Santa, Krampus, and the Case for Radical Honesty in Publishing: Jason June Returns to Writers With Wrinkles

NYT bestselling author Jason June is back on Writers With Wrinkles — and this time he's brought a Christmas villain who moonlights as a hero.

Jason (*Out of the Blue*, *Jay's Gay Agenda*) joined co-hosts Beth McMullen and Lisa Schmid for a conversation that ranged from self-tape auditions to the anxious state of the publishing industry, and landed on the premise of his upcoming adult rom-com, *Santa and Krampus' Cozy Killer Christmas*, out fall 2027. Here's what stood out.

Acting Auditions, Post-COVID

Jason has spent the last few years building a second career as an actor, and he's candid that it hasn't come with the usual behind-the-curtain glamour. Nearly every audition he's done has happened over self-tape or Zoom, not in person — a shift he has mixed feelings about. Self-taping, he says, opens acting up to people who can't afford to live in Los Angeles. But it also means losing the in-room redirect from a casting director, the moment where you find out whether your instincts about a character were right.

He recently filmed his first movie role, an indie mystery he can't say much about yet — a familiar feeling, he joked, for anyone who's been through a publishing NDA.

An Uneasy Moment in Publishing

Beth and Lisa asked Jason for his honest read on where publishing stands right now, and he didn't sugarcoat it. He described a "greater sense of unease" across the industry — publishers stretched thin, tangled in new AI-related legal questions, while authors watch self-published books hit the market and find success faster than the traditional pipeline allows.

Jason was careful to separate his frustration with authors who self-publish from his frustration with the system itself. Traditionally published books, he pointed out, often sit finished for months or years waiting to move through edits, copyediting, and layout — while self-published authors can publish the moment a book is ready. That speed advantage is reshaping how authors think about their careers, even if trad publishing still tends to offer better distribution and bigger advances on average.

Control, Confidence, and Dungeon Crawler Carl

The throughline of Jason's publishing frustrations comes down to one word: control. He pointed to the *Dungeon Crawler Carl* series — self-published during the pandemic, now a massive, genre-defining hit — as proof that trusting your own instincts can pay off in ways no one predicts. He's not expecting to replicate that kind of runaway success, but the appeal of getting a finished book into readers' hands without waiting on the traditional machine is clearly on his mind as he considers a hybrid career.

Why He Shares His Advances

Some of the episode's most striking moments come when Jason explains why he publicly shares his book advances and royalties through his newsletter, The Ventorship. Part of it is personal — his mother's background in union organizing taught him that shared information is what makes collective bargaining possible. Part of it is practical: most authors aren't actually barred from disclosing this information, he argues, and the mystery around author pay is often self-imposed.

He's also candid that his own advances have been shrinking, a trend he attributes to "debut culture" — publishers spreading bets across more first-time authors rather than consolidating behind fewer, bigger ones. Rather than treat that as an embarrassment, he treats it as data other writers can use to plan their own careers.

The MER Principle

When the conversation turned to marketing, Jason offered the piece of advice that gave the episode its clearest takeaway. His breakout hit, *Out of the Blue*, found its audience because he sought out and paid queer merpeople cosplayers to help promote a book about queer merpeople — a hyper-specific community that was already primed to care.

Beth named it on the spot: the **MER Principle**. Find the smallest, most specific community your book actually speaks to, and go there directly, rather than aiming for a general audience that technically fits but isn't obsessed. For *Santa and Krampus' Cozy Killer Christmas*, that means tracking down Krampus fan accounts.

A Dark Cozy Christmas

As for the book itself: in Jason's telling, Krampus has been misunderstood. In his version, Krampus doesn't hurt children — he eliminates the rare person who, left alive, would accidentally doom humanity. It's *Widow's Bay* by way of a Hallmark Christmas movie, cozy and sappy on the surface with an unexpected edge underneath.

Jason's Advice to Writers

Asked for the one piece of advice he gives most often, Jason circled back to joy. If writing doesn't give you a version of the same "for fun" feeling as any other hobby, something needs to change — the project, the process, or your relationship to the work itself.

His second piece of advice: be **prolific, not perfect**. Get feedback, revise, and then release the book into the world instead of chasing an unreachable standard. Every book, even the bestsellers, ships with mistakes. The writers who last are the ones who can live with that and move on to the next story.

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*Listen to the full conversation with Jason June on Writers With Wrinkles, available wherever you get your podcasts.*