Podcasts about bookshops

In this powerful recap, Lesley and Brad reflect on Joy Hoover's inspiring interview about redefining women's safety through community and innovation. They highlight how Joy is working to change harmful narratives around victim shaming and help people recognize red flags before it's too late. From revolutionary tools for drink spiking prevention to bold leadership in gender-based violence advocacy, this episode is a call to rethink how we can band and protect one another.If you have any questions about this episode or want to get some of the resources we mentioned, head over to LesleyLogan.co/podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/. If you have any comments or questions about the Be It pod shoot us a message at beit@lesleylogan.co mailto:beit@lesleylogan.co. And as always, if you're enjoying the show please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. It is your continued support that will help us continue to help others. Thank you so much! Never miss another show by subscribing at LesleyLogan.co/subscribe https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/#follow-subscribe-free.In this episode you will learn about:How Joy Hoover is using innovation to revolutionize women's safety.Why collective action is more powerful than doing it alone.The real cost of gender-based violence and what we can do about it.The importance of storytelling and community in social impact work.Why listening to survivors is key to building safer communities.Episode References/Links:OPC Summer Tour - https://opc.me/tourUK Mullet Tour - https://opc.me/ukP.O.T. Chicago 2025 - https://www.pilates.com/pilates-on-tour-chicagolandCambodia October 2025 Retreat Waitlist - https://crowsnestretreats.comFree Mat Pilates for Strength Training - https://www.fullbodyin15.comSubmit your wins or questions - https://beitpod.com/questionsEpisode 439: Tia Levings - https://beitpod.com/tialevingsEpisode 352: Tess Waresmith - https://beitpod.com/tesswaresmithBad Dates Podcast - https://beitpod.com/baddatesEsōes Cosmetics Website - https://www.esoescosmetics.com If you enjoyed this episode, make sure and give us a five star rating and leave us a review on iTunes, Podcast Addict, Podchaser or Castbox. https://lovethepodcast.com/BITYSIDEALS! DEALS! DEALS! DEALS! https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentCheck out all our Preferred Vendors & Special Deals from Clair Sparrow, Sensate, Lyfefuel BeeKeeper's Naturals, Sauna Space, HigherDose, AG1 and ToeSox https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/memberships/perks/#equipmentBe in the know with all the workshops at OPC https://workshops.onlinepilatesclasses.com/lp-workshop-waitlistBe It Till You See It Podcast Survey https://pod.lesleylogan.co/be-it-podcasts-surveyBe a part of Lesley's Pilates Mentorship https://lesleylogan.co/elevate/FREE Ditching Busy Webinar https://ditchingbusy.com/ Resources:Watch the Be It Till You See It podcast on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gLesley Logan website https://lesleylogan.co/Be It Till You See It Podcast https://lesleylogan.co/podcast/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan https://onlinepilatesclasses.com/Online Pilates Classes by Lesley Logan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjogqXLnfyhS5VlU4rdzlnQProfitable Pilates https://profitablepilates.com/about/ Follow Us on Social Media:Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lesley.logan/The Be It Till You See It Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq08HES7xLMvVa3Fy5DR8-gFacebook https://www.facebook.com/llogan.pilatesLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesley-logan/The OPC YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@OnlinePilatesClasses Episode Transcript:Lesley Logan 0:00  Women aren't being believed as much or or the blame is on them for putting themselves in the situations. And I think like if we can all think about it differently, we can actually start to spot things and support people instead of going well, how did that happen to them? Lesley Logan 0:16  Welcome to the Be It Till You See It podcast where we talk about taking messy action, knowing that perfect is boring. I'm Lesley Logan, Pilates instructor and fitness business coach. I've trained thousands of people around the world and the number one thing I see stopping people from achieving anything is self-doubt. My friends, action brings clarity and it's the antidote to fear. Each week, my guest will bring bold, executable, intrinsic and targeted steps that you can use to put yourself first and Be It Till You See It. It's a practice, not a perfect. Let's get started.Lesley Logan 0:55  Welcome back to the Be It Till You See It interview recap where my co-host in life, Brad, and I are going to dig into the groundbreaking convo I had with Joy Hoover in our last episode. If you haven't yet listened to that interview, feel free to pause this now and go listen to that one, or listen to this one and then listen to that one. You can do whatever order you want, but it's one you have to listen to. Brad Crowell 0:58  Whatever you want. Lesley Logan 1:00  I mean, I say it on all episodes, you got to go listen to it because, you know, we can only cover so much of what the guest said, but it's also like quite a unique, amazing thing. So Today is August 14th 2025 and it's got two things for you. I'm sure Brad want me to choose. I'm not going to do it. National, it's National Financial Awareness Day. So how much would you like to bet that most people don't know August 14th is National Financial Awareness Day?Brad Crowell 1:43  Well, it's about betting. They were being cute. I think it's cute. Lesley Logan 1:46  They still managed to say the date and the name. Brad Crowell 1:49  100% of the time they answer the question, they re-ask the question when answering the question always.Lesley Logan 1:54  It's more important than you think. And plus, what's more fun than financial independence?Brad Crowell 1:58  What is more fun? Yay. Skippy.Lesley Logan 2:01  Hey, you know what? Financial independence is literally the thing that, if you have you can do anything you want. You can leave any job, shitty relationship, shitty situation. Financial independence is like the thing. It's more, I think it's more important than just like, the ability to walk, you need to have financial independence.Brad Crowell 2:19  It's funny because it sounds silly, but at the same time, it's not something that anyone ever talks about. Like, no one, like, you're not taught this stuff at school. Right?Lesley Logan 2:32  Yeah, no, you're, no. I think I was taught to balance a checkbook, as if that did anything for me. But I like, I think about Tia Leving's episode. Brad Crowell 2:39  I have to say I was thinking about that.Lesley Logan 2:41  And I think about.Brad Crowell 2:42  If y'all don't remember, she was stuck in an abusive relationship where she had no control over the finances, and she couldn't leave, even though it was abusive, because if she did, she. Lesley Logan 2:52  Would lose her kids. Brad Crowell 2:54  She would lose her kids because she didn't have any money to support her kids. Lesley Logan 2:56  Yeah, this is where, like, a lot of people were like, oh, why don't they just leave? It goes back to, like, the Diddy stuff, oh they could have just left. No. When they're controlling your career, when they're controlling how where you live, and they're paying your rent and all these things, even if you think, oh, well, they did this. It was, there's, there's control, there's not financial independence, and if we have to teach that, even if the person's not abusive, because there's plenty of people who are partners, who are parents, who are bosses, who are non-abusive. Brad Crowell 3:03  Sure. Lesley Logan 3:05  But everybody deserves to have financial independence and financial awareness information so that they can make sure they're making the right decisions for themselves. And then they have options. You always have choices. Okay, back to why they want to educate us. So, first off, think about that great feeling you get when you don't have the looming spin specter of debt hanging over you. Also sound financial decisions can really make a difference down the road. Remember, retirement is a time to take all those vacations you couldn't when working the daily grind. I have so many problems with this day already, because you shouldn't wait for a retirement to take those vacations and don't let people tell you, debt is a big (inaudible).Brad Crowell 4:01  I was going to say the same thing, like, sure, debt can be looming, especially if it's like credit card debt that's keeping you bound. Lesley Logan 4:08  Yes, because they control you. Brad Crowell 4:09  Well, it's not just that. It's like, it's it's a it's oppressive to to moving forward because you're just paying the interest. But at the same time, like, I think my relationship with that changed when I became a business owner, because, you, you it's part of businesses also, you know, you can also have debt, and you can manage that debt without it destroying everything, so.Lesley Logan 4:30  And also, a good credit score is because you can show that you can manage debt. That's what it is. It's not being debt-free. It's managing debt. Which is which, yeah, okay, so there was good intentions with this day, anyways. Because money is important to our overall peace of mind, Financial Awareness Day is a great time to review where you are now and where you're going financially. Don't let bad financial decisions ruin the best years of your life.Brad Crowell 4:54  Okay, so we're just gonna stop reading this. But I think the points are still good. You know? I think, I think one thing that most, I'll tell you what I didn't do. I never reviewed my financial position. I didn't even know what that meant, right? I just knew that I needed to make enough money to get to the end of the month so that I could do it again, right? I never, like, stepped back and like was, was trying to look at like, oh, I have a car, the value of the car. Oh, I have a house, the value of the house, or, you know, whatever, like my, I have a savings account, or I have been putting money in my savings account. Do I have a plan? Never had a plan before, you know, the last couple of years and and now you can it's easy to get sidetracked from your plan. It's very easy to get sidetracked from your plan, unless you put things on an automated like your your money comes in, and then automatically, things happen at the end of the month. It's easy to forget to slide, you know, money over into your retirement fund, or whatever it might be, and you know, so what what you can do, which I think is really helpful, is to throw once a month review, you know, our just take a look at all the numbers. Take a look at it. Like, open up the credit card statement online, open up the bank account online, take a look at that. Like, log into your Social Security account. How weird is that to even say, does anybody do that? I do that. Okay. Lesley Logan 6:12  Yeah, I do it. I just don't I don't know, at this moment in time we're recording, I doubt we're gonna see any of it, but you should, I agree with you. Like, it's important to be aware of where all your accounts are, what's in all of them. Don't put your, don't be an ostrich. And also, like, please don't let the money stories of your parents or like, even your college years dictate like, what you think of yourself when it comes to money, because that attitude is not going to help you be it till you see it with financial success. Listen to our episode with wealth with Tess. That is the episode I want you to listen to if this day resonates with you. Okay, Love Your Bookshop Day. Of course, we talk about this becauseBrad Crowell 6:50  Tess's episode was 352. Lesley Logan 6:52  Wow. Brad Crowell 6:53  352Lesley Logan 6:54  So, Love Your Bookshop Day is celebrated every year, also on August 14th. It is a holiday that was founded by the Australian Booksellers Association. The aim is to appreciate bookshops around the country and highlight all the things that make local bookshops beneficial with an appreciation for books and encourages more people to read. Bookshops exist to serve the knowledge to the public, and that is a very important job. The more equipped bookshops are, the better quality of knowledge people can access to in a time when books are being ordered online, the local brick and mortar bookshop needs all the support it can get. You guys, they don't sponsor the show, but bookshop.org think that it's called, if you order your books through them, they send the money to support a local bookshop near you, and that if you want to have that online ease, but also support a local bookshop. I also like it's called a bookshop. So it's a bookstore. Anyways, go read a book. Go read, go read a book that's gonna, like, inspire you. Maybe I'll add a book (inaudible). Brad Crowell 7:47  Go sit in a bookshop, coffee shop. Lesley Logan 7:52  Oh my gosh. Have you been to the Writer's Block, babe? Brad Crowell 7:55  No, in Vegas? Lesley Logan 7:56  Yeah. Brad Crowell 7:56  Have not.Lesley Logan 7:57  Oh, they got a smoothie bar, coffee, a cat walk around. Don't take Bayon. Cats walking around the coffee shop. Maybe they have birds. I think it's a bird sanctuary, not cat sanctuary. Anyways, it is the coolest bookshop. And now listen to me, I'm gonna call it a bookshop my Australian accent, it's the coolest bookstore I've been to in a long time. But there's some other ones, and I actually want to start looking at some really cool bookstores when we start doing tours. Brad Crowell 8:19  It's a bird sanctuary. Lesley Logan 8:19  Yeah, bird sanctuary. You know how we like, we do vintage shops a lot. I think I want to switch that to, like, really cool bookstores, because there's some really cool bookstores out there. Okay, speaking of being on the road, we are on the road for a few more days, and so you can go to OPC.me/tour because I think you can get, if there's anything left, you can get to Idaho, Salt Lake or Las Vegas OPC.me/tour. Our winter tour will be announced in the fall, so stick around for that. Then we're home for a couple of weeks, and then, babe, we're headed to, where are we headed, in September, we're headed to the U.K. Brad Crowell 8:52  Yes, we're gonna, we're really fired up to be back to the U.K. and we actually have two stops we're doing this time. We're gonna be in Leeds and in Essex. So come join us. If you are in London. We actually set it up where you could be on a day pass with us.Lesley Logan 9:03  I think there's even all our workshops. So if you are someone who just wants to do one workshop now.Brad Crowell 9:07  Yeah, it might be. Go, go check it out. Go to opc.me/uk. We're going to be covering, it's mostly Pilates stuff. And then there's a couple of workshops. The workshops are skewed toward business, but they're not really business. It's like managing your calendar, that's managing, you know, how do you, how do you make an ideal schedule for yourself? And that, of course, can be used for business, but it's also you don't have to run a business to, you know, pull some benefits from that, and then, yeah, anyway, we can't wait to be back. It's gonna be awesome. In October, we're heading to Chicago. Lesley Logan 9:36  Yeah, there's Balanced Bodies, P.O.T. Chicago. And at the time of this record as this dropping, you can still get the early bird 10% off if there's any spots left. I do know that.Brad Crowell 9:46  Do you have a link for that? Lesley Logan 9:47  balancedbodypilates.com just like a P.O.T. Chicago and it comes up, like it kind of just comes up. But anyways, yeah, of course, it's a long link. However, when they emailed me last week, it was 75% sold out. So just so you know, don't wait on that. Then we're gonna go from Chicago to Cambodia.Brad Crowell 10:07  Directly, literally. Don't even go home. We just go straight through San Francisco to Cambodia. That's gonna be amazing. And basically, you know, we got, we still got room, and there's still time. It's only August. We're not going till October, right, so.Lesley Logan 10:20  Oh I know, people signed up for last one in December, we went. Brad Crowell 10:24  Six weeks ahead of time. Yeah. We had someone sign up six weeks ahead of time so. Lesley Logan 10:29  We had someone signed up two weeks ahead of time. Brad Crowell 10:29  Oh, it was only two. Lesley Logan 10:29  The last October, my mom's. Brad Crowell 10:31  Yeah, yeah, it was only two. Okay, yeah. So anyway, yeah, so it's possible there's still plenty of room come join us. It's gonna be amazing. And then, like, randomly, on the way home from Cambodia we're gonna be in Singapore.Lesley Logan 10:43  Yeah. So we're gonna see the Botanical Gardens, and we're working on teaching a gig. So you know, Singapore, Hi, we're coming. Brad Crowell 10:49  Yeah, we're coming. Lesley Logan 10:50  And then, of course, December is winter tour. We should be announcing all of that in the fall, so come October. But if you want to host with us, reach out. The team will help you fill out the forms. And if we're on the path this year, yay. And if we're not, we'll save you for another time. But don't, don't wait.Brad Crowell 11:06  Yeah that's going to be awesome. Before we get into this really interesting convo with Joy Hoover, also, like, scary-a-little-bit convo with Joy Hoover. From the statistics were like, mind blowing. I was like, What the hell. But before we get there, we got a question from Corinne_ca11 (aka Cori) from IG. She asks, hey, how many days a week do you recommend weight lifting in addition to your Pilates practice?Lesley Logan 11:34  Yeah, so here's okay. Brad Crowell 11:35  Great question. Lesley Logan 11:36  Great question. Personally, I lift weights three to four days a week and I do Pilates four to five days a week. Now, is that a scientific thing that you should be doing? I don't know. It's really works for my schedule. I particularly like an extra day of Pilates compared to my weight training, because I do feel like it keeps everything ready for the next one. Like weight training always makes my body feel a little bit heavy. I mean, of course, I feel great in it, and there's no knocks. Like, I believe every woman does need to lift some weights, but my body feels heavy. And so Pilates kind of like opens everything back up and readies it for the next time. And that's why I like it. But I will say, depending on what your goals are, you definitely, from what I've heard or what I've read, everyone should be lifting weights, two, three days a week, and then I believe Pilates should be done three to four days a week. And that doesn't mean hour long sessions, doesn't have to be, the amount of minutes is not as important as the consistency and the quality of the movement. So three quality reps over 10 is always better than it comes to Pilates, and that's just my opinion, but I particularly really like it, and I will we're actually we taught in Santa Barbara a workshop on mat Pilates for strength training, people who strength train. And I actually taught everyone there how to do a 20, 15-minute workout with 20 Pilates mat exercises that will benefit anyone who lifts weights. And you can literally do it after you lift all your weights at the gym, or you could do it before, or you could do it on your off days, or you could do it under your zone two as a way to, kind of like, stretch and move everything around. It's 15 minutes full body workout. It will absolutely improve your form and the results you're getting with your strength training. You can actually take a version of that workshop at fullbodyin15.com. Brad Crowell 13:17  Yeah, fullbodyin15.com love that, by the way, that's free. Lesley Logan 13:21  It's free. Brad Crowell 13:22  And it'll help you learn the five major spine shapes in Pilates and create that 15-minute workout. So definitely dig in there. Great question, Cori, thanks for that. If you have a question, text us at 310-905-5534 or because who can remember those phone numbers? Go to beitpod.com/questions beitpod.com/questions. Stick around. We'll be right back. We're gonna dig into this convo with Joy Hoover. Brad Crowell 13:49  Okay, now let's talk about Joy Hoover, who's our neighbor, by the way, temporarily, which is kind of cool. After experiencing a devastating family tragedy in 2013, Joy Hoover dedicated herself for 15 years in Vegas to improving women's safety, anti-trafficking and fighting gender-based violence. She founded the nonprofit Cupcake Girls, which y'all probably know because we support them with Profitable Pilates. And she later launched Esōes Cosmetics, pronounced SOS. It's spelled E-S-O-E-S the world's first patented smart lipstick featuring built-in drink testing strips and a panic button that is linked to a safety app. Her work has supported over 10,000 survivors and earned multiple awards and national media recognition. And it's quite, it's quite, quite clever. Lesley Logan 14:40  You know what's funny is we just recapped David Corbin, and you met Joy at the same exact event. Brad Crowell 14:46  David. Lesley Logan 14:48  Is that the same we just interviewed? Brad Crowell 14:50  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lesley Logan 14:51  You met them both at the same event.Brad Crowell 14:52  So yes, David, I did. I actually had lunch with Joy, or I sat at a table withJoy. Yeah, it was lunch. And then David was the after the event was over. You're right. What a great event that was.Lesley Logan 15:03  Yeah. And it's funny, because I didn't interview them near each other, but they're coming out next to each other, so that's hilarious. So we talked. I mean, first, I just want to say that, like, if you haven't yet listened to this episode and you there is, like, violent talk in there. There are some topics that could be triggering or activating in some people. So do take caution when you listen to it, but I do think it's really important to listen to because, I wanna highlight a couple parts of her story that have nothing to do. Well, they have a lot to do with all the things, but like, you can see yourself in those stories. So when she and her husband had their first kid, his dad killed his mom, and they just had a baby. And so can you imagine being new parents and then, like, dealing with, like, the, not just the loss of parent, but like.Brad Crowell 15:49  I think she said that their daughter was, like, eight days old and they had to fly across the country to handle that. Lesley Logan 15:51  I mean, of course, so tragic, but for them to figure out, for them to not let that define them, but instead allow them to create a, carve a path that could help them, use their story to support other people with different stories in them is really, really cool. And I think a lot of times we have these tragic things happen in our lives, and they become the story we tell ourselves that's held us back. Oh, I've lost seven people in my life. Oh, this happened, and I don't want to discount those things. Those are especially like, when you have abuse like that, ends in that way it is. It's devastating. But, I do think that, like. Brad Crowell 16:27  She said it was happening for like, 40 years. Lesley Logan 16:30  Yeah, and that's like, that's really hard to grow up around, to experience, to like, to have relationships and other things. And so I just want to say, like, I think that their their story and other people's stories that are similar, where