• Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing,  workshops

    Regular Monthly Workshop Sale

    Last Full Week of Every Month… Can’t believe it is the last full week of the September already. Wow. The sale code to get everything 50% off on WMG Teachable is SeptemberRegularSale50 Just hit purchase on anything you want and on the next page put in the code and hit apply and your choice will be 50% off. NEW STUFF BEING ADDED… October regular workshops are being added and will all be up in a day or so. I will do a list here, but for the next few days you can still get the active September workshops and I’ll work with you to get caught up on the first…

  • Challenge,  Kickstarter Campaign,  On Writing,  publishing

    Why Do We Do Kickstarters?

    I Got That Question Today… The question sort of caught me by surprise, to be honest. First off, surface reasons. 1… It gets new books to readers ahead of the publication date and at a discount. Fans of a series or a writer enjoy that. I know I do, which is one of the reasons why I back so many campaigns. 2… It gets our work out to readers we might never find and they might then buy more of our work. This is called discoverability. 3… It is amazing promotion and advertising and you don’t have to pay for it. In fact, if you do it right, you get…

  • Challenge,  publishing

    Bestselling Books

    Quick Post After The Earlier Sales Information… Remember, that dozen copies sold information came from a trial from a president of a big five company under oath. What he said was that half of all the books published by the big five traditional publishers sell under a dozen copies. So let’s look at that from other data sources. Here is another piece of data I found quoted from different studies. The average number of copies a book sells is 250 from the big five traditional publishers. Assuming everyone knows the definition of average. Now when you average in Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Koontz and the other hundred top sellers, plus…

  • Challenge,  publishing

    Another Interesting Bit of Information…

    Again Out of the Hot Sheet and New Sales Studies. 30% of traditional publishing sales comes from front list, meaning the new books they put out. 70% is now coming from the backlist. (Remember, they buy all your copyright for the life of the copyright and they can do what they want with it.) But breaking down that backlist number, 30% of it is what they are calling “newer backlist” meaning originally published in the last five to ten years. 40% of the sales are coming from older backlist (because books are still new to readers who have never seen them). Traditional publishing is learning slowly that books don’t spoil,…

  • Challenge,  publishing

    What a Number… Shocking

    WHY WOULD ANY AUTHOR GO TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED?? In the trial going on between the publishers and the government to stop the merger of two of the big five publishers, this information came out, reported on the Hot Sheet. Let me quote this exactly… “During the trial, a couple of depressing statistics were shared: of the 58,000 trade titles published per year, fully half of those titles “sell fewer than one dozen books.” (Not a typo, that’s one dozen.) More broadly, 90 percent of titles sell fewer than 2,000 units. Even a small advance of a few thousand dollars would not earn out at standard royalty rates.” Seriously??  I knew it…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    The Buffet Challenge

    Going To Be Fun and Take Time A while back I talked about trying to visit every buffet in Las Vegas and start or write a short story in each one. And also talk about the buffet in articles and blogs and put all the stories and articles together in different books. I said books (plural) for a reason. Wow, just wow are there a lot of buffets in Las Vegas. From high-end to just regular ones. I have started the research and just making a list of them seems overwhelming. Numbers of top-ten lists, but that mostly just focuses on the really high-end ones. I got a new iPad…

  • Challenge,  publishing

    Something Really Crazy and Innovative

    In Indie Book Selling I am not suggesting that anyone try this. Nope. But it was certainly fascinating to see. Started this afternoon when I drove Kris to an eye appointment that was beside a large mall here in Vegas. So I set off walking in the mall to get my 5 miles. (Yes, streak is still intact at 12 days in a row at five miles.) I was coming up a ramp in the mall and there in front of me was a small kiosk covered in books of all kinds. Nonfiction, poetry, some fiction, some coloring books, some political books, and on the lower shelf were a bunch…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing,  workshops

    Redoing the Post From Saturday

    Figured A Lot of You Don’t Check In Here Over the Weekend… So here is Saturday’s post again about all the new stuff available and the half-price sale going on right now. Everything on WMG Teachable 50% Off! That’s right, everything. And a bunch of new stuff since the last sale. I’ll go over some of it. Go to WMG Teachable. To get the 50% off price, just hit purchase on what you would like to take, then on the next page put in the code: AugustRegularSale And hit apply and it will be 50% off. This sale lasts exactly one week. It does not include the in-person workshops, only…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing,  workshops

    August Regular Workshop Sale Starting!

    Everything on WMG Teachable 50% Off! That’s right, everything. And a bunch of new stuff since the last sale. I’ll go over some of it. Go to WMG Teachable. To get the 50% off price, just hit purchase on what you would like to take, then on the next page put in the code: AugustRegularSale And hit apply and it will be 50% off. This sale lasts exactly one week. It does not include the in-person workshops, only everything on Teachable. New Stuff Included in the Sale! 9 Different Study-Along classes. (Also the Lifetime Subscription to Study Along Classes which is a fantastic deal even at full price. It includes…

  • Challenge,  On Writing,  publishing

    Pulp Speed in Indie Publishing

    Indie vs Traditional Publishing and Speed… There are still writers working today who hit Pulp Speed, or very close to it in traditional publishing. You have to be a master of the business, have an ability to write anything, and the skills to work for many publishing houses to publish that much in traditional publishing. Just do the math. Pulp Speed is about a million consumable words per year. Say you do 300,000 words in blogs, short stories, and other misc stuff, that would leave 700,000 words for traditionally published novels. That’s ten 70,000 word novels per year. I did that for about a decade during the 1990s and there…