alien romances: Targeting

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Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Targeting a Readership Part 18 Targeting a Culture

Targeting a Readership

Part 18

Targeting a Culture

Previous parts of the Targeting a Readership series are indexed here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/index-to-targeting-readership-series-by.html

These posts are about marketing, where the first step is to determine who the decision makers buying your product are, where to find them, how to reach them, and thus how to craft a narrative hook that will make them remember your byline, maybe even the series title.

Marketing is heartless, mathematical, me-me-me oriented, and all about moving product at a profit (buy low, sell high).

Targeting is more about empathy, resonance, understanding. Targeting is like entering a group conversation. If you are not naturally a member of the group, nothing you can say will hook the attention of the group.

For a writer, that means writing swiftly, quickly, not getting trapped in endless rewriting, or in other words mastering the wordsmith's craft of vocabulary, grammar, spelling, punctuation and symbolism that evokes emotion. The real trick to becoming prolific is to also master the template for the type of story your targeted market is willing to buy.

To the reader, the cost of a story includes not only the purchase price, but the reader's time and emotional investment. Hence Netflix facilitated binge-watching of series that could hold up -- not so much the anthology series of yore, but today's more DALLAS type, prime-time soap story-arc series that progress at a crawl.

If you are a natural member of the group you target with your story, you will listen, follow the story of their narrative, and add to their narrative -- not insert your own narrative, not disrupt the conversation, not attract their attention, but rather further their adventures on the way to THEIR goal (which just happens also to be your own).

You won't be seen as the annoying pest, trying to butt in where they are not wanted. You will be welcomed and your contribution to the discussion will be discussed.

So, for a writer, what exactly IS a "readership?"

One of the many useful ways to define a "readership" for marketing purposes is as a "culture."

So what's a "culture?"

The best place I know of to start molding your notion of "what" culture is happens to be a very old non-fiction book I've mentioned here many times, THE SILENT LANGUAGE by Edward T. Hall.

Note the cover blurb "targets" a readership neatly. "THE SILENT LANGUAGE shows how cultural factors influence the individual behind his back, without his knowledge."

People who feel in charge of life, and who think they make their own independent decisions experience a frisson of alarm if they view this sentence as authoritative. That emotional frisson rivets attention.

If this is seen on a book cover on a store's rack, the target will find his/her hand reaching for the book, turning it over, looking inside to find out more. "Nobody can do that to me! I won't allow it."

Readers come away from this (rather brief) book with a wide comprehension of "what" culture is, where it is inside themselves, and the writers among those readers start thinking of ways to "show don't tell" their Characters responding to Culture.

How can a writer "target" an entire CULTURE or sub-culture such as a certain generation among all residents of the USA? Your chances of pulling off this stunt increase with your ability to define and identify a culture. But you also have to understand what marketers mean by "targeting."

In How To Use Tarot And Astrology in Science Fiction Part 6 Confronting Change, we referenced this Time article

-------quote------
Consider this LONG PERSPECTIVE article from a Time writer.

https://time.com/5770140/millennials-change-american-politics/

That article traces the interactions between generations as Millennials sweep the reins of power from the Baby Boomer generation (as usual ignoring the Silent Generation).

---end quote------

And just after that reference, I wrote:

-----quote-------

PLUTO IN CAPRICORN is where we are now, and it is about CHANGE IN GOVERNMENT, shifting borders (we did that in Channel's Destiny, moved the Territory border to make room for Householdings).

This item on generation gap, shifting views, is related to a Blog post on writing craft I did a long while back:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

About halfway down that blog post is a list of what signs Pluto was in at various points in history and how that played out in "generation gap" thinking.

Get a good grip on this principle, and the spectacle of NEWS today will suddenly make sense.

--------end quote-------

Each generation generates a "culture" of its own, and within it many sub-cultures. A writer can build a world to showcase a story, but that story needs a "backstory" (each Character needs ancestors, a history, a changing perspective through life).

To learn how to convey, in symbolism, with few words, how Characters from different generations communicate, understand the generations in terms of culture.

That difference in culture has been termed "The Generation Gap."

