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Kris Has a Birthday!
I Got Her Two Cakes… Why? Well, because for a decade or more, the only cake Kris got was some ugly thing I baked. When we lived in Lincoln City, OR, the idea of dairy-free to the locals meant they didn’t put milk on it, but covered it in butter. So we moved to Las Vegas where there are more major bakeries that do Vegan than we could visit in a day. (We managed six or seven one afternoon in only one area of town.) So today (Sunday, June 4th) I am taking Kris with a group of friends out to her favorite (and safe) restaurant for a fun dinner…
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Pen Names…
Some More On Pen Names… A friend wrote me and pointed out that I was a little harsh on not needing pen names in the indie world in a recent post. He reminded me that there are many reasons to use pen names, something I know and tell people all the time. Reasons to use pen names in indie… You write erotica and other stuff. Keep the erotica under a pen name. You are a doctor or some such thing in real life and don’t want the fact that you write fiction out to your clients. You work in law enforcement or law and write mystery or crime or thriller.…
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Zero-Sum Game
Publishing is NOT a Zero-Sum Game A zero-sum game comes out of game theory and basically means that when one person wins, another must lose. Writing and publishing does not work that way. There is not a finite number of readers who can read one book a year or a finite number of readers who read fifty books a year and everything in between. And readers come into genres, read for a while, and then go away, or new readers every year are grown and others die. A niche explodes, a niche dies. Nature process of reader’s tastes. No one book in the history of the world has reached every…
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Excuses…
Wow Can Writers Make Excuses to Not Write… Of course, those who have taken the Killing the Critical Voice workshop we offer every month know that if something you have made up in your head is keeping you from writing, that is critical voice winning. Critical Voice has one job, and that is to stop you from writing. Creative Voice is always positive. Critical Voice is always negative. So for some reason lately, I have been hearing some amazing excuses to not write. Now granted, we all have health and family issues that stop the writing. Those are not excuses. Those are reality and we come back to writing when…
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Fun Comments
Read All the Series Comments… There have been some really good comments. More than likely I’ll cover a couple more myths that infect both traditional and indie. But not going to deal with the beginning writer myths like writing quickly equals writing poorly, or that all good writing is rewriting. Those are beginner myths and not what I am doing this series for. But I will talk about the new path for Indie writers a little more. And where I see traditional publishing in a decade, using the history of the Dime Novels into Pulps and then the history of Pulps into Paperback publishing. The Pulps were dying a slow…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part 10… More Myths
More Myths on Both Sides… Part Three… I say this little introduction to each new parts… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing, with indie writers in charge. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new…
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Last Day of Weekend Sale
Ends Midnight Monday Night West Coast Time Since everyone here in the States does sales (as I just pointed out yesterday), we decided to see how many writers were paying attention and give those who were a three day sale of any workshop they want to get on Teachable for 50% off. That’s right, any, from the lifetime subscriptions to the June regular workshops, and everything else as well. For example, I thought this surprise sale might get a few writers signing up for the full year of THE DECADE AHEAD or maybe BITE-SIZED COPYRIGHT. First quarters on both are all up, and we are through the 9th week of…
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Everyone Is Doing Sales…
Always Been Aware of That Trend… But I never really, really noticed how massive it was before this weekend when we fired up a sale for workshops. That sort of made me become aware. Wow, just wow. Today alone I got email about three-day-sales from a company I bought socks from, two shoe companies, a t-shirt place, an audio studio, two restaurants, three casinos, two car dealerships, a bakery, a gym, and that was when I stopped paying attention. Kris got in on a couple of the sales, I could use some new running shoes. So I guess they work. But our goal was to just help some folks with…
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Paying Attention Sale
Holiday Here In the States… The holiday here is called Memorial Day which honors those who served in the military and also family members who are no longer with us. And it is a time where people take vacations since it is a three-day weekend, or they spend time with their families in picnics or other activities. Experts also say that today is supposed to be the busiest travel day of the year as well. And for writers, this tends to be the first major weekend of the Time of Great Forgetting. Writers just forget about writing and learning and publishing and often don’t come back to paying attention until…
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Just Writing Fiction Tonight…
The City is Quiet… My email is quiet, and I want to do some reading tonight of stories I am behind reading, and Kris’s new novel. But first I’m going to spend a few hours just writing my own fiction. To be honest, that feels weird. I normally have so many things that must be done yesterday, so much so that I work in the fiction writing late at night. But tonight I am going back to my schedule of getting to the fiction by midnight and if I can do that regularly, I will be back up to my old speed. So during this time of forgetting for most…