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 […]

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Business Musings: Agenting Changes

This past week I got one of those letters. Someone wrote to me to tell me how great his agent is and what a great deal his agent got him. Not for his novel, but for his movie option. I get “my agent is great” letters all the time, but usually they’re about book deals. If someone feels the need to write to me about […]

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Business Musings: Uncertain Times

My crystal ball is broken. When the world worked in a way that progressed, rather neatly, from one point to another, I could see as far as five years in the future. Sure, things would change. My health changed, for example, in the previous decade, and that caused personal changes. But the world I lived in here in the United States was relatively stable and […]

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Business Musings: The Year Ahead…Again

In early January, I arrogantly wrote a post about the year ahead, reminding writers that this was an election year, so they needed to plan for a sales slowdown in the fall. I even said I wasn’t sure if the election would have repercussions in the spring and summer, since I was expecting a protracted primary season. And, oh, yeah! The impeachment. Remember that? Discussed […]

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Business Musings: Tidbits (Planning for 2019 Part 5)

Important things to pay attention to in 2019.

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Business Musings: Bookstores and Libraries (Planning for 2019 Part 3)

If you’re a writer and, more specifically, if you’re an indie writer, there’s a lot of opportunity in the bookstore and library markets. Yes, indeedy, I’m talking brick-and-mortar stuff. First, a reminder: I’m doing a short series reviewing 2018 with an eye toward 2019. If you have not read the first post in this series, please do so. I will be referring to it throughout […]

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Business Musings: Sales (Planning For 2019 Part 2)

The biggest issue for the latter half of 2018 was book sales. Indies and traditional publishers both complained that book sales were down, and that a crisis was imminent. Their ideas of crisis were different, but they come from a similar source, which is the current state of disruption in the publishing industry. I wrote about where we stand on the macro level in the […]

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Business Musings: The Current State of Disruption (Planning for 2019 Part 1)

A Short Series Introduction   For years now, I’ve done a year-end review, examining what happened and where the industry stands. I’ve been having a heck of a time starting this year’s series. At first, I thought it was because I had had such a difficult and disruptive year. But, with the help of my Patreon supporters as well as our annual Business Master Class […]

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Searching For The Fleet Published!

The latest Diving novel, Searching For The Fleet, hit print today. You can get the ebook, trade paper, and audio book. Click here to find the various outlets for the books. Searching For The Fleet tells the story of Coop and Yash as they try to find the modern version of the Fleet. They have hints that it exists, even though they’ve traveled 5,000 years […]

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Business Musings: Bestseller Lists Again (Or Chicken Little Is Wrong. Again.)

In the middle of February, I saw a tweet from Melville House, an independent publisher in Brooklyn, NY, linking to an article of theirs. I followed the link and saw this title: “Into the Bezosphere: The Washington Post will syndicate Amazon Charts.” I was surprised. I had heard nothing about the Post’s new bestseller list. Granted, I’ve been busy and preoccupied this year. Still coping […]

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