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I want to believe that most people do have a book in them. But, since anyone can now simply use prompts to generate a nonfiction book in hours, I'm forced to draw some boundaries. Everyone might have a book in them, but it takes a little something extra to actually make that book worth reading. There are three considerations when actually getting the book out of yourself, and a further four questions I want you to ask yourself before you do. The considerations: Your own health and well-being as the prospective writer.The benefits of the readers who will find your book.How your book contributes to the ecosystem of other writers and experts in your area of expertise. These considerations aren't so heavy in fiction—that's an area where you can have fun telling stories and using your imagination (although it comes with its own set of considerations and cautions that are outside the scope of this episode). As a nonfiction writer, however, you have a little more responsibility. The book that is in you could be incredible, but that doesn't mean it's ready to come out fully formed and speaking in complete sentences. This series will help you make an informed choice and lay out a vision for the way for you to make your mark on the world.

Yes, everyone is mad about Anthropic chopping up millions of books, but here's the, well, million dollar question. Are you mad on more than just aesthetic grounds? Are you mad about what's happening to the world's knowledge and access to it…or is this just about paper and ink? Em talks about how your bookish heroes destroy books every day, why what Anthropic did is (extremely technically) legal, and why other AI execs are using this bad press to make you think they're strawberry shortcake. Photo by Limi change on Unsplash

A rant on how a reader behavior survey taken over the space of one month was conflated into an indictment on readers and—bafflingly—libraries. Emily discusses why fingers are being pointed in these particular directions and where they maybe should be pointed instead. Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

When you buy a digital book, what exactly are you buying? The answer might blow your mind: nothing. You’re not buying a book at all. You’re licensing it, and with that license comes stipulations. In this episode, I talk about digital rights management (DRM), and what Amazon, and other digital media services, giveth and taketh away. We’ll talk about the ups and downs for readers as well as the pros of cons for authors puzzling over whether to apply DRM to their own books.

I won't bore you by telling you a story you've heard before. This isn't hand-wringing about an individual author's ethical issues—this is an examination of what brought us here. In this episode, I talk about: The breakdown in the rules about AI between trad and self publishing.How acquisition practices, especially those of the past several years, have led us to the current situation.How to protect yourself (to the degree it's possible).What we lose in our current approach to creation and what we could have if we bothered letting ourselves envision a different world.

I’m just going to be honest with y’all—I’m overwhelmed. This podcast is about exploring the world of publishing and providing a resource for authors, but everything is moving so quickly that it’s easy to feel left behind even when my goal is to stay on top of things. So I feel that, in this episode, it’d be good to get back to basics. Let’s talk about reading. Yeah, remember that? If I’m not mistaken, that’s what we’re all doing here, or at least why we started. In Episode 87, I talk about: Why it’s so hard to stay focused on books (down to the nuts and bolts of what our eyes have been trained to do)What deep reading does to enrich your lifeSome ways you can rebuild your reading habitA reminder that the sheer number of books and subjects for you to read about is more than you could ever begin to approach To sum-up: between now and my fortieth birthday next February, I’m going to aim to be a more thoughtful reader and retrain my brain to become fully immersed in books rather than just skim the surface. If that sounds like something you’d like for yourself, let me know at [email protected], on LinkedIn, or on Bluesky @emilyeino.

In this episode, I talked with Sarah Giffrow, an expert in helping small businesses with their online presences. If you weren't aware, I worked for Sarah's business, Upswept Creative, for a couple of years, and witnessed the similar workflows and software used for publishing, website design, and digital marketing. It's not a galaxy-brained take to say that the tools that make up those workflows seem increasingly hostile to users—and I'd venture to say both the environment and the economy as well. Completely divesting from every problematic platform isn't realistic for most people's work, but as far as I'm concerned, that's no reason to give up. Both Sarah and I do our best in this conversation to find a balance between “you have no choice but to succumb to your billionaire overlords” or “smash your phone with a sledgehammer and run into the woods.” Hopefully, it empowers you to try to nudge your ethics and your tech use into closer alignment.

Writing is often a solitary activity. Writers spend their days living, and talking with imaginary people, inside our own heads. Existing in that wind tunnel and never coming out of it is not the healthiest way to move through the world (or around the outskirts of it). But, it can be difficult for a swath of people notorious for introversion to brave conferences, networking events, or new writers’ groups. A lot of folks don’t even know where to meet other writers. But, like anyone else, writers need to connect with friends and colleagues. We need people who can relate to the experience of navigating complicated inner worlds and an even more complicated industry. We need people to help us celebrate our writing successes and offer condolences for when we hit craters. We need networks that keep us grounded without pulling us down. Community, or as my guest Jessie Kwak puts it, constellations. Jessie joins the podcast for a second time, this time to talk about her latest book, From Solo to Supported. In this episode, we discuss many of the subjects covered in From Solo to Supported; everything from how to meet other writers, conversation starters for conferences, and how to navigate giving and receiving feedback.

