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Advanced magic bakery

    ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Two

    Chapter Two… Market or No Market… You write this short story. All done. In your magic bakery you have created a magic pie. That pie has a lot of value that I will talk about in later chapters. But instead of taking the pie out of the kitchen and putting it in your store to sell to customers around the world, you just put it on a shelf in the kitchen, for some reason deciding not to market your story. Pie will not spoil. It can just sit there for years and years. But it is not making you any money, not paying you back for the time and energy it took to write it. Not helping you find new readers, new customers for your magic bakery. I can’t begin to count the hundreds of times in the last few years I have heard a writer complaining about not selling much when they only have five things up for sale, while at the same time have a lot of stories and novels they have not gotten out of the kitchen. So for a moment, let’s look at your magic bakery from the perspective of a customer. This customer happens to run across your bakery. Maybe someone told them where it was. So this customer steps in the door into the wonderful smells of baking. You only have five things out for sale, which means only five pies on the shelves. But the customer sees this great store full of nothing but empty shelves. Customer knows there will be nothing there for them and turns around and walks out. This is why the 20 major books idea works. It is enough, if you stage your store correctly, to help the reader think there is something in your store they might like. Think about what you would do as a customer if you walked into a store of empty shelves with only five things for sale total. You would turn and leave. But new writers who have listened to the myths of write a book and get rich flat don’t understand this concept. And their magic bakeries are very sad places, not even earning enough to brew themselves a pot of coffee. Now imagine my magic bakery. I have thousands of pies of novels, novellas, short stories, collections, and editing projects. Hundreds of people browsing at any moment of the day or night in my massive store, the cash register constantly ringing up sales even though the pies never change. Now granted, I have some shelves in my kitchen full of pies not yet put out into the main bakery, mostly because I am writing at such speed, spending so many hours in the bakery kitchen, the publishing part can’t keep up, but those stories will get out into the store and when they do I might have to add yet another addition to the magic bakery. One thing to remember… A magic pie sitting in the kitchen or out in your store has a massive amount of value. When you put a magic pie out and let it start earning for you, its value does go up. But earning or not, the magic pie still has a lot of value. The big problem is that the owner of that pie must believe in the value and even try to understand the value in the magic they have created. Sadly, for most writers, it seems almost impossible that what they have created is worth anything. And thus why so many magic pies never make it off the kitchen shelves and years later end up in the trash, even though they are still fresh and have immense value.    

    ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… CHAPTER ONE

    ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY Copyright, Trademark, and Branding in the Modern World Dean Wesley Smith Chapter One: A Magic Pie   To start off with, I need to make sure this metaphor is totally clear. When you finish a story (a short story or a novella or a novel), you have created a magic pie. The pies are all the same size. The length of the work does not dictate the size of the pie in any way and I will explain that later. When a real baker makes a pie, there might be 20 different ingredients put into the mix in a certain way and baked in a certain way for a certain time. A writer in a story will put in thousands and thousands of ingredients, ordered in a certain way, with multiple levels of plot, character, theme, meaning, and so much more. So the metaphor sort of fails there. And a real pie made by a baker will spoil in a short amount of time, while a magic pie made by a writer will last for seventy years past the writer’s death, and often even more. Metaphor misses there as well. But I’m going to go with this metaphor because the creating of the magic pies and the business aspects of a bakery make this entire thing clear to writers. So How Is A Pie Magic? Each time you create a story of any kind, you create a magic pie. On the outside, the pie might be identified by genre or series or other factors, but that is just surface flavors. What the pie is really made of is copyright. And copyright can be licensed in thousands of ways, and even (heavens forbid) sold. I will repeat this a ton of times, but you never sell copyright. You only license it. And you never allow any magic pie to walk out the door of your bakery. Ever. So this pie that represents that current story you just created is sitting there on the counter in your magic bakery. Say it’s a peach pie that smells wonderful and is warm, even steaming, just waiting for someone to try a slice. So you do a cover for the story, some sales copy, and license the electronic version of the story to Amazon, iBooks, B&N, Kobo, D2D, GooglePlay, and Ingram and other places around the world. For those big seven, you have cut out seven minor slices of the pie for those electronic licenses. Now, here is part of the magic. The pie looks exactly the same. Nothing has been removed. And then a customer at B&N, three customers at Amazon, and two through D2D license your story to read. In other words, they take a piece of the pie. But nothing has changed on the pie. It is still completely intact, but your cash register rang up six sales while you stood there. Now that is magic. And the power of copyright and licensing copyright. A magic pie can be sliced up into thousands of slices. Some will take a little dent out of the pie, most will not. For example, I am licensing a short story to an anthology. The license says that they have exclusive use of the story for one year for the anthology in electronic, paper, and audio. So for one year, three slices of pie vanishes. The pie is still mostly there because all rights not associated with the anthology I retain, such as gaming, movie, streaming, and so much more. But the three slices gone. And then in one year those three slices just magically appears back in the magic pie. And I can license the same rights to a ton of other places. Remember stories and magic pies do not spoil. They remain hot and fresh and smelling wonderful for years and years and years. So you have created a story that is basically a magic pie full of copyright. You can slice that pie up into thousands of pieces and most will not need to be removed from the pie. A thousand readers can come into your store and electronically get a piece of that magic pie to read and the pie will not change. In future chapters, I will talk about more details of when a slice is removed and why, what your store is like, license limits, the value of brands to your magic bakery and why, and the reality of trademark to the magic. And so much more. Right now I am sitting in my office. Over the years I have created almost sixty short stories with the Poker Boy character (sixty magic pies), done numbers of Poker Boy collections, a Poker Boy Kickstarter, and licensed Poker Boy all over the world. Yet not one bit of any magic pie is missing. And I sit here sipping iced tea from a Poker Boy mug. I love the magic of this world. Stay tuned.    