they persevered through that. It kind of it, it changed who they are as parents and also how they raise their children, but also how they see other people. Because I think it's so easy to judge, like, why didn't she leave? Or why, like, we talked about this earlier with the financial stuff, like, Why didn't this? And it's like some of this stuff has been going on for so long, you know, you don't think it will ever turn to something that bad, right? So, and then the other thing that I want to highlight that happened to them as they started SOS, really cool company. Invest their life savings to, like, make this product, it's going to help.Brad Crowell 17:15  Raise money, like, had friends and family help support.Lesley Logan 17:17  It's gonna help people who, who need, access to support wherever they are, and obviously women, this is what the product is for. But we all need this. It can be helpful for anybody, but they had a fire like a freak electrical situation in their roof. First of all, the product helped get the fire department there. You have to listen to the story. It's insane. Brad Crowell 17:38  Faster than calling 911. Lesley Logan 17:39  Yes, faster than calling 911, this product, they were able to press the panic button and get the fire department there, which the fire department said, if they had, any, any minute later, they would have lost the whole house. So they got to keep the framework. Anyways, there's a lot going on there, but they lost all the product. Yeah, however, because they had to start from scratch, and they already had customers, and they'd already been going through it. They use it as an opportunity to make it even better. And I share this because, like, so many times, like.Brad Crowell 18:09  I mean, how do how deflating would that be that not only do you lose your house, but all your business at the exact same time. Lesley Logan 18:16  I mean, I don't even know how you just go get a job at Costco. Like, I don't even know how you go let me do this again. Brad Crowell 18:20  Let me start over. Lesley Logan 18:21  I, like, buy.Brad Crowell 18:22  After everything burned down. Lesley Logan 18:23  While I'm not living in my own home. Like, let me just start this over while like, all, that's what, I'm not gonna lie, like, I think I seriously would have got a job at Costco because I could get my steps in. You know, I hear good things. The hot dogs are $1.50 like, you know, like, I would have just, like, packed it in, but instead, they use it as an opportunity to make the product even better. Aand I think, as a business owner or someone who's working on a new project like we think we have to get it right from the first time, the first start, the first the first iteration has to be the best one. And actually, like most people's first ones are not the one that go like, not the one that goes to market. In fact, we have. Brad Crowell 19:01  How many websites have we rebuilt? Lesley Logan 19:03  Don't tell me. Don't tell me. But you know what? Even our mat deck, right? Like we have changed the mat deck, our Mat Flashcard Deck, because we put it out there, we sold 3000 decks, and then we printed a new version of it, because we've all the feedback we got. And then also how we know other people use the other decks? Ken Endelman said that, you know, Joe Pilates, a lot of his sketches and his patents that he sent in, and not really sent in, but he pretended like he did, those are not things he went to market with. He's like, you don't usually go to market with the first one. Like, you use that to get the patent, but that's not what what you go to market with. And so I think, like. Brad Crowell 19:38  I mean, even now, we've just made another change to the flashcard deck boxes, you know, like, like, like it. Because every time we learn something new, we're like, oh, we need to add that on, or we need to do this, or we should adjust this, or whatever. Lesley Logan 19:53  Oh, yeah, we have to made in the USA, on our boxes. Brad Crowell 19:55  How do we how do we miss that? Five years, we never, we were never (inaudible). Lesley Logan 19:58  Clearly, it wasn't like, I remember my dad, like, going, does it say made in the USA? No, you can't have it. So I don't even know how, like, I'd skipped my brain. We were printing it, but apparently it's a thing. Anyways, I just point this out, because even if you don't think the topic applies to you, you think, oh, I'm not going off having first dates, or I'm not, like, I'm not interested in this, every single one of us is going to do a first again? And then get frustrated because it didn't work. And honestly, it's because you're supposed to, you're supposed to go with the second thing or the third iteration. Brad Crowell 20:30  Yeah. I mean, there's also the tech. The tech part of the of it, it is proximity, or like, as well. So if somebody else in a room, if you are on the app and someone else in the room pushes the button, you will get notified as well. So like, you know, might not necessarily be you personally, who might be in that scenario, but it could be that you're in the proximity of someone who needs help. So, just interesting. Lesley Logan 20:53  Yeah, and this is, like, we're, we're like, you know, we can be, we always think we want it. We can be an alert for other people, but it's hard to be an alert when you can't see the signs, like we've talked about, like somebody like choking, you can see actual signs. They are choking. They need help. But when someone feels unsafe on a date or at a meeting or, you know, or walking down the street, you can't tell oftentimes that they feel unsafe. And this is a very discreet way, a very discreet tech that allows them to say, I'm not safe, and other people to be able to be witnesses or support in that, in that, yeah, so I think it's really cool.Brad Crowell 21:26  Yeah, definitely, you know, like a lot, like a lot going on there, you know, I think I have something else I wanted to talk about, but just the fact, first off, how the hell is it possible that they build a relationship with the emergency services, where pressing a button on a lipstick container would get the fire department to her house faster than calling nine fucking one one, like, what? How did they? How did they do that? I didn't even know that I didn't even know how that's possible. Lesley Logan 21:52  (inaudible) want to know. But obviously, like that might be like, you know, confidential information is I want people to know, not because, like, you know, like, maybe they're not allowed to say, maybe it's an NDA. But no, we called 911, and got put on hold.Brad Crowell 22:05  What? But it also makes you realize that there are, like, clearly, there are systems that can be tapped into, and they were able to figure that out. I didn't even know that that was a thing. Like, I would have imagined.Lesley Logan 22:19  It makes me think of what's the Italian Job where Seth Green's character is like, tapping into, like the yeah napster is like tapping into like the red lights up. That's a red light. That's a green light. Like, clearly, there's.Brad Crowell 22:32  Sorry, I won't start until you address me as Napster.Lesley Logan 22:34  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's clearly, like, something. But I also just want to say, like, if you haven't yet listened to the episode, you want to listen to it so you could understand what the product is, and you can also see it on our YouTube channel. It's quite cool, and I think, an excellent gift for every woman in your life, even if they're married, it's you, you, because she talks about using it for like a kid she saw on the street. Brad Crowell 22:55  So yeah, she said, yeah. She and and her husband saw a kid with no shoes in Vegas, which walking down a sidewalk or whatever, and she's like, there's something wrong here clearly, you know, so, but, but, yeah, I mean, it's, anyway, the tech part is fascinating and really, really fancy. And then, of course, they have, it's lipstick, so presumably they will have different colors at some point. Lesley Logan 23:19  Yeah, there's a whole thing. It's, I mean, she's done a great job. Brad Crowell 23:22  And then, but anyway, you know, she was talking about blame culture, oh yeah. And she was talking about how there's a crazy number of people who've experienced drink spiking where, you know, I was looking up a bunch of stats, and, like, like, at very least 10% of women have reported it saying, like, I either have my drink spiked, or I saw someone spike someone else's drink. Lesley Logan 23:44  It's also, I think the number is so high because, like (inaudible). Brad Crowell 23:50  Well, that's, that's only, that's only, like people who have actually reported it, you know. And then there's, there's polling that has happened where you know it's, it's not, that's not necessarily reported to, like, it's a poll. Lesley Logan 24:00  Well, can you imagine if nothing, or you don't know if anything happened to you? Like, I have just in all the podcasts I listen to, like, people have called the cops and the cops are like. Brad Crowell 24:10  Don't do shit. Lesley Logan 24:11  Don't do fucking shit. And don't I'm not, like, I'm not against police, guys. What I am against is this culture of, like, not believing women, and it goes to this blame stuff. Like, what were you wearing? What were you doing? You know, like, if you're.Brad Crowell 24:23  Or it's like, did they, did they threaten you? You know, like, I guess maybe I don't know what the actually, this is interesting. If you, if you know, what do you need to say to get them to pay attention? That would be something that'd be worth finding. I don't know the answer to that. I mean, just, there's a there's a.Brad Crowell 24:43  Well, because here's like, I, my personal experience was I had somebody threaten me when I was living in L.A. right, and I was afraid, and I didn't know what to do, so I called the police, and it wasn't an emergency. He wasn't like, he wasn't at my door. But I called them, and I said, hey, I I don't know what to do here, but, like, this guy's threatened me, and he's he might be on his way over right now. I don't. know what to do. And they were like, did he threaten to kill you? And I was like, he didn't say, I'm going to kill you. And they were like, we're not going to do anything. And I was like, what? Like, he's, he's making me feel like I'm in trouble.Lesley Logan 25:11  Well, I just listened to, it was just, I was listening to, like, a Dateline or something like that. And they brought up the story about this woman, Denise, who was kidnapped from her home, and then, like, taken away for several days, and then, and then told not to tell anyone. And they called her the American Gone Girl, like the real life Gone Girl. They didn't believe her boyfriend. They said he must have done it. He must, must have done it. They didn't believe her. They tried to charge her with a crime. They just said that they, like, wasted the police time. Then come to find out, two other victims called separate police departments to claim the same thing, and those police departments didn't believe them. Why would anyone do that? Like, didn't believe them. So I am with you. Like, we don't we need to know. What do cops need to hear so they actually believe what you're saying. But also, like, I think it just goes.Brad Crowell 25:53  Like, it's a common experience among survivors is that they're like, I wasn't believed, right, and, and, like, the the number of people who, in polling have to have have said, hey, yes, I've experienced drink spiking, is like, could be, like, super high. It could be as high as one in two women. Right? And anyway, like when you put it all together, there's clearly a problem. It's fucked up, that there's a problem, but there is a problem, right? And then when women aren't believed, you know, and it doesn't actually just have to be women having their drink spiked. Anybody can have their drink spiked. Lesley Logan 26:28  I listen to the podcast Bad Dates, many men get their drinks spiked. Brad Crowell 26:31  Yeah, when, when if it's reported and it's not believed, what does that teach the person who reported it? Yeah, that they're they're not going to try to even report it next time. What's the point is what they're going to say. Lesley Logan 26:43  And that's what puts you people in not so great situations, where by the time something does happen, it's a little too late to get help. But I think, like, what, you know, she talked a little bit like changing, changing the shift of of shame from the survivor, from the survivor to the perpetrator, and making that the focus. And I think when you use a product like they have, or you educate women in an or man in this way of like, what? What does it mean to like it's not your fault. It really is is more empowering because now you, especially like, so many people are have fear about like, well, what goes what if something goes wrong on the date? What happens if something goes wrong in the interview? What if something goes wrong at the house showing like, we can take some of the fear away and put some control back in the hands of the person who might be might become a victim of something, and we can hopefully stop that or mitigate that.Brad Crowell 27:32  Yeah, and obviously, you know, Joy and her company are very aware of all of the stigma, so they've been intentional about their names of their products. Like, one of them is called We Believe You, It's Not The Dress, you know, like, like, stuff like that, which speak directly to the problem, the real problem, which is the blame game.Lesley Logan 27:54  Yeah, yeah. I just think it's like, you know, unfortunately, we're recording this, like, right after, like, some of the Diddy trials and Weinstein's retrial, and, like, it starts to make you think that, like, the Me Too movement, kind of, like, didn't, didn't have the effect that we thought it would have, and women aren't being believed as much or, or the blame is on them for putting themselves in the situations. And I think, like, if we can all think about it differently, we can actually start to spot things and support people, instead of going, well, how did that happen to them? Like with a judgment, it can, things can happen to anybody at any time in this world. And since we can't actually stop these perpetrators because we don't know who they are, what we can all do is band together and be part of a support system, of of being there for people, whether we know them or not, and just being a safety for them, and also not assuming it's what they wore or what they did at a certain time, or why would you be on that street, like all that stuff is unhelpful and.Brad Crowell 28:54  Doesn't solve the problem anyway. Lesley Logan 28:55  No, doesn't, doesn't. So, anyways, we can get our high horse on this forever. But I do love what Joy is doing, and I think this product is really cool. Brad Crowell 29:03  Yeah. And also, you know, driven by a clear problem that needs a solution. And, you know, it's just really, really clever. And you know, if you see, if you actually go look at the lipstick, it's pretty innocuous. You wouldn't act there's no like, press here, like Acme button kind of a thing. It's, it's quick, easy and then what, what I thought was also cool is you can set it so that, if I think there's settings, if you click it once, you can alert one person. If you click it twice, you can alert a different person.Lesley Logan 29:34  Yeah, you can set up the different things in the app for what you do. And one of our neighbors, you know, her daughter was going off to EDC. Daughter's 19 years old, going to EDC, and of course, the mom wants her daughter to go to EDC, like you should experience festivals when you're 19. She had this product, and she had a Narcan, a Narcan thing so she could be there in case someone needed it, right, like Narcan for somebody who's overdosing, but she had this product to make sure that her own stuff was safe. And that she could be safe so she could enjoy herself and be at EDC. You know, I love, for a 19 year to live in a place where she could just go to a festival and be fine. We don't live in that world. So I love that she was empowered to have a good time and also take care of herself and her friends. Brad Crowell 30:19  That's really cool. That's cool. All right. Well, stick around. We'll be right back, because Joy gave us a couple of really amazing Be It Action Items. We're going to dig into those. Brad Crowell 30:19  All right, welcome back. So finally, let's talk about those Be It Action Items. What bold, executable, intrinsic or targeted action items can we take away from your convo with Joy Hoover? She said, hold space for yourself. This came from her conversation around the collective trauma that she and her husband and, you know, daughter experience when her daughter was only eight, but with her in laws, right? And she said, immediately after it happened, they started to get therapy as a as a couple, and they've maintained, you know, therapy since, and that was 2013, so it's been a while, right? And she said, prioritizing your healing, it puts you in a position to help others without inadvertently hurting them, right? Like she said, she's and the call out here was, you have to heal yourself first. You can't heal the heal the world if you're not healing yourself first, right? And she said something very intention. She said it was it's not about your intention, right? It's about your impact. And you could have the intention of helping people, but actually be hurting them. So you need to heal yourself first before you're going on to support others in that kind of a way. She said, also, it's not selfish. It's she said, it is selfish to not heal yourself first. It's not selfish to take care of yourself. It's selfish if you don't take care of yourself. Lesley Logan 31:53  I mean now I love this. Brad Crowell 31:55  Yeah, and this is, like, obviously, right up our alley, you know? And.Lesley Logan 32:00  Do you know what I read the other day in it, in my own My Morning reads, And I am like, now preaching it, because I always say, like, self-care isn't selfish care, right? So self-care is actually an act of self-love. And if you do not love yourself, you actually cannot love other people. Can't. You can feel like you're loving on them and supporting them and liking them, but like, you actually can't truly love others because you don't love yourself. And the hatred and vitriol we're seeing in this world today, online, and in other places, is just because a bunch of people don't love themselves. And we're like, the world needs love. Gotta love yourself first. Cannot just like, go out you can't just spread yourself thin. And I think that that act of therapy, an act of self-love, it's an act of self-care. It's very important. It's not selfish. You're right. Brad Crowell 32:45  Yeah. What about you? Lesley Logan 32:44  Okay, so she said she encouraged us all to join the Swipe Red movement. The core slogan of the movement is, "No more shame, no more doubt. We see red flags, we call them out." And so you can contribute to the community awareness if you just go to Esōes Cosmetics, and that's at esoescosmetics.com and it provides platforms for community engagement. You can submit experiences you had so others can recognize and respond to similar threats. I think that's really important, because sometimes you have not experienced a red flag, but if you hear about other people's, you go, oh, and then you can see the signs. Brad Crowell 33:10  You know, it's funny, because it, I get a weekly email forwarded from my mom who gets notifications from her company about cybersecurity threats, right? And what people have done to trick other people into giving away information that eventually could hurt them, right? And so it's the same idea here. You know this, the community platform that they've put together is a way to just become more educated and be aware. So I love that. Lesley Logan 33:53  And also, in that community, you can ask for guidance on your own red flags. You can submit a question to inquire the situation the minor ick or a significant red flag. Here's the thing, I love this because, you know, 12 years ago, my therapist was like, Yeah, miss, you ignored the red flags in your relationship. So you need to go back into your memory box about those first dates and what flags did you ignore that were red so that you can spot them as you date. And then you have to practice like, how red is this flag? Is this an orange flag? Is it a yellow flag? What kind of flag is this? And I love this because you don't have to do it by yourself. You could do with other people. You could help you can use other people's red flags to help you. So I think it's really cool. I think it's cool. And what a unique Be It Action Item. So, I'm in. Really cool. I hope everyone goes and checks this out again. Like it can be a great gift for a woman in your life or a person in your life, but also, just like to be aware of what's going on. It's so easy for us to think it won't happen to us, and this stuff, you know, like, some people, I've heard people go, oh, I'm too old for that. Like it won't happen to me. And like, I worry the fuck out of like, my mom and women her age who are dating. I'm like, like, no, there are things that can happen to you. I remember my 80 year old clients, like, I can't get pregnant. I'm like, yeah, but you can get crabs, babe. Like, what? You can't just feel like life's good now I don't have anything to worry about. No, bad things happen to good people. You have to be aware. So, thanks, Joy for what you're doing. I'm Lesley Logan. Brad Crowell 35:16  And I'm Brad Crowell. Lesley Logan 35:17  How are you going to use these tips in your life? Please let us know. Let Joy Hoover at Esōes Cosmetics know, let the Be It Pod know. Share this with a friend who needs to hear it. I think it's a great episode to share with a friend. Yes, there's some information that could be hard to listen to, but I think it's really important. And until next time, Be It Till You See It. Brad Crowell 35:35  Bye for now. Lesley Logan 35:35  That's all I got for this episode of the Be It Till You See It Podcast. One thing that would help both myself and future listeners is for you to rate the show and leave a review and follow or subscribe for free wherever you listen to your podcast. Also, make sure to introduce yourself over at the Be It Pod on Instagram. I would love to know more about you. Share this episode with whoever you think needs to hear it. Help us and others Be It Till You See It. Have an awesome day. Be It Till You See It is a production of The Bloom Podcast Network. If you want to leave us a message or a question that we might read on another episode, you can text us at +1-310-905-5534 or send a DM on Instagram @BeItPod.Brad Crowell 36:19  It's written, filmed, and recorded by your host, Lesley Logan, and me, Brad Crowell.Lesley Logan 36:24  It is transcribed, produced and edited by the epic team at Disenyo.co.Brad Crowell 36:29  Our theme music is by Ali at Apex Production Music and our branding by designer and artist, Gianfranco Cioffi.Lesley Logan 36:36  Special thanks to Melissa Solomon for creating our visuals.Brad Crowell 36:39  Also to Angelina Herico for adding all of our content to our website. And finally to Meridith Root for keeping us all on point and on time.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/be-it-till-you-see-it/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

