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Fun and Excitement…
Building a Brand… Right now Steph and I (mostly Steph) are building the Poker Boy brand. In all the years I have been writing Poker Boy stories (since 1987), I have never been able to come up with a look, a brand look, for Poker Boy. At times, his stories had covers that sort of illustrated an event in the story. At one point we went to these really nifty cartoon covers designed by comic writer Lee Allred. Then we gave up on those and I started putting really wonderful fantasy women on the covers. So with a bunch of brainstorming and just standing back and asking basic questions, we…
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Explaining the Class
LICENSING: HOW TO CREATE A BRAND The class is starting tomorrow. (Tuesday) It is a nine week class leading up to the Licensing Expo. It is on Teachable. So let me set a scene for you… You are at (name any place as a setting that you might run into someone with a connection to a license). For now just think major convention or the Licensing Expo, but it can happen anywhere and has to both me and Kris. A person who can license IP who is interested in finding new IP to license comes to learn you own IP. Here is how the conversation goes… Person: “So, what’s your…
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Discussion About Publishing…
So Much To Learn and Do… Indie publishing just eems overwhelming, I know that for a fact. I am going to be doing a lot of my own layouts and publishing on my challenge in this coming year (I will announce what I am doing with the challenge after Christmas as I ramp up.) And I am trying not to panic. Failing at times. So I have really been giving a hard look at all the details now involved with publishing and sales. And slowly realizing I need to figure out a way to organize all that I am learning and have learned to keep the panic down to a…
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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…