discoverability – Page 2 – Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Business Musings: Brand Loyalty 2 (Branding/Discoverability)

June 28, 2017June 21, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch5 Comments

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.

Business Musings: Brand Loyalty 1 (Branding/Discoverability)

June 21, 2017June 21, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch22 Comments

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.

Business Musings: Brand Image (Branding/Discoverability)

June 7, 2017June 7, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch12 Comments

The publishing industry has been shifting since 2009. Indie publishing has become a force since 2011 or so. At first, we writers made our work available, but the things that worked six years ago don’t work now. The problem is that the marketing gurus for writers are just other writers with an okay idea. As […]

Business Musings: Brand Identity (Branding/Discoverability)

May 31, 2017May 30, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch9 Comments

Brand Identity is how you want customers to perceive your brand. Right now, remember, we’re dealing with building the brand. So you get to think about how you want that brand to be perceived. You need to imagine your target as you develop your brand identity. What do you want your target audience to think about your brand?

Let’s start wide with the overall steps to building a brand identity, and then I’ll refine for writers.

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

May 24, 2017May 22, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch33 Comments

I love this blog. I love it because you readers make it so much better with your questions and comments. Last week, I wrote about the early stages of building a brand. In that post is something that seems pretty straightforward to me—define your target audience. Some of you remarked in the email and […]

Business Musings: Types of Brands (Branding/Discoverability)

May 10, 2017May 9, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch20 Comments

I’ve been talking to myself lately. Actually, I’ve been talking back to podcasts, vlogs, and emails. Ever since I said I would be doing a series on branding, I’ve gotten links to great branding tips. (Please, keep them coming.) Every single link I received that dealt with branding from a writer’s perspective talked about cover […]

Business Musings: The Ideas of A Cold-Fogged Brain (Discoverability Again)

May 3, 2017May 2, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch19 Comments

I feel like I’ve been on a particularly grueling business trip, and am slowly recalibrating back into my office. I worked very hard in the front part of April as I prepared for the science fiction writing workshop I ran here on the Oregon Coast. Then the workshop happened. Lots of great discussions, great questions, […]

Business Musings: Found It!

April 19, 2017April 13, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch18 Comments

I’ve been poking, poking, poking trying to find the new topic that will send newer writers, particularly indie writers, into high dudgeon. Topics like that expose the current myths and traps that writers can find themselves in. I was beginning to think we had hit that point in the indie cycle where the writers had […]

Business Musings: Newsletters and Discoverability

April 5, 2017April 3, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch22 Comments

I promised in the comments of last week’s blog that I’d write about newsletters. Except for mentions and brief discussion in blogs on other topics, I really haven’t discussed newsletters much. In my book Discoverability, I list newsletters as one of the minimal things a writer should do (in addition to a static website and […]

Business Musings: The Data Divide

January 25, 2017January 26, 2017Kristine Kathryn Rusch13 Comments

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at the Digital Book World Conference last week as Data Guy made his presentation. He brings data to a world still stuck in the 19th century. As I read reports of the reaction to his presentation, I saw continual insistence that publishing is about […]