Business Musings: Stars

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. Me and the Google (as a friend of mine calls it) spent what I almost termed a “dispiriting” hour as I searched for the 21st century’s superstars in a variety of fields. I say “almost termed” because, when I think of it, “dispiriting” is the wrong word. Adult me, who loves this modern […]

Read Me 8 Comments

Business Musings: Facing The Future

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. The initial title of this post was “Fighting The Future.” It came from a quote that I spent about a half an hour searching for. I had hastily scrawled the quote on a piece of paper while doing a dozen other things the past two weeks, but I didn’t cite the source. All […]

Read Me 8 Comments

Business Musings: Living In The Past

To Get a Free AI Audio Version of this blog, click here. Three things happened in quick succession recently, that forced me to write this blog now, not, say, months from now. First, a writer friend astonished me by saying they have finally gone indie, after being urged to do so for more than a decade. They’ve been unable to sell a book traditionally for […]

Read Me 12 Comments

Business Musings: Tea Leaves: Year in Review 2022 Part 4

I started this year’s Year in Review blogs with traditional publishing partly because that Department of Justice anti-trust case produced such juicy tidbits that I couldn’t ignore them, and partly because I have always started with traditional publishing. Back in the day, I saw all of us (writers, readers, and publishers) as creatures that emerged from traditional publishing. Now, I see a lot of writers […]

Read Me 5 Comments

Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 3: Bestsellers

In my Pocket Reader app, I stored a September article from BBC News as much for the article’s title as its content. That title? “When Is A Bestseller Not Necessarily A Bestseller?” I think that’s been the burning question in publishing for the past ten years. Bestsellers haven’t entirely lost their meaning, but they’re not relevant the way that they were twenty years ago. Back […]

Read Me 7 Comments

Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 2: Traditional Publishing

In the course of this insane year, in which the news cycle was on overdrive in every single industry, and the Western world (which is what I mostly follow) spent all of its time splitting into factions and screaming at each other. In a year that had a moment of holy crap, are we really going to slide into World War III?  followed by the […]

Read Me 9 Comments

Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 1: Overview

This year has been ridiculous. I have no idea why I expected it to be otherwise. I guess there’s a part of me that expected the world to return to normal, even though I’m one of the people who has said since March of 2020 that there would be no normal, at least not what we thought of as normal in 2019. Every industry is […]

Read Me 14 Comments

Business Musings: How Writers Fail Part 10: Blame

I spent most of the morning trying to start this post. It’s not like me to have trouble writing, particularly a nonfiction post, but I simply couldn’t do what I had planned. What I had planned was simple: Because of all of the news recently and the timing, I had planned to start the Year In Review blog posts early. I’ve always hated that they […]

Read Me 8 Comments

Business Musings: How Writers Fail (Part 2): Fear (Established Writer Edition)

I’m writing these posts in no particular order, just as the reasons come to me. And honestly, they’re everywhere. Because of last summer’s move, we reorganized our books. We are in a smaller space than we were in Oregon, so we got rid of a lot of our books—the ones we didn’t need for research or the ones we liked, but didn’t love. Now, we’re […]

Read Me 8 Comments

Business Musings: The Final Brandon Sanderson Post

Well, Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter is one for the record books. It became the highest grossing Kickstarter about a month before his Kickstarter closed. And then it continued to make money, finally ending at $41.7 million. Brandon himself estimates that when this is all said and done, and every one of 185,341 backers have received their books and swag, he will get roughly a high-end novel […]

Read Me 17 Comments