Putting Yourself Out There

I’m gearing back up to return to the university in the fall. After a heck of a couple of years, I’m resuming my very slow attempt to get a few extra college degrees. Mostly, it’s an excuse to listen to people much younger than myself learn cool stuff, and an excuse to listen to people somewhat younger than myself share their expertise.

I get inspired by all of that.

I’m searching class schedules and realizing that my Spanish has gotten rusty again, so there is probably a summertime online refresher in the complicated tenses on the horizon. Even though, really, using the proper tense is not my problem so much as finding the correct vocabulary word. As in any word that might suit in that circumstance. The vocabulary was the first thing to flee my brain in the hiatus.

The thing that fascinates me the most, though, is watching the theater kids, particularly those who are (at 18, 19, or 20) convinced they’re going to be Actors! (and yes, the exclamation point is there for a reason). Most won’t be, not because they’re not good enough, but because they don’t listen well and they already think they’re God’s gift to the profession.

Mostly, I watch the ones who are insecurely secure in their dreams. These kids know exactly what they want in their lives, but they’re not sure they’re good enough to get there, so they work extra hard to figure out where they should be.

Sometimes it is not where they expect to be. In the theater department in particular, they have to take courses in all aspects of theater, and they sometimes learn that they love a part of theater that they hadn’t expected to like at all.

Surprisingly enough to my younger self, the one who didn’t have the courage to follow her musical abilities into a music degree or to even walk into the theater department at the University of Wisconsin, there are a lot of introverts in theater. Some of those introverts are writers, yes, but many go onstage and perform. Most, in fact, because they like being someone else in front of a group. It’s safer for them.

I get safe. It makes sense. I also get the fear of doing something revealing in front of a crowd. Mostly, that fear is gone for me now. Years of public speaking and talking on panels at sf conventions eased my mind.

Still, I was pretty shocked when I learned that a lot of actors and musicians suffer severe stage fright—people you’ve all heard of. If they have to go onstage, they sit in the dressing room and shake, or, in some cases, puke, because they’re so scared.

Had I known that…well, I doubt I would have done it, because puking is not something I voluntarily do, even for art…but it certainly would have eased my mind about what for me is relatively minor stage fright (in comparison to what these folks have).

Really, though, it’s what they are willing to do for their dreams and their art. They put themselves out there. More importantly, they figure out how to put themselves out there.

Every year, I have a conversation with at least one of my writing students who is terrified for some reason I never probe of putting their work in front of an audience. It always boils down to the fact that they’re afraid of being seen.

Sidebar from a nearly 65-year-old person who has worked in the arts her entire life: You are never seen. Not in your entirety. You may reveal all of your secrets and no one will care. Or they’ll comment on the portrayal of something minor, like the cat, and kvetch about that. It’s disappointing…and freeing.

However, the fear of being seen is a real and crippling fear, stopping a lot of prose writers and poets from following their dreams. Writers, unlike actors and musicians, can hide from the world. You can use a pen name, set up a legal entity that doesn’t use your real name (in an obvious manner), and never let your picture out into the world.

You can hide and publish your work. That’s the great thing about being a writer.

Usually when a writer figures out their own personal workaround, they put their work on the market, whatever it means for them.

I had one of those discussions this past week with a couple of different writers, some in person, one online, and when I photo-bombed the Writers’ Block webinar on Wednesday.

After that moment on the webinar, I spent a few hours thinking about how universal that fear is among writers. I’ve been in this business almost fifty years now, and I’ve seen it every year.

Then Dean and I watched a little bit of The Voice. We often watch something to rest our poor brains, usually at dinner. We’ve moved away from news (since there’s no way that will relax anyone), and gone to documentaries and The Voice.

We usually watch a segment or two and then go back to whatever we were doing. It will take us days to watch an entire 2-hour episode.

So that Wednesday night, we watched two members of Michael Bublé’s team duet on a song he wrote, called “Home.” Most of you know it as a super hit for Blake Shelton, but Bublé wrote the song and released it first.

