Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself stripped of status, freedom, and certainty. As president of Carolco Pictures, Hoffman helped steer an era-defining slate that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Rambo, navigating a world of massive egos, creative brilliance, and financial brinkmanship. But ambition has its cost. After the industry turns, legal battles mount, and a federal conviction leads to imprisonment, Hoffman is forced into a confrontation far more exacting than any boardroom negotiation: a reckoning with his own choices, illusions, and moral blind spots. Set partly within the quiet, disorienting confines of Terminal Island federal prison, Karmic Winds traces a journey through humiliation and loss toward clarity and acceptance. Drawing on philosophy, Buddhism, and a lifelong search for meaning, Hoffman examines the nature of justice, the seductions of power, and the invisible forces—personal and systemic—that shape our lives. Neither a tell-all nor a plea for absolution, Karmic Winds is a deeply reflective account of success and failure, told with intellectual rigor and emotional restraint. It is a story of what remains when the titles disappear, the noise falls away, and one is left alone with the self...and the winds that carried them there.

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What should authors be doing to market their books, and when? Book marketing expert Jeffrey Yamaguchi, a writer and poet with 25+ years in publishing, joins Sarah Russo on “The Publishing Playbook” to explain why book marketing and book publicity aren’t the same thing, and why a successful campaign needs both.

In this episode:
• Book marketing vs. publicity: what you earn and what you pay for
• Why your book campaign timeline should start a year or more before pub day
• Why every author needs a newsletter, and when to start a Substack
• Red flags for pay-to-play and AI scams in publishing
• Bouncing back when a book campaign hits a setback
• What vinyl record stores can teach authors about promotion
• What Jeff is reading right now

For more information on Jeff’s work, please visit his website, or check out his Substack, Book Publishing Brick by Brick

Books mentioned in this episode:

“Ten Visits: Brief Accounts of Our Visits to All Ten Japanese American Relocation Centers of World War II,” by Frank and Joanne Iritani

“The Dog Stars,” by Peter Heller

Key Moments

02:19 - Book Marketing vs. Book Publicity 📣
Jeffrey and Sarah untangle the two jobs, what’s earned vs. what’s paid for, and the behind-the-scenes spending authors don’t see.

06:29 - Spotting Pay-to-Play and AI Scams 🚩
Fake podcast and festival invitations are flooding authors’ inboxes. Sarah and Jeffrey share the red flags to watch for.

11:52 - When to Start a Substack ✍️
Jeffrey explains why authors should start a newsletter early, and how to make the most of one even if your book is almost out.

14:34 - “What Should I Be Doing Right Now?”: The Book Campaign Timeline 🗓️
Jeffrey walks through his timeline and why the cover reveal is when a book becomes real.

16:41 - “You Still May Get a No”: How to Make the Case to Your Publisher 🤝
Be strategic with your asks. Jeffrey shares how to lobby for opportunities like regional indie bookseller shows.

19:51 - Bouncing Back from a Campaign Letdown 🌅
Every campaign hits a roadblock. Jeffrey and Sarah discuss regrouping, and why marketing holds steady when breaking news derails publicity.

21:39 - Marketing Lessons from Outside Publishing 🎶
Jeffrey explains why authors should look beyond books, from movie campaigns to how record stores run their social media.

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B. Joseph Pine II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial startups, and cofounder of Strategic Horizons. Previous books include The Experience Economy, which is credited with introducing the concept of “experience” to the business world, Authenticity, and Mass Customization.

Now, in The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations (Harvard Business Press, 2026), Pine brings his clarifying lens to the Rosetta stone of transformation, the customer service experience. What’s the percentage of CEOs who have made a real commitment to the front-line customer service workers who so often serve as the public face of a company in call-center and other interactions? By Joe Pine’s count, odds are merely 5% is an honest answer—and a shame, for the Virtuous Circle means that happy employees mean happier customers, too, inevitably. This episode explores Pine’s vision to inspire customer service departments whose true mission isn’t just resolving complaints but instead serving as guides who help customers achieve the best version of themselves. To do so requires understanding the customer in a way a chatbot never can. To do so means ensuring that the customer service staff isn’t merely a warm body, they’re warm-hearted and given the skills to be empathetic. Want an episode that rings with conviction, this is it.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.

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Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.
From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider the economic and social forces shaping contemporary literature – be they the conglomeration of publishing houses (see Dan’s Big Fiction) or the impact of platform capitalism upon authorial labor (see Sarah’s Content Machinesand Aarthi’s We the Platform).  We acknowledge the hollowing out of institutions meant to cultivate appreciation for literature and ponder the viability of platforms like Substack for reconstituting a literary sphere. Finally, what would a discussion of the literary ecosystem be without addressing the elephant in the room: AI. We bracket the author scandals to address the supporting players under threat: the translators, the audiobook narrators, the humans who bring books to readers across languages and formats. Come for the literary sociology; stay for the inside scoop on “prompting” a dark romance novel.

