I have stories here from 2 different Best American Mystery & Suspense, but I’m not recommending either volume, since I didn’t read a lot of them. The stories seemed child-cruelty heavy or animal abuse heavy, and I’m not really into either of those things. And there’s some I’m not fond of the kind of noir in either of them. So it’s up to you if you get these two volumes. 

So here’s what I liked back in February…

February 2025

Bernier, Ashley-Ruth M., “Ripen,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. When editors are lazy with the Best Americans and do not put the stories in any kind of reading order, the opening story is a real crapshoot. I’m always braced for something that does not give me any ideas as to the way the volume will go. As a result, I approach the first story with trepidation, and usually that trepidation is justified.

In this volume, though, the first story, “Ripen,” is well written, powerful, and memorable. I was happily surprised by the entire thing. The setting is rich, the characters vivid, and the story itself strong. Read this one.

Cho, Winston, “AI: The Ghost in Hollywood’s Machine,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 13, 2024. (This story online has a different title.) Fascinating piece that could have been written about any emerging technology, really. AI will change how business gets done all over the planet (is changing?), and Hollywood is no different. It will make some things easier to “film” such as massive crowd scenes (already is, in fact) but it might cost a lot of jobs. As in a lot of jobs. And the kind that normally don’t get taken by technological change…as in the jobs of creatives. I think we’ll see a lot of these articles in the future as we try to figure out how to live with this newest thing in our lives.

Cobo, Leila, “Guarding Celia Cruz’s Legacy,” Billboard January 11, 2025. Fascinating interview with Omer Pardillo, who manages the Celia Cruz estate. It’s about how he got the job, how he goes about maintaining the estate, and the heart of the estate. He lists where the revenue comes from. He says it’s mostly from recording royalties and brand partnerships. It’s really fun to see his joy at all of the success the estate’s been having. At one point, he states that it’s not bad for an artist who’s been dead for 21 years.

Cole, Alyssa, “Just a Girl,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby, Mariner Books, 2024. This story, written as a series of online TikTok posts, DMs, texts, emails, and online articles, is devastating and heartbreaking and extremely powerful. Tiana, her first year in college during Covid, starts posting updates on TikTok, and gaining a following. She tries a dating app, encounters a gross guy, and calls his yuckiness out on her TikTok…and then he and his friends start going after her. Everything spirals after that. What’s amazing about this story is that you can see the joy leaching from this young woman as she realizes how terrible the world can be—and how dangerous it is for young beautiful women. Highly recommended.

Freimor, Jacqueline, “Forward,” The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023,  edited by Lisa Unger, Mariner Books, 2023. Normally, I wouldn’t read a story that looked dense and difficult, but the format (and the footnotes) are the point of the story. It’s an amazing work of fiction, with a great reveal. Yes, it takes concentration to read it, but it’s really worthwhile.

McClintock, Pamela, “Ryan Reynolds Multitasks Like a Mofo,” The Hollywood Reporter,  December 13, 2024. There’s a lot of fascinating quotes in this interview with Ryan Reynolds, whom The Hollywood Reporter dubbed their Producer of the Year. He does a variety of things besides act, and seems to enjoy all of them. The quote I like the most is at the end:

…it’s all an emotional investment. If you can create emotional investment in anything, any brand, it creates a moat around that brand that really, I think, facilitates the resilience and allows it to weather the storms in the bad times. And yes, that’s the part I love.

I think I love it too, although not as much as actual writing and making things up. Still, lots of good stuff to think about in this interview.

Zeitchik, Steven,“The Other Rebuild,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 17, 2025. 2025 has been such a shitshow already it’s hard to remember that the LA Fires happened only a few months ago. We seem to be moving from tragedy to tragedy, heartbreak to heartbreak, every single day, and we lose track of what others have gone through. A number of my friends went through the fires and fortunately, in this round of the climate change blues, very few of them lost their homes. (I can’t say that about previous California fires.) But everyone’s mental health took a nosedive. Many moved to different digs in the same town while others are leaving their LA homes. It’s an ongoing tragedy, and this is a piece from the early days. Important.

I read holiday anthologies only in the holiday season, so sometimes it takes me years to finish one. There are two here that took years to finish, but I found stories I liked in both of them. And then there is the Library of America Christmas stories collection. I didn’t get far into it, but I will be reading it for several more years. It’s a slow read, because the stories are chronological and I can already see that I disagree with some of Connie Willis’s choices. (Prerogative for the heavy reader.) She leans more into sf/f than I would and of course, completely ignores romance. And also, much of the mystery oeuvre. Still, worth looking at, I suspect. I’ll know more in a few years.

