In this episode we’re joined by Nellie McKesson, founder of publishing software startup Hederis and owner of tuxedo cat Cool Runnings! (emphasis ours) Nellie started her career on a Craigslist link and a prayer at a tiny math journal publisher in Boston. From there, she moved on to production editing at O’Reilly Media, and then to Macmillan, helping usher the company into the twenty-first century by building them automated toolchains. Now she’s based in our fair city of Portland, OR, and heading up Hederis, a book publishing software startup that she hopes will bring the magic and intuitiveness of automated publishing to everyone. We also chat with her about the importance of making ebooks accessible to disabled folks, the eternal question of whether she considers print or ebooks superior, and why spending the day alone in a classroom reading is the ideal field trip.

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Which I do? I do take some time off. I go to the

movies. I That's good play. DND, yeah, that you hate. DND, I

just,

I don't hate it. I just hate it. That's fair. That's that's a

great distinction.

There are plenty of things I hate for me. You

foreign

Welcome to the hybrid club Scout podcast with me. Emily

Einolander and me. Corrine kolasky, hello. We are mapping

the frontier between traditional and indie publishing, and today

we have Nellie McKesson with us. Hi, guys. Hello, hello. Thanks

for coming on. That's my pleasure.

Well, we're going to interview you about yourself and your

career in publishing, yep, but first I have to continue to

fulfill my promises, of course, to read reviews that you all

give me. So I have one here that, no, that does not have an

assigned impression or accent, no to it. So you all have to

torture me now, okay, oh, we have to pick one. Yeah, oh,

shit. You're like,

she's like, Okay, I have, what about like Russian? Oh, Russian.

That's not a good one. Yeah, let's do that. All right. Well,

it's only two sentences, okay. Should be okay for the record.

I'm Oh, you've listened.

Oh, this is gonna be bad. No, it's fine.

It'll be funnier that way. Anyway, when I did the Irish

accent, JT was like, You're so inconsistent.

Yeah, God,

I see like I'm just gonna go to Werner Herzog again. Yes, that's

fine. He and I share a birthday, by the way.

Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. Anyway, sorry,

I've got his Henry Rollins. Oh, I also have Freddie Mercury.

It's a good birthday, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, I have no idea.

No, we'll look it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, I have Jerry

Springer too.

Stop talking.

I'll never stop

come on down.

Wait, was he you're not the father, or was that Montel? Oh,

that was month. Oh, no, that was Maury. Maury, yeah, all right.

HPs covers the full Nope.

We can pick a different Yeah, no, no, I don't know what it is.

I'm like, trying to picture like, Villanelle, yeah. I'm just

like, yeah, do you want me to try to do it? Yeah, I'll try.

I'll try. Okay, that's like, lovers, okay. HBs covers, the

full spectrum of book people, from Self Publishers to

traditional and everything in between. The snark gives a boost

as well, but there's plenty of sincerity as well.

Yeah, now that you can torture both.

Oh yeah, you know I have that, right? I

know it's fine. It's fine. You're fuck

all right. Well,

wasn't that lovely? That was amazing. Do you have anything

you want to talk about before we launch into this interview?

Karen, I don't think so. No, no, yeah. I don't have any, like,

fun news or anything, really. Oh, I'm going to see Michael

McDonald in two weeks there, yeah, which I'm very excited

about. And Chaka Khan, oh my gosh. I imagine more people are

excited about her. Yes, I'm more excited about Michael

McDonald's, which is whatever. But yeah, I feel like I'll

balance out, although I feel like I'll be like, one of like

10 people at the show are excited to see Michael McDonald.

So anyway, I'm looking forward to that. So, yeah, that's pretty

much all I have to say. See, you had great news. I did have great

you're right. We also went and saw mid summer. Oh, I just saw

it yesterday. Oh, I loved it, right? I loved it. Great ending.

Oh, my God yes,

yes, yeah, yeah, did you see hereditary before that? Though I

did see hereditary. I liked Midsomer more. What?

No,

I do think that director is really good at capturing the

feelings of like grief and trauma, which was in both of

those movies, absolutely.

Absolutely, yeah, he just did an amazing job. Yeah, one of them I

want to watch again. Yes,

I did re watch hereditary the other day just to get psyched.

And I was like, oh, yeah, I still feel the same way about

this movie. We watched it with our friends, and we were all

hyping it up, but we watched it in the middle of the afternoon.

No, she does not have blackout curtains. No. The one part, you

couldn't

see it because the calibration on the TV, like, wasn't

contrasted enough, and it was too light in there. And she and

Karen's like, sees me just going, No, and then

I'm like, the whole movie's ruined, yeah? That's like, the

pivotal moment, right, right? That was, like, when everyone in

the theater started whimpering, yeah, yeah,

that. And like, the 10 minutes after that, of, like, the

discovery period, yeah, I almost had to walk out of the theater

because I was just like, This is too intense. Yeah, I've never

said as many words during a movie as loud as I did. Yeah,

you did say a lot. That's true. All right, so Corinne, let's get

into this. Nelly, yeah, we're getting to it about you great.

Corinne, you start. You have the icebreaker question. That's my

favorite question. All right, so tell us about your adorable cat

on your Twitter feed. Oh, my best friend. Her name is cool,

Runnings.

Yeah. So the story behind that is she

followed one of my coworkers home in February. Gosh, I guess

it must have been 2016

and my coworker work the next day and was like, this cat

followed me home, who will take her? And I volunteered, yeah?

And it just brought to mind that whole scene in the movie of the

guys going to Canada, and, like, being freezing, and, uh huh,

yep, yeah, so February, yeah. She's a cute little kitty. She

shouldn't be outside, yeah, on the street in February. Yeah,

tuxedo, right? Yes. She's, oh, I have one of those too. Oh,

they're so wonderful. Black Hats and tuxedos are probably my

favorite. Yeah, yeah, my old cat was a tuxedo Dinah. Oh, that's a

great name.

Yeah? Book, book stuff, book stuff, yeah, it's in Wonderland.

How did she make that? Was that in? That was in New York, that

was in New York, yeah, yeah. She acclimated very quickly. I

actually ended up having a party. I guess it must have been

my birthday party, maybe a week after I got her and she just

came out and was walking around saying hi to everyone. She loves

being around people. She gets very sad when I'm not home all

the time. Yeah, she's a lot happier now than I work from

home a lot. Yeah, I'm sure yeah for her. Oh, she hated it. Oh my

gosh, that was a very stressful time for both of us. I actually

sent her West before I came west,

so I sent her on the airplane by herself, her carrier, she she

hates cars. She hates her carrier. Yeah, I can only

imagine how much she hated the actual airplane. And then my

parents picked her up on the other side, and she lived with

them for a couple months before she came down to Portland. Oh,

okay, okay, yeah, I felt so heartbroken to do that to her.

Was she mad at you afterward? Um, I don't think so. She's a

cat, so they forget pretty quickly.

