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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.…
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Branding
Kris and I Talk All the Time About Branding… Most writers only limit that word “branding” to how their covers look similar in series. How their name in a certain font looks from book to book, and so on. That is all important, but honestly just a tiny touch at branding. When you are taking something out for license, like to a gaming company, or toy company, or anything like that, you detail out your branding on your project. Fonts, type of art, colors and a ton of details are all important to how a product overall looks when transferred from text to media of some sort. Clothing and styles…
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AI Art and Audio…
Topic of a Lot of Discussions Among Writers… Lots and lots of early adaptors in the indie writing world are trying AI. For audio, the technology is jumping ahead at full speed and the prices are slowly coming down. For nonfiction, I like the idea and think the quality and technology is almost there now. For fiction, I personally am still on hold until the AI can use my voice and other issues are fixed. But I do know a lot of writers who are trying books with audio. Still too expensive in my opinion, but it does save time. Also limits markets at the moment. The AI art for…
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Second Part of My New Challenge…
I Should Have Set This Up From January 1st… I started off the year with the challenge to write a short story per day for the entire year. I did fine for three months until the very issue I had been worried about before I started finally caught up with me. I wrote some stories through the summer, but back at my normal pace of about 50 new short stories per year. I was going to do 100 stories in the last 100 days, but the day before I was to start that, Kris and I were talking and I said, “I can’t figure out why my critical voice is…
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Fun Challenge
October Until The End of the Year Challenge… Actually, only part of it. A really fun publishing challenge. Shortly I will be putting up on Teachable all the Collection Classes for 2023. 18 different ones. Six from the first year we did them in 2021 (and if you bought the full year, yes, you can take them in 2023.) Six from the second year. And six new ones for 2023. I will have all of these posted in about a week or so. Each collection class is 9 weeks long and you write five stories during that time, as well as learn how to put a collection together, do the…