• Challenge,  publishing

    Interesting Math

    A Focus I Didn’t Mention Yesterday… I hinted at it.  That $20,000 plus I have made for the short story “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man” was for licenses (to magazines, anthologies, collections, audio play, and Hollywood options) before indie publishing. Those licenses were over the space of 30 years. So the average is about $55 per month. Considering that a full decade went by and the story made nothing, just sat in a file drawer, not bad at all. So Looking at Indie Sales… I calculated my licensing fee yesterday in that total. Now, because I own the company publishing the story, I can calculate the sales income.…

  • Challenge

    Valuation of IP

    I Have Been Focused On IP Valuation… … A lot lately, especially when it comes to estates. (No, nothing wrong with me or Kris, just sort of waking up in this new indie reality.) You see, when I came out of traditional publishing, the value of my couple hundred short stories and few novels (all the rest were work-for-hire or media) was not enough to hurt anyheir who got it when I died, even with a simple will situation. So I didn’t give it much thought past putting all the basic estate stuff in place. Which we did. And updated it fairly regularly. Then one day I sort of started…

  • Challenge

    Copyright Valuation… A Sort of Rant…

    Or Maybe Just Puzzlement… Before I start on the rant, a reminder that the workshop discount I offered in the Monday blog will expire late on Friday night. Don’t miss it. —– This story starts at Superstars. Kevin J. Anderson and his wonderful crew had set up some panels on estate planning for writers and I was sitting in all of them. So was Kevin. Kevin and I and Kris are all working hard on dealing with our estates after two of our friends died without even a will. We all have wills and such, but we want to take everything to the next step. We all want our estates…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff,  publishing

    Another Note on Copyright Valuation

    Head-Shaking But True… I talk copyright on this blog in any way and the letters and comments just dry up like they were hit by a bad desert wind on a hot summer day. Fun to watch, and I know these posts are just skipped by most. Makes them uncomfortable. But on the last valuation posts, I got a couple of private comments that went something like this… “How can my copyright be worth anything if I only sell a couple copies a month?” Or… “I am a new writer, my work has no value.” Well, in some ways, past performance and sales do help set value at that moment…

  • Challenge,  Misc,  publishing

    Adding Fun and Games to Copyright Valuation…

    The Music Industry Is Always Ahead of the Publishing Industry… Often by about a decade. That seems to be the fact in the case of valuation of copyright. I assume that everyone has heard of major song writers and artists selling entire catalogs. Justin Bieber just did it, lots of older artists have done it for tons of money. Each deal is different and interesting. But they all had one thing in common. There was a valuation of the catalog of songs and such owned by the artist. So thanks to a New York Law Journal article, some of the methods used to value an artist’s music catalog are discussed.…

  • Challenge,  Fun Stuff,  publishing

    More Copyright Valuation

    Main Way of Valuing Fiction… If you haven’t read the previous posts on this topic, might want to go back and do so. Or read them again. And if you don’t understand copyright, much of this will just go past you I’m afraid. So I mentioned one way of valuing copyright. I called it the “Cost Method” because you just add up all the costs of producing the book and that is the value. That method flat doesn’t work past putting a value on covers and a few other design elements. But it is the easy one to understand for most. Now to be clear right here… I am not…

  • Challenge,  publishing

    Playing with Numbers and Math

    I Am Not An Accountant… But I am doing my best to understand this for writers. So this is me, talking to myself, and most of you will just read this and go, “What the hell is he talking about?” That’s fine. But in essence what I am talking about is in a licensing business, copyright valuation will play a very important part. And I will be talking about this often over the coming year in the Licensing Transition workshop on Teachable. (Lost half of the writers reading this with the term copyright. (grin)) So bear with my very simplistic, non-accountant way of saying this. Okay? I am not even…