Most often parents grow up to discover their children have ditched major tenets of the parent's and grandparent's generational-culture and behave in "deplorable" ways because of it.

The parents are not aware (because they don't see it in terms of culture) that they, themselves, did exactly the same thing and considered it righteous to ditch the elements of their parent's culture that no longer pertained to modern life.

The themes your reader are struggling with in daily life are mostly derived from the elements of their parent's culture that they see as deplorable and necessary to ditch. So study that "generation gap."

Google "Targeting definition marketing," and get this definition:

-----quote------
Targeting in marketing is a strategy that breaks a large market into smaller segments to concentrate on a specific group of customers within that audience. It defines a segment of customers based on their unique characteristics and focuses solely on serving them.
------end quote------

Note the "focuses solely on serving them" -- but you have to know "who" them is before you can determine what "serving" means.

So bring THE SILENT LANGUAGE up into the 2020's by noting this article:

http://theconversation.com/hate-cancel-culture-blame-algorithms-129402

The Twitter/Facebook social-media, Web 2.0 tool-set put into the hands of humans whose culture included elements that prevented the adaptation to living in a world where you're personal, private, small circle of friends could be multiples of 10,000.

We came from villages of a dozen families where most people never traveled more than 50 miles from home. We knew everyone - their grandparents and great-grandchildren (because people had children in their teens). We associate IN DEPTH, by nature and by culture. We reject anyone not a natural member of our group, our village culture. Anyone "different" is rejected -- watch kindergarten and first grade children playing in a school yard.

REJECTION -- pecking the unfit to death as duck flocks will do -- is built into our physical bodies (not Souls, though, hence Soul Mates are often from different cultures).

Today, we live in the 3rd generation of a cultural-change sparked by Web 2.0

I noted that in 2008 on this blog entry:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html

And still delving into this phenomenon and what it means for book sales:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-via-social-networking.html

In 2009 writers were collaborating via the Web

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/emigrating-to-future.html

And in 2010 I still saw vast joy in the freedom the Web was providing:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/emigrating-to-future.html

In 2011 writers were already exploiting the social networking tools:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/social-networking-is-learning-tool.html

It really got started in the 1980's as computers appeared in everyday houses, and those computers got online. In the 2000's kids were raised with the necessity of having a laptop in high school. Now kids "must" have some kind of tablet computer for grammar school -- or schools are full of desks with screens.

Children raised in a computerized environment are now having kids - that's 3rd generation. Their great grandparents didn't know how to type, but these people "thumb type" at the speed of light.

What has speed of thumb typing to do with Targeting a Culture?

Thumb typing is a cultural symbol, and it increases the broadcasting power of the youngest, least experienced in life, people growing up without being surrounded by a closed multi-generation community.

Classmates are from families who come from all different places, often speak different languages, certainly read different books, watch different TV shows, etc. A "class" is just a bunch of kids who happen to be the same age. They come from different cultures and hit different stages of maturity (as we mature, we shift cultural environment) at different ages. And they REJECT that which is "different" and peck them to death on social media.

This younger culture has even named this PECK TO DEATH process -- "Cancel."

The school corridor version was named "crowding."

Now whole commercial chain stores, or brands, are being "crowded" to death (often real bankruptcy), and individuals are learning the hard way that if they stick up for the REJECTED, they, too, will be CANCELLED.

This experience, and watching their parents generation doing the same, will shape the themes they love most in stories.

From the article HATE CANCEL CULTURE BLAME ALGORITHMS

---quote------

A lot of attention has been given to repercussions of cancel culture on celebrities, from JK Rowling, to Kevin Hart to Lena Dunham.

Less talked about is the way algorithms actually perpetuate cancel culture.

-----end quote--------

The article identifies the widely used algorithm that, when activated, sends minor items (even personal opinion tweets or YouTube items by non-celebrities) viral as triggered by "outrage."

That's a current cultural artifact. Eventually it will shift to some other response, but the magnifying power will remain and even grow. The common villager whose heritage equips him to associate with about 1,000 people suddenly is aswim among millions and they are all facing him, yelling vile epithets.

The tiny firecracker of bullying and "crowding" - ganging up on the different one - now has become an atomic bomb, capable of destroying not just one teen-school-life, but millions of adult careers.

