Letters From Libby James

Nobody wants to talk about metadata. I know I don’t. I want to talk about the last book I read (Exiles by Mason Coile). But it’s important so we’re going to talk about it. For those that don’t know, metadata is backend stuff like keywords and categories the helps the algorithms figure out who sees your book. It’s the who, what, where, when, and why of your book. So yeah, it’s kinda a big deal. Every retailer (Google, Amazon, etc.) relies on metadata to decide where a book appears. Categories...

I don’t know man, the older I get, and after the f**ked up situation of my divorce, I can’t say that too many things surprise me anymore. Messed up things in the publishing world suck, but don’t shock me. Yet, every once in a while, I learn that my jaw can still drop. Rosa Linda Román recently told a story on her Substack that did just that about a white man speaking at a writers conference on how he uses AI to pose as a young Brazilian woman author and is making bank on it….and he is...

Well, isn’t this a big fat ol’ bummer. Like, give-up-right-now-and-just-focus-only-on-my-romcom-project-that-is-far-less-depressing-anyway bummer. I recently learned through my friend's lawyer husband that anything that I learned during my divorce through discovery paperwork I can't write about in my memoir. That I will get my pants sued off me. And that is such a major let down because some of the most ridiculous and funny things I learned during my divorce were all thanks to filing...

When you see in Publishers Weekly that someone just scored a big five- or six-digit advance, do you ever think, “I wonder how they are going to spend that big fat check?” I don’t, because I know they aren’t getting that check all at one time, that it is in fact coming in over the course of months, sometimes years, and so they are likely just desperately paying the bills with it like the rest of us… This is how advances work: Advances are split into installments tied to milestones in the...

For about a decade I went pretty hard in the zine world. The first zine serial I wrote was called Sour Girl, of which there were maybe close to a dozen issues, and then when I graduated high school I graduated to a zine called The Way Fish Love, which I only mustered a few issues. Then I took a long breath from making my own zines, and only taught zine arts on occasion to the next generation of zinesters. I did make a zine a handful of years ago that was a set of flash stories set in...

There is this expectation about speed and leverage based on the old ways of things that does not match what is happening inside the acquisition pipeline now. One of the clearest structural signal changes came when Baker & Taylor, one of the largest library distributors in the United States and a company operating since 1828, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Library distribution has for so long been a stable revenue stream for publishers, particularly for midlist and backlist titles that...

I recently relocated to Arizona. Some back story first, why the desert: Arizona is where I lived many years ago when I went to college, and I moved back to Minnesota (my home state) for grad school with the intent of always leaving again as soon as I was done with the program. Then I met the person that I thought would be my life partner...who I am now no longer with, and it freed me to go where I wanted again. I committed to a year lease, and that is something that I am now deeply struggling...