Business Musings: Mushroom Publishers And The Tsunami of Crap

So much of the writing advice we get comes from a set of assumptions that are no longer true. I’m not sure if they were ever true. But that’s for another blog post. (Or maybe I’ve written that post already.) Anyway, the assumption is that our culture is monolithic, that we all read the same books, and we’re all influenced by the same writers. Maybe […]

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Business Musings: Churning It Out

Toward the end of a pretty good Entertainment Weekly article about the romance side of the publishing industry, this sentence appears: [Bella Andre]’s a naturally fast writer — on average she churns out four to six books a year — and she released the first one in June 2011. Before we get to the reason I’m telling you about that sentence, let me say one […]

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The Business Rusch: The Old Ways (Discoverability Part 4)

Here’s how writers decide to market their books: They read blogs and articles, which tell them the best thing to do. Or, they mimic what they’ve seen other authors do. Or, they try to act like big traditional publishers, by funding their own book tours and doing signings. I’d say that’s no way to run a business, but honestly, that’s how traditional publishers have run […]

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The Business Rusch: The Bad Book

This week, I finished reading a bad book by one of my favorite authors. Well, “finished reading” isn’t accurate. “Paged through the last half” is probably better. The book was astoundingly bad. The author decided to go 50 Shades of Grey on me when she’d never written more than a fade-to-black sex scene before. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that her protagonist […]

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The Business Rusch: Writers and Business

The last two weeks have been quite a revelation for me. My post on perfection led to last week’s post  about writing workshops/writing culture, and even then, it wasn’t until the comment sections of both blogs that I realized just how prevalent the whole writing problem thing is. What I consider to be “the whole writing problem thing” is this: writers have never learned how to […]

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Recommended Reading List: March, 2012

I was extremely busy in March, but somehow I managed to read a lot of good stuff as well. Some of my reading came at a workshop at the end of February, beginning of March. If the stories that I liked appear in print, I told the students to contact me with that information. So far, only one has, but I hope others will so […]

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The Business Rusch: Why Not?

The Business Rusch: Why Not? Kristine Kathryn Rusch On TV’s most popular drama series, NCIS, the main character, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, walks through the office, and if he hears a stupid statement, he slaps the speaker on the back of the head. Now, this is fiction, mind you. In any real office, military or not, he’d probably be fired, brought up on charges, or forced […]

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The Business Rusch: The Holiday Surprise

The Business Rusch: The Holiday Surprise Kristine Kathryn Rusch  I’m starting this column on Boxing Day because I’m absolutely and utterly buried. December had a lot of real life bumps, including illness, spousal illness, more estate stuff, and some other business things that got in the way of writing. And you should realize: Usually nothing gets in the way of my writing, so these things […]

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The Business Rusch: Comparisons

The Business Rusch: Comparisons Kristine Kathryn Rusch I have spent a lot of time with other writers in the past three months, and I have seen this scenario over and over and over again: Writers are talking about indie publishing e-books at a dinner or a lunch or over drinks. A newer writer, maybe one with little or no name recognition, mentions that his e-books […]

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The Business Rusch: More Modern Writer Survival Skills (Changing Times Part 19)

The Business Rusch: More Modern Writer Survival Skills (Changing Times Part Nineteen) Kristine Kathryn Rusch This week hasn’t been quite as heady as last week was in publishing, but part of that is because the industry is trying to face the reality of the Borders bankruptcy filing.  Most of the publishing blogs that I’ve read this week have dealt with the potential impact of that […]

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