Business Musings: The Future of Audio 2019

Surprisingly, for me, one of the best panels at the Business Master Class this year was on audio. We’ve done audio panels in the past. They’ve dealt with audio books, podcasts, and a whole variety of audio options. Except that in the past, there weren’t as many audio options. The game changer for indies was Audible’s ACX. In the beginning, it was truly wonderful, because […]

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Business Musings: Audio (Planning For 2019 Part 4)

Initially, I started this post as a highlight reel of things that we need to pay attention to in 2019, but which I don’t have the time to explore deeply. I started with audio, and although I don’t have the time to explore audio deeply even in this post, just explaining where we are took more words than I had planned. (Please note that I […]

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Business Musings: Popcorn Bunnies (A Process Blog)

I could spend the next seven days on promotion and feel like I’m working at my writing full time. Seriously. I have the Fiction River Kickstarter to promote. I’m in a Storybundle with a Diving novella that might get more readers to the next book in the series, which will appear in mid-September.  I have a brand new story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine  that’s […]

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Business Musings: Beautiful Books

  I got really weird about a book recently. Dean and I stopped at the mail on the way out of town for a day off. On our days off, I often go to Starbucks and read a paper book. Why not read on my Kindle or iPad? Because my days off are no-screen days. Otherwise, I’ll obsessively check my email or text some friends […]

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Business Musings: My Day in Negotiation

In dealing with movie and TV producers, and foreign rights publishers, and pretty much anyone who wants subsidiary rights to my book, I hold all of the power in the negotiation.

I know, I know. A bunch of you just did double-takes. How can I have more power than a Hollywood studio?

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Business Musings: Brand Loyalty 1 (Branding/Discoverability)

Brand loyalty—name loyalty—is something that we writers desire, but it’s not something that we can simply will into being. And it certainly doesn’t come about by bribing your reader.

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Business Musings: The First (?) 2017 Process Blog

I was staring down the barrel of 2017, trying to figure out my writing projects. And I realized on Tuesday that the reason I couldn’t just dive in on Monday was because I hadn’t…oh, crap…defined myself.

I had defined myself in general. That’s easy. I’m a writer first, and to me, that means all the writerly things I do and have done from the old Star Wars book to new fiction I’m writing (from the romance short to the Diving universe to the historical mystery I just finished for the next Lawrence Block antho) to this blog and all the nonfiction.

But I somehow did not handle the specifics of being a writer very well in 2016.

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Business Musings: The Curse of Early Adopters

All of us who indie publish our work are pressed for time. And even if we’re early adopters, we don’t adopt every change. We can’t. We make a cost-benefit analysis of each innovation to see if it’s worth our time to upgrade.

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