This episode’s guest is David Morris of Lake Drive Books.In today’s interview, David tells us more about Lake Drive’s mission, publishing practices, and unconventional financial model. David also offers his takes on how to determine what works for you when it comes to choosing a publishing path and gives some platform-building insights for authors. -- Publishing Disrupted - Podcast - Apple PodcastsHyponymous LiteraryFree 30-Day Plottr TrialHybrid Pub Scout's Bookshop.org ShopLake Drive Books | Spirituality, Self Help, WholenessIBPA’s Hybrid Publishing Criteria Hybrid publishing has a bit of a nebulous definition at the moment, but as authors are becoming more disenchanted with traditional publishing and discovering how grueling self publishing can be, they’re becoming more relevant.  Since it’s been the standard for such a long time, people are used to the traditional publishing model. They expect that: Publishers pay for everythingAuthors get advances and royaltiesPublishers take care of book promotion and marketing But here’s a few problems (among others): The “everything” that publishers pay for has a big asterisk attached to it, even in tradAdvances and royalties are more underwhelming than ever (or maybe “less whelming”?)Book promotion and marketing mostly falls on the author now (see point 1) I’ve seen a lot of talk about hybrid publishing being predatory and no different from vanity presses, and in some cases…sure. But when you don’t have a major corporation paying all the up front costs, there are some practicalities to consider. Namely, who’s going to pay for all these professionals to do the work of making a book? If you listened to the show before, hopefully you’ve gotten the message of how hard ghostwriters, editors, designers, marketers, and other publishing professionals work to create the best book possible. And that work needs to be compensated. But, authors, obviously, should get the best deal possible for their work, too. So where does that leave us? How do we bring books into the world while making sure it’s fair to everyone, especially when everyone who isn’t a CEO of a major corporation has such a tight budget? And how do you, as an author, know the money and effort you spend on the publishing side is going to get you to your goal? The Independent Book Publisher’s Association (or IBPA) has tried to set up some standards for hybrid presses in the last several years. At last look, these are what the IBPA says a good hybrid publisher should do: Define a mission and vision for its publishing program.Vet submissions.Commit to truth and transparency in business practices.Provide a negotiable, easy-to-understand contract for each book published.Publish under its own imprint(s) and ISBNs.Publish to industry standards.Ensure editorial, design, and production quality. Pursue and manage a range of publishing rights. Provide distribution services.Demonstrate respectable sales. Pay authors a higher-than-standard royalty.  As you may have noticed, there’s considerable wiggle room in there for these definitions (for example, you as the author are responsible for deciding how to define things like “respectable sales”). And the definitions are constantly evolving. So, that’s a big part of what we’ll be looking at in this and upcoming episodes.

Recent surveys verify what you probably have already guessed, that there are profound divides between writers who use AI and writers who downright refuse. But interestingly, these surveys have also shown that around 60% of writers do use AI tools of some kind. So, when you’re creating a software program for writers, you have some choices to make. Do you alienate your anti-AI users or your pro-AI users? Or do you try to find a compromise that works for the greatest number of people? One of my favorite tools that I use in my fiction writing is Plottr, which I introduced to y’all back in Episode 74. It’s a program that lets you visualize your story from beginning to end and keep your notes on characters, themes, settings, and other plot elements all in one central place. When I interviewed Plottr’s education outreach lead back in 2023, I had bought the basic program for myself, which is a tool that you download and use offline. I've used it for at least three different writing projects, and it's helped make my process much more streamlined. So when the folks from Plottr reached out to me to chat about new developments, I was excited. However, when I looked into it and saw that they had a new tool that used AI, I got very uncomfortable. I’m way more on the skeptical side of this issue, and I was scared to see another program I used get gobbled up by AI features. But then I got curious, because I noticed that it was being implemented in a different way that we see in products like Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot (or, if you listened to my last episode ProWritingAid). The difference is that instead of forcing AI features on Plottr users, they offered a choice where users could stick to the completely AI-free Plottr program, or buy the AI-powered Storysnap either on its own or as an add-on.  Seriously, it’d be nice if more companies would do that instead of making you jump through hoops to opt out. No matter my own feelings, I can understand how that statistic poses a dilemma for software companies that don’t want to go out of business. Plottr seems to be trying to create a solution that gives both groups what they want, and I wanted to know more about how that choice was made and where those lines were drawn. When I interviewed Plottr’s founder Cameron Sutter about the way they’re trying to employ ethical AI use, I learned that a lot of careful thought was put into how to deploy AI in a way that avoids using stolen works and doesn’t write users’ stories for them. I’m not here to sell you Storysnap, but I did make space in this interview to talk about it (even though, as you’ll hear, I struggle to pronounce it correctly). To keep it simple: Storysnap helps series writers create a personal story bible, so they can easily maintain continuity throughout each book. Cameron does a good job explaining how they’ve attempted to address issues about privacy and what measures they’ve taken to keep the AI from training on users’ work.

