Think Differently!

Those words came to me during my morning prayer time a couple of weeks ago. Prayer is my time for personal reflection and conversation with Christ, sharing my concerns and those of others. Since hearing those words, they’ve been constantly on my mind.

It’s a fresh start—a time for new beginnings, personal resolutions, and transformation. And it’s appropriate that I read a book like Rethinking The Writing Business by Kristine Kathryn Rusch to begin 2025. I have been a reader of Rusch’s Blog (which is now on Patreon only) for over a decade. Veteran author Rusch, writing across multiple genres for almost 50 years, has shared her insights—along with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith—on the evolving publishing industry. Her clear and practical writing on the industry has been invaluable to me as an author-publisher since 2014, the year I released Diondray’s Discovery.

I read the blog posts that later became “Rethinking the Writing Business” as they were published in 2019. Rusch reassessed her writing business, viewing her extensive catalog as intellectual property rather than merely books for traditional or independent publishing.

She reminds writers to learn about copyright (see Nolo Press’s Copyright Handbook) and encourages them to rethink their intellectual property. Rusch explores licensing opportunities beyond film and television, branching into diverse, less conventional avenues. This statement from the introduction summarizes what she is trying to get across in the book:

“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.”

Admittedly, I have thought of my novels as just a one-and-done published work of fiction and nothing more than the dream of getting them on television or film. As an author, I’ve realized that approach is too restrictive, and I need a broader perspective and a different way of thinking.

Rusch shares her journey into the licensing world and how her own beliefs about the publishing industry have limited her in ways that she never realized. The book fittingly concludes with a chapter titled, “Paradigm Shift.” The chapter has some of the most inspirational words I have ever read in the decade plus as an author-publisher. Here are these words to bring this review to a close:

Writers never see themselves as powerful. In fact, writers beg people to “buy” their work, when really, what the writers want is a license. They want a traditional publisher to license their Worldwide English Rights to produce and distribute the writer’s novel in hardcover, paperback, and ebook.

Writers beg for this “opportunity.” They want an agent who takes 15% for the life of a very bad deal to represent them, and the writers beg the agent to take them on, not realizing that the writer hires the agent, and pays them commission.

Writers have been in a one-down position for so long that they see their profession as something they have to luck into, rather than something they can work for.

Reading those words may come across as harsh but for me they have become much-needed medicine as an author-publisher. I know why those two words I wrote at the beginning of this review came to me during my prayer time. I highly recommend all writers read Rethinking the Writing Business by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Whether you share her views on the publishing world, writers shouldn’t have to beg for someone to buy their work or give them a chance. There is a path to where writers can see themselves larger than they ever have and more powerful than they have given themselves credit for. We just have to think differently, and this book is a start to doing just that.