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Last Day for Early Bird Discount!!!
FALL INDIE WRITING FESTIVAL… Online October 13th through November 7th Going to put this basic information here again since we still have more than enough spots open and just one day to get it at the early bird discount and save $200. (Information below on how to sign up.) We will have a minimum of five videos a day, often over ten when we do special focus things. There will be between 150 and 200 learning videos in the four weeks you can do on your own time. No assignments at all. But staying up with the videos as they go along also allows you to ask questions, which is…
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FALL INDIE WRITING FESTIVAL…
FALL INDIE WRITING FESTIVAL… Online October 13th through November 7th Since we did the last master class back six or seven years ago, we have been trying to come up with a way to bring everything in indie publishing and writing together. And have it all presented in a way that makes sense. With our regular workshops and classes and such, there are so many gaps of large areas we are missing that we want to cover. Really important gaps to indie writers and publishers. So this last summer in our INDIE WRITING CAMP, we did our best in an orderly fashion that we hoped helped writers of all levels…
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My Challenge
Four Months Left… My challenge had two parts. First, the idea was to write a short story per day for the entire year. Second, to get my writing back up to over Pulp Speed One, which is one million words a year. The year started off rough right from the start, with a ton of business things that just overwhelmed everything. Called a life roll, and I sort of expected it but hoped I could drive through it. Nope. It was just too much. But my word count has been hanging around the pace to make one million words, so that part I think I can smash through in the…
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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…