This month I attended my first Women in Publishing Summit! It's a virtual four-day event with loads of sessions on all facets of indie publishing. Plus, there were four networking breakout-room chats per day. Talk about working harder (in the sense of more 'people-ing') than I do on a typical workday. It was a lot! But it was also fantastically interesting and fun to meet so many authors, editors, and bookish people all in one spot.

On the editing side of things in March, I finished up a proofread of a 70K-word sci-fi dystopian novel (and got the most epic testimonial likening me to a hobbit). Next up in April I'm copyediting a self-help book from my publisher client and editing the second edition of a short story collection. Loving all the variety in genres I get to work with recently!

Author Resource Round-Up

Here are some of the best tools and resources I learned about at the WIP Summit:

Writing Grants/Funding: Sharissa from Project Seed Money is hosting a Free Online Grant Writing Seminar (May 17th from 10am-12pm PST) to equip women authors with the skills to secure funding for their writing projects. You'll learn practical strategies for crafting compelling grant proposals, finding appropriate funding sources, and structuring your narrative to resonate with reviewers.
Audiobooks: Here's good entry point if you want to learn more about audiobook production and what audio proofers do.
ARC Readers/Reviews: Check out BookSirens to grow your ARC team and get more reviews as you launch your book.
Selling Direct: Check out Curios, a new self-publishing platform that allows you to sell your ebooks/audiobooks directly to readers (and get away from Amazon) while keeping 100% of your sales.
Book Covers: Get access to professional Big 5 book designers from the I Need a Book Cover job board. Also, their extensive gallery of book covers is tagged and can be sorted by colour, style, imagery, and more. Very useful if you want to search for cover ideas!

What I'm Reading

I've been reading a lot of nonfiction this month, all on some aspect of self-development.

Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg was our Freelance Editors Club - Book Club pick. Really enjoyed the actionable tips on how to actually make habits stick (i.e., make them extremely easy and tiny). In my case, I wanted to get back into my art practice. So I came up with this tiny habit: "When I come upstairs to my office first thing in the morning, I will sit down at my art desk." That's it! I just have to sit down. But because it's so easy, I end up actually doing more. The key is believing that just sitting down (and possibly getting back up immediately) is actually fine. 😆
No Boundary by Ken Wilbur blends eastern and western philosophical traditions, musing on the topic of consciousness and identity. It's some of the clearest writing on deep, esoteric stuff I've read in a while!
Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of the incredible blog Ness Labs. I've only just started, but it's full of the good stuff.