Michael Dante DiMartino graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Film and Animation. His directing credits include the primetime animated series King of the Hill, Family Guy, and Mission Hill. DiMartino is the co-creator of the award-winning animated Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel, The Legend of Korra. From 2002 to 2014, he served as executive producer and story editor for both series. He continued Korra’s story as the writer of the graphic novels Turf Wars and Ruins of the Empire. His other projects include authoring the fantasy novels Rebel Genius and Warrior Genius as well as creating and writing the Audible Original fiction podcast, Sundown: A Time Capsule Society Mystery. His latest novel is the YA coming-of-age story, Both Here And Gone.

Currently, DiMartino serves as the co-Chief Creative Officer of Avatar Studios, developing new content for the Avatar-verse.You can find out more about Michael by visiting his website www.michaeldantedimartino.com, on Facebook /MichaelDanteDiMartino, or on Instagram @mike_dante_d

Let me start with this: if you have any interest at all in literary magazines or small presses, you want this book: How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses. It’s a wonderful book and a great guide, and will lead you into this world and help you feel good about your journey without your getting lost in the universe of scattered information that’s available online. We’ve included a ton of links to that scattered universe below, but I encourage you to buy the book, which will ground you in your own journey.

I loved doing this interview, which felt like a return to my own roots in magazine work. As Dennis puts it in the book, there is something about doing the work of shorter pieces and pushing your own boundaries that can be remarkably helpful whether or not you’re also engaged in long form book, and there’s nothing I love more than a roadmap and a checklist. Start, please, by reading and exploring in this world, and then we hope to hear about you contributing. Send links, always!

You know, that’s a thing we should do. I’m creating a chat for links and success stories. By the time you see this, it will have been rolling for a while, but go check it out and add yours HERE.

And follow Dennis!

Links from the pod

Heavy Feather Review’s Where to Submit list

AM/PM, Amelia Gray

Underworld, Don Delillo

Making a Literary Life, Carolyn See

HTML Giant

Kathleen Rooney

Laird Hunt

Essay Press

Autumn House Press

Clifford Garstang’s Literary Magazine Rankings

Margot Atwell’s piece in LitHub about the big five thinking of small press as farm Team

Dorothy, a publishing project

#AmReading

Dennis: God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas

Index for Continuance podcast

Material Witness, Aditi Machado

Runaways: A Writer's Dilemma, Michael J. Seidlinger

KJ: Margo's Got Money Troubles, Rufi Thorpe

Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor

There are many misconceptions about what a hybrid publisher does or doesn’t do, and why it may or may not be a good choice for a writer. I thought hearing from a hybrid publisher directly would be educational for our audience, so I’m pleased to be speaking in this episode to Dr. Nick Courtright, CEO of Atmosphere Press.

Check out Atmosphere Press here or submit a manuscript here.

Hey ho, Jess here. This week, all four of us discuss some of the happenings out there in the publishing world.

First up: Super Bowl Sunday is apparently a great reading day. Sarina sent us a screenshot of her sales (she was tipped off by another author) and found out what many people are reading during the game:

So that’s fun.

Next up, Sean Manning of Simon & Schuster announced no more blurbs (yay!)…unless you want to (boo!) in Publisher’s Weekly and everyone had a lot to say about it. The New York Times, LitHub, lots of others. We add some perspective to the conversation as both blurbees and blurbers.

Here’s that wonderful AJ Jacobs NYT piece about not blurbing.

And Rebecca Makkai’s piece on not blurbing anymore in her Substack.

PEN America

The Authors Guild. Please join.

Authors Against Book Bans. Please join.

Is Sarina Bowen going to jail? We sure hope not.

Here’s OK SB593, the legislation we discussed by the dude in Oklahoma. Make sure to check out the language on pages 10-11. Don’t take our word for it, read it yourself.

Here’s an example of the work The Authors Guild is doing to stop book banning, in this case in Idaho.

I mentioned author and illustrator Katherine Roy in passing, so here’s her episode and her website, and the book I mentioned, Making More: How Life Begins.

Hi listeners! Sarina here, with a topic that has been on my mind for years. When I began my career, everyone told me I had to develop a “thick skin” to do this job. But it turns out that a “thick skin” is one of the only things you can’t buy on Amazon.

