The Phillip Drayer Duncan Newsletter - March 2026

I know you were sad I didn’t do a rant last month, so we’ll start with one this time around…

Let’s talk about Jim Butcher.

Actually, this isn’t about Jim. It’s not about him at all, in fact.

But we’ll start with him.

It may have come to your attention that The Blade Mage, like many other urban fantasy titles, is somewhat similar to The Dresden Files. At least in style and tone. It’s similar enough that many people who like my books are fans of his. This, I know, is a shocking revelation.

You may be equally surprised to learn that people who like my books and Jim’s books also enjoy the works of authors like R.L. King, Gary Jonas, Simon R. Green, Steve McHugh, and so on. I lovingly refer to this sub-sub-sub-genre as Unlucky Guy Urban Fantasy. I didn’t coin the term, and I haven’t the slightest clue who deserves credit for it, but I adore it. It perfectly sums it up. Whoever I picked that up from also delineated between Unlucky Guy Urban Fantasy and Spunky Chick Urban Fantasy. Both flawlessly describe their sub-sub-sub-genres.

Now that your mind has been blown straight out its socket, let’s get back to Jim.

Jim Butcher has become a regular speaker at the Superstars Writing Seminar, which J.H. and I have only just recently returned from (More about that below). Starting last year, and continuing this year, I’ve made it a tradition to walk up and thank him for being such a damned good comp. You see, Jim has sold a few more books than me. And by a few, I mean, like… I have no idea. Don’t even want to know, actually. I’m over here trying to find Nemo, and he’s Moby Big Dick.

Just to be clear, Jim has taken no direct action in helping me market my books. Doubt he even remembers my name. It’s just that, living in the future as we do, all these funky fresh algorithms have come to the same shocking conclusion. People who like his books might like mine.

So, when I thanked Jim for being such a great comp and helping me sell books, how do you think he reacted?

He was ecstatic. More so when I told him I was writing full-time. Two years in a row, he has been nothing but genuinely enthusiastic about my success. And he told me… Actually, this is a little inside scoop for all you Dresden fans, but he told me he hoped he’d be even more helpful since he’s clacking away a lot faster these days. And he said he loves to hear that his books are helping other authors sell.

That’s because Jim Butcher understands something important about this business. Something I wish every author understood.

You see, when we say “comp,” it’s not shorthand for “competition.” It’s for “complimentary.”

Because we aren’t competition.

Neither of us can write fast enough to feed all the readers who like our brand of fiction. Neither can Gary Jonas, Simon R. Green, Steve McHugh, or R.L. King… Well, actually, R.L. King might. Absolute machine. And sometimes reads my newsletter, so…SHOUT OUT to R.L. King! 42 books in a single series! Or is it 43? Either way…stuff of legend.

Anyway, I recently heard a different author, one who will remain unnamed, say that they would go into Amazon, search for their own book, and click on ALL the ads which targeted their work. That way, the authors who dared target “their” readers would get charged for the clicks, but wouldn’t get sales, making them lose money, and thus dissuading them from targeting that author. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

And of course, we’ve all heard stories about authors review bombing one another. And you know…all the other nonsense. I won’t make a list. There’s been plenty of crummy behavior. Especially in YA for some reason, which you’d think would be the last place for it. Anyway…

It’s madness.

And worse still… It doesn’t accomplish a damned thing. Even for the most selfish of jerk-faces, driving people away from similar books will not help THEM sell more books. In fact, it’s the opposite.

I WANT my comp authors to be successful. The more books they sell, the more these fancy pants algorithms will push our little pocket of Unlucky Guy Urban Fantasy, thus increasing discoverability for all of us. And more readers leads to more people talking about our books, which leads to more readers. Everyone wins. Readers get more of what they like and find new authors. And the authors get more money for beans. It becomes one big, buck-wild monster mash.

As my friend Craig Martelle often reminds us, “The rising tide lifts all boats.”

Writing can be a lonely endeavor, so why not treat marketing like a team sport?

Anyway, I guess what I’m really trying to say is…go read R.L. King’s books. And Gary Jonas’s, too. And also, if you’ve been living under a rock, it’s worth noting that this Jim Butcher fellow I mentioned has a pretty solid urban fantasy series, too.

