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Pricing Silliness and a Learning Lesson
Five Years is Forever in Indie Publishing… Well, I spent the last two nights going back and trying to update and then even fisk my own post from five years ago about pricing. What a fool’s errand. The post was so out of date, I just kept shaking my head in amazement and wondering who wrote it. I was looking at it through 2017 glasses and a ton of new knowledge. Stunning, just stunning how many changes in this business have happened. In the last five years we have done a master business class here on the coast every October, the next one in a few weeks. And every year…
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Working On Pricing Post
Plus Working On Workshop Stuff Last Call for the October Online workshops that are starting. Still room in all of them. Online Workshops I will announce officially with description the new online Novel Structure workshop tomorrow while posting the November workshops. Actually I now have workshops posted out until April for those thinking of taking advantage of the Kickstarter workshop specials. There are some slots that say (TBA) for new workshops to come along. This Novel Structure Online Workshop will not be a “how to outline” workshop, but instead a workshop to teach you at a deep level the structure of novels. In numbers of genres and with different types of…
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Star Trek Stuff
Still Typing with One Hand… So a Blast from 2012! I wrote this originally in 2012, over a hundred novels ago… I have republished it at least once, but it is good Trek history. ————— Last week in the mail (2012) I got this huge packet of royalty statements from Pocket Books. Now understand, when I say huge, I mean huge. Maybe 200 pages. I’ve written shorter novels to be honest. These statements are only for the books I did with Pocket Books that are still in print in one form or another. And a bunch of them are Star Trek books of one sort or another. Looking through those statements,…
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My Star Trek Writing
A Blast From the Past I wrote this is July of 2012, eleven years ago. I had been indie publishing my own stuff for three years at that point and WMG had become a corporation in May of that year. I was solidly in my blog streak. So thought this would be interesting to bring forward just for historical perspective… July 2012… Last week in the mail I got this huge packet of royalty statements from Pocket Books. Now understand, when I say huge, I mean huge. Maybe 200 pages. I’ve written shorter novels to be honest. These statements are only for the books I did with Pocket Books that are…
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More On In-Person Workshops…
All Set Up… And Getting Sign-Ups… So I figured I would mention a few things. First off, here in Vegas the Covid statistics are very low, in the moderate range and are dropping steadily. No masks required anywhere. In the entire state there are just over a hundred people in the hospital, all of them not vaccinated and most of them older and up north where the non-vax folks live. All of them have other conditions as well. But even so, we are still going to require for all of 2023 workshops that everyone attending an in-person workshop must have proof of vaccination and boosters. No exceptions. Do not make…
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The True End of Trade Publishing…
At Least As Anyone Knows It… Trade publishing is what I call traditional publishing. The reason for the word “trade,” very, very, VERY simply put, is that the publishers don’t sell directly to readers, they sell into the trades. The trades in publishing are a distribution system that is an old-fashioned channel to get books from an old-fashioned printing presses to warehouses to distributors to bookstores and then into the hands of readers. (By the way, three of the major trade printers have filed for bankruptcy or shut down. That is another really bad sign that causes books to be extremely delayed.) Trade publishers do not care about readers and…
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A Scary Topic
A Realization Tonight… Bookstores might not survive this virus in any form I know. Online bookstores will, sure, but physical bookstores, not so much. Here is what made me jump to that idea. First, some history and a lesson on how major publishing used to work and works now. Back 15 years ago… Traditional publishing was in total control of the industry and had been for forty years. A book would go into one of the offices through an agent, get bought, get rewritten for cash flow reasons, then copyedited and sales meetings and so on and be ready to go in one slot or another in the monthly imprint…
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Sales Numbers
Some Interesting Comments… A number of posts back I talked about the difference between indie writers and traditional publishing writers. Not one person thought my sales numbers of over forty thousand for the traditional published author were too high. No one even questioned them. (They were far too high for 2019.) But wow did I get a lot of people objecting to around 50 copies a month average sales for indie. I understand that. I was doing a comparison on two books between the two types of publishing. And I used the word average, but so many writers don’t understand that term when it comes to sales. So let me…
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Myth Lectures
The Sixth Lecture Is Up… It’s the first one in the Roadblocks bundle. The other four later this week in that bundle. So here, once again, is all the information about the myth lectures… Fiction Writing Myths Lecture Series… The first six lectures on the myths of fiction writing are now available on Teachable.com. There will be twenty lectures total, twenty different myths in four different lecture bundles. This first bundle of five lectures we are calling Creation. There will be three other bundles of five lectures each, totally twenty different lectures of nine or so videos each lecture. (They will appear as I get them recorded.) In other words,…
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The Myths of Fiction Writing Lectures
Fiction Writing Myths Lecture Series… The first five lectures on the myths of fiction writing are now available on Teachable.com. There will be twenty lectures total, twenty different myths in four different lecture bundles. This first bundle of five lectures we are calling Creation. There will be three other bundles of five lectures each, totally twenty different lectures of nine or so videos each lecture. (They will appear as I get them recorded.) In other words, each bundle of five lectures has around 45 videos. Each lecture will have nine questions we ask about each myth. The nine questions for each myth are: — What is the origin of the…