Humans don't know (on the SILENT LANGUAGE cultural level, the part of us that functions behind our back, without our knowledge) how to manage that much power.

Internationally, countries are struggling to keep "different" countries from attaining atomic missile capability. We know we don't know how to handle that much power -- but the internet has swamped us before we can realize we don't know.

It is knowledge that has to be infused into our being on the pre-verbal level, before we learn to walk and talk. Culture is pretty much set in stone by age 7, and one element of culture is kindness. Not to just act kindly - but to have no unkind emotional responses to the "different" one. A kind person doesn't FEEL like hitting back, gathering a mob and destroying the intruder.

To our 2020's online culture, that lack of hostile response to intruders is just plain Science Fiction Alien material -- no human could relate to it.

To portray a non-human Character, study the culture of your target readership, and create such an Alien to make them empathize with, and understand on that "behind his back, without his knowledge" level how to communicate across a cultural gap.

The more people who understand on that level, the easier it will be for your children to live in their world, beyond the generation gap.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Targeting a Readership Part 14 - Readers Are A Moving Target

Targeting a Readership

Part 14

Readers Are A Moving Target

(but so are you)

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous posts in this series are indexed at:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/index-to-targeting-readership-series-by.html

Here I am stating the "obvious" -- but it is so obvious, many writers just plain miss it.

Whatever topic you are interested in, say Romance, or Finding Mr. Right, or Playing the Field, or Rebuilding Life After Divorce/widowhood, it interests you because of something inside of you.

See my series on Tarot
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/10/index-to-posts-about-or-involving-tarot.html

And see my series on Astrology
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

And note how over time, humans go through experiences as individuals and also, at the same time, go through experiences with their age-group, (Pluto) and at the same time as all that, go through experiences (major and minor) that challenge or destroy or build the ability to cope.

In other words, like is about experiences. When we have time to breathe, we (because we are human) either think about what has been happening and state it as a "word problem" or we try our best to shut the chattering-brain down so we can rest.

Some people use alcohol or drugs to shut the brain down -- some use fiction, and some use "activism" (e.g. getting involved in supporting a Cause, political or social).

Writers are no different from readers. Writers live, sometimes survive, experiences that become major questions about the meaning of life.

Such major questions, generated by the experiences the writer has had, generate a myriad answers, each of which can become the THEME of a novel.

Themes are ANSWERS -- not just questions. But usually themes are posed as questions.

The science and art of posing a question involves knowing the secret of questioning -- that the answer is fabricated into the question itself.

The worst experience most people have of early education is running into the buzz saw of the WORD PROBLEM. The trick of doing the math is to figure out how to pose the question, how to state the words in numbers, and after that, it's easy arithmetic.

Wrong answers are generated by incorrect statements of the problem.

And trick word problem questions are created by the way the words lead anywhere but the correct answer.

Themes are like that. The writer lives through (sometimes by the skin of their teeth) an experience which is blended from the writer's generational experiences (Pluto, Uranus) plus the writer's personal individuality (natal chart, houses etc.)

The generational experience, woven into the theme, gives the resulting fictional work a resonance, like a musical Key or an interior decorator's palate of colors, with a vast number of people born when the writer was born, plus or minus maybe 20 years.

The personal experience woven into the theme gives the resulting fictional work a resonance that induces readers to recognize the Characters as real people such as the people they know. Everyone knows a "social climber" or a "boot licker" or a "own drummer" type of person, and such types are recognizable far beyond the generational boundaries. But those close in age know people of those types who have been hammered by similar experiences.

So the Eternal Truths of a Theme, the truths that make the novel potentially a Classic that speaks to far-future generations, come from the generational experiences the writer has survived. These experiences are cyclical - repeating every 80 years, or every 250 or so years, and so those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

The Spiritual Truths of a Theme, the truths that make the novel potentially memorable, with a high-impact on guiding a reader's life-choices (choice of college major, choice of walking out on a deadbeat husband, choice of having an abortion) come from the individualized, nuanced, personal and internal experiences the writer has survived.

Thus the most popular fiction of one generation might not "speak" to the next generation or the next, but might connect with readers a hundred years later.

