ONE: MASLOW THE FUCK OUT OF IT My friend Laura Goodin has a saying: Maslow the fuck out of it. Actually, that could be a lie. She has something similar to this, but I can’t remember if I’m inserting the profanity or the profanity was there when she deployed it in our most recent conversations.  If I’m wrong, the intent was definitely something close, and I will owe Laura a beer and an apology. Life would be much easier if I actually copied down the interesting things my friends said, exactly, on the basis that I will one day want to write a blog post around their adages. But for our purposes, lets go with this. Laura Goodin has this saying: Maslow the fuck out of it. Near as I can gather, the saying come from her years working with emergency services, where she would train new recruits in the best way to respond to a crisis. When in doubt, work your way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Take care of the biological needs, then the safety needs, then the social needs. Much as those of us on the internet would disagree, providing a populace with food and a safe place to

I logged to Amazon this morning to see how pre-orders were going for A White Cross On A Lonely Road. The nice thing about the dashboard they offer is the way it lines up a whole lot of books you’ve published in a row. If you’ve made a decision to adopt a standardised layout, that means you get a neat little visual when you log in. I’m still working through some of the older releases, bringing them into line with the standardised approach, and I’ll admit that I’ve gone back-and-forth between this and trying for a more genre appropriate cover for certain kinds of work. Today, though, was the first time I looked at them as a whole and felt satisfied with the effect. The approach is very much an approach that is designed to work with my relatively limited graphic design skills and keep the production side of things fast, but theres just enough scope to try new things and tweak the design as I go and while they may not always scream “fantasy story’ or “horror story” or “science fiction,” I’m pretty pleased with the way it makes it clear that you’re looking at something Brain Jar has

Last Monday, I talked about the need for writers to develop a business model. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and I doubt it will be the last, but it was the first time I’ve said this here on the blog and in such am easily sharable form. That meant people started giving me feedback, which largely came in two camps: How, exactly, do I do this business model thing? GIVE US DETAILS; or Dude, I’ve got a business model, but it’s not working the way I want. I’ll address both of those eventually, but given that I’m Melbourne today (and I’ve gone three days without medication and CPAP, thanks to poor packing on my part) I’m going to hold off on answering the first. Mostly because I started and it got very, very long. As for the second: well, I’ve worked for a bunch of small businesses where exactly this has happened. This is the nature of running a small business, particularly one where you’re dealing primarily with other businesses who act as middle men, as most traditionally published authors do. Many of those small businesses I worked for had plans, but their plans were…flawed. Based on wild

Back in April I stayed awake until 1:00 AM and recorded an hour-long chat with for Mark Leslie Lefebvre’s Stark Reflections podcast. It went live last week, and over the course of the interview we tackle many writing and publishing topics, including my start as an RPG publisher in the pre-Kindle days of the early 2000s. One thing I dig about Stark Reflections is Mark’s habit of ending every interview by reflecting on the things he can take away and apply to his own practice as a writer/publisher. It’s possible one of my own reflections is “don’t do interviews at 1:00 AM”, because oh wow, I was getting a big loopy towards the end, but such is the curse of writing and publishing in a different time zone to the vast majority of your contemporaries. Check it out on the Stark Reflections website. Here’s the summary of what we cover: