Year(s) in Review

Catching up

There’s a generic oddness to newsletters. As a writer, I enjoy thinking of my audience as a group that has some familiarity with who I am, what I am writing about, and what I’ve already written. I enjoy being able to shorthand topics and ideas by saying “as you readers well know” when I bring up something I’ve discussed several times before, for instance. But every week new people sign up to receive these newsletters. What do they already know? Are they confused by my shorthands? I’ve been writing this for going on 3 years now, so the stream of new folks and number of shorthands only increases.

So I went through the archives and pulled out 10 topics I wrote about in previous newsletters.

1.) I wrote a book based on the first 18 months of this newsletter. Everything you want to know about writing a nonfiction proposal, the returns system, doing a P&L, the difference between developmental editing, copyediting, and proofreading, how covers are designed, what the big five are, the importance of recognizing indie presses versus corporate presses, how distribution works, and more is covered in that book. You can buy it here for only $10.

2.) I updated and summarized a number of posts about supply chain issues here.

3.) I finally addressed agents here. (Apparently an agent read this and concluded I prefer not to deal with agents, which is not true! I am thrilled to receive agented submissions.)

4.) I wrote about what I aspire to as an indie press lots of places, but the most recent is here.

5.) I wrote about the prices of books—and why they should be higher—here.

6.) how Amazon is changing how we write is here.

7.) Being attacked by Glenn Greenwald on Twitter? That one is here.

8.) I wrote about Jane Austen and the secret to the literary canon, and getting a book deal, here.

9.) Book reviews—the art, the influence, the problems—here.

10.) Paper shortages — and the history of printing and publishing in America—since 1638

I hope this helps anyone who is more interested in topics than in me find some information! And I hope it orients anyone interested in reading this newsletter’s intro and first chapter as it were, were it a book.

PS: Last week’s post about 1099s, W2, and mortgages received lots of fascinating responses and one very helpful solution: set yourself up as an S-Corp. I actually learned about this workaround in February 2020, put it on my list to look into, and then…pandemic. So I will go back to this in February 2022!

Remember this newsletter is now going every other—every other post is free to all, and every other for paid subscribers.