So when targeting a readership, you have to blend two (often competing) streams of emotional force, the generational and the personal, and add something else, something contemporaneous, to say something relevant to the people of book-buying-reading age at the moment the novel will be published.

Publishers now have computers to sift/sort/surface information on book-buyers and what titles sell. There might be ten manuscripts being shopped around by agents, but only one will be chosen to be promoted with Big Bucks (yes, promotion, advertising, marketing, cost enormous amounts of money). Being chosen doesn't mean being better, wiser, or more important. Being chosen means being more like whatever is selling now.

Analyses of what sells are very shallow. Publishers, being in business to make a profit these days (unlike 50 years ago when they were designed to lose or break even, but do important books) focus on the numbers.

It matters what it costs to produce and deliver a book, vs how many copies can be sold at what prices. That equation is very complex now because of ebooks, audiobook, print editions all at different discounts.

Editors choosing manuscripts look at Plot, Setting, and sometimes Character, but rarely if ever at Theme to choose a book.

That trend is changing. Certain themes are being excluded, others emphasized in fiction publishing as machine-learning and AI begin to dig deeper into what makes a Best Seller. But keep in mind, there's a difference between a Best Seller and a Classic. Classics don't usually sell well off the bat.

So Targeting a Readership means Targeting an Editor who knows a lot more about the readership than you do.

See my series on what exactly the job of an editor is.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/02/index-to-what-exactly-is-editing-by.html

Think of it this way.

You walk into a cocktail party, dressed to the 9's, full of news about your latest contract signing with a Big Publishing House, and just a little late. You pick up a drink from a passing waiter and stroll into the room full of circles of people talking to each other (well, yelling by now).

You know some of the people, but not everyone, and hardly anyone recognizes you or pays you any attention.

So you drift into a circle of people having an animated discussion you can barely hear. You listen intently, but the truth is you know nothing about the topic they are discussing, not because you're an ignoramus but because you just didn't see that New York Times Feature last Sunday.

Everyone has an opinion, and is trying to convince others.

This is your READERSHIP in symbolic microcosm. The dynamics of selling a novel are the same as the dynamics of joining that conversation.

You might, after five minutes or so of being unable to get a word in edgewise, drift off to another group having a different discussion.

The publishing industry grinds out a steady stream of novels, trying to capture the attention of these circles of screaming, opinionated, intense and animated conversationalists.

Consider the Editors, who are your actual Readership, the first you must captivate, as the waiters at the Cocktail Party, circulating with trays of delights and noting what "everyone" is choosing. They run back and forth to the kitchen getting more of what is being scarfed up, and less of what is just sitting there on trays.

You are in the kitchen, dispensing more of what the waiters pick up, and wondering what to do with the heaps of crates in the back room full of what nobody wants.

You have to choose from all the stuff on your catering trucks, and send out to the party what the guests are consuming.

In other words, you the writer have a million story ideas, and a lot to say about everything. You have decades of life experience to distill into advice to those searching for a Soul Mate. All that is in crates on your catering truck, backed up to the door of your kitchen. You, the writer, run back and forth, selecting ingredients to grind, roll, and decorate into canapés or mix into drinks.

If you're listening to the roar of the crowd, sampling the conversations in the various circles (watching Twitter and Facebook?), you guess more accurately what topic this crowd is addressing right now.

What people are talking about is usually what they are interested in. Anyone who intrudes into a conversation trying to change the topic will be regarded as socially inept or ignored.

But just because you're talking about the same topic doesn't mean your comments will blend smoothly into the conversation, be picked up, and generate further thinking.

There is an art to conversation, and most of that art is composed of the ability to listen, and to hear what is not-being-said.

Why do you write novels?

A) Are you writing novels to reinforce what everyone thinks?

B) Are you writing novels to refute and disprove what everyone thinks, to challenge established assumptions?

C) Are you writing novels to weave a soft, pleasurable, comfortable world for your reader to escape into?

D) Or are you writing novels to lend your erudite talents in language and symbols to express the heart and soul of your Readership, to give voice to their subconscious beliefs?