One of Auckland's best loved and long-running bookshops is on the brink of closure now its landlord, the Catholic Church, wants to sell up the historic central city property. Hard to Find books moved to the old Newton convent eight years ago, something the owner hailed a 'miracle' after they were forced out of their Onehunga store because of rampant rent rises. But the shop and its more than 200,000 books are one again in search of a new home and owner Warrick Jordan has no choice but to hope for yet another miracle. Evie Richardson reports.

Welcome back to another episode of the Online Warriors Podcast! This week we have a very special episode! The gang talks about the latest in Gaming and Entertainment! - Mortal Kombat 2 Trailer (3:27) - Miles Morales Restricted from the MCU (13:38) - Assassins Creed Netflix Series (20:22) - Live Action Legend of Zelda Casting (31:34) Then we talk about what the gang has been up to: - Nerdbomber watches Superman and reads Bookshops and Bone Dust (36:34) - Techtic watches F1 (44:03)   Special shoutout to our Patreon Producer: Steven Keller!   We'd like to thank each and every one of you for listening in every week. If you'd like to support the show, you can drop us a review on your favorite podcast platform or, if you're feeling extra generous, drop us a subscribe over at Patreon.com/OnlineWarriorsPodcast. We have three tiers of subscriptions, each of which gives you some awesome bonus content! As always, we appreciate you tuning in, and look forward to seeing you next week! Stay safe and healthy everyone! Find us all over the web: Online Warriors Website: https://www.onlinewarriorspodcast.com Online Warriors Twitter: https://twitter.com/onlinewarriors1 Illeagle's Twitter: https://twitter.com/OWIlleagle86 Nerdbomber's Twitter: https://twitter.com/OWNerdbomber Techtic's Twitter: https://twitter.com/OWTechtic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onlinewarriorspodcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onlinewarriorspodcast/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwOwzY6aBcTFucWEeFEtwIg Merch Store: https://onlinewarriorspodcast-shop.fourthwall.com/

In this week's episode, we look at five ways writers can avoid the self-destructive mindset trap of "comparisonitis", and five ways that comparing oneself to other writers can be useful. Once again it is time for Coupon of the Week! This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store: WOLVES50 The coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook this summer, we've got you covered! TRANSCRIPT 00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 259 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is July 11th, 2025, and today we are looking at why comparing yourself to other writers is a bad idea. Before that, we will do Coupon of the Week and have an update on my current writing progress. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Cloak of Wolves, Book #2 in the Cloak Mage series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store, and that is WOLVES50. This coupon code is valid through August 5th, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to listen to during your travels this summer, we have got you covered. Now let's have an update on my current writing projects. I'm pleased to report that Shield of Power is 100% done, completing the Shield War series. You can get Shield of Power at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Apple Books, Smashwords and my own Payhip store. It's been selling briskly and it's gotten good reviews so far, so thank you very much to everyone who has bought and enjoyed the book. Now that Shield of Power is done, the first third of my Super Summer of Finishing Things is complete. So what's next? My next main project is Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest. It was originally going to be named Reactant, but I changed the title to Final Quest to emphasize really and truly and definitively that this is the final book in the trilogy. In fact, I'm already done with the rough draft and I am done with the first phase of editing it as of this recording. If you've been listening to the podcast for a long time, you know how I frequently say that if you keep chipping away the novel over a long enough time, sooner or later you'll finish it. That is exactly what happened here. Since October of 2024, I've been writing 500 words a day on Final Quest, and this piled up over time enough so that after Shield of Power came out, I only had 3,000 more words to write to finish Final Quest, and I did that in an afternoon. One more phase of editing on that and then I would like to have Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest out before July 22nd, if all goes well. I'm also 21,000 words into Ghost in the Siege, which will be my main project once Final Quest is finished. Ghost in the Siege will be the sixth and final book in the Ghost Armor series and will hopefully cap off my Super Summer of Finishing Things. In audiobook news, Shield of Battle (as excellently narrated by Brad Wills) is now out. You can get it at Audible, Amazon, Apple, and Google Play as of this recording. Because of some difficulties with Findaway Voices, it's going to take a little bit longer to get into the other stores, but I'm working on a way to do that and as I mentioned before, Ghost in the Corruption (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy ) is done and just has to finish processing on the various stores, and so hopefully that should be out before too much longer. So that's where I'm at with my current writing and audiobook projects. 00:02:52 Main Topic: Comparison Now let's move right on to our main topic, The Dangers of Comparison. In Episode 257, we started a series on mindset for writers. In some of the previous series I've talked about some of the practical ways to help with distractions, procrastination, and managing time wasters. In this series, we're going to focus on things that derail writers from a mindset perspective because as we know with any endeavor in life, mindset is something like three quarters of the battle where if you convince yourself that you're going to fail before you start, you're probably going to fail. So that's why it's important to have an appropriate mindset to the task at hand. Today we're going to focus on comparing yourself to others, and I will share five reasons it's not a great idea to compare yourself to others aimlessly and how to shift your focus to five more constructive ways to compare your work to other authors. Comparisons are a constant of the reading world. Librarians and Goodreads reviewers talk constantly about “readalikes” or finding books that have similar themes or settings. Book displays and shops and libraries love to group similar books or authors together. People look at the bestseller lists like they're sports scores. Dollar amounts in publishing deals are a constant source of gossip and jealousy. Sometimes comparison is useful, especially when creating ads or finding the right demographics to market to. Other times, it can lead to limiting or self-destructive thoughts. So let's start off with five reasons not to compare yourself to others. #1: It can limit you creatively. It can be easy to look at the bestseller list and try to think of ways to write a similar book. Following publishing trends keeps you from your most creative work and frankly isn't as enjoyable to write and most likely for your readers to read. Also, unless you're a fast writer, the publishing world might have moved on by the time you finished that book. In fact, I just saw a thread on social media about that where the commenter was bemoaning the fact that she used to enjoy what's now called cozy fantasy, but that as the genre has evolved, it's developed established tropes and the writers of it are not willing to variate from those tropes. So you have what she said in her words were dozens of clones of Lattes and Legends and Bookshops and Bone Dusts floating around, which is a tricky thread to balance, I do admit, because you want something that'll appeal to the reader, but then the readers like familiarity. What they really seem to like is familiarity presented to them in a way they've never seen before, which can be a challenge when you are trying to look at the bestseller list and limit yourself creatively. #2: What other people are doing is out of your control. You can't control if a book you think isn't as good as yours is suddenly the runaway hit of the year or an author who isn't experienced as you suddenly gets a movie deal. You can't control their success, so don't worry about it or get upset by it. You can control if you're wasting time online mocking those people or complaining about it, for example. That's a waste of your time and energy and doesn't actually make you feel better in the long run (and possibly in the short run as well). I believe in psychology and in military theory for that matter, there's something called the locus of control where you identify the things that you can control and then you drill in and focus in on the things you can control rather than worrying about the things you can't control. As we said, if an author who wrote a book you don't think is very good or you don't personally like has had a massive amount of success, there's nothing you can do about that and worrying about it is a waste of time and comparing yourself to that writer is also a waste of time. So that's why it's a better idea to focus in on what you can control. #3: You're not being fair to yourself. Comparing yourself to other authors, especially as an aspiring or new author, isn't being fair to yourself. They have years (if not decades) of experience that you don't have. It's like comparing yourself to an ultra-marathoner when you're someone who's just starting to jog and struggling to get all the way around the block, which is some of the tricky parts of someone like me giving advice to new writers because Shield of Power was my 163rd book and Stealth and Spells Online: Final Quest will be my 164th. I've been doing this for a long time, which means I probably know what I'm talking about, but that not everything I do is immediately reproducible by someone who hasn't been doing it as long as I have. If you're writing something that's not as marketable or in a smaller genre, it's not fair to compare yourself to people in the biggest genre or even your own previous work. For example, I can't compare the amount one of my technical books earns to one of my fantasy books. If I did that, it'd be a disappointment. But in reality, my technical books have had steady success and have even been used as textbooks at times (which is always surprising when I discovered that's happened because my Windows Command Line book and my Linux Command Line book have both been used as textbooks at various times, which was a surprise to me because that's not what I expected when I set out to write them, but I'm glad that they've been able to be useful for people). #4: And point number four, which I think is a really important one, someone's online life is only the highlight reel of someone's actual life. Looking at someone's social media accounts isn't a great way to know what they're actually doing or how they're actually doing. Just because they're posting pictures of tropical vacations, speaking at conferences, or showing off shiny new stuff doesn't mean you're seeing the full picture of how they're actually doing. As I said in a recent episode that when I was applying for disability insurance (just in case I need it someday), I learned that writers are actually one of the hardest professions to insure due to their high rates of mental illness and substance abuse. You might see the good stuff, but they might not be posting the challenges that come with their success: increased stress and anxiety, more criticism, the need to hire people and how much time it takes to manage them, more complicated taxes, increased business expenses, and relationship problems from the demands of success. These are all things that can accompany success. You're not getting the whole picture. You need to keep that in mind when you compare yourself to people online. The best fictional example out of this that applies to so many situations is Lord Denethor and the Palantir from Return of the King. If you read the book, Denethor has been using the Palantir for years to spy on Sauron and give advantages to his forces and the soldiers of Gondor. But Sauron is able to manipulate what Denethor sees in the Palantir and has been gradually using this to create an edited version of what Denethor sees in the Palantir, and that drives Denethor to despair and eventual suicide. People talk about the increased rates of mental illness related to social media. Sauron did that deliberately to Denethor through the Palantir. It's a sign of how good J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer that he managed to anticipate the effects that Facebook would have on some people by like 60 years. So always bear that in mind when you're looking at someone online and feeling jealous of them. You are not getting the whole picture and there are more than likely things going on that are difficulties in their life that they just don't talk about. #5: Your time is better spent writing than comparing yourself to other writers. And this is back to our old friend, the locus of control. Looking at other authors' sales ranks and reviews is not a productive use of your time. As I mentioned in the writing adjacent activities series, you need to be purposeful in non-writing tasks that take up your time and make sure you're not pretending they're writing related. If you need to compare sales ranks or some other data point with other authors or something you're actively working on like ad targeting, schedule that time and don't let it turn into an Internet spiral of time wasting. And now to avoid those Internet spirals of time wasting, here are five ways to use comparisons positively and constructively. #1: Number one, getting keywords or demographics for marketing purposes. For sites like BookBub or when creating keyword ads, knowing authors who are similar to you is incredibly helpful and can help you structure your ads. And this doesn't even necessarily require you to read the other author's books to see if they actually compare. There are tools that let you expedite this process. For example, if you look on Amazon at the Also Boughts, you can scroll through some of that and see which other authors and which other books people have bought in addition to your own and then you can test using those for keyword targeting. On Goodreads, people put books in lists or compare books. You can use that data to generate keywords for ad targeting. You can test them very easily. With BookBub ads in particular, if you build a campaign around just a single author and keywords and test the results. You can quickly see whether a specific author generates an appropriate click-through rate for you to use or not. #2: A second way is to find authors you might want to do a promo with. Some authors, especially in the romance genre, do really well with group promotions. Finding other authors that write similar books and are at a similar level of success may be a way to take advantage of that. I've never actually set up a group promo, but I have participated in several of them from time to time with pretty good results. #3: A third way is to better understand reader preferences in a genre. My best story for this is I've gone through six different variations of cover design for the Silent Order series. When I started out, I was using GIMP and stock photo images. GIMP is the free Linux version of Photoshop essentially. After I learned Photoshop, I upgraded to characters on the covers, but they never quite sold quite as well until finally I saw a Penny Arcade comic where they were commenting how they just want to buy books where they have spaceships in close proximity to planets on the covers. And I thought, huh, that makes a lot of sense. So I redesigned all the covers to have a spaceship in close proximity to a planet, and the series immediately started selling a fair bit better with those covers. I would say that was not so much a comparison thing, just a genre preference I stumbled across and then had sort of the moment of enlightenment that I did. But if I had looked at the bestseller list for various science fiction categories, I would have realized that most of the bestsellers had spaceships and planets in close proximity to each other on the cover. So I redesigned all the covers. It was just that I was too fond of the character based covers to give them up until I had that moment of revelation. So all the main books in the series were redesigned to have the spaceship covers, though for the free short stories, I did keep the character covers just because I was giving away the free short stories and I did like the character covers, so I got to have my cake and eat it too, which was nice. #4: Learn from the successes and failures of others. You can learn from what another author does well. For example, Brandon Sanderson is very good at communicating his writing progress and other updates to his fans through weekly video messages on YouTube. Other authors are good at collaborating with other authors, while others make engaging and funny videos that make people more interested in their work. Knowing your own strengths is an important first step. If you're just trying to follow everyone who is a success without first reflecting on that, you'll chase too many options and then can't excel at any of them. You can also learn from when an author responds poorly and how the Internet reacts to it. Understandably, I'm not going to give specific examples here. For myself, I tend to focus on what I do best, which is writing really fast and doing social media updates. I never got into video because I kind of have a face for radio and I just don't enjoy doing video. I don't enjoy editing them. It's a lot of work that I don't really enjoy, so I don't do it. #5: Being informed makes comparisons less emotional. Knowing, for example, that an author was hired to write a book based on an existing outline created by the publisher, and then promised a future book deal with a big marketing budget in a preferred genre as part of the contract makes their cross-genre success seem less surprising and makes you feel less guilty for not being able to do the same on your own as an indie author. It's not a fair comparison because they have advantages that you can't understand without some industry knowledge. For people that compare themselves to me, for example, they should know that I've been writing since I was a teenager a very long time ago. I was an early adopter of self-publishing when it was less competitive and I usually work more than eight hours a day and I generally keep to a very rigid writing schedule. Some authors like me were able to get the rights back to their earlier published works and then self-publish them early on in order to finish a series, which is much less likely to be an option in a contract for a traditionally published author now. If you're just starting out, travel frequently for work, and only have an hour a day to write (and even that is dicey because your partner would rather you spend that time on some other activity because they don't support your writing), you can't possibly compare your writing output to mine. Knowing all this about me explains why it might be harder for you and why you shouldn't feel bad about having a harder time with writing. Comparison has been called “The Thief of Joy” all over social media for many years. That can definitely be true, but like so many things in life, how you respond to something and find ways to help it make you stronger is what really matters. Comparison has its place in the writing world, but it's important to keep it in perspective and not to let it overwhelm you emotionally or keep you from your writing goals or plans. So that is it for talking about comparison. I hope that was helpful and offered some useful tips on how to avoid the trap of comparison-itis. So that's it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.

