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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…
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Branding
Kris and I Talk All the Time About Branding… Most writers only limit that word “branding” to how their covers look similar in series. How their name in a certain font looks from book to book, and so on. That is all important, but honestly just a tiny touch at branding. When you are taking something out for license, like to a gaming company, or toy company, or anything like that, you detail out your branding on your project. Fonts, type of art, colors and a ton of details are all important to how a product overall looks when transferred from text to media of some sort. Clothing and styles…
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More Cover Information
Someone Asked… How long does it take me to do these covers? On the short story paperbacks, I use the same art I used when I first did the story, but the template is brand new and the art is sometimes interesting trying to make it fit. All the novels that represent the novel in Smith’s Monthly have been redone over the years, so I am using that new art for them. But I am going ahead at decent speed, so I decided to time how long it took me to do these new covers. It took exactly 15 minutes to put in the new art on Smith’s Monthly #2,…
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One Time Science Fiction Cover Branding Workshop
BRANDING SCIENCE FICTION COVERS WORKSHOP… We did a form of this workshop back in May for four weeks that filled almost instantly and another one on Fantasy Covers in July that also filled. So Allyson had fun on both workshops and I didn’t get killed by the writers, so I talked Allyson into doing the workshop for branding a science fiction covers and series. Any type of science fiction. So here are the details… Allyson Longueira, the publisher of WMG Publishing has offered to design a cover and help brand a science fiction series for a limited number of writers. For those of you who don’t know her, Allyson is an award-winning…
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Writing A Novel From a Cover
Yes, An Old Pulp Trick… But I did it a number of times in the hundred-plus books I wrote in my days of traditional publishing. And I am writing a book now from a cover. And having a blast with it. What do I mean by writing a novel from a cover? Well, exactly that. The cover exists and I look at the cover and write the novel to fit the cover. The history of this tends to flow through many writers and far over a hundred years. In fact, at one point or another, most pulp writers were assigned to do this for a short story or a novel…