🎧 Or listen to the episode HERE

Interview Overview

In this Twisted Tales Diaries check-in, Daniel Willcocks and co-author R.P. Howley sit down for a candid behind-the-scenes look at the first five months of building Twisted Tales, their “Goosebumps for grown-ups” horror series.

They talk honestly about the joy and pressure of rapid releases, what co-writing really looks like in practice, and why the quiet months are often filled with invisible work like launch planning, promos and social media. Daniel and Rob also share early performance numbers with transparency, reflect on what each book has taught them so far, and tease what’s coming next, including Deal (Book 4), their free short story Thaw, possible 2026 themes and a renewed push towards events and community growth.

Interview Transcript

Intro

Daniel Willcocks: Welcome back, wordsmiths and story seekers. I’m your host, Daniel Willcocks, broadcasting from the shadowy halls of Devil’s Rock HQ. And today we’re bringing you a Twisted Tales Diaries episode. Joining me this week is my wonderful co-author, R.P. Howley. Rob, how’s it going?

R.P. Howley: Yeah, good man. How are you?

Daniel Willcocks: I’m doing very good. So it’s been a couple of months since we recorded the Twisted Tales Diaries. I think in the first episode we said we’d bring these out, not regularly, but we’d bring them out to give people a behind-the-scenes look at what we’re doing with the Twisted Tales series, and hopefully share bits of wisdom and things we’re learning along the way.

The last time we spoke was not long after Jack had come out and Twisted Tales had launched. I think it was June, July sort of time.

R.P. Howley: Around then, yeah.

Daniel Willcocks: And July already feels like several years ago. It’s kind of crazy that we’ve just had Book 3 come out nine days ago.

R.P. Howley: Yep.

Daniel Willcocks: That was a very nice little happy birthday present for me, just saying.

R.P. Howley: It was. It was the day before your birthday, yeah. Got the little paperback through to your house.

Daniel Willcocks: Yep, thank you very much.

Also, my throat’s decided to be sore. We’ve been chatting for about an hour before this and I’ve been fine, but now that we’re recording… classic.

So, it’s been five months now since Twisted Tales came out. Broad question, but how are you finding the process so far? What’s it been like bringing the concept of Twisted Tales to life?

How it’s felt so far

R.P. Howley: I’d say it’s twofold.

It’s an absolute joy to see the reviews coming in and going through the process of it. Now we’ve got our process down a bit more. We know what we’re doing. We know when we’re doing it. We know how long it’s going to take us to do certain things. And we’ve given ourselves a little bit more time with that because Slay was…

Daniel Willcocks: To the wire. Very, very stressful.

R.P. Howley: Very stressful. But that stress and pressure has given us something we can both be proud of.

Also, there are certain aspects people who haven’t co-authored before might not know about. The downtime between things, for example, while you’re working on Book 4 at the moment… I have been for a while because of life, and also because we want to make this good. That downtime gives me time to think about everything else, what we can do with the business side, the future promotion events we might plan next year.

It gives me space to think, but it also makes me feel like I’m not doing enough, because that is the way of author life.

Daniel Willcocks: Yeah. I definitely want to underline that, because it’s something I want to raise too.

What Twisted Tales is

Daniel Willcocks: For anyone coming fresh to this episode and not sure what Twisted Tales is: Twisted Tales is essentially mine and Rob’s version of Goosebumps for grown-ups.

The tagline Rob found, which we love, is: “The 90s called and they want their nightmares back.” Genius. I love it.

We loved the idea of serialising horror, standalone stories packaged in a consistent way so readers know what to expect even though each story is different.

Now that we’re three books in, I really feel like we’re delivering that. We’ve got a good base of readers reading early, people on social media sharing the books and excited about what’s next. It hasn’t exploded yet by any measure, but the plan from the beginning was consistent, sustainable, and joy-driven.

Downtime, guilt and the strange rhythm of co-writing

Daniel Willcocks: The “not doing enough” feeling — I’ve felt similarly. I’m working on Book 4, which is called Deal.

R.P. Howley: We haven’t said that anywhere, have we?

Daniel Willcocks: I don’t think we have. So if you’re listening, that’s an exclusive. Book 4 is Deal.