You know what? While I’m at it, you’re almost certainly here because of The Blade Mage. So, here’s a fat list of authors who are comps. Haven’t read them all to confirm, but I think they’re close. And in no particular order…

Jim Butcher, R.L. King, Gary Jonas, Steve McHugh, Brad Magnarella, Orlando A. Sanchez, Shami Stovall, R.S. Belcher, F. Paul Wilson, Benedict Jacka, Simon R. Green, Ben Aaronovitch, C.N. Rowan, M.D. Massey, Craig Halloran, David R. Slayton, Emma Shelford, G.K. Lund, Harry Connolly, Kevin Hearne, Hunter Blain, Jonathan Yanez, Josh Erikson, Ken Warner, Steve Higgs, Morgan Quaid, Shayne Silvers, Nazri Noor, Nicholas Woode-Smith, Richard Kadrey, Peter J. Woods, Rob Thurman, Robert J. Crane, Theophilus Monroe, Tim Rangnow

What am I working on?

Blade Mage Book 8 – Fun with Friends!: It’s in God’s hands now… Wait, no, that’s not right. It’s with my editor! That’s where it’s at. Easy mistake, though, considering her work is divine. Has to be to put up with both me and my work. Even after several passes, I still fail to spell things correctly, and always words I know how to spell. And sometimes my commas get, a, mind, of, their, own. <- See what I did there. I made a funny!

And apparently, lame jokes are just what we’re doing this month. Buckle in.

At any rate, she’s working through it, and I expect I’ll get it back soon, then I’ll have a quick go at it and get it shipped off to my betas, who will no doubt find a few more elusive misspellings and rambunctious typos. Bitch-ass typos…

Mad Maudlin: Sadly, I’ve not made as much progress as I would have liked. Still cracking away, though. Between two conventions and helping my dad tile a bathroom, my work time has been a scattered mess. That said, the way I’m writing this one is a bit tricky. I don’t know why I do this to myself. I have the power. I could have made the book flow in a normal, linear fashion, but noooooo, I had to get all artsy fartsy. So, for the sake of keeping my ducks in a pleasant little row, I had to go back and re-read from the beginning. Since I was there, I went ahead and started editing up to where I was. So, while I’ve not made a ton of new progress, what I have is already on its 3^rd draft, so that’s pretty good.

Also, and I think I’m allowed to say this, but I feel like this is some of my best work to date. I could be totally wrong, and you might hate it, but up to this point, I’m in love with it. Hoping to get it finished soon.

Where are we going to be?

Nowhere. Believe it or not, but as of this moment, we are not scheduled to be anywhere anytime soon. That will probably change, like…tomorrow. But at the time of this writing, we are not officially scheduled for anything.

Actually, let me be totally honest… This is a very first-world problem but it’s annoying. When we had normal full-time jobs, we could afford to go to all the conventions, but what held us back was getting the time off work. Now that we write full-time, we have the availability, but we aren’t exactly making the big bucks. More like beans and cornbread bucks. Finding Nemo, remember? So, often, going to an event means pulling down from the runway, which… Yeah, not great. So, that makes it challenging to decide which things to attend. So, we have several we’ve been bouncing around, and we may do some, or none, or all of them, if I can figure out a way to make it work.

We will almost certainly be doing some local table events in the near future. Standby for updates!

What's going on in life?

Superstars Writing Seminar

We kicked off the month with one of our favorite annual events in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This was our 4^th Superstars, I believe. If I’m wrong, I’m sure J.H. will correct it when she reads this before I hit send (J.H. here. Yes, it was the fourth). I highly recommend Superstars for any aspiring authors. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind conference that’s entirely focused on the business of being an author, both for indie and trad. It’s the best place to go to stay apprised of what’s going on in the industry. And if you’ve listened to the audiobook version of The Blade Mage, well, Superstars was where I met my editor from Blackstone.

We flew in on Monday. It was a long day of travel and when we landed on the tarmac at COS they had a wonderful surprise waiting for us… Our gate was being used by another plane, so logically, the best course of action was to make us sit in the plane for an extra hour and a half. Awesome.

I thought it sucked, but the guy beside me… Oh, right… Let me back up a step. Despite having booked our flights six months earlier and choosing our seats, good old American Airlines decided to rearrange shit and split us up. On our first flight, they stuck J.H. between two hefty folks, one of which had a bad case of gas. Lucky her. So, anyway, as we’re sitting on the tarmac with our thumbs up our sore butts, the guy next to me explains that he was just returning from Greece. He’s in the military and was finally coming home after a year, and he’d been traveling for about the past 40 hours. Now he gets to sit on the runway while his wife is waiting in the airport with their four little ones. Good times!

Our dear friend Becca was waiting for us. She was super cool about it, though, and scooped us up when we were finally set free.

We’ve made it a tradition to show up a couple of days early so we can attend the Garden of the Gods tour Kevin J. Anderson leads. It’s a beautiful place and more fun with a gaggle of friends.

