The sun was hitting the brickwork of a small coffee shop in Brooklyn this morning, and I watched a ten-year-old boy. He wasn’t on his phone. He was staring at a physical book, but his thumb was hovering over the page as if he expected it to react to a touch. It was a small, … Read more
I remember sitting in a cramped apartment in Chicago, staring at a spreadsheet of narrator quotes that felt more like mortgage applications than production costs. It was the winter of 2024, and the dream of turning my latest manuscript into a sprawling, cinematic audio experience was dying under the weight of per-finished-hour rates. Back then, … Read more
I spent most of last Tuesday staring at a cracked screen on the subway in New York, scrolling through a digital graveyard of half-baked thoughts. There were grocery lists, sure, but buried between the eggs and the oat milk were fragments of something else. Observations about the way the light hits the brickwork in Brooklyn. … Read more
I remember sitting in a small, cramped coffee shop in Seattle last October, watching a woman across from me unwrap a package. It wasn’t the usual rushed tearing of cardboard. She handled the book inside like it was a piece of vintage jewelry. It had a heavy, cream-colored cover with gold foil that caught the … Read more
I was sitting in a small, slightly drafty coffee shop in Portland last Tuesday, watching a woman at the next table ignore her cooling latte because she was so buried in a paperback. I couldn’t help but peek at the cover. It wasn’t the usual “murder at the bakeshop” with a cartoon cupcake on the … Read more
There is a specific kind of silence that follows a book launch on a major platform. You spend months, maybe years, bleeding onto a keyboard in a cramped apartment in Chicago or a quiet corner of a library in Seattle, and then you hit publish. The algorithm yawns. You are a drop of water in … Read more
I remember sitting in a drafty coffee shop in Seattle, watching the rain blur the windows while I stared at a finished manuscript that felt more like a burden than an achievement. It was 2024 back then, and the barrier between a digital file and a professional audiobook was a wall of money I simply … Read more
I spent a drizzly Tuesday last November in a small library branch outside of Seattle, watching a group of twelve year olds interact with a display of paperbacks. It wasn’t the quiet, reverent scene you might find in a nostalgic film from the nineties. Instead, it was loud, chaotic, and fascinatingly tactile. One girl was … Read more
There is a specific weight to a book that hasn’t changed since the first printing presses started rattling floors in Europe. You feel it in your wrist when you’ve been reading too long in bed, that solid, stubborn presence of paper and glue. For a long time, we were told this weight was a liability. … Read more
There is a specific kind of silence that haunts a self-published author after the initial launch high fades. You’ve done the social media rounds, you’ve begged for reviews, and you’ve watched the Amazon dashboard with a level of intensity that borders on clinical. Then, the plateau hits. We were told for years that audio was … Read more