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.
Paige Racette envisioned the perfect man over and over in her romance novels.
But when Josiah Wells starts using those novels as a blueprint for the way to romance her, she finds the attention creepy, not attractive.
When Wells escalates, adding violence to his role-playing, Paige realizes she must escape the perfect man. But she might find help from someone unexpected—someone a little more flawed, a little less perfect.
“The Perfect Man,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was chosen as one of the best short stories of 2003 and is free on this website for one week only.
In talking to hybrid writers, I did miss something. It only concerned a handful of writers, and most of them only wrote one series. These writers would email me after they had indie-released a new book or two in their existing series, and complain that the series wasn’t growing.
When these writers were traditionally published, the series grew well. Each book sold better than the last. Now, even taking into account the year or so of sales, the books sold at the same number of copies or less than the previous volumes had.
I couldn’t figure it out…
This week, let’s deal with the clause that agents insert into your book contract with your publisher. (This is the book contract that your agent negotiated for you. Yes, I’m telling you the agent inserted something into that contract that benefits the agent, but doesn’t benefit you.) Agents have been abusing this clause for years now. Agents, not publishers, even though this clause is in a publishing contract between the writer and her publisher.
Many long-time traditionally published writers get stuck in the wrong number. We look at copies sold rather than income earned.
Indie-only writers know better. They understand modern numbers for what they are—great for writers.
I was going to write a blog on why you never hire people for a percentage of your sales for the life of the project. I was going to look at some of the contract terms that writers should be wary of, from companies like Booktrope, companies that still exist.
And then I choked on a big gigantic paragraph in the Booktrope sample author agreement. This big gigantic paragraph is the one thing that allowed Booktrope to raise millions of dollars. Had Booktrope succeeded, that success would have come at the expense of its authors.
The scary thing is that other companies are behaving the exact same way.
This poor-poor-pitiful-me attitude has become the norm in the publishing industry right now, and I’m really tired of it.
I want to support what the Authors Guild is doing here. I really do. I believe this “conversation” needs to commence. Writers—particularly writers of the Take Care of Me school—need to understand that their publishers and their agents are not their friends. Those two entities are in business for themselves and will devise contract terms to benefit them. But…
As promised, I’m doing a lot of catch-up on the state of the publishing industry at the beginning of 2016. The reading is illuminating. Many things seem similar to the situation at this point last year, and many others seem so wildly different that it’s hard to believe only a year has gone by. I haven’t had time to read all I want to read, […]
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 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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