Today I invite my friend Lauren Blakely onto the podcast for a frank discussion of all that we’ve learned about resilience, one-star ratings and feedback these past ten years or so.

Together, we offer the beginnings of a handy framework for how to think about feedback. We offer some actionable advice for what to do, where to turn and how to process unsolicited criticism.

You do not have to attend every conversation you’re invited to. - A wise stranger on the interwebs.

Since avoiding negative feedback just isn’t feasible, we discuss the following coping mechanisms.

* Checking in with a friend and having friends in the business

* How to make sure that good feedback is as available and memorable as the bad

* Recognizing that clinging to negatives is how the brain works. That reflex has an important evolutionary role, but we don’t have to subjugate ourselves to it.

* Lifting up other people as soulcraft

Where to find Lauren Blakely:

Ms. Blakely is the author of multiple bestsellers. For a master class in how to package genre fiction, you’ll definitely want a peek at her backlist.

Find more from Lauren at Instagram!

What we are reading:

Lauren is loving the forthcoming Shoot Your Shot by Lexi LaFleur. It’s a hockey romance.

Sarina is loving The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, which tickles her geeky, paper-loving heart.

“If the language isn’t there, I have difficulty showing up for the idea” - Jenny Anderson

Jess here. Rebecca Winthrop, Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and Jenny Anderson, award-winning journalist, paired up to write one of my favorite education and parenting books in recent memory: The Disengaged Teen.

While I adore the book and could go on for ages about it, that’s not why I invited these two to come on the podcast. I am fascinated - and strangely horrified - by the idea of co-writing. Maybe it’s my control issues, who knows. I’ve asked Sarina Bowen about her writing partnerships with Tanya Eby and Elle Kennedy (come ON now, have you read their award-winning trilogy, Him, Us and Epic?) so I thought I’d give her a bit of a break and ask Rebecca and Jenny to tell me all about how their writing collaboration went with this book.

I learned a lot during this podcast, but the thing I’m definitely taking with me is the concept of “clearing” before a collaboration or writing session. I’ve tried it a few times and so far, I love it. No, I can’t find any links for this specific practice despite the breadcrumbs “Narrative company” and “clearing,” so if you find out on your own, drop me a line so I can give credit where credit is due.

Edited: A lovely listener came through! https://www.narativ.uk/

Things we mention in the episode:

Jenny’s Substack, How to Be Brave

Rebecca’s newsletter over at LinkedIn, Winthrop’s World of Education

Sharepoint

QUICK NOTE for non-fiction writers! Friend of the pod Christie Aschwanden is running her non-fiction book proposal workshop again for the first time since 2022. It’s 8 weeks long and participants are carefully vetted (requires an application) and it’s had great results in the past. All details HERE: The Book Proposal Factory.

Do you have a Doubt Monster? (Doesn’t everyone?) Amy Bernstein is an Author Accelerator certified writing coach, an #AmWriting Blueprint Challenge coach, a writer, a creative coach and many other things—but for our purposes, the author of Wrangling the Doubt Monster—a delightful book that you can open on any page for help wrangling your own doubts into something that you can live with, in the vein of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art or Gretchen Rubin’s Outer Order, Inner Calm. In this episode we talk—what else?—doubt monsters, declaring ourselves as writers and all the ways we live with our self-doubt and write anyway.

Links from the Pod

Bancroft Press

Amywrites.live

Persephone Books

The Making of a Marchioness, Frances Hodgson Burnett

Beacon Street Books

KJ’s #AmReading Substack

One of the things I think we do well with on this podcast is addressing the long game of writing. It’s not just about writing a good book or pitching one or selling one, but about the work of doing it over and over again, of succeeding and failing, of PERSISTING. That’s why I love this conversation with Tiffany Yates Martin, who is an author herself under the penname, Phoebe Fox, but who also for 30 years has been a developmental editor working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors. She is a respected leader in the writing education field and my friend and colleague. Her new book, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow and Sustain a Happier Writing Career addresses the long sweep of a writing career. And I think there's a lot for all of us to learn from this book and this conversation.

You can find Tiffany via her website, on Instagram at @tiffanyyatesmartin, or check out her books Intuitive Editing and The Intuitive Author.

