(Note: I forgot a major topic. The doors to the Magic Bakery. So this chapter will fit into the middle of the book somewhere.) Chapter (in the center)… Doors to the Bakery Any business must have a way to get into the business. For example, at our North collectable store here in town you can enter through an interior staircase and climb, or climb an exterior staircase. Both methods take some work for customers and we also have a special entrance in the back that comes in without stairs. Three entrances. We have the store full of enough cool stuff, we hope it is worth the customer’s climb. So how…

Chapter Nine… Beyond Next Year. As I said last chapter, it has been my observation that most writers never look more than a year out, if that. And that lack of being able to see five years and ten years and fifty years into the future causes all sorts of really bad decisions. Now, I wish I could say I had been an exception to this in my first few decades or so in publishing. Nope. Kris was a bunch better at looking long term and making decisions based on that vision. But I wasn’t. And wow did I make some boneheaded mistakes because of that lack of vision. So now…

Chapter Eight… Success and the future. Now there are two words that almost every writer I have met can’t fathom or even see when it comes to their own writing and business. Now granted, some writers give those two words lip service, and in different workshops Kris and I work at getting writers to think ahead. It feels like walking into a brick wall. Success and future planning when it comes to writing and a publishing business are just not possible for almost every writer to fathom. And honestly, I understand that. My goal, for a very long time, was to make a living at my writing. I had NO concept…

Chapter Seven… I knew I was going to need to talk about this topic in a chapter and honestly, have dreaded it. Writers, especially newer writers have no understanding of the value of their own work and how others value it. So with that problem in mind, I am going to try to add a level of understanding of value of copyright to this book. For most of you, I will fail at this, but at least I can say I tried right here in Chapter Seven. I’m calling this chapter “Perceived Value” of the inventory in the Magic Bakery. I cannot even begin to count the hundreds and hundreds of…

Chapter Five… I get a lot of questions about pen names and if writers should use pen names in this modern world of publishing. So let me use The Magic Bakery to explain my answer to that question. Now understand, the reason for this book about The Magic Bakery is to help writers understand copyright and the magic power of copyright in this world. But the metaphor of the bakery can help in business logic as well. And in sales. And in promotions. For example, understanding the power of free is clearly illustrated in The Magic Bakery and I will get to that in a later chapter. But for this chapter,…

Chapter Four… I started off chapter three with a question and an answer: “How do you slice a magic pie? The answer is simply as many ways as you want.” But first you have to have a magic pie to slice. You have to have copyright to license. And that is the rub, the place where so many writers flat run into a massive wall. It takes time and a lot of practice and knocking down personal demons to produce new stories and novels regularly. Anyone can do it for a short time. A year. Maybe two. But then with just a few cases in their Magic Bakery half full and the rest…

Chapter Three… How do you slice a magic pie? The answer is simply as many ways as you want. The wonderful thing about copyright is that you can license any part of it. And you can name the part and dictate the terms and define the shape of the part. I know this is difficult to imagine. And the pie analogy sort of falls apart because pie is a physical thing that can only be sliced in so many ways. But image the pie is solid and you have a saw that can slice off a piece so thin you can barely see the slice under a microscope. Yup, you…

Chapter Two… So what makes this bakery so magic anyway? Copyright, that’s what. As the Copyright Handbook says, “Copyright is the legal device that provides the creator of a work of art or literature, or a work that conveys information or idea, the right to control how the work is used.” So what is so magic about that? All countries in the world have copyright protections in one form or another. As of the writing of this chapter, almost all countries in the world have signed onto one copyright convention or another, agreeing to the basic aspects of copyright protections. In fact, here in the States, copyright protection was written…