Last week it was announced the University of Auckland's campus bookshop, UBIQ, will close. In 2023 the Victoria University shop Vic Books also closed after nearly 50 years in business. Not only do these stores help stock students with textbooks, but they can also act as social hubs on campus. So, what are students missing out on without a bookshop on campus? And do we need to do more to support booksellers?

Four Letter Word season continues with a quiz (which is a four-letter word itself) about four letter words. Test your etymological knowledge, and hear about the original nepo baby, John Venn's invention that wasn't the venn diagram, brat, gunk, rube, the time(s) Led Zeppelin changed their name, and plenty more.Play along while you listen - there's an interactive scoresheet at theallusionist.org/444, where there's also a transcript of this episode, plus links to more information about topics therein, and to the rest of Four Letter Word season and the previous Allusionist quizzes. Also check theallusionist.org/events for upcoming live shows, including a special collab with Material Girls podcast, and an event with Samin Nosrat for her new book Good Things.Support the show at theallusionist.org/donate and as well as keeping this independent podcast going, you also get behind-the-scenes glimpses about every episode, livestreams with me and my collection of dictionaries, and the charming and supportive Allusioverse Discord community.This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. The music is by Martin Austwick. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com and listen to his podcasts Song By Song and Neutrino Watch.Find the Allusionist at youtube.com/allusionistshow, instagram.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, @allusionistshow.bsky.social… If I'm there, I'm there as @allusionistshow. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you want me to talk compellingly about your product, sponsor an episode: contact Multitude at multitude.productions/ads. This episode is sponsored by:• Squarespace, your one-stop shop for building and running your online forever home. Go to squarespace.com/allusionist for a free 2-week trial, and get 10 percent off your first purchase of a website or domain with the code allusionist.• Home Chef, meal kits that fit your needs. For a limited time, Home Chef is offering Allusionist listeners fifty per cent off and free shipping on your first box, plus free dessert for life, at HomeChef.com/allusionist.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

New Zealand adds to the cosy crime genre with Gareth and Louise Ward's The Bookshop Detectives.

If you live in a town or a city in Australia, the chances are that you'll find it easy to find a book to read. Bookshops, local libraries, department stores - they're all places where it's easy to get your literary fix. But if you're hours away from the nearest town of any size, down difficult dirt roads, or even not served by a road at all, none of those are viable options.And that's where the Indigenous Literacy Foundation comes in. They've just passed the milestone of a million books, many in First Languages, sent to around 500 remote Indigenous communities.If you live in a town or a city in Australia, the chances are that you'll find it easy to find a book to read. Bookshops, local libraries, department stores - they're all places where it's easy to get your literary fix. But if you're hours away from the nearest town of any size, down difficult dirt roads, or even not served by a road at all, none of those are viable options.And that's where the Indigenous Literacy Foundation comes in. They've just passed the milestone of a million books, many in First Languages, sent to around 500 remote Indigenous communities. - Жителям отдаленных общин Австралии тяжело получать доступ к книгам, особенно на языках Коренных народов. И тут на помощь приходит The Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

If you live in a town or a city in Australia, the chances are that you'll find it easy to find a book to read. Bookshops, local libraries, department stores - they're all places where it's easy to get your literary fix. But if you're hours away from the nearest town of any size, down difficult dirt roads, or even not served by a road at all, none of those are viable options.And that's where the Indigenous Literacy Foundation comes in. They've just passed the milestone of a million books, many in First Languages, sent to around 500 remote Indigenous communities.If you live in a town or a city in Australia, the chances are that you'll find it easy to find a book to read. Bookshops, local libraries, department stores - they're all places where it's easy to get your literary fix. But if you're hours away from the nearest town of any size, down difficult dirt roads, or even not served by a road at all, none of those are viable options.And that's where the Indigenous Literacy Foundation comes in. They've just passed the milestone of a million books, many in First Languages, sent to around 500 remote Indigenous communities.

Bobby's guests this week were Vinny Browne from Charlie Byrne's Bookshop, Liam Donnelly, Bookshop Manager with Hodges Figgis & Louisa Earls, General Manager of Books Upstairs.

In this Booked & Unfiltered episode of My Simplified Life, host Michelle Glogovac is joined by Stephanie Hockersmith for a heartfelt conversation about the power of family vacations and the lifelong memories made through travel. They dive into the joys and chaos of traveling with kids, the healing that happens when families unplug together, and the beauty of investing in experiences over things. From navigating career changes to dreaming about opening a bookstore, Michelle and Stephanie reflect on how our journeys, both literal and personal, shape who we are and where we're headed. Tune in for laughs, inspiration, and a reminder that your past and present don't define your future. What We're Talking About... Family vacations create lasting memories and bonds. Traveling with kids can be a rewarding experience. Invest in experiences over material items. Family time is essential for healing and connection. Career transitions can lead to new opportunities. Living in different cities shapes our perspectives. Community connections are vital for personal growth. Bookstores can serve as community hubs. Traveling opens up new possibilities and adventures. Chapters 00:00 Spring Break Adventures 03:39 Family Vacations and Memories 06:37 The Importance of Family Time 09:41 Traveling with Kids 12:40 Reflections on Past Trips 15:38 Career Journey and Corporate Aviation 19:09 Career Transitions and Industry Insights 20:52 Living Preferences and City Comparisons 23:16 Dreams of Community and Bookshops 26:12 Travel Plans and Family Adventures 29:43 Book Festivals and Literary Connections

Bookshops and libraries are bursting with books on parenting and what to expect when you're expecting, but there aren't nearly as many guidebooks out there on how to be a good grandparent. That's why family psychologist Terri Apter has written her latest book all about the topic. Grandparenting: On Love and Relationships Across Generations offers readers an expert guide on modern grand parenting and how to overcome tricky family dynamics that might occur along the way. Apter talks to Róisín Ingle about how the first grandchild changed her family, the different types of grandmothers and how important a grandparent is in building a child's identity. But first, Irish Times journalist Ella Sloane is here to discuss some of the biggest stories of the week including new research from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre examining attitudes towards victims of sexual assault, why only half of fathers in Ireland are taking paternity leave and how pottery fever is catching in Dublin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Polly discusses the book Bookshops and Bonedust from the Legends and Lattes Series

Best Scottish Poems is the Scottish Poetry Library's annual online anthology of the 20 Best Scottish Poems, edited each year by a different editor. Bookshops and libraries – with honourable exceptions – often provide a very narrow range of poetry, and Scottish poetry in particular. Best Scottish Poems offers readers in Scotland and abroad a way of sampling the range and achievement of our poets, their languages, forms, concerns. It is in no sense a competition but a personal choice, and this year's editors, the novelists Louise Welsh and Zoë Strachan, checked and balanced each other's predilections. Their introduction demonstrates how widely they read, and how intensely. All the Best Scottish Poems selections are available on the SPL website. This special podcast features readings by established voices and emerging talent. With readings by Kathleen Jamie, Liz Lochhead, Robin Robertson, John Burnside, and many more.  Photo by Jen Hadfield.

After the smash success of his first book, Legends & Lattes, it surprised some fans when the next book of the series was announced as a prequel. Looking back into Viv's violent past, it turns out that her cafe wasn't her first dip into small businesses. Can Viv save the bookshop, financially and physically from an invading necromancer? And what does this mean for the first book? Follow the Author: Website: ⁠https://www.travisbaldree.com/⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/TravisBaldreeNarrator/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://twitter.com/TravisBaldree⁠ Discord: ⁠https://discord.com/invite/duzCS2D⁠ 00:00 Intro 00:41 Background 03:34 Age & Content Warning 04:17 Judge a Book by It's Cover 05:59 Discussion 45:18 General Thought 50:08 One Question for the Author 52:25 Rating 54:54 Read Again? 55:59 Favorite of the Series so Far 56:48 Outro TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/lunar_skulk⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/lunar_skulk⁠⁠⁠⁠

On this episode Matt & Jon discuss Mickey 17, the return of The Righteous Gemstones, the bloody end of Invincible season three, Daredevil: Born Again, Harley Quinn, Reacher, Yellowjackets and Severance, while Jon saw Squid Game 2, Flow, Venom: The Last Dance for some reason and read Bookshops and Bonedust Travis Baldree, while Matt continues The White Lotus and Gilmore Girls as well as catches up with Strange Darling. Twitter, or X or whatever (For Now): https://twitter.com/Jonwahizzle Threads: https://www.threads.net/@jonwahizzle Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/damnthattelevision/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/damntvpod Cage Match: https://whatisamovie.buzzsprout.com/669235 Matt's show The Drop: A Pop Culture Mix Tape: wscafm.org Sundays 6-8 PM: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thedropwsca/

When you walk in the doors of justBook-Ish in Fields Corner, it is immediately clear that it is more than just a bookshop. The space invites patrons to stay for a while. There is a bar with a menu of snacks and non-alcoholic drinks. Visitors can take a seat at the communal table and chairs, or snuggle up in one of several window reading nooks. JustBook-Ish was founded by Porsha Olayiwola, who is a former Boston Poet Laureate, and Bing Broderick, who previously served as the executive director at Haley House. Porsha and Bing wanted to provide a 'third place' in the neighborhood. The concept of a 'third place' is one that's gained a lot of popularity in recent years. It refers to a space that isn't work or school or home, where folks can relax and connect with their community. The Common recently took a trip to justBook-Ish to talk to Porsha about why our community needs more 'third places' and why that drives their mission. Here are other bookstores and 'third places' to check out:  Trident Booksellers & Cafe on Newbury Street Narrative Bookshop in Somerville Lovestruck Books in Harvard Square Greater Boston's weekly podcast where news and culture meet.

