The Business of Writing

David Trammel's picture

Our own Teresa of Hershey posted this link to a good tutorial series about the business side of writing.

Business Musings: Rethinking The Writing Business (Part One)

@ Isabel Cooper and anyone else thinking about licensing intellectual property.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is writing a TERRIFIC series about managing and licensing intellectual property for writers on her blog. If you’ve got a line of whisky being made using your fictional characters, you’re licensing your IP. A writer’s IP can be licensed in thousands of ways. Think of J.K. Rowling! She’s even got tea towels.

Go to her site for the first part of her dozen part (and counting) series.

Read Kris’s posts BEFORE you start negotiating. It will take a few hours to go through them all, but they are a quick course in licensing that you won’t get anywhere else.

I'm a big fan of Kristine Kathryn Rusch, hereinafter referred to as KKR. She's been an indie writer for decades now. Her weekly (every Thursday) column on various business aspects of writing is a must-read.

She has LOADS of things to say about contracts, contract negotiations, agents, traditional publishers, multiple income streams, you name it.

Her current series on licensing and Intellectual Property (IP) is outstanding.
A takeaway is that when you sell your book (full of your world-building and characters) you have sold a license to your intellectual property. The audio book is another license. The ebook is a third. A graphic novel adaptation? License number 4. T-shirts with your characters' images on them at Cafe Press? License number 5.

This is NOT how traditional publishing looks at your intellectual property (i.e., your novel).

KKR's business of writing posts should be read by any writer if only so they can better negotiate a contract.

Teresa from Hershey