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Write Stuff Storybundle Ends in 2 Days!!
This is a Stunning Value! Nine different writing books plus a $150 craft workshop, all for $25 bucks. And it is about to end! Here is Kris’s blog about it describing the books and everything. THE 2024 WRITE STUFF BUNDLE The 2024 Write Stuff Bundle – Curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Every year, I put together a bundle on writing. Every year, I find new concerns and ways to help writers market their work. I also find inspiration books on craft and keeping the faith as writers struggle with the blank page. This year’s bundle has four distinct elements. First, the all-important craft. J. Daniel Sawyer teaches you how to…
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Fiction Branding… Part 9
Lack of Knowledge… For some reason, fiction writers have an aversion to learning anything about the one thing that makes them money. That is copyright and licensing that copyright. For upwards of thirty years now, I have been trying to figure out why this aversion happens. Even though learning copyright is far, far more important than say learning how to pace a story or indie publish a story, writers just ignore it or if they are even aware, they simply say they will get to it someday. Now, I tend to be kinder to writers who are just unaware of how copyright works vs those who purposely do not want…
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50 Years…
Sold My First Two Short Stories 50 Years Ago… I just finished recording and putting up on Teachable a nine-week class called A FIFTY YEAR PERSPECTIVE OF LEARNING. Five videos each week for nine weeks talking about what I learned from my mentors over the years, and from others along the way, that got me to this place fifty years down the road. Tonight, as I was recording a topic on both the weekly CREATIVE SURVIVAL and MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY classes, I got thinking about the idea of doing a class that would talk about what I learned in fifty years from crashes, mistakes, and setbacks and what I learned from…
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Fiction Branding… Part 8
Here We Go…. I have come at fiction branding from a number of different directions in the first seven posts, not counting the “small author name” post. But as I have said, that is only the basics and most writers can’t even do all the basics of marketing well not from lack of skill but just from lack of being willing to study a little. So to make this as simple as I can, let me break up fiction branding into three major areas. 1… Marketing (discoverability… what I have been talking about so far) 2… Value (copyright and trademark) 3… Licensing (products and derivative sales) There is a fourth…
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Small Name Writers…
Something I Find Stunning… Readers buy book by not only what their front brain thinks of the sales copy and the cover, but more than that, readers (all of us) buy books because of subconscious clues. Clues like: —Cover art not professional — Cover art not to genre or book title impossible to read — Book sales copy dull and passive and gives too much plot away. — Book interior so poorly formatted as to be impossible to read. There are others, but one major clue that helps readers trust that the book is done by a professional and it will be entertaining is the size of the author name…
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ANTHOLOGY WORKSHOP DETAILS…
Wow, Will This Be Fun! Those of you already signed up, no worries, I will be contacting you in a few weeks or so. But right now I wanted to let everyone know we have the editors all lined up. First let me tell you how this works. Months ahead of time, through me, the editors all send out guidelines for their anthologies. You have a deadline to write each story for each anthology. Usually one week.) All the editors read every story, even if the story is for another anthology. Then during the workshop all the editors up front comment on the story, usually a —“I really liked this…
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The Write Stuff Storybundle Launched…
Curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch This is an amazing group of writing books and one of our workshops in one Storybundle. Let me have Kris tell you about it. THE 2024 WRITE STUFF BUNDLE The 2024 Write Stuff Bundle – Curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Every year, I put together a bundle on writing. Every year, I find new concerns and ways to help writers market their work. I also find inspiration books on craft and keeping the faith as writers struggle with the blank page. This year’s bundle has four distinct elements. First, the all-important craft. J. Daniel Sawyer teaches you how to put words on the page…
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Expanding Your Market…
Sell Dozens of Things vs One Thing… I will be talking about this concept some in the branding series, but because I had some comments and emails on this topic, I figured I would address it head-on. I have been talking about the future of indie publishing is Shopify stores. I got a couple of comments and four different emails pushing back on this and asking why I was feeling this way. Answer boils down to simple math, actually. Let’s say a writer has one series of 12 books and 12 short stories not in the series. 24 items to sell through Amazon, Kobo, D2D and the rest. Great. Not…
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Fiction Branding… Part 6
One More Preliminary Suggestion… Before getting into more details on branding in general. The suggestion: Have a Shopify store. Is it possible to build a brand with only books selling through Amazon and other bookstores world wide? Sure. My gut sense is that unless you have been living under a rock for the past 15 years or sticking your head in the traditional publishing cesspool, you have already been branding your own series. More than likely you have branded to genre. And your author name has a brand if you got out of your own way and didn’t hide your name in small print at the bottom of the cover.…
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Fiction Branding… Part 5
Not All Stories Are Created Equal… I hate to bring up this topic, but sort of needed for this series right about now. Why do I hate saying that not all stories are suited for branding? Because writers have the lowest opinions of their own work and will automatically take this as an excuse to not bother on some stories or series that could be branded. Here is the reality. Just because you can’t yet think of how a brand would even happen with a series of stories or novels does not mean it can’t happen. And the reverse is true. Just because you think a series of stories would…