-
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…
-
Cash Streams and Writing Income…
A Making A Living Mentorship… Kris and I have been talking about this for a very long time and we are still not going to try it. At the moment, we haven’t figured out all the moving parts. But we are still messing with the idea. One part that came up this week for the few who are taking the Making a Living with Novels class is cash streams. That class is more of an awareness class, not really that much of a hands-on how-to, which is why most of the time it is a classic workshop. The awareness is basically how far you need to go to make a…
-
The Fun of the Uninformed…
And Sadly, They Know How To Type Letters to Me… I have no problem at all with questions on most topics, mostly writing and publishing. And I have no real issues about what people think of me. I’ve been in this business for over fifty years. Seen some amazingly stupid things and did a few of them myself along the way. But today I got a letter from someone who seemed to have an issue with me (again which is fine) but his issue was how can I make a living with my fiction when clearly my Amazon sales numbers are so low and my author ranking is so low.…
-
Fantastic New Storybundle!!
THE ESCAPE FROM 2026 BUNDLE I have a Thunder Mountain novel in this fantastic new bundle that Kris has put together. And also you can get the Classic How to Write Time Travel workshop. 14 books by some fantastic writers and one class, all for one money. Amazing deal! Here is Kris’s introduction to ESCAPE FROM 2026 BUNDLE… The Escape From 2026 Bundle – curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch If time travel existed, everyone would target 2026. Or maybe 2016. Or maybe 1980—or heck, 1875—depending on when you believe the seeds of this nightmare year were sown. I proposed this bundle in late 2025, expecting 2026 to be bad…but holy…
-
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…
-
Short Story Organization…
I Am Slowly Winning the Battle… I think I have most of my short stories that I want to move into the future on my spreadsheet now. Maybe I will find another thirty or so, but for now I am happy. A whole bunch of stories are just dropping into deep storage. And at the moment I am not reprinting any of my early short sales that I sold to different markets because I wrote them on a typewriter and I see no reason to bother with them. (Yes, I know how to scan, but again, no point at this time.) Only exception is my story that was in Writer’s…
-
Quick Update On My Publishing Challenge…
Still On Target… My challenge, at its core, is to clean up and get all my short fiction into print so I can get back writing without wondering “What was the point?” I have now put together 26 different 10-story collections. 260 different stories. It has been great fun and I have done covers for all of them. More than likely I have that many more to go before I get everything into print, but that I find exciting. To start getting these books out, I am doing a collections Kickstarter in May. Focus on science fiction. 5 collections are the main ones, with five more that can be gotten…
-
WRITING STORY BUNDLE!!
It Is Now Live!! 14 Exclusive Books and a Class! This is through Storybundle.com/writing and is amazing. Kris put it all together and it is amazing. Here is her introduction and details about Storybundle.com The 2026 Write Stuff Bundle – Introduction by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Long about January, I got the idea to do an all-exclusives StoryBundle. I knew we had our annual StoryBundle on writing coming up in April, and I figured if I asked nicely, I could get a dozen writers to come up with something new just for the bundle. Most of these writers blog already. They’re experts in their field, not just in fiction, but also…
-
Working Over Another Writing Book…
Actually Three Books Into One… This weekend I went over and updated to 2026 “How to Write a Novel in Five Days While Traveling.” And today I went over and updated, “Writing a Novel in Seven Days.” Both books are a series of long blog posts detailing how to get ready for the challenge, day-by-day the process, the thinking, the attitude. And here in 2026 they stand up very well after I added a bunch and cleared up a few things. Next few days I will go over and update “How to Write a Novel in Ten Days.” I am hoping it holds together as well and then I will…
-
Returns and Ingrams…
This is a Great Topic and Question… Basically, when loading books to Ingrams paper and hardback, should you accept returns? Allowing book returns started as a promotion to help bookstores in the depression in the 1930s. And after that, no one publisher had the guts to take the hit by ending the allowance of returns. This made the bookstore owner take no responsibility in the books they ordered. A horrid practice. When I came into the business in the 1970s and up through the mid 1990s, this practice was so bad that you could stand in the mall and look into a B’Dalton’s mall store and know that in six…