Rethinking the Writing Business: A WMG Writer's Guide: WMG Writer's Guides, #17

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

In this WMG Writer's Guide, award-winning author and business owner Kristine Kathryn Rusch provokes writers to think about their own careers as a business with limits only the writers, themselves, impose.

From newly professional writers to those with years in the trenches dealing with traditional publishers, Rusch shows how to expand author earnings and audiences beyond the obvious channels.

Drawing from her own vast experience in the industry, Rusch demonstrates that potential markets abound, and every novel, short story, or creative nonfiction essay can become so much more than a one-and-done published piece.

From information on IP and licensing to what the writing industry truly looks like today, Rusch lifts the veil on the potential for every writer's business to thrive.

 

"[Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog,] The Business Rusch…is full of sound advice and analysis about what's going on."

—Jeff Baker, The Oregonian

 

"Kristine Kathryn Rusch's new book Discoverability is by far the best resource I have read to date to help indie authors succeed after the book is written."

—Chris Syme, Principal of CKSyme Media Group

 

"Kristine [Kathryn Rusch]'s extensive experience in both traditional and indie publishing shines through in this amazing book."

—Tim Grahl, "11 Best Book Marketing Books" on Discoverability

 

"Discoverability gets my highest recommendation and a must read for writers who want to develop a career and make a living in the Indie Publishing industry."

—Marion Hill

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Jun 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393743361

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

Introduction

I started this book in the spring of 2018, even though, at the time, I hadn’t realized that I would write a book about this, or even that the events of that spring would so drastically change my thinking that a book would be necessary.

I work my way through changes in my life and in the world around me by writing about them. It’s clarifying to put my thoughts on the page. It also forces me to step past my assumptions. In order to write about those thoughts, which I do for a weekly audience on my blog, I have to research anything that I have the slightest hesitation about.

I have a lot of hesitations, particularly when I’m challenging the system I’ve known for years.

I grew up, as a person and as a writer, in a completely different writing environment. When I was young (and we went uphill in the snow both ways just to get to the car), traditional publishing was the only game in town. Either you had to play by their rules, or you probably wouldn’t play at all.

Granted, there were writers who self-published their books. And there were writers who licensed bits of their books—to the movies or to a game—long before traditional publishing came knocking. But in a profession of strange people, those self-published writers were considered delusional weirdos who had no idea how things are done.

A lot of those writers were delusional weirdos, who ended up with a garage full of badly produced and badly written hardcover books that they couldn’t give away. But for every dozen delusional weirdos, there was one writer who always made me pause. I would look at what that person was doing, and it would send a shiver down my spine, a shiver that went with the thought—should I be doing that?

Then I would realize that I couldn’t do that, either because of the contract I signed or the limits of my own imagination. I also had the delusional belief—based on promises made by my agent and editor—that the publishing company would do all the things that the handful of self-published authors were doing well.

Those promises were false. Maybe they had been true in the 1960s, when many of traditional publishing’s contract templates were written, but they weren’t true in the 1990s, and they certainly aren’t true now.

I’m writing this introduction in the midst of the COVID-19 social distancing month of March, 2020. This month, ViacomCBS put Simon & Schuster up for sale, one of the most bone-headed moves I’ve seen a major company make. Instead, ViacomCBS should hire some employees to put all of S&S’s contracts into a database, looking at the terms and the various opportunities for licensing. Because I know for a fact that since the year 2000, S&S had some harsh licensing terms, things they kept for themselves that writers couldn’t fight if they wanted to.

I know this, because I was one of those writers. I’ve managed to get most of those terms reverted, but not all of them. And I also know that for the most part, no one at S&S remembers or cares what’s in my contract, and probably has no real idea that they still have a book contract with me.

In this book, you’ll see chapters here about traditional publishing. That’s because of my history. I’m still, technically, what’s called a hybrid writer, one who is traditionally published and also is indie published. I own my own publishing company, along with my husband Dean Wesley Smith, and that company licenses our writing product. So, in reality, I’m still traditionally published. I just own the traditional publishing company.

However, I’m writing this book for indie-published writers. Writers who own their own company, writers who understand business, and writers who control their intellectual property (IP). If you’re one of those writers, then this book is definitely for you.

If you’re one of the writers who is contemplating going indie, then this book is for you as well.

If you’re traditionally published, I urge you to set up a database for your contracts, so that you know which rights you’ve licensed and which ones you still retain in each book you’ve got coming out of any traditional publishing house. You will have some rights to exploit, even if you’re traditionally published, unless you signed one of the extremely bad contracts that have come out of traditional publishing in the past few years.

If you don’t understand contract terms or even how intellectual property works, I urge you to pick up my book, Closing The Deal On Your Terms: Agents, Contracts and Other Considerations. I will touch on the importance of intellectual property in this book, but if you truly want to understand it, please pick up that one as well as The Copyright Handbook, from Nolo Press.

Even though I’m working on a fairly stringent deadline, I hesitated over finishing this book. After all, my reality is those first few weeks of the coronavirus shutdown that hit the U.S. this March. Friends in other countries (and in other cities) are already on lockdown, and the Licensing Expo, which I’ve mentioned in the chapters that follow, was postponed from May this year to August of this year.

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, and so I wondered if I should compile this book or try to rapidly write another one to fit into the same deadline.

I decided to compile this one, because I know that its principles will still apply after this current crisis is over.

