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A Writing and Health Tip…
Drink a Beverage of Choice… As some of you know, and that I talked about a week or so ago because I am slow reading stories sent to me, I somehow got Optic Nuritis in my only good eye. Pretty much blind for a few days, most spent in doctors and emergency rooms. Since then I have very limited vision which they say should get better over the next month to six months. (No idea what caused it, no cure, and no I do not have MS. I am typing this with the letters blown up way, way large.) So as I learn to live with this, I am needing…
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Lots of Learning
Amazing Week of Conversations and Learning.. Pretty exhausted after four days of getting up very early. But wow was it worth it. Major areas I have learned stuff about… Kickstarter… I will be sharing a bunch of this over time as we test some of it out, and also sometime this winter I will be updating the free Kickstarter class with a bunch of new suggestions. I will alert you here and over that class when we get it done. AI in Publishing. So, so many ways AI change indie publishing and our lives over the next five years. Art, audio, and text. Just amazing. I will do updates regularly…
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Lectures and A Panel Today
AT 20BOOKS CONFERENCE… At 10 am I do a talk about Writing into the Dark. That should be fun and will leave time for questions since the topic sort of begs to allow them. Then after lunch I am doing a talk about how to stay productive over a long period of time. So, so, so many writers burn out in a couple years or five years, or more likely they are gone in ten. How am I still here after selling my first short story in 1974? Yeah, that’s going to fit in 40 minutes. (grin) Sadly, most writers are so short-sighted, I will be stunned that anyone attends…
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COLLECTION CLASSES 2023
INCLUDES 2021, 2022, AND 2023 CLASSES I am in the process of launching two or three of these a night. So they will be appearing on Teachable as this week and into next week. There are 24 choices of Collection Classes including six new in 2023. Each class is 9 weeks long and you write five stories, do titles and blurbs and covers and publish the collection by the end of the nine weeks. If you turn in all nine assignments (5 are stories) you get credit for a Pop-Up of your choice. The title of the class is the theme of the collection, but no genre restrictions at all.…
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I Don’t Care!
I Really, Really Don’t… I constantly get letters from people talking about traditional publishing in one fashion or another, assuming, I suppose, that I still care about the buggy-whip factories of publishing. And sometimes, like a few days ago, I post about something going on in traditional publishing that just makes me laugh.I do posts like that to entertain myself because I had to live in that traditional publishing world for decades. I can make snorting noises at it now if I want. I do have interest when copyright issues are being hammered out in court by a traditional publisher, or a trademark issues. But past that legal interest, or…
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An Interesting Opinion…
From a Very Surprising Source… Some of you may be familiar with Mike Shatzkin, the great traditional publishing apologist for the last decade or more. I honestly stopped paying much attention to his Shatzkin File posts four or five years ago. But I still sort of follow his comments at times. It seems lately he just can’t ignore data anymore with indie publishing and with the blocking of the merger of two of the big five traditional publishers, he seems to be a little clearer on their position. And indie publishing and smaller publishers in general. Mike spends a bunch of the November 2nd letter talking about how Ingrams is…
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Workshops Not Ending… Only the Sales
Thank you for the kind words, everyone… But a lot of you are making it sound as if the workshops are going away. Nope, just the sales, and I do understand that will limit a number of you going forward. Just nothing we can do if we want to get these out to as many writers as possible who might need them. So here is what is happening that we have planned now for the workshops that I can talk about or announce… First, we will keep doing new regular workshops. The six that are there for November are the core. Other new ones will be added in and then…
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The Last Sale…
Ever…. And we will not change our minds. This is it. This week. Why the about face on sales??? We said in June we would do a regular sale the last full week of each month up until the end of the year. Well, total failure. What is success to us? Having writers take the workshops or classes to keep learning. What the regular sales did from June until now basically caused the writers who are taking workshops and learning to be cut more than in half. So the sales don’t help more writers take classes, they instead cut the number of people taking classes and learning. And that is…
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5 Does and 5 Don’ts For Fiction Writers…
Some Don’ts… 1… Writers, do not say you are going to go trademark your idea or your most recent book. It does not work that way. 2… Writers, do not say you are going to go copyright your most recent story or novel or idea. It does not work that way. 3… Writers, do not think everyone is going to steal your new idea. It does not work that way. (And chances are your wonderful new idea has been done a million times before anyway. However, it will be original if you write it in your voice and don’t rewrite it into pablum. (Definition of pablum is bland or insipid…
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What Is A Brand?
I Get Asked That Question At Times… My answer is, “It depends on what you are asking.” If you are branding a series of books, then branding is making the covers and layout of the books similar enough that a reader, at a glance, will know it is first, your book, and second, part of the series. You do that with name and title placements, fonts, similar art, and actual titles. Plus other smaller things, but you get the idea. Then there is “author brand” which depends more on the types of books you are writing and what readers can depend on when they pick up one of your books.…