And she got fattened up by my parents. They're good

grandparents, so they fed her a lot of treats. And no, yeah,

yeah, she was pretty happy by the time we were reunited. Oh,

did

your parents like message you and go, she's so mad at us?

Yeah,

no, she did have to hang out in the bathroom for a few days,

though, like stop peeing on things. Oh, sure.

Yeah, yeah. Rage, sure, yeah. All right. Nellie, well, will

you please tell us about your path to the book publishing

world, how you came to that conclusion that that's what you

wanted to do? Sure. So,

as with probably most of you, I was very much a book nerd as I

was growing up. I read a lot. I remember a lot of trips to the

library with my mom, when I was little, did you spend all your

childhood summers in the library? Oh, yeah, just checking

Yeah. Go on. Sorry. We would spend hours at the library, and

then I come home with this crazy stack of books. Yep, I

discovered a lot of great books that way. I remember, actually,

in seventh grade, we had this, like, field trip day, where you

could pick a special field trip to go on, and it was like, go to

the water park or go to, like, the Science Center. And I picked

read alone in a classroom.

They allowed. It was one of the options that's awesome. So,

like, no teachers or anything. The teacher was there too. But

we just, like, we just brought a ton of snacks, and we all just

like, sat in our corners. I brought up.

I get I was reading The Once and Future King at the time, so I

worked my way through it. I don't know that, but, oh, it's

by Evie white. Oh, the classic King Arthur tale. Oh, okay, I

haven't read that either. Oh, you know, just, it's old. Yeah,

it's hard to get through. Sure, sure. But yeah, it's the classic

story. Yeah, just the Elements of Style and Charlotte, oh, my

god, yeah.

Oh man, I that's so just forward thinking, Yeah,

let's have something for the introvert. Yeah,

yeah. I admire them for giving us an option like that. Yeah,

yeah. So then

fast forward, I went to college at this school called St John's

College, not St John's University. I'm seeing fierce

nods.

So it's this tiny, tiny school. They have two campuses, one in

Annapolis, Maryland, and one in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I

actually went to both of them, but each campus only has about

400 students, and it's this set curriculum where you just read

the great books of philosophy all through history. You start

with, like the ancient Greeks, with Homer and the Iliad, and

then you work up to more modern fiction, like we got to Flannery

O'Connor.

And we also read, you know, classic science works we read,

like Newton's Principia and math books like Euclid elements. So

lots of books, books, books, books. Yeah, I remember getting

a lot of information from them when I was in high school, I'm

sure. And I was like, This looks amazing. I really want to go.

And my dad had gone to the

Academy in Annapolis

for a semester, and then he missed my mom and came back,

but he was there long enough to be like those guys were the guys

from that college were dicks. There

definitely was a rivalry between our campus and the Academy, and

we had a croquet game against each other every year, and

croquet, that was the only organized sport that we had at

our school, was croquet. Wow, played against the Naval

Academy, and usually we won. Sometimes they won, which was

very upsetting for us, because, as non athletic book people,

sure was our one thing, right, right?

Yeah, it was great. Though. I really loved it. It was actually

my dad found out about it because we lived in Baltimore

for a time when I was younger, and one of the students was

going door to door, selling those, like, Great Books sets.

Oh, yeah. So my dad just started talking to him and found out

about the school, and just like, saved it in his memory until I

was old enough for college. And then he was like, this is the

school you should go for. He was right. Like, see you as a child

and kind of go, I know, yeah.

I always had a lot in common with him. So yeah, he he

pinpointed me as the weak link,

but the week becomes the strong That's right. That's right.

So anyways, again, flash forward a couple years, and I was ready

to actually get a job, and I had moved to Boston just sort of on

a whim, and I knew that Boston was a big publishing town, and I

knew that I liked books, which is, like, the lamest reason to

get into publishing, but there we go. I mean, if you don't, you

end up being one of those people that everyone is everyone else

in publishing is just like, they're a monster, yeah?

And then they make all the money, that's right, they're at

the top of the food chain, with everyone beneath them, hating

them.

Yeah, so that's my path to publishing. I didn't know Boston

was a big publisher. Oh, yeah, I knew that. Yeah, I am the

neophyte here. Well, you're on the West Coast, true. I've never

left the West Yes, yeah. I actually don't know much about

the West Coast publishing scene, which has been fun to discover

as I moved back here. Yeah, yeah, it's, there's a big scene

in, like, the Bay Area. There's a lot of publishers down there.

Like, I worked for a couple down there, and then here, and that's

kind of it. I mean, well, that's not true. There's a couple in

LA, like, I think of maybe just a handful, very few. I only know

that because of the lady who, like, took

there was a woman who had a book deal with this weird publisher

in Los Angeles, and then her distributor, who was another

distributing company, rare bird. Rare bird, yeah, thank you. Like

Tara would just be telling the story

she took a picture of a woman eating her lunch. She, like,

worked on the train, and was like, Excuse me, boss of this

woman. And it was, it was a black woman, and it was just

like, everyone's just like, You're a monster. Why are you

like, snitching on this woman who's just hungry? Yeah,

terrible.

And.

So her distributor dropped her, and it was all la people, and

that's pretty much all I know about LA publishing. Yeah, are

an LA publisher?

Presumably, Disney is there, right? Yeah, oh, maybe it is, I

don't even know. Maybe not. Maybe a Disney publisher? Yes,

please send us an email, yeah,

leave us a review. Tell me what terrible accent to say it, and

so I can hand it over to Corinne.

So you're in Boston, so I'm in Boston, so I decided to find a

job in publishing.

So I got on Craigslist, which was still a big job market site

back then, this was 2005 I guess,

and I applied to a few editorial assistant jobs.

Wasn't really getting any responses. I didn't really have

a ton of like, Office experience under my belt at that point. So

I was like, Okay, well, I'm a young American woman. I have a

healthy sense of my own worthlessness, so I'll start at

the very bottom. Yeah,

exactly. I'll do whatever it takes. So I got an internship at

this tiny, tiny math journal publisher, and that was my first

publishing job, and I just worked my ass off. And like, two

weeks in, they promoted me to editorial assistant, and then I

got another promotion at some point within the next year or

so, and then went on to my illustrious career, damn.

And now for the illustrious Oh, yes, let's get into that.

Alright, so you eventually came to ebooks as your thing, and

it's you. You started in 2005 and publishing, you just said

that, right? Yes. Okay,

so it seems like you're proceeding that like by just a

few years. Ebooks coming into into the world. Yeah, there for

the very beginning. I was there for the very beginning. So I'm

going to actually not answer this question right away. I will

answer it in a minute, but it's so funny to me to hear people

say that I'm an e book person, which I think on paper, I think

that's very much true, but I actually don't think of myself

as an e book person. I think of myself as an automated

publishing person, which I say with air quotes,

which definitely crosses over into e books. And I'll explain

more what that means, probably at some point tonight.

