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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Business Musings: What The…?
I toyed with a lot of titles for this post, most of which would have insulted those of you who have followed my blog posts for a long time and know what I’m about to say. I don’t want to insult you people. And then there are the others, the ones for whom this post is intended. There’s a lot I could say, but let’s […]
Business Musings: Brandon’s Kickstarter
The conversation started about 10 hours after Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter went live. That’s when the press noticed that a writer made millions in the space of a few hours—without the help of any major publishing house. Brandon’s own fans are doing this. I’m writing this post about 3 days after the Kickstarter went live. Sometime in the last 24 hours, this Kickstarter campaign became the […]
Business Musings: New Tools: Indie Publishing (Year in Review 7)
I feel like I write a version of this post every year, and I always feel out of my depth when doing so. Part of that is because we’re dealing with new tools. Part of it is because—full disclosure—I do the writing, but WMG does the publishing. Because I’m me, and endlessly curious, I find a lot of this stuff, and forward it to them. […]
Ten Little Fen: A Spade/Paladin Novel
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The Chase
The Chase, the latest Diving novel, answers a lot of your questions about the series. It also might cause you to ask a few more. Click here to find out more.
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