Of course, I read a lot more than that as well. My schedule slowly freed up (as much as my schedule can) and I had some time for reading, leisure and otherwise. Here’s what I liked from the leisure.

December 2024

Brown, Leah Marie, “Finding Colin,” Winter Wishes, Zebra Books, 2017. This novella comes from a book with no attributed editor, something that always annoys the heck out of me. No matter. The stories were good enough, but “Finding Colin” was charming. It has a great voice, a great sense of humor, and a story problem that made me vaguely uncomfortable (and I think the author intended that). A hardcore fan spends her vacation dollars to track down the man of her dreams, an actor named Colin. She finds out where he’s filming his latest movie and…well, the story goes from there. And it didn’t go the way I feared it would. It’s a lot of fun, and well worth reading.

Dunne, Griffin, The Friday Afternoon Club, Penguin Press, 2024. I feel an affinity for Griffin Dunne. I was going to write that I have no idea why, but that’s really not true. Dunne is a survivor. His family was famously dysfunctional. His beloved sister was murdered. He dropped out of school (understandably, as he recites the incident), and yet has managed to have a major career in the arts. Given his history, he shouldn’t have survived, and yet he has.

His father, Dominick Dunne, came to my attention after he had lost his daughter and became a crusader for justice. He continually wrote about the way the courts and the justice system failed victims’ families. His aunt by marriage, Joan Didion, has been one of my favorite writers for my entire life. (That’s her on the left, arms around her daughter.)

So I wanted to read this book to read about the family, which I knew was interesting, but also to read about Griffin Dunne, whose work I’ve admired since he was the only memorable part of An American Werewolf in London. The book is well written (not surprisingly) although it clearly retools the stories that Dunne has probably been dining out on for years. Still, there were some surprises, particularly from his good friend Carrie Fisher, and some truly sad and heartfelt moments. The book ends with the birth of Dunne’s daughter, and it should end there. But that leaves another twenty years or more of his life to discuss at some point.

Even if you have no idea who any of these people are, you might want to read this. It really is a testament to survival and stubbornness and lots of other fascinating things.

Lipshutz, Jason, “In Control,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. This is a fascinating—to me, at least—article about a badly managed company (Warner Music Group) that turned itself around with new management. Considering that’s what’s happening with our WMG Publishing right now, this was an exceedingly timely and hopeful article. Dunno if you all will find it as interesting. Hope you do.

Meier, Leslie, “Candy Canes of Christmas Past,” Candy Cane Murder, Kensington, 2007. I have no idea when I first started this book, but I note that I recommended Laura Levine’s story in 2020. Which means I haven’t picked it up since then. So…four years later…I was in the mood for cozies again at holiday time, I guess.

Leslie Meier’s story features her regular heroine, Lucy Stone, in a story that takes place in two time periods—when she is a grandmother and her kids and grandkids come to visit, and when she’s a young mother, dealing with a new home and a toddler, while pregnant in a new town. The house is a fixer-upper and it’s falling apart around her, yet she makes time to solve an old crime involving glass candy canes. The 1980 details are marvelous, the discomfort of advanced pregnancy plain, and the stress on young parents also vivid. The mystery is meh, but I always find that with cozies. The read, though, was great.

Mitchell, Gail, “Quincy Delight Jones,” Billboard Magazine, November 16, 2024. It’s hard to believe that Quincy Jones is gone. He was perhaps the influence on all music in the last 60 years or more. If you don’t believe me, read this piece, and think about the choices Quincy made, the talent and creativity he brought to everything he did. Then maybe watch “We Are The World: The Greatest Night In Pop,” a documentary about something that just seems impossible now. It was impossible then too, but Quincy helped pull it off. If you’ve never thought about Quincy Jones, well, you’re in for a treat.

Oppenheimer, Mark, “The Gonzo Life and Tragic Death of ‘Heff'” The Hollywood Reporter, October 23, 2024. I found this to be an utterly fascinating character study of a…well, I don’t want to say tragic figure, but someone whose life didn’t turn out the way anyone thought it would. John Connery Heffernan III was one of the people behind the movie Snakes on a Plane. That ended up being his biggest success. Then after a few years of being somewhat famous, he disappeared from his friends’ lives. That led Oppenheimer to track him down only to learn that Heff was dead. So, Oppenheimer wanted to know what happened. This story is as strange as the movie.