But yeah, so that first job that I had at this math journal

publisher was actually my first exposure to what's called

Automated publishing, which is where you so instead of having

someone write in a Microsoft Word file and then you put that

into at that time, it was Quark InDesign was just getting its

foothold. Now it's InDesign. So instead of doing that, you would

have them write in some sort of like markup language, like HTML

or XML. So in the math journal, it was this language called law

tech, which is a very science markup language which supports

like equations and scientific formulas and that sort of thing.

And so then, once you have your your manuscript in this markup

language, you can just push a button and spit out a laid out

book, like print file, and also spit out an e book file, if you

want. We actually didn't make e books at that company. We only

did print, but it was all automated. So yeah, I got my

job. My next job was at O'Reilly Media, which is another sort of

trailblazer in the automated publishing world. They did XML

publishing.

So when, when I started there, I actually was doing the InDesign

workflow side of things, and I was very print focused again.

And

was, I was a production editor, so I was, you know, looking

through manuscripts, proofreading, looking through

laid out pages, marking up all the bad line breaks, all the bad

page breaks.

But at the same time, ebooks were just starting to explode,

so I think they really started making their mark in like 2008

ish, yeah, so I kind of saw that happening, and I had started

learning a little bit of HTML at the time. I really didn't know

much computer programming, but I just thought it seemed like

something I should know about. So I decided to crack one open

and figure out how to make one. It turns out they're just HTML

files inside with a bunch of other stuff.

So, yeah, I taught myself how to do an ebook, and I started by

making them from InDesign, and I've since progressed from

there. Thank God,

which we will talk.

People still do. Yes, that's how, that's how we were taught,

yeah, I have a lot of opinions about

that. We want to hear them.

Can I ask a dumb question? Sure, sure. It's something I've always

wanted to know, but like in

in mathematics books, yes, how do people.

Actually input all of those equations, because it's not like

on the keyboard like so I've never really known how people do

it. Yeah, that's a great question. So there's a few

different answers to this, and it depends on how the book is

being published. So again, at that journal publisher, because

we were using this law tech markup language, they actually

could mark up these equations right in this language. So they

would write like a tag around something like, I don't know,

like a superscript tag or something around an n, and then,

you know, the slash, and there's, you know, there's just

all this like special markup to say, you know, this goes on top

of the equation. This goes on bottom, this is the next piece.

I don't know math, so

trying to say the right words, but I don't actually know them.

Diddly do Yeah,

denominators.

So that's like the the easiest way to write math is if you're

doing it right in markup. And there's more modern ways now. So

there's

very web friendly languages like MathJax,

or

I'm blanking on the other one,

but they're sort of made to be

compatible with websites. And so anyone who wants to be able to

write a mathematical equation into a computer has to know some

kind of markup language, right? So that's not necessarily true.

Most of them do. I think it's especially if you're a person

who's writing these kinds of books, you've been through like

a master's program, and a lot of the times, part of doing that is

just learning these languages, because this is what all the

math journals expect. And when you're doing journal publishing,

you have to do whatever they tell you to do.

Go back to our episode with Jihad moment. Oh, yeah.

So the other way is you can just make it as an image and just

plop it right into the book as an image file, which is not

friendly for

ebooks. Well, it's actually okay for ebooks. It's not friendly

for accessible reading. So, right,

yeah, people with doesn't, it doesn't.

What is that called? Right? Yeah, flow, right, yeah, it's a

flow. And also, because it's just this fixed image. You know,

if someone who's vision impaired is trying to do like the read

aloud function or something, the it's just like image, yeah,

exactly, all right, yeah, yeah. So that's actually a big thing

that people are trying to solve for ebooks specifically right

now, is figuring out how to get more accessible handling for

math and chemistry and all that sort of thing. Cool. Yeah, all

right, so let's talk more about ebooks. So you started doing

that I before I interrupted you to ask how math works,

and I did my best to answer

a lot more now, yeah, because all I knew, because I had to

do some language books in college, and it was, there were

a lot of symbols in there that are not on the keyboard, and I

didn't like the way it looked, but it was kind of all I could

figure out to do at the time with no guidance. And so I was

like, someone knows how to do this the right way? Yeah,

yeah. Interestingly, the handling for that sort of thing

is the same as the handling for math. It's just it's much better

supported. So a lot of font files have built in handling for

all of those different language symbols. So if you just know the

code to put in, then it'll pop right up. Is it called a

Unicode? Yeah, Unicode is one of them. I mean, it says it when

you like, oh,

okay,

I got, I got this analog system set up, right? Yeah, I know, I'm

aware.

That's why we're friends. That's right. That's exactly right,

all right. So you just kind of started ebooks because you

thought it was something you should know, yeah, exactly. So I

just dove in, and that was really my foray into programming

in general. Like I said, I had tried to learn or I had started

learning some HTML and CSS, so I really pushed myself to learn

more. I told my dad that I would make him a website, just as a

way of learning.

And at the same time, I learned the other little ins and outs of

EPUB.

There's a few other little specification things that that

are part of it,

yeah. And then from there, I just dove deeper and deeper into

the programming side of things, the technology side of

publishing. And so I ended up running the e book development

program at O'Reilly for a while, and then fully transitioned over

into programming and helped them do some web app development

stuff around helping people actually make books.

Books using automated publishing.

Automated publishing.

All right, so

I almost feel like you've answered the next question,

which is, how have you seen publishing technologies evolve

over the course of your career? Do you have any I do want to add

more. Do you want to say more? Yes, please. I'll talk this is

where I'm going to talk more about automated publishing.

So

the way automated publishing, for most publishers, worked

originally, was, it was all based around this language

called XML, which is, it's a markup language that you can use

for anything. It's very customizable, so you can make up

tags for any kind of thing.

Yes, question just later, can you explain to me the different

Yeah, that's okay. Explain to me the difference between x, HTML

and XML. At some point I'm going to be on mic. Okay, that's where

we're headed. You

jumped ahead, all right. So, yeah, so XML, you can make up

your own tags. So, like, you could make up a tag set just

for, like, the furniture in your house, so you could have tags

for like table or chair or, I don't know, cup,

and then you would use those tags to tag all the different

kinds of tables in your house. So your dining room table and

your coffee table would both use the tag table, because they're

both kinds of tables and all the chairs in your house, your arm

chair and your kitchen chairs would both use chair tags.

So XML part of its name is extensible, which means

customizable, and that's all it means, is you can just make up

any kind of tag set that you want to make up. So XHTML is

just a version of HTML. So HTML is the language behind the web.

So any website that you look at that's actually HTML code behind

the scenes,

and HTML is a version of XML, but it's a version that the tags

are predetermined, so you only have this set list of tags that

you can use to identify the different parts of your text.

And it's all about it's all about identifying the parts of

your text so that web browsers, or whatever else needs to look

at that text knows what to do with it at least a little bit

out of the box. So identifying like, this is the heading of a

page. This is just a paragraph. This is like a sidebar. This is

a navigation menu, that sort of thing.

