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How Writers Fail…
A New Writing Book By Kris… Just released… How Writers Fail… Analysis and Solutions by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. This a blunt, straight-forward book that might save your career or at least help you head off some really, really ugly bumps in the road. It is focused at indie writers. (If you are headed toward traditional publishing, you have already failed.) Here is the sales copy… “Everyone fails at times. Writers fail in predictable ways—ways both foreseeable and preventable. In this WMG Writer’s Guide, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch addresses the pitfalls writers face and offers solutions to help them overcome those obstacles. Because the best writers push…
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Magic Bakery Plus…
I Got To Watch a Magic Bakery In Action… On the 4th, Kris and I had lunch downtown and stopped by PinkBox Doughnuts to get her a snack. (I am losing weight, so no snack for me at this point.) We were standing in line (never seen the place without a line) and I was staring at the amazing thirty-foot long display counter of four shelves high of a variety of doughnuts of all colors and shapes. Plus at least thirty-foot long glass cabinets full of shelves and trays of doughnuts behind the counter. And besides all the doughnuts, everywhere you looked there was a ton of licensed products, from…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part 11
Expectations… I say this little introduction to each new parts… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing, with indie writers in charge. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new era lasting about 50 years and…
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So You Wrote a Book…
You Have Options… How do you get that book to readers? There are an amazingly large number of ways. Let me list the five major ways and then explain them a little. Keep in mind that books could and have been written about doing all five. 1… Traditional Publishing 2… Retail Sales Worldwide 3… Crowdfunding 4… Direct Sales On Websites 5… Personal events Traditional Publishing… In 2023, no writer with an ounce of brains who lives in the real world instead of myth-world, would spend the years and years to sign a small deal with a traditional publisher only to lose all copyright and control of the book. This way…
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Guest Post By Kris…
This is from Kris’s regular business blog series, but I thought it important enough that I asked her if I could reprint it here. Important mind set change for indie writers. Thanks, Kris… ———- Business Musings: Stars Kristine Kathryn Rusch Me and the Google spent what I almost termed a “dispiriting” hour as I searched for the 21st century’s superstars in a variety of fields. I say “almost termed” because, when I think of it, “dispiriting” is the wrong word. Adult me, who loves this modern world of indie publishing and going directly to the reader, doesn’t mind the lack of superstars or “big names” as most people call them.…
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Quick Note On Author Tag Lines…
This Is 2023… As I have been saying in my series of posts about decisions young authors have to make, we are in a transition time between Traditional paperback distribution and Indie electronic distribution. And the two different ways of doing business. One of the major changes is the author tag line. You know, that line you put above your name on a cover that no one can read, but it needs to be there for cover design. For a decade, I have put above my name USA Today Bestselling Writer. Not one reader of my books knows what that really means, and that list is gone now. I am…
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Oh, my…
All I Can Say… I was sent a couple days ago a court case about one author taking the work of another author. This has been a public case and I am going to make no comments on the case itself or let any comments through about the case. I do not know the facts beyond what I have read in the suit. Of course, there is an agent in the middle of the entire mess. And also named in the action. No comment there other than I stand by my solid belief that all agents are crooks and steal writer’s money. So why am I writing this… why am…
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Zero-Sum Game
Publishing is NOT a Zero-Sum Game A zero-sum game comes out of game theory and basically means that when one person wins, another must lose. Writing and publishing does not work that way. There is not a finite number of readers who can read one book a year or a finite number of readers who read fifty books a year and everything in between. And readers come into genres, read for a while, and then go away, or new readers every year are grown and others die. A niche explodes, a niche dies. Nature process of reader’s tastes. No one book in the history of the world has reached every…
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Fun Comments
Read All the Series Comments… There have been some really good comments. More than likely I’ll cover a couple more myths that infect both traditional and indie. But not going to deal with the beginning writer myths like writing quickly equals writing poorly, or that all good writing is rewriting. Those are beginner myths and not what I am doing this series for. But I will talk about the new path for Indie writers a little more. And where I see traditional publishing in a decade, using the history of the Dime Novels into Pulps and then the history of Pulps into Paperback publishing. The Pulps were dying a slow…
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Paying Attention Sale
Holiday Here In the States… The holiday here is called Memorial Day which honors those who served in the military and also family members who are no longer with us. And it is a time where people take vacations since it is a three-day weekend, or they spend time with their families in picnics or other activities. Experts also say that today is supposed to be the busiest travel day of the year as well. And for writers, this tends to be the first major weekend of the Time of Great Forgetting. Writers just forget about writing and learning and publishing and often don’t come back to paying attention until…