Overall, it was very inconsiderate of Pope Francis to die right before the release date of my new book. This is the kind of thing PR teams’ nightmares are made of. New Novella: “Moriarty & Moran Contribute to Community Welfare” The Barrie Children’s Hospital is holding its annual fundraising gala,… (keep reading)

For various ethical and business reasons, I’ve decided to shut down my Gumroad store. My account balance with them should pay out on April 18; after that point, I’ll be removing all my books from the site. Any purchases you’ve made from me on Gumroad should still be available in… (keep reading)

I’ve recently had a few people ask me why my books aren’t on Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service. The short answer is, Amazon is evil. Here’s the long answer: In order for an independent publisher like me to get a book onto Kindle Unlimited, I have to submit it to a… (keep reading)

There’s a weird, funny thing about running an online business where people are so often forced to interact with chatbots and “knowledge bases” that they’ll just assume any customer support process they have to deal with is automated. So when you hear from your customers at all, it’s in the… (keep reading)

I’m job-hunting at the moment, which means updating and polishing up my portfolio. While I’ve got plenty of documentation and scriptwriting samples in there, I’ve been thinking I want to include at least one prose fiction sample. The problem is that, of the two short stories I’ve written at the… (keep reading)

I’m from Canada, where it’s a long-running joke that our celebrities have to wear name tags. It’s certainly true that being an artist in Canada is not a job that makes you rich unless your name is Margaret Atwood; as my dad likes to point out, even Pierre Berton —… (keep reading)

As previously mentioned in this newsletter, at some point within the past few years I completely lost track of the Hollywood hype machine. I have no idea which movies are being made, or when they’re supposed to come out, until I see whichever ads are on the side of a… (keep reading)

For reasons that may be obvious at this point, my mother is thoroughly sick of Facebook and wants to leave the site. Unfortunately Facebook is the thing keeping her in contact with friends and family she’d otherwise never see, so she needs a different way to keep in touch with… (keep reading)

Conventional publishing wisdom holds that it’s not a good idea to release a new book on the same day as a highly-anticipated title like Onyx Storm, but I’m pretty sure the overlap between my readership and Rebecca Yarros’ readership is, uh, nonexistent. New Release: “Jay Moriarty vs the Machine God”… (keep reading)

I have not yet figured out how one builds an effective book marketing strategy when one’s target demographic isn’t “queer romance readers” or “crime thriller fans” so much as “people who watched a lot of summer replacement shows that aired on TNT or USA Network in the late 2000s and… (keep reading)