For Andrew, it is the writings of Dr James Hollis, one of the world's most eminent Jungian analysts, that have “sustained me through my dark times”. Dr Hollis' books also regularly help Andrew's marital therapy clients create change in their relationships and recover from infidelity.  In this classic reissued episode, Andrew speaks to James Hollis about what it means to be resilient - how do we discover and develop the strength nature gives us to “walk through the forest” when we inevitably hit dark times?  Bookshops and the internet are full of “five steps to happiness” style self-help manuals, telling us that if only we wake up earlier, change jobs, or eliminate caffeine, we will solve all our problems. In fact, life is fractious and difficult, and requires us to persist. The best way to do this is not an external solution, but to find and trust the strength within ourselves.  Dr. James Hollis is a Washington D.C. based Jungian psychoanalyst and the author of seventeen books. He was Executive Director of the Jung Educational Center in Houston, Texas for many years and Executive Director of the Jung Society of Washington (JSW) until 2019. He also worked as a Senior Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, as a Director of Training of the Philadelphia Jung Institute, and is Vice-President Emeritus of the Philemon Foundation. If You're Looking for More…. You can subscribe to The Meaningful Life (via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts) and hear a bonus mini-episode every week. Or you can join our Supporters Club on Patreon to also access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests  and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.  This week supporters will hear: Three Things James Hollis knows to be true.  AND subscribers also access all of our previous bonus content - a rich trove of insight on love, life and meaning created by Andrew and his interviewees. Follow Up Get Andrew's free guide to difficult conversations with your partner: How to Tell Your Partner Difficult Things Take a look at Andrew's new online relationship course: My Best Relationship Tools  Take a look at James Hollis' website Read James Hollis' book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life Read Andrew's review of James Hollis' book Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places:  Join our Supporters Club to access exclusive behind-the-scenes content, fan requests and the chance to ask Andrew your own questions. Membership starts at just £4.50.  Andrew offers regular advice on love, marriage and finding meaning in your life via his social channels. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube @andrewgmarshall   

The poet Michael Longley, who died on 22nd January 2025 at the age of 85, was described by Seamus Heaney as 'a keeper of the artistic estate, a custodian of griefs and wonders.' He devoted a lifetime to the art of poetry and won numerous poetry prizes.In Episode 1 of this series of The Essay, first broadcast in 2024 and recorded to mark his 85th birthday, he talked with presenter Olivia O'Leary about his home town of Belfast and his love of jazz, saying that, 'Good poetry for me combines two things: meaning and melody.' He also loved the classics, which he studied at Trinity College Dublin, where he met his wife, Edna, a distinguished literary critic. He was one of a group of young poets that emerged from Northern Ireland in the 1960s and he describes the mutual support, rivalry and excitement of that time.He reads his poems Elegy for Fats Waller and an extract from his poem River and Fountain from a new collection, Ash Keys: New Selected Poems (Cape Poetry), published to mark his 85th birthday on 27th July 2024. He also reads Bookshops from his collection Angel Hill and Poem from The Slain Birds.Presenter: Olivia O'Leary Producer: Claire Cunningham Executive Producer: Regan HutchinsMichael Longley's Life of Poetry is a Rockfinch production for BBC Radio 3.

Una Kelly RTE Reporter

For live show tickets, click here Charlie and Chloe C Peñaranda (The Stars Are Dying) discuss the incident wherein her heroine stabs the hero, getting around her hero's ability to run amok via deus ex machina, and becoming a hybrid author after success as a self-published writer. Please note there are brief mentions of abuse in this episode. A transcript is available on my site General references: Chloe's TikTok Books mentioned by name or extensively: Chloe C Peñaranda: An Heir Comes To Rise Chloe C Peñaranda: A Throne From The Ashes Chloe C Peñaranda: A Sword From The Embers Chloe C Peñaranda: The Stars An Dying Chloe C Peñaranda: The Night Is Defying Sarah J Maas: A Court Of Thorns And Roses Buy the books: UK || USA Release details: recorded 24th October 2024; published 13th January 2025 Where to find Chloe online: Website || Facebook || Instagram || TikTok Where to find Charlie online: Website || Twitter || Instagram || TikTok Discussions 01:36 Was romantasy the genre you'd been waiting for? 02:55 The initial thought for The Stars Are Dying - Greek myths and Chloe's series An Heir Comes To Rise, and we talk about potential spin-off series 06:34 Why Chloe chose the second iteration of Nyte and Astraea's relationship to focus on instead of the first 08:04 On having a general direction or goal in mind for The Stars Are Dying 08:49 Creating Astraea and Nyte 10:26 Using a slow burn romance 11:45 Getting around the potential deus ex machina of Nyte's powers 13:07 Deciding when to give readers answers as to Astraea's mental state and so on 14:33 The inclusion of amnesia and abuse 15:44 The Libertatum 17:55 The planning before putting pen to paper 19:21 Discussing Astrea's stabbing of Nyte 20:53 Slight notes on the crossover between The Stars Are Dying and An Heir Comes To Rise 23:54 On Cassia's role 25:06 Drystan 25:38 About The Night Is Defying 27:06 How fans of An Heir Comes To Rise have responded to The Stars Are Dying 28:38 Being, now, a hybrid author 30:13 How the traditional publishing deal came about 32:19 On getting a house and garden for her dogs following the publishing deal 33:37 Ideas Chloe is considering for her next work Photo credit: Caroline Anne Disclosure: If you buy books linked to my site, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Join Charles and Joe in the latest exciting episode of Wise_N_Nerdy as they welcome the extraordinary Douglas A. Burton to the show. Packed with laughter, thought-provoking discussions, and heartfelt moments, this episode truly embodies the podcast's tagline: "Find your FAMdom." What's a Great Book You've Read Recently? Kicking things off, the question of the week prompts a lively bookish exchange. Charles highlights Southern Saudade by Bob McGough, a deeply atmospheric tale. Douglas shares his love for Bride of the Tornado by James Kennedy, describing it as a whirlwind of imagination. Joe rounds things out with Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree, a delightful blend of fantasy and nostalgia. Daddy, Tell Me a Story: First Fandoms Rolling the dice lands us on the beloved segment, "Daddy, Tell Me a Story." The trio delves into the roots of their fandom journeys. Douglas recalls being captivated by Star Wars as a child, igniting a lifelong love for the galaxy far, far away. Joe reminisces about his obsession with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, embracing both the cartoon series and the 1990s live-action films. Meanwhile, Charles brings a touch of heartwarming nostalgia with his early love for Sesame Street. Bad Dad Jokes Galore As the dice dictate, it's time for some groan-worthy humor. Douglas, Joe, and even Charles take turns sharing dad jokes, leaving listeners both cringing and chuckling in equal measure. Devocite's contributions ensure the comedy keeps rolling. What Are You Nerding Out About? Next up, the fates treat us to the "What Are You Nerding Out About?" segment. Joe enthusiastically discusses the latest season of Arcane, celebrating its intricate storytelling and stunning animation. Douglas revels in the news that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan has been added to the National Film Registry, marking a win for Trekkies everywhere. Charles shares his newfound joy in two captivating shows: Overlord and Secret Level. Listener Feedback and the Parliament of Papas The episode shifts gears as the hosts respond to insightful listener feedback from Devocite before moving on to the "Parliament of Papas" segment. A compelling real-life story of two families with IVF embryo mix-ups leads to a meaningful discussion on fatherhood, responsibility, and resilience. How Do I...? In the final segment, the hosts explore the "How Do I...?" theme. Douglas dives into the concept of the heroine's journey and its profound influence on his writing, providing listeners with valuable insights into storytelling and character development. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wise-n-nerdy/support

On this episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: mistletoe horror and book to screen adaptations Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: how to fit in reading during the holidays The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) .  .  .  .  4:03 - Our Bookish Moments Of The Week 4:21 - 25 Days by Per Jacobson 8:50 - Wicked by Gregory McGuire 9:23 - The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson 9:37 - The Salt Path by Raynor Winn 9:39 - Landlines by Raynor Winn 9:49 - Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder 10:43 - Our Current Reads 10:56 - Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty (Meredith) 16:15 - The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson (Kaytee) 16:24 - Grown by Tiffany D. Jackson 16:37 - Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson 16:38 - Monday's Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson 16:48 - White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson 21:00 - Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth (Meredith, amazon link) 25:29 - Many Things Under a Rock by David Scheel (Kaytee) 28:01 - Secrets of the Octopus by Sy Montgomery 28:03 - The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery 29:05 - The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie (Meredith) 33:23 - The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst (Kaytee) 35:39 - The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett 35:54 - Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree 35:55 - Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree 36:56 - Fitting In Reading Around The Holidays 48:27 - Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time #1) 51:37 - Meet Us At The Fountain 52:32 - I wish we would take the time to rate our books by superlatives. (Meredith) 54:00 - I wish to have a holiday book exchange instead of a cookie exchange. (Kaytee) 55:46 - Currently Reading Patreon Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. December's IPL is a recap of the 2024 year!  Love and Chili Peppers with Kaytee and Rebekah - romance lovers get their due with this special episode focused entirely on the best selling genre fiction in the business.  All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the behind-the-scenes insights of an independent bookseller From the Editor's Desk with Kaytee and Bunmi Ishola - a quarterly peek behind the curtain at the publishing industry The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Production and Editing: Megan Phouthavong Evans Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Send us a textIn this episode our stack is so charming it will sweep you off your feet! Laura read one of her favorites of the year. Leslie continues a favorite series and hopes for a new one. We'll also share a Book in Hand...Plus there's baking!Featured Books:A Cyclist's Guide to Crime and Croissants by Ann Claire (LH)A Pirate's Life for Tea by Rebecca Thorne (LH)Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford (LP)The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong (LP)Book in HandThe Night Librarian: A Graphic Novel by Christopher Lincoln (LH)Books Mentioned in This EpisodeYou Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Ann ClaireLegends and Lattes (#1) and Bookshops and Bonedust (#2) by Travis BaldreeThe Land of Stories series by Chris ColferAdditional Books That Go Along with Our StackMeet Me At the Museum by Anne YoungsonIona Iverson's Rules for Commuting by Clare PooleyLenny Marks Gets Away With Murder by Kerryn MayneThe Library of Broken Hearts by Lucy GilmoreThe Honey Witch by Sydney J ShieldsMajor Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen SimonsonWays to contact us:Follow us on Instagram - @thebookbumbleFacebook:  Book BumbleOur website:  https://thebookbumble.buzzsprout.comEmail:  bookbumblepodcast@gmail.comHey Friends, please rate and review us!

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Charlie and Louise Morrish discuss the extensive efforts the latter went to in order to be published, the networking she did prior to that, and how she's giving back to the writing community. Please note there is a very mild swear word at the end of this episode. A transcript is available on my site General references: Goldfinch Books Owner Gary is Gary Clark of The Interland series Books mentioned by name or extensively: Louise Morrish: Operation Moonlight Louise Morrish: Women Of War The Writer's And Artists' Yearbook Buy the books: UK || USA Release details: recorded 17th July 2024; published 4th November 2024 Where to find Louise online: Website || Twitter || Instagram Where to find Charlie online: Website || Twitter || Instagram || TikTok Discussions 01:11 The early days of Louise's writing and the Faber Academy course 03:54 The importance of networking with others 05:32 Struggling to get anywhere, submitting to the Penguin Random House First Novel Competition, and winning 12:27 Persevering in the face of rejection 14:30 Class, and, then, novels in the drawer 17:53 The process Louise used when submitting to all the agents and talking about shyness and gaining confidence 27:16 More on the writing groups Louise runs and 'giving back' 31:52 About Louise's books, Operation Moonlight, and Women Of War 37:07 Being a librarian and seeing your own books in the libraries Disclosure: If you buy books linked to my site, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops

Its warren of underground bunkers and tunnels, which sheltered the city's residents during the heavy bombing of the Second Sino-Japanese war, are turned into lifestyle destinations today. Synopsis: The Straits Times chats with ST's global correspondents about life as it goes on, amid the screaming headlines and bubbling crises. Chongqing bears a grim wartime history. As China's wartime capital which Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government decamped to in 1937, it was heavily bombed during the Second Sino-Japanese war. Bunkers - some 16,000 - were built into the city's hills and mountains, sheltering terrified residents as the bombs rained down. Some eight decades on, the Chongqing government has given these underground shelters a new lease of life.  In this episode, ST's foreign editor Li Xueying speaks to China correspondent Aw Cheng Wei about what it is like to be in those bunkers today, and why Chongqing is approaching its wartime past differently from other Chinese cities. Highlights (click/tap above): 0:39 Bookshops, car washes and mahjong sessions 2:51 A real coming to terms with its history?  8:24 Making the most of one's past  14:04 The Straits Times sets up shop in Chongqing Read Aw Cheng Wei's article here: https://str.sg/w2Esn  Read Li Xueying's articles: https://str.sg/iqmR Follow Li Xueying on LinkedIn: https://str.sg/ip4x Register for Asian Insider newsletter: https://str.sg/stnewsletters  Host: Li Xueying (xueying@sph.com.sg) Edited by: Fa'izah Sani Executive producer: Lynda Hong Follow Asian Insider on Fridays here: Channel: https://str.sg/JWa7 Apple Podcasts: https://str.sg/JWa8 Spotify: https://str.sg/JWaX Feedback to: podcast@sph.com.sg --- Follow more ST podcast channels: All-in-one ST Podcasts channel: https://str.sg/wvz7   ST Podcast website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts   ST Podcasts YouTube: https://str.sg/4Vwsa  --- Get The Straits Times' app, which has a dedicated podcast player section: The App Store: https://str.sg/icyB Google Play: https://str.sg/icyX --- #STAsianInsiderSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Its warren of underground bunkers and tunnels, which sheltered the city's residents during the heavy bombing of the Second Sino-Japanese war, are turned into lifestyle destinations today. Synopsis: The Straits Times chats with ST's global correspondents about life as it goes on, amid the screaming headlines and bubbling crises. Chongqing bears a grim wartime history. As China's wartime capital which Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government decamped to in 1937, it was heavily bombed during the Second Sino-Japanese war. Bunkers - some 16,000 - were built into the city's hills and mountains, sheltering terrified residents as the bombs rained down. Some eight decades on, the Chongqing government has given these underground shelters a new lease of life.  In this episode, ST's foreign editor Li Xueying speaks to China correspondent Aw Cheng Wei about what it is like to be in those bunkers today, and why Chongqing is approaching its wartime past differently from other Chinese cities. Highlights (click/tap above): 0:39 Bookshops, car washes and mahjong sessions 2:51 A real coming to terms with its history?  8:24 Making the most of one's past  14:04 The Straits Times sets up shop in Chongqing Read Aw Cheng Wei's article here: https://str.sg/w2Esn  Read Li Xueying's articles: https://str.sg/iqmR Follow Li Xueying on LinkedIn: https://str.sg/ip4x Register for Asian Insider newsletter: https://str.sg/stnewsletters  Host: Li Xueying (xueying@sph.com.sg) Edited by: Fa'izah Sani Executive producer: Lynda Hong Follow Asian Insider on Fridays here: Channel: https://str.sg/JWa7 Apple Podcasts: https://str.sg/JWa8 Spotify: https://str.sg/JWaX Feedback to: podcast@sph.com.sg --- Follow more ST podcast channels: All-in-one ST Podcasts channel: https://str.sg/wvz7   ST Podcast website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts   ST Podcasts YouTube: https://str.sg/4Vwsa  --- Get The Straits Times' app, which has a dedicated podcast player section: The App Store: https://str.sg/icyB Google Play: https://str.sg/icyX --- #STAsianInsiderSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join us in this exciting episode of Epic Realms as we welcome the legendary Mark Mir, renowned actor, voice actor, and writer, best known for his iconic role as Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series! In this episode, Mark shares his experiences from PAX Australia, including a memorable Mass Effect cosplay meetup and his love for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. We dive into the nuances of acting and voice acting, exploring how Mark's journey began with Dungeons & Dragons and how it shaped his career. Mark discusses the evolution of the gaming industry over the years, his creative process in developing unique character voices, and the collaborative nature of video game production. He also shares insights into his recent projects, including his portrayal of the Joker in a fan film and his involvement in actual play RPGs like Bookshops of Arkham and Graveyards of Arkham. Whether you're a fan of video games, tabletop RPGs, or just love a good story, this episode is packed with fascinating insights and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Don't miss out on Mark's thoughts on cosplay, conventions, and the vibrant world of nerd culture!