Crises happen. From 9/11 to the coronavirus to maybe something else lurking on the horizon, these moments in history cause pivot points that change the direction of everything from the way we live our lives to the way we conduct business. At first, I wondered if this coronavirus would change how we do business.

It probably will on some level. Some industries will be changed forever.

But, as I usually do, I looked back at history for guidance. I did not look at the 1918 flu, as so many others did, or any other pandemic. Instead I looked at one of those globe-changing events that caused everyone to alter their behavior at the same time.

I looked at World War II.

The entertainment industry mobilized in World War II. Actors who didn’t serve made films for the War Office (which were written by writers who didn’t serve either). Recorded music became even more important than live music because people wanted to share moments with their loved ones across the world. A new form of book appeared—the pocket book, developed in the early part of the 20 th century, but became ubiquitous in the war. The Armed Services Editions, paperbacks of a strange size and shape, were shipped free to GIs, in a box with chocolates or other items that made life at war just a bit easier. The publisher and author split the royalty on the free edition, at one penny each—which sounds like a little, but was actually 18 cents in 2020 currency—about two-thirds of what a traditionally published author gets in actual royalties for the sale of a modern mass market paperback.

Music from the era went into the movies. Some of the books got filmed. Many of them became the basis for cartoons, and a lot of the characters that became well known in the war went on to have a long post-war life.

Products change in the middle of a crisis. The way that we consume entertainment changes as well. But our need for stories and storytelling remains the same.

And if someone likes the story you’re telling, likes it enough to become a fan of it, that person doesn’t just want another book, they also like related products like T-shirts and mugs and stuffed animals, and pretty much anything you can think of.

As I do with all of my nonfiction, I wrote this book as a series of blog posts that ran off and on from spring of 2019 to winter of 2020. You can find them for free on my website, kriswrites.com, but they’re out of order and often repeat information. That site also has whatever new nonfiction book I’m working on, as well as a weekly business blog about the publishing industry.

I have kept the chatty tone of the weekly blog, as well as the present tense in the current examples. I want you to see how my thinking evolved.

This book is much more organized than the original posts. I deleted some information I no longer agree with. Some of you who have read previous nonfiction books of mine might recognize a chapter or two, as I repurpose the information because I feel that information is necessary for the understanding of the ideas presented in this book. I promise that the repurposing is only a tiny amount of what you’ll find herein.

The purpose of this book is to get you to think about your writing career as a business. I hope the book will also show you how each novel or short story or creative nonfiction essay that you write can be so much more than a one-and-done published piece. The limits you have on the uses for your work are limits that you impose—either by a lack of time or a lack of imagination or a lack of resources.

I want this book to help with the imagination aspect. The book won’t help with time or resources. But I always believe that it’s better for someone to know what is possible, so that they might take advantage of those possibilities somewhere down the road. In other words, it’s better to be prepared for future opportunities than to have those opportunities pass by.

The opportunities presented here are legion. I hope you’ll be able to take advantage of many of them. I know I plan to.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Las Vegas, Nevada

March 16, 2020

Chapter One: Understanding Copyright And Intellectual Property

This chapter is very cursory and vague, but it’s necessary. I wrote the original blog posts for Rethinking The Writing Business for the readers who come to my website every week. Those readers are probably tired of me harping at them about copyright.

For many of you, however, this book is your introduction to my nonfiction about the publishing industry. You’ve probably never had anyone harangue you about copyright before.

Get used to it. Because I harangue a lot.

Only to be fair, I figure you need to know what I’m talking about before I browbeat you for not knowing it. Parts of this chapter also appear in Closing The Deal on Your Terms, but for those of you who have already read it, it is worth reading again.

Here goes:

Writers do not sell books. We license copyright. Usually I say, if you don’t understand that, get a copy of Nolo Press’s current Copyright Handbook. Many of you do that, but not all of you have read it.

So I’m going to give you a quick primer on copyright. Very, very, very quick, along with a few links that will answer more of your questions. Or maybe scare you with the wealth of material you have to learn.

By the way, if you Google copyright for writers, much of what you get is older. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s slanted to a world that no longer exists. For example, as I wrote this chapter I found one article from 1997.

If you want one good newer post that starts to explain copyright, go to 11 Things Every Writer Should Know About Copyrights, from Helen Sedwick’s blog ¹.

I stumbled upon a relatively good article on copyright basics on a law firm’s website. The article is from 2005, but has some clear information. The article is titled, Know Your Copyrights: A Legal Guide For Writers. ²

Nolo.com has a copyright FAQ that is about as basic as it gets. ³ And of course, the U.S. Copyright Office has a FAQ for copyright. ⁴

And if you want to read the US Copyright Act, you can find it on Cornell Law’s website. ⁵

All of this, of course, deals with United States’ copyright law, not copyright law for any other country. The U.S. copyright laws are based in our Constitution, and have been expanded and changed through acts of Congress over the past 200+ years. The trade agreements we sign, the copyright conventions held in conjunction with other countries, all have an impact on copyright.

After I had published this chapter as a blog, a reader shared the best place to find information on Canada’s copyright laws, which is Michael Geist’s website. ⁶

Before you all ask me questions about copyright below, do some research on your own. Use those sites or the equivalent sites for your countries. Do the research.

So…let’s give you some basics here, from my American perspective.

What is copyright?

Here’s how the U.S. government answers that question:

Copyright is a form of