So…in this world of celebrity and the internet and data at our fingertips, should we even try to keep our business information confidential? The big companies do so. Smaller companies do as well.
Smart business-oriented writers do.
Many long-time traditionally published writers get stuck in the wrong number. We look at copies sold rather than income earned.
Indie-only writers know better. They understand modern numbers for what they are—great for writers.
Want to know the future of publishing? You’ll find it in TV. I know, I know, a bunch of you just went, “Huh?” But seriously, the entertainment industry is the entertainment industry is the entertainment industry, and those of us who write and publish have a small corner of it. I often use examples from the music industry on this blog, especially as I look […]
I want to support what the Authors Guild is doing here. I really do. I believe this “conversation” needs to commence. Writers—particularly writers of the Take Care of Me school—need to understand that their publishers and their agents are not their friends. Those two entities are in business for themselves and will devise contract terms to benefit them. But…
This morning, I found out through the magic of Facebook that four of my sf novellas, translated into Italian, are four of the five bestselling titles in my Italian publisher’s bookstore. As I mentioned in my blog on translation a few weeks ago, that’s not due to me. That’s because I have an excellent translator. It’s a good marriage of translator and story, because books […]
This week, though, I’m focused on Author Earnings, again. The October report examines “the rest of the ebook market.” In the past, Author Earnings only examined Amazon’s numbers and only from a “slice,” usually numbers spread out over an entire day. This time, Hugh and Data Guy looked at Apple, Kobo, Nook, and Google Play in the United States only. The numerical results surprised me as did, I suppose, Hugh and Data Guy’s personal conclusions.
A while back, I promised I would look at the new report from Author Earnings. I needed time to assess the data for the purposes of this blog. For those of you who don’t know, Author Earnings is a website started by Hugh Howey and a man known only as Data Guy. The site takes snapshots of the Amazon rankings on a given day and […]
Readers are the original binge consumers. Readers find a writer whose work they like and read everything the writer has done.
Nowadays, everything by that writer can remain in print—if the writer is indie or hybrid.
But not if the writer is traditionally published.
In the fall of 2014, before I started this blog back up again, I wrote a series of posts. You’ve seen several of them, particularly the “What I Learned” posts at the end of the year. This one dates from that period. I’d been sitting on it for a moment just like this. I’m in the middle of a big writing workshop this week. I […]
The new year hadn’t even had a week to catch its breath before the first year-end numbers for 2014 appeared. The definitive numbers—if you can call any numbers “definitive” in traditional publishing—won’t show up until late February or early March. But the early numbers reveal quite a bit. Publishers Weekly spent the first full week of 2015 reporting the numbers, but Publishers Marketplace actually analyzed […]
Spade and Paladin find themselves snowed in at a remote sf convention, with a killer on the loose! Get your copy here.
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