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Brand and Licenses
Famous To Get Licenses? Most authors think they have to first be famous to get a major license in anything. Nope. Not even slightly. But you do have to be a good storyteller and have your work out wide so people will see it. No gaming person or movie person or streaming person is going to go dumpster diving into the cesspool of AI that is Kindle Select. Nope. You must have your work out wide with a good brand. You must be a good storyteller that readers want to read. You must know copyright. Protect it and never lose it. You must own your work, meaning AI never touched…
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Wonderful Day!!!
I Got To Work All Day!! I can not begin to tell you how rare that is. It is so rare from the last three or four years that I noticed it today. Nothing good or bad happened and I just got to work and not do anything special for any reason. Here is how the day went. Got up after eight hours sleep and Kris and I headed out to lunch for her and breakfast for me. A wonderful place called Bagelmania. I don’t get near their fantastic sandwiches which are HUGE, just an egg bagel and soup. Wonderful!! Then we came home and Kris went off to do…
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Email Stuff…
Email Address… It was pointed out to me that on my responses to comments on this blog, my old email dean@deanwesleysmith.com still shows. That has been a dead email now since the pandemic. And I want it to show because spammers killed that email and they can just keep on wasting their AI time with it. And the email dean@wmgpublishingstore.com has been dead since 2018, but I use it for PayPal. If you try to email me at either of those emails, I will never see it. Does not mean I am ignoring you or that I am a jerk more than normal. You just sent your question or comment…
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A Puzzle…
Story Manuscripts Just Vanished… For about a year’s period when I was doing Smith’s Monthly issues every month, and I had help putting them together, I lost dozens of original manuscripts. Best I can figure I sent the story manuscripts to WMG. The stories got put into the issue, and somehow those original story manuscripts in electronic files just vanished. Now, I have no memory of what was happening at that point in time, or why I would have let my stories out of my control instead of just sending copies, but I clearly did. So now, to put those stories into collections as I am doing for my challenge,…
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2026 FANTASY BUNDLE OF BUNDLES… Wow!!!
I Have Two Collections In This Bundle!! If you are following my challenge, you can get two of my collections bundled together in this fantastic fantasy bundle. Every bundle of fantasy books in this is exclusive to this Storybundle.com/fantasy. All 15. About 47 different books. Wow, just wow. I am just blown away by the amount of great reading in this one, and I even got to put in two original collections, never before published anywhere, into a bundle and made it exclusive to this. That’s right, two of the collections I have working on and talking about here are now available to read. Kris put this all together. https://storybundle.com/fantasy…
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40K Seminar Starts Tomorrow (Monday)…
Still Time To Jump In… Those of you who are signed up and did not get a letter from me with how to get into the class, write me. You have a free book to read before you get too deep into this class. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SEMINAR… Five days per week, five or more videos per day. Four weeks long. Questions will be answered either privately or in videos for all to see as extras, depending on the question. Four webinars, one per week to focus on each week’s topics and what has gone before. Webinars will also be recorded. In the second, third, and fourth years, (every…
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Kickstarter Friday
Some Fun Campaigns I Think Work… I’ve been doing this every Friday now for a long time. And it certainly has been fun studying Kickstarters. I look for fiction campaigns that are not just about “pretty books” but actually want readers. I look for clarity in the campaign, meaning can I figure out what the hell is offered. I look for a good story that flows and good art. I do not bother with anyone who is so flipping lazy as to us AI in any part of their campaign. And I look to see if the campaign will fund or if they writer behind the campaign asked for far…
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40K Seminar Starts Monday…
Still Time To Jump In… Those of you who are signed up and did not get a letter from me with how to get into the class, write me. You have a free book to read before you get too deep into this class. THE STRUCTURE OF THE SEMINAR… Five days per week, five or more videos per day. Four weeks long. Questions will be answered either privately or in videos for all to see as extras, depending on the question. Four webinars, one per week to focus on each week’s topics and what has gone before. Webinars will also be recorded. In the second, third, and fourth years, (every…
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Minor Life Roll
Really Minor… Went out Tuesday evening to head to the Ace’s game and we had a flat tire. A very clear nail. So luckily Ron and Lisa had not left and we caught a ride with them. Yes, we do have a second car, but the battery had been killed by the heat and I was just sort of waiting around to let the heat drop some. Extreme desert heat just kills batteries, and even though our cars are in a contained parking garage, the summer heat still got the battery after three years. So today we walked to a pizza place that was close, even in the heat, and…
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A Brand Thought…
Humans Know Brands… Authors Do Not… Yeah, I know, authors are humans (for the most part), but they take nothing they know about branding and apply it to their own books. Author… “I like designing my books and I want every one to look different.” Same author/human in the grocery store searching for a favorite breakfast cereal. Say Cheerios. God help the store if they moved those big yellow boxes, or if someone in corporate headquarters decided they wanted Cheerios to look different, so they cut the size of the name down, put the name in some green and blue art near the bottom and removed all the yellow color.…