Why you want to write this particular novel is the reason the Readership would want to read this novel. That reason is stated in your theme.

The 4 Basic Readerships read novels to achieve those 4 basic objectives:

A) to relax into assuredness that the world really is what everyone thinks.

B) to articulate what's wrong with the world, state the word problem so a clear solution can be visualized.

C) to escape the rasping noise of life's experiences, to rest and heal

D) to grow spiritually by walking in another's moccasins, experiencing a different life, a harder life, but culminating in triumph.

Each of those 4 Readerships can be served by any Genre, often by all the active publishers.

Each of those 4 Readerships tends to go to different cocktail parties, or end up in different rooms of the house at a family get together (where the men are in the living room, the women in the kitchen, the kids in the yard, the teens off in a bedroom gaming).

You will likely have the best chance of success joining a conversation (getting a book published) that is about what most interests you at this point in your life.

Readerships age.

Just like the family party separating throughout the house by age group, readerships do that, too.

You have often heard, and probably experienced, "outgrowing" a particular genre, author, or setting.

People who were Star Trek fans in their teens have set the whole space-adventure-dream aside to live in their "real" worlds, or gone on to read in other fields, often non-fiction, but also Romance, Historicals, Mystery, and so on.

People "outgrow" interests when the subconscious questions raised by some Generational or Personal Life Experience have been satisfactorily articulated and a working answer implemented in their lives.

Themes are questions with proposed answers, all of which are rooted in assumptions.

Whatever is the fiery torch of absolute, riveting fascination at one point in life is the scattered embers at a later point. It's done. Burned out, and either answered satisfactorily or simply abandoned as unanswerable or unimportant. The next generation will rekindle that torch, but it might become an LED instead of a Flame.

There is an art to capturing reader interest, as well as a science, but both are rooted in the writer's ability to listen, to hear what you are listening to, and to understand the subconscious resonances the speakers don't even know are in them.

What you have to say, or what you want to say, or what you MUST say, might not be what the people you are talking to want or need to hear.

Your job, as a writer, is not only to have something to say, but to find the people who want to hear it and to say it in a way that facilitates their achieving whichever of the 4 Goals of a readership those individuals are pursuing.

The upshot of all this is simple. The adage, "There is no accounting for taste," is wrong. Taste can be accounted for. Mood is not random, and people are not victims of their moods.

The art of fiction writing is the art of evoking a mood, and using the nuances of emotion to cast new light on the old drudgery of life's routines. To do that, you have to become part of the conversation, and not boorishly intrude and change the subject.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Sunday, April 01, 2018

Leaking Clouds, Dark Days, Do Not Track... My Underwear

When marketing a novel, the received wisdom is -or used to be- that a reader must see the cover/title/author name at least seven times (presumably in a positive context) before that reader is inclined to purchase the book. Does it still work that way? Maybe. The ad-funded internet giants would like authors and publishers to believe that paid advertising works.

When marketing a song, the vinyl model was that it was worth giving radio stations one's blessing to play the song, because the more a song was heard, the more likely it was that a listener would like it, and the more a listener liked it, the more likely they were to buy the vinyl.

The internet is funded by advertising. Perhaps the biggest question is, who pays? (Quis solvit.)

For Crowell & Moring LLP, legal blogger Christopher A. Cole asks "Is the Cambridge Analytic Scandal a Watershed moment for the Ad-Funded Internet?

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f81ed65e-14d4-4c3b-8a8e-509726507d88&utm_source=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed&utm_medium=HTML+email&utm_campaign=Lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=Lexology+Daily+Newsfeed+2018-03-30&utm_term=

The legal blog article mentions the use of blackmail and dirty tricks to influence elections, and also the use of information scraped from Facebook "friends" for the purpose of psychological manipulation.

There's a lot of passive blackmail and extortion on the internet, anyway, and deleting social media accounts is not a viable solution. Public figures and would-be public figures are obliged to join social media sites to protect their own names and identities. We writers probably all know of someone who had to become "thereal...." because his or her real name or pen name had already been taken by someone else.

That does not mean that one has to give these sites one's true birthdate (as long as one can remember the lie), or be bullied into giving answers to their questions. Remember, the more you reveal online about cousins' names and memorable streets where you have lived, and school names, and youthful crushes, the less choice you have when filling out those banking secret questions/answers that have to be changed every few years.

