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A Look Back… Twice
I Put Part of This Up On a Blog in 2013… Ten years ago. But tonight I was also thinking about the decade ahead class that is in its last ten weeks (you can sign up for it and go through it at any time, just ten more weeks of new stuff but all weekly videos are all still there.) Ten years ago I put this blog up about a time in my life fifty years ago. I am a lot of decades ahead from 1973, thats for sure… There is also a brand new five-story driving range opening up within a mile walk of our place, so I am…
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Eleven New Kickstarter Writer Campaigns…
The Most Ever in a Week!! I think October brings out the fun of Kickstarters. Wonder if Kickstarter has data on that. All of these are by members of the Kickstarter Best Practices class on Teachable. It is free and I have sent this blog to all 1,500 plus members as well as posted them on the class itself. I talk about the good parts of each campaign and if I see a problem, I say that as well. The idea is to learn and keep going. So these campaigns are great to study if you are thinking of trying one yourself. And even more important, back the ones you…
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Nora Roberts Had 204 Books Stolen…
By ChatGPT… Without permission, without payment, just 204 novels stolen whole cloth and used to train the AI stuff so lazy-ass writers can use her work to pretend to make their own crap better. Nora just discovered this and is not happy, to say the least. I stopped counting when I got to 28 of my novels stolen without permission or payment. What is bringing this up tonight is that tomorrow I will be pushing a bunch of Kickstarters by writers that are going now. I will put them on the Kickstarter free class and send out a letter to all of the writer’s signed up in that class, all…
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Learning Copyright…
What Does “Learn Copyright” Mean? I’m talking about one tiny area of this on the Bite-Sized Copyright class this week. But much deeper than I will do here. When I tell a writer to learn copyright, I not only mean the Copyright Handbook, which is a great place to start, but I also mean following and understanding what is happening now in the culture when it comes to copyright. Everything from reading the recent copyright suits to reading the WGA settlement agreement. All kinds of copyright stuff. But I also mean learn the history of copyright because most writers have gotten stuck in time at one point or another with…
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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…