Provost, Megan, “Teaching Possibility,” On Wisconsin, Fall, 2024. Apparently, the University of Wisconsin selects a book for every student at this incredibly large campus to read each year in the Go Big Read (for Go Big Red, a school saying) every year. This year’s book was by Rebekah Taussig, whose book is part of Carolyn Mueller’s class in disability and identity. The interview is with Mueller, but I also suggest you pick up the book…after you’ve read the interview, of course.

Walker, Joseph S., “Crime Scene,”  The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, edited by Amor Towles, The Mysterious Press, 2023. I think this is the only story that made it into both Best-of collections for 2023, and it deserves to be there. The crime scene in question is the scene of President Kennedy’s assassination. The story is smart and twisty, and like my notes on most smart and twisty stories, I can’t tell you much more than that without ruining it. Just pick it up and enjoy.

Willis, Connie, “Introduction,” American Christmas Stories: The Library of America Collection, Library of America, 2021. Connie’s introduction on the history of Christmas storytelling in America is fascinating. I knew much of it, and feel like she missed a few things (L.Frank Baum, for example), but overall, this is really worth the read. Well researched and well considered.

I remember August better than I remember July. (Whew.) We held a successful anthology workshop. We learned a lot. We made a lot of progress on truly good things. And…we had to hire a lot more lawyers than the two we usually deal with. Such fun that was/is. [sarcasm alert]

I did get a lot more reading done in August than I did in July, but still not as much as I would have liked. Although some of that reading was for the anthology workshop, which I can’t count here, but you will see many of those stories in the coming year, as we revive and rebrand Fiction River. (Oh, I’m looking forward to that.)

So you’ll find some interesting books here, and just two articles to match my necessarily short attention span from that month.

August 2024

Baxter, John, Montemarte: Paris’s Village of Art and Sin, Harper Collins, 2017. I plucked this out of my TBR pile because I needed something that was not going to challenge me in the front part of the month. I just needed vignettes, which this has in abundance. What I did not expect was how many story ideas I got from this. Quite a few! I hope I’ll have a chance to get to them before getting distracted by something else. There are a lot of fun things here, as always with a John Baxter travel “guide.”  (It’s an excuse for great literary and historical essays.

Cabot, Meg, No Judgements, William Morrow, 2019. A fun and dramatic book from Meg Cabot. This one is set on a Florida island as a hurricane bears down. Our heroine is a clueless New Yorker who had never lived through severe storms before and can’t quite believe the locals when they tell her that she has to do certain things. Of course, there’s this one particular local who helps her…

One of the most fun things about this book for me is that I lived on the Oregon Coast for 23 years. We had hurricanes, although they’re not called hurricanes in that part of the world. We had Big Storms. And no one from the outside could believe that things would be bad. In fact, when there were tsunami warnings, people drove to the Oregon Coast to watch the big wave hit. Friends of ours had to yank tourists off the beaches so they wouldn’t be killed. (I kid you not.)

So there’s an extra layer in this book for me, but I think you’ll enjoy it even without that. This is Meg Cabot at her most fun.

Nevala-Lee, Alec, Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Dey Street, 2018. Alec’s book is a Hugo and Locus Award Finalist. I bought the paperback when it came out. (Note: I’ve linked to a ridiculously priced ebook.) When the book came out, I picked it up a few times, cherry-picked a few references using the index, and got grumpy. I fell into the mistake so many writers make, which is that the book I held was not the book I would have written. Let me say to me (and to all of you who do that): Well, duh. If I was going to write the book, I would…ahem…write the book.

I don’t know what made me pick up the book in August, but I’m so glad I did. It kept me entertained while a lot of the above stuff happened in my life. I had met Isaac a few times, and the bastard groped me every single time. I nearly killed him once in an elevator, because my reaction to being grabbed like that is to hit someone as hard as I could with my elbow, and I refrained only because it was my first Nebula award ceremony as the editor of F&SF. I had a thought that maybe whoever groped me was someone famous—and it was a frail Asimov. His delicate ribcage was only a few inches from my deadly elbow. That would have been bad.

Needless to say that while the rest of the world admires the heck out of that man, I do not. I didn’t know much about Campbell other than the stories the old timers told about him, and I had avoided reading/listening to stories about Hubbard. OMG, that man should have been in jail. Heinlein, whom I had met and who was bombastic as hell, came out the best.

Kudos for Alec for writing about all of these men, warts and all. I love the analysis of what sf became because of them and what still needs to be changed. As worthy a book as I have read in years.

