If you don’t understand copyright and you consider yourself a professional writer, then you do not understand the business you are in. If you have published a novel, traditionally or indie, and you do not understand copyright, you are volunteering to get screwed over and over and over again. I say this often, and I’m saying it loudly again, because the trend for 2019 and beyond is that every organization you do business with will try to take a piece (if not all) of your copyright on each and every one of your projects.
Business Musings: Stealing Intellectual Property (Contracts/Dealbreakers)
I just had the most illuminating conversation. I had been consulting with someone about one of the TV deals I’m currently negotiating. I had run into a situation I had never encountered before, and I needed help evaluating it. No one I knew personally could help me. Either my good friends had not done a TV deal in years or they had let their agent […]
Business Musings: Brand Loyalty 1 (Branding/Discoverability)
Brand loyalty—name loyalty—is something that we writers desire, but it’s not something that we can simply will into being. And it certainly doesn’t come about by bribing your reader.
The Business Rusch: The Biggest News of The Summer
The marvelous Tom Dupree, one of the best people I’ve ever worked with in traditional publishing, wrote a great blog last month. In it, he claims that the biggest news of the summer so far, maybe even the biggest news of the year, isn’t the fact that Apple lost the anti-trust lawsuit the Justice Department brought against it, or even that Barnes & Noble continues […]
The Business Rusch: Selling Books Elsewhere
For the past week, I have stared at an e-mail that I printed out nearly two years ago. I flagged the e-mail and put it in the back of my 2011 paper calendar, and moved the printout with each new calendar. The e-mail is from my former French mystery editor. We exchanged e-mails as she left my French publisher for a new publisher, and she […]
The Business Rusch: Experiments
This morning, on my Twitter feed, a kind gentleman tweeted me with the news that he had just bought the first volume of Fiction River on Smashwords. Then he thanked me for “having good sense to make it easy not to steal.” I know what he meant, even though the tweet was oddly phrased: WMG Publishing has published DRM-free editions of Fiction River, in addition […]
The Business Rusch: Audience
The Business Rusch: Audience Kristine Kathryn Rusch Ah, the sound of bubbles bursting. On television, bursting bubbles have an audible “pop!” so loud it almost sounds like a gunshot. In real life, bubbles make almost no sound as they pop, maybe a faint little wet smack as they cease to be, barely louder than a kiss. Bubbles really are an apt analogy for […]
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