-
Second-Hand Sales
Another Topic I Get Lots of Questions About… And again, this topic is so full of myths about sales and publishing, it will be impossible for me to do this justice here. But we are going to do a Pop-Up on this topic soon that will go into why this isn’t a problem and how to use second-hand sales to help your own sales. Yeah, I know, crazy, but true. So for this topic, I’m going to use second-hand sales to mean sales out of used bookstores or garage sales or other places where the writer or publisher makes no money from that exact sale. To do a second-hand sale,…
-
Trust the Character
We Hear That All the Time… Trust the Character… What it basically means is just stay true to the character you have set up in the opening of a story and let them tell the story to you. It is your creative voice playing through the character, but it is great fun to just follow a character you are writing just as you follow a character you are reading in another author’s book. I am always surprised by my characters when writing. Well, this last week I’ve been puttering along on a novel, not doing more than a thousand or two thousand words a day, even though I really like…
-
Magic Bakery Workshop Moved to Classic
I Pulled It From the February Line-up… I looked back over the records and no one had taken the Magic Bakery workshop since last spring I think. So no point in listing it as a monthly workshop anymore, even though I think it is one of the most important workshops we have done. So now only nine workshops offered in February. I will continue to work to clean up old workshops so there is room for new ones this spring. So the Magic Bakery workshop is now a classic workshop. And it has been added to the Lifetime Subscription as a Classic workshop, and I left the original one there…
-
February Workshops Now Up
They Are Live On Teachable… A good list of workshops for February. And a few of the January workshops are still live as well if anyone wants to jump in late. But they won’t be still available by Monday. Also, anyone can still get the Lifetime Workshop Subscription that gives you complete control over when you can go through a workshop. Also, the first Futures workshop is available and the second one is available and going right now. There will be four in that series by the time it is all done. http://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/ Class #11… Feb 5th … Endings Class #12… Feb 5th … Point of View Class #13… Feb 5th … Writing…
-
No One Cares
And No One Will Notice… I constantly get comments and questions from writers worrying about putting out a book that someone might hate, or that might have a mistake in it, or whatever other excuse they can think of to not take a chance and put a book out on the market. All based on fear. All excuses. This sort of continues the last post about always wanting to go back and fix something you put out earlier. You think someone might care if you did that to your book, that someone might notice. Or even more stupid, they might notice that you didn’t fix it. Gadzooks!!! This area, among…
-
Special Stories
This Came From A Question I Get A Great Deal… In fact, I think some form of this question is the most common question I get overall. The question basically boils down to this… A writer has learned something new. Should that writer go back and fix some old stories or novels to make them better? The last two times I got this question (just yesterday and today) caused me to flash back to a memory. (Might have been being so tired from CES, but either way, here came the memory.) I remembered clearly how when I finished a story back in my “rewriting” days it was something special. And…
-
Fun First Day at CES
But Only 1,000 Words of Writing… The day chewed up my time completely, but a lot of fun. I did manage 1,000 words tonight on the book, but under my daily goal, but that’s all right. CES is only once a year. Kris did a really good blog on her Patreon page about our first day, so figured I would just add a few pictures and call it a night. Got to leave the condo tomorrow morning at 7:30 a.m. so another long day. I will talk more here about the cool stuff I am learning as I get it sorted out. Going not only as a SF and Mystery…
-
The Book With Baggage
An Idea for a Series of Posts… Or maybe a Pop-Up. Or a new writing book. Or all three. This came about when a number of professional writers were talking and writer J. Steven York mentioned a book he was going back to that he had struggled with. And then we got talking about that book (or two) that we all had that carried so much baggage with it, we either couldn’t finish it or don’t want to think about it ever again. I have never met a long-term professional writer that doesn’t have a book-from-hell story. Or a book so hard to work on that it is just not…
-
CES Show
Kris and I Are Both Going… For at least as long as our brains hold out from all the crowds and things to see. For us it starts on Tuesday. We are only planning to be there during the days, but my gut sense is that by Thursday we might both be burnt out. I might be wrong. The entire Consumer Electronics Show is spread over the entire city and I am not kidding. There had to be thirty or more places to pick up badges. We walked a few blocks downtown and got ours in the lobby of a hotel there. Free shuttles leave the four major downtown hotels…
-
A Crazy First Five Days
Workshop and Mentor Stuff… It has been a wild and crazy five days for me, both in ramping up the writing and exercise, but mostly in the WMG Publishing side of work. You know, first of the year business stuff. Longest five days I have had in a long, long time. But now things are smoothing out. And tomorrow I even turn in two book projects to WMG Publishing. One on time, one ahead of time. (They might faint.) So to get some rest and make tomorrow my best fiction writing day in a long time, I am just going to give you the information I gave out earlier in…