Business Musings: Brand Loyalty 2 (Branding/Discoverability)

Marketing firms, economics departments in universities, and many high-end retailers spend a lot of time thinking about how to build brand loyalty. As I researched this piece, I found articles that promised 11 ways to build brand loyalty! 15 ways to build brand loyalty! 5 ways to build brand loyalty! And so on. Most of these ways are completely different from each other, and have little to do with each. Most of the people writing about brand loyalty online are doing so to get you to hire them to build your brand. Ignore all that. I’m going to.

Instead, I’m going to focus on a few ways that show up in all of the articles, and then I’ll tailor those ways to writers.

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Business Musings: Brand Loyalty 1 (Branding/Discoverability)

Brand loyalty—name loyalty—is something that we writers desire, but it’s not something that we can simply will into being. And it certainly doesn’t come about by bribing your reader.

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Business Musings: Why I Love Taylor Swift

I love Taylor Swift, and I’m not afraid to admit it. It’s not just because her song “Shake It Off” accompanied me on my daily run during those tough days earlier this year when my world got infiltrated by haters. (Swift wrote the song with Max Martin and Shellback as a response to the criticism she constantly receives.) “Shake It Off” reminded me that I’m better off writing than I am worrying about people who aren’t worth my time.

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Business Musings: What Traditional Publishing Learned in 2014

I want to say nothing, but that’s not true. Traditional publishers learned a lot these past few years, and in 2014, started putting their knowledge into action. Over the next few weeks, I’ll do the traditional media thing, and provide you with my own sort of year in review. All of it will focus on publishing and writing, both indie and traditional, and all of […]

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The Business Rusch: Watching The Numbers

 I should never read the comments on other people’s writing information blogs. The comments discourage me, generally for one of two reasons. If the blog is about traditional publishing, and the authors are traditionally published only with no desire to change, I get discouraged at the amount of misinformation. If the blog is about indie publishing, I get discouraged because successful indie publishing writers think […]

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The Business Rusch: Content is King

This week came the news that Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program will offer its content providers a 70% royalty on all sales made in India—provided the content providers go with Kindle Select only. For those of you who don’t know, Kindle Select requires exclusivity from anyone who joins it. You can’t market your work on the iBookstore, for example, or on Kobo if you’re part […]

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The Business Rusch: The Changing Definition of Publishing

The Business Rusch: The Changing Definition of Publishing Kristine Kathryn Rusch   This week, the announcements for the Pulitzer Prize shocked the publishing world because, for some reason, the Pulitzer board declined to chose a winner from the three fiction nominees. Lost in the controversy (besides the hurt feelings of the fiction nominees and the fact that no award was given in the editorial writing category […]

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The Business Rusch: Writers And The DOJ Lawsuit

The Business Rusch: Writers and The DOJ Lawsuit Kristine Kathryn Rusch This week, the Department of Justice filed its lawsuit against Apple and five publishers. Three publishers settled immediately with two, as of this writing, going forward—Penguin and MacMillan. I am not a lawyer, so I cannot comment on the filing.  A few have, including Charles Petit on his website. He points out various things […]

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The Business Rusch: Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain

The Business Rusch: Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Curtain Kristine Kathryn Rusch   The curtains are rustling. In some gilded office, a little dog with a lot of attitude has taken a green curtain in his teeth and has pulled it aside, revealing a rather plain and disappointing figure pulling a bunch of lever and shouting into a microphone. Welcome to the […]

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The Business Rusch: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The Business Rusch: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Kristine Kathryn Rusch The quote in my title comes from Mark Twain’s autobiography.  Twain said: “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” The problem with […]

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