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“In my continuing quest to demystify things related to the business of writing, at least inasmuch as they relate to me, today I am going to talk revenue streams. As many of you know, I am a huge proponent of writers having multiple revenue streams, so that when one of them cuts out on you — and it will cut out on you — you still have money coming in while you look for something to replace the income you’ve lost. I am also a huge proponent of recognizing that even within an individual stream of income, there can and will be substantial variation from year to year.
To make these points, I’m going to lay out to you my own revenue streams for 2010, and point out what I currently expect from each of these in the coming year.”
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“A very common assertion is that if you just drop the price to 99 cents, people will flock to the deal and ‘volume will make up for the lost margin.’ It’s a mantra that’s very strongly believed. To be honest, I think that works somewhat, because it boosts discoverability (it’s cheap to try a new author), and I think having something as a 99 cent ‘lead in’ discovery book/title is a good idea, but I don’t think its a strategy to depend on.
So a year ago, I made the eBook version of Tides From The New Worlds, and I’ve been experimenting with covers and price to test how it effects sales.”
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“Even though its running days are numbered, the Tevatron reminds us that it can still muster up an interesting hint of new physics. This is a quick post on a brand new result from the CDF collaboration, “Invariant Mass Distribution of Jet Pairs Produced in Association with a W boson in p-pbar Collisions at Sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV” [arXiv:1104.0699]. Just to whet your appetite, here’s one of the plots that we’d like to understand (hot off the press!):
Unpacking the title
Before diving in, let’s first understand what the title means. It’s somewhat cumbersome, but that’s because it encodes a lot of good physics. It turns out that it’s easier to start at the end of the title and work our way backwards.”