On April 14, I received a mass email from Draft2Digital’s CEO Kris Austen. His message informed me that they are: Why would they do that? Well, as the email states, legit indies are being punished because of AI slop: Like many platforms, we’ve seen a significant increase in automated and low-quality account creation in recent […]
CANADA (February 11, 2026) — The Canadian Book Club Awards (CBCA), the country’s largest readers’ choice award, today announced that Chaos Calling: Book I of The Xenthian Cycle by E. M. Williams has won the award in the SCI-FI/Fantasy category for 2025. “This afternoon, I found out how it would feel to win gold for […]
Jess Joyce, one of the co-hosts for the New Growth Show podcast, invited me on to talk about indie author marketing and my creative journey. The episode aired on December 17, 2025, but I was in a holiday crunch mode so I’m late posting about it. You can also listen to the episode on Spotify. […]
CANADA (November 20, 2025) — The Canadian Book Club Awards (CBCA), the country’s largest readers’ choice award, is pleased to announce the finalists for its 2025 awards. Eighteen books competed in the fantasy category this year. Chaos Calling: Book I of The Xenthian Cycle, by E. M. Williams, is among the three fantasy finalists advancing […]
Meeting your writing heroes can be a fraught exercise. It’s easy to put people on a pedestal and meet your idea of the presence rather than the person. Luckily, by the time I crossed paths with the late Ursula K. Le Guin in 2005, she was adroit at managing her public persona. I suspect she […]
The first time I read Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic, I was finishing Chaos Calling’s first draft (which turned out to be a skeletal draft of the whole Xenthian Cycle). I’d seen Gilbert’s Tedx talks about creativity and working through her phenomenal writing success after Eat, Pray, Love. When I learned she was publishing a non-fiction […]
Chaotic loss gets baked into the bones of many creative projects. My writing projects are no exception. From the outset of a new manuscript, I begin with a vision for what I want to achieve. Inevitably, as the draft gets longer, my ideas about what I’m doing shift. Sometimes, it’s because: That’s part of the […]
How did I end up with a rare ARC of Elantris, Brandon Sanderson’s first book in the Cosmere universe? Sanderson is a juggernaut in science fiction and fantasy. His work is so popular that when he announced four secret book projects in February 2022, he raised over $41 million from over 185,000 people. I’ve done […]
Conny Lee, host of the How Did I Not Know That? podcast, invited me on her show to talk about being a self-published author, why people choose to self publish and the process of getting a book released. Her episode aired on November 4, 2024. Here’s where you can listen: On the How Did I […]
And it’s a triple lift if you’re an indie author Writing a book series no one asked for may be one of the most massive creative commitments on Earth. And that’s especially true for indie authors. Collaborative art projects—film, television, theatre, etc.—strike me as equally bonkers in terms of their ambition. You get a lot […]