Before the battle, Bublé talked a bit about writing the song. I can’t find the clip for that (mostly because I’m lazy, but also because it’s not that relevant), but I did find the one that caught my attention.

It got me thinking, and I went up to my office and made a list.

Most people who work in the arts realize that their work has to be put out into the world.

• People who write music must perform that music to sell that song/sonata/whatever. They may be terrible singers. They might be shy as hell. But they need to make, at minimum, a demo tape.

Often they perform their own work, in some kind of concert, and it is that work that ends up catapulting them into whatever level of fame they will reach.

And then, partly because of the vagaries of the (exceedingly complex) music copyright laws, they may hear someone else cover their song. They might be like John Legend, who has said on The Voice that he cannot listen to a cover of one of his songs fairly. Or they might be like Bublé who not only assigned the song, but was honored by the way the singers performed it.

• People who write plays write them with production in mind. What is the point of writing a play if it’s just going to languish on your desk? The problem, though, with writing a play is that when it is performed, there will be an area that the performers cannot do or cannot say.

In early drafts of a play, the playwright will have to be nearby to do some kind of work to smooth out that section. Sometimes it’s because the star is a doofus and can’t say a word with more than two syllables, but mostly it’s because that section of the show, when performed in previews, did not work. Neil Simon deals with this a lot in his autobiography Rewrites.

• People who write screenplays know that they’re writing something that will be performed as well. I had a very famous writer friend who wrote the wordiest damn screenplays ever and had, in his contract, a clause that said not a word could be touched.

After his early years in Hollywood (when he didn’t have enough clout to have that stupid contract), he rarely sold a screenplay and when he did, it was a charity sale from a friend who would buy the screenplay so that the writer could retain his Writers Guild membership. (And then the charity friend would do a shooting script.)

• Artists know that their paintings or photographs will be displayed or used on covers or put on t-shirts and prints and everything else.

Even the lowest of the low, graffiti “artists,” the ones who deface buildings, understand that their art needs to be seen. (I’m grumpy about graffiti these days since Vegas has a lot of wall murals all over the city—and the freakin’ graffiti “artists” will deface them. Grrr. I hate people who deface other people’s art.)

• Even young poets these days understand that they might have to get up in front of a crowd at a poetry slam and declaim their poem.
• And let’s not talk about comedians, who are also writers, who get in front of a crowd, and risk bombing night after night after night. Dean and I saw one of George Carlin’s shows in his last years, and Carlin was testing material so new that he was holding paper torn from a notepad.

Some of it was funny. Much of it was not.

Fiction writers—people who write novels and short stories—are the only artists I know who expect someone else to publish their work. Fiction writers, particularly those who are traditionally published, believe that all they have to do is write it, and everyone will flock to their feet.

That’s an ingrained attitude, and a hard one to fight. Heck, a lot of these writers are worried when they decide to give a copy of their manuscript to an editor at a book publishing house or (worse) an agent.

Writers do not expect to have their work in the public view, and often fear it.

I’m not sure why this is. I think it’s just part of the culture.

There are movies that show writers at work, and someone else dragging that “brilliant” manuscript off the writer’s desk. Or the writer “gets discovered” in an English class (never happened when I was in school). Or someone else mailed off their manuscript.

That myth goes hand in hand with the idea that writing should be hard and writers should suffer while doing it. That myth also goes with the idea that anything written fast is terrible and anything labored over is brilliant. And that myth goes with the idea that being prolific is a sin. (Tell that to Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare.)

Indie writers have a similar problem, but it’s couched in other terms. I don’t want to learn how to publish. That’s going to be hard. It’ll take too much money or I can’t do covers or…or…

Okay, I want to reply, whatever roadblocks you want to set up for your work, go ahead.

But real artists—be they musicians or painters or (yes) writers—need to have their work seen. They need to figure out how to get on that stage despite their stage fright and put their art in front of an audience.

Otherwise the art will be destroyed when they die, tossed out with the trash or deleted off their computers.

Oh…and let’s talk “covers” for a minute. Blake Shelton’s version of “Home” is very different from Bublé’s version, which is different from the duet that aired on The Voice this past week.

