Day: September 29, 2021
News & Upcoming Events

Pre-Made Book Covers, Going Cheap

I opened up for Freelance Cover Design Work last week because our cat had an unexpected vet visit and it wiped out my emergencies fund. However, with my small business grant running out towards the end of October, I’m also preparing to open up a few more side-hustles to keep things afloat while I’m looking for a new day-job and keeping Brain Jar Press running. Which brings us to the secondary side-hustle on the design front: pre-made book covers folks can pick up slightly cheaper than getting me to design stuff from scratch. The proper launch for this will likely come in October, when I’ve had time to set up a proper web store to streamline the buying process and built up a decent catalogue (the aim is about 5-to-6 covers for each genre I want to cover at time of launch). Meanwhile, here’s the preview gallery of what’s coming: Like I said, the full store is coming in October.

PeterMBall 29/09/2021
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

An Intriguing (and Discouraging) Take On Substack’s Business Model

My favourite headline doing the rounds right now:  Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel? It seems to originate from Julian Novitz’s article over on The Conversation, taking a quick dive into Rushdie’s decision to publish his new novella through Substack on a Pro deal (where Substack pays creators with a certain profile to use the platform and build up the service’s profile, rather than paying based on how many paid subscribers a writer brings to the platform). The answer to the question, of course, is “No,” but the original article is worth reading because Novitz is primarily interested in using Rushdie’s decision to publish there as a lens through which to examine the current state of the Substack platform and business model. The interesting thing about the question posed in the headline is how familiar it is. People have been looking towards digital reading platforms and considering it for about two decades now,

PeterMBall 29/09/2021