Rose, Lucy, “The Worst Thing that Can Happen is You Suck,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 5, 2024. This is a roundtable interview with actors John Hamm, Matt Bomer, Nicholas Galitzine, Clive Owen, David Oyelowo, and Collum Turner. I love the roundtables that The Hollywood Reporter does because they get a group of professionals together to discuss their art. There’s always something in the roundtables that mean something to me. Here, there are quotes I circled from Clive Owen…

I have never listened to anybody else. Ultimately, you are the one who has to go to work every day. I do what I want to do because that’s what’s going to sustain me through it.

…and John Hamm…

But yeah, to Clive’s point, agents and managers can all bat a thousand in the rearview mirror, they can always tell you what they thought after the thing came out and it was good or bad. It’s in the moment that you have to make the decision. And the worst thing that can happen is you suck.

I love that last part, which is also the title of this piece in the printed form. “The worst thing that can happen is you suck.” Exactly. And that’s not so very bad, now is it?

Silva, Daniel, A Death in Cornwall, HarperCollins, 2024. I’m fascinated by the way that Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series has changed since the Trump era began. Silva’s books were always on the edge of modern politics, as close to real politics as possible. But it became clear that Silva was struggling with the constant changes instigated by Trump in his first term, and then the worldwide unrest in Biden’s term—from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the utter mess in the Middle East.

Silva solved it by returning Allon to his roots; he was a painter and an art restorer who also became a spy. (And then a super spy.) Now, he has retired and gone back to restoring amazing paintings…and solving worldwide art-related crimes. This crime starts in Allon’s former residence on the Cornish coast of England, with the death of a reknown art history professor and scurries along from there. Highly recommended.

Stoynoff, Natasha,“Brooke Shields Wants You To Know She Is Just Fine,” AARP Magazine, April/May 2024.  Because of the year I had in 2024, I sometimes find it hard to remember articles I had marked as long ago (and far away) as August. I have dumped a few magazines without recommending anything from them because, for the life of me, I have no idea why I marked a certain page.

Not so with the April/May AARP Magazine. I picked it up to see what I had recommended, didn’t see my usual mark, and frowned at it. I distinctly remember reading the Brooke Shields interview and finding it both wise and inspiring.

Brooke Shields and I are of an age. She’s younger, but not by much. And by the time she was being exploited all over the world, I was old enough to feel icky about it, but young enough not to know why. This article addresses her past, yes, but it also looks at her now. At least from this interview, it seems that she has accepted both her age and the changes that aging brings. I recommend this article to everyone.

I read a lot of court cases and stuff in Spanish. I read a few novels that are so forgettable that I can’t even find them, let alone remember what they are. I also worked on a massive short story collection that I’ve been reading all year. I’m not going to recommend the book, although I might at times recommend stories. The book contains too many stories (from the 20th century) that are racist AF. I mean breathtakingly horribly awfully racist. The conceit of the book gives the editor the excuse to include them and, if I’m being charitable, I wonder if he’s even read them in the years since his first reading. Sometimes the stuff we read as teenagers and as kids isn’t quite what we remember. Still, the book is difficult, but it’s the only place where I’ve found some of the good stories, so I’m going to complete the entire thing.

So here are a bunch of essays and articles that I read, as well as two novels that really stood out above the handful that I either finished and didn’t like much or disliked so much I quit in the middle. You know I’m getting tired when court cases are substituting for fiction…

September, 2021

Diamond, Krista, “How A Colony of Feral Cats Welcomed Me to Las Vegas,” Desert Companion, Summer, 2021. Lovely little essay about the feral cats downtown. There aren’t nearly as many here as there were in Lincoln City, but the ones here are urban dwellers, used to dealing with cars and people and other hazards. As Diamond learned her little corner of the city, she also took care of some of the ferals. It’s a short read. Then poke around the site and look at the photography contest winners. They’re lovely too.

Gardner, Eriq, “Disney has an Avengers-Size Legal Problem,” Hollywood Reporter, September 27, 2021. Here’s how you learn copyright informally. You read articles like this one. Dean’s been talking about the 35 year rule for years, and here’s the rule in action. Disney might lose partial ownership of some of its biggest characters if these lawsuits are handled poorly. I suspect Disney will settle, because they handled the first of these lawsuits poorly, but what do I know. This will fun for us copyright geeks to watch–and important as well for all writers.