If you’re lucky as a writer, and if you put yourself out there, at some point, someone will want to do make another piece of art using yours as inspiration. Maybe a movie, maybe a TV show, maybe a dramatic reading or an audio book.

That’s a “cover” for lack of a better term. (It really is a derivative work, and it does fall in a different place in the copyright law, but go with me on this for a minute.) Instead of being all protective and saying that you must control all things, say yes…if the contract terms are good.

That’s all.

A singer doesn’t have to get permission to cover a song. I can sing “Home” badly in front of an audience if I want to, but if I get paid for it, I need to let the songwriter know that I’m going to be covering the song. The songwriter cannot say no.

It gets complicated after that. (Okay, it’s already complicated.) But implied in all of this is that the music needs to get in front of an audience. The play will be performed. The screenplay will become the basis for a movie. The painting will hang on a gallery wall.

What makes writer-artists any different? Why should we fight so hard to create something and then be afraid to put it in front of an audience. Particularly since we’ll never see that audience. We don’t have to hear from them either, if we keep our email private and don’t go on social media and don’t read reviews.

What makes fiction writers so dang delicate? Every artist has fears. All of us do. If we want to make a living at our art, we learn to overcome the fear.

It may take a dozen workarounds. It might mean the writing equivalent of puking in the bathroom before stepping on the stage. But if you value your own work and your own dreams, you learn how to get past whatever is stopping you.

Just like other performers do.

“Putting Yourself Out There,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Picture of Gavin is there because, despite appearances, he’s terrified of putting himself out there.

A short story can become a novel (more money, different licenses), sell in foreign editions (more money, different licenses), become an audio book (more money, different licenses), be reprinted in anthologies (more money, different licenses), become an hour-long TV special (more money, different licenses), become a TV series (more money, different licenses), become a movie (more money, different licenses), become a video game (more money, different licenses), become a board game…

Well, you get the idea. And the writer really doesn’t have to do any more writing after finishing that short story. Everything I mentioned above is licensing little snippets of copyright. Once writers start understanding that, then they can manage their assets for the rest of their life…and beyond.

If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, check out this post. And if that scares you sufficiently into learning how to run your business, then get The Copyright Handbook and read it.

But let’s ignore copyright for a moment, and simply think about money. Boatloads and boatloads and yachtloads of money. Rivers of money. Oceans of money.

One thing we all know, because we read books and watch TV, is that lots of money makes people crazy—both in fiction and in real life. Financial expectations, even in the smallest instances, can cause some people to become homicidal when those expectations go awry. That’s the basis for entire subgenres of mystery fiction.

In real life, few people kill over financial matters. Most people go to court, and those court cases drag on for years.

As an example that hits the publishing industry, let’s take a look at the big shocker that happened to the supposed heirs of Scholastic Corporation in June of 2021.

For context, Scholastic Corporation grew from a magazine published in the 1920s to a $1.2 billion dollar corporation with most of its revenue still in publishing. Scholastic has had amazing success over the years. They publish Clifford: The Big Red Dog, Captain Underpants, The Hunger Games, and…oh…some little series called Harry Potter. Their contracts, while not draconian, aren’t really writer-friendly either, so all of that merchandising you see for most of the big series that Scholastic publishes? Yeah, that money mostly goes to Scholastic, not to the writers.

Scholastic has done some great things for literacy and for children’s literacy in particular. It also has worked with schools for more than fifty years to make sure that kids get books to read. I still remember Scholastic Day at my school, and I looked forward to it.

Corporations aren’t really soulless things. People exist behind the corporation. And in this case, Scholastic was a family business. That little magazine was started by Maurice R. Robinson. His son, M. Richard Robinson Junior took over the company as CEO in 1975, and ran it until 2021…when he died suddenly while on a walk with one of his sons.

Richard Robinson was 84 years old, so there’s sudden and then there’s well…not as sudden so much as unexpected right now. He did have a will, however, and rather than leaving his estate and his interest in Scholastic Corporation to his sons, he left everything to his girlfriend.

