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Quitting Comments and Some Learning Sales
Seems I Touched a Few Writers… I got a bunch of email, but two letters were from writers who had quit as well as the other ones I mentioned. Both had less than 20 books discoverability and both didn’t understand why their books didn’t sell more than a few copies. Both had even bought into the myth of doing ads. They had no branding on the covers, dull plot-filled sales copy that no buyer would get past, and the two I looked inside at had no depth of openings at all. Alas, they wrote, but never bothered to learn how to get their books to readers. Sadly, both of them…
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Wee Beasties Storybundle.com
A Great Bundle!! I have an exclusive, brand-new, ten-story collection in this bundle called MY SOCKS ROLLED DOWN and other stories. Kris also has an exclusive collection in this. There are 14 books in this bundle by top writers, and eight of them are exclusive. That is a record for www.Storybundle.com. I even have a Pulphouse anthology in here that I edited full of ten great Pulphouse stories. Kris is the curator and she explains it all really well in her introduction to the bundle, so here is her intro. Jump into this one, folks. Some really great fantasy reading. THE WEE BEASTIES FANTASY BUNDLE The Wee Beasties Bundle –…
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Writers Quitting…
Three Letters… In the last seven days, I have gotten not one, not two, but three letters from writers about ready to quit. Now I get these letters occasionally, I think all professional writers do. Sort of a last gasp before letting the dream float away. Not sure why three this week. Maybe the way the world is right now, I don’t know. All three had clearly spent some time. None of them were published wide, seeming to think Amazon was the be-all and end-all. Real bad information there. Two of them had in the ten-or-more-book range before discoverability, but one had 24 books. No sales at all, or just…
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Update on Challenge and Vellum Battle
Won the Vellum Battle… I am sure I will have issues at times, but they will be minor. Got my collection through Vellum and turned into StoryBundle and that bundle will launch in a couple of days. I will do covers in InDesign, most interiors in Vellum, Smith Monthly interiors in InDesign, and fun Kickstarter designs in Canva. And that collection (called MY SOCKS ROLLED DOWN AND OTHER STORIES) is also book #1 in my challenge of 75 major books published in my 75th year. A few things have shifted for me in that for the first time in my life, I want to have every one of my short…
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Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again…
… And Expecting Different Results. That definition of insanity is often credited to Albert Einstein, but no evidence he actually said it. But wow does it ring true, and very much so for fiction writers. Every year I watch hundreds of writers just keep doing what they have been doing, make no real changes going into a new year, and then get to the end of the year wondering what went wrong. Why didn’t their word count increase, why didn’t they get those stories or books out published? And so on and so on. I suppose this is totally human nature, and patterns of behavior are very difficult to break…
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Mindset… A New Workshop Starting Dec 1st.
MINDSET: Optimism and Prosperity in 2026 A step-by-step guide to understanding how you can get your thinking ready for a great 2026 in writing and publishing. 5-week class given by New York Times bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith and planned by both Dean and New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch together. We will be honest and pull no punches, so if you want someone to pat you on the head, tell you what hasn’t worked for you in the past is how you should keep going into 2026, you won’t get that. Mindset is everything in so many things in publishing and writing and you can have a…
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Kickstarter Friday
Some Fiction Campaigns That Are Worth Studying and Backing… I do this every Friday when I have a few campaigns I think are worth putting here. Tonight three campaigns. I will not say much negative about a campaign. If there is too much or it is going to fail, I won’t post it here. And for those wondering where I get off judging Kickstarter Campaigns by fiction writers, I have now done 59 of them, every one funded and made money. My first campaign was in the very early days of Kickstarter. But if yoyu are going to study campaigns that I have done, study the last year or so.…
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Vellum 1— Dean 0
Just Got Hammered by the Learning Curve… Vellum is just plain strange, and for years I designed the interior of books in InDesign and before that Pagemaaker. Well over a thousand books. But unlike those two programs, Vellum has more things you can’t do than you can. And very little of what you can do is logical. And it does things automatically you don’t want done. (I got to learn how to turn some of that off.) So I am working on putting a collection together. Not difficult, right? I did hundreds of them in Pagemaker and InDesign over the decades. First attempt was a mess as I tried to…
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2026 Warm Ups… Craft
Start Getting Ready for 2026 Now! With some craft warm up deals with can’t-miss prices to help out. And remember, you can always give these as a gift to a writer friend. So starting with craft tonight, on the WMG Writer Store, Kris did a series of 5 craft workshops that many missed. They were called The Quick and Dirty Craft Classes. Each was three weeks long with a webinar that Kris answered questions at the end. All of it is recorded now so you can go over them at your own pace and go back to them at any time. Each was $150 each. Each focused on Kris teaching…
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Learning Curves
Pacing Myself… Learning One Major Thing Per Day… With Steph being gone, there are a number of things I just never got around to learning over the last number of years. (Sort of like many of you with copyright… Sorry, too easy…) She just did the tasks in her wonderful way. Today I learned, with the help of Chris York who has better eyes than I do, the inner workings of Zoom and recordings for webinars and so on. Plus today I did a couple covers in InDesign (Canva is a coming learning curve for me…) and also put most of a collection together to get ready to put into…