Haws, Stephanie, “Finding a Voice, Against All Odds,” On Wisconsin, Spring, 2021. A program for non-traditional students at the UW is now old enough to show long term results. It helps people whom many others didn’t think had a chance—or people who themselves didn’t think they had a chance. Read this. It’ll make you feel better about the world.

Long, Harvey and Whitmire, Ethelene, “Running From Race,” On Wisconsin, Spring 2021. An ultimately sad article about  librarian Louise Butler Walker who passed for white, and all of the compromises she had to make throughout her life. She graduated from the UW in 1935, which tells you the time frame here. This history isn’t long behind us, and articles like this serve as a reminder of the inequities on our culture.

Mayes, Aaron, “East Fremont,” Desert Companion, Summer 2021. Bikes! Sorry, had to start with that. Because a group of cyclists that started riding the Strip when it was shut down and which has now grown to hundreds who ride around the downtown every Wednesday night got me through the pandemic. Either I or Dean would shout, “Bikes!” and there they were. And they’re here in this essay too. The essay is a little slice of life about my neighborhood. It’s lovely, and, well…it has the bikes.

McQuiston, Casey, Red, White, and Royal Blue, St. Martins Griffin, 2019. I have had this book on my shelf since 2019, but I couldn’t bear to read it. Written about an alternate world in which a white woman with biracial children wins the presidency in 2016, the book is, in part, a love letter to the possibilities of American politics, something I really, really, really couldn’t handle until Trump got out of office. (I was terrified that if he got a second term, the country that I loved would vanish.) After the election of 2020 and the inauguration of Biden, which was not guaranteed, I felt like I could read the book, but I still wasn’t picking it up. So I did what I often do in these situations: I assigned it for the students in the romance study-along.

Which meant I had to read it, eventually. And of course, I read it at the very last minute. It’s a first novel, so there are some rookie mistakes. McQuiston believes we all know what the inside of the palace and the White House looks like. Her setting and depth is great in other locations, but those, where the bulk of the action takes place, are missing. She does a few other things that grate, and show she needs more practice.

But…wow. The dialogue is sharp. The characters are smart and funny and sincere. The stakes are as high as I’ve ever seen in a romance novel. Two young men—one the son of the President (up for re-election) and the other Prince of Wales (the spare)—fall in love. The problems this relationship has are global and personal at the same time.

I knew, because this was a romance, and no romance reader that I’m aware of complained about it missing the mark, that the book had a happy ever after ending. I just didn’t know what that would look like or how we would get there. It is the most surprising and wonderful romance I’ve read in quite a while. Fun, poignant, funny, and heartbreaking, this book is worth your time.

Moe, Doug, “The Concerts You Never Forget,” On Wisconsin, Spring 2021. Doug Moe has been around longer than I have. He was in Madison media back when I was, and he’s still there. This time, he tries to write about the impossible: those ground-breaking concerts that everyone remembers but which didn’t receive a recording. I loved this piece. He mentioned concerts I’d heard of and ones I hadn’t. This isn’t so much nostalgia as it is a reminder that even big names were once unknown.

On Wisconsin, Spring 2021. This entire issue is excellent. I’m not going to highlight each story, but I could. Take a look.

Press, Joy, “Binge Without Borders,” Vanity Fair, June, 2021. The pandemic accelerated a lot of things. One of those things was the easy availability of foreign programs to binge, no matter what country you were in. With so much TV production shut down for so long, our regular programming got disrupted and those of us who watched TV to relax had to find new things. We’ve always watched a lot of Canadian and British shows, but now, Dean and I ended up watching French shows (Lupin), Spanish shows, (Money Heist), and several others. And we weren’t alone. A lot of people did that as well.

This article from Vanity Fair explores how some of the changes came about and what it might mean for the future. Worth reading and thinking about.

Prevatt, Mike, “Community: The Rainbow Bridge,” Desert Companion, Summer 2021. Drag has a long history in Las Vegas. Prevatt explores how that history has shaped the city.

Quick, Amanda, The Lady Has a Past, Berkley, 2021. I have read this series from the beginning. This is one of those loosely related series that has the same characters, but a different romantic couple at the center. The first book was marvelous, and then the series became more and more impossible to believe as time went on. It’s rather like Cabot Cove in Murder She Wrote. So much crime happens in this little community near Los Angeles that someone should evacuate the place or put a fence around it or something. So, with each book, I’ve had to get past that little problem.

This one has another little believability problem that I’m not going to elucidate here. Once I jumped over that…and the other town problem…I had a heck of a good time. But I had to decide that the book had too many impossible parts.

