“What are you up to this week?” a pal enquired.
“Catching up on all the stuff I didn’t do last week,” I replied, compiling the list in my head. “Uploading clones of the website I’ve just had approved, putting up a blog post, editing a podcast and writing a load of advance pieces for Indies to send in before I leave.” I was preparing to take off on another book research jaunt and attempting to get ahead of myself.
“Cool, do they pay well?”
“We do this one for love,” is what I said. I should of course have said that we also do it for kudos, backlinks and kickass exposure but if I had, I wouldn’t have had the conversation that followed.
We spent a while ruminating on the point of free writing. I kept on using that word ‘branding’ and the eyebrow raisings began to look like the sort of facial exercises you see in ads for fabulous secret alternatives to cosmetic surgery. Now we’ve had a good few articles on the subject here at Indies and the consensus seems to be that, um, you should get your little self out there and make sure the interwebs know who you are and also that marketing is a time sink and everybody hates you for doing it anyway. They put it kinda better than that (here and here for example) but we mostly seem to conclude that the writing is your brand, if only you can get it out there. Continue reading “Back to Branding”