So, yeah,

yeah. So one of the biggest shifts, actually on the

automated publishing side, was the shift from XML to HTML,

and that opened up a lot of doors for people to do much more

web friendly things,

so you can actually use HTML combined with CSS to actually

make print layouts, yeah, which is really awesome and very

magical.

So, gosh, I don't even know when it was, but at some point, maybe

2010

maybe before then, 2010 was when people started being like,

ebooks are the thing. Yeah, yeah. Wave of the future, yeah.

So at around the same time,

the people who are in charge of the web kind of made a bunch of

improvements to this new part of CSS, which CSS is sort of the

companion to HTML. So CSS is what determines how things look

on the web. Charge of the

web, no, no,

we will defeat him. Yes, we will. It's this organization

called the W 3c

they have various working groups to decide about the rules for

all the different parts of the web. So there's like, general

CSS, there's a whole publishing Working Group, which I'm a part

of, and we get to decide how ePub works, what the next thing

is. So actually, we're in the process of determining

a spec for audiobooks. Sorry, we're fangirling

Amanda and I are freaking out.

Usually,

when I say things like this, people's eyes just sort of

glaze.

Anyway. Well, continue,

please. All right,

so yeah, so a bunch of people who are actually part of that

group helped to create this new version of CSS that's actually

just for print. So you can do things with CSS, like set the

trim size of a book, or set your like margin widths. You.

Yeah, and this isn't used yet, or it is used, it is used. So,

yeah, that's part of what I'm doing, yeah? Well, yeah. So that

was one of the huge developments. So actually, when

I was at O'Reilly, I helped them transition from using XML to

using HTML, because we could use this new CSS to make our print

books, yeah, so then we could have a fully HTML tool chain

where we were making our ePubs with HTML. We're making our

print books with HTML. It's all using CSS, and it just makes

things a lot more streamlined.

Awesome. All right, Whoa, yeah.

Oh.

Yeah.

So how do you feel about print books versus like ebooks? Like,

what are what are your

proclivities? I guess I've had a lot of 180s over the years on

this topic.

So as I said, I started out very print centric. I was making

print books exclusively. I cared a lot about how many lines were

on the last page of a chapter. Every single hyphen on every

page got checked.

And then I kind of 188 and went fully digital. So all I cared

about was, like, reflowable. Everything has to be reflowable.

Stop worrying about hyphens. Stop worrying about line breaks

up to a point like there. Of course there's a reader

usability aspect there, but I definitely scaled back on my

standards in that regard. That's a lot more mental flexibility

that I'm used to from a production

like, I love production managers, but I'm used to them

being very much, like, this is the way it is all the time.

Yeah, I think my thing is, I care a lot about efficiency. So

for me, it was all about the efficiency of the workflow. And

it helped that I was working at a company at the time where we

didn't care about Balanced pages. We had slightly less

strict Print Layout requirements, so I could take

some liberties. So you know, if we had an inch at the bottom of

one page and, you know, two inches at the bottom of the

other page, like whatever, that was fine. And it was fine with

our readers too. It's sort of an accepted thing because it was

more academic and reference. Sure people aren't just reading

for pleasure, right? That's less distracting. Yeah, that makes

sense. Yeah? Like, you know why you're here, you're right for

esthetic, right? Yeah, you're not here for fun, yeah,

certainly not.

So after O'Reilly, I moved over to Macmillan, and I was building

their first automated book tool chain there, using HTML and CSS

again.

And I again 188 and came back to caring more about print from

working there and just working more on the trade side, talking

to more trade designers and really

realizing that it was very much a user experience question, and

so while I still care a great deal about efficiency,

I don't want to take away from that quality that people are

expecting when they're reading a print book. And that's really

important. Print books have evolved over hundreds of years,

and they've been perfected over all this time. So the experience

that people are used to seeing, I think, is really valuable,

and people may not know it, but if they didn't see that quality

in their print books, I think that they would really kind of

be taken out of the experience a little bit. Oh, for sure. Yeah,

yeah. And that's the most important thing I find with

editing, too. It's like, that's, that's the argument you give to

people when you're making a query, is like, this takes me

out of the story, like, you know you're supposed to be absorbed.

And it's almost like, meditative, yeah? Anything that

takes you out of the out of the material, is bad. Yeah? It's the

one overriding Yeah, thing in a book, right, right, in any

design sense.

So you have a lot of mental flexibility going back from

ebook to print, print to ebook.

Have you encountered people? Well, hearing nice

things about myself,

typical woman.

So do you find yourself

coming up against resistance with publishing people who are

more like traditional or like into one or the other?

Because I know a lot of people who, I don't mean a lot of

people who are comfortable going back and forth. Firm, yes.

So the Macmillan experience is a really great example of that,

where I was working with these editors. So we were developing

this initially for the tor.com new imprint where they were

publishing novellas. It was really exciting. They did not.

Have a huge budget. They wanted to be able to take risks on new

authors and this new format, so we thought we it would be a

great testing ground for this new production platform. And Tor

does tortoise science fiction, right? Yeah. Okay, so it's all

sci fi. So tor.com is actually their website, and their website

launched their own imprint, which is really hilarious. Yeah,

it's really awesome that they published some really wonderful

books, and they're nice and short, which is great for me.

We'll talk more about our reading. Yes, we sure will.

So I was working with these editors who still were fairly

entrenched in the old school way of thinking about print, where

they wanted to be able to fix every single line break and

every single page break.

And the tools that we had at the time, even though they're pretty

advanced, they're still very much based around efficiency and

doing things really quickly, and it's really hard to do quality

control like that with those kinds of tools.

So I did manage to build in some controls for them into the tool,

tool that I build built for them,

but it's definitely not nearly as fine tuned as the control

that you would get with like InDesign or some other hands on

layout program. I don't know if any other exists, yeah, except

for mine,

I can think of what so I'm trying not to jump into that

yet, because I know we're saving that for later, but that's sort

of where I'm headed, is I wanted to make something that would

still let people do things quickly, but also give them some

control over and now we're seeing what the problem is and

why that problem exists too. Yeah.

Well, all right, so a lot of purists going, this is not what

I think it should be, right? Yeah? So we definitely there was

some head butting.

We had a lot of meetings where they would say, well, but we

just really need this. And I would have to kind of dance

around it. I'm also kind of a ask for forgiveness, not

permission. Person, sure, yeah,

yeah. I I'm just a person with a vision and a passion for it,

whatever it takes. Knows what you're doing. How do you ask for

permission?

Yeah, it's, you know, I did my best to explain it, but I think

it ultimately came down to you just have to see. You guys are

just gonna have to see how it works, see what readers say, see

how the product looks in the end. And I think once they did

see, a lot of those concerns sort of melted away to a certain

extent. I know the production editors still had to kind of

filter out some of those kinds of requests when they were

working on the books. And the production editors also put in

more manual labor than I would have liked them to, again,

because they have really high standards, and I don't blame

them for it. I was a production editor also, I totally

understand.

