Evan Shapiro used to run Seeso, an early comedy streaming platform that was a little too ahead of its time. Today, he edits Media War & Peace, a newsletter about the fight for attention, and this issue introduces the Affinity…
→ Before you publish, know your defamation risk
The Authors Guild is running a free webinar this Wednesday on defamation in fiction and nonfiction, walking through what happens when a book — invented or not — cuts too close to a real person. Traditional publishers have lawyers who…
→ Steven Pressfield’s first agent told him 427 minus one equals zero
Steven Pressfield tells the story of the first agent he ever had, and the arithmetic she gave him about unfinished work. If the finished book is 427 and you’ve written 426, you don’t have 426/427ths of a book. You have…
→ Every freelancer marketing strategy, ranked and sortable by where you actually are
Double Your Freelancing built a sortable ranking of every freelancer marketing strategy, organised by where you actually are right now. There’s no best strategy, only what’s best for you given your goals and experience — which sounds like a hedge…
→ The barter agreement behind eighteen years of A Working Library
Mandy Brown has been publishing A Working Library for eighteen years. Saturday’s issue is a memorial for Nevan Scott, a teacher and developer who died this year, and who had been quietly keeping the site running since he wrote in…
→ James Clear on the business behind Atomic Habits
Nathan Barry got James Clear on stage at Craft + Commerce, years after the last time Clear spoke there — back when Atomic Habits hadn’t come out yet. Thirty million copies later, the conversation is about the four-million-subscriber email list…
→ Publishers took the AI settlement money and didn’t pass it down
Ben Werdmuller spends most Fridays rounding up links that caught his eye at the intersection of technology, media and society. This week, the top slot went to the newsroom lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, and to who actually ends up…
→ A biographer on why Alice Coltrane’s moment took this long
Nate Chinen recorded fifty-four minutes with biographer Andy Beta on why Alice Coltrane’s moment took as long as it did. “I’m reluctant to classify Alice Coltrane as an example of a beloved artist going from obscurity to belated discovery,” [Beta]…
→ The people who arbitraged their traffic are done
The Rebooting talked to Vivian Schiller about what happens to publishers who spent a decade arbitraging search traffic. If that was your model and Google Zero killed it, you’re done — unless there’s a real community that comes looking for…
→ One long video a week, for years, from a stone cabin in the Alps
Martijn Doolaard moved alone into the Italian Alps to restore two stone cabins, and published one long, finely edited video a week for years. Dense Discovery framed it well. Weekly is slow by every metric the platforms reward, and the…
→ A literary agent on the writer you can’t stop measuring yourself against
Anna Sproul-Latimer, a literary agent writing at Neon Literary took on “the writer you can’t stop measuring yourself against.” You can’t girlboss your way out of envy, she says, and she isn’t buying the standard advice about converting it into…
→ A Belfast punk band turned a protest song around in four days
Charlie Jane Anders wrote about Problem Patterns, a Belfast punk band who posted a protest song called Bodies four days after the anti-immigrant riots in Northern Ireland. Riots June 9 to 11, song out June 15, proceeds given away. Cancelled…