When the ailing emperor of Tensha names Terren, his second son, as his heir, a search begins for young women to serve as concubines. Despite reports of Terren’s sadism, Yin Wei, the 16-year-old daughter of a rice farmer, presents herself as a candidate, hoping to secure gifts for her famine-ravaged village and a chance for …
Ani Avakian quit her job to follow her dream of becoming the Bay Area’s most successful Armenian wedding planner, but her career is off to a rocky start. With overdraft fees looming, she agrees to take on the wedding of an up-and-coming indie movie star, Grace, who’d already lined up an Armenian-owned winery as the …
Reid grew up in a crossroads hamlet in southern Nevada where not much happened, his father a taciturn hard-rock miner who took to drink, his father figure a brothel keeper who taught him a valuable lesson early in life: “You’ve got a future ahead of you. Always be honest in everything you do.” Reid took …
“We are ALL gifted. / Each one of us has treasures within.” So begins the authors’ paraphrasing of a message from Pope Francis, printed in full on the previous page. An accompanying illustration depicts a large, diverse group of children of different ages, including one wheelchair user, all gathered as if onstage, ready to share …
My ALLi author guest this episode is Diana Colleen, a Canadian-born, Seattle-based writer whose work is shaped by a life of activism, public service, trauma, and healing. Drawing on her experience with meditation and psychedelic-assisted therapy, her fiction explores climate responsibility, wealth, power, and the possibility of personal and societal transformation. The post Inspirational Indie …
The uncomfortable relationship between AI and translation has been in the news again this week. HarperCollins in France has hired the services of Fluent Planet to help it save money by reducing the labor-intensiveness of the translation process. Fluent Planet will, it seems, be using machine learning to achieve this. The reaction has been exactly …
Orna Ross and Joanna Penn compare notes from the indie front line, drawing on Jo’s new novel and her renewed focus on business basics for ALLi’s Indie Author Lab at the London Book Fair, alongside Orna’s shift to Substack and a clear-eyed look at what is changing fastest for authors. In this forward-looking conversation, two …
On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports from a literary conference setting as Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library enters the public domain. He unpacks new reporting on the Anthropic settlement, including unresolved issues for textbook authors and questions over how much claimants may ultimately receive. Dan also looks …
At the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., Calamity Jane recounts her exploits to a diverse crowd of spectators. The crowd audibly gasps as the former Pony Express rider—known to friends by her birth name, Martha—describes how she bested a desperado armed only with a meat cleaver. Buffalo Bill Cody, his Cowboy Band, and mighty …
As the third entry in the Elemental Witch League trilogy, The Fog raises the stakes to biblical proportions, opening with Satan and the Nephilim unleashing a supernatural “end-of-days” weapon meant to drown the world in terror and death. From there, the novel widens fast—into a globe-spanning, good-versus-evil conflict where a young “Fundamental Witch,” Susan, and her …