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Posts from the ‘business’ Category

Jul 15

8 Comments

Picking up small rocks

So today was move da rocks day to patch da road day. I was the young, tough guy, who was collecting and throwing all the bits of granite that had missed the road, into the bucket of the skid-steer, while Alan drove it along at a steady pace (so no slowing down, just keep bending and throwing).  I did about three and half tons of rocks… Which ain’t 16 tons of number nine coal. But 1) I’m not young. 2) I’m as tough as a junket sandwich 3) at least with a shovel you don’t have to pick them off the ground by hand. It’s the bending that killed me. I still feel another day older and deeper in debt. Although, as a sensible self-employed writer I avoid debt like the plague. Income is erratic. Don’t owe money. That way you’re only broke. Read more

Jun 28

6 Comments

Not Publishing, but Content Creation

An illustration from a book by Maximilian II Habsburg. Author photo.

That’s the basis of Kris Rusch’s piece Rethinking the Writing Business: Part 1 over at Kris Writes. We authors are looking at ourselves as publishers, or working with publishers and trying to match their take.

Nope. Wrong. Too limited. Read more

Jun 22

29 Comments

The Slothful Writer

The sloth earned it’s name not from it’s habits, but the human perception of them. You see, there’s a sin of slothfulness: laziness, the inability to get things done, much less in any kind of timely manner. So how did the innocent animal get named for a sin? Well, it’s slow. Takes the sloth a while to get anywhere. Takes the sloth a really really long time to poop (look, I was briefly a children’s librarian. Kids love poop facts. More than that, they love to share them with any adult in range. What can I say? Did you know the wombat has square poops?). Read more

May 24

10 Comments

Publisher Bites Author

From over at PG’s place, the dreadful tale of a publisher-relationship that went badly wrong for the writer. Short version – he got stiffed and was not paid what he was owed.

Dan Rhodes got curious about why one book wasn’t earning anything. Here’s the first part of the story, and the publisher’s explanation: it was all a mistake.

Read more

May 12

27 Comments

The Long Tail—the tail that is always new

Rudyard Kipling wrote several great poems about wanderlust and the itch to look over the next hill, including “The Long Trail.” We authors are more interested in the long tail, the sales of our earlier books. We want new readers to have access to our older work, to buy them, enjoy them, tell others about them. Long tail sales can yield a pretty penny over time, and can lure new readers in as well.

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Apr 28

11 Comments

Already?!?

How many of us have laughed, sometimes a little bitterly, at the little sign saying, “Deadlines: I love the sound they make as they go zooming past?” Or “If it wasn’t for the last minute, I’d never get anything done.”

Yes. We writers feel that a lot, either because of contract deadlines, tax deadlines, or self-imposed sales and publications deadlines. The threat of a hard time limit can be wonderfully inspiring, or it can turn a brain to mush. I tend to fall into the latter category, or used to. The words, “You have five minutes to finish your paper,” caused all cerebral function to cease. I might as well hand in what I had, or print it and turn it in, because the connection between hand/hands and brain had just been severed. Read more

Apr 7

18 Comments

Mindset

The question came up in comments under the steps for opening a small business post: why do all this work? Why not just run it on the side like a hobby, commingling all your funds, skip the business licenses and all the other hurdles?

Why, in fact, are we encouraging you to do all that? What about all the folks who never got started along the way because of the hurdles of running a business, or who spent all their energy on opening the business, and never got any further – why are we discouraging them?

The key is: mindset. This is a collection of writers who do this for a living, not a collection of people who published a book once, and maybe will get around to that again.

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