I’m working on the second draft and I’m getting close to the finish. It’s been with me for a little while because, as Rob says, life. And it’s such a weird process, because I came up with the idea years ago. We started talking about it properly end of 2023, beginning of 2024, roughly nine to twelve months before Jack came out.

We’ve got a rhythm now. Dan and Rob meet up once a quarter, roughly every four months. We catch up, plan the next six to twelve months, and pitch ideas for upcoming books.

I vividly remember us in a Costa in a shopping centre in Milton Keynes — cookies, bacon sandwiches — and a couple next to us looked at us like we were insane because we’re pitching horror ideas to each other like we’ve never met.

That’s how every book starts.

Setting expectations and why planning matters

Daniel Willcocks: Those conversations early on were fundamental. When people collaborate, excitement can take over rationale. But we took time to get clear on what Twisted Tales is, what we’re trying to achieve, who it’s for, how we’ll reach them, who we don’t want it to reach, and what a schedule looks like given our lives.

We can always come back to what we agreed. We can always say, “This is what we said we were building.”

Deal is a perfect example. It’s darker than Jack, Air and Slay — darker in theme and content, more gruesome. I worried it might be too dark, and you reminded me we planned for different levels of horror, with room to flex creatively over time.

How it’s performing so far

Daniel Willcocks: I want to be transparent with numbers, because people talk about “success” without saying what that actually looks like.

I’ve been writing and publishing for ten years, which is wild to say out loud. But Twisted Tales is a brand-new project, and it’s different horror to what I’ve written before. Twisted is designed to be fast, accessible, fun horror — foundational in the best way — and we’re building trust with new readers.

We’ve invested money into covers, audiobooks and more, so we haven’t broken even yet. But as of now, we’re sitting at £324 total across the books, growing daily. It’s slow. We said from the start this would be a slow, consistent build.

In terms of units, we’re at 457 units, and we’ve got 2,147 KU page reads so far since moving into Kindle Unlimited.

These are not huge numbers yet, but the momentum is there, and the goal is compounding: more books out, more entry points, more trust, more readers moving through the series.

What counts as progress

R.P. Howley: I’d push back a little on “deflating”, though. It’s not disheartening. It’s just the process of being an indie author while having a life outside writing.

Full transparency, I’ve got a day job. My living situation is difficult, so I’m carving out time to bring the joy back to writing around what I need to live. Writing doesn’t pay the bills, but it makes me happy.

And it goes back to what we said in Oxford: joy and sustainability, not the quick lightning strike.

We’ve got an amazing group of ARC readers. People regularly message us, review, share posts, and suggest promos. That’s huge.

And yeah, we ran that Halloween promo with over 20 authors. We sold units and reached new readers, but we reduced price and margin. Some days we made basically nothing. But that wasn’t the point. The point is getting readers into the series and building trust.

Trusting the process and playing the long game

Daniel Willcocks: Exactly. For Jack’s first week, we ran promos to get eyeballs because social media alone isn’t enough.

If you want big numbers quickly, you need capital — money neither of us has right now. But I’m happy ticking along like this for now because we’re building foundations.

I love the idea that in a year we can sit down and say: “We’ve done 1,000 units, 2,000 units, we’ve packaged it in new ways, we’ve built audience, we’ve grown community.” The key is conviction and foresight.

Shout-out mindset: “onto the next book”

Daniel Willcocks: I want to shout out Anthony Stanton. I don’t know if he listens to these, but he’s active in supporting us. He launched his first book recently and I love his attitude — publish the book, then onto the next.

A lot of people self-publish and expect instant explosion. That’s not what the industry looks like for most authors. Sometimes you get the lightning strike. Usually it takes time.

R.P. Howley: And Anthony has been great. He’s on our ARC team too. It’s a trust thing — we trust what he’s doing, he trusts what we’re doing, and those connections didn’t exist for any of us before.

Twisted Tales is a new journey for us. You’ve got your publishing journey, I’ve got mine. This is another step.

Favourite book so far

Daniel Willcocks: Fun question. We have Jack — folk rural town horror. Air — gothic wolfy tale. Slay — festive elven nightmare.

What’s your favourite?

R.P. Howley: Oh, no. Two answers.

