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Zero-Sum Game
Publishing is NOT a Zero-Sum Game A zero-sum game comes out of game theory and basically means that when one person wins, another must lose. Writing and publishing does not work that way. There is not a finite number of readers who can read one book a year or a finite number of readers who read fifty books a year and everything in between. And readers come into genres, read for a while, and then go away, or new readers every year are grown and others die. A niche explodes, a niche dies. Nature process of reader’s tastes. No one book in the history of the world has reached every…
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Fun Comments
Read All the Series Comments… There have been some really good comments. More than likely I’ll cover a couple more myths that infect both traditional and indie. But not going to deal with the beginning writer myths like writing quickly equals writing poorly, or that all good writing is rewriting. Those are beginner myths and not what I am doing this series for. But I will talk about the new path for Indie writers a little more. And where I see traditional publishing in a decade, using the history of the Dime Novels into Pulps and then the history of Pulps into Paperback publishing. The Pulps were dying a slow…
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Paying Attention Sale
Holiday Here In the States… The holiday here is called Memorial Day which honors those who served in the military and also family members who are no longer with us. And it is a time where people take vacations since it is a three-day weekend, or they spend time with their families in picnics or other activities. Experts also say that today is supposed to be the busiest travel day of the year as well. And for writers, this tends to be the first major weekend of the Time of Great Forgetting. Writers just forget about writing and learning and publishing and often don’t come back to paying attention until…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part 9… More Myths
Myths on Both Sides… Part Two… I say this little introduction to each new parts… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing, with indie writers in charge. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new era…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part 8… Myths
Massive Numbers of Myths on Both Paths… I say this little introduction to each new parts… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing, with indie writers in charge. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new…
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I Feel Bad for New Writers… Part 7… More terminology
Outdated Terminology Continued… As I said before, ew fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing, with indie writers in charge. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new era lasting about 50 years and the transitions lasting…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part Six… Things Change
The Changing Terminology… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new era lasting about 50 years and the transitions lasting about 25 years. Again, see my first post. New…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part Five… The Upside
The Choice Between Two Paths… This entire series has been talking about the choice new writers coming into professional fiction writing have between the old methods of traditional publishing and the new world of indie publishing. If you have not read the first five parts of this series, please do so now. This will make more sense if you do so. So in this chapter, I want to quickly go over what is possible for success on both paths. Traditional Publishing… For many, many, many writers, simply having a book published by a traditional publisher is the success. Period. And many writers don’t ever want to leave their professional job…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part 4
The Failures on Both Paths… In fiction writing, the only time you fail is if you stop writing fiction. Period. There is no other marker. You stop writing, you fail. It really is that simple. So in this series, I have been talking about the choices of paths new writers can take to get their books to readers. Traditional path and indie path. So what forces in those two distribution paths make a writer think they should quit writing and thus fail? TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING… On this path, the dreams can be crushed in a number of points along the way, causing maybe a great writer to stop writing. Understand clearly……
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A Second Way to Go…
Part Three of This Series… First two parts were in my blogs the last three days. I started this off by saying I feel bad for the young writers coming into fiction publishing today. They are torn between the myths of the old traditional publishing world and the myths of the new indie world. Publishing is smack in the middle of a transition to electronic and indie publishing. Over the last two hundred years, these transitions have taken 25 years or so before publishing stabilizes for 40-50 years. We are around year 14 right now in this transition. So in last part of this series I talked about how a…