From Author Nation on Facebook, and a great read. Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts wanted an answer to a question that should keep every working author up at night: why do some books explode while nearly identical ones vanish? So they built a market they could control. 14,341 people. A library of unknown songs by unknown bands. Two versions of the same world. In one, people chose music with no idea what anyone else was doing. In the other, they could see what everyone before them had downloaded. Same songs. Same starting line. The only difference was whether people could see each other's choices. The results were brutal for anyone selling a formula. When people could see what others picked, the hits got bigger, the flops got deader, and — this is the part that matters — success became almost impossible to predict. The same song could finish near the top in one world and near the bottom in another. Quality only set the outer edges. As the researchers put it in plain language: the best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well — but any other result was possible. Read that twice. Because that isn't a study about music. That's a photograph of publishing. If you're just starting out, this is interesting. But if you're a full-time author who already did the hard part — you have the readers, the list, maybe a small team, and somewhere around five or ten thousand a month the growth quietly flattened and no new tactic seems to move it — then this is the most important thing you'll read this year. Keep going. Here's the mistake nearly everyone makes. They treat publishing like a complicated system — a machine. A Swiss watch. Something with knowable parts you can take apart, understand, and reassemble: the right cover, the right blurb, the right ad recipe, run it through the machine, get the predictable output. That is the unspoken promise behind every "six-figure formula" and "bestseller blueprint" you've ever been sold. But publishing isn't complicated. It's complex. A self-organizing system — like a city, a language, a market. No one designed it. No one runs it. Order emerges from the bottom up, from thousands of readers and algorithms and conversations interacting in ways nobody controls. Same input, different output. Every time.

Okay, look. There are all kinds of writing devices and software out there. Which one is better? Well, you already know what I'm going to say: whatever works for you. There are those writers who don't want AI anywhere near their manuscript or in their software. There are options for you. But the industry standard for editing is Microsoft Word, and while you can turn AI off in Office programs, it's pretty integral at this point. You may need to find an old version, or the way to shut off all AI features to work with a pro editor. But when it comes to drafting, things like Scrivener or Ellipsus are solid, non-AI options. As to devices: writers are easily distracted, so distraction free devices like FreeWrite or my own favorite, Remarkable eInk tablets are a great choice. No WiFi, no browser, no email or social media, pure writing heaven. Of course, you can do that with any device - create a secondary user on your computer, and don't allow access to browsers, email, or even WiFi, and you have a distraction free device, since you have to swap users to access those other features. You still can, but at least you have to work for it. Right now, my distraction free device is a Remarkable with a keyboard folio. My travel device is a MacBook Neo (definitely worth looking at, for all kinds of reasons). And my desktop is a Mac mini. What are y'll doing, and how to you avoid distractions?

Hey there everyone, I just wanted to pass on a message from Ingramspark. Apparently, we have some scammers impersonating the company. Be hyper vigilant, my friends. "We have recently been made aware of bad actors fraudulently posing as our business through lookalike websites, emails, social media accounts, phone calls, and text messages. These individuals often request that the author pay them or provide sensitive banking information in exchange for publishing their book with IngramSpark. These impersonators are not affiliated with IngramSpark. Visit https://www.ingramspark.com/fraudalert for more information"

Does my book need to be ready for publishing to get an ISBN?

So as you can imagine with our ongoing AI survey, I have talked to a lot of people (even before that) about AI. And there seem to be two primary reactions: enthusiasm, or fear, although my theory is that those are simply the loudest voices, and most people fall somewhere in between. But let's talk about a few things that might fall on both sides: AI is not a savior, or the devil. It is certainly not the answer to some of the woes of publishing, and may even create new ones (at least temporarily). But in and of itself it is a tool, and tools do not do bad things without evil people to wield them. AI has the potential to do good or bad things, and how that happens is the choice of the user. Digital Privacy and AI. Look, digital privacy has been a myth online for years, and we need to dispel a few things. First, if you use any modern tech, from cell phones to social media in any form, and most email services, and certainly if you own and run a website, have an email list of readers, or use most other tech, your privacy is already compromised to a certain extent, and maybe a great extent. As a public figure, like an author, your image, your name, and at least some information about you is easily found in a Google Search. Because to build the audience and platform you need to sell books, you have to be discoverable. Discoverability is the biggest obstacle most authors face when it comes to marketing. (even though people are more likely to know your name than your face). You can choose, to some extent, how visible you are, but it is extremely challenging to remain invisible and build an author career at the same time. AI is not making that better. It makes it worse, and people constantly give their images to AI to do fun things like put on make up, or make me into an action figure, or try different hairstyles. AI is being used at airports to verify your face and identity. Most people use their face to unlock their phones. This is hard when we see AI in so many things in so many places, and in almost every app we use. Here's the truth: if you are online, you are likely using AI, like it or not. In some places you can turn AI features off, in others it is part of the price of using an app.