The will wasn’t new though; it was executed in 2018.

Let’s ignore the family drama part of this—that all of his belongings and such and his personal $100 million fortune went to his girlfriend. The real interest are the Class A voting stocks in Scholastic Corporation. Robinson owned 53% of those stocks, which meant that he had a majority on the board of directors. He could outvote all of them, and now his girlfriend can.

This isn’t as random as it sounds. She is Iole Lucchese, the chair of Scholastic’s board,  as well as executive vice president and president of Scholastic Entertainment. In other words, she knows business and she knows the company very, very, very well.

The adult sons are contesting the will. Neither of them works in the family business. At a quick glance, it doesn’t seem like either of them ever did.

As a number of experts have said in the various articles about this battle, companies are difficult to run when the ownership of the company is under dispute. And these cases can drag on for years.

As an example, let’s look at another estate in the arts. Prince died in April of 2016 of a fentanyl overdose, and he did not leave a valid will. His heirs—or potential heirs—ended up working together to find an administrator for the estate, which is required under Minnesota law. But there was still a lot to do, all of it legal wrangling. Then the IRS got involved. At some point, the IRS determined that the estate was worth twice the amount listed on the estate tax return, so that meant more legal wrangling, which finally got settled in January.

Now that the estate finally has a value ($156 million), it can be properly divvied up between the heirs. Two of the heirs died as the legal wrangling was underway; their shares will go to their families (I assume). According to Billboard in that December article, it looks like the

…estate likely will be divided between New York music company Primary Wave and Prince’s three oldest heirs or their families. Primary Wave bought out all or most of the interests of Prince’s three youngest siblings.

Six years, almost to the day, after Prince’s death. That means for six years, no one has really managed the assets in Prince’s estate. Sure, some things were done. Contracts renewed, items catalogued, a few changes made. But musically, nothing.

And who knows what will happen when three heirs (or their families) and a New York Music company try to work together on all the things that need to be done to manage a music catalog as large and vast as Prince’s.

The clusterfuck will continue.

And if you think the aging rockers from rock’s golden years aren’t paying attention to the Prince debacle, then you’re not paying attention.

Music copyrights are extremely complicated. Some portions of them are regulated by U.S. law, including royalties and percentages that must be paid to the songwriters by cover artists. Music copyrights fall into several categories, which make my head hurt when I think about managing them, even as a low-level musical artist. I’m not going to try to explain them here.

Just put a pin in complicated.

I’ve done a lot of work with the heirs to writers’ estates. When the superagent Ralph Vicinanza died suddenly and his sister initially handled the estate, a bunch of writer heirs—who had been relying on Ralph to handle all things writing and publishing related—contacted me. I couldn’t say anything bad about Ralph at the time (except to hang up or walk away from my email cursing the contracts he had gotten them all into, contracts that benefited him more than the writers), so I listened.

And realized that these people, who were farmers and professors and stay-at-home parents, had no idea how the publishing industry worked and worse, had no real interest in learning it.

They just wanted Mommy or Daddy’s royalties, which to them were like a stock annuity, an income they could rely on so they could continue living their lives.

Publishing contracts and licensing agreements for novels and short stories are so easy compared to music industry contracts, copyrights, and licensing agreements, the differences are like this: Publishing is arithmetic; music is calculus.

Not kidding.

So when some of the biggest musicians in the world started selling their entire music catalogs, I was not surprised. Intellectual property has become an asset that large corporations want on their books. To say that they own all of Big Name Musician’s catalog is a coup. It’s also a really good investment.

It’s great for the musician as well. Paul Simon was about to turn 80 when he sold his music publishing rights to Sony Music Publishing for $250 million dollars. Not every musician you follow writes songs or owns music publishing rights, by the way. The singer-songwriters are the ones cashing in here.

And the songwriters are too. The ones who write major hits for other artists because, as I said, the copyrights and licensing agreements in the music industry are complicated.

