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A Reminder of Traditional Publishing Stupidity….
The Past is Present… A few days ago I got a huge packet of royalty statements from Pocket Books… Huge. And a check for $9.12 for six months. On those statements were the “sales” and returns of thirty-seven books I did for them (I did more, but they are out of print). Most of the statements were negative by more thousands than I could imagine. That packet reminded me of a post I wrote a long time ago here about Star Trek books I wrote for Pocket Books. Turned out I wrote that post on July 7th, 2012. After I got a big packet of royalty statements. Twelve years ago…
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ONLY A FEW MORE BACKERS NEEDED…
To Hit the Special Stretch Goal.. The Pulphouse Fiction Magazine Subscription Drive 2024 Kickstarter campaign is going great. By hitting the third and fourth stretch rewards, all backers will get two crazy Pulphouse anthologies and also a chance to submit a story in both August and October to Pulphouse. Understand, Pulphouse Fiction Magazine is never open to submissions. But sometimes, in these subscription drives, if we get high enough, we open submissions of one per month per backer. And we are there. So we have added in a Special Stretch reward. We are trying to hit 120 backers by late Sunday night… And we are only 3 backers away as…
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Great Bundle Sale Still Going!!
Any Bundle on Teachable (Including The Six New Ones) Any bundle is 50% off on Teachable. And as some suggested, we are adding in new bundles to focus on certain topics We have six now with more coming soon. To get a bundle at half price, simply go to WMG Teachable, find the bundle or bundles you want, and hit purchase. Then put in the code… GREATBUNDLE And hit apply and you will have it for 50% off. And most bundles are really good deals to start with. We are doing this because we are launching the FOCUS BUNDLE series. But first let me list the large bundles, the ones…
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What Is A Weekend?
A Great Question That Applies to Professional Writers… Kris and I honestly at times don’t know what day of the week it is. For example, tonight, on the way home from the Aces’s game, we ran into a bunch of traffic right near the Art’s District near where we live. Neither one of us could figure out what was going on until finally Kris said, “Oh, it’s first Friday.” First Friday of every month there is a massive arts’ fair in the downtown area. Even though earlier we had done a normal Friday lunch with writers and I had done a webinar that is always late Friday, neither of our…
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She’s Doing It Again…
Kris Wants to Do Another Challenge for the Summer!! Not kidding. She told me that and for the next three days I asked her if she sure until she got mad at me and said she was SURE!! It seemed the January challenge and the May challenge really kept her focused on writing first every day, even with all the business stuff she has been dealing with. And it was a lot, let me tell you. Her challenges work like this… She writes a letter to me every day telling me what went on in and around her writing and how many words she got done. I take that letter…
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It’s Here!!!
The Time of Great Forgetting.. In all my years of watching writers go through this period from April to the middle-end of July, break all streaks, get too busy to write, actually forget about writing and publishing completely, I have not seen a year this bad except for the spring two years after the pandemic. That was the worst, but this is coming in a close second this year. Not a clue why. It is just very, very clear to watch. So in this time, the focus is on family (as it always should be), vacations, gardens, nice weather, and just GETTING OUT OF THE HOUSE. With writing and publishing,…
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Fiction Branding… Part 12
The Value of Copyright… This will be very basic in this chapter. Very. And then in another post on branding, I will talk more about estates and so on which is very complex and writers need to think about it. To start off with, many of you automatically defaulted to the… “My copyright has no value. It really doesn’t sell.” The problem is that statement is a belief that has no basis in any reality. Sort of like believing in a Yeti having babies with a an alien from space. It could happen, but more than likely your belief is just wrong. Copyright is a form of property under the…
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Fiction Branding… Part 11
Short Fiction and Discoverability… I said clearly in the last part of this series that short stories, standing alone, do not lead to major discoverability in the calculation of 20 to 50. Wow, I really wish they did. However I left the impression that short fiction does not help in general discoverability and that is so, so far wrong as to be funny. Short fiction is a major source of discoverability, just not in the 20 books to 50 thousand thinking. Let me start off with one major thing here that I will talk about later. NEVER PAY FOR PROMOTION OF ANY KIND. You could make that a hard and…
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EXPECTATIONS…
A Topic So Large I Have Considered Writing a Book About It… Expectations are both powerful and deadly to writers. But to early stage writers, mostly deadly. A positive expectation can come from experience. For example, back in traditional publishing days, when I was hired by a publisher to write a book, they had an expectation that I could do the job and I had an expectation I could do the job. I like testing myself with writing challenges. I always go into them with an expectation that I can hit the challenge and that gives me fuel to keep going on tough days. When I send a story to…
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Fiction Branding… Part 10
20 to 50 Thinking… And how branding fits with that. 20 to 50 is shorthand for having 20 major books published will make you 50 thousand a year. And if you do a bunch of things right, it often works. But you have to do a bunch of things right. Why 20 Major Books? Ways of discoverability, basically. If you have one book, that book can be found through all the places you have it for sale and that’s it. So say you are wide and have it out in 150 different stores around the world, plus paper through Ingrams. (I am estimating that number of stores by counting up…