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What WMG Publishing Did
In 2019… A wonderful year-end summary of 2019 at WMG Publishing by the associate publisher, Gwyneth Gibby. I knew we had been busy, but wow. You want to know about everything WMG related in books and such, go to: WMG Publishing Inc. ———————————– How do you measure a year? Sometimes it feels like the song from Rent, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,” and every one of them goes by at an excruciatingly slow pace. Or, as in 2019, suddenly you realize that 525,600 minutes of life and work and growth have passed by in a blink! WMG has launched multiple big, new projects; published new novels in multiple…
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Playing With Covers
Having Fun On This Saturday Night… I did three covers tonight in just about 45 minutes, and that included looking for art that sort of matched for the three collections. That’s right, 45 minutes for three wrap-around paperback covers. These will need the spines on them, of course, where the black bar is at, since they are larger than my normal short story paperbacks. But the front covers can be chopped and used for electronic book covers as they stand now. I did them in InDesign. And I am still learning that, so a few minutes was spent a couple times looking for how to do something. (grin) These covers…
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Fear and Publishing
Did Not Expect Some Comments… On the Great Publishing Challenge. It seems that writing and doing challenges on writing is popular, but not so much publishing. In fact, I got a number of comments about the fear involved. And I know for a fact that the fear comes from myths. And the fear of what might happen if you did it wrong. Well, you will do it wrong. I sure did when we started into indie publishing. I spent nine months putting up over 200 titles as fast as I could. I worked at it day and night. Mostly short stories, a few collections, some nonfiction, and a bunch of…
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I’m Doing The Great Publishing Challenge
Yup, I Will Be Documenting What I Am Doing… For those who want to jump into the Great Publishing Challenge of publishing 12 books in a year, you will also get my progress reports regularly as videos in the challenge. But I am taking it to another level, as you might expect. I will be publishing three times the challenge, or 36 books in one year. And if you are doing the challenge, you can watch me do it. But first off, if I was in the stage many of you are, here is how I would do the 12 book challenge. (Think how fantastic it would be that one…
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A Tough Week…
For Writing Streaks and Challenges. Amazing how such a good time of the year can be so tough on writing. After all, it is the holiday season full of fun and family and travel. And that’s the problem… it’s the holiday season full of fun and family and travel. More streaks and challenges break in this last week before Christmas than any other time of the year. But thankfully, next week is the start of a new year and challenges and streaks can be fired back up then for the long winter. After forty years in this business, I have observed general times of the year where writing comes easy…
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All Focus On The New Year
Everything Kris and I Are Doing is Focused on 2020 and Beyond… That focus on the new year seems to be taking up a ton of our time and effort over the last week. Tonight, on occasion, I heard swearing coming from Kris’s office because she was focusing on putting her calendar system for 2020 together. It is extensive. And complex. And she has been doing it for all of the thirty-plus years I have known her. And I really appreciate that she does the organization because, to be honest, I depend on her a lot to tell me when we are scheduled to do something here in Vegas. That…
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The Decade Ahead Class Questions
Got a Number of Them… So thought I would respond here as well as individually. First off, all four quarters of The Decade Ahead class (plus the special Pop-Ups in each quarter that are included) will be focused in a balance on personal problems that affect the writing, craft work, and publishing business. Three parts working in unison and I hope balanced over the year. What I mean by personal work is productivity, getting to the computer, surviving life rolls, family issues, health issues, money, and so on. That is all a major part of building a writing career that will be where you want it to be in 2029.…
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The Decade Ahead
Four New Classes To Help You Get Through 2020… …And to Plan For 2029 You have been creating all the stories and novels. Getting them out to readers, promoting them, then moving on to the next story. Great! But how do you keep that going? How do you make sure you have a successful year, and at the same time plan for the new decade ahead? In fact, how do you even plan in a realistic way that will help you long term? In other words, how to keep going in 2020 and where would you like to be in 2029? These four quarterly classes will help you with that.…
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Mentor Program
I Have Two New Mentor Writers For 2020… The two new writers joined up through Kickstarter earlier in the year and are starting January 1st. Plus for 2020 I have two writers who started in August and are carrying over into the new year, and another with a health issue who will be carrying forward some if health allows. Plus I’m going to continue to help those I worked with for the entire year into the new year when I am needed. Interesting how this worked. Each person was different. And my focus and goal was to not be intrusive, to not try to force anyone into working my way,…
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Writers Blaming Editors
Funniest Thing I Have Read… Now granted, for most beginning writers, if they read a writer blaming an editor for a rejection, they would nod sagely and say, “Yeah, editors just don’t get me either.” Uh….no. More than likely your story didn’t work. Or it didn’t fit what the editor was looking for in their magazine, or the editor had just bought a story similar to it two weeks earlier, or… or… or… But blaming an editor because the editor did not “see” how really deep your subtext was on page seven and your nifty plot twist on page twenty… Uh… no. And I bet if you are thinking like…