The Business Rusch: All Good Things

April marks the fifth anniversary of this blog. Not of the Business Rusch, exactly, but of me writing every Thursday about business or writing or something to do with publishing. Five years at 52 weeks per year at about 3,000 to 4,000 words per blog. That’s damn near a million words about various topics, more than some business writers have written in their entire careers. […]

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The Business Rusch: Markers

So Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. The blogosphere is going crazy with opinions; the New York Times thinks the world has ended; and everyone has a comment. Except me. I’ve been dealing with other issues. Dean and I are traveling, and so we’re consuming news differently. A few hours after I finish this (I hope), we will meet with a few other long-term professionals […]

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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 […]

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The Business Rusch: Anti-Published

I didn’t read my five newspapers this morning. I’m cranky about that. I love my newspapers. I read them on my iPad, and don’t mind the advertising at all, even though I accidentally click on the ads once in a while. (And please, don’t tell anyone: Occasionally, I investigate the product.) Which is way more than I used to do when I read paper newspapers. […]

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The Business Rusch: What Writers Need To Know

On Monday, I spent an hour talking with a very knowledgeable business reporter who works at a well-known business daily newspaper, one you probably read. I didn’t exactly speak to her on what’s called “deep background,” but that ended up being my function. She had found a blog of mine that pertains to an article she’s writing, and wanted an interview. I won’t know whether […]

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The Business Rusch: Where Art Meets Commerce

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably think I make a business decision every time I sit down to write. You might assume that I have audience-tested my ideas and have planned my next works in excruciating market-approved details. And if you think any of that, you would be wrong. When I write, I create, markets be damned. When I’m at my […]

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The Business Rusch: The Agent Clause (Deal Breakers 2012)

For the past several weeks, this blog has focused on deal breakers in modern publishing contracts. Novelists Inc. asked me to update my article on deal breakers for their conference binder from last year, and wow, oh, wow have things changed in these short twelve months. I used that article as a jumping off point for these blogs. I turned the article in last week, […]

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The Business Rusch: Hurry Up. Wait.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the differences between traditional publishing and indie publishing this week. Almost every day, some writer writes to me and asks if they should go traditional or indie on some new project. Sometimes the writer has just finished his first novel, and wants to know what to do with it—go the traditional route or publish it himself. Sometimes […]

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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 […]

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The Business Rusch: A Short Post

The Business Rusch: A Short Post Kristine Kathryn Rusch   As most of you know, my website got hacked last week. In fact, all of my websites–and I have a few–got hacked. So I’ve been busy, even though I don’t have a lot to show for it. Dean and I hired a website security firm to clean up the mess, and to clean up our […]

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