Quick’s writing is fun and her characters are delightful. The dialogue is fun. This book was a great diversion in a busy month.

Schmitt, Preston, “How The Humanities Building Went Wrong,” On Wisconsin, Spring 2021. The Humanities Building at the University of Wisconsin is an ugly monstrosity that’s cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. It has no real windows. I have vivid memories of sitting in one of the weird concrete window seats in the 20 minutes I had between classes and trying to study Japanese history while shivering.

Schmitt tells the tale of a vision gone awry. It’s fascinating even if you’ve never seen this monstrosity. And, some of the sharp-eyed among you will note, all of the myths he mentions about the building have shown up in at least one or two of my stories.

Yang, Rachel, “TikTok Boom,” Entertainment Weekly, September 2021. The entire entertainment world is changing and it’s changing very, very quickly. This particular article is about the ways TikTok helps recording artists get a contract in traditional. It’s fascinating, if only about an inch deep. Take a look.

We’re all different, and because of the new world of publishing, we all have choices like we’ve never had before. As writers, we choose what’s best for us and our circumstance, and that’s our business.

I was stating mine last week: I write this blog for writers who want to make a living at writing or what I called career writers.

Some of the comments, in combination with things I’ve seen in the mainstream press over the past few months, got me thinking. One commenter on another website said something along the lines of “Rusch doesn’t know how many writers are making a living these days.”

That commenter was right: I don’t. Neither does the commenter. We both know that the number of writers making a living at writing is tremendously higher than it was just five short years ago. I’m guessing, but I believe the number is also higher than it was ten or fifteen years ago.

But looking at the percentage of writers who have written something who are now making a living gives an added perspective, at least for me. I suspect—and again, I don’t have the numbers (I’m not sure anyone does)—that the percentage of writers who are now making a living out of the pool of existing writers is about the same as the percentage of writers who made a living at it in the previous two Golden Ages of fiction writing (at least in the US): the 1950s and (weirdly) the 1930s.

What happened in both of those time periods was an increase in venues for work, due to a change in forms. In the 1920s and 1930s, the rise of the pulp magazines increased the number of paying markets so quickly that writers (like Frederik Pohl, who died this week) sometimes wrote entire issues of the pulps all by themselves.

In the 1950s, the rise of the paperback gave a lot of writers the opportunity to publish and make a living, writers who hadn’t had that chance before. New markets, new publishing houses, new everything.

The 1950s boom ended in a severe distribution crisis. The 1930s ended with paper drives caused by the war. (I’m simplifying in both cases.)

In other words, serious change happened that had an impact on the ways that writers made a living at writing.

Now, we’re seeing the same thing. The rise in indie publishing—or rather, the return of indie publishing (it was really big a century ago as well: we wouldn’t be reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, Frank L. Baum, or Virginia Wolfe without self-publishing/indie publishing)—has given writers who never could or could no longer get traditional book deals the opportunity to publish their books. And not just publish them, but do so in a way that will get a wide audience as well as allow the writer a creative freedom she hasn’t had in the past.

This change—the rise of the internet and ecommerce—is hitting all of the arts, and doing so in a variety of ways. The music industry went through it first, and in some aspects, the television/movie industry is just starting into it. It’s so much easier to produce a film now than it ever was—I can do so from my computer in my tiny office if I want to. Distribution is easier too, thanks to places like iTunes and YouTube and a variety of other services I know nothing about.

The changes are happening so fast, especially in our publishing neck of the woods, that it’s head-spinning. Yesterday, Amazon announced its new bundling service, MatchBook, which I’m grateful for as a reader.

Just last week, I bought an ebook version of a book I already owned in hardcover because my old eyes didn’t want to look at the tiny print, and the damn hardcover would have made a better doorstop than reading material. I didn’t want to sit at a table to read it, heavy as it was, but I’m happy to own it. I like having this author’s books in hardcover. I just happened to read her last two in ebook.

I know I’m not alone in this, and I do hope that the bigger publishers sign onto this program.  I’ll be urging my publishers to do so as well.

In the trades this week, there’s talk of subscription services like Spotify or Netflix for ebooks. We’ll see if readers go for that. I think pricing will be an issue.

But I can guarantee you this: When we look back on this blog post six months from now, we’ll all frown and mutter to ourselves: Really? Those two things were happening at the same time? Or we’ll say: That was only six months ago? It feels so five years ago.

