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Business Master Class Finishing Up
Business Master Class Finishing Up Here on the coast we are just tomorrow finishing up the really fun business master class. Forty professional fiction writers, all in one meeting room, talking nothing but business morning, afternoon, and night, and into the night, actually. Great fun. Exhausted but I have a long list of things I want to do. So tomorrow night it will be done and things will be back to normal here on Sunday. And I will start making some of the changes to this site at that point. ——– Kickstarter Update: We have finally figured out a few tricks on the surveys we send out to supporters to give…
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Ten Stupid Writer Business Practices
Because I had a wonderful and long conversation today with a friend who has been a major business lawyer for forty years in the real world, I decided to do this post. The conversation with someone who understands real business was refreshing after spending most of my time around writers who actively ignore sane business practices. So in no particular order, here are ten of the really head-shaking business practices writers do that would be laughed at in any real-world business setting. 1… Give 15% of a piece of property for the life of the property to a person who does a few chores. (I call it giving the gardner 15%…
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Think Like a Publisher: 2015… Projected Income
Chapter Three Projected Income To actually get a profit-and-loss calculation for a book project, you must now make some pricing decisions and projections of income. Yeah, I know. I know. This is all so new, how can anyone predict how much money they will make on any project? Well, you can’t. Not really. But you can try. And you want to know a dirty little secret. New York traditional publishing can’t predict how much they will make on any book either. But they try. And that’s the key. To really act like a publisher, you need to understand what you are trying to gain. You need to know how many…
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The New World of Publishing: Can’t Get Books Into Bookstore Myth
It Has Officially Hit Myth Status When some of the biggest supporters of indie publishing and indie writers start going on about how they are giving up paper books to New York, I finally just shook my head and assigned all the silliness to myth status. So, since I have the book Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing now out in both paper and electronic and available, I suppose it’s time I start into the next book: Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing. And Sacred Cow (myth) #1 is that indie writers, with their own press, CAN’T GET THEIR BOOKS INTO BOOKSTORES. A complete myth.…
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Think Like a Publisher 2014: Chapter One…The Early Decisions
Here we go again. It’s been over three years since I wrote the first version of Think Like a Publisher. And a year since I updated it into a 2013 edition. Stunning how time goes by. Since those first words all those years ago, the indie publishing world has gotten by the early years of the “gold rush” thinking and has now settled into a new normal that should last for years, if not decades. 2013 was the first year of that new normal. Also, the publishing company I helped start, WMG Publishing Inc. now has three full-time employees and three part-time employees and has published about 400 different book titles,…