Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 3: Bestsellers

In my Pocket Reader app, I stored a September article from BBC News as much for the article’s title as its content. That title? “When Is A Bestseller Not Necessarily A Bestseller?” I think that’s been the burning question in publishing for the past ten years. Bestsellers haven’t entirely lost their meaning, but they’re not relevant the way that they were twenty years ago. Back […]

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Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 2: Traditional Publishing

In the course of this insane year, in which the news cycle was on overdrive in every single industry, and the Western world (which is what I mostly follow) spent all of its time splitting into factions and screaming at each other. In a year that had a moment of holy crap, are we really going to slide into World War III?  followed by the […]

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Business Musings: Trainwreck November Edition

Three days before I sat down to write this blog post, I finished reading Drama High by Michael Sokolove. I clutched the book to my heart, and thought, no one will ever see books like this again. Then I mentally slapped myself. I had slipped into traditional writer think. Drama High was published by Riverhead Books in 2014. Riverhead was once a literary imprint of […]

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Business Musings: Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble is undergoing changes yet again. What does this mean for writers?

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Business Musings: What Traditional Publishing Says It Does Best

Once upon a time, a writer taking on a big publisher like that remained secret, partly so that the writer could sell another book. (Even then, the large publisher would often bad-mouth the writer in private to any other publisher who would listen.)

Times have changed.

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Business Musings: Price Wars and Victims

The traditional publishers are screaming about Amazon. I’ve learned over the years that when someone screams about something, they’re doing so because they feel some kind of pressure, some kind of pinch.

How could traditional publishers be feeling a pinch from Amazon? After all, in the United States, Amazon is selling more books than any other retailer. Why would that hurt traditional publishers? Is it hurting traditional publishers?

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The Business Rusch: Advertising, Print Editions, and Traditional Publishing (Discoverability Part One)

 The latest buzz word in the publishing industry is “discoverability.” Everyone’s worried about the “mountain of crap” that self publishing will (has?) brought into the industry—including self published authors. Everyone ignores two important facts: one person’s crap is another person’s beloved book, and publishing has always produced books in great volume. The newly merged Penguin Random House (or Randy Penguin as one of my favorite […]

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The Business Rusch: The Global View

 I’ll be honest with you: when I planned a topic for my blog last week that wasn’t US-specific, I was thinking that the hits on my site would drop off. After all, the Thursday Business Blog fell on one of the US’s big federal holidays, Independence Day (aka the Fourth of July). I figured I’d get a quarter of my usual attendance. Instead, I got […]

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The Business Rusch: The Year of The Bookstore

A week ago Sunday, one of our local booksellers, Sheldon McArthur of North by Northwest Books, tossed me the April 22, 2013 Publishers Weekly. The issue has a good review of my upcoming Kris DeLake novel, A Spy To Die For, but it turns out that wasn’t why Sheldon gave me the PW. He gave it to me to see my reaction to the ad […]

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The Business Rusch: The Fear Chronicles

The Business Rusch: The Fear Chronicles Kristine Kathryn Rusch Last week, as the stock market took yet another tumble, I saw a big-name trader get interviewed on the evening news. The trader said—not flippantly, but tiredly—“You know how it goes in the markets. Traders either respond with greed or terror.” Economic analysts have been talking about fear a lot in the past three years. Ever […]

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