    Advanced Magic Bakery… Introduction

    ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY Copyright, Trademark, and Branding in the Modern World Dean Wesley Smith (Author Note: I am going to write this book here one chapter at a time… At some point it will also be a class on Teachable and the book will be for sale in my store.) INTRODUCTION You are a magician. You are. Trust me. And not just an illusionist. You are a real, honest-to-god magician with real magic. Although often you use the techniques of an illusionist as well. But your magic is very, very real. You create from nothing entire people, entire worlds, entire galaxies. You help people understand the feelings of loss and love and so much more. By using your magic, you can transport a person to another place, another time, and let them be something or someone they could never be in their own world. You help those who can’t walk in their own world stride through magical places, people who don’t have love experience the wonders of falling in love, and you give the young trapped in bad homes a pathway to escape. Your stage is your computer, your audience is the entire world. You are a fiction writer. You create on a daily basis enjoyment, entertainment, and illusion to transport your readers into your worlds. When done well, that is flat magical. But when the writer returns from the worlds, the lands, the people they have created, they have to live in the hard, real world of business to get their words and magic out to readers. Most writers think the magic they have stops when they finish a story. That there is no magic in the business of publishing. And most writers are flat wrong. Sorry. Magic runs through the entire process. But the writer must understand how the magic in the business works to fully get the most from their creations. That is what this book is about. I have been a fiction writer for fifty years. Along the way I was also an editor, a publisher, and the co-owner of two publishing companies. I have three years of law school which helps me really understand the magic of copyright, branding, and trademark. And trust me, it is magic. Back in 2017, I wrote a book called THE MAGIC BAKERY attempting to help writers understand how copyright works. Now, in eight years, indie publishing of fiction has drastically changed and I would love to bring the ideas in THE MAGIC BAKERY forward. I am not going to update or even look at that original book. Or the original workshop that went along with it. I am going to write this fresh here in 2025, talking not only about copyright, but branding and trademark and how they all go together. And to make the idea on all of this clear, I am going to use the metaphor of a bakery that specializes in pies. It will be a small business just like you can find on any street corner. But it will be magic because a writer runs it and is the baker. And the metaphor is that every story the writer creates brings about a magic pie for the writer’s shop. So I hope you step inside the magic bakery, into the fantastic smells of pumpkin and apple and cherry, all warm, all fresh. Because magic bakery pies are always warm and fresh and never spoil. And while you are in the bakery, I will give you a tour behind the scenes and into how the bakery stays alive and makes money. And with luck, when you leave the magic bakery and step out onto the dull, gray concrete of the sidewalk, you will have an understanding of how copyright and branding and trademark work in this modern world of 2025. (Coming soon… Chapter One… A Magic Pie)

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