Mentions

• Marx – base-superstructure model
• Bruno Latour – actor-network theory
• Sophie Bishop – Influencer Creep
• Andrew de Waard -  Derivative Media
• Pierre Bourdieu – The Rules of Art

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In this episode, host Richard Lucas sits down with Polish entrepreneur, author, and publisher Marcin Osman for an insightful conversation tracing his remarkable journey through entrepreneurship, publishing, and personal transformation.

Marcin shares how his entrepreneurial path began two decades ago as a broke student attending Toastmasters in Kraków. Through humble curiosity, networking, and cold outreach, he built his first marketing agency—landing major clients before facing the hard lessons of business failure. Undeterred, Marcin pivoted into self-publishing, pioneering a pre-sale model that grew OSMPower into a 5M PLN/year publishing powerhouse. Over the years, OSMPower published Polish editions for global figures such as Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Wim Hof, and Fredrik Eklund, alongside Marcin's own bestselling books like Biznes ci ucieka (Your Business Is Getting Away) and Sprzedawaj więcej (Sell More).

After building a massive digital footprint with over 1,200 videos and viral social media campaigns, Marcin recently made a bold strategic shift: archiving his entire video catalog to transition away from relentless content creation. Now based in Madeira, he discusses entering a new phase of life focused on depth over hustle, exploring new ventures, and helping others drive real conversions.

Key Links

Marcin Osman Official Website

OSMPower Publishing Store 

Marcin Osman Facebook Page

Marcin Osman Facebook Profile

Mentioned Organizations & Publishers

Toastmasters International

OSMPower Publishing

Venture Adventure  

Mentioned Books (Marcin Osman & Published Works)

Biznes ci ucieka (Your Business Is Getting Away) - Marcin Osman

Sprzedawaj więcej (Sell More) - Marcin Osman

Jak radzić sobie z porażką (nie tylko) w biznesie - Marcin Osman

Przedsiębiorca w podróży - Marcin Osman, Dawid Dudek, Kamila Kruk

Filozofia lekkiego plecaka - Marcin Osman, Kamila Kruk

Sprzedaż (The Sell) - Fredrik Eklund

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Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Princeton UP, 2026) retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector. Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing this work? And what kind of labor politics does it generate? If service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how exploitation functions today. Uncovering a history that runs from eighteenth-century servants to present-day gig workers, Annie McClanahan retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated. Assembling a diverse set of sources for understanding and reimagining service work—from reality television and conceptual poetry to novels and workers’ own descriptions of what they do—McClanahan explores three paradigmatic types of contemporary service labor: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork. She shows how work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity.

Annie McClanahan is Associate Professor of English at UC Irvine. Her first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture explores how U.S. culture responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. She has published on topics like the rise of microeconomics and methodological individualism, the cultural history of economic stagnation, so-called “neoliberalism” and the history of the university, and the politics and theory of sexwork. 

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Making Sense of China's Economy (Routledge, 2023) untangles China’s complex economic structure, evolving issues and curious contradictions, and explains some key features of this most puzzling of global economic powerhouses. This book reveals how factors such as demographics, the initial stage of development in 1978, the transition away from full state ownership and central planning, the dual urban-rural society, and a decentralised governance structure have combined to shape the economy, its development and its reforms. It shows how the pragmatic and adaptive nature of China’s policymaking upends familiar perspectives and hinders simple cross-country comparisons. The book also explores crucial topics including the property market, debt accumulation and environmental challenges. In this book, Tao Wang innovatively weaves the multiple strands of China’s economy into a holistic and organic tapestry that gives us unique insights from both a Chinese and an international perspective. This book is critical reading for business leaders, investors, policymakers, students, and anyone else hoping to understand China’s economy and its future evolution and impact, written by a specialist who has studied the country from both inside and out.

Tao Wang is senior advisor at UBS Investment Bank in Hong Kong, and until recently was chief China economist at the firm.

Michael Leger is Policy Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Meg Reid and Will Evans join Mesha Maren to consider what makes up a literary ecosystem. As leaders of two nonprofit independent presses,Hub City Writers Project and Deep Vellum Press, Meg and Will describe their roles as publishers, booksellers, community builders, and advocates working with the many interconnected players in publishing: writers, readers, translators, critics, librarians, distributors, and funders. They discuss how independent presses create literary infrastructure by staying rooted in their communities, building relationships with readers, and making space for voices and stories that might otherwise be overlooked.

