Business Musings: Consumers Jumped Across The Digital Divide (Part One)

From the moment I started writing these weekly business blogs, I covered the attitudes of online retailers who wondered how they could appeal to customers. If the company was big, like Amazon or Walmart, consumers shopped online when they trusted the website or knew that their information would be safe. I’m resisting the urge to put in quotes around trust and safe, because that attitude […]

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Business Musings: The Data Divide

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at the Digital Book World Conference last week as Data Guy made his presentation. He brings data to a world still stuck in the 19th century. As I read reports of the reaction to his presentation, I saw continual insistence that publishing is about “gut instinct” and the ways that data undermines the art […]

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Business Musings: Hidden Treasures

What a fascinating few weeks I’ve had. At the end of May, I hit most of my major writing deadlines. I’m turning my attention to short stories and to a massive project I’m doing for Baen Books, under the unwieldy title Tough Mothers, Great Dames, and Warrior Princesses: Classic Stories By Women in Science Fiction. (Yes, I’m considering another title, but still haven’t come up […]

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Business Musings: The Rise of The Backlist

The new year hadn’t even had a week to catch its breath before the first year-end numbers for 2014 appeared. The definitive numbers—if you can call any numbers “definitive” in traditional publishing—won’t show up until late February or early March. But the early numbers reveal quite a bit. Publishers Weekly spent the first full week of 2015 reporting the numbers, but Publishers Marketplace actually analyzed […]

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The Business Rusch: Bestseller Lists and Other Thoughts

The Business Rusch: Bestseller Lists and Other Thoughts Kristine Kathryn Rusch On Tuesday, in my morning business reading, I came across a rather startling statistic: the claim that it only took 20,000 sales of paper books to hit the paper bestseller lists. I’m also assuming the statistic means paper; it might mean that it takes 20K to hit any bestseller list, which is still shockingly […]

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