By Walt HickeyWelcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.This week, I spoke to Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzales, coauthors of the book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, out in paperback this week.I really loved the book, it dives into what is the main flywheel of mainstream entertainment, for better or for worse, and dives into the fascinating history of the MCU. Whether you're a fan of Marvel movies or just someone living in a world dominated by them, the book is a really interesting look into contemporary filmmaking and the pressures and economics and just simply human scale of these massive operations.We spoke about Marvel's journey from underdog to cultural icon, how its moviemaking process has changed over time, and what it was like covering a narrative that was developing in real time.Robinson and Gonzales can both be found on the podcast Trial by Content, and the book can be found wherever books are sold.This interview has been condensed and edited. Dave and Joanna, thank you so much for coming on.GONZALES: Absolutely.ROBINSON: Thanks for having us.I really, really love this book. So happy to see it out in paperback. I guess I'll just kick it off with an easy one: What were each of your first experiences with Marvel? How'd you get into this?ROBINSON: As in the comic books or the films?Anything.ROBINSON: Anything at all. Gosh, I think X-Men: The Animated Series was my introduction, back in my infancy. It really got into the world they created, the various characters, their character sets, the trading cards, and then everything spirals out from there. That was my introduction.GONZALES: Mine was probably with the comics. I might have had some X-Men: The Animated Series in there, but I got much more into the comics around late 1993, early '94, when I happened to buy a Spider-Man issue that was part of “The Trial of Peter Parker.” Suddenly I had questions: Why was Peter Parker on trial? How many different Spider-Man books were there? Because I bought an issue of The Spectacular Spider-Man, but the next part of “The Trial of Peter Parker” was The Amazing Spider-Man.That led me to get a cubby at my local comic book shop in Louisville, Colorado, which was Time Warp Comics at the time. That was my way in, just being a comic book fan. I also jumped in on one of the longest and mostly considered worst Spider-Man arcs, but loved it. So imagine how good “good” Spider-Man was to me as a child, because I got weaned in on “bad” Spider-Man.Amazing. One reason I really dug the book is that it's about the MCU, but it's also about Marvel, the history of this entire company, and its very different evolution over time, from the '60s to the period of the '90s. What was it like trying to cover not just a film series, but a big franchise with a lot of moving parts as part of an even bigger company with even more moving parts?ROBINSON: A good question we asked ourselves was both where to start and where to end, and where to end was a constant, ongoing question mark. I'll let Dave address that. But in terms of where to start, there were certain things we felt we had to backdate, because there were players involved in the major “How did Marvel Studios come to be?” question and you had to know who they were, why they were important, how did we get here and what were the stakes? Being able to loosely explain who's Stan Lee, who's Perlmutter, who's Avi Arad, who are all these people, helped us tell that story without losing the audience entirely by throwing a bunch of new names at them. Dave, what about ending the book?GONZALES: Oh, ending the book. That was super fun. We started right as Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. I remember seeing Endgame and knowing that Joanna and I were going to work on this, so we started off thinking, what a fantastic hill that Marvel climbed, this interconnected universe with three phases. Everything surely was planned out from the beginning and could only go up from here. The book was originally “The Rise of Marvel Studios,” because we thought surely this was just up and up and up.Then the pandemic hit — which was very good for us, having to write the book and just sit down and figure out what it was. It also gave us and a lot of sources a pause to regain our footing. As Marvel started rolling out, we tried to peg an end date. I wanted it to be Blade to Blade when we started, but Mahershala Ali's project has still not come out, so that became an impossibility. Then WandaVision premiered and suddenly there was this whole other aspect to the story we were trying to tell. So we wanted to do that and just tried to report things as they went along.We were blessed and cursed by the year that we published the hardcover, October 2023. As we were turning in the final part of the book in January and February, a whole bunch of Marvel news started breaking. Ike Perlmutter left Disney; Victoria Alonso, who was a big mover and shaker in Marvel Studios, was let go, so we had to report that out; Jonathan Majors went on trial.It was only in a panic over all those things that I really ended up appreciating what we had done just by thinking of all these topics so thoroughly for several years. Even though we were tacking new endings on, it wasn't that hard to make it feel like it was a whole arc because we were kind of working there anyway. I wouldn't say I'd've enjoyed releasing the first version of this book in one of Marvel's worst financial years and most critical years ever, but I do think it provided an interesting little tie-off or a fascinating ellipses that allowed us to be relevant and, more importantly, in the year 2024, look like we knew exactly what we were talking about in Marvel's rebounds.That's a really good point. When I met you on tour, a key thing you were getting at was that the idea that Marvel has not had a slump before is naive, and also ahistorical. A fun thing about the book is that you go through all these different eras, and sure, there's an easier story and probably a more polished, corporate story that's ever upward, toward Excelsior, all that crap.But you really do cover the pits and troughs of this. There was Iron Man 2; there was Thor: The Dark World; there was that period of time between the assorted Spider-Mans. What was that perspective like, particularly as it was coming out and as you were able to talk about the issues in 2023?ROBINSON: It was important for us, just on a basic journalistic level, to try to tell as much of the story as possible. We're fans of Marvel, of the movies, but as long as I've known Dave, both of us have been people who don't like to feel like we're not being told the whole story. We don't want the PR version of something — we want to know all the messy details as well. And it's not to knock Marvel or have any kind of “gotcha” moment. It's to say, “Okay, they had these various pitfalls, these various problematic people that they were working with, X, Y and Z. Look what they accomplished anyway.” That's the story in broad strokes. It was important for us to be able to acknowledge the stumbles along the way.When we found ourselves in a 2023 space where everyone was saying Marvel is cooked, or Marvel used to know exactly what it was doing from the beginning and now they're just making it up — no, they were always making it up. They just did it so well, you didn't notice. That gave us a better perspective to be able to say, let's just slow down. We were looking ahead to 2024, saying they're only putting out one movie and two shows next year. If those hit, then you'll start to hear that Marvel's back, baby. Then Deadpool & Wolverine makes a gajillion dollars and Agatha All Along is a pretty solid hit for them.So I think that “Marvel is over” narrative that was so prevalent a year ago is now the question, “Is Marvel back?” Looking even further forward at the next couple of big projects coming, I think Captain America: Brave New World is going to be a tough one for them. I don't know if that's going to hit the way a lot of people want it to. I think Thunderbolts is going to be hit for them, and I think The Fantastic Four: First Steps is going to be hit for them. They're still getting their bearings, but to your point, it was a bit naive to say they've been nothing but successful and now they've run off a cliff. Dave, what do you think?GONZALES: It was just a less interesting narrative, ultimately. I actually found myself getting less adversarial the more we learned, especially being a fan when all this started around 2008. There was this idea that Joanna was talking about, which is even a fan perspective today, that if something doesn't work out it's because we've been denied something at some creative step. Like, you know what, screw those guys; we want to do Harrison Ford as Red Hulk instead, or something like that.But it's not that at all. There are a whole bunch of different drama and production and business problems, and all these things come together to make these gigantic machines of a movie work. It was really important for us to drill down on Marvel Studios and get into those ups and downs, because a lot of times you can try to compare Marvel Studios to something through contrast, through Warner Brothers trying to do it with DC back in the early 2010s. Everybody started trying to launch an interconnected universe from the first movie, but all you could really say is that Marvel's worked and these others didn't. The details of the alchemy are in the tiny stories and little conflicts. That's why I think they were so important to track, be they how movie stars look or how we use CGI to make movie stars look. Tracking that over at Marvel Studios was just as important as how many movies Tony Stark was going to be in.Can you speak more to how much of this was on the fly? One of my big takeaways from your book was just how much things aren't necessarily set in stone during the production of a movie, and how sometimes one person's smart idea, regardless of where it comes from, can drastically alter what a lot of folks think was written in stone in 2007.ROBINSON: That idea of “best idea wins” — without ego; best idea from whomsoever — was a prevailing concept at Marvel. Kevin Feige was also this really interesting figure that has no comparison at any other studio. He's head of the studio, a creative producer, a storyteller in his own right and someone who wanted to make movies as a kid and thought he would be a director. He wound up an executive, but he has that storytelling sense. When Marvel was putting out fewer films and TV shows — or no TV shows at all and just a few films a year — the process was, “Go shoot your movie. Bring me, Kevin Feige, back the pieces and I'll tell you what you're missing.” They had this built-in reshoot window where you could go and add scenes where he felt like you hadn't really nailed this character, or cut this action out to bump up the action over here a bit more. They had this rough-drafting process with the master editor being Kevin Feige himself. There's no system like that at any other studio.That works so well for them, and in doing so, they're able to cement over the cracks and make it all feel like one smooth story that they're telling, because that refining process is built into their filmmaking process. Once the mandate comes from Disney, from Iger on his way out the door, from Chapek in his seat for a while, that they need to compete with Netflix and all these other streaming services, that they need more and more content — then the pace becomes untenable for that revision process that made them so solid in the first place.You talk about Feige not having an analog. I was really shocked reading the book because there's not even anything recent. You have to go back to Cecil B. DeMille for someone who has that producer, authorial presence. He's really a fascinating figure, and it's a key takeaway from the book that I loved. It really highlights the people who make these movies, not just the corporation. It's actual human beings who do this kind of stuff, often with long continuities. Do you want to speak about some of that?GONZALES: Definitely. Actually, while you were talking, I was wondering if part of the chip on Zack Snyder's shoulder was because someone at some point told him he was going to be a Kevin Feige and he's been chasing that ever since.A lot of the Marvel continuity that's been going on is still going on, even after our new chapter. It's been interesting to see how it's developed. It could be that the best idea wins, but then they also have that old school, in-house process where the starting team is very often the same people and has been since phase one. You put together a bullpen of concept artists, so you're constantly using concept art. Not only is that smart from a design standpoint for making a movie, but then you can have those things scanned and it goes directly into making toys. So at the beginning, there's no fight about bringing on these design creatives super early on.Where we start to see the wear and tear is, as Joanna was saying, with this output increase. All of the pressure starts being put on post-production, which is the place where you can't make more time. The solution is to hire more people, and because of that, the job of keeping things consistent falls to Victoria Alonso.She does a pretty good job considering that she's working a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week work schedule because the industry is so messed up. It was never built to do stuff like this. In a lot of ways, the way the VFX industry is structured is still from the '90s turn of the century, when you would bid on a number of shots to do and get money for that number of shots. You'd have to work those shots until they get approved by the director. There isn't an extra budget, and there isn't an overtime, which was a fine way to do it when there were three or four VFX shots in every movie. But now that we're in the 200s or some such, there's a natural strain put on that, and it's impossible to budget on the VFX side. They have to underbid because there's a limited amount of work. If Marvel decides they don't like you, as much as a third of your entire year's work can just not come to your company.As Marvel ages into it, we get a lot of people who are able to make their careers there, from Kevin Feige to Mary Livanos, who's doing great things on Agatha and seems really close to being ascendant. We have Brad Winderbaum, who's been made head of streaming now to take some of that pressure off Kevin. You have all these great continuities. You're less likely to see continuities in visual effects artists, just because of how they're going recently. When Joanna and I were interviewing people like ILM for Hulk, occasionally we'd do a person that was in three or four movies. Now, like for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, there was a team of about 12 people at Framestore who make animals look good. They just come in for that movie to make animals look incredibly good. They did it the whole time, but they're not as legacy as other parts of the Marvel development studios — which I hope will change, because there are some people who are really good at making Hulks. And if you've made Hulks for 20 years, shouldn't those be the people that are making Hulks in Brave New World? We'll have to see.ROBINSON: I love that you mentioned Cecil B. DeMille. As we were putting this whole story together and realizing that they bring all these teams in-house, Dave and our coauthor Gavin and I, we are to varying degrees students of old Hollywood history, and we had this realization that it's just the old Hollywood studio system. You're putting actors under contract for nine movies, all this other stuff, and we felt so smart. Then I was talking to someone who worked at Marvel and they were like, “Oh yeah, Kevin says that all the time.” I was like, oh, I thought we really put something together. But at least we were right! We were consciously doing this.I think that industrial element of it is really interesting. A key thing that changed the way I see the film industry was realizing that every movie is basically a corporation that briefly exists. Every movie is an entire apparatus, with a CEO operation and departments and all that. Then it folds and you move on to the next one.With Marvel, though, the circus never closes; it's just onto the next city. It was really interesting to see its place in the industry. Like Dave was saying, the limiting reactant for some of this is just the number of animators on the earth who are capable of making this kind of stuff. It's so cool to get a look inside this apparatus through the book.ROBINSON: Thank you.GONZALES: What an apparatus. It's really interesting to me, even now, as we are pending the return of the Russo brothers, who are just able to find this and also find the emotion in it.In Endgame, the Tony Stark “I am Iron Man” moment was the last insert. They had to go to dinner with Robert Downey Jr. and Joel Silver and have Silver be like, “You'd be dumb not to do it, Robert,” because Downey didn't want to go back there. He's a weird dude, but for him, it felt like in order to get to what he needed to do, he had to take off a scab that had formed and get back into the character. Whereas the Russo brothers are like, we built a workout system and we have our smoothies and every day is trying to make the machine work. Somehow, through the alchemy of those two things, the machine works, and occasionally we get these story moments that feel like they were created individually for that movie.That, I think, is the mystery that the book is trying to unravel. At the beginning, it's untapped storytelling potential. Everyone's like, if you don't have the X-Men, if you don't have Spider-Man, what do you have? There's so much in just proving that you have good stories. Now that you're the biggest game in town, that idea of, “Are you going to make me feel anything?” is so much different than what the initial promise was, that they're going to bring Thanos to the screen and you're going to understand who he is and what he wants. That was the big lift. Now there's a whole simultaneous saving of the industry, and bestowing status on different actors. There's just so much more mixed up in it now. It's amazing we got where we did.The book is also a really interesting look at the transition from being a super underdog. As you describe in the earliest chapters of the book, Marvel was bankrupt, and all the executives were folks who fell out of the toy industry or Revlon. The folks who were in charge came to it in the manner of somebody accidentally having to join a carnival, and then eventually it becomes the hegemonic juggernaut of everything, in many ways the thing that people stand against. In the book, watching the perception around it change and then internally having to adapt to that change in perception was a really cool tension.ROBINSON: My favorite indicator of that underdog status versus top-of-the-world status versus wherever we are now is the making of the first Iron Man movie. Marvel Entertainment in New York — who was, to your point, chiefly concerned with merchandising and toys — had the attitude, “Okay, go make your cute little movie. If it doesn't cost us any money, you can go do your little cinematic experiment in Hollywood and we don't really care that much. Just make sure you don't spend any of our money. Other than that, go have fun.”And they make Iron Man, and Iron Man is a massive, smash hit, and all of a sudden the people in New York are like, we're forming something called the Creative Committee. We would like a lot of intake. We want to be part of this. This is the big shiny thing, and everyone wants to weigh in on it. So it's really interesting to track this going from a weird little project they were doing out in Los Angeles to The Thing for Marvel. You can track it by who needs to have an opinion about what and when they start to care.GONZALES: One of my favorite moments — it's after the book chapter “Marvel vs. the Creative Committee” — is when Kevin Feige gets on stage himself to unveil the entirety of phase three, which includes Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War and everything. That is such a telling moment for me. He had just won his battles with these behind the scenes. He's fully in full control. Black Panther is coming. Joss Whedon is in the edits for Avengers: Age of Ultron, in the audience, but they already know he's not coming back.There was a version of a chapter in the book that was just me going through that and being like, here's why each one of these announcements is like Kevin Feige spiking a football in the face of someone that told him he couldn't do it. That's still the purest creative energy I've seen. “We could finally do it!” burst out of Marvel. I think they've been more reserved since, even with some big announcements, but I like to go back and look at that just to see the pivot point when Marvel was the underdog. It was like, we want Black Panther, we want Captain Marvel, but the studio won't let us do it. Then Kevin Feige gets up and goes, “Here are the next 10 years of your life.” It's just such a joyous moment.ROBINSON: We love that moment. We talked to people behind the scenes who were working at Marvel at the time about it, and there's a reason that whole presentation wasn't at a Comic-Con. It wasn't at D23. It was its own thing at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles, and internally, they jokingly called it Kevin-Con. It was this whole thing, and part of it was that they weren't ready to announce certain things at Comic-Con.But part of it was this moment for Feige who fought various personalities across the various companies to get control of the narrative. And I agree, Endgame is of course in all of history going to be looked at as the pinnacle of achievement at Marvel. But I actually think it might be Kevin-Con at the El Capitan Theater, when Chadwick Boseman comes out and Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans are there to anoint him as the future of the franchise. That, of course, comes with its own terrible poignancy. We were really lucky to talk to Chadwick Boseman for the book before he passed away. These were things that happened while we were writing the book. History was constantly happening as we were trying to frame this entire narrative.If there's a protagonist in the book, it feels like it's Kevin, even in the earliest days when he was advising on the Fox products. Having read the book and then seen Deadpool & Wolverine — which, as you mentioned, went on to become a phenomenal financial success — it was really cool to come away with a little more admiration for the role that Kevin had in some of the Fox properties. Seeing that manifest in the MCU was just really nice.ROBINSON: I love that he got to have his Wolverine story, given that it all starts with him in a trailer with Hugh Jackman saying it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger, it needs to be bigger. I love that.GONZALES: I don't even know if it's still called that, but Joanna used to call that the “Feige fix-it.” Instead of developing these things by always going forward and introducing younger Avengers, he's actually much more interested in reaching back. There were good things there. Or, I guess the generous way to think about it is rewarding the fans that were around before it was the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like, “You didn't waste your time with X-Men: The Last Stand. I know it might have felt like that occasionally, but here's this. Or Andrew Garfield. Yeah, maybe we treated him badly, but don't worry. You didn't waste your time with that because boom, here it is paying off in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”Initially there was some hesitancy about Marvel homework. Do I need to have seen these things to do these things? But ultimately, if we're just talking dollars and cents, the nostalgia play has made them a billion dollars so many times that it doesn't surprise me that Deadpool & Wolverine is a huge hit just by being a swan song for the Fox movies.ROBINSON: I was personally incredibly gratified to finally get Channing Tatum as Gambit. That was a very important moment for me.My favorite version of the Feige fix-it was putting the storyline from Thor: The Dark World into Endgame and making Thor: The Dark World, the most universally mocked and reviled MCU film, an integral part of their biggest triumph. All of a sudden that's wrapped into the larger tapestry in a way so you can't just toss it in the garbage and say, oh, don't bother watching Thor: The Dark World — now you have to watch it to understand everything you're seeing in Endgame, which is certainly not a movie you're ever going to skip.It's a magic trick that really works and almost shouldn't work as well as it does. But even how they were able to get the Infinity Stones, almost taking elements of the first couple films that were dropped or introduced somewhat randomly and then doing that. It's a trick that they keep on pulling.GONZALES: Kevin Feige will say this, but we're coming up on 80 years of comic book history, and if there's one thing that comic books do more than any other medium, it's just use the same story. How could you have another angle on this story? They have so much A/B testing on what we like about this character, or what we'll buy about a certain character, it's interesting to see Marvel adapt that along with what sort of story you like on the Hollywood side of it.But yeah, we're going to see Captain America: Brave New World and finally see that Celestial that came out of the ocean in Eternals. Every Marvel property contributes something, we're told. Except the Inhumans; that never happens.The book is MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, and it's a fascinating look at the intersection of the humanity behind these movies and the technology of these movies. And if there's one figure that reminds me of that in particular, obviously, one of the most central people in the Marvel universe is Green Steve. Let's talk a little about him before we wrap this one up.ROBINSON: He's my favorite! Green Steve, a Chippendales dancer that was painted green in order to make sure they understood how the green light on skin would be captured accurately for the Hulk. Green Steve was one of my favorite anecdotes we got, and it was out of the book for a while before we worked it back in. Dave, what do you want to say about Green Steve?GONZALES: I love Green Steve. I love that this bodybuilder from Long Island can technically say he played the Hulk in a sort of way. In theory, because it's a whole CGI character, he might have played the Hulk close to how much Mark Ruffalo played the Hulk in that first movie. I love that story.Pretty early on, we brought in Gavin Edwards, our third author, to help us do a book, since Joanna and I had never done a book before. We were starting to put together the notes and I was like, can we please have a mid-credits scene? Can we just have a chapter in the middle of the notes?ROBINSON: That was Dave.GONZALES: I held onto that for as long as possible. I remember in one of the final meetings after we turned in the draft, we pitched it up to the editor and they were like, “That's really fun,” and I thought, oh thank god. That was a really early idea, and Green Steve fits that perfectly; it's a super interesting story that doesn't really belong anywhere else, but will stick in your mind as, Marvel literally tried everything to make the best Hulk. So I'm very happy that it's the mid-credits chapter — and remains the mid-credits chapter! Even when we added another chapter in, we were like, where does this go? Not before Green Steve.ROBINSON: He's got the final word for sure.Amazing. The book's out of paperback now. Where can folks find it? Where can they find you? And what's next?ROBINSON: “All good and evil news agents.” That's what the Empire Magazine folks say. All good and evil bookstores or any online book purveyor is where you can find our book. Dave does a tremendous podcast called Fighting in the War Room, which I love to listen to, so you should listen to that. And together we do a podcast called Trial by Content that y'all should listen to.GONZALES: Joanna's on a fantastic podcast called the House of R with Mallory Rubin over on The Ringer, where she covers lots of cool pop culture things. If you want to go to a bookstore and don't know exactly which one to go to, you could head to theMCUbook.com. That will forward you to our publisher's website, which has links to your Barnes and Nobles, your Amazons, your Bookshops.org, and will help you track down the book near you. And look for us in a couple more years with something similar.Thanks for coming on.ROBINSON: Thanks, Walt.GONZALES: Thank you.Edited by Susie Stark.If you have anything you'd like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.Thank you so much for becoming a paid subscriber! Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.numlock.com/subscribe

