To hear an audio version of this post, click here. I had a shocking experience this past week, and yet the experience shouldn’t have been shocking at all if I actually thought about it. Because of the events of the past three weeks, I’m behind on almost everything. For those of you who don’t know, Dean fell in a 5K (while running really fast) and shattered his shoulder. He had surgery to replace the shoulder five days later. (The American system, my god, it’s a nightmare of phone calls and organization and…well, some of you know. I hope the rest of you never find out.) He met with the surgeon ..read more

For a free audio version of this post, click here. Every year, the Las Vegas Book Festival takes place three blocks from my condo. Every year, I watch the tents go up for the outdoor presentations and the book sales, and every year, I think, Hmmm, maybe I should go. A few years ago, I tried to get a ticket the day before to see one of the featured speakers, not because of a book he’d written, but because he’s a personal hero of mine. Unsurprisingly, since he’s uber-famous, the tickets had disappeared months before. (The festival is free, but you still need tickets to attend the big events.) As ..read more

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. Me and the Google (as a friend of mine calls it) spent what I almost termed a “dispiriting” hour as I searched for the 21st century’s superstars in a variety of fields. I say “almost termed” because, when I think of it, “dispiriting” is the wrong word. Adult me, who loves this modern world of indie publishing and going directly to the reader, doesn’t mind the lack of superstars or “big names” as most people call them. Teenage me, who was trained to figure out the coolest, latest, most “in” superstar (and to judge people based on who they ..read more

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. The initial title of this post was “Fighting The Future.” It came from a quote that I spent about a half an hour searching for. I had hastily scrawled the quote on a piece of paper while doing a dozen other things the past two weeks, but I didn’t cite the source. All I know is that the quote came from something I was reading, but what, exactly, appears to be lost to the wind. I suspect the quote came from a book called Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman. The book is a dishy, but well-research ..read more

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. Three things happened in quick succession recently, that forced me to write this blog now, not, say, months from now. First, a writer friend astonished me by saying they have finally gone indie, after being urged to do so for more than a decade. They’ve been unable to sell a book traditionally for that entire decade, but they’ve kept writing. Only…they’re not really ready to go indie, because they want to pay someone to design the book’s interior for both ebook and for paper. They want to pay someone else to design their cover, and they ..read more

I started this year’s Year in Review blogs with traditional publishing partly because that Department of Justice anti-trust case produced such juicy tidbits that I couldn’t ignore them, and partly because I have always started with traditional publishing. Back in the day, I saw all of us (writers, readers, and publishers) as creatures that emerged from traditional publishing. Now, I see a lot of writers who didn’t start in traditional and have no desire to go there. I’ve met a lot of young readers who really don’t care what the newest hottest book is. Heck, I’ve met a lot of young people who h ..read more

In my Pocket Reader app, I stored a September article from BBC News as much for the article’s title as its content. That title? “When Is A Bestseller Not Necessarily A Bestseller?” I think that’s been the burning question in publishing for the past ten years. Bestsellers haven’t entirely lost their meaning, but they’re not relevant the way that they were twenty years ago. Back in the day when traditional publishing controlled 99% of the books that we saw on shelves (before ebooks), a bestseller was the book that sold the best out of the myriad of bookstores. Even then, those bestseller lists w ..read more

In the course of this insane year, in which the news cycle was on overdrive in every single industry, and the Western world (which is what I mostly follow) spent all of its time splitting into factions and screaming at each other. In a year that had a moment of holy crap, are we really going to slide into World War III?  followed by the return of inflation, and in America a realization that there’s a segment in this country that thinks Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is a utopia (shudder), publishing news took a backseat. Which is unfortunate for the bulk of writers who are still strivi ..read more

This year has been ridiculous. I have no idea why I expected it to be otherwise. I guess there’s a part of me that expected the world to return to normal, even though I’m one of the people who has said since March of 2020 that there would be no normal, at least not what we thought of as normal in 2019. Every industry is changing. The fluctuations in the real estate market have been insane. Imagine, in the space of two years, going from a “normal” market to an all-you-can-sell-at-any-price buffet to the slowest market for sellers in almost two decades. The changes in higher education have just ..read more

I spent most of the morning trying to start this post. It’s not like me to have trouble writing, particularly a nonfiction post, but I simply couldn’t do what I had planned. What I had planned was simple: Because of all of the news recently and the timing, I had planned to start the Year In Review blog posts early. I’ve always hated that they bleed into January (and given the amount of news and changes this year, they probably will anyway), but I couldn’t start, not without addressing something that has been bothering me since last week. Last week’s post focused on the way that the world is ch ..read more