I won't bore you by telling you a story you've heard before. This isn't hand-wringing about an individual author's ethical issues—this is an examination of what brought us here.

In this episode, I talk about:

• The breakdown in the rules about AI between trad and self publishing.
• How acquisition practices, especially those of the past several years, have led us to the current situation.
• How to protect yourself (to the degree it's possible).
• What we lose in our current approach to creation and what we could have if we bothered letting ourselves envision a different world.

I’m just going to be honest with y’all—I’m overwhelmed. This podcast is about exploring the world of publishing and providing a resource for authors, but everything is moving so quickly that it’s easy to feel left behind even when my goal is to stay on top of things.

So I feel that, in this episode, it’d be good to get back to basics.

Let’s talk about reading. Yeah, remember that? If I’m not mistaken, that’s what we’re all doing here, or at least why we started.

In Episode 87, I talk about:

1. Why it’s so hard to stay focused on books (down to the nuts and bolts of what our eyes have been trained to do)
2. What deep reading does to enrich your life
3. Some ways you can rebuild your reading habit
4. A reminder that the sheer number of books and subjects for you to read about is more than you could ever begin to approach

To sum-up: between now and my fortieth birthday next February, I’m going to aim to be a more thoughtful reader and retrain my brain to become fully immersed in books rather than just skim the surface.

If that sounds like something you’d like for yourself, let me know at emily@hybridpubscout.com, on LinkedIn, or on Bluesky @emilyeino.

In this episode, I talked with Sarah Giffrow, an expert in helping small businesses with their online presences. If you weren't aware, I worked for Sarah's business, Upswept Creative, for a couple of years, and witnessed the similar workflows and software used for publishing, website design, and digital marketing.

It's not a galaxy-brained take to say that the tools that make up those workflows seem increasingly hostile to users—and I'd venture to say both the environment and the economy as well. Completely divesting from every problematic platform isn't realistic for most people's work, but as far as I'm concerned, that's no reason to give up.

Both Sarah and I do our best in this conversation to find a balance between “you have no choice but to succumb to your billionaire overlords” or “smash your phone with a sledgehammer and run into the woods.”

Hopefully, it empowers you to try to nudge your ethics and your tech use into closer alignment.