The silence of reading used to be its greatest virtue. You sat in a chair, likely in a room with poor lighting, and disappeared into someone else’s brain for three hundred pages. When you finished, you might mention it to a friend over coffee, or maybe you posted a photo of the cover on a … Read more
There is a specific kind of silence that happens on a crowded subway in Chicago when everyone is looking at their wrists instead of their phones. It is a smaller, more intimate sort of distraction. We used to joke about the “iPhone neck,” that perpetual downward tilt of the head that defined the last decade, … Read more
I was sitting in a small, slightly overpriced coffee shop in downtown Seattle last Tuesday when I realized that the way I used to write books is officially dead. Across from me, a colleague was showing off a dashboard on her tablet that looked more like a high-stakes video game than a bibliography. She wasn’t … Read more
I watched a writer friend in Seattle nearly lose her mind last year trying to drop a eighty thousand word space opera onto a retail platform all at once. She did everything the gurus told her to do. She had the flashy cover, the polished blurb, and a modest ad spend that should have moved … Read more
The silence of a finished manuscript is a heavy thing. You stare at that final cursor blink in a coffee shop in Seattle or maybe a quiet corner of a library in Vermont, and there is this immediate, nagging sense of what comes next. For years, the path for those of us in the self-publishing … Read more
We have been told for a decade that the book is the product. You write it, you polish the prose until it shines or you get sick of looking at it, and then you toss it into the digital void of various storefronts, hoping the algorithm feels charitable that morning. But the math of the … Read more
I spent yesterday afternoon sitting on a bench in Boston Common, watching people who looked like they were staring at nothing. They weren’t, of course. Their eyes were darting in that specific, rhythmic pattern we’ve all come to recognize, tracking lines of text projected directly onto their retinas or through a thin layer of smart … Read more
I remember sitting in a cramped Brooklyn cafe three years ago watching a friend try to coordinate a traditional book tour. It was a logistical nightmare involving delayed flights, half-empty bookstores, and the crushing weight of unsold hardcovers. We both knew the industry was tilting toward something else, but we didn’t know it would look … Read more
The air in Brooklyn feels different this February, a bit sharper than usual, or maybe it is just the caffeine hitting my system as I watch a manuscript upload to a node that didn’t exist three years ago. I remember when the dream of being an international author meant begging a legacy publisher to notice … Read more
We have spent years treating the ebook like a digital photocopier. You take a manuscript, you squash it into a file format that mimics paper, and you hope the reader has enough imagination to stay awake past chapter four. But the walls are closing in on that old way of doing things. I spent a … Read more