They host a “Skills” day the day before the actual conference. In the past, we always participated, but back to that whole money thing, we decided to skip the extra expense and instead spent the day in Manitou with our dear friends Steve and Julie Jones. Julie is a badass author who has a weird western series and Steve is in a band called The Bison, who actually has a song about traveling to Colorado. They’re two of our favorite people, so it was fun getting some time with them. Plus they took us to a kickass witch shop with this statue of a bear that looks an awful lot like a loa who may, or may not, have appeared in The Southern Circle.

Once the conference kicked off for real, it was all kind of a big, happy blur. We saw a lot of old friends and made plenty of new ones. It was a brilliant time. I don’t know what else to say about it, really.

On the last night, Damon Courtney from Book Funnel sponsored a karaoke party. No, I did not sing. I’m not sure my body could handle the amount of alcohol it would take to get me to sing… Wait, that’s a lie. Not the alcohol part, but as I’m typing this, I have a fuzzy memory coming back to me…

It was about two in the morning. Someone said it was time for the final song, and that we were all going to do it together… Hm… Yup… It’s there, that memory. I got up on stage with the others. I definitely sang. So, ha! There! I did sing at karaoke.

Also, I utterly failed to take pictures this year, and after we finished that final song, I had the drunken epiphany that it wasn’t too late. So, here were some of the many selfies I demanded people take with me at 2:00 a.m.

Since it was cheaper to keep the hotel an additional day and fly out on Monday instead of Sunday, we hung around for an extra day and got more time with our friend Becca, as well as a few others. When Monday came around, we sadly loaded up and headed to the airport where… Shenanigans.

Forget about our runway drama on arrival. It got even better on the way home. Turned out, good ole American Airlines had more shenanigans for us! Originally, we had planned to drive. On a whim, I checked what it would cost to fly and… Damn, those were the cheapest tickets I’d ever seen. I remember thinking, I sure hope this doesn’t come around to bite me in the butt cheeks.

Pro-traveling tip: cheap airline tickets are a trap.

When we got to the airport, me wearing the last of my clean clothes, we checked our luggage and made it through security only for the airline to inform us our flight was overbooked. We were the unlucky suckers who drew the short straws.

Public Service Announcement: airlines are legally allowed to overbook flights. If you look it up or ask anyone, you’ll get the same bread and butter answer every time. It goes like this… In order to remain profitable, the airlines must be allowed to overbook to compensate for people not showing up for their flights.

This, when you think about it, makes zero futzing sense. If I book a flight and don’t show up, are they going to give me my money back? Hell no. So, they get paid the same, regardless of whether all the seats have a bum in them. There may be a perfectly legitimate explanation, but I have yet to hear one, nor has anyone been able to explain beyond the bread and butter explanation. But that’s a rant for another day. Back to our story…

Actually, I was at the top of the waiting list, so they gave me the option to head home and leave J.H. behind. Something told me that wouldn’t bode well for my relationship. That something was J.H. She made it quite clear what she would do if I left her behind in Colorado. I won’t go into specifics, but it involved a sharp knife and me being single. Which, come to think of it, one would sort of write-off the other, so… Anyway, of course I wasn’t going to leave her behind.

So, we didn’t get to go home. My luggage did, though. Shipped right off without us. And why not? Who needs their luggage when they’re stranded? Why wouldn’t you take someone’s luggage, have them go through security, waste their time by making them wait until the flight is about to take off, just to not let them board? Sure would have been a shame if they reached out ahead of time.

We were mad.

Very mad.

But here’s the thing…

I’m a believer in trying to find a way to turn my negatives into positives. This one was a struggle.

There was a couple of ladies sitting next to us and I told them as much. I told them I was really struggling to put a positive spin on this situation. They agreed.

But the thing is…

I kind of wish I had seen those ladies again. I wish I had an opportunity to tell them how wrong I was.

First, American Airlines hooked us up with some sweet vouchers. Sweet enough to cover flights to another convention later this year.

Second, it meant we got more time to hang out with Becca, who of course came to our rescue.

Third, we got to see our friend and author Kevin Ikenberry briefly as he happened to be at the airport as we were leaving.

Fourth, J.H. suggested that it might be fun to stay the night at the Antlers downtown, since that’s where the conference was held when we first started attending. I shrugged and pulled up my phone. The rate for a Monday night was incredibly reasonable. So, heck yeah.

Fifth, several of the local Superstars crew have a weekly Monday night meetup at a brewery. We totally crashed that shizz! We strolled in and surprised them all. It was an absolute blast!

And the next day, we finally made it home. But futz that noise, we’ll drive next year. Probably.

Fen Con

We weren’t actually planning to do Fen Con this year, but at the last possible minute, we decided to. Glad we did. It was a lot of fun, and we got to see some of our favorite people.