I’m about to enter a business venture with a writer who is always on the cutting edge of any new publication and any new trend. He mentioned in e-mail that what we’re going to do will probably only last a year or two before becoming passé, so the time to jump on that bandwagon is now. I completely agree, and so we’re jumping, even though we’re both busy as hell.

We recognize the patterns: everything is moving quickly, and we’re going to try as much of it as we can before it changes. We don’t know what impact one change will have on the rest of the industry. We also don’t know what will stay and what will disappear after a few months.

No one does, in any of the entertainment industries.

For example, Wednesday’s The Hollywood Reporter had an article about the changes in the network television pilot season, brought on by cable and Netflix. Apparently, the number of drama pilots offered to the television networks was way down this year, caused by the changes in the way that consumers are watching dramas.

One reason for this is that there are so many dramas already in production that the go-to people, (show runners, producers, and established writers) are already working and don’t have time for something new.

But there are other reasons, listed in my favorite part of the article:

Many writers who are available often are more interested in chasing their own passion projects a la Breaking Bad or House of Cards, say several top agents. Plus, a cable drama doesn’t have to compete against 50 to 70 other hourlong entries in development the way it would in broadcast — and once on the air, the likelihood of survival is considerably greater. Even the traditional advantage network executives have had in being able to promise financial rewards far greater than their cable cousins has slipped with what some are dubbing the “Netflix effect,” referring to the streaming service’s willingness to shell out big money, straight-to-series orders and limited creative interference — a combination against which ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC often can’t compete.

Sound familiar? Writers like the control. Hmmm…

Of course the big networks won’t go away, and they’ll find something else to fill the hole left by the drama pilots, or maybe they’ll go back to developing their own content like they did when I was a kid. But that’s in flux, due to the technology, just like everything else.

And since I’m looking at other forms of entertainment right now, there’s this:

Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times had a fascinating article about the entertainment company, Prospect Park, which had a dream of saving soap operas by continuing them online. Soap operas got their start in radio, and got their name because they “sold soap”—in other words, they sold a lot of advertising.

My mother, born in 1918, listened to soap operas on the radio starting when the soap operas did, and followed them to the new medium of television in the 1950s. If she were alive today, she’d probably be watching online.

But the fascinating thing to me, the writer trying to survive in the new world of publishing, isn’t the history of soap operas, it’s the struggle that Prospect Park is still having in finding the right way to sell the soap operas to the online market.

Going from radio to television meant learning how to have action in soap operas, not just a lot of dialogue and dramatic music. Going from television to online is causing some changes as well. As The LA Times reported:

The producers determined they had miscalculated audience willingness to follow the shows to the Web. They also decided shows had to be shorter, move faster and be available in multiple episodes for binge viewing. They had tried to be more like a TV network, but they realized they had to be more like video service Netflix. And instead of letting stories unfold slowly, over months or even years, they had to write crisp story lines with a distinct beginning, middle and end.

In all of the entertainment industries, it’s about experimentation, and a new learning curve, bringing an old model to a new format.

Commenters like the one I mentioned above say that I don’t know how many writers are now making a living at writing, and I don’t. I also don’t know how many writers will want to keep at the writing career over years and decades. I also don’t know how many of those writers will suffer when something—and I don’t know what—has some kind of impact on the way those writers are doing business.

One thing I do know is that big traditional publishers haven’t died. In fact, they’re reporting record profits even though their book sales are down. Why is this? Because of the terrible deals that publishers offered writers—and which writers took—when e-books became a force five years ago.

Instead of splitting the e-book revenue 50/50 as a subsidiary right (like other subsidiary rights), or paying for e-books based on the cover price the way that publishers do on print books, publishers offered—and writers agreed—to 25% of net (with net usually undefined). That means that publishers are getting a lot of profit on ebooks, even when the sales decline. You can see the effects of this in the Publisher’s Weekly article I linked to above, when you look at the comparison between sales and earnings in the digital sphere in almost all of these companies. You see the phrase “digital accounted for (%) of revenue” over and over again, and that percentage is generally higher than the year before even when digital sales went down.

Big publishers are still searching for the best way to make money. Most of them are confused by the new products coming in like the subscription services. In fact, one online publishing trade journal characterized the Wall Street Journal’s take on this as “The Folly of Netflix for books.”

Right now, traditional publishing has taken the position that everything new is threatening and/or wrong for books. And that attitude is familiar. The music industry had the same attitude years ago.

The real key for those of us in publishing is that we don’t know what we don’t know. And we won’t know it for a while. Seriously. We’re all expounding on what will work, what won’t work, what might work, what everything is going to be like fifteen years from now, and we don’t know.

