The Long Goodbye, The Quick Hello

In my podcast feed this morning, two of the Wednesday podcasts that loaded to my pod-catcher come with interesting timing.

• My final podcast as host of the Kobo Writing Life Podcast, interviewing Rachel Amplett

• My first post-Kobo podcast interview on the Self-Publishing Podcast, with Johnny, Sean & Dave

The interview with Rachel took place in Kobo's office in October and is wonderful to go back and listen to. I was particularly impressed with how hard and long she worked at writing (and how she prioritizes writing into her daily schedule), and the tipping point for her towards making a full-time go of it. Rachel was inspiring and charming and fun to talk to. At the end of that episode I offer my own "audio" goodbye to the podcast listeners.

For the SPP Podcast (not always safe for work, BTW - and I believe I'm the first to say a naughty word in this episode - "When in Rome" after all) I talk about "Life After Kobo" but also reflect on the book industry in general and what I learned from my years at Kobo, as well as speculation about what the future holds.

It feels as if I'm spent the past thirty days participating in "The Long Goodbye" - I suppose that's a side-effect of the deep adoration I had for the past six years working at Kobo (all the amazing people I worked with their and the fantastic authors I was fortunate to get to know and to spend time with.

Something I realized, in the past month, was that I was going to miss the ongoing interaction with authors, and for that reason, I decided to create my own podcast where I could talk to industry folks, to authors, and continue to share my own reflections on publishing.

So I decided to adapt the first publishing imprint I created back in 2004 to publish One Hand Screaming (Stark Publishing - derived from Stark Entertainment, the DJing service that my best friend Steve and I created back in University. STARK = "Ste" from Steve and "ark" from Mark), use part of the original design Steve created for me and call it STARK REFLECTIONS ON WRITING & PUBLISHING.

I'm recording episodes now and will be releasing it in January 2018. But you can listen to a quick teaser about the podcast and be notified when the episodes start up.