But they just it's not, it's not a tool chain that lends itself

to doing that kind of manual work it takes, it actually takes

a lot longer to do that sort of thing with these automated tool

chains than it would with you were just like moving a box up

in InDesign, right? That makes sense. Yep.

So how do you prefer to read,

oh, well again, as a person who cares a lot about practicality

and efficiency, I can't believe you're not a Virgo. I really

can't just keep hearing you say, like, efficiency. And I'm like,

I was raised by a Virgo father. Yeah, that checks

out. That checks out. Okay, yeah, every Yeah, it really

does. It does okay, sorry, go on. So it really depends on my

lifestyle at the time. So when I was in New York, I was actually

reading exclusively on my phone. Thank you everyone.

You're the first person I've seen who hasn't been like, oh,

people reading on their phone. Oh, man. And I'm like, No way.

Except brain Brie likes reading on her phone. Yeah? I mean, I

took the subway to and from work every day. It was at least a 45

minute ride, and I always had my phone with me. I didn't want to

carry around a bunch of books. And, like, when you're standing

on the subway, you can't, like, hold a book open while you're

trying to, like, also hold on to the pole. So it's a lot easier

to just hold your phone. And even if you do, everyone's like,

what's she reading? Yeah? Actually a very awkward because

I'm, like, a print purist, yeah, I'm sure we'll get into later

anyway, but I so I worked at Harper Collins when I lived in

New York, and they had published Jenna Jameson's memoir How to

Make love like a porn star, which I did not realize was

loaded with nudie pigs like in the middle of it. And so I was

like, reading it, and then I get to that part, and I'm like, Oh

my God. Like, who's watching this book? So anyway, that was

slightly embarrassing. So that's probably like, why you should

read on your phone. I think, yeah, it was fine, whatever.

But, yeah, good. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Live out liberating

about that.

Oh, God, not 40 yet.

Fun of Lori. Oh, I'm sorry,

that's not what I meant. I also listened to that episode. It was

crazy. She was I was sad that I was not here for that episode.

Yeah, she okay. So, have you seen awards for good boys, no,

oh my god,

dogs,

oh

boy. I think, like, yeah, right. Like, when a man does something

good for feminism,

oh, my God. Okay, it's a whole, it's,

it's a great Instagram account, and because we live in this

current climate, they give Instagram people books however

she deserves it. Yeah, amazing. So Lori was like, I don't have a

lot of she's a used bookstore person. She's like, I don't have

a lot of, like, non used books, but if you order it from me, you

get a discount. And I'm like, can you get me the new awards

for Good boys?

And so she, like, texted me the day that the podcast comes out,

and is, like, your book

is here.

So, yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I've never really done that

before where I like, just had someone order a book for me,

which, as a person who, like, is trying to have some hope for the

world, sure, I was like, Maybe I should do this. Yeah, I do read

on a Kindle like

mine, mine from 2011 died, yeah, and so I stole my husband's from

2014

and I don't know what I gonna do when that dies, but I don't

think I'm gonna buy another one. Well, maybe something new will

exist. Then maybe,

I mean, I'm not saying I'm building anything, but these are

changing.

That's gonna bring up a question that I haven't put on the list

yet. But anyway, okay, so formats about your your favorite

reading so you read, you read on your phone, on the train, yeah,

I read on my phone on the on the train, yeah, actually, relatedly

to your story of reading the train and having people see what

you're reading when Elena Francis books all came out. Oh,

yeah, I was reading those on my phone, because that's when I was

living in New York, and there was a really nice moment where I

was sitting next to this dude who was also reading the same

book, oh, in print, and, like, I was like, oh. And he like, we

bonded for a moment. Yeah,

yeah, that is sweet. Yeah. It was nice. So you can still bond

when you're reading on the phone. You just have to be a

little more open about it, yeah, to hold it, like, I have to hold

it, yeah, further away from your face. Crank up the font size so

they can really see what's on there. I'm just trying to make

friends. Yeah? So lonely. Oh, god,

yeah. So now that I don't take the subway all the time, I am

back to print, although these days I am reading a lot of

graphic novels, more than

novels. Novel, novels, um, although I did read a great book

recently, but we'll get to that later too. Yeah, yeah, we sure

will

all right. So we're finally here, yeah, what is heterus? So

heteros is um,

my attempt to solve all those problems that we just talked

about where people either can make books really slowly with

InDesign, really manually, and have them be beautiful, or make

them really quickly, but give up a lot of that beauty and control

that they're used to. So I was working at Macmillan. I was

building their automated tool chain. I saw all of this.

I saw all these problems. I got a much better sense for what

people really want to be doing right now. And

you know, McMillan was really great. They're really,

they're really, they were really liberal with letting me build

things that I wanted to build and experiment a little bit, but

they're also a publishing company, and they're not a

software company, so they just didn't have the resources to be

able to support a real like development team the way that I

wanted to build it, and I don't think that they would have had

the budget or resources to help me build this thing that I want

to build.

So I left and I started my own company called heteros to try

and build this tool, which is sort of a cross between

InDesign and automated publishing, so it's all HTML and

CSS in the background, and you can actually download the raw

HTML or CSS if you want to, but You also have this like visual

design tool, just like InDesign, where you can see your laid out

pages right in the browser. You can configure your design right

in the browser and see how it looks. And it also has controls

for like, line breaking, page breaking, that sort of thing, a

little more pared down and definitely much more book

centric than InDesign.

Is so InDesign is really made for any kind of visual design

that you want to do, which means that it's actually a little bit

tricky for publishing designers to get a handle on how to use

it, because it has so much stuff and a lot of noise for a book

designer who only needs to do you know a subset of things most

of the time. Of course, there are more complicated books, so

I'm sort of just talking about simple prose books right now.

Yeah, so we tried to build a simpler tool set, very book

centric. So, you know, we have our page breaking window where

you go and it has buttons like, loosen this line, tighten this

line, add a line, break here.

So like, normal person language, yeah, exactly, exactly everyday

Joe, yeah,

yeah. I mean, our goal is really to help publishers be able to

publish books faster,

you know, take more risks on authors from more underserved

segments of the population

and capture, you know, publish published books like on trend. I

know a lot of publishers are trying to do that right now.

Look at the Amazon keywords and publish a book that goes along

with those. I worked for a startup that did exactly that,

actually, yeah, yeah. Callisto media, okay. Uh huh, yeah.

Interesting. Tell you some stories. Yeah,

I have a lot of wine.

