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NEW LECTURE SERIES AND SUBSCRIPTION OFFER
Advanced Business Lectures Now Offered… Below is not only a list of all the lectures available (25 of them), but also the six new lectures in the Advanced Business for Writers lecture series. Plus a list of planned coming lectures. (We will end up after this with 38 available lectures on writing and publishing.) After two years of not doing new lectures, we are back with a vengeance thanks to the ease of Teachable.com. Since I am going to be starting to record these Advanced Business Lectures this week, we decided to offer a special rate on them, plus a special subscription rate to all lectures and upcoming lectures. For…
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The Magic Bakery: Chapter Six
Chapter Six… I get questions all the time about free. Should an author put up their book for free? How about their first book in a series? Does leaving something up for free forever work? Interestingly enough, The Magic Bakery works perfectly to illustrate the answer to these questions so writers can decide for themselves. All I’m going to be talking about in this chapter is basic, standard-retail sales practices. I won’t tell you one thing new in the world. You can see some of these practices working every day from grocery stories to music stores. But explaining these practices to authors who do not understand basic sales of retail has…
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Business and Writing
Business and Writing… We offer a business workshop online at WMG Publishing. It’s for writers who want to actually handle their writing business correctly and know where to find the right advice to make money with their writing. And more importantly, the workshop helps writers know what is even possible in the business of writing. It has always been stunning to me how writers flat don’t want to learn business. And when I noticed that the December business online workshop had no one signed up, (zip, zero, zilch) I just laughed. I knew that workshop would soon be dead when we first did it. Why did I know that? Because very few…
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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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Think Like a Publisher 2015: Chapter Two… Expected Costs
Chapter Two: Expected Costs The first chapter was “The Early Decisions” which included picking a business name, setting up checking accounts, and so on. There were no real costs at all in those early steps unless your state had a small fee for registering a business name. Checking accounts are free, so are PayPal accounts, and so on. So, the question on this second basic business-planning chapter is: “What are your expected costs?” For those of you with a basic understanding of business, you can now see the structure of how I am setting up these chapters. Before starting into a business, there are certain things that need to be…
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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,…