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Traditional Book Publishers…
Why To Avoid At All Costs… I am going to make this post simple and very clear. This will hurt some of you who still believe in the 1980’s myth of traditional publishing being the best path. I am not sorry. First, a short story. Ten years ago I met a writer at a conference that was all excited about finishing a novel and getting the novel to an agent. (I had known this beginning writer from a few years before. Very promising writer.) A name writer at the conference who was still lost in traditional publishing had provided an introduction to this baby writer to an agent. Make note,…
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Day Job Thinking
DAY-JOB THINKING VS LONG-TERM THINKING (I first published this post back in 2015 or so. Had a couple of conversations that reminded me of it, so I went looking, updated it, and put it here on this fine Friday evening.) Day-Job Thinking goes like this: I need a certain amount of money to make my bills this month and a day job gives it to me in a “secure” fashion. Nothing at all wrong with that thinking. Nothing. We all have to live and make bills and eat and all those sorts of things. This is survival thinking, folks, plain and simple. So again, nothing wrong with that kind of…
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Your Likes Have Nothing To Do With It
I Know, Hard to Believe… I have talked about apps a few times here, got some great comments and ideas. And numbers of writers are already on the chase in different ways. Thanks for those comments! And I talk all the time about electronic publishing and how readers are reading. And how so much of the world is reading on their phones now. Clearly a trend of the future that I don’t see changing. But if I only published in ways that I personally read or like, I would never publish electronically, only paper. And I would never think of gift cards or apps. Why? I don’t read electronically and…
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How to Think About a Challenge
New Year Is Coming… And many writers, me included, are starting to set up challenges to help us reach goals with our writing. But the question is how to make the goals large enough to be challenging and yet not set up for failure. So let me tell you how I do it, since I have started and backed off a challenge twice now that I will be starting for the third time on January 1st. I do not consider the two first false starts as failure. Not in the slightest, actually. They were learning. So that is point one… Never think about failure. Just think positive about the challenge…
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A Publisher By Any Other Name
Indie Writers… What a Strange Term… Just for a short time I want to explain why I have been shaking my head for almost ten years now when I hear the term “Indie Writer.” I hate to say it, but I was an indie writer when I sold over a hundred novels to traditional publishing. That’s right. I was an independent writer, with my own business, often selling to three or four or five traditional publishers at the same time. Not counting magazines and anthologies and other stuff. I had my own business as a writer. I was an indie writer. We were just not called indie writers back then.…
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Business Shift In Thinking
BUSINESS SHIFT IN THINKING Well, Kris did a great article about some of the issues facing long-term professional writers like her in this new world of publishing. The shift from old publishing thinking to new publishing is hard for everyone. Information below. —— THE DAY Meetings from 2 p.m. until after 5 p.m. In three different locations. Then worked for an hour or so at WMG after taking a walk with Kris, then home to cook dinner, then in here to do e-mail before taking a long nap. Then downstairs to watch television, back in here to work on things on this site and do one session on the book of…
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Topic of the Night: Day-Job Thinking
DAY-JOB THINKING VS LONG-TERM THINKING In the great comments on the last topic of the night, this new topic was brought up. So thought I would expand on the idea. Day-Job Thinking goes like this: I need a certain amount of money to make my bills this month and a day job gives it to me in a “secure” fashion. Nothing at all wrong with that thinking. Nothing. We all have to live and make bills and eat and all those sorts of things. This is survival thinking, folks, plain and simple. So again, nothing wrong with that kind of thinking. Critical. Long-Term Thinking is the ability of a person to see…
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Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing: #6… Selling to a Big Publisher Insures Quality
Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing will be out later this fall with an introduction. And then it will be followed by a book called Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing. But first I wanted to put each myth or “Sacred Cow” up here again as I promised. — Very few of these chapters will deal with the editor and publisher side of publishing. I know that in fiction publishing there are lots of problems with publishers, and right now picking on them just seems to be like kicking dirt onto a person who is struggling to even figure out how to stay alive. Besides,…
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Workshops Information and Sale Ending…
Workshop 50% Off Sale Ends Monday!! A ton of workshop information tonight since the half-price office-moving sale is ending on Monday on Teachable. The code to get anything at half price is… OfficeMove Here is a summary of information in this post… — Information on Lifetime Subscriptions… — Information on new “Buy Five for the Price of Four”… — November Regular Workshops Now Up… — List of Classic Workshops… All 47 of them… Starting with the List of Classic Workshops… I don’t think many know of the fantastic selection of writing and publishing classes we have that are Classic Workshops. I have no memory of doing a list of them,…
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Workshop Order and Breakdown…
Workshop Curriculum 1/1/2021 I went through these back about four months ago, so with the sale going on now, I thought I would do it again so everything is clear. Today’s post is just the workshops and I’m going to divide all of them down into areas of study. And the numbers are my suggestions on the order to take these workshops because many of them build on others. (Two types of workshops are included. Regular and Classic.) All workshops and courses can be found on Teachable. Just hit “see all courses.” To get them at half price, just use the code Resolution Pop-Ups and others will be listed later.…