Domino's doesn't have here, though. I'm an unincorporated

right now. You're liking the Wild West. So you said

publishing companies, or, you know, anyone who wants to

publish a book right now, we're kind of, we're not excluding

Self Publishers, but we are focusing our like marketing and

sales efforts on companies, mainly because we want to get

all of those, like, quality standards built into our app. So

working with publishers first helps us kind of figure out what

people really want, like, what makes a professional book

because they know what to complain about, because they

know what people have complained about, yeah, exactly, yeah. So

yeah, and then Self Publishers will also have access to all of

that knowledge, okay? Because when I looked at it, I thought

it was more for Self Publishers when I first looked at the

website, yeah, that's funny.

No, no, that's great. That's great feedback.

But like, when you say that is for publishers like that, that

makes a lot of sense, but that's also kind of something where you

have to, like, break into people who think that they know what

they're doing already? Well, I would say they do know what

they're doing to a certain extent, right? But in terms of,

like, software, or, I guess more said, in their ways, I mean, the

traditional publishing is famously set in its ways.

There's a lot of training that I have to think about, which we're

still in beta right now, so that means it's all free, but it also

means that I'm not not promising as much as I would promise if I

was charging people sure to use it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I we

definitely training is a huge thing we're thinking about and

documentation. Part of my job at Macmillan was actually training

people on how to use the things that I was building there, so I

got a good sense of how to do that, and you know how to

approach people, and what terminology to use that they'll

sort of latch on to.

So do you have some publishers that are already working with

you since beta? Yes, I do, yeah. So I I've got a handful of

publishers,

one person who's, like, fully on board, ready to go. She's just

waiting for her book to come in. She's a new publisher. So it's,

it's actually a little bit easier with her, because there

is no set workflow in place, so we can kind of build a workflow

together. So it's sort of my dream partner, because there's

so much like open endedness too. Yeah, exactly. I mean partner,

yeah, that sounds like an actual partnership. Yeah? Like, she's

really, yeah, like, she's willing to, like, hear what I

have to say, and I'm listening to her and sort of incorporating

her feedback into what I'm building.

That's Erewhon press, which is a really exciting new literary

publisher, yeah, okay, yeah, Portland or no. So she's in New

York. She was she actually used to work at Macmillan too. We

didn't know each other then, but I remember seeing her in the

hallway, and I actually ran into her at a conference recently,

and she was like, Oh, you're Nelly. I've heard about what

you're doing, and I actually really want to talk to you. So

we very cool. Yeah,

yeah. And then I've got a couple other publishers who are in the,

like, beta testing for their own purposes phase, where they're,

like, deciding if they want to partner with us and test for us.

So that's

pressure, yeah, my God. I really, like, I really have to

try and.

Be charming and give them everything they want, which, you

know, I want to give them what they want. So it's not that

hard, but it is a lot of pressure. Well, that's the whole

startup thing, right? Yes, like, you have to be like, I'm so

great. Yeah, thing.

I'll wear a great turtleneck for you,

gray hoodie and, oh, wait, no, Steve Jobs is the black turtle,

right? Mark Zuckerberg is the Oh, I was talking about

Elizabeth Holmes. She was just trying to be like Steve Jobs,

yeah, she was true. She was trying to model herself after

Yeah, right, yeah. She's reading bad blood. I am. Yes, yeah. We

just like talking about horrible people. Yeah to them. No, just,

I don't want to have her on the podcast. Do we already ask about

the thoughts about the future of publishing, basically, right

now. All right, let's ask that one. Okay, what are your

thoughts about the future of publishing? Yeah. So I think

that publishing is going in a really interesting direction

right now. So right now, especially, I think there's kind

of an explosion of like, small apps that are trying to do one

part of the publishing process, like trying to streamline one

part of the publishing process. So my app, of course, is an

example of that. There's things like colibriel reader, which is

trying is trying to tackle online reading. Yeah, we're buds

on Twitter, yeah, yeah. So he's a really great guy. He's one of

my people. You should watch recommendations. Cool. There's

people like, I can't

remember the name of the company, but their product is

master plan. The CEO is Ken Jones, so he's trying to tackle

like,

I guess, discovering book content and sort of helping

publishers find a way to share their book content without

giving it, making it all or nothing, and without having to

create like. This is my sampler file. This is my like web, my

like Amazon, look inside the book file, and this is my print

file.

Yeah. So, and a variety of other publishers, I think there are

some distribution or a variety of other apps. So I think there

are some distribution apps out there,

and we're just seeing this explosion of

smaller people tackling one little thing, and I think that

that's going to evolve over the next few years, and we're gonna

see

a lot of market share either get taken from the big guys, or the

big guys are just gonna buy all the small guys and further

monopolize the market. Yeah, I am on the fence. I'm I'm a

little bit of a cynic in that regard, so we'll see which way

things shake out. I would love to see a smaller world,

yeah,

but we're also, I think digital reading has not stopped

evolving. I think that there's a lot of changes that are going to

happen over the next, I don't know, 10 years or so,

it's taken a long time to get publishers on board with epub

and to get them making ePubs,

but I think that publishers are now kind of feeling frustrated

around ePub as a publishing format, sure, less because of

the format, and more because of the devices that it's limited to

being read on. Yeah, so there's a lot of restrictions that those

devices add that ePub as a format actually supports a lot

of stuff,

but the devices just don't support that. Are people still,

are we still about devices? Or do you think it's just moving to

people's phones? Yeah, no, I think you're right phones, and

in the phone ecosystem, it would be the apps that are the

limitations. So the apps support more. So like the Kindle app,

the iBooks app, or I guess it's just books now,

they support more than like the old school Kindles, but they

still have limitations that they put on the ePub format.

And I think also,

readers are also discovering that, you know, e e books are

great again for, you know, reading on the go, or very

practical reasons,

but they just don't compare to print reading in terms of

getting lost in the experience again, because print has evolved

over so long, and ebooks are still very young. So I think

that there's a lot that will happen in terms of figuring out

the best way to present content digitally to people, and I don't

think that we've found that yet. And again, like I said, the W

3c, publishing working group, so we've been talking a lot about

what the next format might be. We were talking a lot about

developing a web book format specifically so separate from

EPUB, but

it would have a lot of the same things as EPUB, but specifically

before any kind of web publication. Okay? And that

actually just.

Just recently got stalled, mainly because, again, we were

having trouble getting publishers to agree to use it.

And if people aren't going to use it, then there's no real

point in pursuing it until people are really ready, right?

But it's sort of a chicken and egg thing, because you have to

make people do it, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And if it

doesn't exist, then what are people gonna do? Yeah, and

publishers, you know, they're, as I said, they're not tech

companies. They need some guidance in that regard. So they

need people to help them get there.

So why Portland?

No,

please don't say Portland. I don't

think you will. But never know. People come here for lots of

reasons. No, not at all. So I was living in New York. I was

working at Macmillan. I quit my job there to start heteros,

and I was no longer receiving an income, so I could no longer

afford to live in the city as you do. Yeah, so one of the

women who I was actually supposed to found the company

with actually already lived in Portland, so I just figured it'd

be easier. I had to move anyways, and it'd be easier if

we were in the same place, and I was from the West Coast also. So

I had a bunch of family out here, so I just did it. And,

yeah, that was, I guess, last April, April 2018

or somewhere around there, maybe February, I don't remember,

yeah, so it's a little over a year now. I'm loving it, yay.