Moreover, ages are not private. In "A Dark Day For Hollywood..." legal blogger Tony Oncidi for the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP reveals the gob-smacking truth that a Californian law prohibiting online commercial sites' publishing of Hollywood actors' ages is unconstitutional.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7aad561a-cbc6-4723-825b-4fddc6cef270

Apparently, it's a free speech issue. If a commercial site wants to sell true information about how old you are, even if you object, they may do so.

For the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP, legal bloggers John F. Delaney and Aaron P. Rubin reveal that over the first half of 2017, Facebook received almost 33,000 requests from law enforcement for user "data" and 57% of those "requests" forbade Facebook to notify the users that their information had been requested by the authorities.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=03dbdcc2-2c7b-4616-ba91-49e6482462a6

Coming back to Christopher A. Cole, he suggests that advertisers who buy into "data analytics" to target their pitches will need to pay attention to the sources of the "data".

"Data", by the way, comes from the Latin "dare" (to give), and its singular "datum" used to mean "that which is given". How ironic! (I shall now go back and edit to add a plethora of "give" words.)

I cannot help wondering if everyone is missing the woods for the trees. By what metric do the purchasers of advertising know if their advertising budget is well spent? Clicks, perhaps?

If advertising is the problem, it is helpful to know how pay per click (PPC) works.
https://farotech.com/blog/how-does-ppc-work-a-beginners-guide-to-pay-per-click/

Christopher Carr of Farotech tells us that 64.6% of people click on Google ads when they are looking to buy an item online.

Why buy online? Oh, yes, it is convenient. Instead of a check out clerk knowing that you buy (insert most embarrassing product) ... you'd rather risk all the internet and the Dark Web too knowing your buying habits, and embarrassing afflictions, and monetizing the knowledge.

But, if you want to buy online, why not do the research, clear your cookies and cache, and go directly to the website without clicking a Google ad link?

Perhaps the problem is not the ability to buy online, or the convenience of clicking through. It's the aggregators' interest in TARGETING the advertisements. Even that probably does not serve the purchaser of the advertising or the recipient of the advertising. If I bought a houseful of perfectly fragrant and safe, 30-year guaranteed hardwood flooring three weeks ago, how likely is it that I want to replace my new flooring with more of the same this week?

As a Romance writer, what am I supposed to think about the advertising executives at a brassiere-selling business if they seem to expect me to rip my bodices and need replacement underwear every single day?

Which brings me to Under Armour. They've been hacked. According to Lifelock, (2 days after Wired, Fox and NBC broke the story) approximately 150 million social exercisers using the MyFitness Pal app need to change their passwords immediately.

Another tip:
Don't let your computer or your ISP or the "cloud" store your passwords for you.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/252437297/Firefox-bug-exposes-passwords-to-brute-force-for-nine-years
By Peter Loshin

IMHO, permissionless "targeting" is akin to stalking. The most elegant legislative solution would be to give legal standing and force to a Do Not Track request. Right now, too many sites ignore a "Do Not Track" setting and install tracking cookies regardless.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Index to Marketing Fiction In A Changing World by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Index to Marketing Fiction In A Changing World

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

It isn't enough to just write a great story, nor even to write a story that precisely fits what publishers want.

Today's changing world requires writers to do much more than write.

Some manage this problem by marrying or partnering up with someone with the requisite skills, and some hire an agent. Some get lucky and connect with the right editor.

Everyone else has to pay attention to Marketing, Markets, Publishing, video, advertising, PR, and branding -- all kinds of things that really compete with creative time.

Self-publishing is yet another whole set of skills that adds in book design, formatting, layout, cost-effective use of various online outlets, accounting, and a myriad secretarial skills.

We have not yet covered all these requisites in this blog series, even though I've been touching on this subject since 2009. Here is what we have so far in this series, with the newest at the top.

My series on Marketing Fiction In A Changing World:

Part 27 -
The Half Hour Drama Is Back
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/08/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
Part 26 -

Must You Compromise Your Art To Sell Big?