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 Identity (Branding/Discoverability)
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: How To Build A Brand: The Early Stages (Branding/Discoverability)
When I do marketing posts, they tend to freak my loyal readers out. Sometimes, the posts freak me out too. What writers want from marketing blogs are simple suggestions that boil down to this: Do x, y, and z, and you’ll get these fantastic results! Only it doesn’t work that way. Or rather, it doesn’t work that way for everyone. I’m writing this on Sunday, […]
Business Musings: Types of Brands (Branding/Discoverability)
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 branding. Lots of great information in each and every one […]
Business Musings: The Ideas of A Cold-Fogged Brain (Discoverability Again)
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, great stories, and dedicated work later, we finished…and I got […]
Business Musings: Found It!
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 spread out and didn’t have the same assumptions or were […]
Business Musings: Things I Learned (Or Relearned) in 2014
In the past two weeks, I wrote two year-in-review posts, “What Traditional Publishing Learned in 2014,” and “Things Indie Writers Learned in 2014.” Those two posts came after I started this one. I’ve been writing bits of this one off and on since October, as the year has become clearer in my brain. Usually, I do a year-end analysis just for me, and there’s a […]
Business Musings: What Is Discoverability? (Discoverability Part Oooops I Left This Out)
WMG Publishing has Discoverability, the book based on the posts I was writing from November to April, on the schedule for the fall of 2014, which meant I had to get off my butt and assemble those posts into something coherent. I write the pieces, and then I build the bridges to hold them together. This post is one of those bridges…
The Business Rusch: When The Old Ways Work (Discoverability Part 13)
Yeah, yeah, I was pretty disparaging of the old ways to promote books back fifteen weeks ago, when I was just digging into this series. And there’s a good reason to disparage the way Things Have Always Been Done. But here’s the catch: The old ways work. Occasionally. Sometimes. When done right. They usually aren’t done right. In fact, most places—including traditional publishers—use all the […]
Ten Little Fen: A Spade/Paladin Novel
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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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