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Real Basic Trademark Quiz…
Just Fooling Around This Friday Night… Since we just launched the Bite-Sized Branding and Trademark class yesterday and have an early bird discount on it for the weekend, (See previous post) I thought I would ask a few basic trademark questions. These are very basic… Do you have to register a trademark to own and control it? What makes something a strong mark? What is the Lanham Act? Basic Differences between Copyright and Trademark Registration? Did you get the answers right off the top of your head? Why would writers worry about trademark and branding? Well, simply put, to make a lot more money. Sure you license your work to…
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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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Fiction Branding… Part 9
Lack of Knowledge… For some reason, fiction writers have an aversion to learning anything about the one thing that makes them money. That is copyright and licensing that copyright. For upwards of thirty years now, I have been trying to figure out why this aversion happens. Even though learning copyright is far, far more important than say learning how to pace a story or indie publish a story, writers just ignore it or if they are even aware, they simply say they will get to it someday. Now, I tend to be kinder to writers who are just unaware of how copyright works vs those who purposely do not want…
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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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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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Trademarks…
Something to Learn… At the Licensing Expo, you often hear about trademarks. And just about every writer I know has no real understanding about trademarks. Sadly, fiction writers know little to nothing about copyright, let alone a trademark. Trademark is something that you have been making money on. It is a business tool to protect something you have been making money on, such as a business name. So here are some really, really basic things a writer needs to understand without me writing a book trying to explain the details. (The TRADEMARK book by Fishman from LOLO Press will give you a basic, bare-bones start, which is all you need…
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The Trademark Book
For Fiction Writers… Remember, I started that book here, did some chapters, promised I would keep going. I even have another chapter or two written. And that is where it will end. So why did I stop? Two pretty basic reasons. First reason is that fiction writers just don’t need it much at all. Fiction writers can’t seem to find the time or energy to learn copyright, what they do need to learn. And copyright is “See Dick Run” simple compared to trademark. So the lack of need and my discouragement that fiction writers don’t even bother with the basics of IP by learning copyright. No point at all putting…
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Trademark for Fiction Writers… Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE… (Please read the introduction and first and second chapter to this book before reading this. You can find them at… Introduction and First Chapter and Second Chapter.) And you need to buy the book Trademark: Legal Care for Your Business and Product Name by Stephen Fishman. For a quick moment here in this third chapter, I want to relay ways to think about trademarks, and the level of value a mark has in use. (In Chapter Nine of Fishman’s Trademark book he goes into more depth on these in similar, but slightly different ways. Worth the read.) Basically there are five ways to look at trademarks and evaluate their…
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Trademark for Fiction Writers… Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO… (Please read the introduction and first chapter to this book before reading this. You can find that at… Introduction and First Chapter.) If, after the introduction and first chapter, you are starting to question why you would ever need to do a trademark for anything in your fiction, let me simply say…”Good.” As I learned more and more about trademark, I started to understand that this area of the law is very similar to all the myths pushed by traditional book publishers. In other words, most of it is just flat wrong for fiction writers. But there are places and times it is right, and understanding that is…
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Trademark for Fiction Writers… Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE… (Please read the introduction to this book before reading this. You can find that at… Introduction.) The hardest part of writing a book on Trademark for Fiction Writers is where to start. I finally figured out that I do need to start with the fact that I am not an attorney, and nothing in this book is legal advice. I’m just trying to help other fiction writers understand this concept of Trademark in Intellectual Property. To do anything in this area, consult a real IP attorney. But my hope is after this book, the attorney won’t have to waste a lot of your money explaining basics to you.…