Chapter Five… I get a lot of questions about pen names and if writers should use pen names in this modern world of publishing. So let me use The Magic Bakery to explain my answer to that question. Now understand, the reason for this book about The Magic Bakery is to help writers understand copyright and the magic power of copyright in this world. But the metaphor of the bakery can help in business logic as well. And in sales. And in promotions. For example, understanding the power of free is clearly illustrated in The Magic Bakery and I will get to that in a later chapter. But for this chapter,…

Chapter Four… I started off chapter three with a question and an answer: “How do you slice a magic pie? The answer is simply as many ways as you want.” But first you have to have a magic pie to slice. You have to have copyright to license. And that is the rub, the place where so many writers flat run into a massive wall. It takes time and a lot of practice and knocking down personal demons to produce new stories and novels regularly. Anyone can do it for a short time. A year. Maybe two. But then with just a few cases in their Magic Bakery half full and the rest…

Chapter Three… How do you slice a magic pie? The answer is simply as many ways as you want. The wonderful thing about copyright is that you can license any part of it. And you can name the part and dictate the terms and define the shape of the part. I know this is difficult to imagine. And the pie analogy sort of falls apart because pie is a physical thing that can only be sliced in so many ways. But image the pie is solid and you have a saw that can slice off a piece so thin you can barely see the slice under a microscope. Yup, you…

Chapter Two… So what makes this bakery so magic anyway? Copyright, that’s what. As the Copyright Handbook says, “Copyright is the legal device that provides the creator of a work of art or literature, or a work that conveys information or idea, the right to control how the work is used.” So what is so magic about that? All countries in the world have copyright protections in one form or another. As of the writing of this chapter, almost all countries in the world have signed onto one copyright convention or another, agreeing to the basic aspects of copyright protections. In fact, here in the States, copyright protection was written…

Chapter One… Digging down into all the vast areas of how writers sell books and the business of selling fiction, I figured the best way to start this would be on the surface, explaining some real logical, but forgotten (by writers), business concepts. So an example: A young writer (not in age, but in experience) writes and finishes a first novel. And somehow manages to avoid all the traps of rewriting and letting a peer workshop kill the book. Fantastic! This is a real event and once published should be celebrated. First novels are important to every writer. Get copies out to family, tell friends where the book can be bought, and…

Introduction… Indie writers make great money these days with their small and medium-sized businesses. Some make millions, while at the same time others sell few books. The writers selling few copies tend to look for reasons why they are not selling. I could spend a lot of time listing all the reasons writers find for a book now selling, but almost always the reason is a very simple business reason. Inventory. And a complete failure to understand what they are selling. But that seemingly simple answer has a vast universe of issues around it. And understanding inventory in publishing takes an understanding of copyright. So for this book, I am…