Hello people! What I said, more or less: A “hostile brand” is a brand that doesn’t bend over backwards trying to be accessible or “mainstream”. It plays up its differences as advantages and has an edgy, challenging quality. People tend to love or hate them. People also use them as identity markers: to engage with…
(note: I’m using ‘manifesta’ instead of ‘manifesto’ because I like the womanly sound of it. indulge me.) One of my favorite bloggers, Kelly Diels writes a bang-up post about what she would do if she was a new writer named Dorothy who’d just published a book about her adventures on the yellow brick road: So…
1 A writer’s idea of a writing career has to change. Jane Friedman said this in a webinar I attended recently, and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. I’m also wondering if a writer’s idea of a brand has to change. I wrote about the importance of developing your author brand in my last…
1 People don’t respond to marketing. They respond to vision. 2 In this engaging and well-written post, blogger Siddhartha states that “authors shouldn’t have to be social media experts”. Writing and marketing are different, require different skillsets, and most artists just want to do their art anyway. So let the writers do the writing and…
1 I was speaking on a panel at the Literary Orange writer’s conference the other weekend and heard myself say, “Writers are creative entrepreneurs now.” To which the guy sitting next to me responded, “That sounds hard.” I’m not sure it’s any harder than writing an actual publishable novel. But it requires a flexibility of…
One of my goals is to learn about author platform through study, trial and error so that you don’t have to. If your tactics involve the actual tools you use (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), your strategy involves an overarching sense of how everything fits together: what Chris Brogan calls a simple presence framework or Michael…
What makes a story go viral? In his blog post The Elements of Awe (check it out) Donald Maass draws your attention to a piece in the New York Times that describes how sociologists “have been studying data provided by The New York Times showing which of the paper’s articles are the most often e-mailed”….
In her blog, one writer urges other aspiring writers not to worry about establishing an online presence or building an author platform until they actually have a book to sell. Jane Friedman, who is the “community director” for the Writer’s Digest brand (the online community, the magazine, the books), thought it was so important to…
Publishing is changing. “It’s not an evolution,” Jane Friedman commented recently, “but a revolution…And it’s not going back.” Part of that revolution involves the still-evolving notion of author platform. A key part of any author’s platform is Twitter. It forms what I consider the Golden Triangle of blog/facebook/twitter that forms the heart and home of…
1 I’ve come to hate the term ‘author platform’. It sounds concrete and specific – like something you buy at Home Depot (“Excuse me, miss? Where can I find the author platforms?” “Aisle 3, beside the snow shovels”). But the term itself seems to be a bit vague, meaning different things to different people. Here…
