Business Musings: Go Wide or Run Away or Amazon Fail

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. [Note on 5/5/23: As most of my regular readers know, I’m dyslexic. I have a first reader to catch errors, but this post–which was late–went live without the assistance of that first reader. As a result, I made two typical errors for me, which have been discussed in the comments. Normally, I leave […]

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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: International Growth (Jumping The Digital Divide Part 4)

Trying to wrap my brain around the possibilities for growth in the digital sphere hurts. Seriously. Because the markets are so big and the opportunities so vast that I’m not capable of grasping it all. For a long time, the digital divide wasn’t just generational. It was also location-based. When the Kindle came into being and reader after reader discovered ebooks, the early focus was […]

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Business Musings: Consumers Jumped Across The Digital Divide (Part One)

From the moment I started writing these weekly business blogs, I covered the attitudes of online retailers who wondered how they could appeal to customers. If the company was big, like Amazon or Walmart, consumers shopped online when they trusted the website or knew that their information would be safe. I’m resisting the urge to put in quotes around trust and safe, because that attitude […]

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Business Musings: Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket: Amazon Edition

I’m putting up this post in the middle of the fear sequence as it appears on my website, not because the post fits in the fear cycle, but because I don’t want to monitor the news for weeks to see what, if anything, has changed. On June 9, here in the States, Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced a package of five bills which […]

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Business Musings: Reading and Ebooks (2020 in Review)

Believe it or not, there’s some great news in 2020. Reading became cool again. With all the other distractions shut down and people stuck inside, they picked up the books they had set aside because they were busy with other things. Most publishers and writers made it easy for readers in the early part of the pandemic, by offering a lot of free content to […]

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Business Musings: Speaking Out

Finished my morning routine an hour or so ago, thought a lot about what I was going to write for my weekly blog, and grabbed the laptop, heading to one of my favorite chairs. I set the laptop down so that I could take the teabags out of the cup of tea that I had prepared for this moment, and glanced at a new news […]

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Business Musings: Tidbits (Planning for 2019 Part 5)

Important things to pay attention to in 2019.

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Business Musings: Audio (Planning For 2019 Part 4)

Initially, I started this post as a highlight reel of things that we need to pay attention to in 2019, but which I don’t have the time to explore deeply. I started with audio, and although I don’t have the time to explore audio deeply even in this post, just explaining where we are took more words than I had planned. (Please note that I […]

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Business Musings: Bookstores and Libraries (Planning for 2019 Part 3)

If you’re a writer and, more specifically, if you’re an indie writer, there’s a lot of opportunity in the bookstore and library markets. Yes, indeedy, I’m talking brick-and-mortar stuff. First, a reminder: I’m doing a short series reviewing 2018 with an eye toward 2019. If you have not read the first post in this series, please do so. I will be referring to it throughout […]

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