What do you do when the author gives a three-word answer and you have 58 minutes to fill? We break down the surprising art and psychology of moderating author events — specifically for murder mystery books.

Topics covered:

- The golden rule:

over-prepare your questions, under-prepare your ego

- The 'insider bubble' trap and how friendship on stage alienates your audience

- A

minute-by-minute blueprint for engineering a 60-minute event around human attention spans

- The spoiler paradox: how to talk about a

mystery novel for an hour without ruining the ending

- Crowd control tactics for the 'more of a comment than a question' guy

- The

Steve Wettel rule: double your questions, then add 20

Timestamps:

00:00 - The nightmare scenario: dead air at the podium

01:30 -

Core philosophy: you are the lighting technician, not the star

03:00 - The insider bubble trap and 'we' language

05:00 - Replace

flattery with specificity

06:00 - The minute-by-minute event blueprint

08:00 - Why the reading goes at minute 15, not the end

10:00 -

The energy valley: minutes 25-35 danger zone

12:00 - Games that save the room (Two Truths and a Lie for murder writers)

13:30 - The

spoiler paradox and the first 50 pages rule

15:00 - Audience Q&A: the Wild West

17:00 - Crowd control and the art of the polite

interrupt

18:30 - Emergency moves: the magic question

19:30 - Sticking the landing and selling the books

This episode was produced

with NotebookLM from research by Claude.

This podcast episode was generated using NotebookLM's audio overview feature. The source material was researched and curated by the host, with AI assistance in audio production.