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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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….

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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 […]

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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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