Authors Electric

  May is only the beginning of a ride I believed I had taken before and urgently need to take now. In my 15 years of publishing on Kindle I'd always loved the writing part but had always moved on to the next book as an award-winning writer between publishers and agents without bothering to market or hustle my work. But something remarkable happened as I approached two milestones. My first Kindle book, Nobility, had never been available in paperback. Something about rights management had condemned it to only digital status. But this book had always been special to me and had had a curious history, sitting for years on the desks of publishers and agents. Too short. Too dark as a Christmas thriller with a hard-won happy ending (written long before the wave of dark and violent Yule movies). I'd drawn up a long list of other short books sold as novels instead of novellas. No market for a story of a broken man who'd betrayed his country and an angel who's no angel against a b...

Old Scratch Press (OSP), a poetry and short-form collective that I started in 2022, is seeking two new members to join us starting at the end of 2025. I began the press because authors who I had published in  Instant Noodles Lit Mag  asked me to publish a book of poetry for them. But, as a small indie publisher without a university backing me, it was a big ask to publish one-author-only books of poetry, because books of poetry typically do not sell in a press-sustaining way. I run my various publishing things with my long-suffering husband Dave , and we looked at what the major costs of producing a book are, beyond our time. We decided that, to do it, we'd pay some costs, and some of the labor that had costs associated with it beyond our personal time we could avoid if a group would come together and take on the labor. Basically I went to all the authors I'd worked with in anthologies or the lit mag, and asked them, "If you could trade a little labor for a published book,...