Yeah, I've really fell in love with this town. I don't think I

will move back to New York.

Cheers,

yeah. Sadly, I do think I will have to be bicoastal for a

while, just because most of the people that I'm trying to work

with are in New York, and I need to have a physical presence

there for a while. So there will be a lot of travel in my future

for the next year or two. But that's okay, I can handle it,

although, you know, global warming is making plane rides a

lot less pleasant.

Also true, yeah?

Well, we have more remote working, yeah, yeah. So my other

founder is actually in Brooklyn also, so so we do a lot of

Google Hangouts, okay, yeah, lots of online code merges and

that sort of thing

that makes it sound like a party. All right.

Well, I think you have questions about, oh, I do have questions.

So the next question, so we saw in our research that you're a

drummer. Oh, yeah. Have you joined a band here in Portland

yet? Oh, well, I tried to have a jam sash with one of my new

Portland friends. Yeah, she plays the bass. It actually went

really great.

I think we had really similar styles, so we were coming up

with some cool stuff.

The problem with having a startup is that you do not have

a lot of spare time or mental energy.

So we sort of hit a wall where I was going on a bunch of trips in

a row, so

we didn't schedule a new thing, and then I was just sort of

like, I'm tired, yeah, like I'm either thinking about work all

the time, or I'm working all the time. Which I do? I do take some

time off. I go to the movies. I That's good play D and D. Yeah,

that you hate D

and

D.

I don't hate it. I just hate it. That's fair. That's that's a

great distinction.

There are plenty of things I hate for me,

yeah, I'm a horror movie fan, so I'm used to people hating things

I love. I love horror movies. Yeah, yeah. It's like a Venn

diagram. It is, yeah. It's exactly like that. Okay, I have

a follow on the middle.

I have a follow up question to the drama question. So do you

know about, like, the recent drama with slider Kinney. Oh, I

heard a hint. I think their drummer quit. Yeah, when you

think about that, are you? Are you fan of them? I do you know

there's their music and, I mean, I definitely know their music

and listen to them. I would not describe myself as, like, their,

like, super fan, like, I didn't go to their most recent shows,

yeah, yeah. But you went to really shows if yeah to their

most recent, yeah. I definitely have seen them before. Actually,

I saw them in Seattle, like, way back in the day, they played,

like, one of the big fests, yeah, when they're when they're

still cool, and they actually yelled at people for playing

hacky sack in the back of the audience, which was kind of what

a bunch of cops, yeah,

like for being a huge festival, like, give him a break. We gotta

let people play. Which festival was it? It was bumber shoe. Oh,

yeah, yeah, Jesus, yeah. That's shitty. Yeah?

Trailblazing with.

In

that yeah, they definitely deserve credit. Yeah until they

turn into cops, yes until they turn Yeah, no caps, yeah, no

cops, no cops allowed. Yeah, let's see. What other questions

do we have?

Let's see what bloggers should people follow if they're

interested in learning more about digital publishing, other

than you or companies, Yeah, or like calibrio, yes. I made a

list for myself. Hi, I have a tendency to as soon as I'm on

the spot, every name that I've ever heard will fall out of my

head. Don't you love when that happens in interviews,

especially when they're like, What are you reading right now?

And I'm like, oh yes. Like, I asked you that every I know, and

I know I have no answer now I have an answer. Last year I

didn't read anything, so I had nothing but

change, I know. Give us a review.

I'm gonna do it tonight. I told you. Well, I promise. Oh,

anyway, sorry.

Okay, so I have a list of people and companies and things. So

Laura Brady, of course, is sort of a another trailblazing woman

in ePub. She's great. Lars Wallin, who is the founder of

colibrio,

Rachel Comerford, she works at Macmillan learning, and she

actually is very passionate about accessibility, and

accessibility and digital reading especially, and she's

very vocal about it, and she's a great person to learn from. I

would love to talk about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You should

talk to her. She's amazing. And they Macmillan learning actually

has done some really awesome stuff. I think they're one of

the first companies to be fully have their ebooks actually fully

certified accessible. Oh, wow, yeah, there's this organization

called pagedmedia.org who has done really awesome stuff around

trying to build open source tools for publishers to use. So

we actually use one of their tools in our app. They've built

a page layout tool. It's very developer centric, but anyone

can use it, and it's what powers our ability to make that laid

out page preview right in the browser. So they have a few

people who work for them. Adam Hyde is their leader. Julie

Blanc is a really amazing person on their team. And then Fred

chasen is also a great person. Then a list of names. Wendy

Reed, who is on the W 3c Dave Kramer, spiah sigman, all W 3c

people who are doing amazing things. Wendy works at

racketing, Kobo, I think Kobo racket whatever it is, yeah,

they're still doing a lot of cool things with digital

reading. Dave works at Hachette, and spiah works at

again, Wiley and then booknet Canada, which puts on my very

favorite publishing conference, ebookcraft. It's where all the

true publishing tech nerds gather.

And that's a niche, yeah, yeah, it's definitely niche. But I

always learn something there,

and it's just this great sort of convening of people who really

care about digital publishing. And there's always a strong

emphasis on accessibility,

and just they cover pretty much every topic under the sun in

terms of digital publishing. So I've given a few talks there,

actually,

yeah, it's really great. And then they booknet actually has a

blog that's also really great, and they publish things just

about digital publishing or automated publishing or whatever

under the sun. Yeah, so that's my list. Awesome.

A lot. I'm gonna, I don't, I'm gonna go follow all of them.

Yes, you should I recommend.

All right, okay, so what are you reading? Oh, well, so I said I'm

mostly reading graphic novels right now. So I just started

Neil Gaiman's Sandman. Oh, my God, I'm on the first, the first

book right now. I'm loving it. Very good. It's been described

as one of the greatest graphic novels ever, and I am starting

to believe it.

Previously, the last like Book, book that I read was

the latest and last book in the Night Watch book series, which

is this Russian vampire Sci Fi series. They made a couple

movies. They made a couple movies. Of them, the movies are

not as good as the books.

They're really wonderful. I kind of, I fell in love with Russian

writing back when I was reading the classics with like Tolstoy

and Dostoevsky.

There's some, I don't know if it's like the translation of the

language or something, but I love Crime and Punishment. Yeah,

one of my favorite. I mean, maybe it's a horror fan thing.

That's possible. Yeah, I wrote my college thesis, actually on

Brothers Karamazov. It's Dostoevsky. They're similar,

yeah, so I think Russian writers tend to be there's just

something about the way that they write, like dialog and

interpersonal interaction.

Shins that I love.

So this guy wrote these, like, vampire books, but they just

feel very Russian to me, but they're still, like, very light

and fun. And

the last one, I think was called, like, I think was called

sixth watch.

