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 colleges?

This is a short solo episode with an announcement at the end. Dan walks through the logic of the possible rebrand (and why he’d keep the artwork he loves), shares updates on his 2027 events, the Hatching Season charity anthology for Mind, and his current projects. He also explains why he’s leaning towards making The Nowhere Line a direct-and-events-only book, and why, after eleven years, he’s finally planning a series that is purely for himself.

The episode closes with the news that The Writer’s Chair is taking a short break from its weekly schedule. The feed isn’t going anywhere, and Dan is clear he’ll be back, but books come first for the rest of the year.

🎙️ What we get into:

• Why Dan is considering rebranding Devil’s Rock Publishing, and the origin of the name and logo
• The Innsmouth Literary Festival incident that made him question whether “devil” is a barrier to events, schools and colleges
• Why you can become numb to your own brand name, and how to sanity-check it before spending on banners, tablecloths and business cards
• How to find Dan at his 2027 events, with an events page coming to his website
• The state of the Hatching Season charity anthology (proceeds to Mind): around 60,000 words selected and the final stories under review
• The challenge of balancing an anthology’s reader journey when many strong stories overlap
• Why The Nowhere Line is likely to become a direct-only, event-exclusive book, and why indie freedom makes that kind of experiment possible
• Why Dan realised he doesn’t actually read series, and how he plans to change that while planning his own
• Why he’s considering a purely “selfish” series, and how he’s narrowing down cosmic horror versus dark fantasy
• The announcement: a short hiatus from the weekly schedule, with the podcast feed staying live

Links & Resources:

• Daniel Willcocks: https://danielwillcocks.com
• Devil’s Rock Publishing: https://devilsrockbooks.com
• Free seven-day course, Finish Your Damn Draft: https://danielwillcocks.com/finish

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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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