The Power of SMALL - Smart Tips for Storytellers

CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE PUBLISHER'S SOUL: 5 Remedies to Protect Your Small Publishing Business from COVID-19 [This post is more for my fellow colleagues in the publishing industry, but anyone with their own business or side gig could benefit from this same recipe for surviving tumultuous times. And, if you are facing an obstacle of a different sort, read on for a little chicken soup.] You may have stocked your personal shelves with soap, toilet paper, medicines, and canned goods, but what would be the equivalent to help your small indy publishing business survive disruptions caused by COVID-19? How vulnerable are you, and what can you do now to protect your business? Look at the publishing events cancelled or postponed to date, and you know the dominoes are falling. Bookstores in high-risk areas around the world show seemingly insurmountable sales loss. We’d like to think books would be the perfect answer to ‘social distancing’ and sheltering in place, but jittery marke

If you’ve been in a coma the last few weeks of January 2020, then you may have missed the release of American Dirt (Jeanine Cummins, Flatiron Books/ MacMillan, 2020, New York), its synchronous pick for “Oprah’s Book Club,” and the immediate backlash against the author and publisher, as well as Oprah Winfrey, and basically against the entire publishing industry. Two issues were illuminated: First, the claim from certain spokespeople for the Latino community that the Latino voice was grossly misrepresented in the book, written by a “white woman” who they say had no right to speak for them, who stole their identity, and whose publisher made inexcusable errors in both the edit and marketing of the book. I read the book and wrote about this issue, and my take on it, here  in an article titled, "STOP hating on American Dirt - PART I   [Spoiler alert: I don’t entirely disagree, but I still devoured and liked the book.] Second, the assertion that the publishing industry as a