-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Got Behind… So A Product…
Late on Writing and Workshops Tonight… So nothing here as I had planned. But I have to post something to keep my daily blog streak alive. Yup, the power of a streak. So instead I am going to post a fun merchandise thing I have had since the early 1990s and never used. It is a note pad about 3 inches by 3 inches and 3 inches high of blank sheets of paper. About a thousand sheets of thin paper I am guessing. It is called a “Note Cube.” No idea what this would cost today, or if it could be done POD, but I thought it was cool when…
-
Direct Sales
Been An Interesting Journey… I came into traditional publishing as a young writer almost 50 years ago. 49 to be exact. And that traditional publishing that was in place at the time was the system I learned very, very well, until the system itself became so corrupted I could not longer stomach working in it. Thankfully, indie publishing started up just about the time I was headed to do something else, and I fell in love with the freedom of being able to write what I wanted and publish it when I wanted and just let readers decide instead of gatekeepers. Problem is that it has taken me years to…
-
AI Not Protected Under Copyright…
Decision Upheld on Friday… Here in the States, and in different forms in Europe and other countries as well, all forms of AI generated art and text cannot be protected under copyright law and the Berne Convention and thus hold no copyright. You can’t own it. No one does. Last March the copyright office issued decisions on that, and a Federal judge on Friday stood with the copyright office. This is an oh-oh of major proportions for any of you using AI for art or text. To own a piece of work, it must have human creativity. You have an AI cover on one of your books and yet you…
-
Trademark Silliness
Jane Friedman Post… I have gotten numbers of questions about this post. Basically what happened is that Jane Freedman, one of the great traditional publishing apologists in her Hot Sheet, had some of her own books up indie on Amazon and someone copied her name and the titles of the books and did some poor AI books and put them up for sale. The books were put up under another account, so any sales would go to the other account. Jane wrote Amazon and asked them to be taken down. Amazon wrote back and asked if her name was a licensed trademark. Jane said her name was not trademarked under…