Business Musings: Facing The Future

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. The initial title of this post was “Fighting The Future.” It came from a quote that I spent about a half an hour searching for. I had hastily scrawled the quote on a piece of paper while doing a dozen other things the past two weeks, but I didn’t cite the source. All […]

Read Me 4 Comments

Business Musings: Living In The Past

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. Three things happened in quick succession recently, that forced me to write this blog now, not, say, months from now. First, a writer friend astonished me by saying they have finally gone indie, after being urged to do so for more than a decade. They’ve been unable to sell a book traditionally for […]

Read Me 12 Comments

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 […]

Read Me 29 Comments

Business Musings: Tea Leaves: Year in Review 2022 Part 4

I started this year’s Year in Review blogs with traditional publishing partly because that Department of Justice anti-trust case produced such juicy tidbits that I couldn’t ignore them, and partly because I have always started with traditional publishing. Back in the day, I saw all of us (writers, readers, and publishers) as creatures that emerged from traditional publishing. Now, I see a lot of writers […]

Read Me 5 Comments

Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 1: Overview

This year has been ridiculous. I have no idea why I expected it to be otherwise. I guess there’s a part of me that expected the world to return to normal, even though I’m one of the people who has said since March of 2020 that there would be no normal, at least not what we thought of as normal in 2019. Every industry is […]

Read Me 14 Comments

Business Musings: How Writers Fail Part 10: Blame

I spent most of the morning trying to start this post. It’s not like me to have trouble writing, particularly a nonfiction post, but I simply couldn’t do what I had planned. What I had planned was simple: Because of all of the news recently and the timing, I had planned to start the Year In Review blog posts early. I’ve always hated that they […]

Read Me 8 Comments

Business Musings: Searching For A Sense of Urgency

As of the writing of this post, I have not yet seen Season 4 of Stranger Things.  I decided in May to wait until the entire series dropped so I could binge it. Then I found myself busier than I expected. Dean doesn’t watch Stranger Things, so I need to find time away from reading and writing to watch the entire series. I skipped three […]

Read Me 6 Comments

Business Musings: How Writers Fail (Part 5) Money

I know most of you are going to stare at this title and think: Yep, writers fail because they don’t earn enough money. Um…nope. That’s not the problem at all. Money causes writers to fail because writers bring the wrong expectations to their view of their financial spreadsheet. First, let’s talk about money in general. Some people are very bad at handling money. For example, […]

Read Me 15 Comments

Business Musings: How Writers Fail (Part 2): Fear (Established Writer Edition)

I’m writing these posts in no particular order, just as the reasons come to me. And honestly, they’re everywhere. Because of last summer’s move, we reorganized our books. We are in a smaller space than we were in Oregon, so we got rid of a lot of our books—the ones we didn’t need for research or the ones we liked, but didn’t love. Now, we’re […]

Read Me 8 Comments

Business Musings: Attorneys

As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts, I’ve been taking a pretty extensive Entertainment Law class. Initially, I took it to learn about industries related to mine, as I get back to licensing. But I found the first semester fascinating, because it filled in a lot of gaps in my learning. It also filled in a few gaps in my teaching. For years now, I’ve […]

Read Me 11 Comments