Business Musings: Learning, The Future, and CES (Contracts/Negotiations)

In November, 2007, the members of the Writers Guild of America (East & West) walked off the job as part of a contract negotiation with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. (AMPTP) That strike was consequential for a variety of reasons. But what caught me at the time, and catches me now, was how prescient that strike was. The writers walked off because, […]

Read Me 9 Comments

The Business Rusch: The Changing Playing Field

Let’s start with some really cool statistics. The first is reliable. It’s based on daily data received from 70 million retail locations all over the United States. Here it is: In the first quarter of 2013, brick-and-mortar bookstores saw a 27% increase in foot traffic over the same period in 2012. Combine that with the number of independent brick-and-mortar booksellers increasing for the past four […]

Read Me 45 Comments

The Business Rusch: More Distribution Changes

This morning, my iPad Los Angeles Times app informed me that the creators of the TV show Veronica Mars had started a Kickstarter project. They wanted two million dollars to jump-start a movie, using the original cast. I clicked the link to Kickstarter and donated. At the time, the movie hadn’t yet reached its goal. As of Wednesday evening, it had. I have my browser […]

Read Me 28 Comments

The Business Rusch: Binge Reading

On a day when most of the publishing blogosphere is dealing with Random House’s horrible Hydra publishing line, I figured I’d talk about something else. First of all, if you haven’t heard about Hydra and what it wants to do to writers who know nothing about business, check out John Scalzi’s blog. In fact, check out John Scalzi’s blog to see why so many writers […]

Read Me 31 Comments

The Business Rusch: The “Brutal” 2000-Word Day

The Business Rusch: The “Brutal” 2000-Word Day Kristine Kathryn Rusch I know, I know. I didn’t do a long blog last week because of the hack-attack, now fixed, and I heard from a lot of you wondering what the “missing” post would have been about. Many of you speculated that I would take on Simon Lipskar’s ridiculous letter from the Association of Authors Representatives to […]

Read Me 92 Comments

The Business Rusch: Scarcity and Abundance

The Business Rusch: Scarcity and Abundance Kristine Kathryn Rusch   For nearly two years now, I’ve been trying to find a succinct way to express how publishing is changing. So imagine my pleasure when I found the exact analogy that I wanted in John Seabrook’s New Yorker article, “Streaming Dreams,” about YouTube. A few years ago, YouTube decided to make some structural changes to reflect […]

Read Me 93 Comments

The Business Rusch: Playing To Win

  The Business Rusch: Playing To Win Kristine Kathryn Rusch I keep teasing my husband, saying he should write a how-to book called Think and Grow Thin. Seriously. Because that’s how this man loses weight. He lost 40 pounds this year on the Think and Grow Thin method. He sets his mind to losing weight, and voila! he does it. Of course, there’s some effort […]

Read Me 49 Comments