Shorthand, though, Sony Music Publishing will control the licenses for Simon’s most famous songs (and the not-so-famous ones too). So when you hear a Paul Simon song in a commercial, it will have been licensed by Sony now, instead of Simon himself.

He wasn’t the only artist to sell his catalog outright in 2021.

In fact, there’s been a lot of money tossed around for music IP in 2021. Here’s a link to a rather staggering list of all of 2021’s music industry purchases (and not all of them were music publishing rights. Some were for master recordings, some were for even more music rights, some were for stakes in existing companies, and so on and so forth. More than I can comprehend, really). Music Business Worldwide  estimates that $5 billion was spent on music rights acquisition in 2021. Yes, billion with a “b.”

And half a billion of that was for Bruce Springsteen’s entire masters-plus-publishing catalog alone. Bruce Springsteen, age 72.

People are looking at their legacy, especially after Prince. Rather than have their catalog dissolve into disuse after they die or their heirs squabble over publishing rights, these already-rich artists are taking an extra payout.

Now, the heirs will be able to squabble, but they’ll be fighting over money, not over whether or not “Born in the U.S.A.” gets played in a scene in a movie.

There are a lot of other reasons to do this, of course. Managing all of this—or managing the managers—is time-consuming and very unfun. And right now, companies all over the world are paying top dollar to control the copyrights to music that everyone knows and loves.

Cashing in is a really good idea for older musicians (and even some younger ones: John Legend has sold his copyrights for music he composed between 2004 and 2021.   Legend is 43 years old, and presumably has decades of composing and recording ahead of him. None of those rights in future compositions were sold.

John Legend makes money on more than his music. As Bloomberg helpfully explained,

Dubbed “Music Mogul of the Year” by Variety in 2020, Legend … has gone on to expand into other areas of the entertainment field, in part through the founding of a production studio that’s created shows for Netflix Inc. and ABC. Variety estimates that Legend, born John Roger Stephens before adopting his stage name, takes in between $50 million and $100 million annually from his various enterprises, including LVE, his Napa Valley wine brand. 

Legend made a business transaction. I’ll wager he and his advisors are thinking that the payments for music catalogs will go down by the time he’s Paul Simon’s age. Better to cash in now.

This is how you leverage copyright. What these musicians—these business people—are doing. They’re looking at the value of their complicated music catalogs to them over the next ten to twenty years or the value to others. Given the estate benefits as well, these deals will (with luck) protect their legacy in this way:

Art—be it actual paintings or plays or novels or songs—dies when its mismanaged or argued over. Copyright in the U.S. is life plus 70 years. So heirs spending a decade or two…or 5 decades in the case of the Jimi Hendrix estate, is ridiculous and can really cut into the legacy of the artist.

This entire short series has been about ways to use copyright or ways others use copyright to control an artist’s work. I’m hoping you’ll all find this as fascinating as I do and maybe start understanding why I read articles about copyright and licensing.

It’s better to learn as things happen and change. It’s also kinda fun to learn some of the more esoteric versions of copyright law. Or how others decide to license or outright sell their copyrights, and the reasons they do so.

2021 was a complicated copyright year. It took three posts for me to explain that, which is why I didn’t put them in the year in review.

And then I found all the lists, which is fun for me.

Thanks for coming along on the ride.

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“Business Musings: Copyright Fun Part 3,” copyright © 2022 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / Krisdog.

There’s been a lot of spin in the press about Levine’s departure, some of it having to do with the advertising Upfronts the week before. But if you’d been watching the show, as we had, Levine’s dissatisfaction with the new format went from I guess I’ll put up with it to That’s not what I signed up for.

The comments slipped out sideways. He started talking about the show as a music show rather than a competition. Levine and the early judges were all about the music: heck, that was why they did blind auditions, so they could hear the purity of the voices singing with nothing else—no package, no spin.

This season the show introduced a new round, called “The Cross Battles,” in which an artist from each team sang against an artist from another team. They were picked to sing against each other on the live show, and then fans voted overnight.

