one: build a consistent reader experience, sell direct where you can, and stop expecting the platforms to do the discovery for you.

🎙️ What we get into:

• The Halloween sale post-mortem: 2,500 page visitors last year versus 850 this year, and why cross-promotions are getting harder
• Why he believes sharing failures is more useful to other authors than sharing wins
• The paralysis that kept him from publishing a solo book for three years, and the mindset shifts that got him out of it
• How he reframed his priorities around print books and events, rather than chart positions and review counts
• The origin of Cock: a four-year-old joke that became a darker, more psychological story once he stopped forcing it into the Twisted Tales mould
• Why selling ebooks direct (via PayHip, and testing a platform called Curious) means fewer sales but a much bigger margin and instant payouts
• How the playful Cock marketing got around 25,000 views and interactions, yet converted to very few sales
• The TikTok Live experiment: the requirements to unlock extra visibility and why it may be one of the last organic discovery routes
• Why Facebook ads to the Twisted Tales series work: readers who buy Jack go on to buy the rest, so ad spend comes back
• Why a consistent reader experience (branding, linked stories, a shared universe) matters more than any single book, and how he plans to build that from his backlist

Links & Resources:

• Cock by Daniel Willcocks: https://danielwillcocks.com/cock

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"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 Afrofuturist, editor, and librarian with over a hundred short stories published in Lightspeed Magazine, Black Panther anthologies, Jordan Peele's Out There Screaming, and more. Dr. Chesya Burke is an assistant professor of English and US literatures and director of Africana Studies at Stetson University, whose writing has been compared to Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison by Nikki Giovanni, and named "formidable" by Samuel Delany. Together they've edited Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now, out from Flame Tree Publishing on 17 November 2026, featuring contributors including Victor LaValle, Tananarive Due, and P. Djèlí Clark.

We get into how the project evolved from an impossibly broad vision into a focused, budget- and genre-constrained anthology, why a poetry reading at a convention led to poems being added to the collection almost by accident, and how a script from Tales from the Hood ended up sitting inside a prose anthology. We also talk candidly about what new writers actually need to hear — that developing a distinctive voice can take a decade, that AI actively hinders that development, and that rejection is universal even among the writers who inspired this very book.

🎙️ What we get into:

• What Afrofuturism actually means, and its roots tracing back through Martin Delany, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sun Ra, and Octavia Butler
• How a phone call between longtime friends became a full anthology partnership with Flame Tree Publishing
• Why the anthology had to start at a specific point in history rather than attempt a full chronological survey
• The budget and licensing realities that shaped which historical voices could and couldn't be included
• Why they invited every contributor to choose their own foundational story rather than assigning one
• How a convention poetry reading led to poems — including someone's first-ever publication — being added to the anthology
• Why Dr. Burke believes AI actively hinders new writers developing their own voice, rather than helping them
• The years-long process of developing a distinctive authorial voice, and why rushing that process is one of the biggest reasons writers don't make it
• Why they see the book as "myth-making" — defining Black horror's canon on their own terms before someone else does it for them
• What's exciting both editors most about where Black horror and new voices in the genre are headed next

Links & Resources:

• Halloween Book Sale https://devilsrockbooks.com/halloween-2026/
• Black Horror: Canonical Voices from Then to Now https://www.flametreepublishing.com/black-horror-canonical-voices-from-then-to-now-isbn-9781835629598.html
• Maurice Broaddus: https://mauricebroaddus.com
• Dr. Chesya Burke: https://thechesyaburke.com
• "Cock" by Daniel Willcocks https://www.danielwillcocks.com/books/cock/

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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 support conversations to work through.

In this solo episode, Dan steps away from interviewing guests to talk through what's actually happening in his own author business right now — from a stalled flat sale eating his bandwidth, to relaunching The Self-Publishing Blueprint 2.0, to finally publishing a new solo horror novella, Cock, four years after the idea first came up on a beach at ChillerCon.

He gets candid about the current state of author marketing: why organic discovery on social media has become nearly impossible, why pay-per-click advertising is now close to essential, and the early results from his first real Facebook ad test selling his Twisted Tales series. He also shares an honest, no-polish look at submission life — including a full manuscript read request from Tor Nightfire that ultimately ended in rejection — and makes the case for writing in series as one of the clearest paths to sustainable author income right now.

🎙️ What we get into:

• Why The Self-Publishing Blueprint 2.0 got blocked from Draft2Digital and other platforms as flagged "generic AI content" — and how he got it unblocked
• Why there's currently no formal appeal process when a platform blocks your book, and what persistence actually looks like in practice
• The Deliciously Twisted Halloween Book Sale running 5–11 October, featuring Flame Tree Press, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Bloodbound Books, and dozens of indie authors
• The four-year origin story behind Cock, his new rural horror novella, from a joke on a beach at ChilliCon to a finished 37,000-word book
• Submitting The Nowhere Line to Tor Nightfire, getting a full manuscript read request, a kind rejection, and where the book stands now
• Early results from his first Facebook ad test promoting Jack and the Twisted Tales series — real numbers, not just theory
• Why he believes pay-per-click advertising has become close to essential for discoverability in 2026, not just a nice-to-have
• His argument for writing in series rather than standalones, based on what's actually working for authors he knows
• The ongoing mission behind Devil's Rock Publishing beyond being a personal imprint — including nearing £15,000 raised for charity since 2022
• An early-stage idea for a new kind of incubator publishing contract to help new horror writers get started

Links & Resources:

• Devil's Rock Publishing: https://devilsrockbooks.com
• Deliciously Twisted Halloween Book Sale: https://devilsrockbooks.com/halloween-2026
• Cock by Daniel Willcocks https://www.danielwillcocks.com/books/cock

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📺 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@willcocksauthor

🎧 Listen on your favourite app: https://pod.link/1829723468

🖥️ Find out more: https://danielwillcocks.com/thewriterschair

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.