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Writers Quitting…
Three Letters… In the last seven days, I have gotten not one, not two, but three letters from writers about ready to quit. Now I get these letters occasionally, I think all professional writers do. Sort of a last gasp before letting the dream float away. Not sure why three this week. Maybe the way the world is right now, I don’t know. All three had clearly spent some time. None of them were published wide, seeming to think Amazon was the be-all and end-all. Real bad information there. Two of them had in the ten-or-more-book range before discoverability, but one had 24 books. No sales at all, or just…
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Going For It!!!
Starting Two New Challenges for Myself… Actually, three. And I will be doing every detail of everything all myself. No help from anyone. That’s right. I will be doing my own covers and my own interiors with Vellum or InDesign. I will be listing them all electronically and with Ingram for paper and hardbacks. And I will be working on my store and getting all of them there as well. So what is my challenge? From November 10, 2025 until November 9th 2026… Challenge #1… I am going to write and finish a new novel every two weeks. So 26 novels, but in the actual year I will more than…
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Getting Ready…
A Bunch to Learn or Relearn… Just to get ready to start this challenge of writing a novel every two weeks. And do collections. And other books. I got to relearn all over how to find art that is not AI. I got to relearn InDesign, which I have already started on and having a blast. Double column layouts of Smith’s Monthly issues will be a challenge. Using Vellum for regular books will seem easy people tell me. Getting my learning back up to full on Shopify will take a little time, but looking forward to that this coming year. None of that is the writing side, just the publishing…
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New Workshops and Regular Workshops
HOW TO ACHIEVE YOUR DREAMS… That’s the name of the new class we are offering starting June 10th. How to Write More, Get More Readers, and Make a Living with Your Fiction. Cost is $500 and it is 9 weeks long with eight assignments. Again starts on the 10th. Everything Subscribers got a letter from me about it tonight with the code to get in. Wow am I excited about this one. We have been thinking about doing this for some time now and to help people stay focused through the time of great forgetting, we figured this would be a good one to offer. You can find this on…
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Discussion About Publishing…
So Much To Learn and Do… Indie publishing just eems overwhelming, I know that for a fact. I am going to be doing a lot of my own layouts and publishing on my challenge in this coming year (I will announce what I am doing with the challenge after Christmas as I ramp up.) And I am trying not to panic. Failing at times. So I have really been giving a hard look at all the details now involved with publishing and sales. And slowly realizing I need to figure out a way to organize all that I am learning and have learned to keep the panic down to a…
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Introduction to A Class About Learning…
A FIFTY YEAR PERSPECTIVE OF LEARNING… As I said last night, this year marks 50 years since I sold my first two short stories (and started selling a lot of poetry as well.) Over those 50 years, I was stunningly lucky to have some amazing mentors (who also became friends.) Jack Williamson, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison, Frederick Pohl, Julius Schwartz, and others. As I said, stunningly lucky. So I figured that since I am still around after 50 years of selling fiction and they all told me a lot of great stuff, I am going to do a nine-week class talking about and telling stories about…
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So You Wrote a Book…
You Have Options… How do you get that book to readers? There are an amazingly large number of ways. Let me list the five major ways and then explain them a little. Keep in mind that books could and have been written about doing all five. 1… Traditional Publishing 2… Retail Sales Worldwide 3… Crowdfunding 4… Direct Sales On Websites 5… Personal events Traditional Publishing… In 2023, no writer with an ounce of brains who lives in the real world instead of myth-world, would spend the years and years to sign a small deal with a traditional publisher only to lose all copyright and control of the book. This way…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part Six… Things Change
The Changing Terminology… New fiction writers coming in now are really torn between all the myths and hype of traditional publishing and all the myths and hype of indie publishing. But as I said back in the first post of this series, the paperback era of big publishing is pretty much done, and the distribution of fiction is changing over to the electronic era of indie publishing. These kinds of major shifts in fiction distribution to the readers has happened four major times through the history of this country, with each new era lasting about 50 years and the transitions lasting about 25 years. Again, see my first post. New…
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I Feel Bad For New Writers… Part Five… The Upside
The Choice Between Two Paths… This entire series has been talking about the choice new writers coming into professional fiction writing have between the old methods of traditional publishing and the new world of indie publishing. If you have not read the first five parts of this series, please do so now. This will make more sense if you do so. So in this chapter, I want to quickly go over what is possible for success on both paths. Traditional Publishing… For many, many, many writers, simply having a book published by a traditional publisher is the success. Period. And many writers don’t ever want to leave their professional job…
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Lots of Learning
Amazing Week of Conversations and Learning.. Pretty exhausted after four days of getting up very early. But wow was it worth it. Major areas I have learned stuff about… Kickstarter… I will be sharing a bunch of this over time as we test some of it out, and also sometime this winter I will be updating the free Kickstarter class with a bunch of new suggestions. I will alert you here and over that class when we get it done. AI in Publishing. So, so many ways AI change indie publishing and our lives over the next five years. Art, audio, and text. Just amazing. I will do updates regularly…