Business Musings: Advertising: The Year in Review Part 6

2022: The year that advertising stopped working. That’s not true, but it feels true. Conversations at the 20Booksto50K conference were all about the broken ad revenues, and the inability to goose algorithms. BookBub ads don’t seem as effective. Newsletter campaigns aren’t working. And what happened to all the book bloggers? Nothing seemed to get a book traction…except…BookTok, maybe. Social media sites at the beginning of […]

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Business Musings: Advertising, Marketing, and Connection

Every time I turn around, someone is talking about advertising. It seems like every news story mentions it. Many of the magazines I subscribe to mention it. When I go on social media someone is discussing it. Right now, every business article that revolves around Hollywood or movies or TV mentions advertising, because it’s changing. Streaming services that once had one tier, paid for with […]

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Business Musings: How We Use Kickstarter

In last week’s post, I talked about the sense of urgency in publishing. I suggest you read the post, because it’s important for all of us. We need to understand how, in the world of entertainment, the producers of content have lost control of the sense of urgency, and how that sense of urgency has moved to the consumers of content. Read the post, please, […]

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Business Musings: Book Birth Days

Recently, a couple of my writer friends announced their “book birthdays”—the day their book got published and/or became widely available.  I love that phrase “book birthday,” because it is so appropriate to the way we should be thinking about a book release in the modern publishing era. In fact, we should call it a book “birth day,” because that’s the day the book starts its […]

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Business Musings: Define Your Target Audience: The Intermediate Stages (Branding/Discoverability)

In the past eight or so years since indie publishing took off, writers found that the commodity they lack the most is time. Time to write. Time to research. Time to read. Time to market. We get inundated daily with shoulds and have-tos. Someone is always so much more successful than we are, and they’re successful at something we’ve wanted for a long time. Then […]

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The Business Rusch: How To Measure Success (Discoverability Part The Last)

Even though I posted a business blog on Tuesday, I couldn’t let a Thursday go by without a blog post. Especially since this week marks the fifth anniversary of the Business Rusch (and the business blog that came before it, The Freelancer’s Survival Guide). Yep, I’ve hit every single Thursday for five years, without a miss. Two-hundred-and-sixty posts. That, my friends, is success. But, weirdly […]

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The Business Rusch: The Fierce Urgency of Now (Discoverability Part 3)

 We’re all familiar with the “fierce urgency of now.” We have experienced it all of our lives. It’s that feeling that we have to have something or have to do something right now or we’ll lose the chance. When it comes to buying something, “the fierce urgency of now” used to drive our purchasing life. Back in the days of brick-and-mortar stores only, back in […]

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The Business Rusch: Changing Times (Overview)

The Business Rusch: Changing Times (Overview) Kristine Kathryn Rusch As I have mentioned many times in the past, my industry—publishing—is changing.  I have written a few posts about it, but generally, I have avoided the topic.  My reason is simple: this business blog, and the Freelancer’s Guide before it, are geared toward the general business reader, not just toward everyone in the publishing industry. However, […]

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Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Advertising Part One

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle. The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Advertising Part One Kristine Kathryn Rusch I have had this topic in my topics list for nearly a year, but it became relevant just last week when I got my third request to put an ad on my website.  For once, I didn’t dismiss the request with a polite note.  I actually considered it and as […]

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