Going Back in Time

I had a half-hour Teams meeting with an intern at Nine Ten’s sales agency the other day, and she asked me how I got my start in publishing.

The answer to that question is wild, because I did not come up in this industry through any normal or established career path. Especially not in the context of Canadian publishing. My journey started online, traversed the phenomenon of blogging and the birth of social media, stopped for a while in print magazines, involved writing several books, and I spent many years as a freelance editor, too.

Maybe one day I’ll go into more details of various parts of the meandering route I took, but for now this is relevant because I’ve been wanting to start a blog for Nine Ten for a long time. I want to have a place to share about our work, and to share my thoughts about books and publishing. And I do my best thinking out loud, or in writing.

So welcome to Nine Ten’s blog. Like in the old days, it lives here on Nine Ten’s website, but unlike in the old days there is no Google Reader (RIP) to feed you new posts when they’re published. I’ll do my best to make it easy for you to get email alerts, or some such thing, and I do not want to use Substack or some other platform, because I am overworked and blogging is comfortable and this is just how it’s going to be. Also, I, or rather Nine Ten, owns this space, which makes blogging here an anchor of stability and reliability in an ever-shifting landscape of business and life.

Ideally, I will write here weekly. I used to write a weekly newsletter and the rhythm of it helped set a rhythm for the rest of my week, too. We’ll see if I can get back into that groove.

So this is my start.

This week I’m trying very hard to mostly be on holiday with my family, at a cabin ten kilometres down a dirt road in the Southern Interior of British Columbia. In reality, I have a book in the final stages of being prepped for printing, a zine I’m squeezing into an already full schedule, the trade war has taken an alarming turn just as I’m about to start shipping Kickstarter rewards for Be a Fool, and there’s some nitty gritty operations stuff going on behind the scenes that I’ll share another time.

All to say, I guess, that this isn’t much of a holiday, but at least all these things are moving forward (except the trade war, which is so deeply frustrating and stupid and cruel that I have no further words to commit to it).