Business Musings: Outrage Fatigue

Every time I log onto my Twitter feed, everyone is screaming at everyone else about something. Even my go-to writers are angry right now. I logged onto #Caturday last Saturday, terrified that the silly cat pictures had devolved into some kind of war between Siamese and tortoise shells, but I haven’t found that so far. Although this photo gave me a moment of concern: Granted, […]

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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: Surviving The Stupid

I sometimes think I live in a constant state of outrage because I read the news. Every day, there’s something new. I occasionally divorce myself from the constant barrage by going on a news-holiday or a Twitter-holiday, so I sometimes miss the current stuff. Imagine my surprise, as I scanned through Twitter a few weeks ago, to see a writer I follow go after Tor […]

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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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Business Musings: Sneaky Money Grabs (Contracts/Dealbreakers)

I was going to write a blog on why you never hire people for a percentage of your sales for the life of the project. I was going to look at some of the contract terms that writers should be wary of, from companies like Booktrope, companies that still exist.

And then I choked on a big gigantic paragraph in the Booktrope sample author agreement. This big gigantic paragraph is the one thing that allowed Booktrope to raise millions of dollars. Had Booktrope succeeded, that success would have come at the expense of its authors.

The scary thing is that other companies are behaving the exact same way.

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Business Musings: Things Indie Writers Learned in 2014

I’d love to say nothing, but that’s not true—if we’re discussing indie writers who have remained in the business for several years. There will always be new indie writers who know very little, and there will always be those with “experience” who turn a year or two worth of sales into a know-it-all platform. However, those indie writers who’ve been at this since the beginning […]

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