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: 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 […]
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, […]
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: The Licensing Business (Rethinking The Writing Business Part Two)
When a writer dies, usually one of three things happens to her writing estate: It goes dormant. This is the most common thing. Most heirs have no idea how to deal with the mass of writing and published materials left over. The heirs might noodle with it for a while, but after that, they’ll accidentally or maybe even purposely forget about it. It gets subsumed […]
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: 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 […]
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.
Ten Little Fen: A Spade/Paladin Novel
Spade and Paladin find themselves snowed in at a remote sf convention, with a killer on the loose! Get your copy here.
The Chase
The Chase, the latest Diving novel, answers a lot of your questions about the series. It also might cause you to ask a few more. Click here to find out more.
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Rethinking The Writing Business
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A New Edition of A Dangerous Road
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