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.

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

Hey there, everyone. Just letting you know (if you didn't already see it) that this Thursday at 12:00 MST I will be holding a live FREE webinar that will be about how to build your publishing dream team. I will be going over when and how to hire professionals and outsource help on your publishing journey. I will also be warning you about some red flags. There will be a valuable handout that includes what to look for in contracts and a long checklist to help you ask the right questions when you hire pros. You can register here: https://learning.printtopro.com/p2p-power-session-june-session/ I hope to see you there.

Our latest podcast drops tomorrow at 7:00 am Mountain time. When you're preparing your first book or managing a growing backlist, understanding how deadlines affect every member of your publishing team can save you time, money, and a whole lot of unnecessary stress. Check out the latest episode

Related to my previous question. The first iteration of my novel had chapters start with quotes from songs and the lyricist's name attributed the next line down. What are the mechanics of that? Do I seek permission from the source or is an attribution enough? I removed them until I found out the legality of it.