> Carl: Your books are safe. While you’re reading them, you get to become Tarzan, or Robinson Crusoe. > Bastian: But that’s what I like about them. > Carl: Mm hmm. But afterwards, you get to be a little boy again.” > —The Neverending Story (1984) It’s

Last year, I’d seriously considered partnering with various trusted peers in the creation of a new, “hybrid” publisher. It was clear as Gorilla Glass what traditional publishers were doing wrong so I figured I’d start my own. Then I realized I had no idea what to do instead.

In response to my article on how to package your book so that people will pick it up off the shelf [http://mavengame.com/2015/10/06/package-your-book/], Josh Bernoff [http://withoutbullshit.com/] wrote: > Isn’t it more important what browsers on Amazon.com see than bookstore browsers? I

Authors stumble when it comes to titling their work. “Titling,” mind you, not “naming.” Naming says what it is to you, the author. Titling tells readers what it might be to them. Subtle but important distinction. On the traditional publishing side, we’d lump title, subtitle, and cover design under

> Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. Chatterton killed

> “Like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”—Herman Melville, > Moby-Dick You may have read my previous article, on escaping the New Media cargo cult [http://mavengame.com/2015/07/16/escaping-the-new-media-cargo-cult/]. Well, I take it back. To find out why,

Today, if you aren’t writing fiction, every single word you put down has to do something for you, or have the potential to do something. We write our diary entries in public on Facebook. We send letters to our friends on Medium. Our culture tells us that it’s

You dream of writing a book. In fact, even if you’ve previously written books, you dream of writing another one. Two things are going through your mind right now: 1. He’s reading my mind. That means magic is real. I can fly. I can fly! crash…thump 2.

This article appeared in modified form on Boing Boing [https://boingboing.net/2015/07/16/escaping-the-new-media-cargo-c.html]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What appealed to me about the Web from the start was that what seemed too niche for the “mainstream” could flourish because you had a mechanism (search, links) for reaching all the

It used to be 15 minutes, but then TED came along.As an editor, I judge the strength of a piece of writing by the weight of its emphasis on a single viewpoint. If you read something written (well) by a person with a substantially different way of seeing the