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Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine… Easy Promotion That Makes Money So you have over 20 pies in your magic bakery and also some short story pies. (If you have not read the previous eight chapters plus the introduction, don’t blame me if you are confused and lost.) Most importantly, you have stopped all your anti-promotion of your bakery. (I bet any amount of pie crust you have not.) So going to spend this chapter on easy, money-making promotion that costs very little to nothing. In a future chapter I will bring up ads and such, but for now if you think you have to spend much money at all on promotion at the…
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Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight… The Basics of Anti-Promotion Promotion for writers and indie publishers can go in so many ways in this modern world, but going to start here with the basics of anti-promotion, or how to at least give your book and your store a fighting chance. So let me give you some guidelines. You might not like these, but alas, they have facts and studies behind them. The magic number of major books you need in your magic bakery is around 20, where discoverability starts to kick in. (Lots and lots of advertising studies back this up.) Novels, stand-alone novellas, collections, and omnibus. Discoverability is the number of ways a…
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Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven… The Magic of the Business Oh, oh, to show another aspect of the magic of the bakery, I have to talk a few numbers and some pretty easy business terms. So hang on. I promise I will be gentle. To start a regular store on the corner of any town, it costs a lot before the first customer even walks through the door. Rent, set up of electric, fixtures, money and inventory systems, licenses, often remodeling and then you have to buy your inventory to stock your store. And since it has been 8 years since I started a brick and mortar store, I know I am forgetting…
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Advanced Magic Bakery… Chapter Six
Chapter Six… Who Are Your Customers? Right now this Advanced Magic Bakery metaphor is getting a little extended. You think? So to understand exactly what this is about, make sure you have read the Introduction and first five chapters. So you have been baking for a number of years and getting better at making your pies (stories) taste better and be more desirable to readers. And you have a bunch of short fiction pies and over twenty major book pies in your magic bakery. (In your magic bakery means you have published your stories wide around the world. That is all.) The pies are all on your wonderful magic bakery…
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ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Five
CHAPTER FIVE… What You Sell… What do you sell out of your magic bakery? Simple answer… NOTHING. You never sell anything. Period. When someone walks in and wants all rights to use one of your magic pies, you simply say no. You sell all rights, you lose your pie. It walks out the door with the buyer and you can do nothing with it. And as I said last chapter, you wave your moral rights and basically the same thing happens. You lose control of your pie. You still have your copyright, but no control over what is done with it. You make all your money in your magic bakery…
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ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Four
Chapter Four… Starting a Business Granted, there are a lot of writers, or for this metaphor, bakers, who just make pies and stack them up in their kitchen. Every writer is different. No judgements by me. But for me, and most other writers, we like to try to get our work out into the public to enjoy. And that is where you take off your baking apron and put on a business suit and step into the business part of your bakery. Granted, not as much fun as baking for most of us, but if you are going to get people to enjoy your work, to come into your bakery,…
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ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Two
Chapter Two… Market or No Market… You write this short story. All done. In your magic bakery you have created a magic pie. That pie has a lot of value that I will talk about in later chapters. But instead of taking the pie out of the kitchen and putting it in your store to sell to customers around the world, you just put it on a shelf in the kitchen, for some reason deciding not to market your story. Pie will not spoil. It can just sit there for years and years. But it is not making you any money, not paying you back for the time and energy…
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ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… CHAPTER ONE
ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY Copyright, Trademark, and Branding in the Modern World Dean Wesley Smith Chapter One: A Magic Pie To start off with, I need to make sure this metaphor is totally clear. When you finish a story (a short story or a novella or a novel), you have created a magic pie. The pies are all the same size. The length of the work does not dictate the size of the pie in any way and I will explain that later. When a real baker makes a pie, there might be 20 different ingredients put into the mix in a certain way and baked in a certain way…
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Advanced Magic Bakery… Introduction
ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY Copyright, Trademark, and Branding in the Modern World Dean Wesley Smith (Author Note: I am going to write this book here one chapter at a time… At some point it will also be a class on Teachable and the book will be for sale in my store.) INTRODUCTION You are a magician. You are. Trust me. And not just an illusionist. You are a real, honest-to-god magician with real magic. Although often you use the techniques of an illusionist as well. But your magic is very, very real. You create from nothing entire people, entire worlds, entire galaxies. You help people understand the feelings of loss and…