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Length of a Brand/Trademark
I Was Surprised… I was working on an issue of Pulphouse Fiction Magazine tonight and mentioned in the introduction that Kris and I started Pulphouse in 1987 and it has been going along one way or another, making money as a brand and a business name for 37 years this coming year. And we have plans to expand the brand even more very shortly. I find it interesting that the older I get, the bigger the numbers get with different things I have been doing. My best friend and I have been close for sixty years this year. I sold my first short stories 50 years ago. And the Pulphouse…
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The Fun of Building a Brand…
And A Trademark In the Process… So many writers think of doing a Kickstarter campaign for a new book or a series of old books as a way to make some small money. It is that if done right, and if you have a few followers of your work. Doing a Kickstarter campaign is also great promotion for your new book. Here are the steps for that… Have your book finished. Build Campaign and launch it. (Study lots of other campaigns first.) Put book on pre-order at the same time as you launch the campaign. Get book out to backers when campaign is over and while doing that put it…
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Bite-Sized Branding and Trademark
EVERY MONDAY MORNING FOR 2025 Last few years we have done Motivational Mondays (twice), Creative Survival, and Bite-Sized Copyright with the structure of four videos every Monday morning for the entire year. So for 2025, we are going ahead and really doing a challenge with BITE-SIZED BRANDING AND TRADEMARK. Four videos every Monday morning for the entire year to make branding and trademark for writers easy and painless to learn. Of all the classes we teach, this might make you the most money in both the short run and long term. This will not be legal advice on trademark in any way, but will be advice from one writer to…
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A Branding Summary,,,
Figuring Out What I Missed… When you write a series of nonfiction posts on something, with no outline or path you are intending to go, unlike fiction, it can get really jumbled. And then do the posts over almost ten months of crazy busy stuff, it gets stupidly disorganized. Yeah, I did that. So now my attempt to start figuring out what I have missed in these branding posts turns out to be tougher than I thought it might be. I started doing branding posts back in February with a post titled: Fiction Branding Part 1… https://deanwesleysmith.com/fiction-branding-part-1/ About different types of branding using the Bryant Street books as an example.…
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Oh, Yes We Did…
Kris and I Killed Many a Good Brand… I got two different emails suggesting that it was hard to believe that business-focused writers like us could kill brands. “Must have been pretty minor brands.” Well, we can and we did. And like many writers, we only saw the real value in hindsight. For example, in 1987 I was offered a small press by the name of Axolotl. It was in financial problems and had promised a book and taken money on the book from readers, so we bought the press and got out the book and then we promptly changed the focus of the press to original science fiction novellas,…
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Kill a Brand…
Indie Publishers Kill Brands All the Time… Indie publishers will spend all the time and money to build up a brand, then let it just coast until dead. Why? Numbers and numbers of reasons… Here are just a few. — Indie publishers have zero idea what they are creating when they publish books and stories. — Indie publishers seldom even understand copyright, let alone brands and trademarks. — Indie publishers just don’t care unless it helps them make a few extra sales on some Amazon measure. — Indie publishers seldom understand licensing or what a brand might get the publisher in yearly financial return. Thus indie publishers don’t often know…
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Branding… Part 16…
I’ve Lost Track of The Numbers… A Branding Post… I got a question a few days back that was basically “Why are you so down on trademark?” Answer… “I am not.” But I am down on the seemingly purposeful desire to not learn on the part of fiction writers about copyright and trademark. Now that I am down on. And I don’t think a month goes by when some writer thinking they want to control something they dug out of the public domain (where all writing comes from) by finding an attorney hungry for money willing to slap a trademark on the thing. Stupid meet greed. Or worse yet, the…
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Fiction Branding… Part 16
More On Branding To… Four branding posts in a row. I am sort of focused on it at the moment, more than ever. Great stuff happening coming out of the Licensing Expo last month, so that might be the reason. (grin) Two major areas of branding I did not talk about in the last few posts are “branding to setting” and “branding to character. Both are major items in helping both branding to readers and branding to other businesses. In fact, character can often be a major part of branding deal from business to business. But at the same time, setting and world in other business deals. For example, there…
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Branding… Part 15
What Do You Brand To?… I got that question a few days back and it took me a while to really think about it. My first reaction was to say you brand to genre or sub-genre. Then I realized that was just one focus of a brand to get readers, so was the answer that you brand to attract readers? Well, yes, sort of, at times, sure, nope, maybe… Turns out the question was a great question. And there is just not one answer to the question, other than… “It depends.” So let me run through just a few of the really, really basic answers. For all indie writers, we…
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Fiction Branding… Part 13
Branding Is Fun!! No clue if any of these branding posts go into any kind of order. I will figure that out down the road if I decide to do something with them. At the moment I am just learning and thinking. I realized a while back that branding a series was fun in a bunch of ways. Ways that hit me where I write and live, actually. I realized this when I found myself doing a “chart” of a brand on a series. (More like a rough spreadsheet.) Not anything for public consumption or a sales tool to a licensee. Just sort of me, for fun, keeping track of…