Letters From Libby James

Writers, critics, teachers, and readers have debated whether stories possess the ability to create meaningful change for centuries, often arriving at dramatically different conclusions. Some maintain that fiction exists primarily to entertain and provide an escape from the pressures of life. Others argue that literature carries a deeper responsibility, serving as a way to preserve memory, challenge injustice, and help readers better understand the societies in which they live. While I am not...

Last year, when I was at Author Nation, JL Birchwood and I went and sat in on Joanna Penn’s lecture on authors and AI. We were no more than about three minutes into the presentation when I turned to JL and whispered, “Well, shit.” You see, I had been planning to transition into an author’s assistant as part of my quest to become a full-time nomad, and she knew this. I was starting to figure out how I could build that business for myself and was slowly putting out feelers about what that would...

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...