Overnight votes (and the Twitter saves, which were introduced a few years ago) reward the coaches with the biggest active Twitter following, and that’s Blake Shelton. Country music radio also does a get-out-the-vote campaign, which none of the other coaches benefit from.

Sure enough, Shelton’s artists almost swept the Cross Battles, while the other coaches barely hung on. Fans barely hung on as well. Ratings for this season of The Voice were down 20 percent over the previous year.

That’s huge, but NBC doesn’t seem anxious. In fact, the network seems to like Twitter saves and overnight voting. Active fan engagement: proof that the fans exist.

I already had some context for The Voice debacle (okay, that’s my personal opinion, which I suspect I share with Levine). I had gone to most of the film and TV discussions about the future of programming at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and every major executive was talking about numbers.

The upshot was, they said, it’s impossible to figure out who is watching what when anymore. The problem with that, particularly for network television and cable TV, is that on-air advertising is still based on the 1960s model of measurable eyeballs on the screen. It used to be counting the number of people who watched the show live. Then it was live+1 (watching it the next day). Then live+7 and jeez, I have no idea what it is now.

But streaming has come into network and cable as well, with their apps that are available on Amazon TV or a Roku device or on a phone or on a computer. And streaming is a whole different count. Not to mention buying the entire season on DVD, which some people still do. (I watched some guy buy an entire season of Westworld at a discount department store the other day.)

Then there’s social media. If there’s buzz, it counts as well. This all got reinforced, oddly enough, as I read an article in my university alumni magazine, On Wisconsin. The magazine decided to interview a lot of the alumni who are currently active in TV and TV production. They spoke to everyone from the presidents of AMC and CBS Entertainment to producers and showrunners on projects that air on Netflix and ESPN and beyond. Some of these folks have decades of experience, and others maybe ten years, but they’re all fascinating to read. [link: ]

Buried in these interviews were some observations on numbers. First, there was this from Justine Nagan, who works as as the executive director for American Documentary and an executive producer for POV and America ReFramed.

In answer to a question on storytelling, she said this:

POV is 31 years old this year. For many years of POV’ s existence, the broadcast was the highlight of a film’s release and now it’s a highlight. We are really focused on broadcast, streaming, and community engagement.

A highlight. Not the highlight. Community engagement. Those two comments are quite telling. She didn’t answer the storytelling question at all. She answered the question as if it were a ratings question. She’s looking at engaging the audience, not just through the first broadcast, but on streaming services and on social media.

Then there was this from Jennifer Carreras, Vice President of Comedy Development, ABC. When asked how she knows if a show is successful, she said this:

Ratings are still a discussion, but not nearly as important as they were before. Part of it is what the ratings are, but also viewer engagement across social media. There are a lot of different ways to look at things, to see how the audience is responding.

That last sentence describes The Voice. They look at ratings, yes, but are working very hard to gin up audience involvement in real time. And that apparently means something to the execs at NBC, or The Voice producers wouldn’t do it.

Here I am again, discussing television in a fiction writing blog.

But we have some of the same issues, and we have had those issues for more than a decade now. With all the different ways readers can consume books, how do we know if a title or even a byline is successful?

It really does come down to how we measure success.

For one of my writer friends, success is a million-dollar advance. Another knows, as close as he is able, how many readers bought his novels since the beginning of his career. Yet another friend wants great reviews. And one of my friends wanted to be award-nominated for a particular industry award that had meant a lot to him as a child.

For some indie writers, success is the number of names they have on their newsletter. For others, it’s how many reviews they get on Amazon in the first few months after release. For still others, it’s how many five-star reviews they get (even if they have to ask people to write those reviews).

For me, I have and always will say that I want to make a good living as a writer. That’s not a guaranteed thing, by the way. Freelance income goes up and down, which is why these blogs are often about money management. A writer who manages her money well can handle the gusher of money followed by the lean years. Or the lean years that slowly morph into a steady income. Writers who expect consistent money and spend like their income is as consistent as a salary always end up broke and disillusioned.