“I put my effort into building trust, showing up, and being present for people who have opted into my universe.” A slight paraphrase of Jennie Nash

On the day we recorded this episode, no one really knew what was going to happen to TikTok (Jess thinks it’s going away, everyone else doubts her) and Sarina was attempting to manage all the emails from people asking her why she was promoting businesses on The Place Formerly Known as Twitter (she wasn’t, she quit that app and someone promptly squatted on her name, pretended to be her and began promoting for-profit businesses). What do we do when we can’t trust the people in our social media circles to be who they say they are and what is the future of social media as a whole? We discuss these and many other questions.

Things we talk about:

“I’d rather be taken than be hard” Sarina quoted this via “a pastor,” and search as I may, I can’t find an attribution. We discuss the sentiment.

The OpEd Project founded by Katie Orenstein

Mighty Networks

I called it the “red square app” but it’s actually the Red Note app or “Xiaohongshu” and as of this writing, is still the top free app in the Apple store. Here’s an explainer on the app from NPR.

I’m Sarina, and I’m a business nerd.

Hi, my name is Sarina, and I’m a business nerd. I was born this way. I can’t help it. I realize that not everyone gets excited about spreadsheets, but if you have any writerly income at all, I’m begging you to make 2025 the year you treat your writing as a business. There are actually two reasons to do this:

* First of all it’s centering. Treating your writing as a grownup activity helps you frame your goal-setting around writing. It holds you accountable to your goals

* Secondly, and more practically, it makes tax time is so much easier, and it might save you money

First, let’s do a little primer on how writerly income affects your taxes. Unlike a job, which sends you a W2 in January, writers are technically self-employed. In fact, the first time someone pays you for a book or an article, you have just become an entrepreneur.

So, congratulations on your promotion from artist to businessperson. Let’s go over what that means for you. I must offer a disclaimer here: I’m not a tax professional and I’m not your tax professional, so please ask an accountant in your state if you have actionable questions.

Most writers treat themselves as sole proprietors for tax purposes. That means you’re doing business as yourself, and you haven’t taken the additional step of forming a separate taxable entity. For the purposes of today’s episode, let’s assume that you’re in this category.

Depending on the dollar amount—and the professionalism of the people who paid you—a 1099 tax form may appear in your mailbox in January of next year. That 1099 will also be reported to the IRS, who will expect you to report it on your taxes. When done correctly, this income shows up on your schedule C.

It’s possible to deposit your writing income in your regular checking account, and many people do. But what if we assume that your writing business will continue to grow in volume and complexity? Then it’s time to consider treating your writing as a business in 2025.

The first way to do that is to open a second checking account. My tiny bank in New Hampshire offers this kind of account for free. Opening it was as easy as going into the branch and explaining that I wanted an account for my sole proprietorship. This is the where you’ll deposit any earnings you make as a writer.

The second useful account is an extra credit card that only gets used for business purposes. If you have any expenses during the writing year, they all belong on this card. Such as:

* Substacks you pay for to help further your writing career. (See what I did there?)

* Websites you join to assist in your work

* Transportation to writing-related conferences and research

* Printed materials you purchase for research

* Stock photography

* Your Canva subscription, etc

Every one of these things is a business expense. Any money you spend in service to your writing career is deductible from the income you made from your writing. When you’re just getting started, the legitimate expenses might well exceed your income. This all gets netted out on Schedule C of your 1040.

If you have this setup, you won’t have to scramble to figure out your business income and deductions at tax time. Your writing bank and credit card statements will tell the whole story.

Furthermore, if you’re self-published, the business bank account provides an added layer of security. In my publishing business, I have had to provide my banking details to countless publishing platforms. I like knowing that my banking information is separated from my family’s money.

This is also true of your social security number. There’s a fix for this, though. To avoid sharing your social security number with publishers and publishing platforms, all you have to do is request an EIN, or employer identification number from the IRS. It’s simple, it takes only minutes, and I’ll put the link in the show notes.

And there you have it. Your homework assignments are ready—you’re opening a couple of accounts and requesting an EIN from the IRS. It’s not the sexiest part of your writer journey, but don’t let that stop you.

Until next week, writers, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

Links!

Your EIN can be attained here: https://sa.www4.irs.gov/modiein/individual/index.jsp