Saturday Scoop: The "Tuesday" Edition

The most noteworthy publishing news for the week.

Hey there! The Saturday Scoop is a roundup of publishing news that I found noteworthy over the course of this week, with some added but minimal commentary.

I’m also rounding up what has been going on in my newsletter this week. Did you know I don’t send everything out to my email list? Make sure you peruse the links to see what you might have missed!

Yes, it’s Tuesday. I didn’t forget about the Saturday Scoop on Saturday, I was just on a book deadline! I wanted to get Get Your Book Selling on Amazon done before I headed to NINC. And at about 450 pages, it was a tough one to finish! However, it’s done now. So if you have purchased it, it is loaded up to Kickstarter and the website. And if you haven’t purchased it but want to, it now delivers immediately through my website store.

Get Your Book Selling on Amazon on Monica’s Shop

https://theworldneedsyourpassion.com/product/gybs-on-amazon-digital-edition/

The World Needs Your Passion

I’ve also been blogging and sharing some behind-the-scenes of my business (and general take on creativity) over on Ream this week through my new publication, The Passion Papers.

The World Needs Your Passion: A spiritual/woo approach to creativity and entrepreneurship. It's a new book and a new direction that's being seeded in my world right now.

I've owned the domain for years (my original for many years was The World Needs Your Book, but I feel like I've grown out of that so much). I had picked up the domain because my long-term plan was always to bring my work to an expanded community of not just authors, but creatives and entrepreneurs in general. No writing required!

Along the way, I've taken some weird and long detours. A 20+ book series for authors that I didn't intend to write. 🤔🤔🤔 A 6+ book series on spirituality that I always forget to promote. 😅😅😅

I have a lot of ideas about what The World Needs Your Passion book is, but I have a long queue of books waiting to be written before it.

So I'm organizing my thoughts and notes and tidbits in a different diary-esque book/blog/whatever called The Passion Papers.

And I'm hosting it on Ream for free! You can read the first 7 notes completely free, but then you have to be a free Follower (also free aside from taking the Following action) to read the rest.

A lot of these posts are just, as

Austin Kleon

might call it, the bi-product of living my creative life. They flow easily from me as social updates or notes to myself. I often use social media as a starting point for in-the-moment ideas and inspiration (I do this for Substack too), and then I bring that work over to my repository (like Ream or Substack) for posterity and safe-keeping.

My hope is that when it's time to write the book, some of it is already written and can be refined. But I'm also okay if The Passion Papers just serves as a sketchbook of sorts!

I've not done anything like this in a while—years, at least. Few people know that my books for authors started as a 60-day diary of me trying to write faster. 🤣

I can imagine publishing The Passion Papers alongside The World Needs Your Passion when it comes out, as a fan bonus where you can trace back to the seeds of various ideas or chapters.

It's also not that much like the work I normally put out there. A lot of my current work is filled with analytics, data, fact-checking. This work is much more around mindset, spirituality, healing, and trying to become a better creative. It's reflective of the transformation I'm constantly undergoing behind-the-scenes in a life that I have historically tried to keep separate from my more professional, public persona.

If you would like to read along, please join me over on Ream! The image is a list of posts that are already there and ready to read, along with the bottom five which are yet-to-be-published posts that will go out one at a time next week. I'm mostly posting on weekdays and posting on most weekdays. (If schedules are important to you, that's as close as I'll get to promising one.)

Come join me!

You can start reading here:

https://reamstories.com/page/ledec9qdfe/story/lm0p3vwdzg

Are you on Ream yet? Give me a holler (and a Follow) over there if you are!

The Saturday Scoop

• General Writer News:

  • Drew Barrymore and Others Halt Their Daytime Talk Shows - While many watching the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes will consider this a win, I have mixed feelings on it. First, I feel sorry for Drew Barrymore who became a poster child for this situation, even though dozens of daytime talk shows were scheduled to come back at the same time. Second, many with hot takes on this don’t seem to understand the nuance of how daytime talk shows work, and how few writers they actually have on staff compared to the total staff. When 150-200 people per show are forced to strike “in solidarity” with a union that they are not even a part of, is feels a bit like bullying to me. It may seem like a win for writers, but given that the strikes show no sign of ending (not a surprise and something I predicted from the beginning), the unions seem to be using cancel culture and weaponizing fandoms to put a lot more people out of jobs for the long-term.