The fact that we don’t know and can’t predict what the landscape will look like after all this disruptive technological change became really clear to me a few weeks ago, when I read an article in Entertainment Weekly. Titled, “How The Music Industry Saved Itself,” the article looks at the assumptions the industry made way back when, and the reality that has hit since. (Right now, EW expects you to buy the issue, which is the August 2, 2013 edition, so I can’t link to the article.)

We all know that the music industry got nailed by  the digital revolution. This article claims that album sales went from 785 million in 2000 to 326 million in 2010. But now, in 2013, “stability is resting comfortably on the horizon” because of the growth in market share for digital music and “the explosion of streaming.” More than 50 billion songs were streamed this year in part because of event albums.

The advent of stability seems so…well… stable that the article’s author Kyle Anderson feels comfortable in giving rules for the new music industry.

They are:

1. Give Away A Little, Get Back A Lot

2. Offer Options

3. Embrace Even Older Technology

4. Work Outside The System

5. Don’t Be Like Kanye

Anderson compares what the industry believed ten years ago to what it now knows. For example, he takes on the “free” controversy this way:

When the MP3 became public enemy No. 1, the assumption was that if you offered any music for free, the buying public would never again pony up for an album. But music fans respond to getting an advance taste for free. A number of high-profile artists…made their new albums available as free streams a week before the release dates, and they all enjoyed a significant first-week sales bump over their previous releases.

Notice that this was a free stream. Only the most dedicated could actually figure out a way to keep the album. If you liked it, you had to buy it.

Which brings us to his second point—options—which I fight new indie writers about all the time.

He writes:

For years, industry executives assumed that people only wanted their music one way, but actually they’re happy to diversify their intake—a streaming subscription here, a handful of iTunes downloads there, and yes, even good old-fashioned CDs.

Not only that, but his third point—embrace older technology—goes to the heart of book publishing. He’s talking about vinyl, which has seen a nearly 4 million piece growth in the past five years, but he could easily be talking about hardcovers or maybe even collectible books. And, you’ll note, that the labels are offering vinyl and a free download of the music as a single package. Sounds like MatchBook, doesn’t it?

Working outside the system is about innovative ways of marketing the music, through apps, through mixtapes, and so on. All creative, all different. And that’s what we’re facing in the publishing industry. All kinds of different choices—some of which will work, some won’t, and some which will work for a while.

The last point—don’t be like Kanye—was about how Kanye West refused to adopt the industry’s new model. For his latest album, he did almost no appearances (very important in music), and had no advance streaming or preorders. As a result, his first-week sales were at a career low for West, and went down 80% in the second week.

Essentially, Kyle Anderson’s point is that the internet, digital downloads, and the availability of all kinds of music broke the music industry and then remade it. The music industry is far enough ahead of publishing that the music industry actually has some long-term data on what works and what doesn’t. The rate of change has slowed. The music industry now believes it’s in the new normal.

The publishing industry isn’t stable yet. We’re still in the disruption part of the cycle. We won’t stabilize for a few years at best.

Until then, I think the only pronouncements we as writers in the industry can make is that we don’t know what we don’t know. And what we do know is that things will change.

We have to pay attention. We can’t assume that what we’re doing today will work tomorrow.

I think the biggest takeaway from the articles about other media that I’ve mentioned here is that consumers want choices. And, like the artists themselves, the consumers want control over those choices. They want TV dramas on demand so that they can binge-watch and they want once-per-week appointment television. They want streaming music and vinyl albums. They want hardcover books and ebooks.

They might even want never-ending print stories that mimic the soap operas of old. Serials, as the pulps called them.

We don’t know.

Someday, someone will be able to say that stability is on the horizon for the publishing industry, just like Anderson did this summer for the music industry. But that day is still years off. If we follow music’s trajectory, we won’t see stability on the horizon until 2022, thirteen years from the start of the disruption.

Until then, to misquote Margo Channing from All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

This blog came into being in part because you guys asked me to continue The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, only focused on the publishing industry. Since things were changing so quickly, I figured a weekly blog was a good way to figure out what was happening.

I don’t know if I’ve figured anything out except that the most unexpected things work in the most unexpected ways. I do know that this blog takes time from my novel writing (about 2 books per year’s worth!), so I want the blog to fund itself.

So, if you learned anything or got anything out of a past blog, please leave a tip on the way out.

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“The Business Rusch: We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know” copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.