“If you have good customer research set up, it’s very hard to go wrong.” —Nadia Odunayo Picture this: You walk into a bookstore, and the first floor is filled with books selected based on your personal tastes. They’re not based on the comp title research you’re doing for work or the books you looked … Read more
“Bad Books Kill People” Exhibit A: The Malleus Maleficarum “The swift propagation of the witch hysteria by the press was the first evidence that Gutenberg had not liberated man from original sin.” — Jeffrey Burton Russell Sometimes readers forget that these cherished bound objects aren’t always beacons of goodness and enlightenment in a mad world. … Read more
CW: Many cusses!! (Back to our roots, we suppose) Happy almost Halloween, scouts! On this episode, we’re joined by the wonderful Emily Edwards, host of the Fuckbois of Literature podcast, a podcast about the toxic characters you encounter in all your favorite books! (Apparently, Amy March is not a fuckboi (?!)) We also chat about … Read more
“Whatever role you’re in, whatever genre you’re in, find something about it to love and be passionate about because it’s going to take a lot of slow days.” In this power-packed episode, we welcome back Nellie McKesson, founder of book design software Hederis, and meet Liz Gorinsky, president and publisher of Erewhon Books, a small … Read more
What do you do when you can’t find anything you want to read? You write it yourself. After plumbing the depths of Amazon for erotic romance featuring queer POC and coming up empty, Katrina Jackson took matters into her own hands and started writing her own. Seventeen books later, we chatted with her about why … Read more
Kimberly talks about rocking book PR inside and outside of a major publishing house. In this episode, we chatted with freelance food and lifestyle book publicist and Thursday Media founder Kimberly Escobar about the adorable perils of working from home (specifically, Zoom-bombing kittens), how both traditionally and self-published authors can make their publicists’ jobs easier, … Read more
Digital-only and digital-first means I’ll have to repeat myself, but figure out how to do so in a way that’s tolerable and sustainable for me and still interesting for people who are plugged in a little bit more. Michael R. Underwood’s book Annihilation Aria, published by Parvus Press, was supposed to come out in February … Read more
Kickstarter Publishing Head Margot Atwell talks crowdfunding books and money in book publishing. Margot Atwell, Head of Publishing at Kickstarter, talks with us about how a pre-order campaign on the crowdfunding platform can connect authors with hungry readers—thereby making their publishers very happy—and how to work on solving the industry’s biggest challenges: diversity, money, technology, … Read more
You’ve self-published a book. Congrats! Now how do you find your readers? On this episode, Emily sat down with prolific romance authors Elaina Jadin and Marie Robinson to discuss just that, along with the best marketing tools you can use to to find—and keep—an enthusiastic army of fans. They also chat about how having … Read more
Book marketer Robyn Crummer-Olson talks to authors of all kinds about how to share their books with the world. We had the pleasure of speaking with Robyn Crummer-Olson, where she shares the exciting news about her appointment as Publisher at Portland State University’s Ooligan Press. She delivers some real talk about her gold-star author marketing … Read more