On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway dives into why "bookshops are cool" according to a recent survey, exploring the unique appeal of browsing shelves and finding new reads in person. He also discusses South Korean author Han Kang's Nobel Prize win and asks whether AI might soon compete with humans in literature and science. Dan rounds out the show with insights on AI rights and metadata protections for authors. Sponsors Self-Publishing News is proudly sponsored by Bookvault. Sell high-quality, print-on-demand books directly to readers worldwide and earn maximum royalties selling directly. Automate fulfillment and create stunning special editions with BookvaultBespoke. Visit Bookvault.app today for an instant quote. Self-Publishing News is also sponsored by book cover design company Miblart. They offer unlimited revisions, take no deposit to start work and you pay only when you love the final result. Get a book cover that will become your number-one marketing tool. Find more author advice, tips, and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need. And, if you haven't already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. About the Host Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.

A photo book paying tribute to 32 of New Zealand's indie book stores has hit the shelves, fittingly on New Zealand Bookshop Day. Bold Types - Indie Bookshops of Aotearoa New Zealand is a collection of crafted stories and quirky insights - with the booksellers describing their businesses, their communities and the joy of pairing readers with the right books. The shops' unique characters, their backrooms and even resident pets, have been captured by one of the country's most celebrated photographers, Jane Ussher. Jane and Masterton bookshop owner David Hedley - whose family has been in the book business since 1907 - join Perlina to discuss Bold Types, and the art of selling books.

Linda Sue Park, author of A Long Walk to Water with her newest book Gracie Under the Waves. Linda Sue is the founder of KiBooka, which highlights children's books by Korean-American authors, and a member of the advisory board for We Need Diverse Books. New Releases: The Hill: Inside the Secret World of the U.S. Capitol by Kate Andersen Keeper Chance and the Conundrum of Chaos (Evil Villains International League #1) by Alex Evanovich Sylvia Doe and the 100-Year Flood by Robert Beatty Links and resources available at patreon.com/thebookfaire --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thebookfaire/support

Rebekah Berndt, writer, spiritual director and psychic reader, talks to us from Charleston, South Carolina about her love of weird and magical bookshops, their often eccentric owners, how she cares for her books and connects to their past owners through their notes and markings in the books. More on Rebekah’s Substack The Unfolding. (WPKN,  September […] The post Rebekah Berndt on magical bookshops and their eccentric owners appeared first on Hazel Kahan.

This week on Fresh Hop Cinema; Beers from Mortalis (Avon, NY) Beer 1: "As Above, So Below" // Style: Imperial Stout // 10% // Ratings: Jonny - 8.4, Max - 8. Beer 2: "Hypnos" // Style: Imperial Stout // ABV: 10% // Ratings: Jonny - 10, Max - 9.5. Film: "Alien: Romulus" directed by Fedé Alvarez . Ratings: Jonny - 8.6, Max - 6. Inside Hot & Bothered: - Max: Reviews: - "Bookshops & Bonedust" by Travis Baldree - "Nettle & Bone" by T Kingfisher - Jonny: "Fall Guy" revisited // "Love Lies Bleeding" (2024) -------------------- Episode Timeline: 0:00 - Intro, Ads, & Shout Outs 7:00 - Beer 1 25:00 - Film (No Spoilers) 40:20 - DANGER ZONE 54:30 - Beer 2 1:12:40 - Hot & Bothered

Behind every great man and woman of history, there's usually a library or a bookstore that has been formative in their life. Not only have bookstores shaped influential leaders, but also the ideas and movements that have altered society. Stoicism originated in a bookstore, Benjamin Franklin's bookstore influenced the American Revolution, and countless bookstores have been the backbones of activist movements. Evan Friss, author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, talks with Ryan in today's episode about the unchanged charm of bookstores over centuries, the impact of Amazon on the book industry, the role of libraries, and the romantic yet challenging undertaking of running a bookstore.

Welcome to the 77th Episode of the ABC Pod the Adult Book Club where we drink and we read things. This episode features Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree. Discussion of the book starts at the 11th minute. Spoilers are between the 39 and 1:11 minute marks. We discuss our characters and the decision to write a prequel to a best seller at length.  In spoilers, we get into the rest of our troop and romantic interest while discussing how we thought the ending was a bit flat. We then have our longest book grading conversation to date and the first ever scoring change mid-podcast. We finish with a double surprise book and our usual segments. Enjoy!

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry wants to take action to get people to return to brick-and-mortar stores. Synopsis: Every first Friday of the month, The Straits Times chats with ST's correspondents in the Asia-Pacific, the US and Europe, about life as it goes on, amid the screaming headlines and bubbling crises. The Japanese are sentimental about bookstores, viewing them as precious communal spaces that do more than just sell books.   And yet, fewer and fewer are going to these stores, in line with global trends. What is more surprising is how the Japanese government has decided to seize the problem by its horns, with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry setting up a taskforce to look into the matter, even as the bookshops themselves are striving to find fresh ways to appeal to customers.  In this episode, ST's foreign editor Li Xueying chats with Japan Correspondent Walter Sim on why the Japanese government has decided to be so interventionist. Highlights (click/tap above):1:59 One in two Japanese read “less than one book” every six months 3:26 Why the Japanese are sentimental about bookshops 6:15 A “psychic” bookseller in Osaka 10:06 Laments at shuttered shops but it's too late 12:15 Taking action 17:12 Walter's favourite bookshops in Japan Read Walter Sim's article here: https://str.sg/AWsW Produced by: Li Xueying (xueying@sph.com.sg) and Fa'izah Sani Edited by: Fa'izah Sani Follow Letter From The Bureau Podcast every first Friday of the month here: Channel: https://str.sg/JWa7 Apple Podcasts: https://str.sg/JWa8 Spotify: https://str.sg/JWaX SPH Awedio app: https://www.awedio.sg/ Website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts Feedback to: podcast@sph.com.sg Read Li Xueying's articles: https://str.sg/iqmR  Follow Li Xueying on LinkedIn: https://str.sg/ip4x Read Walter Sim's articles: https://str.sg/wHY2  Read ST's Letters From The Bureau: https://str.sg/3xRd Register for Asian Insider newsletter: https://str.sg/stnewsletters --- Discover more ST podcast channels: All-in-one ST Podcasts channel: https://str.sg/wvz7  The Usual Place: https://str.sg/wEr7u  In Your Opinion: https://str.sg/w7Qt  COE Watch: https://str.sg/iTtE  Asian Insider: https://str.sg/JWa7  Health Check: https://str.sg/JWaN  Green Pulse: https://str.sg/JWaf  Your Money & Career: https://str.sg/wB2m  Hard Tackle: https://str.sg/JWRE  #PopVultures: https://str.sg/JWad  Music Lab: https://str.sg/w9TX  --- ST Podcast website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts  ST Podcasts YouTube: https://str.sg/4Vwsa  --- Special edition series: True Crimes Of Asia (6 eps): https://str.sg/i44T The Unsolved Mysteries of South-east Asia (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuZ2  Invisible Asia (9 eps): https://str.sg/wuZn  Stop Scams (10 eps): https://str.sg/wuZB  Singapore's War On Covid (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuJa  --- Get The Straits Times' app, which has a dedicated podcast player section: The App Store: https://str.sg/icyB  Google Play: https://str.sg/icyX  #STAsianInsiderSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry wants to take action to get people to return to brick-and-mortar stores. Synopsis: Every first Friday of the month, The Straits Times chats with ST's correspondents in the Asia-Pacific, the US and Europe, about life as it goes on, amid the screaming headlines and bubbling crises. The Japanese are sentimental about bookstores, viewing them as precious communal spaces that do more than just sell books.   And yet, fewer and fewer are going to these stores, in line with global trends. What is more surprising is how the Japanese government has decided to seize the problem by its horns, with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry setting up a taskforce to look into the matter, even as the bookshops themselves are striving to find fresh ways to appeal to customers.  In this episode, ST's foreign editor Li Xueying chats with Japan Correspondent Walter Sim on why the Japanese government has decided to be so interventionist. Highlights (click/tap above):01:59 One in two Japanese read “less than one book” every six months 03:26 Why the Japanese are sentimental about bookshops 06:15 A “psychic” bookseller in Osaka 10:06 Laments at shuttered shops but it's too late 12:15 Taking action 17:12 Walter's favourite bookshops in Japan Read Walter Sim's article here: https://str.sg/AWsW Produced by: Li Xueying (xueying@sph.com.sg) and Fa'izah Sani Edited by: Fa'izah Sani Follow Letter From The Bureau Podcast every first Friday of the month here: Channel: https://str.sg/JWa7 Apple Podcasts: https://str.sg/JWa8 Spotify: https://str.sg/JWaX SPH Awedio app: https://www.awedio.sg/ Website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts Feedback to: podcast@sph.com.sg Read Li Xueying's articles: https://str.sg/iqmR  Follow Li Xueying on LinkedIn: https://str.sg/ip4x Read Walter Sim's articles: https://str.sg/wHY2  Read ST's Letters From The Bureau: https://str.sg/3xRd Register for Asian Insider newsletter: https://str.sg/stnewsletters --- Discover more ST podcast channels: All-in-one ST Podcasts channel: https://str.sg/wvz7  The Usual Place: https://str.sg/wEr7u  In Your Opinion: https://str.sg/w7Qt  COE Watch: https://str.sg/iTtE  Asian Insider: https://str.sg/JWa7  Health Check: https://str.sg/JWaN  Green Pulse: https://str.sg/JWaf  Your Money & Career: https://str.sg/wB2m  Hard Tackle: https://str.sg/JWRE  #PopVultures: https://str.sg/JWad  Music Lab: https://str.sg/w9TX  --- ST Podcast website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts  ST Podcasts YouTube: https://str.sg/4Vwsa  --- Special edition series: True Crimes Of Asia (6 eps): https://str.sg/i44T The Unsolved Mysteries of South-east Asia (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuZ2  Invisible Asia (9 eps): https://str.sg/wuZn  Stop Scams (10 eps): https://str.sg/wuZB  Singapore's War On Covid (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuJa  --- Get The Straits Times' app, which has a dedicated podcast player section: The App Store: https://str.sg/icyB  Google Play: https://str.sg/icyX  #STAsianInsiderSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Supporting the shop local and shop small movements has always been a core value of mine. One way I was failing at that, however, was with my book-buying habits. Instead of supporting local bookshops, I often bought books with 1-click checkout at Amazon.  Thankfully, I've discovered a new way to buy books online that also supports local bookshops!  Listen in to learn more about the genius website that distributes profits to thousands of local bookshops—and how I've partnered with them to share my favorite recommendations with savvy shopkeepers like you.  Plus, I'll share how you can win a $50 gift card to the new Savvy Shopkeeper Bookshop! For show notes, visit www.savvyshopkeeper.com/episode204. Kathy Cruz is an Independent Retail Coach who helps store owners work smarter, profit more, and grow their brick and mortar businesses. Connect with Kathy and learn more here: Website: Retail Business Coach For Brick & Mortar Store Owners • Savvy Shopkeeper Instagram: @savvyshopkeeper Mastermind Group: Master Shopkeepers