A not-so-brief history of National Novel Writing Month from its beginnings in 1999, its growth as a nonprofit, its scandals, and where November Novel-writers can go from here, -- It's that time of year again. You may love it, hate it, fear it, or be totally uninterested. I'm talking about...well, what you're calling it now depends on your history with it and your feelings on the way things went down. It used to be National Novel Writing Month, aka., NaNoWriMo, and in some cases it still is. Some are calling it Novel November. Others seem to be not calling it anything and just *describing* what it is. For the sake of ease, I'll be calling it NaNoWriMo (or NaNo for short) during the full duration of its existence as a nonprofit. This is a rabbit hole. I set out to write something about commodifying creativity and the problems of centralizing movements under capitalism. But it ended up being so much more than that. I'm going to do my best to sum everything up according to my understanding of what happened based on the graveyard of evidence from shut-down forums. Sound CreditsJester Dance by Conquest | https://freetouse.com/music/conquest  Meditation Music by Dana Music from PixabayTyping Sound Effect by DRAGON-STUDIO from Pixabay "State of NaNoWriMo" closing announcementThread for NaNo Alternatives, Writing Discords & ResourcesTrackBearEllipsus Preptober TemplatesNaNo 2.0Ellipsus's sponsorship retractionDaniel José Older's resignation postNational Novel Writing Month: Inside the A.I. controversy tearing a writing community apart.What is NaNoWriMo's position on Artificial Intelligence (AI)? – National Novel Writing MonthSPEAK OUTNaNoWriMo 2023-2025 controversy summaryNaNoWriMo Moderator accused of child exploitationSpam, Spam, Spam Spam: Inkitt and the Grand Novel Contest - Writer Beware2024 Volunteer Agreement - Final Revision.pdf - Google DriveReddit Thread: "Discords, forums and a decade’s worth of allegations" - Part OneReddit Thread: "Discords, forums and a decade’s worth of allegations" - Part 2The Tragic Downfall of NaNoWriMo | Deep Dive - Savy Writes BooksThe Fall ContinuesFall of the House of NaNoWriMo?Interview with Chris BatyHistory told from NaNo's POV, on Archive.org

We’re building Ellipsus as a platform that prioritizes transparency, trust, independence, and creative freedom. Writers shouldn’t have to trade their privacy or their ownership for good tools. The rise of AI scraping and big tech overreach only made that more urgent for us. —Rex at EllipsusWhatever your attitude toward emerging technologies, we can probably agree it’s tough to be online these days. The tools available seem to be multiplying for some and dwindling for others—particularly those who don’t want to use generative AI. A growing distrust of big tech is leading people to search for less exploitative options than Google or Microsoft.  Fortunately for them (and also me), new developers are creating tools that don’t push AI without the opportunity to opt-in. One of those new tools is Ellipsus, a writing tool created by a small group of writers who wanted better collaborative document options, and who are solidly for transparency, privacy, and writers' rights to their own work. What Makes Ellipsus DifferentAs a text editor, Ellipsus is a lot like Google Docs, but more focused on better performance for large docs. It’s got a git-style feature for better version control, richer permissions, flexibility, and creative customizations. It’s got a unique knack for supporting real-time collaboration, and is simple enough to start using right away.  How Ellipsus Addresses Concerns about AI, Privacy, and AccessEllipsus has been very clear on their stance: no generative AI in the program, ever. They believe writers’ work shouldn’t be harvested to train models without consent. Generative AI, when built on creative labor, undermines originality, and they believe putting it inside a writing tool would be fundamentally counterproductive to fostering genuine voices. Ellipsus's creators want it to be a safe space for writers, and are working on offering better encryption and privacy protections, too. Things that Make Ellipsus FunEllipsus has a vibrant Discord community of writers providing mutual support, betas, collaborators, and the opportunity to commune. Collaboration options in the documents themselves are pretty fun too—I love being able to create different drafts for different beta readers so no one has to feel put on the spot. And another small but mighty feature is the variety of different skins you can apply to your program (my current favorite is Red Velvet 😊🎂). Check out links of interest, including Ellipsus's full statement on generative AI in the notes below. -- Music by Amy Hakanson Logo design by Leigh Kaisen

Karl Becker, founder of Improving Sales Performance and author of Iceberg Selling, talks about his books, how they've made a difference in his business and life, and the necessity of being open to surprises during the writing process.

Dr. Amanda Nell Edgar, founder of Page & Podium Press, joins Emily to talk about overcoming impostor syndrome and taking the courageous step to share your story.

Website copywriter Kelley Gardiner joins Emily to talk about the overlaps between writing clear, attention-getting copy and writing a good nonfiction book.