The Book Trailer Problem Nobody Wants to Admit Let us be honest from the start: most book trailers are deeply uncomfortable to watch. They occupy that peculiar space between a middle-school PowerPoint presentation and a local car dealership ad, somehow managing to make even genuinely good books look like vanity projects. I have seen award-winning…
Why Most Book Trailers Are Terrible and How to Fix Them I’ve watched hundreds of book trailers. This isn’t a brag. This is a confession of poor judgment and an inability to look away from slow-motion train wrecks set to royalty-free piano music. Somewhere around the four hundredth trailer—another montage of fog rolling over a…
The Midnight Realization That Changed Publishing Five years ago, BookTok was just a corner of TikTok where people filmed themselves crying over fictional men and dog-eared the pages of romantasy novels. Now it is a $12 million industry division at HarperCollins. That sentence should make you pause. Not because publishing needed a social media boost,…
The Book That Broke Through I need you to understand something about the literary world before May 2025: Percival Everett had been writing extraordinary books for decades. Thirty books. Thirty. And yet he remained that name critics whispered about at conferences, the one serious readers pressed into your hands with an almost urgent intensity, the…
The Numbers That Should Make Us Sit Still for a Moment I was halfway through my morning coffee when I saw the new numbers, and I had to set the mug down. The American Library Association’s latest State of America’s Libraries report documented something that stopped me cold: 1,247 unique titles challenged or banned across…
The Year Everything Changed I remember the exact moment I realized something fundamental had shifted in how we think about books. It was a Tuesday afternoon in late 2024, and I was standing in a charity bookshop I’d walked past a hundred times without really seeing it. The shelves were packed three-deep. People were lined…
When Speed Reading Lost Its Shine I need to tell you something that’s been brewing in my brain for months now, and I’ve finally figured out why it matters so much. Slow reading isn’t trendy because we’re all secretly yearning for a Victorian parlor where ladies clutched leather-bound novels by candlelight. It’s trending because our…
The Moment Everything Shifted I finished Percival Everett’s James at three in the morning on a Tuesday, and I sat in my bed for forty minutes without moving. Not because I didn’t know what to do with myself, but because I physically could not reassemble the parts of myself that the book had taken apart.…
The Moment Everything Shifted I finished Percival Everett’s James at three in the morning on a Tuesday, and I sat in my bed for forty minutes without moving. Not because I didn’t know what to do with myself, but because I physically could not reassemble the parts of myself that the book had taken apart.…
The Midnight Panic That Started It All I remember exactly when this started feeling real to me. It was January 2026, and I was doom-scrolling through Publishing Twitter at 2 AM like some kind of masochist, and I saw the Atlantic investigation hit. Over 700 AI-generated titles, all dressed up in covers that looked disturbingly…