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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…
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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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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…
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Fiction Branding… Part 7
What Exactly Is A Brand??? Well, the general definition of a brand is pretty easy. It is a product or service that is set out and apart in such a way as to be clear to the public that it can be distinguished from other similar products or services. It is also a mark you burn into a horse or cow to show ownership, but we won’t go there, even though the concept is the same. As I said before, most indie writers (not all) are pretty good and making a series of books identifiable as a unit. So a reader will know from the look (the branding) that the…
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Fiction Branding… Part 4
Stories Don’t Spoil… But wow can authors kill them. I have to deal with this topic before I can move on into branding and how to do it and the reasons for it. Back in the day (say the 1960s through the 1990s), writers would sell a short story and then toss it into a file cabinet. A lucky few stories got reprinted, but the attitude was that once a story was published (no matter the market), it had spoiled and was no longer of value. Writers did this with books as well. I can’t begin to tell you about the hundreds of boxes of manuscripts, proofs, and spoiled matter…
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Fiction Branding… Part 3
Too Much of a Good Thing… Lots of varied kinds of branding that I’m going to talk about in this series. But for the moment I want to stay on the type of branding most indie writers do very well, and that is making their books look like they are in the same series. This kind of branding is a basic part of marketing and selling. So for the four books of Bryant Street ( the Kickstarter is over and thank you all), I thought it would be a cool idea for me to take the street sign that we had used to brand the Bryant Street books and recover…
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Fiction Branding… Part 2
When To Think About Branding… Being a fiction writer is a fine balance in your head of being completely creative and telling the best story you can while at the same time holding in check all the critical voice stuff that says everything you are writing is crap. Long-term professional fiction writers have this controlled completely in one way or another. Early stage and middle stage fiction writers fight the battle with every story or novel. The key early on is to clear out or hold back the critical voice while trying to stay out of the way of the creative voice. Most writers fail and thus have short careers.…
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Launching A Brand In a Few Hours
I’m Really Excited About This Brand Launching! Bryant Street Kickstarter. Launching Noon Tuesday! Bryant Street… where The Twilight Zone lives. A really twisted, but normal-looking subdivision street. 40 stories in four books. The seasons of Bryant Street, basically. Or four seasons of a Bryant Street television series, 10 episodes per season. I have been writing and selling and publishing Bryant Street stories since the mid-1980s. It has always been a brand I paid attention to, but really never pushed it. I did have my writer corporation for about 20 years named Bryant Street. And the trademark of Bryant Street is very solid for a number of reasons. So for years…