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Fiction Branding… Part 11
Short Fiction and Discoverability… I said clearly in the last part of this series that short stories, standing alone, do not lead to major discoverability in the calculation of 20 to 50. Wow, I really wish they did. However I left the impression that short fiction does not help in general discoverability and that is so, so far wrong as to be funny. Short fiction is a major source of discoverability, just not in the 20 books to 50 thousand thinking. Let me start off with one major thing here that I will talk about later. NEVER PAY FOR PROMOTION OF ANY KIND. You could make that a hard and…
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EXPECTATIONS…
A Topic So Large I Have Considered Writing a Book About It… Expectations are both powerful and deadly to writers. But to early stage writers, mostly deadly. A positive expectation can come from experience. For example, back in traditional publishing days, when I was hired by a publisher to write a book, they had an expectation that I could do the job and I had an expectation I could do the job. I like testing myself with writing challenges. I always go into them with an expectation that I can hit the challenge and that gives me fuel to keep going on tough days. When I send a story to…
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Fiction Branding… Part 10
20 to 50 Thinking… And how branding fits with that. 20 to 50 is shorthand for having 20 major books published will make you 50 thousand a year. And if you do a bunch of things right, it often works. But you have to do a bunch of things right. Why 20 Major Books? Ways of discoverability, basically. If you have one book, that book can be found through all the places you have it for sale and that’s it. So say you are wide and have it out in 150 different stores around the world, plus paper through Ingrams. (I am estimating that number of stores by counting up…
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Attend the 2024 Licensing Expo with Kris and Dean
Kris and I Will Have a Blast… And share a ton of information. Here is the sales stuff on the class. (It is already in the Everything Subscription.) Virtually Attend the 2024 Licensing Expo With Kris and Dean In 2024, the Licensing Expo is being held May 21-23 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center here in Vegas. This is a virtual way to go along with me and Kris. Low Tech, but virtual. We will post some videos here about our process of signing up, getting ready, making appointments, and so on. We will be talking about our thinking about this year’s expo, the planning for next year’s expo and maybe…
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Reminded of Something…
Backlist Memories… Not a part of my branding series, just me reminding myself of something… Here is the story. Fact, at the moment Kris and I have about 1,400 titles of one sort or another. We have spent over 12 years of hard work and time and a ton of money to get those all into one form of print or another. Some make decent money, some make a little money, some don’t sell at all. Normal and expected. I have to be honest, I can’t remember a bunch of the novels I have written and published. Very few of the 106 published novels in traditional publishing, more of the…
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Write Stuff Storybundle Ends Today!!!
An Amazing Deal! Nine different writing books plus a $150 craft workshop, all for $25 bucks. And it is about to end! Read yesterday’s blog for Kris’s essay about all the books. I even have one in this bundle that some of you might recognize as from blogs I did here about editing and getting editors to read your work. And Doug Smith’s new edition of his book is worth the entire price of the bundle. Not counting the $150 pop-up writing class on Fear of Success. You can get it all for just $25 at least through the rest of today. Then all gone. The Write Stuff Storybundle
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Write Stuff Storybundle Ends in 2 Days!!
This is a Stunning Value! Nine different writing books plus a $150 craft workshop, all for $25 bucks. And it is about to end! Here is Kris’s blog about it describing the books and everything. THE 2024 WRITE STUFF BUNDLE The 2024 Write Stuff Bundle – Curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Every year, I put together a bundle on writing. Every year, I find new concerns and ways to help writers market their work. I also find inspiration books on craft and keeping the faith as writers struggle with the blank page. This year’s bundle has four distinct elements. First, the all-important craft. J. Daniel Sawyer teaches you how to…
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Fiction Branding… Part 9
Lack of Knowledge… For some reason, fiction writers have an aversion to learning anything about the one thing that makes them money. That is copyright and licensing that copyright. For upwards of thirty years now, I have been trying to figure out why this aversion happens. Even though learning copyright is far, far more important than say learning how to pace a story or indie publish a story, writers just ignore it or if they are even aware, they simply say they will get to it someday. Now, I tend to be kinder to writers who are just unaware of how copyright works vs those who purposely do not want…
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50 Years…
Sold My First Two Short Stories 50 Years Ago… I just finished recording and putting up on Teachable a nine-week class called A FIFTY YEAR PERSPECTIVE OF LEARNING. Five videos each week for nine weeks talking about what I learned from my mentors over the years, and from others along the way, that got me to this place fifty years down the road. Tonight, as I was recording a topic on both the weekly CREATIVE SURVIVAL and MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY classes, I got thinking about the idea of doing a class that would talk about what I learned in fifty years from crashes, mistakes, and setbacks and what I learned from…
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Fiction Branding… Part 8
Here We Go…. I have come at fiction branding from a number of different directions in the first seven posts, not counting the “small author name” post. But as I have said, that is only the basics and most writers can’t even do all the basics of marketing well not from lack of skill but just from lack of being willing to study a little. So to make this as simple as I can, let me break up fiction branding into three major areas. 1… Marketing (discoverability… what I have been talking about so far) 2… Value (copyright and trademark) 3… Licensing (products and derivative sales) There is a fourth…