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Quick Post On AI Lawsuit
Has To Be Quick Since Aces Game Early Tomorrow… For those of you who do not watch any news at all, this last week most of the remaining bestselling traditional writers and the Author’s Guild filed a lawsuit to stop the theft of their work by ChapGPT. I am not a lawyer, but reading the complaint is very clear and powerful. Lots and lots of artists are already filing suits against AI art companies. And this big suit by old bestsellers is just a part of the massive wave of lawsuits for copyright infringement that have already been filed and will be filed. Simply put… AI in art and in…
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Wow!! What a Store!!
WMG Publishing Started a New Diving Universe Store And right now it is having a grand opening sale. Go to www.divingintothewreck.com and browse around. Imagine the store without all the Grand Opening sales stuff. And imagine something like it as your own author web site. Yes, Shopify can do all kinds of looks and blogs and anything a regular web site can do and so much more. I loved the Pulphouse Shopify Store and our main WMG Books store we call “the mothership.” But when I saw how Stephanie Writt had built this store, the first thing I thought of was an author web site. It would be one of…
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Special Stretch Goal…
On IVORY TREES Kickstarter… Since we just hit the second stretch goal this morning, we decided to add in a special stretch goal on the IVORY TREES: A Diving Universe Novel Kickstarter. Here is is… SPECIAL STRETCH GOAL…350 Backers by Midnight Sunday… If this campaign reaches 350 Backers by Midnight Sunday, September 17th, every backer of any reward will get a free ebook copy of RICK THE ROBBER BARRON by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Also, for writers, the really fun writing class titled Writing About Relativity in Science Fiction. It is part of a new Down in the Details writing series. Each class will have a prompt to write a fun…
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Paperback Writer…
I Loved the Beatles Song “Paperback Writer”… When I came into publishing almost fifty years ago, what dominated as far as fiction distribution was the mass market paperback. In 1977 I opened a bookstore called “The Paperback Exchange” and did really well, changing the name to “Twice Sold Tales” after I bought a comic store and the towns only album store and moved them all in together. It was a fun place. As a writer, all I ever wanted to be was a paperback writer. And then as the world changed in the early part of this century, trade paperbacks started taking the place of mass market paperbacks and now…
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Interesting Math
A Focus I Didn’t Mention Yesterday… I hinted at it. That $20,000 plus I have made for the short story “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man” was for licenses (to magazines, anthologies, collections, audio play, and Hollywood options) before indie publishing. Those licenses were over the space of 30 years. So the average is about $55 per month. Considering that a full decade went by and the story made nothing, just sat in a file drawer, not bad at all. So Looking at Indie Sales… I calculated my licensing fee yesterday in that total. Now, because I own the company publishing the story, I can calculate the sales income.…
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The Life and Times of a Copyright…
How One Short Story Made A Lot of Money… So many writers do not understand the value of a single piece of copyright. In this case, let me tell you the story of the life (so far) of a short story titled, “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man.” Back in the early 1990s, about thirty years ago, I was invited to write a story for a vampire anthology and like a fool I said yes. I hate vampires. So I put it off until a writing retreat on the Oregon Coast with eight other writers in one house for the weekend. I sat down at my then-massive computer sitting…
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Reaction To Failure Post Brought Forward
Number of Requests for “Fail to Success”… So I brought this post which I think says it perfectly from 2018… No memory of the challenge I was talking about, or much else from 2018 since Kris was so sick and we moved to Vegas about that point. But somehow I managed this post, so hope it helps some… Maybe One of the Best Quotes from The Voice Ever… On Tuesday, while talking to and encouraging a young woman who didn’t get a chair to turn, Adam Levine said to her out of nowhere, and I quote, “It’s your reaction to your failures that make your success.” As many things on…
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Indie Publishers and Copyright
A Court Case… More than likely, this is something almost no indie writers and publishers even know about. Seven years ago, WMG Publishing got a demand letter from the copyright office that we needed to submit two of our best copies of every title we had published. Or pay a $250 fine per title. Yikes… Yeah, I know you didn’t know about this… Not something talked about in indie publishing circles and because most writers refuse to learn copyright, not something that would ever come up. Until you get the demand letter from the Copyright office like we did. Kris and I knew about it from our days at Pulphouse…
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Stories We Buy At WMG…
Pulphouse, Holiday Spectacular, Other Projects… If a story comes to us, such as through the Pulphouse Kickstarter, the author warrants the following… If you submit a story, you warrant that you are the legal representative for the story, and that it was not created by or with the assistance of “AI” machine learning tools, such as ChatGPT or others, and that it has not been previously published in English, and that it is not under consideration by any other publishers. And we have a similar, more legal-sounding clause in our contracts now. Why? Because simply if you use one of the AI writing services, you are taking other writer’s work (and we hate working…
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The Myth That Writing is Hard…
I Wrote This in 2009… I have updated it for 2023… It is long but I thought it needed to be said again. And note, this was written before I was doing a blog per day. ————- This myth comes in many forms and has many faces, but let me put it as plainly as I can to start. Myth: To be Good, Writing Must Be Hard. (And it can’t be fun.) Total hogwash, of course, yet it is stunning how many new writers believe this, and how readers, when they bother to think about it, believe the myth as well. And, of course, almost everyone who teaches creative writing…