The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* I talked about how I go through “seasons of focus” as a writer, wherein sometimes I’m writing feverishly and other times I’m just trying to run the business and get things done. This led us into a whole discussion about where writers spend their time … and how complicated being an “independent authorpreneur” really is.

* Emma talked a bit about print-on-demand and how far it’s come since the old days. More importantly, this led us into a chat about how bookstores buy lots of printed books and then destroy (or expensively return) them when they don’t sell.

* We talked some about whether gatekeepers are bad (because they decide who gets to publish and who doesn’t) or whether you could call the same function “curation” sometimes, and maybe that’s good because otherwise, there’s too much noise out there to find the “signal” of good books. (I won’t even browse Amazon for books. It’s a personal recommendation (curation) or nothing.)

* What’s the role of AI these days — not in writing books, but in how Amazon and others are now making rules around it?

* We talked about the perniciousness of typos, and how Bill thinks there’s a lot more now than there used to be in published books. (I think we Indies are to blame for that.)

* Emma talked about an embarrassing experience narrating her own books, including the sex scenes.

* We ended by talking a bit about Reginald the Vampire (the SyFy show based on my Fat Vampire books) and how Season Two is debuting this coming Wednesday!

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