Business Musings: The People in Your Office

So, it happened again. A big name fantasy writer made his fans angry because the next book in his series hasn’t appeared in years. And, in a passing remark, he compared the comments fans make on his overdue book to those comments people make to their unemployed adult child about getting a job or to their single grandkid about getting married. Patrick Rothfuss made the […]

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Business Musings: Things I Learned From My Readers

The title of this blog is things I learned from my readers. The pieces below link to comments or websites.

The main thing I learned from you folks over the course of writing the contract series is this: Not only do you pay attention, but you use this information. Almost daily now, I get letters from a writer who used some piece of the contracts blog to negotiate a better deal or to get their rights reverted or to handle a foreign rights contract.

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Business Musings: Authors Guild 2016 Letter

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…

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A New Anthology, A New Story, and One Tight Deadline

I’m pleased to announce that WMG Publishing just released the first Fiction River Special edition, marking the end of the anthology series first year! We’re so pleased–and I’m especially thrilled. I edited Fiction River Special: Crime, and invited all kinds of wonderful writers to join up.  From bestsellers to Edgar-award winners to a handful of first sales, the writers in this volume are–to a person–fantastic.    […]

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The Business Rusch: With A Little Help From My Friends (Discoverability Part 11)

When we set up the anthology workshop that we held last week, Dean Wesley Smith told everyone that they would have a great opportunity to network. After all, 50 professional writers whose work runs the gamut of the fiction genres would be there from all over the world. A few of the new attendees worried about that admonition because, as introverts, being in a new […]

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The Business Rusch: Social Media Part 2 (or Discoverability Part 10 continued)

Boy, there are a lot of misconceptions among writers about social media and a few of those misconceptions cropped up in last week’s post. If you haven’t read last week’s post, please do so now, because I’m not going to recap in this post. I’m just going to continue forward. First, the misconceptions (or at least those as of the weekend before this post goes […]

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The Business Rusch: Social Media (Discoverability Part 10)

 As I got deep into this discoverability series, I promised that I would examine marketing strategies from passive to active. I have to abandon that promise now, because most everything we’ll discuss from here on out will be active. By active, I mean you’ll have to do something—write something, design something, or pay for something—and you’ll have to do it several times. You had to […]

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The Business Rusch: The Helpful Reader (Discoverability Part Two)

I publish this blog late on Wednesday night my time so that readers have the blog on Thursday. In the United States, this Thursday is our annual day set aside for giving thanks. Before I start this blog, let me give thanks for all of you. You’ve come to this blog on a regular basis for years now, and I greatly appreciate it. Thank you. […]

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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 […]

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The Business Rusch: One Phone Call From Our Knees

The Business Rusch: One Phone Call From Our Knees Kristine Kathryn Rusch   In 2009, Mat Kearney came out with a song called Closer to Love, which is, apparently, a favorite of the DJs on the station I listen to. It still plays in rather heavy rotation for an older song, and I hear it at least once a week. The song isn’t one of […]

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