indie publishing

What I Learned Writing a Grief Memoir About My Wife: Five Years, One AI, and the Question of What Makes Writing “Real”

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Five years writing a grief memoir… That’s how long I spent writing about my life with Ellen, my wife of 47 years who died on Thanksgiving Day 2019. Five years of wrestling with memories, confronting regrets, trying to honor a complicated woman and an even more complicated marriage. Five years of starting over, deleting thousands … Read more

Why Your Life Story Matters More Than Ever: Memoir’s Unlikely Moment

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I’ve been watching something interesting happen in the publishing world regarding memoir writing in 20205, and I’ll be honest: it surprised the tar out of me. Memoirs are everywhere. Not just the celebrity tell-alls you’d expect (though yeah, those too), but regular people writing about their regular lives. And here’s the kicker: readers are eating … Read more

When Author Blogging Actually Works (And When It Doesn’t)

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In the previous post, we had a dose of reality about author blogging–where I basically told most of you to skip it entirely–and if I allowed comments on these posts I suspect we would have seen a predictable mix of responses. Half the messages might have thanked for saying what needed to be said. The … Read more

The Harsh Truth About Author Blogging in 2025

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Let me start with something that might sting a little: most of you reading this shouldn’t be blogging. I know, I know. That’s not what you expected to hear from a guy who’s about to spend three blog posts writing about author blogging. But here’s the thing–and this comes from someone who’s been at this … Read more

The Brutal Math Every Indie Author Needs to See

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So there I was last week, deep in research for a crazy bestseller quest I keep fantasizing about at 77, when I stumbled across some indie author income numbers that made me put down my coffee and stare at the screen for a good five minutes. Not because the numbers were encouraging–hell no. Because they … Read more