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 […]

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Business Musings: More Splits: Indie Publishing (Year in Review 6)

For years now, I have expected indie publishing to split into two different parts. In fact, for nearly a decade, indie publishing has split into two different parts. What I didn’t foresee were the other splits that occurred this year. For the record, what I’m calling indie publishing is what most people call self publishing. Neither term is accurate. Self-publishing is too limiting, because a […]

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Business Musings: The Sad State of the Traditional Publishing Backlist (The Year in Review 3)

A quietly astonishing moment happened on November 9, the first day of 20Booksto50K, in a panel titled “High-Powered Authors.” Multiple New York Times bestselling author Kat Martin said something that caught fire when the video of the panel went live. At least three people sent me the video and pointed me to that moment, about 38 minutes into the panel. For those of you who […]

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My Talk On Perfection At 20Books

Thanks to one of my readers, I now have a copy of my talk at 20Books to share with you. Enjoy!  

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Business Musings: Raising The Bar

I haven’t had a lot of contemplation time in the past month, but I sure have a lot of notes about things I want to contemplate for this blog. One problem I have living in Las Vegas is that the weather is no longer a prompt for me. Back when I lived up north, the shortened days combined with the overcast, cold, and generally cruddy […]

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Business Musings: Scheduling: A Process Blog

Not five minutes ago, I said no to a podcaster friend. She wanted me on her very successful podcast sometime in 2020. We had even discussed it at one of the conferences that I attended this fall, and I told her that I wasn’t doing podcasts in 2020, but I would make an exception for her. Only when it came time to commit, I just […]

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Business Musings: Shifting Attitudes (Planning For 2019 Part 7)

This is my final post in the series, because otherwise I’ll be spending the rest of my life reviewing 2018 and looking toward 2019—while 2019 is passing me by. 2018 marked the crossover moment in the disruption in publishing where we firmly left the old model and accept the new model as normal. Old industries (like traditional publishing) are still grappling with the new, but […]

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Business Musings: Your Basket is Leaking

In October 2018, Sears filed for bankruptcy. The form of bankruptcy the corporate heads chose was something called Chapter 11 here in the U.S. It means that the company—once the largest retailer in the entire world—will be able to reorganize and, if they’re lucky and the folks running the company are smart, they might be able to emerge from bankruptcy with some of the business […]

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