And, yeah, it was great time. I'm actually reading

Neil game is North Norse mythology right now. Oh, wow.

And I haven't read anything he's done since I read American Gods

several years. Oh, wow. This is my first reading of anything

he's done. Yeah. I mean, I've never read one of his graphic

novels, but it was just like my mom sent it to me, and was like,

you like,

remember why she said, I really know about him because he's,

like, best friends with Tori Amos, yeah, I'm a huge Tory.

There's Amanda Palmer jealous. I don't fucking care. Yeah,

like, they're back in the day, she, like, said some really

shitty things about Tory.

But no, yeah, no, Tory, okay,

I kind of had this, like, knee jerk reaction against Neil

Gaiman, just because of, like, all of the, I guess there's a

lot of, like, indie fanboy around him, yeah, just boys, you

know,

yeah, yeah, I was kind of looking askance at Yeah, prick.

I'm judgy. Welcome, yeah.

I don't want to be so, like, I recognize that it's very silly

of me to, like, resist reading his books because I just because

of this reason that people like him, like that. Oh god. How

hipster. How hipster of me. Yes, whatever. I used to like the

dress and

Dolce.

Yeah. So yeah, Sandman is really great. So far, I'm about halfway

through the first and then Night Watch, he said. So this book was

called sixth watch, but it's in the Night Watch series. So start

from the beginning. They're all great. They're all very fun.

Awesome.

Corinne, okay, well, I'm ready. This week, I'm ready. I'm still

reading bad blood,

which is awesome. I did get the large print edition because it

is always the first edition that comes available at the library

when there's, like, a waiting everyone thinks they're too good

for it, yeah? Like, my eyes work just fine. I'll get regular. And

you're like, if you click on on large print, yeah, there's,

like, a shorter list.

Yeah. I think there were like 200 or 300 holds, and the

library for like, the regular version of the book, and this

one, it was like 40 or something, and I got it like

three weeks after I was so I was like, fuck yeah, large print,

yeah. I'm almost sorry that we're telling people that

now maybe we should edit it out. You can decide,

because I love our listeners. Yeah, okay, leave us a good

review. The

library is great, though, right? Yeah, it's amazing, lovely.

Yeah, that's so much love. Six watch. I was browsing the

shelves. Yeah, a rare event. Yeah, found it there. There it

is. Yeah, they're always there when you need a library, yeah, I

think that's honestly though I'm reading another Jen Kirkman

book, yeah, it's called,

I know what I'm doing, and other lies I tell myself. So do you

know who she is? I feel like I've heard of this book. She's a

comedian. Yeah, she's a couple, like Netflix specials and stuff.

So and I love her. So anyway, I just finished reading her other

book, so I started on this one. So she was the first one to

complain about Louis CK and she sure was, oh, wow, sure was,

yeah. And she complained about Bernie Bros constantly. Also, I

went to see her actually in, like her show or whatever. I

think it was, like a year or two ago here, and she said something

about Bernie and I swear to God, like 10 man buns just got up

and, like, walked out. It was beautiful. Anyway, yeah, but it

was wonderful. Anyway, what are you reading? Neil Gaiman, Oh,

you already said that. Sorry, sorry, that's about it, okay.

Oh, my God, I can't believe it. You're always reading like, six

books. Oh, I was reading some that I stopped reading. I was

reading

that I so

Oh, my God, I think I made it about halfway. I made it 30%

through, and I was like, I was just waiting for I was skipping

things and going to the scary part already totally. I saw, you

know, the old one, and then I watched the new movie. And I was

just like, I know what happens. I don't want to read about

killing gay people, like,

like, it's really violent and misogynist. And Steven King's

writing of women is really and you can tell he comfortable.

He's like, trying to critique it, yeah, but it's like, not

quite, yeah. I think he definitely is one of the classic

people who does the like, I.

Abuse of women as a plot point or a way to drive a car forward.

It's an award for Good boys.

I don't like abuse, but I'm going to exploit it. Yeah,

totally, totally. I will watch Doctor sleep, though, oh, I

don't know about just sleep. I've never seen you know about

the book, right? No, oh, it's the sequel to The Shining. Oh,

oh my gosh. I think my friends were just talking about it the

other day, actually. Yeah, he it came out in like, 2013

14. Okay, and it was good. I mean, it's not the shining, but,

like, Sure, it's pretty good. Yeah, all right, I've never read

The Shining. I've only seen Kubrick, which, of course, I've

heard is not, not the book, not approved by Stephen, yes,

apples and orange, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I feel like, you can

like both. Okay, I'll read it. I'll, maybe it'll be my next

book. Yeah, book, yeah, yeah. I don't know anymore. After

reading it, I'm questioning everything.

I mean, like, you know, even from seeing the movie, the

various movies of it, that it's complicated, yeah, it's just not

my I don't know. I, like, I'm not into, like, the whole

nostalgic childhood thing, but I do, yeah, I did like Salem's

Lot. That's the one. Oh, I loved that book. Yeah, so much. My mom

told me that when she read it, she got so scared she put it in

the freezer. Isn't

that a Catholic thing to put things in the freezer that you

think are demonic? I've never though. I don't know current the

Catholic, yeah, I don't know. She'll probably tell me after

this,

because, like, Hell is fiery or something. Get it cool. Maybe

could be sealed

in there, in the cold, and you're going to be in there for

1000 Yeah, Catholics do such weird shit. I mean, there's no

like, would put the exorcist book, yeah? That's like,

whenever you hear it, but someone like, I'm so scared of

this book, I pray freezer, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, that would not

occur to me. No thing you do, you take away its power, take

away its heat, yeah? Maybe that's what I don't know.

All right. Well,

you got anything else to plug? Yeah, headers.com

app.headers.com. If you want to just jump in and start playing

around, otherwise, you can just read about it on our website.

It's totally free, available to anyone. You just create an

account. You don't need to have a credit card or anything. And

we would love to hear feedback. So even if you are a self

publisher, please go ahead and play around and tell us how it

is working. You can email me directly at nelly@heteros.com,

there you go. Yeah, I did it.

You did a plug.

We're on Facebook at hybrid pub scout. We're on Twitter at

hybrid pub scout. We are on Instagram at hybrid pub Scout,

pod, and then go to our website, sign up for our newsletter.

We're gonna, I'm going to force my husband to read some smut

soon. I know I keep saying that, but it's really happening soon,

now that I

put in notice for my job, and I'm going to be not having a job

in a couple weeks. So, uh, my world except that I do have a

job, but I don't have any money. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I

have no idea if you got stuff that you want me to get into. I

am very

She's very smart, she's very talented. I'm also just game.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true. So if something sounds fun, I'll do it. Yeah,

she's open minded, yeah. Anyway, so cool party. Got anything else

to say? Karen, I don't think so. All right, everyone, thanks for

giving a rip about them.

You.