The conversation turns to the impact of consolidation across the publishing industry and the effects of a marketplace increasingly shaped by scale. Will explains how Deep Vellum’s origins were tied to a concern that conglomeration was narrowing access to translated literature—and how that same narrowing affects writers and readers in local communities. Meg reflects on Hub City’s intentionally small publishing model and the ways independent presses can offer an alternative built around people rather than volume. Together, they explore the possibilities of a more diverse literary landscape, one where readers are invited to discover books beyond the dominant channels.

From bookstores to distribution networks, Meg and Will unpack the systems that determine how books reach readers. They discuss why independent presses have increasingly opened their own bookstores, how distribution consolidation affects which books appear on shelves, and why availability in a warehouse does not necessarily mean availability in a bookstore. They also examine the difficult economics behind publishing: inventory costs, shipping, print runs, pricing, and the challenge of keeping books accessible while sustaining small presses.

Closing with the announcement of the Literary Arts Fund’s first round of grants, Meg and Will reflect on what sustained philanthropic investment could mean for literary nonprofits. They describe the importance of long-term support that allows presses to take risks, deepen community work, and collaborate across the literary field. For both publishers, the future of books depends on strengthening the connections among all parts of the ecosystem—and finding ways to invite more people into it.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Meg Reid, Hub City Writers Project
• Will Evans, Deep Vellum Press
• Dan Sinykin, scholar and author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature and American Literature & the Long Downturn
• Ingram
• Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
• Two Dollar Radio
• Milkweed Editions
• Center for the Art of Translation
• Two Lines Press
• The Literary Arts Fund
• Mellon Foundation
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

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The Integrity Compass: Leading with Ethics in a Changing World is a practical, readable guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, technologists, managers, policymakers, and students navigating complexity and pressure. Blending lived experience with clear frameworks, it shows how integrity becomes action—especially when deadlines, incentives, and power dynamics push the other way.

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How Do AI & Innovation Cohabitate?
 

Bryan Cassady is an author, professor, and all-around innovator, whether in book form or in classrooms, real and virtual, stretching from Europe to India.  He is a professor, consultant, and a serial entrepreneur now with a mission: to teach 1 million innovators by 2027.

He has built companies in 6 countries and trained 40,000+ leaders. He’s also a former professional racquetball player turned mathematician, a United Nations professional who speaks four languages. A researcher who has published on innovation, alignment, and social-media addiction. He’s co-created books with 50+ experts worldwide, including the international bestsellers CYCLES and The Generative Organization: AI Playbook for Exponential Leaders.

There’s the question before the formal questions begin, and then there’s adding humans into the loop—and all across the innovation process, AI has an instrumental role to play. That’s the verdict of this week’s guest, Bryan Cassady, who, true to his word, has put together an outside-the-box book that has brought into the fold multiple co-authors. One of Bryan's main points in both his book and this interview is that AI is a brilliant co-pilot, but a terrible pilot alone. Good prompts are vital for establishing context, role-playing scenarios, and using synthetic-user personas to create a Customer Avatar that helps you tell whether your innovation is likely to find buyers in the marketplace. If there’s a more charming, thoughtful guest than today’s, we’d be surprised. 

Bryan’s Offer

You can learn more about him at BryanCassady.com and take advantage of his offer to download a free book and toolkit here, helping him achieve his mission above!

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out the website here.  

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It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.”

Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have responded since 2008. (That means compression" so please Google Aarthi to learn more about her Duke professorship, earlier Levin-prize winning Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe, 1914-2016 , role as President of the Society for Novel Studies; and forthcoming co-edited Columbia University Press collection of conversations from podcast she co-founded, Novel Dialogue.) Aarthi is brimming with unexpected insights about writers responding in varied and unpredictable ways to textual production under digital conditions: Patricia Lockwood, Lauren Oyler, Tao Lin and even Sheila Heti, who early on experimented with LLM conversations in the New Yorker. She sees a new range of writers (Vauhini Vara, Meghan O'Gieblyn) maintaining a commitment to experimental writing, while engaging the power dynamics befalling them with this new tool, what she calls a new case of the "writer's hand at a distance."

Finally, when it comes to defining the "multi-front battle" university English departments will have to fight for their survival, Aarthi also wants to respond generously to students whose desire to write is as strong as their desire to read: why should we condemn that as a narcissistic impulse?

Read the episode here.

Mentioned in the episode

• Karen Hao, Empire of AI
• Sarah Wynne-Williams, Careless People
• Laurence Lessig Free Culture
• Xu Bing's Book from the Ground
• Fred Bennison's Emoji Dick.
• “glitch art”

Recallable Books

•  Elizabeth Eisenstein's 1970 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, as well as this AHR debate between Eisenstein and Adrian Johns.
• Ben Mangrum, The Comedy of Computation: also this excellent Recall this Book conversation about the feared obsolsence of the human knolwedge worker).

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