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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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Scheduling the Impossible…
Scheduling Is Something We All Get Used To… Indie writers at some level or another all get used to scheduling publishing projects. Nature of this new world and actually for me, I had so many deadlines in a year in the old traditional publishing days, I had a massive yearly schedule for writing and travel and deadlines and money flow. In indie publishing, scheduling is just something we all do at one level or another. And then there is the WMG Publishing schedule master, Kris. Two major ongoing projects (Pulphouse monthly) and Holiday Spectacular (More moving parts than you can imagine) are year-long things. Plus for our books and such,…
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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…
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I Don’t Care!
I Really, Really Don’t… I constantly get letters from people talking about traditional publishing in one fashion or another, assuming, I suppose, that I still care about the buggy-whip factories of publishing. And sometimes, like a few days ago, I post about something going on in traditional publishing that just makes me laugh.I do posts like that to entertain myself because I had to live in that traditional publishing world for decades. I can make snorting noises at it now if I want. I do have interest when copyright issues are being hammered out in court by a traditional publisher, or a trademark issues. But past that legal interest, or…
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An Interesting Opinion…
From a Very Surprising Source… Some of you may be familiar with Mike Shatzkin, the great traditional publishing apologist for the last decade or more. I honestly stopped paying much attention to his Shatzkin File posts four or five years ago. But I still sort of follow his comments at times. It seems lately he just can’t ignore data anymore with indie publishing and with the blocking of the merger of two of the big five traditional publishers, he seems to be a little clearer on their position. And indie publishing and smaller publishers in general. Mike spends a bunch of the November 2nd letter talking about how Ingrams is…
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Why Do We Do Kickstarters?
I Got That Question Today… The question sort of caught me by surprise, to be honest. First off, surface reasons. 1… It gets new books to readers ahead of the publication date and at a discount. Fans of a series or a writer enjoy that. I know I do, which is one of the reasons why I back so many campaigns. 2… It gets our work out to readers we might never find and they might then buy more of our work. This is called discoverability. 3… It is amazing promotion and advertising and you don’t have to pay for it. In fact, if you do it right, you get…