Reader Views announced their 2025 Literary Award winners and look who is right up top! Congrats to our own @Jeremy Shapiro for winning Silver in Business/Sales/Economics category! You're in great company. Book Launchers client Jesse Hurst also won for his book PopEnomics. :) Yay, @Jeremy Shapiro

I've been doing the thousand words a day exercise every morning since 2023. Scrivener just now popped up and said I hit 794,000 words. (The target for this month.) Aside from the obvious benefits; improving your writing, clearing your throat, and getting rid of the static in your brain before you actually start writing, it has made the thought of writing an 80,000-word book not that big a deal. Below is the video I saw in 2023 that finally got me started and kept me going. A link to this video is the first thing I put on page one... https://youtu.be/LPkNt1gFdZ4?si=UXrWO-MhTlI3ZMvv

Julie - Do you have any videos about writers using Substack?

🥳 I'm pretty proud that four months after launch, Your Business Growth Playbook is still ranking as a #1 Best Seller in multiple categories. 🟠 That orange badge is not easy to get - and even harder to keep - in an ever changing sea of book releases. @Julie Broad often talks about how publishing the book isn't the end of the journey, and it certainly isn't. A book launch isn't a one and done event. There's plenty to do post launch to keep the momentum going - and it's all the better prepped because of all of the PRE launch work we talk about here! 🚀

So Spotify and Bookshop.org dropped some big news this week. Who has been following along? 1) Draft2Digital and Bookshop.org have teamed up to sell self-published ebooks through Bookshop.org: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/99616-bookshop-draft2digital-deal.html 2) Spotify and Bookshop.org are teaming up to sell physical books through Spotify: https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-02-05/bookshop-partnership-page-match-announcement/ 3) Spotify is releasing a Page Match feature which will let readers move seamlessly from print book reading to ebook reading to audiobook listening and back again. It's a one of a kind feature and is kinda revolutionary in how readers interact with books. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2026-02-05/page-match-how-to/ Do you use Spotify for audiobooks currently? It'll be so interesting to see how this shakes things up in terms of discoverability. Spotify is making it so you don't ever have to leave their platform. Curious to hear what you think!