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The New World of Publishing: The Learning Must Continue
Strange world we live in these days. I have run across a number of writers lately that think they have this all down, that they know what they are doing, and they are happy with their sales. And some of them should be, I grant that. But thinking they know what they are doing just sort of makes me laugh. The one thing that is an absolute in publishing and the art of storytelling is that the learning never stops. It’s not even a rule. It’s just a fact. So for a post here, I thought I would tell a story about myself and my golf days that will illustrate…
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Killing Even More Sacred Cows of Publishing: #1… Novels Must Be A Certain Length
Here we go… Book three in this series. Book one was KILLING THE TOP TEN SACRED COWS OF PUBLISHING. Book two was KILLING THE TOP TEN SACRED COWS OF INDIE PUBLISHING. Both books are available everywhere in electronic, paper, and soon audio. What I call a “Sacred Cow” is basically a myth spread around publishing like the truth. Myths such as “rewriting must be done for every story.” Myths such as “you need an agent to sell a book,” or “sell a book to a different country.” And so on. You can either buy the first two books to get all twenty of the Sacred Cows, or just click on the tab…
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The New World of Publishing: Top 10 Reasons Why I Would Never Publish Traditionally
Got an interesting question last week when sitting having dinner with an old friend. He wanted to know why I said I would never go back to publishing novels with traditional major publishers. Now over dinner, with my friend having no background in what was happening in publishing, that question because impossible to answer. So I muttered something about bad contracts and moved on. Now understand, I published over a hundred novels with traditional novel publishers and made my living doing that for a few decades. So why not now? What changed? The industry changed, that’s what. Traditional publishing is flat not what it was when I was selling books…
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The New World of Publishing: Spreading Out
SPREADING OUT: The 2014 Story of One Business and Two Writers I figure it would be time to clear the air here at the beginning of the year on a few things about our business. Now understand, WMG Publishing Inc. is a corporation that is privately held and I can’t and won’t spread financial information as many indie writers do without a thought to the consequences. But I can talk in general about things for teaching purposes. The point of this is to help writers understand how we do it and also illustrate the idea that it is a bad idea to look to only one source for sales or…
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The New World of Publishing: Getting Knocked Off a Goal
This is another fixed and updated post from a bunch of years back. But it still works fine right here. —- Got the goals? Dreaming the dreams? All set for 2015 and a good year of writing? Standing here at the beginning of the year, every writer I know says, “Ready!” And they mean it. But sadly, ask all but the most driven writers in May the same question and life will have stopped almost all writers cold. And they will not be back at it. And the year will pass and around Christmas many writers will wonder what happened, swear they will do better in the new year, set…
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New World of Publishing: Control
CONTROL This is the second post on setting goals and getting ready to write for the new year that I have brought forward from 2012 and redone. The first one was about how to handle failure, which will be a part of your new year. You won’t be able to avoid it completely. Now this post is on dreams and goals. It is critical to know the difference between a dream and a goal. Critical to having a successful and fun year writing. Set your goals only on what you can control. Any business plan you decide to set up for yourself for the new year is made up of goals…
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New World of Publishing: Failure Must Be An Option
FAILURE MUST BE AN OPTION Part one of the annual setting goals posts. I’ll bet a few of you got very uneasy by me starting off a New World blog post with: “Failure Must Be Option.” This post is a much changed post from 2012 about setting goals. And how to move forward with your writing. And to do that, you must fail, over and over to become an artist in this business and to just survive. And that’s normal and perfectly fine. Let me say this clearly. The reason I am starting right here, talking about failure, is that until you understand failure in publishing, you don’t have a lot of…
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The New World of Writing: Pulp Speed
Pulp Speed I’ve mentioned this concept a number of times on my nightly blog and in the Topic of the Night little sections. But since Pulp Speed was almost impossible in the new traditional world, it belongs as a post in this series. Not at all sure why this idea sort of hits me right. I think because it flies in the face of all the myths. A writer has to have all myths under control to even attempt this. So this post might just make you angry because it hits at belief systems I’m afraid. The second reason I can’t shake this idea is because for all of my life…
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Writing in Public Summary
Writing in Public: A Summary So Far In the Life of a Professional Fiction Writer Here is a summary of this crazy project through 16 months. (Plan for December in the last day of November post below.) I have just taken the major areas and put the totals. November of this year I decided to finally stop talking about it and take my fiction writing up another level. So it was the best month so far and I have a hunch that given time, you will be able to look back clearly on where this decision was made. The fun of tracking stuff like this. Also I have written 17 novels…
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The New World of Writing: Dare To Be Bad
This is another modern major update of a post I did about three plus years ago about a topic that has been talked about in the Productivity Online Workshop. I’ve mentioned this topic a few times before in places, so I figured it would be time to be clear on it again and update this into this modern world of indie publishing. Kevin J. Anderson did a good blog on the topic of taking a chance with your work, about “Daring to be Bad” on a first draft and getting it down. Read his blog here, it’s short. And even though he put it up in 2011, it’s still there and can be…