On January 6, 2023, Michael W. Lucas made a rather important announcement on his blog. He wrote, in all caps: AMAZON IS NO LONGER MY BIGGEST INCOME SOURCE. It’s not that he added a consulting business to his writing income, or started doing in-person speaking gigs. He didn’t get a day job. Instead, he’s been, in his words, disintermediating. He’s been consciously moving his readers […]
Business Musings: Social Media: The Year in Review Part 7
I’ve been dreading this post, but not for the reason that you think. Somewhere, probably back in November, I had gotten the bright idea that I would do this post and find a social media site to replace Twitter for my promotion and news needs. (As a former journalist, I found Twitter very useful. I followed journalists in real time, as well as old journalist […]
Business Musings: Advertising: The Year in Review Part 6
2022: The year that advertising stopped working. That’s not true, but it feels true. Conversations at the 20Booksto50K conference were all about the broken ad revenues, and the inability to goose algorithms. BookBub ads don’t seem as effective. Newsletter campaigns aren’t working. And what happened to all the book bloggers? Nothing seemed to get a book traction…except…BookTok, maybe. Social media sites at the beginning of […]
Business Musings: Amazon: Year in Review Part 5
I used to be quite dismissive of the usefulness of the 20Booksto50K conference. Pre-pandemic, 20Books was all about Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Select, and making money on page reads. Great money, for a few folks who learned to manipulate Amazon’s algorithms. Good money, for some who went exclusive to Amazon and manipulated the algorithms. Okay money, for many who did what they could when they were […]
Business Musings: Tea Leaves: Year in Review 2022 Part 4
I started this year’s Year in Review blogs with traditional publishing partly because that Department of Justice anti-trust case produced such juicy tidbits that I couldn’t ignore them, and partly because I have always started with traditional publishing. Back in the day, I saw all of us (writers, readers, and publishers) as creatures that emerged from traditional publishing. Now, I see a lot of writers […]
Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 3: Bestsellers
In my Pocket Reader app, I stored a September article from BBC News as much for the article’s title as its content. That title? “When Is A Bestseller Not Necessarily A Bestseller?” I think that’s been the burning question in publishing for the past ten years. Bestsellers haven’t entirely lost their meaning, but they’re not relevant the way that they were twenty years ago. Back […]
Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 1: Overview
This year has been ridiculous. I have no idea why I expected it to be otherwise. I guess there’s a part of me that expected the world to return to normal, even though I’m one of the people who has said since March of 2020 that there would be no normal, at least not what we thought of as normal in 2019. Every industry is […]
Business Musings: How Writers Fail Part 10: Blame
I spent most of the morning trying to start this post. It’s not like me to have trouble writing, particularly a nonfiction post, but I simply couldn’t do what I had planned. What I had planned was simple: Because of all of the news recently and the timing, I had planned to start the Year In Review blog posts early. I’ve always hated that they […]
Business Musings: Building A New World
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m tired. Bone-weary, in fact. The last six years or so have been a terrible rollercoaster, filled with disaster upon disaster. There have been some lovely moments, and a few victories for those of us who still believe in the power of the human spirit, but lately, it seems like the bigots and the haters are […]
Business Musings: Thinking Big
Writers are curious creatures. We’re a mix of insecurity and ego. The ego is there whether we admit it or not. Why else would we write stories and put them out into the world? Deep down, we believe that other people want to read these stories. For some of us (all of us?), we believe that our stories will be read by millions of people […]
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