Sometimes I think the best preparation I had for the business of writing was marrying (and then divorcing) a man who could talk anyone into anything. He liked sales and he was always the best salesperson in the room…in the beginning. But his sales dwindled over time, because his early sales were based on hype, […]
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Gloria and Emilio Estefan have an estimated net worth of 700 million dollars. Jimmy Buffett has an estimated net worth of 550 million dollars. What do those artists have in common? They kept control of the copyrights to their songs. They maintained control of those copyrights starting in the 1970s, when other musicians signed away […]
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I could spend the next seven days on promotion and feel like I’m working at my writing full time. Seriously. I have the Fiction River Kickstarter to promote. I’m in a Storybundle with a Diving novella that might get more readers to the next book in the series, which will appear in mid-September. I have […]
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The problem with the hamster wheel school of writing is that at a certain point all of that love of writing, all of that joy in storytelling, goes out the window, and writing becomes drudgery. It’s not fun to write the same story over and over again. It’s not fun to write stories on topics you hate. It’s not fun to write in genres you loathe.
So many writers are doing that, though, and have no idea how to quit…
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A lot of times on this blog, I deal with the problems in publishing. Bad problems, like agents embezzling, traditional publishers not paying royalties, income going down, or sales not up to expectations. In the early days of indie publishing, I would also blog about the problems of success. In our workshops and classes, we […]
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While Dean was running one of our webinars on the morning I wrote this post, I decided to work in one of the nearby cafes. As I came in, a beautiful little girl wearing a flower in her hair and a sparkly unicorn t-shirt with pink shorts ran up to the counter. She tried to […]
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Well, I’m sitting in a breakfast nook, surrounded by sunshine, in a condo I hadn’t seen as of January 1, living a life that I hadn’t expected to be living on that day either. Dean and I are now going back and forth between Las Vegas and Lincoln City. In fact, he’s in Lincoln City […]
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As of this writing (Saturday, March 10, 2018), I have a gigantic research library. I started it in the 1980s, and much of what I buy is impulse. In other words, I see a book and my creative brain says, Ooooooo, yes!, and I listen. I know that book in come in handy one day. […]
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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.
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The fact that we can no longer agree on the great stuff…is the greatest thing that happened in 2017.
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