How Well Do Ebooks Sell?

It’s royalty time here at Orange Hat Publishing! We have a new system that I’ve built for handling all the data and calculating what is owed. I wrote it all in the statistical programming language R, because that’s the programming language I’m most familiar with. It does a pretty good job handling datasets, and our…

Read More

Trying Out “AI Proofreading” in Our Editing Process

I’ve yet to see any “intelligence” in so-called artificial intelligence (AI) tools, but I’ve tried out as many as I can to see if they can be useful in proofreading. For the most part, the tools do poorly. The problem is that they are focused on rewriting (or even writing from scratch) based on tone…

Read More

What Publishers Owe Authors Submitting Work

It’s common for an author to feel that publishers hold all the power. Until the advent of print-on-demand and self-publishing, authors trying to break through felt their limits acutely, with the metaphor gatekeeper feeling quite literal at times. And publishers abused this power, taking advantage of the oversupply of would-be authors to treat authors as…

Read More

Authors are Extraordinary; Publishers are Ordinary

I gave a presentation called “Publishing 101” at the Brookfield Public Library on Sunday. I’ve given this presentation a couple of times before, and it treads familiar territory for me. I do an overview of types of publishers, types of contracts, and some good-to-know pieces of information for anyone interested in the industry (usually folks…

Read More

Orange Hat’s Next Chapter: Now What? 

When deciding what was next in my career and discussing my purchase of Orange Hat with our founder Shannon Ishizaki, I kept returning to the phrase “service continuity” as my foremost goal. Yes, ownership was changing, and there was soon to be someone else at the helm. But I wanted our authors to feel that…

Read More