Recommended Reading List: September, 2022

Read a lot this month, but much of it was academic articles in Spanish for one of my classes. You can thank me for not recommended any of those. I also read some great unpublished novellas, but I’m afraid you won’t be able to find them…yet. If the writers let me know when/where they’re published, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, what you’ll find below are […]

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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 […]

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Business Musings: Kate Bush and the Multimillion Dollar Long Game

This summer, Kate Bush broke three Guinness Book of World Records: Oldest Female Artist To Reach Number One, Longest Time For A Track To Reach Number One On The UK’s Official Singles Chart, and Longest Gap Between Number Ones. She did all of this with the song, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” which she first released in 1985. The song, which initially […]

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Business Musings: Vexing Numbers

In May, NBC’s former flagship reality TV show, The Voice, hit a weird patch. Adam Levine, one of two remaining original coaches, left the series suddenly, the day after the season finale. Two weeks before, Levine had posted on social media that he would return to The Voice for the next season. Indeed, The Hollywood Reporter says that Levine had signed on to The Voice […]

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Business Musings: Here It Comes

I didn’t mean to go down the rabbit hole this afternoon. I blame Led Zeppelin. Seriously. I blame them. In mid-May, I flagged an article on Rollingstone.com titled “The Eternal Revenue Stream of Led Zeppelin.” I had no real idea what the article was about, but I figured it might be important for writers, because the music business is always way ahead of the next […]

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Business Musings: Knowing What You Want (Agents/Negotiation)

In the late 1980s, some functionary at a record label fielded a call about a song called “Private Idaho,” by the B-52s. The song was never a major hit, although by the time that phone call got made, the B-52s were topping the charts with a song called “Love Shack.” The caller wanted to use the song in an upcoming movie written and directed by […]

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Business Musings: Rethinking A Title

  I blame Marvel. As I finished my Kris Nelscott/Smokey Dalton novel, Stone Cribs, I realized that the victim in the book, Valentina Wilson, was one amazing woman. And she needed a story arc all her own. I knew how she was going to end up, and who she would be years after the events in Stone Cribs, but I needed to write the story […]

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Business Musings: Money Talks

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 […]

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The Business Rusch: More Passive Marketing (Discoverability Part 8)

 This week, Hugh Howey put a funny post on his website. Titled “One-Man Operation,” Hugh’s post profiles—if you want to call it that—the man who runs Nautilis Publishing in Taiwan. Nautilis publishes Hugh, and according to the post, has existed since 2010, and has done two books per year. They’re always bestsellers. Hugh says his book has sold 50,000 copies in Taiwan alone. Apparently, the […]

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The Business Rusch: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

I had a lot of marvelous, thoughtful comments on last week’s blog. I didn’t respond, in part because I was extremely busy this past week, but mostly because I would have been expressing my opinion on the commenter’s life and career choices. I try not to do that, particularly in public. We’re all different, and because of the new world of publishing, we all have […]

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