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 […]
Business Musings: Endings
For more than a decade, writers have asked me what they can do to sell their existing books. I always tell them to write the next book. Some writers don’t have time for promotion. Others don’t have the constitution for it. But all the ads in the world don’t work unless the writer has a lot of inventory. And when the reader is done with […]
Business Musings: New Tools: Indie Publishing (Year in Review 7)
I feel like I write a version of this post every year, and I always feel out of my depth when doing so. Part of that is because we’re dealing with new tools. Part of it is because—full disclosure—I do the writing, but WMG does the publishing. Because I’m me, and endlessly curious, I find a lot of this stuff, and forward it to them. […]
Business Musings: Stale (IP Frontlist Part 3)
Because of a crush of work and deadlines, I got so laughably behind on my “current” reading that I am only now digging through it. Compounding the problem is that when I moved all of my back issues of “current” paper magazines (yes, I’m the last person on the planet who reads paper magazine; that bother you?), they got horribly, terribly, awfully out of order. […]
Business Musings: Discoverability in the 21st Century (Part Three )
When this pandemic got underway, I filled my Twitter feed with information from actual doctors. I now follow many of them, who explain some things that I need to understand, send me down the rabbit hole of links on therapeutics and vaccines and other lovely science things, and generally keep me sane. The morning I sat down to write this post, one of the doctors, […]
Business Musings: Expand Your Target Audience 3: Aggressive Growth (Branding/Discoverability)
Here’s the surprising post. Many of you who read this blog regularly probably think that I’m opposed to major marketing campaigns. I’m not. I’m opposed to them when they’re done incorrectly. What’s incorrectly? Pretty much everything you see from traditional publishing to most indies. You have to look outside of publishing to see how to do a smart, aggressive growth campaign designed to grow […]
Business Musings: Expand Your Target Audience 2: Slow Growth (Branding/Discoverability)
Writers always believe that they can become a bestseller if they only goose their sales properly. I actually had a brand-new writer scream at me once about this very thing. Back in the early days of Amazon’s Kindle, she had “sold” 50,000 copies of her only novel by giving it away for free. “I’ll take my 50,000 sales over your sales any day,” she […]
Business Musings: How To Expand Your Target Audience 1: Choices (Branding/Discoverability)
Most writers—most businesses, in fact—believe that they must actively grow their audience. And that belief is a mistake.
In your writing business, as in all business, there is no one-size-fits-all model. That goes to everything from building a business to building a brand. Even if you’re in the same field as someone else, your business is different. What you do with that business is based entirely on your goals for that business.
Um, what? you might ask.
Yep, expanding an audience fits into your business goals, not just into branding. Change happens all the time in business, but growth happens only when a business actively pursues that growth….
Business Musings: How To Build A Brand 2: The Intermediate Stages (Branding/Discoverability)
So when I write these posts, I feel a deep frustration. Because my brand, in almost all of its forms, is extremely messy.
These posts, as I said from the beginning, are for me, writing to myself about all the various things I can do to improve my branding or, in most instances, take control of it.
If I were in the lucky position that most of you indies are in, I could define my Rusch brand from the beginning as something that spans genres, that uses a multitude of styles, that promises quality of a certain type, but never compromises on some things….
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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