Once upon a time, we used to all agree on what constituted success. We had to: traditional publishers mandated it. The books had to have some kind growth trajectory, and had to sell within some kind of set lines. Or, rather, not sell per se, but ship. If the book shipped well, and other books by the same author shipped well, it might take years for the traditional publisher to realize that those books didn’t sell well. They would have huge returns that trickled in, and ultimately the book lost money.

Even then, even when everything was based on copies shipped versus copies sold, returns and all kinds of games that publishers played to keep as much money in their pockets as possible while hanging onto (or hemorrhaging) writers, no one knew what the actual numbers were.

Just like in television back when the ratings system developed in the 1960s. How did they know who was watching what? Nielsen sent out paper booklets to random homes. My family got one during those years, and my mother filled out our viewing habits like it was her sacred duty. Then she sent the booklet back in the prepaid envelope, and some poor schmo tallied up the results coming in from across the country. That schmo or a different schmo would then apply the numbers received from the booklet households to some kind of algorithm, figure out an average, and from that would declare what the viewing audience was that week (or that month) for various TV shows.

Computers took Schmo Two’s job before taking away Schmo One’s. Cable boxes eventually sent back numbers to various data collection places. And now, Netflix and Amazon and other streaming services know what we watch when we watch it and how we watch it.

The first time I accidentally left my streaming device on Netflix freaked me out. I came back to the TV to see a floating message: We note that you have not been active for three hours. Are you still watching or should we shut down the stream?

Yeah. I shut down the stream. But I went back the next night and finished what I was watching.

This long elaborate point, though, was only to show you that the numbers are ephemeral and, in some ways, meaningless.

Unless we writers give those numbers meaning. And it’s up to us to figure out what’s important to us.

I think what happened on The Voice this past season shows the changes in a nutshell. Levine has always been about music purity. When it came his turn to save an artist who got eliminated by the so-called popular vote, he would invariably pick the true musician who was in his stable. Not the prettiest person or even the person with the best voice, but the person who had a great love for and ability in music itself, who maybe played a lot of instruments and who was often a songwriter. In the early years, Levine’s enthusiasm for that type of contestant would translate into a slow build for that person, and they would often place in the top five at the end of the season.

There is no slow build now. There’s Twitter saves and jockeying for votes. And even that doesn’t always work. At the end of this past season — SPOILER ALERT!!!!!— all three of Shelton’s contestants in the top four split the Shelton fan vote, and John Legend’s contestant won. She had a lovely voice and she was a great performer, but did she win because Legend has a good Twitter following and his wife Chrissy Teigen has an even larger one? Or because Shelton’s contestants split the vote, and Legend’s contestant barely edged above the others?

Impossible to know, because NBC doesn’t release the actual numbers. Much like traditional publishers of old.

Levine left, I think, because the pure musicians have no place in the latter half of the show. He wasn’t having fun anymore. He has gone on to produce Songland which is sort of about true musicians. It’s actually about songwriters and collaboration and tailoring songs. But it is about music, not about who has the most Twitter followers. So I have no idea if the show will survive.

Just like I don’t know if some of my writer friends will continue on. There’s been a lot of number comparisons and social media follower comparisons and newsletter comparisons going on in the past ten years. It’s hard to keep your head on straight through all of that.

I even get wrapped around it sometimes, when I’m tired and vulnerable. I have had a lot of talks with myself about the writing being about what I want to do, and about building a fan base slowly, without noticing that I had been continuing to build my fanbase.

I don’t use the velocity (selling books fast) metric, and I don’t read reviews. I have grown my Twitter following organically, and I bifurcate my newsletter into a bunch of newsletters that focus on particular projects. People have spoken up more lately about Free Fiction Monday, but even then it’s only a comment or two, or maybe an emailed thank-you for putting up a particular story. I used to go online and obsessively watch the sales numbers as the indie world grew, because I couldn’t quite believe we were in such a great position—that writers actually could control their own careers.

So back in those days, I could have charted what sold best or quickly or consistently. I didn’t, except to notice trends. Such as the Free Fiction stories selling better the month they were up for free than they had previously. And the way that new books in a series goosed previous book sales. And how some forms of advertising worked while others didn’t.