The night we arrived, J.H. had band practice over Google Meet, and though I offered to stand behind her and stomp and clap, she still wanted me to leave. Weird. At any rate, this seemed like a perfectly good time to undertake my annual Fen Con tradition of having Jack in the Box delivered to the hotel.

As I was eating my disgusting but delicious tacos in the lobby, I struck up a conversation with a stranger. He was dressed to the tens. Wearing every part of a suit except the jacket. But he had two chains to make up for it. One had a big platinum “KING” on it. A knife was dangling from the other. Cool guy. His name was Andrew, but his friends call him Andy. I didn’t catch his daughter’s or wife’s names, but I did learn that his daughter had a great job at the post office, but spent her entire check at the bar, and now she wanted him to pay her phone bill. He told me all of this while she sat five feet away glaring at both of us.

At any rate, J.H. finally called me, like, “Where are you?”

I said I was talking to strangers but that I would be right up. That turned out to be a lie. Somehow, I ended up in the bar, found Kevin J. Anderson, and blabbed with him for a bit. Then, I spotted Leonard and Daniel, two other of our friends, and ended up talking with them.

Pro traveling tip – don’t forget your toothbrush. The hotel offered me a freebie, which looked fine, but was about like using a wire brush. Icky.

We weren’t on any programming, so the opening day we spent most of our time in the room working. Gotta get those words did!

That night we had dinner with two of our favorite authory people, the world-famous William Ledbetter and Tracy S. Morris, along with a few others we got to meet along the way.

Saturday, we met up with William Ledbetter and a few others to write in the hotel’s restaurant. That was pretty fun. Not often we actually get to work alongside our writing friends.

Saturday night…

We got stuck in the elevator.

With as many hotels as we’ve stayed in, I suppose it had to happen eventually. Naturally, it also had to happen with our friends Bread, or, as they are also known, Ed and Brandy. This was extra terrifying because Brandy is pregnant and due very soon. It went unsaid at the time, but I later confirmed everyone else had the same fear as me: dat baby gonna be born in dis elevator…

That did not happen, thankfully. They got us out in about five minutes. At any rate, I mentioned it would happen with them because of course it would happen with them. A great deal of our hotel mishaps have been in their company. In fact, we’ve been evacuated from two different hotels for fire alarms alongside that pair. Both times in the middle of the night.

Sunday, we blabbed with some more people and began saying our goodbyes. We weren’t leaving until Monday because…

Pro-traveling tip – okay, so when you’re flying somewhere, it’s totally worth checking if an extra day in the hotel is cheaper than flying out the day your event ends. Like, conventions usually end on Sunday, so a lot of people fly out then. But actually, it’s often half as much to fly home on Monday. This time we drove, but I still discovered something neat: I got a lower rate for staying an extra day. It cost $60 less to stay four nights instead of three. Weird, right?

So, Sunday we mostly did a lot of blah, blah, and goodbyes, then made our way down to the restaurant to work for a while and have dinner. We had a few people stop by to chat with us, some solicited and some…not so much.

But shortly after he left, some others came over and plopped down without so much as asking if they could join us. In fact, the only question they asked was if Kevin had left. So, I suspect they just wanted to talk to him, but since he was gone, we’d have to do.

Then one of them proceeded into a tirade about publishing and marketing, and… Look, I always try to be nice. And I was. But the thing is…

The dude was going on about publishing and book marketing. Specifically, he was talking about some of marketing stuff I have experience with. The very same marketing stuff that has allowed me to go full-time. He was lamenting his lack of experience in this arena.

It went like this… He would say, “I’m not sure how this thing works, blah, blah, blah.” I would start to offer an explanation, but then he would railroad me with his next bit of wisdom. Over and over. At one point, he described the exact method I’ve used to sell the most books, and before I could get a word in, he informed me that he wasn’t sure whether it would work, but he could confirm for me in three to four years. I guess I’m supposed to find him then and ask?

And the best part? Right at the end, he said, “Yeah, the great thing about conventions is you never know who you’re going to meet!”

I smiled, nodded, and somehow refrained from saying, “Like someone who might be able to answer your marketing questions.” I know that sounds jerky, but… Good lord on a skateboard. Also, speaking of “never know who you’re going to meet.” We didn’t. Meet, that is. He never asked my futzing name. Not once. He did ask J.H.’s, of course. Eyeroll to the tenth power.

Moral of the story: don’t be that person. Sometimes it’s better to ask questions than just blah, blah, blah… At the very least, sometimes it’s nice to let other people speak. Dude also mentioned that he was shutdown during a panel for monopolizing the time. Hard to believe.

What have I been reading?

Final Thoughts

I was sure this was going to be a short newsletter, but per usual, I blah, blah, blahed for too long. So, I think I will just say goodbye now.

Goodbye!

-Phill