Tag Archives: Marketing

Career and Lifestyle, Season 16, Theory and Technique

16.8: Smart Promotion

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Your Hosts: Dan, Erin, Brandon, and Howard

Let’s talk about how promote yourself and your work, and how to do it well. The tools we use for this continue to evolve, and in this discussion we’ll cover things that have worked, things that have stopped working, things we use now, and strategies we apply to not sink beneath the churning disruptions endemic to promoting books (or, really, anything else.)

Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson

Liner Notes: Here is your invitation link for the  TypeCastRPG Discord.

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Look at authors who self-promote, and how they’re doing it.

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
(currently available for pre-order, scheduled to release in May 2021)

Career and Lifestyle, Season 16, Theory and Technique

16.6: Building Your Brand

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Your Hosts: Dan, Erin, Brandon, and Howard

Branding, in marketing terms for writers, is the process of establishing a recognizable identity—a brand— for you and your works in the marketplace of readers, and people who buy things for readers. In this episode we talk about what our brands need to be doing for us, and how we go about getting them to do that.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Marshall Carr, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Find the elements of your brand from your friends, alpha readers, and beta readers.

Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth, by Rachel Maddow

Archive Seasons 11-15, Career and Lifestyle, Season 15

15.11: Digital is Different, with Cory Doctorow

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Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Piper, Howard, and special guest Cory Doctorow

“How do you break in?” is one of those questions we always get asked in some form or another, and it’s also one for which those of us who “broke in” more than a couple of years ago are increasingly unqualified to answer. The path “in” is always changing, and it seems to be changing faster as time goes on.

With the obligatory disclaimer out of the way, in this episode we’ll talk about how “digital” (read: “social media + everything else internet”) applies to building a career as a creative.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Think about a pen name for yourself. Practice the signature.

Catfishing on the Catnet, by Naomi Kritzer

Career and Lifestyle, Guest

14.34: Author Branding

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Your Hosts: Howard, Mary Robinette, Dan, and DongWon

Authors have brands whether they want to have them or not. It’s a simple principle of marketing, and the better we understand that principle, the better able we are to control how it affects our careers.

In this episode we talk marketing, and freely use terms like “relationship marketing,” “authentic experience,” and “brand loyalty,” despite the fact that sometimes these words make our inner artists cringe.

Credits: This episode was recorded by Bert Grimm, and mastered by Alex Jackson. 

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Identify your brand. Think about the core aspects of your personality which you’re comfortable sharing publicly. Pick at least three things, and document them.

Be aware that “Murder Hat” is taken.

Empress of Forever, by Max Gladstone

Archive Seasons 11-15, Career and Lifestyle, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.46: Reinventing Yourself

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Your Hosts: Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley

We discuss the idea of “reinventing yourself,” which can mean anything from “trying something new” to “completely re-branding yourself as a writer,” and how it’s a difficult thing to do without figuring out what it actually is that you’re currently doing. We talk about how we’ve done it, how others have done it, and how important it is to continue learning as a writer.

Credits: This episode was recorded in Chicago by Andrew Twiss, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Immerse yourself in a genre that is new to you. Short story anthologies in that genre, or award winning novels are a good place to start. Read those.

NOTE: The Lost Book of the White by Wesley Chu and Cassandra Claire has been retitled and rescheduled. You should (eventually) be looking for:

The Red Scrolls of Magic, by Wesley Chu and Cassandra Clare, scheduled for release in March of 2019.

Archive Seasons 11-15, Guest, Season 12, Theory and Technique

12.38: What Do Editors Really Want, with Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo

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Your Hosts: Dan and Howard

Toni Weisskopf and Cat Rambo joined Dan and Howard to discuss what it is that editors “really want.”

Question To Help You Decide Whether Or Not To Send Your Editor Bad News: “Will this news get better if I wait?”

Credits: this episode was recorded at GenCon Indy 2016, and mastered by Alex Jackson

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Do something completely new. Write by hand, or outdoors. Also, listen to actual people talking, and write down what is being said.

Through Fire, by Sarah Hoyt, and Neither Here Nor There, a collection from Cat Rambo

Archive Seasons 1-6, Season 04, Theory and Technique

Writing Excuses 4.20: Strategies for Getting Published

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Your hosts here at Writing Excuses have tried to answer the “how to get published” question before. We’re going to try again.

In this episode we begin with a discussion of New Media. Welcome to the Age of the Internet, everybody! The Web is now “old media.” When we say “New Media” we’re talking about social media — Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, user-generated content, and countless blogging tools.  After a brief warning about embracing the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, Brandon, Dan, and Howard provide some examples for how these tools can help you.

We talk a bit about some submission practices that you should not practice, most of which Stacy Whitman covered with us back in episodes 12 and 13 of  Season 1. Then we throw you some off-the-wall suggestions that might get you published. Some of these cost real money, and none of them come with guarantees that they’ll work. We restate our firm belief that the best strategies for getting published hinge upon writing excellently and networking with people who write.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. Howard owes him a plug after last month’s epic faux-pas at Penguicon. After bringing it up in this context, Howard probably owes him ANOTHER one.

Writing Prompt: For some reason, 1000 years in the future the most cost-effective publishing involves writing on human skin…

Blame for That Horrible Mental Picture of Howard Dressed as an Elf Sans Pants: Brandon Sanderson owns that blame, down to the last mote of scowling-with-eyes-averted disapproval.

Why Mayan Calendars Predict The End of The World in 2012: seventeen minutes in…

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

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