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A Saying That Has Stuck With Me…
Printed and Framed On a Card… This saying has been in my writing offices for 43 years now. Don’t really care who originally said it. But it came about because Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I were challenging each other to write one story per week, not rewrite it, and put it in the mail. Nina called it “Dare to Be Bad” and that stuck. And is the reason both of us started selling regularly. Takes far, far more courage to write and put out your work than to be so afraid as to not write and not publish anything. And that’s a fact. So the saying I have had in…
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New Promotion Class and Extension of Early Bird Discount…
Yes… We Are Doing A Promotion Class It is called… INDIE PUBLISHING PROMOTION 2025 A step-by-step guide to understanding how promotion is done for books in 2025. You don’t need to waste money on Facebook or Amazon ads. There are more great promotions than you have time for that you can do for your books that work and build a real fan base. 9 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. This will have some information talked about in the Writing Summer Camp, but a lot more added plus assignments…
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List of Workshops Starting September 2nd…
Some Really Great Classes and All On Sale! All of these are on WMG Teachable. All start either September 2nd or 3rd. I have put the links with most of them, but if the link doesn’t work, you can scroll through on Teachable and find it. (Search function on Teachable is not great.) Sale information at the bottom of the post. REGULAR WORKSHOPS… 5 available starting on September 2nd… 6 weeks long with 5 assignments… I respond personally to all assignments… $300 Four of these are available every month. This month Heinlein’s Rules is added in for one month only. To find them just go to WMG Teachable and hit…
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A Look At 13 Years Ago… For Fun…
In 2012 Indie Publishing Was Just Starting… Since I started this blog 13 years ago today, I thought it might be fun to look back. Kris and I had been getting books up indie for over a year, and I had just finished time taking care of a friend’s estate. I had also done all the covers and loading and everything. Over 300 books at this point, mostly short stories by me and Kris and some of Kris’s novellas and some of her novels. I had put up about sixty of my short stories indie, but if you looked at the Amazon sales page under my name, the only thing…
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Still Reading for Pulphouse…
Finding Some Great Writing… In fact, it is easy to say that almost none of the stories I have been reading are slush material. Almost none. Most of the stories pull me into the story with good depth and great characters and sometimes great voice. Yet I still am sending back a lot of them. Why? They don’t shout “Pulphouse Story.” Clearly they are good stories, maybe even great stories, but if they don’t have that “Pulphouse” feel, I stop reading and send it back and tell the writer why. I will be through the last stories sent in from the Series Collides Kickstarter in a week and in the…
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How I Write Clean One-Draft Fiction…
Writers Can Not Seem to Understand This… So first, let me say I averaged 1.3 million words of fiction a year from 1992 until 2023. You do the math. I wrote 106 novels in traditional publishing under a ton of pen names, and even more in indie. I have published north of 800 books and written over 700 short stories. Well over 35 million copies of my books are in print. All were written by the exact method I am about to tell you about… Tonight for a short story I came up with a title by combining two half-titles. “The Real Shape of Death.” So I started typing and…
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Some Basics About Writing That I Believe…
Okay, This Might Be Blunt… But here are some hard-held beliefs of mine that have helped me get through 50 years of writing and selling fiction. 1… I do not believe that anyone, for any reason, should tell another person what to write in their fiction. No one tries to tell me on fear of death, so this is not a problem that I face, but poor early stage writers are constantly bombarded by how they should write to market and so on and so on… I have told a lot of writers over the years to grow a backbone and write what they want. 2… I do not believe…
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ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen… Magic Paperbacks… Today talking with a friend on the phone and he told me he had just bought two of my writing books for his granddaughter. Seems she is reading a ton and loving the idea of writing her own books. Cool that he did that. Then he asked how much I made on the books. I said, “Electronic… 70%.” He said they were paper and told me which ones. Both are thin and priced at $12.99. I told him I made about six bucks total for the two books, and he said, “Wow, that’s not bad.” He was right, not bad at all. He asked how many…
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My Personal Challenge Update…
Not Quitting… Firing On… I set out to write one short story per day for this entire year. I am not out of the fight, but life needs to ease up a little bit over the last five months of the year for me to get close. Not expecting that. Hoping, not expecting. (grin) If I do come close, it will be a total success. Actually anywhere over 200 short stories in one year is a total success by any standards. That is more than most writers do in an entire career. But we shall see. I already have my challenge for myself set for 2026. I will write one…
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Last Day of Four Science Fiction Kickstarter!!!
Four Kristine Kathryn Rusch Science Fiction Novellas… Campaign ends at 7pm West Coast Time on Thursday. Hit SEVEN stretch goals and those have five brand new Pop-Up writing classes on details of writing science fiction. Value is $750 in workshops alone, plus seven Kristine Kathryn Rusch stories for all backers. So jump in and become a backer and get all the great stuff. Check it out at Four Science Fiction. Ends today Thursday at 7 pm. Wow, is there some good sf reading in this campaign. Don’t forget, you also get the four science fiction novellas with every award, but you can also get six of Kris’s other sf novellas.…