Business Musings: Tempest in a Bestseller List

There’s less reason to game the Times list now, however. The list has bifurcated so much that you can climb the top of one of the many lists with sales that my first novel (which didn’t even sniff at the list) blew out of the water in its first week twenty-five years ago. Big publishers don’t make a lot of money on 5,000 copies. Indies do, compared to expenses. But big publishers do not.

So, the amount of work that someone had put into placing Sarem’s book on the bestseller list made no sense to me at all. Where was the profit here? What was the point? Bragging rights are nice, but unless you have money to burn, ordering 18,000 copies of your own book is pretty expensive.

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The Business Rusch: The Holiday Surprise

The Business Rusch: The Holiday Surprise Kristine Kathryn Rusch  I’m starting this column on Boxing Day because I’m absolutely and utterly buried. December had a lot of real life bumps, including illness, spousal illness, more estate stuff, and some other business things that got in the way of writing. And you should realize: Usually nothing gets in the way of my writing, so these things […]

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