Weathering the security storm

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A painting in muted, yellow tones, of a sick child lying in bed. On the bedclothes, an army of toy soldiers is spread out, as if marching through hills.

‘The Land of Counterpane’ (1905) by Jessie Willcox Smith, based on the poem of the same title by Robert Louis Stevenson.

As an optimist, it sucks to acknowledge this: over the next few years we’re going to see waves of automated hacking that affect every aspect of our lives. It will feel like a global pandemic. Most of us will be affected, and we will all know someone who got severely hacked, causing them serious loss or distress.

I feel awful sounding so dramatic, but it’s plainly obvious that AI-fuelled automation makes hacking trivially easy. A single person can quickly amass an army of self-replicating attackers, and a well-resourced group can do much more. Those of us who work in tech already see it every day, spending more and more of our time battening down the hatches. Just in the last two weeks, off the top of my head: the Binance heist, French blood-bank freezers, South African credit-card details, global GitHub Actions secrets. You’ll have read about others.

All of us, to some degree, rely on human-level obfuscation to keep information private. For millennia, hiding things by making them hard for humans to find was a reasonable way to keep things safe. But there is no hiding from a multiplying hoard of determined, tireless bots who can reason their way through unpredictable barriers, or pretend to be someone they are not.

The best we can do is work on our digital immune systems: backups, two-step logins, strong passwords, updated software. Demand excellence from well-resourced companies like banks and online platforms, who should be investing more in boring back-end security than new features or marketing campaigns. Work only with humans you like and trust to be careful with your data. Corroborate what you read. And take a cautious, skeptical approach to new technologies. If something doesn’t have to be plugged into the web, don’t plug it into the web. Every piece of tech we add opens a new pathway for the pandemic.

Finally, enjoy being offline, or relearn how to: reading on paper, being outside, exercising, crafting, cooking, performing, building, gardening – ideally with lovely people – so that when the Internet bites you, you don’t feel like everything is falling apart. It will eventually be okay, but we have to ride out the fever. ♥️

On editing, and what matters most for aspiring publishers

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Over at Electric Book Works, I’ve recently published two new pieces: one about the tiny details, and one about the big picture.

In ‘Editing and quality control in publishing‘, I go into concrete detail about the many stages of the publishing process that refine a book.

Most of book production is the steady work of eliminating flaws. When I explain to budget-keepers how many times a book needs checking, they are incredulous: manuscript review, manuscript development, copy editing, proofreading, second-eye checks, metadata checks, printer’s proofs? Surely, they ask, you can skip something? After making books for thirty years, I can promise you: the best books need all of these.

Each layer requires a different mindset, and often a different set of skills.

Zooming out, ‘To a student considering publishing‘ is the transcript of a short guest lecture, which you can also listen to as an episode of my podcast How Books Are Made. Perhaps the part closest to my heart, and one most of us struggle with, is this:

Because now you have to be the sensible one, and remember to stop scrolling and put down your phone. You have to choose instead to read. Reading is not going back to the olden days, it’s jumping ahead to a future where we understand how to be thoughtful humans. Humans that are full of their own complex, creative thoughts.

When you read, read anything longer than a thousand words: long articles, essays, books, long comics. Listening to audiobooks and scripted podcasts counts as reading, too. And when you’ve filled your brain with ideas from reading, then make something – books, pictures, music, games, sculpture, baking, performance, clothing, gardening, woodwork, mechanical repairs. And then go for a walk. That’s the cycle: fill your brain with reading, empty your brain into making things, exercise, repeat.

And trust this process. Be good about it for a few weeks and I promise that you will like yourself more. The people getting good jobs in publishing are the ones who’ve been reading, and making things, and taking care of their mental health by getting up and moving their living, breathing bodies till the endorphins kick in.

If you spend more than five minutes at a time scrolling social media, then you have not yet realised how precious your time is, and how precious your mental health is. How precious you are. And how precious your work will be, whether or not that’s making books.

May you also read something great today, make something meaningful, and enjoy a walk in the open air.

Strategic publishing, AI, and the battle for heart and minds

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Strategic publishers have to make an impact – our books are in a battle for hearts and minds. That battle is increasingly won or lost in AI chat windows. How do we ensure that our ideas are in those conversations?

The answer is simple, but it’s not cheap: we have to publish writing that is great for humans – clearly and creatively written, well-structured, carefully edited, cleanly presented, interesting, novel, accessible, and trustworthy. And we need to publish it on the open web as well-constructed HTML pages.

[…]

AI companies have stopped at nothing, least of all the law, to hoover up every bit of good writing they can find, because that’s what makes AI worth anything at all. They’ve triaged and ingested it all to feed their magnificent robots. And they absolutely can’t afford to stop now. They also can’t afford to feed AI’s own writing back to itself over and over: the models will collapse. They need fresh content, rich with human ingenuity, to keep their models alive.

Read my new post on the Electric Book Works website or on LinkedIn, where you can also leave your thoughts in the comments.

Who chooses your book, and who reads it? The crucial distinction for strategic publishers

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While working on a publishing strategy for a new project recently, I was reminded how important it is to distinguish between who selects your book and who actually reads it. That distinction has implications for almost every downstream editorial, design, and distribution decision.

‘Who chooses your book, and who reads it?’ is an essay about this.

As writers and publishers, it’s crucial that we know who will select our books and who will read them, and whether or not that’s the same person. It will inform many of our decisions about the book, from writing and style through editing and design, to formats, marketing, and distribution.

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selectors and readers are motivated differently. They are looking for different things when they pay their costs. That’s easier to cater for when they are the same human, but if they are not, and especially if they are very different, we have to prioritise one or the other. In parts of our work selectors will matter most, and in other parts readers will. We have a difficult balance to strike, and we have to be very deliberate about where we spend time and money.

Read the full post on the EBW website or on LinkedIn.

 

On the rising costs of publishing technology

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We love and hate the Internet mainly because it’s been so cheap to use. But perhaps, like me, your tech costs have shot up, or your tech keeps breaking. Perhaps you feel more and more disappointed that technology always over-promises and under-delivers. We’re reckoning with the fact that we get what we pay for.

On the Electric Book Works website, I have a new post on the rising costs of publishing technology, in which I unpack what happened, and what it means for publishing decision-makers.

I explain the main reasons we’ve seen a surge in technology costs in recent years:

  • Investors need a return
  • Open-source dependencies demand attention
  • Platforms evolve
  • As regulation evolves, the paperwork comes due
  • Social costs demand an ethical response
  • User expectations keep getting higher
  • Anxiety about IP requires legal expertise
  • The content flood is infinite

And I say more about what this means for how we invest in tech in publishing. Head over to the EBW site to read the post, and find my thread on it on LinkedIn, where I’d love to hear what you think about these issues.