Travis Baldree, Author of Legends and Lattes and the new Bookshops and Bonedust, stops by to chat with Craig about what it's like to go from narrating to writing books. What have been the challenges, the lessons, the surprises?   Check out Travis and his books here: https://www.travisbaldree.com/   Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/legendarium Check out the archives at https://www.thelegendarium.com/ Join the Discord community: https://discord.com/invite/FnCSsxx Twitter: https://twitter.com/LegendariumPod

Olga Mecking is a writer, journalist, and translator based in the Netherlands, and she's the reporter who made Niksen (“doing nothing”) go viral. Her New York Times article on the subject was shared over 100,000 times. In this episode, Annmarie and Olga talk about the health and creativity benefits of doing nothing and why it is that pauses, rests, and breaks too often feel out of reach for our overworked selves. Episode Sponsors: The American Book Center – Booksellers with a personal touch. This family-owned bookstore, opened in 1972, has been quirky, friendly and knowledgeable from the start, and just counting our present staff, we represent more than 700 years of combined bookselling experience. Our Amsterdam location is often listed as one of the Ten Most beautiful Bookshops in the World, and our stores are highly rated for assortment and personal service. Drop by to touch and smell the books, or shop online at abc.nl. International Writers' Collective – The Collective offers fiction and poetry workshops online and in the Netherlands and a vibrant international community to support you in your writing goals. Many students view their program as a cheaper and more flexible alternative to an MFA. Learn more and find a class at internationalwriterscollective.com. Titles Discussed in This Episode: Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing, by Olga Mecking One Chance in a Thousand: A Holocaust Memoir, by Jan Balicki and Olga Mecking Here's the trailer for FLASHDANCE. Here's the video for YELLOW SUBMARINE by the Beatles. Follow Olga Mecking: Instagram: @olgamecking Twitter: @OlgaMecking Facebook: @OlgaMeckingWriter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: the 2024 reading tracker and Christmas picture books Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: how the holidays affect our reading lives The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) .  .  .  .  .  2:04 - Currently Reading Patreon 8:24 - Our Bookish Moments of the Week 9:19 - Mr. Willowby's Christmas Tree by Robert Barry 10:25 - The Poison Pen Bookstore 10:46 - The Secret of Helmersbruk Manor by Eva Frantz (Blackwell's link) 11:06 - The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson  11:11 - The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum 12:44 - Current Reads 12:59 - Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter 13:19 - Close to Home by Cara Hunter (Meredith, Blackwell's link) 17:55 - The Book of Cold Cases by Simone St. James (Kaytee) 18:04 - CR Season 5: Episode 44 21:53 - Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill (Meredith) 24:15 - The Novel Neighbor 25:56 - The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry 26:43 - The Novel Neighbor on Instagram 27:03 - The Great Sex Rescue by Sheila Wray Gregoire 29:12 - Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski 30:24 - Unhinged by Vera Valentine  31:06 - The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes (Meredith) 31:16 - I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes 33:29 - Blackwell's UK 33:48 - booktalketc on Instagram 41:26 - Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree 42:14 - The Reformatory by Tananarive Due (Kaytee) 43:27 - Libro.fm 54:14 - The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead 48:25 - Deep Dive: How Holidays Can Change Our Reading Habits 50:33 - The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate Dicamillo 51:08 - The Novel Neighbor 55:09 - The Afterlife of Holly Chase by Cynthia Hand 55:14 - Marley by Jon Clinch 55:54 - The Christmas Murder Game by Alexandra Benedict 56:54 - The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H.G. Parry 57:34 - Mrs. Miracle by Debbie Macomber 58:09 - Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan 59:20 - Meet Us At The Fountain 59:42 - My wish is that you read I Am Pilgrim (Meredith) 59:48 - I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes 1:01:54 - I wish that Google Sheets would allow “select multiple” in drop downs (Kaytee) Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. December's IPL will be a yearly recap from us, so we can give our beloved Indies a break for the holidays! Trope Thursday with Kaytee and Bunmi - a behind the scenes peek into the publishing industry All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the special insights of an independent bookseller The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

Turns out that the stress of dealing with November has made me sit on this production. :( But Travis Baldree and I hung out online and talked about our books that launched this month, Chaos Terminal and Bookshops and Bonedust.   Transcript Travis Baldree 03:53 ...I've discovered stickers are the easiest way for me to not feel awkward at assigning or a thing, because I can just say, Do you want a sticker? Okay, well, I lay them out in front of me. There's like more than one kind of sticker. And so I say, Would you like a sticker? And then while they're preoccupied trying to pick a sticker, you run don't have to say anything. Oh, and they have to think so I can sign something. Because the thing that happens to me is if I sign things, and somebody asks me a question, I will start writing my answer. To get the rest of the interview, check out my Patreon or Substack!   Evergreen Links I don't talk enough about the I Should Be Writing book. It exists. Did you know that? Mur's newsletter, The Hot Mic Socials: Bluesky, Mastodon, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Focusmate. No more bird site. Alas. Theme by John Anealio I Should Be Writing tea blends Support local book stores! Station Eternity, Six Wakes, Solo: A Star Wars Story: Expanded Edition and more! OR Get signed books from my friendly local store, Flyleaf Books! Support small bookshops and shop here! (affiliate link) November 4, 2023 | Season 19 Ep 30 | murverse.com | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

On this episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing: Bookish Moments: spoiling bookish gifts and needing book intel before continuing Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: when Goodreads ratings don't match your own The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) .  .  .  .  .  1:24 - Our Bookish Moments of the Week 2:10 - Book Embosser 2:28 - The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery 4:05 - Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree 4:15 - Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree 6:43 - Current Reads 6:50 - The Novel Neighbor 6:55 - The Story of the Hundred Promises by Neil Cochrane (Kaytee) 8:57 - A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer 8:59 - Beauty by Robin McKinley 9:51 - Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (Meredith) 13:07 - Good Inside by Becky Kennedy (Kaytee) 17:03 - With A Kiss We Die by L.R. Dorn (Meredith) 21:45 - Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Kaytee) 22:23 - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver  24:53 - The Dutch House by Ann Patchett 27:25 - Unhinged by Vera Valentine (Meredith, Amazon link) 27:40 - CONTENT WARNING HERE FOR SEXY TIME TALK. SKIP TO 35:46 FOR THE DEEP DIVE 29:44 - ezeekat on Instagram 31:18 - The Dragon's Bride by Katee Robert 35:46 - Deep Dive: When Goodreads Ratings Don't Match Your Own 36:06 - @thelinenfox on Instagram 39:33 - Search by Michelle Huneven 40:29 - Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker 42:02 - Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros 42:17 - The Story of the Hundred Promises by Neil Cochrane 43:21 - Twilight by Stephanie Meyer 46:12 - The Exchange by John Grishom 46:57 - Clean Air by Sarah Blake 47:36 - Fiction Matters on Instagram 48:12 - The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal 48:38 - Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal 52:04 - StoryGraph 55:17 - Meet Us At The Fountain 55:24 - My wish was granted about stickers to cover up book club stickers on book covers. (Kaytee) 55:28 - Bookish-blends.com 56:38 - Tom Lake by Ann Patchett 56:41 - Starling House by Alix E. Harrow 57:07 - I wish to give extra encouragement to Bookish_Blends for finding a hole in the market and filling it! (Meredith) 57:08 - Bookish_blends on Instagram 57:25 - Mother-Daughter Murder Night by Nina Simon Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. December's IPL will be a yearly recap from us, so we can give our beloved Indies a break for the holidays! Trope Thursday with Kaytee and Bunmi - a behind the scenes peek into the publishing industry All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the special insights of an independent bookseller The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

On this episode of Currently Reading, Kaytee and Meredith are discussing: Bookish Moments: being immersed in spreadsheets and the publishing woes of Iron Flame Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: foodie books that symbolize different thanksgiving dishes The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) .  .  .  .  .  2:19 - Our Bookish Moments of the Week 2:01 - Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros 2:46 - Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros 10:52 - Currently Reading Patreon 11:08 - Current Reads 11:41 - Slewfoot by Brom (Meredith) 14:50 - A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas 13:52 - The Novel Neighbor 16:44 - Krampus by Brom 17:14 - Tunnel of Bones by Victoria Schwab (Kaytee) 17:29 - City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab 19:53 - The Night Gardener by Jonathan Auxier 19:54 - The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud 19:55 - 100 Cupboards by N.D. Wilson 20:17 - Bridge of Souls by Victoria Schwab 21:16 - Under the Influence by Noelle Crooks (Meredith) 23:22 - Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis 25:32 - The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger 27:30 - The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende (Kaytee) 31:19 - Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker (Meredith) 34:32 - Article about racial bias media coverage 35:46 - Fantasticland by Mike Bockoven 35:50 - Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid 35:59 - Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett M. Graff 36:08 - Beyond the Wand by Tom Felton (Kaytee) 36:25 - Foyles UK 39:59 - Deep Dive: Foodie Books to Create Your Thanksgiving Plate 41:20 - Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver  43:26 - Taste by Stanley Tucci  43:44 - Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Mananasala 44:33 - Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwauchi 45:42 - Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan 46:39 - A City Baker's Guide to Country Living by Louise Miller 47:39 - Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain 48:49 - Chef's Kiss by T.J. Alexander 49:22 - La Cucina by Lily Prior 49:32 - Chocolat by Joanne Harris 49:33 - Like Water for Chocolate Laura Esquivel 50:09 - Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree 50:37 - Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree 50:53 - The House Witch by Delemhach 51:34 - Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson 51:55 - Still Life by Louise Penny 52:34 - The Novel Neighbor on Instagram 53:06 - Meet Us At The Fountain 53:14 - I wish to convey my most heartfelt thankfulness to our listeners and to Kaytee herself for a wonderful bookish partnership. (Meredith) 54:00 - I wish for listeners to let me know about their favorite Indie bookstores. (Kaytee) 54:19 - Indie bookstore SURVEY Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. December's IPL will be a yearly recap from us, so we can give our beloved Indies a break for the holidays! Trope Thursday with Kaytee and Bunmi - a behind the scenes peek into the publishing industry All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the special insights of an independent bookseller The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

On this episode of Currently Reading, Meredith and Kaytee are discussing: Bookish Moments: creating bookish community in a new place and being bossed to read books NOW Current Reads: all the great, interesting, and/or terrible stuff we've been reading lately Deep Dive: how to have hobbies outside of reading The Fountain: we visit our perfect fountain to make wishes about our reading lives Show notes are time-stamped below for your convenience. Read the transcript of the episode (this link only works on the main site) .  .  .  .  .  1:33 - Our Bookish Moments of the Week 2:09 - Changing Hands Bookstore 2:15 - Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree 4:19 - Piranesi by Susanna Clarke 5:43 - Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros 7:16 - Current Reads 7:24 - The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Kaytee) 12:38 - Creature Feature by Various Authors (Meredith, Audible Original link) 13:33 - Libro.fm 13:44 - In Bloom by Paul Tremblay 14:24 - Big Bad by Chandler Baker 14:26 - The Husbands by Chandler Baker 14:28 - Cutting Teeth by Chandler Baker 15:03 - The Pram by Joe Hill 15:27 - It Waits in the Woods by Josh Malerman 16:27 - Ankle Snatcher by Grady Hendrix 18:01 - Going Zero by Anthoney McCarten (Kaytee) 18:24 - Digital Fortress by Dan Brown 18:26 - The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown 20:36 - @codyhill__ on Instagram 21:55 - Glossy by Marisa Meltzer (Meredith) 27:20 - Bad Blood by John Carreyrou 28:18 - It Was An Ugly Couch Anyway by Elizabeth Passarella (Kaytee) 30:29 - Good Apple by Elizabeth Passarella 30:35 - 10 Things To Tell You episode 178 w/Elizabeth Passarella 31:29 - Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter (Meredith) 36:45 - Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston 36:57 - Deep Dive: Having Hobbies Outside of Reading 37:05 - Currently Reading Patreon 47:42 - Meet Us At The Fountain 47:57 - I wish to mark the end of an era for the Sorta Awesome podcast. (Kaytee) 48:03 - Sorta Awesome podcast 50:35 - I wish books could be searched like playlists such as books with jump scares, books with full cast narration, etc. (Meredith) 51:23 - Libro.fm Support Us: Become a Bookish Friend | Grab Some Merch Shop Bookshop dot org | Shop Amazon Bookish Friends Receive: The Indie Press List with a curated list of five books hand sold by the indie of the month. December's IPL will be a yearly recap from us, so we can give our beloved Indies a break for the holidays! Trope Thursday with Kaytee and Bunmi - a behind the scenes peek into the publishing industry All Things Murderful with Meredith and Elizabeth - special content for the scary-lovers, brought to you with the special insights of an independent bookseller The Bookish Friends Facebook Group - where you can build community with bookish friends from around the globe as well as our hosts Connect With Us: The Show: Instagram | Website | Email | Threads The Hosts and Regulars: Meredith | Kaytee | Mary | Roxanna Affiliate Disclosure: All affiliate links go to Bookshop unless otherwise noted. Shopping here helps keep the lights on and benefits indie bookstores. Thanks for your support!

This week, Liberty and Danika discuss Bookshops & Bonedust, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces, The Liberators, and more great books! Subscribe to All the Books! using RSS, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify and never miss a book. Sign up for the weekly New Books! newsletter for even more new book news. It's happening, readers — we're bringing paperbacks! Whether you hate carrying around bulky hardcovers, you're on a budget, you want a wider range of recommendations, or all of the above, you can now get a paperback subscription from TBR, curated just for you by one of our Bibliologists. You can also gift it (and the holidays, they are coming.) Get all the details at mytbr.co. This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Books Discussed On the Show: Bookshops & Bonedust (Legends & Lattes) by Travis Baldree Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng The Liberators by E. J. Koh Hunt on Dark Waters by Katee Robert Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter  A Grandmother Begins the Story by Michelle Porter World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music by Jeff Tweedy  The Queer Girl is Going to Be Okay by Dale Walls For a complete list of books discussed in this episode, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've been following along this season, you've likely just finished listening to LEGENDS & LATTES by Travis Baldree. In this bonus episode, you'll get to hear Travis and Natalie Naudus—audiobook narrator and voice of Stories from Among the Stars—discuss the audiobook. Listen all the way through for an exclusive sneak peek of BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST, the new prequel to LEGENDS & LATTES, which will be released November 7th. You can pre-order BOOKSHOPS & BONEDUST here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices