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Passive Income…
Passive Income: A Concept Critical in Copyright… No smart writer sells any copyright. (Now this leaves out all stupid-as-a-post traditional writers.) No copyright ever leaves the control of the writer. Writer’s license the use of a story to another party. No copyright changes hands. It really is that simple. But writers who do not understand copyright think they must sell their stories to make money. Nope. All income from your fiction writing comes to you in hundreds and hundreds of ways as passive income, meaning you don’t have to do anything to the copyright to get it. You have a reader buy your electronic book on Amazon (actually they licensed…
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A Top Question I Get…
I Get This Question In Some Fashion Once or Twice A Week… In general, the question boils down to this… “What do I (Dean) consider prolific?” Or more honestly put (which some do), “How much do I (writer) need to write to be enough?” I got this question twice because of my last post about professional writers always being behind on the publishing side. That post seemed to just boggle the mind of writers starting out, not imagining how they could write more than they could publish. So the question then comes up, “How much…?” My answer… I always start with the fact that every fiction writer is different. Writing…
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Interesting Problems…
Being Consistent and Prolific Is Fun… But often the publishing just doesn’t keep up with the writing and production. I know a lot of writers who have told me they are a number of books behind getting them out and published. Kris and I are both that way at the moment. Kris has a fantastic novel she wrote over a year ago that we were going to do a Kickstarter for, but then life, business issues, and other things got in the way and now we have that planned for this fall. She has two Fey novels, both new, that have not seen the light of day yet. One will…
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What-Ever-Happened-To?…
That Is a Really Sad Question Talking to my best friend of 62 years the other day and that What-Ever-Happened-To question came up a number of times. Half the time, sadly, neither one of us knew the answer. And for 75-year-old-guys, we are both still very sharp and have good memories. And I have no doubt that at times we all are the subject of that question in one group of people or another. Why I call it a sad question is because in the writing community, it usually means the loss of a dream. Usually some writer really pushing and learning and publishing and then something happens and the…
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A Few Conclusions I Came To…
Writing a Novel in 5 Days… While Traveling… I did that challenge back before the pandemic and before we moved to Vegas, and then I did blogs every day about the writing which has the title above. So in essence I got two books out of it. And a while back I went through and updated the book to 2026 for the Kickstarter (The four writing books will be going out this week for that. Main four are already out. See the update on the Kickstarter campaign for the links. Kris’s four writing books are coming.) So at the end, I did a 2026 update about the challenge and added…
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You Do What You Can Do…
Standing Outside Looking In… So many fiction writers who want to make a living with their fiction feel like they are standing outside a huge house looking in at all the writers making a living and just not know how to get inside. There is no secret other than having fun with your writing. All the writers who are making a living longer term have a few things in common (not the flash-in-the-pan ones who appear and vanish.) They all love to read, love to keep learning, love what they are doing with both the publishing and writing. They are all hungry for knowledge concerning anything to do with writing…
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Quick Update On My Word Count…
This is for Kris’s Motivation Challenge… I sat my total high, especially for starting off mostly cold, and with my having to stay focused on my own publishing challenge to hit that in the next six months. I knew it was high. I needed the focus, just as Kris needed the focus when she came up with this challenge. So I am now working on a brand new Cold Poker Gang novel titled at the moment CHECK RAISE. If I was on schedule, I would be around 4,000 words with a 7,000 word goal this week by Sunday night. I am just over 3,000 words, so feeling good about the…
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Learn to Listen…
If You Can Hear Yourself, You Make Better Decisions… This last week I had a decision to make about getting my writing restarted. Kris had come up with this great summer challenge idea to keep her focused on her writing through the summer. It is called the Kris Summer Motivation Challenge and I have written about it a number of times and yes, there still is six spots open. Sign up on Teachable. Information in previous blogs. So my decision as to what to do with the challenge for me was three-sided. 1… Was it too early in the organizing and publishing process to bring the writing back in? 2……
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I Am Going for the Kris Challenge…
Still Open for Signing Up… Kris and I are offering the Kris Motivation Challenge Seminar, with two motivation videos every week (30 total videos) and three webinars. Jump in and make sure you stay focused, even if your family is taking a trip, you can write in a notebook or on a laptop. Or get your words for the week done ahead. The focus in the key, and in the videos Kris and I will be giving a ton of motivation tips on how to stay in the writing, even when the garden is calling, the pool is waiting, and the hamburgers on the grill smell wonderful. You don’t have…
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Kickstarter Live!
MY STORIES HEADED INTO THE WORLD! FIVE SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTIONS by Dean Wesley Smith Can’t begin to tell you how happy this makes my creative voice to finally have my short stories started out into the world. Amazing, just amazing, and I want to thank you ahead of time anyone who decides to back this. Thank you. This is my 60th Kickstarter campaign and we already have a “Project We Love” from Kickstarter. Really cool. This is the start of me getting out a bunch of my short stories finally. (Story in the introduction as to what happened.) The base of this campaign is five science fiction 10-story collection. But…