  • IngramSpark Can Block Your AI-Generated Books - IngramSpark has slightly changed its terms of service and updated the list of content that it may remove from distribution through its platform. The company notes that it may remove, “Books created using artificial intelligence or automated processes.” It’s not clear how this policy looks in practice at this time, so until I hear stories of authors getting their books blocked, I’m just keeping this notice at the back of mind as an initial effort for IngramSpark to put an AI policy into place.

  • Bill Willingham makes Fables public domain after fighting with DC Comics - Willingham is stuck in his contracts with DC, but he believes that if he makes his work public domain, then you won’t be. It’s an interesting question of whether he can really make his work public domain, especially while under contract with DC Comics, that is likely to be challenged legally, as it relates to interpretation of copyright law.

• Amazon News:

  • Amazon Limits New Title Uploads To Three Per Day - This new policy meant to keep scammers at bay got implemented early last week. It appears that you can only upload three new titles per day and seems to include both print and ebook (three total per day). You can contact Amazon to get waiver or exception if you are an established author. While this shouldn’t affect independent authors in the long-term, I have seen a few authors who got caught in the transition. Specifically, there was an author who uploaded three print books, then uploaded a preorder file in the same day before Amazon had announced this new policy. A week later, they learned that their preorder had been cancelled. Be cautious, as Amazon has not specified enough how this functionality works, and they unfortunately do a lot of this work through automated processes.

  • Everything We Know About Amazon’s New AI Policy - I wrote a post this week to talk about disclosure at Amazon—what it means, and how to navigate this new required metadata in the storefront.

  • Publish Rocket Releases New Data on Amazon Categories - Dave Chesson of Publisher Rocket, Kindlepreneur, and Atticus sent me a message about some really cool data he and his team have collected on all the Amazon categories changes that have come out in the last year. He’s just released a YouTube video this week for you that offers an overview of everything they found. It’s about six minutes so well worth your time to watch—and I also dropped a few of my own notes mixed with Chesson’s notes about it into this post. (I had a few different takes and some thoughts to add on their data.)

  • Get Your Book Selling on Amazon is here! With all the news about Amazon coming out this week, I am glad to have this new book out (with all the new information included). If you are interested in learning to sell your book on Amazon, this is one of the most comprehensive, definitive guides to Amazon available now. Full of tons of data and algorithm research across ebooks, print books, audiobooks, translations, comics, KDP Select (Kindle Unlimited), wide strategies, and more.

• Direct Sales News:

  • How Direct Sales is Making the Novelist's Dilemma More Apparent - What is the Novelist's Dilemma? It's the idea that we simply don't have enough to sell to our readers. Direct sales makes this more apparent than retailer sales ever did, but we also finally have control to change the Novelist’s Dilemma through direct sales.

  • How To Make Money With Direct Sales By Embracing Your Author Ecosystem - We live-coached four authors this week about how they can do better with direct sales using what we know about Author Ecosystems. If you think you are a Grassland, Tundra, or Forest, here’s how to use your Author Ecosystem archetype to forge your own direct sales path.

    • Watch the video: https://writermba.com/aedirect/

    • Listen to the podcast episode: https://kickstartyourbooksales.buzzsprout.com/2013629/13600405-how-to-make-money-with-direct-sales-by-embracing-your-author-ecosystem-live-coaching-call

  • Our new book, Get Your Book Selling Direct to Readers, is coming to Kickstarter on November 6th! Because the size of our campaigns has gotten much larger, this will happen on the new and dedicated Writer MBA account (blessed by Kickstarter). That means that you will not be alerted about the campaign unless you Follow it, so make sure you click through and hit the Follow button here »

Looking to Chat In-Person About Industry News Like This? You Should Come to the Future of Publishing Mastermind!

We’ve recently updated the Future of Publishing Mastermind website to include an incomplete list of speakers and attendees so you can see who else is coming.

Join us for the Future of Publishing Mastermind February 26th-29th at the gorgeous Hilton Riverside and hang out with speakers, vendors, sponsors, attendees, and us! We are headed to New Orleans next year with some of the best and brightest minds in publishing.

Please note: this is a private, premium event with many successful authors attending.

You can now see some of the people who are attending the event—we’ll share more announcements about who is coming soon.

You can learn more about the exclusive mastermind here and you can apply to be one of the attendees here. Tickets are more than 70% sold out!

If you’ve heard anything interesting in the publishing world this week, make sure you share it in the comments!