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Thinking About Motivation
And What Motivates Each of Us… As I put the final touches on the BRAND NEW FEY NOVEL Kickstarter campaign that will launch on Tuesday, I got thinking about motivation because in the story in this new campaign, Kris talks about how it was the first Fey Kickstarter and all the backing that got her motivated to tackle the monster project of getting back into the Fey books and cleaning them all up and writing new ones. Link to the Fey Kickstarter Promotion page is: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/403649867/brand-new-fey-novel And I tried to do a short story per day challenge as motivation going into this year and it had all sorts of issues…
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Bestselling Books
Quick Post After The Earlier Sales Information… Remember, that dozen copies sold information came from a trial from a president of a big five company under oath. What he said was that half of all the books published by the big five traditional publishers sell under a dozen copies. So let’s look at that from other data sources. Here is another piece of data I found quoted from different studies. The average number of copies a book sells is 250 from the big five traditional publishers. Assuming everyone knows the definition of average. Now when you average in Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Koontz and the other hundred top sellers, plus…
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Freezing and Typing
Yes, I Know… It’s 101 Degrees Outside at Midnight Right Now… But at the moment I am thinking of trying to dig out my ski parka and if I could type in gloves I would. You see, someone in this building needs to have their air-conditioner fixed, and it seems for some strange reason they have to turn off the entire building from 1 am to 8 am. So Kris came up with the idea (or maybe I did, too cold to remember) to turn down ours very low until it gets shut off at 1 am. I must say our air-conditioner works very, very well. The low tonight will…
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Another Interesting Bit of Information…
Again Out of the Hot Sheet and New Sales Studies. 30% of traditional publishing sales comes from front list, meaning the new books they put out. 70% is now coming from the backlist. (Remember, they buy all your copyright for the life of the copyright and they can do what they want with it.) But breaking down that backlist number, 30% of it is what they are calling “newer backlist” meaning originally published in the last five to ten years. 40% of the sales are coming from older backlist (because books are still new to readers who have never seen them). Traditional publishing is learning slowly that books don’t spoil,…
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What a Number… Shocking
WHY WOULD ANY AUTHOR GO TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED?? In the trial going on between the publishers and the government to stop the merger of two of the big five publishers, this information came out, reported on the Hot Sheet. Let me quote this exactly… “During the trial, a couple of depressing statistics were shared: of the 58,000 trade titles published per year, fully half of those titles “sell fewer than one dozen books.” (Not a typo, that’s one dozen.) More broadly, 90 percent of titles sell fewer than 2,000 units. Even a small advance of a few thousand dollars would not earn out at standard royalty rates.” Seriously?? I knew it…
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The Buffet Challenge
Going To Be Fun and Take Time A while back I talked about trying to visit every buffet in Las Vegas and start or write a short story in each one. And also talk about the buffet in articles and blogs and put all the stories and articles together in different books. I said books (plural) for a reason. Wow, just wow are there a lot of buffets in Las Vegas. From high-end to just regular ones. I have started the research and just making a list of them seems overwhelming. Numbers of top-ten lists, but that mostly just focuses on the really high-end ones. I got a new iPad…
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Maybe Changing Hotels for In-Person Workshops
We Are Working On It…. And wow, if we make this work will it be fantastic. Not going to give you the name of the hotel yet, but it is brand new major hotel for pretty close to the same price for rooms as the Golden Nugget. And it actually has a resort that the resort fees go to that you can use. It is never crowded because it is so massive and no smoke smell or smokey areas at all. It will not be downtown, but part of the Strip. It will be very quiet!!! Unlike the noise at the Golden Nugget. It has more restaurants than the entire…
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Cover Fun… Sale Extended One Day
Not Sure if Teachable Was Having Troubles on Sunday… So the August half-off workshop sale is extended until Monday night. Detail in previous posts. Now for Cover Fun I spent a few hours today doing covers. Four new short story covers and one new Smith’s Monthly cover. Had a good time with them. They all use my templates so other than finding the art, they were quick and easy. Thought I show you them just for fun like I do every other month or so. The four short stories are all original stories done this year.
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New Workshops and Last Day of the Sale
Half-Price Sale ends late Sunday Evening… And I got a number of new workshops up, three just today before the sale ends. The big new class, starting in September is the regular six-week workshop SEPTEMBER APPLIED DEPTH. (You must have taken the Depth workshop to take this one. Yes, it will be offered every month for a while.) Also today I put up three new classic workshops as promised. Classic Pulp Speed Classic Power Words Classic Making a Living from Novels These originally were six week regular workshops, but are now classic. Only differences are that you take them at your own speed and do the assignments only for yourself.…
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Lessons from the Writing of the Fey Videos
Now Up On Teachable… Kris has been writing on Fey novels solidly since she got everything cleaned up and going after the first Fey Kickstarter campaign ended. But it took her a while to record the ten videos of the Lessons from the Writing of the Fey, because, to be honest, she wanted a few books under her fingers before she looked back again. The book got out a number of months back and now tonight, on Teachable, I have posted the videos. I have written personally to everyone who backed the Kris videos on that first Fey Kickstarter and gave them the way to get to them on Teachable,…