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The Stages of a Fiction Writer: Chapter One
(Every day I will put another chapter here of this book. Patreon supporters, you will get the full book sent to you when it is all done. Please note: This is advanced reader copy. This has not been proofed. That will be taken care of when I turn in the final book to WMG Publishing.) STAGES OF A FICTION WRITER Chapter One There are four basic stages of commercial fiction writing that are pretty clear. For this book, I just number them one through four. I kind of think of them as places where writers live. Basically, I’m an early-to-middle stage four writer. So is Kris. And we’re working to…
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The New World of Publishing: Spreading Out
SPREADING OUT: The 2014 Story of One Business and Two Writers I figure it would be time to clear the air here at the beginning of the year on a few things about our business. Now understand, WMG Publishing Inc. is a corporation that is privately held and I can’t and won’t spread financial information as many indie writers do without a thought to the consequences. But I can talk in general about things for teaching purposes. The point of this is to help writers understand how we do it and also illustrate the idea that it is a bad idea to look to only one source for sales or…
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New World of Publishing: Failure Must Be An Option
FAILURE MUST BE AN OPTION Part one of the annual setting goals posts. I’ll bet a few of you got very uneasy by me starting off a New World blog post with: “Failure Must Be Option.” This post is a much changed post from 2012 about setting goals. And how to move forward with your writing. And to do that, you must fail, over and over to become an artist in this business and to just survive. And that’s normal and perfectly fine. Let me say this clearly. The reason I am starting right here, talking about failure, is that until you understand failure in publishing, you don’t have a lot of…
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The New World of Publishing: A Return to the Past
A Look Back at January 11, 2011 That’s right, I wrote the following post on January 11, 2011, talking some about the coming war between writers and the problems with the future of agents. I was looking back at some old posts to clean them out and stumbled on this and was stunned. I remember warning people of the coming war between writers and getting laughed at. Not sure anyone is laughing anymore, sadly. Take a look back at 2011. Anything I put in (Bold Italics is a comment I have added tonight.) ———— Okay, time to talk about agents and their future in this changing world. Mary Kole, who…
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Year End Summary of Writing in Public: Year One
Year End Summary of this Writing in Public challenge. Not even sure where to begin this summary to be honest. I’ve post all the different categories I count and monthly and yearly totals below, but those numbers only tell a part of the story. But let me start with the numbers first and go from there. I did (not counting comments on web sites) 1,281,675 original words in the last twelve months. 745,175 words of that was original fiction. 51,700 words of that was nonfiction. (So just under 800,000 words of fiction and nonfiction combined. More than I thought, actually.) That ended up being twelve novels and over thirty short stories…
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Writing in Public: Month 5 (and a little Year End) Summary
Month #5 Summary of this Writing in Public challenge. December, 2013 Made it through Month #5 and firing into Month #6 of this Writing in Public. And, as it happens, this month is the end of the year as well, so a little about that. Of the five months of this challenge, December was the worst month in the fiction writing. I always slack off in November and December for some reason, but until I started this exact recording every day, I hadn’t really realized how much. Of course, I was doing so much other stuff, I just didn’t push this month. This is the kind of writing month I have…
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The New World of Publishing: How to Get Started Selling in 2014
In the old days, meaning more than four years ago, the path to becoming a professional fiction writer was pretty simple to understand. You wrote stories and novels and mailed them to traditional publishers directly. When the story was rejected, you kept the story (or novel) in the mail until someone bought it. Well, not so much anymore. Fiction writers now have that dreaded word: Choice. And so, the path to being a successful fiction writer isn’t so clear anymore. In fact, I would call it downright muddy. So I’m going to update this article that I did last year because there are so many people coming to this place…
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The New World of Publishing: Making a Living with Your Short Fiction Updated 2013
Way back, over three years ago now, I did a post in my Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing series called “Myth: You Can’t Make Money Writing Fiction.” And then I wrote the basis of this post about one year ago right now. And things have changed so much, I wanted to update this now, and then I will follow this with another short fiction post on a slightly different area of short fiction. But in this post, I want to go after a saying that used to be almost 100% true before four years ago. “You can’t make a living writing only short fiction.” Not so true anymore. Why…
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Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Writing Fast
Years ago I did this series called Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. I stopped doing this because I hoped for a time that indie publishing would murder a few of the myths on its own, but sadly, it hasn’t. In fact, indie publishing created some new ones to go along with the old ones. Since I am going to blog about a ghost novel I’m writing here, I figured why not bring this forward to make sure everyone is on the same page as I go into this writing week. And maybe after I get the book done I’ll start back updating and bringing forward all these and get…