We’re five months into the year so this is a perfect time to start a new series on the blog I use sporadically. Actually I just got through a huge deadline and my time is about to free up considerably so I’m hoping to get more active online. I’m reading more these days too so I thought it’d be fun to talk about what I’m reading every month.

I’m entering my hashtag girlboss era. Early this year I kicked around the idea of eventually making a return to self-employment and I started exploring YouTube videos and books about small business. Then in April I was laid off from my full-time job. It was sudden and jarring and not the plan at all, but I decided to turn it into an opportunity and take the plunge into working on my small business full-time. Do I have a steady income? No, but I do have a lot of free time and a Libby account, and my local library system has marketing and business books that no one’s checking out so I can borrow them immediately.

Marketing Made Simple

Authors: Donald Miller, Dr. J.J. Peterson

What’s In It: Newsletters and e-mail campaigns and lead generators, oh my!

Marketing is often a scary topic for artists, and maybe people in general. Not me, though. I was a communications major with a public relations concentration and my first “career” job after college was as a marketing writer. I like marketing, I think it’s pretty neat, and reading this book reminded me of why I like it. Miller and Peterson do indeed make marketing simple. Marketing gets a bad rap as deceiving customers and badgering them into buying your product, and I think this is mainly true for the business that lacks clear vision. Marketing is really about communication and clarity. It’s about sharing your story, stating who your product is for, and telling people how to get your product or service. Marketing Made Simple is so simple that the audio book is only four hours long. There’s no fluff, nothing complicated, just a short list of the core parts of a successful marketing plan. The audio book is great, but I’m going to buy a copy of the physical book too so that I can refer to it as I need.

Before and After the Book Deal

Author: Courtney Maum

What’s In It: Quite nearly everything a new or aspiring author should know about getting published

I can’t remember how I found out about this book, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the target audience. I’ve got a few books under my belt now so I’m not a brand new author, but I wanted to read it to see if it was a good resource I could pass on to other authors or to see if there were any good tips that I’d maybe missed in my own author journey. It covers a lot of ground, from discussing the links between publishing and academia (should you get an MFA?), getting paid to write and jobs to support a writing career, publicizing your book, book tours and travel tips, author etiquette. I was surprised that Maum even talks about when authors experience an agent or editor mismatch. My friends and followers know that I’ve had some rough situations with agents and editors in my own author journey, and I found these parts of the book very relatable and validating. Maum interviews writers and publishing professionals to offer a well-rounded perspective on the many facets of book publishing. As an illustrator, I’ll note that Before and After focuses entirely on writers and the writer experience. Illustrators may get something out of reading it, but I do feel like the world needs books like this that speak directly to authors and publishers of illustrated books like picture books and graphic novels.

A Deadly Education

Author: Naomi Novik

What’s In It: Fantasy, magic, monsters, a liminal high school that may or may not want to eat its students

I was getting off the high of finishing my April fantasy novel read, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson which I am obsessed with (A Fox in Winter out in October 2027!), but I didn’t know what I wanted to read next, so I opted for re-reading this YA series from one of my favorite authors. I love the Scholomance books, though I hesitate to call them a comfort read since they’re about a magic school that wants to kill its students. Or at least, it feeds off magic energy, and teenage wizards are little magic batteries. Since my first read, the protagonist has stuck with me. She is the line “all shall love me a despair” personified, a girl destined to become a dark sorceress who is fighting desperately against her fate, and she is appropriately named Galadriel. On the re-read, I was struck by how incredibly exposition-heavy the series is. A great deal of the story is devoted to explaining the magic system, but what keeps you reading is the cast of quirky characters, the life-or-death stakes, and the steady parade of monsters crawling around the Scholomance looking for distracted students to devour.

This Is Strategy

Author: Seth Godin

What’s In It: All the seemingly disconnected thoughts floating around in Godin’s head

I feel like you can really tell how far I’m getting down the marketing and small business road when I add Seth Godin to the mix. He started popping up in my YouTube feed and I recalled that I followed his blog years ago, because let’s be honest, I’ve been here before. This is not the first time I quite nearly made the leap to starting a business and then chickened out and searched for a full-time job instead. I like Godin’s philosophy, though, and This Is Strategy is very much about philosophy. It’s not a how-to book. It’s more about changing one’s mindset. It’s about clarity of vision and purpose. It also reads a bit like a collection of unassorted thoughts and anecdotes. The chapters are short and don’t neatly lead one into the other, but they do all communicate Godin’s perspective on what strategy is, why strategy is not what most people think it is, and why businesses need it. Like many of the business audio books I’ve been listening to, I want a physical copy of this one so I can refer to it at my leisure.  

The Faraway Inn

Author: Sarah Beth Durst

What’s In It: Fantasy, cakes, cranky aunties, a summer of running away from your problems and self-discovery, Vermont, a cat

As soon as I saw Durst’s latest was out, I placed a library hold. And as soon as the audio book was finally ready to borrow, I knew I had to read it right away. There’s a six-week wait on the audio book so there’s no auto-renewing. The Faraway Inn is not a follow-up to The Spellshop and The Enchanted Greenhouse, though all three books share the same cover artist, Lulu Chen. The Faraway Inn is young adult with a sixteen-year-old protagonist. It is also set in the real world, but fans of The Spellshop and The Greenhouse will appreciate that this book is written in Durst’s signature cozy fantasy romance style. After a traumatic breakup, Calisa travels to her great aunt’s bed and breakfast inn in the woods of Vermont to spend a summer in solitude to work out her feelings, only to arrive and discover she’s not welcome. Calisa has nowhere else to go though, and in her endeavor to make herself useful, she starts to uncover the magical secrets of her aunt’s inn. I don’t think I’ve read a cozy teen fantasy, so I appreciate this addition to the genre. It’s a nice low-stakes, soothing read. “I do not dream of labor” has become a popular millennial and gen Z refrain, but perhaps we do dream of labor, as long as it’s cozy. There is a certain magic in the idea of running an inn, a bakery, a coffeeshop, a bookstore, comforting customers and solving their problems while falling in love. As a working artist I know the realities of capitalism fall far short of cozy fantasy expectations, but hey, a girl can dream.