After writing the TIAC post and noting I lost money on it (and, as my wife would say – again!), I would like to make a somewhat public admission. I’m a horrible business person. I constantly take on projects that are, frankly, not a good sensible business decision. Many of these projects are passion projects, […] The post Business Post: Being a Bad Business Person appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

Well, the inaugural Toronto Indie Author Conference ended last weekend. It was an interesting experience, one that continually caught me by surprise. I had a lot of help setting it up – mostly from the employees in Starlit Publishing – but also from the volunteers and speakers who generously donated their time to the event. […] The post Business Post: The Toronto Indie Author Conference appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

This is a very basic overview of marketing strategy and the marketing plan. Please understand, you could cover entire textbooks on this topic and I have literally written a book about marketing strategy for authors. What I’m covering is both a refresher and to orient people who might find this book out of order. I seriously […] The post Business Post: Product Line Management – Marketing Plan Basics appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

For those that don’t know, I’m self-published. Quite decently well, too. I pretty much run my own tiny publishing house, but for all that, I actually don’t have any issue with traditional (in this case, other publishing companies) publishing. I think there is a place for them in the ecosystem of writing, especially the big […] The post Business Post: On Trad Publishing, Agents and Contracts appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

I was intending to continue my series of posts about backlist management, and I swear, I’ll get it done at some point; but this came into my inbox recently and I had to read it. ShuSH writes a series of posts about the Canadian book market, and they did an analysis of the recent market […] The post Business Post: The Canadian Book Market appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

What’s the Backlist? There is no precise and generally agreed upon definition of a backlist. I’ve seen multiple attempts, from ‘books older than a year’, to ‘every book but the most recent one’ to ‘anything over 3 months old’. Key word here is ‘old’. In the end, the focus is all about previous books. I […] The post Business Post: Editing and Testing appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

This week’s post has been kept to Patreon only. If you’d like to read this business post please consider becoming a Patron and choose the $2-tier to be able to read the business posts only and ask questions about the business side of writing. The post Business & Craft Post: On Editors – Rankings and Learning (PATREON ONLY) appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

Been talking to a few new authors recently, both in my Discord and on Threads and realising that a lot of people struggle with the cost of publishing. Which I get – it can get up there. I should note, I don’t use dev editors for the most part. I generally get a dev edit […] The post Business Post: Editing and Testing appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

 Return to the Nameless Restaurant now in Chaotic Apéritifs, exclusively on Starlit Publishing’s Shop until the end of April.  About the Book The Only Constant with Magic is Change. Mo Meng is reminded of that fact once again, as the Nameless Restaurant faces a new challenge. Magic and its old wielders are returning to the world. […] The post Now on Starlit Publishing: Chaotic Apéritifs appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more

Some of you might have seen a variation of this chart before. I’m going to be discussing each of these over the next few weeks and how you could manage a publishing career when you have multiple series.  However, this is basically how I recommend you look at the various series that you have. Things […] The post Business Post: Series Management (the Chart) appeared first on My Life, My Tao ..read more