Category: Stuff

I’m currently writing a short essay on TikTok and Instagram Reels for my Patreon, which has meant I’m playing around with both platforms. I’m over at @PeterMBall on both, having a bit of fun and talking about books/writing, but I did want to share one creation here because… well, cat. And it amuses me way too much. @petermball Its always hard to explain the economics of what you do to your pets. #writertok #writerscats #fantasyauthortok #publishersoftiktok ♬ Oh No – Kreepa Brain Jar Press announced a fantastic new short story collection by Tansy Rayner Roberts this week. If you’d like to keep our cat in kibble, you can pre-order now.

Yesterday Brain Jar Press released the sixth Writer Chap, Headstrong Girl, from the powerhouse of Australian genre, Kim Wilkins (aka Kimberly Freeman). It brings a close to season one, which was a test case for what seemed like an improbable and weird idea back in the middle of 20202. But this isn’t a pitch for the new Writer Chap, or even the Season One subscription/bundle that gets you all six at a discount. It’s a post where I talk about my favourite bit of cover design going up on the top left corner of every Writer Chap. I chose a very specific numbering convention, three digits for every book even though the first two are 00. Faintly ludicrous at these early stages, when a single digit is all we’re really working with, but that 00 is a subtle statement of intent that we’ll get to three digits one day. That I built the writer chaps concept with a long-term strategy

While the traditional side of the publishing industry is bracing itself for disruptions in the supply chain, the conversation over on the indie publishing side is all about how to prepare for the coming email marketing apocalypse. For those who don’t pay attention to such things, the low-down goes something like this: Apple has been doubling down on email privacy with updates for a while now, and their most recent update to iO15 adds a feature dubbed “Mail Privacy Protection.” Once activated, this feature disrupts a bunch of tools that email marketing relies on: the ability to track open rates; details about what country the reader is in; triggers that would send you a follow-up email if you showed an interest in a particular thing. There’s a pretty good round-up over here if you want to get into the technical stuff, but all you really need to know is this: a foundational marketing tool for many indie publishers is about

So I’ve started publishing books again, after an unintentional hiatus. The weirdest thing about publishing is this: you don’t pay for your mistakes in real-time. Stopped writing because of a serious illness? The books and stories you’ve already sold will keep appearing for another six months to two years, after which there will be a mysterious gap and the deafening silence feels like the end of your career. Did your layout and design computer go boom, preventing work on new books in your small press publishing queue? The books you’ve already developed will chug along for a while, and it’s not until three-to-six months later that you’ve got no new releases and your cash-flow becomes the stuff of nightmares. And the worst part: you forget the awful stuff happened. The flow of cause-and-effect gets muddy, and it never feels like you’re not publishing because bad stuff happened a while back, it feels like some personal flaw that means you should

Ah, the holiday season is almost upon us. All the signs are there: Brisbane is turning into a sweltering slow cooker of humidity; Netflix swarms viewers with terrible Christmas movies (and, frankly, the temptation to watch them all is oddly overwhelming); NaNoWriMo is in full swing; and the sales of Brian Jar books evaporate into the ether as everyone waits for the Black Friday deals at the end of the month. There are many lessons I’ve picked up the hard way in this publishing gig, but one of the biggest I’d pass on to aspiring indie publishers or writers is this: don’t launch your goddamn publishing company in November. If you attempt it, you’re launching a new book into a maelstrom of distractions that will make it hard to nab the attention of readers. You’ll end up drowned out by the Black Friday promotions, American thanksgiving, the swarm of NaNoWriMo deals aimed at writers, and that lingering awareness everyone has

For the past few years I’ve been running a more-or-less weekly newsletter that goes out to a couple of hundred loyal readers. What started out as an exercise in promoting new books and updating folks about projects gradually evolved into a weekly missive where I stashed write-ups about publishing, writing, technology, creative processes, culture, and other interesting things I came across while working. Basically, all the things I used to blog about back in the days when folks read blogs. And it turns out I wrote long newsletters. They average about two thousand words a pop, plus a handful of graphics. A lot of the time, my clumsy attempts to sell books either got lost amid more interesting elements or felt like an awkward intrusion. I haven’t been happy with that balance for a while, so I did something about it. A few weeks ago, I decided to pull back on the overt marketing in my weekly emails and embrace

In my planning, this year is broken up into phases. Periods of time when all my focus bends towards a particular milestone, then pivots to spin off in a new direction once radically new focus is needed. For instance, the first stages of the year were all about preparing for my Thesis Review meeting, where I sit down with supervisors and review where I’m up to after three years of research, then determine whether I’m likely to finish my doctorate in a timely manner. It’s a phase that’s required a *lot* of dedicated work on my exegetical writing, which meant my focus hasn’t been on fiction for nearly three months now. Also a phase where I ticked boxes I’d left unticked through 2019, such as delivering a hastily conceived public presentation of my research (archived here, in all it’s flawed glory) and structuring the meta-data that goes along with the thesis. One of my supervisors suggested my exegesis could be

In the immortal words of the Ramones, there’s less than twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go before Exile hits shelves, and it’s currently got the strongest pre-orders of any book Brain Jar press has released. Ebooks can be pre-ordered via Amazon, and print books can be ordered at all good bookstores. Today, I’m posting the first chapter as a little taste-test, giving you some insight into how hitman on the run Keith Murphy deals with the demons of the Gold Coast once they detect his presence… PARADISE CITY They found me in the Hard Rock. Thursday night, a little after ten. The bar drew a good crowd for a Thursday, all things considered. Lots of girls with inscrutable, backpacker accents clustered around the counter. Plenty more heading to the Beer Garden upstairs, attracted by the cover band’s caterwaul. Blondes, legitimate and peroxide—a Gold Coast epidemic. Swathes of exposed skin, despite the cool nip in the air. Twenty-dollar cocktails named after natural disasters:

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor crept onto the top 100 free downloads in the Contemporary Fantasy section of Amazon Australia over Christmas, snagging a position at #16. This occurred twelve months after I first republished the story via Brain Jar, on the heels of nearly 300+ downloads in various storefronts. It’s interesting to look at the books that surround it in that section—one of these things is very clearly not like the other ones. Not just in terms of being a short story, but in the choices around cover arts and fonts that position it within the genre. This pleases me. One of my great issues with the indie publishing scene lies in the rush to conformity. The conversations that dominate forums are how do I produce fast and earn some sweet kindle money, and familiarity is a powerful tool for achieving that goal. The advice always boils down to the same core principles: hit the genre tropes, use