But I slowly got away from that, because watching the numbers can make you insane. Or make me insane, anyway. Because ultimately, they don’t mean much.

For example, this week, at least six new books came into the condo. I finished one book that arrived the week before. My TBR shelf, whittled down in our move, is about 100 books strong. And those are the paper books, which I can keep track of. I have ebooks as well on my various devices, but I tend to forget about the ebooks. They don’t nag at me that way that paper books do.

So all of that is to say that while I’ve bought the books, I haven’t read them yet. And I know I’m not alone in this. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be an accepted acronym for the phenomenon. (My TBR pile.) Which means that just because people buy your books doesn’t mean they read your books—at least right away.

So the sales numbers aren’t the actual reader numbers. And buried in the actual reader numbers—the unavailable actual reader numbers—are the library books that get read repeatedly or the number of times a person loans out her favorite book to someone else.

We can never really know how many people read our books. Our newsletters sign-ups don’t tell us. Our social media doesn’t tell us. Our sales figures don’t tell us.

The readers themselves do, though, sometimes in startling ways. I was really humbled and surprised by the Diving Universe Kickstarter. I set the ask at $2000, figuring that readers who wanted The Renegat early would take the $5 reward, and readers who really wanted more of the series would also take the books of extras at $15. I didn’t think that there would be a lot of readers who would go for that stuff, which was why I put the ask at $2000. And hit it within hours.

I had no idea so many folks were waiting for the series—to read the next book—and I also had no idea that so many folks wanted the next book early. That’s really neat. As is the number of people who backed it the Kickstarter.

Here’s the thing about Kickstarter numbers. They’re like social media numbers. People who are active on Kickstarter think everyone is active on Kickstarter (just like people on Twitter think everyone is active on Twitter). But most people don’t go on Kickstarter. Most people have never backed a Kickstarter. Just like a lot of people (I’m not looking at this year’s statistic) haven’t read an ebook.

We get all caught up in our various favorite delivery methods and forget that it’s a subset of a subset. That such a large subset of Kickstarter backers and my readers came together in May was a pleasant surprise for me. And one that fits into one of my personal definitions of success.

Not only am I writing things I love to write, but people like to read those things and are willing to invest in them. That’s amazing, and makes me one lucky writer.

For the past ten years, I’ve been saying that the changes in publishing have given writers a real shot at doing what they want to do. We can write what we want, publish what we want, and make more money at it than we can in traditional publishing.

But, with those changes has come yet another upheaval on the ways we measure success. And I use the word measure on purpose.

I’ll wager that, if you ask Adam Levine, he’ll tell you that Twitter saves and overnight live votes, stirred up by social media accounts, aren’t the way to measure what makes music successful. I don’t know what he considers as successful. I just know how frustrated he got with the way that someone tinkered with The Voice. It wasn’t what he had signed up for, so he left.

Clearly it’s not about money for him either, or he wouldn’t have left $30 million on the table. He would have (grumpily) stuck it out until the end of the new contract.

But television, like music, like publishing, is trying to find a new metric, one that everyone will agree measures the audience in a way that we all believe is accurate. The key word in that sentence, by the way, is believe since we never had accurate measures in the past.

As artists, we can continue our search for a new metric or we can just tell our stories and put them out there, letting them build organically, and finding the audience in their own sweet time.

Eventually I’ll read all the books on my TBR pile. I have some books by new-to-me writers there. If I like those books, I’ll buy more from the same author. But it might take me two or three years after I bought the first book to do so. And by then, no metric will be able to track that first sale as something that led to the latter ones.

Maybe we should stop trying to find the perfect way to measure, and focus on our writing. After all, that’s what we love. That’s why we got into this business. And, I assume, that’s what we all do best.

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I’m writing some of these blog posts in advance of the Licensing Expo, so that I have a few posts in the bank while I go over what I’ve learned at the Expo. Those posts will follow in mid-June and beyond as I process everything.

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“Business Musings: Vexing Numbers” copyright © 2019 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / lucadp.