From an enjoyment of writing point of view, Slay has been my favourite. I basically had full creative licence. We didn’t even have a proper story meeting. You were like, “Here’s an idea”, and I was like, “Do it.”

And it’s one of the biggest things people have commented on — that wild choice you dropped on me without warning. In future, I will trust the process. I wasn’t sure at first, but it worked. It made it camp, inclusive, colourful festive horror, which I love.

From an experience point of view: Jack, because it was the first book I was brought into in this collaboration. It was a learning journey — working with someone else rather than just writing alone.

Air and Deal are joint, because they’re gory and different in their own ways.

Same question back.

Daniel Willcocks: Jack holds a special place for me. Twisted as an idea hit me in 2021, festered, life happened, and then when you came in, you helped cement that accountability to finish it.

You cut out the purple, brought Charlie to life, added inclusivity, and it became a proper Twisted Tale.

Slay was the most fun to write, and that seems to match what readers are saying too.

Pacing, structure and why the stories move fast

Daniel Willcocks: Slay feels the most pacey story we’ve got. It really gets into it.

R.P. Howley: I’m thinking because they’re all set over a limited time period. They all happen over a weekend, basically.

If you give characters a week, they escape. If you give them two days, they have to deal with it.

We deliberately write them as snapshots of horror. Fast, contained, isolated.

Thaw and what’s next

Daniel Willcocks: We’re three books in, technically three and a half because we’ve got Thaw as well.

If anyone wants a free short Twisted Tale, go to twistedtalesbooks.com and download Thaw. It’s Thaw as in T-H-A-W, not Thor with a hammer.

Book 4 is nearly finished at second draft — I’ve got maybe six or seven thousand words to go. Then we need to figure out what’s next after that.

So, 2026 — anything you’d like to do with Twisted Tales?

R.P. Howley: Something fey, or witches, or potentially a twisted Easter. Those are my three options.

Same question back.

Daniel Willcocks: Something cosmic. I love a bit of cosmic.

And away from the stories, I want us to go out and do an event. We’ve started talking about it already, but we need to plan it properly.

The invisible work: launches, socials and what “counts”

Daniel Willcocks: I keep track of word counts. We realised neither of us did much in July, then remembered: we launched a book.

July wasn’t “no work”. It was promos, socials, planning, scheduling, building assets — all between day jobs.

R.P. Howley: Exactly. We use SocialPilot. It’s images from scratch, planning content, managing it around each other. It downplays hard work when you just look at “words written”.

Also, what we do is normal to us, but not normal to most people. We’ve both built publishing companies. We’ve put heart, time and effort into three and a half books.

The income often doesn’t reflect the effort, but it’s still the thing you put out into the world and love.

Gratitude and closing thoughts

Daniel Willcocks: I want to say publicly: thank you for everything you’ve done this year, and for being an absolute pleasure to work with. We’ve got three printed books to show for it, and a short story people can download. So thank you.

R.P. Howley: Likewise. Thank you for bringing me on to the Twisted Tales journey. I hope everyone’s enjoying it as much as we are.

Daniel Willcocks: If you like Twisted Tales and you like what we’re doing, consider joining the Devil’s Rock community. There’s a lot happening next year. Visit devilsrockbooks.com/podcast for the invite link.

Or go to twistedtalesbooks.com and grab a book. If you’re new, see if there’s one that grabs you.

Also: the books are now in Kindle Unlimited. We’re experimenting for three months because 98% of traffic was coming from Amazon anyway, so we’re testing the most sustainable way to reach new readers. We’ll report back on what that looks like.

Anything you want to add before we wrap up?

R.P. Howley: Just: if you come over to Discord, there’s always the opportunity to get beta and ARC copies before the general public. It’s growing slowly but steadily, and it’s always nice seeing new readers there. Shout out to everyone in the community — too many to name, but thank you for being part of it.

Daniel Willcocks: Boom. Hashtag Team Twisted.

R.P. Howley: Hashtag Team Twisted.

Daniel Willcocks: We’ll leave it there. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll have another one of these at some point soon. Maybe. Somewhen.

R.P. Howley: No worries. Bye people.

Daniel Willcocks: Bye.