The first time I ever heard the saying, “The problems in your writing are the problems in your life,” I was having a conversation with Harlan Ellison about editing. Back when I was editing Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, I was feeling my way around editing fiction. I had run a newsroom and put out a […]
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In some ways, 2020 and 2021 were straightforward years. 2020 was a long scream of a year, one in which we all were trying to survive against a tiny unseen foe. We got vaccines in 2021, and while that eased some of the worry, it didn’t make the worry go away. We were still a […]
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I used to train radio news announcers. I trained them how to read live and on air, a skill I learned myself while still in college. In 2021, I took a voiceover class from an impressive-as-hell studio here in Las Vegas, with the full intention that I would somehow get my books into audio. I […]
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On January 6, 2023, Michael W. Lucas made a rather important announcement on his blog. He wrote, in all caps: AMAZON IS NO LONGER MY BIGGEST INCOME SOURCE. It’s not that he added a consulting business to his writing income, or started doing in-person speaking gigs. He didn’t get a day job. Instead, he’s been, […]
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I’m actually a little excited (and terrified that I’m excited) for 2023. All of us involved with WMG Publishing are starting the year at a full run. We’ve made a lot of changes and progress in December, and we have great plans for this new year. First, let me tell you Diving fans that I’m […]
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2022: The year that advertising stopped working. That’s not true, but it feels true. Conversations at the 20Booksto50K conference were all about the broken ad revenues, and the inability to goose algorithms. BookBub ads don’t seem as effective. Newsletter campaigns aren’t working. And what happened to all the book bloggers? Nothing seemed to get a […]
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I used to be quite dismissive of the usefulness of the 20Booksto50K conference. Pre-pandemic, 20Books was all about Amazon, Kindle, Kindle Select, and making money on page reads. Great money, for a few folks who learned to manipulate Amazon’s algorithms. Good money, for some who went exclusive to Amazon and manipulated the algorithms. Okay money, […]
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…Especially on the Recommended Reading List. I’m going to get there, but the last 2 weeks have consisted of literally cramming to get too many projects done in too little time. (Including a Diving novella for Asimov’s!) Big final project for Spanish, which included some reading that really inspired me on a few things, so […]
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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 […]
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I’m lucky to have books and stories in the latest Storybundle. This one is on time travel. The ten books in the bundle represent many different forms of time travel, from time travel sf to time travel fantasy to time travel mystery to time travel romance. If you scan to the bottom of this post, […]
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