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Posts from the ‘FYNBOSSPRESS’ Category

Jan 13

45 Comments

The Taste Gap & Feedback

Or, how can you tell how good your work is… or isn’t? All artists, no matter what the medium, tend to be pretty aware of the phenomenon of looking at their work and going “This is awesome! Just as good as the bestsellers, if not better by leaps and bounds!” Also, they’re aware of looking at their work and going “This is the worst thing ever! I need to hide this in a nuclear waste dump, lest it contaminate the very electrons desecrated with its presence!” In fact, most of us can cycle through both of these viewpoints multiple times on the exact same piece of work.

This is normal. I can’t tell you how to stop doing that, but I can offer some insights on how to mitigate it, and how to get better anyway. Read more

Dec 30

8 Comments

Wrapping up the year, business edition

Good morning; It’s Dec 30. Before you get distracted by New Year’s Eve preparations, please remember to pull out all your record-keeping files and folders, and create duplicates for 2019 – this way it’s easy, as the new year rings in, to start your recordkeeping on the correct foot even as you wrap up the last paperwork for 2018. This will also give you a little breathing room to consider if you want to change your record keeping, as well as split or combine any categories / files / folders to better reflect changes in your business over the last year (and anticipated changes coming up.) Read more

Dec 16

9 Comments

Additional Classes

LTUE – Life, The Universe, & Everything – is a symposium in Utah every February by writers for writers. Unlike Comic Cons where panels are likely to on costuming, and literary cons where the panels are by authors for readers, LTUE panels cover things like “writing action” and “balancing the books”, and “boring beginnings” and things like that.

And you don’t even have to go!

Read more

Dec 2

166 Comments

Writing Guns, The 10,000 Foot View by JL Curtis

Today’s guest post is by J.L. Curtis, who blogs at Old NFO, and writes awesome contemporary westerns with cowboys vs. drug smugglers, as well as science fiction.

Get your guns…

Right.

A 10,000 foot view…

First, forget everything you’ve ever seen in the movies, it’s all BS! Read more

Nov 18

20 Comments

Continuing Education

There’s a flat spot of no new words on my NaNo graph. (A couple, actually). There’s a book for Margaret Ball that I’m… a month? ack! overdue on writing a blurb for. (Yes, more mathemagics coming!) There’s a writing class that I just threw up my hands and skipped turning in the assignment, and went and got some sleep instead. And let’s not even talk about the state of my kitchen floors, or the way I’m failing to make the gym coaching sessions I paid good hard-earned money for.

Welcome to adult life, eh? But why did I even get into this writing class in the first place, much less NaNo? Because I looked around, and realized a basic truth – nothing alive is static. If you’re not learning, then you’re not growing, and if you’re not growing, you’re dying. It’s too late in the year to pick up glider lessons, so I’m going to concentrate on warmer, indoor pursuits.  Read more

Nov 11

16 Comments

The problems of success

As pointed out last week, Mad Genius Club has been around for over 10 years, now. This means it’s older than the average career of a fiction writer… and more than twice the lifespan of the average indie writer. The advantage of a group blog is that as writers get burned out, they can take a break or leave, but the group is still here – and thanks to Dave Freer, Sarah Hoyt, and Amanda Green holding down the cornerstones and surviving through it all, this place is still awesome.  (Check out their books! Good stuff, and thanks to long careers, they have lots to choose from!)

As the bloggers and commenters have been here a while, the questions start to change. Starting out, the problems are simple, clear, and everybody has them. How do I tell the story in my head? How do I get published? How do I get noticed? But when you’ve been around long enough, you have the problems of success, and the problems of having a career. When and how do I end a series, and how do I minimize the impact to my income, and draw readers to other books? When do I rebrand all of my covers, and rewrite my blurbs? What are the advantages and disadvantages of anthologies, or of going hybrid? How do I get my rights back? When is it time to incorporate? What provisions do I make for a literary trust in my will?

Read more

Oct 21

11 Comments

Seasonal Releases

When is the best time to release and promote your books? Usually, indie authors look at me and say “Uh, when they’re finished?” or they start thinking about staggered serial releases. But in our wonderful world of not planning releases a year out, there’s an interesting question: when do you release Holiday-themed or seasonal books? We all know the outcry when Christmas decorations appear in the store before Halloween, but is it better to release a Christmas romance before in early November, or early December? Read more

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