Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 16

Growing a writing life

Expectation. At the start of the summer, the 4 year old and I planted a whole row of sunflower seeds. We tended them with love and the plants were a couple of inches tall … when the guys that do our lawn decided to bathe the entire row in weed killer. (They are very nice people, the lawn guys, but they are not really great at weed vs flower identification. There have been many casualties this summer, despite my best efforts at flower protection.) It was a dark day and I’m still really super b...

August 2017: Takin’ care of writer business

Nothing sums up 2017 like the fact that I’ve started to include the letters I write to my government reps in my word count because of the number of times I’ve had to write them. I’m up to contacting them daily now and everything is complete and total garbage. But anyway…

Here’s what August 2017 looked like in writing…

Total Words Written This Month
37,279 words

Average Words Per Day
1,203 words

Monthly Goal
didn’t set one

Yearly Goal
445,834 / 500,000 (89%)

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Things completed:

my adaptation...

Good customer service means more word of mouth, sales and repeat buyers

This is post 21 of 23 in the series “eBay Marketing Makeover”

Set up a good customer-service philosophy

The customer may not always be right, but you should still make sure you’ve got your head on correctly when you approach buyer disagreements and issues.

Here’s what to do:

Write down a customer service philosophy for your company. You may already have some policies in place, and now’s a good time to articulate them in black and white for later reference. This doesn’t need to be complica...

A quality product is easier to market and sell

This is post 20 of 21 in the series “eBay Marketing Makeover”

A good product sells itself

There’s an expression in business that says a good product will sell itself. While that’s an oversimplification, it’s true that quality makes a marketer’s job that much easier. When what you’re selling is good, it will naturally lend itself to more repeat business and good word of mouth. But your product isn’t just the physical items in your store, it’s actually the whole sales process from start to...

Introducing Script Sort, the easiest way to find the play that best fit your needs

Especially this time of year with schools and community theatres setting up their seasons, planning for the school year ahead or looking for competition friendly pieces, I get a lot of emails from groups who need a recommendation for which play of mine best fits their needs when it comes to casting, length and content. While I’m always happy to help, I thought it’d be nice to give anyone the chance to do this themselves right here on the site without waiting for me to reply.

Introducing Scrip...

Nothing says unprofessional like spelling & grammar mistakes in your eBay store

This is post 19 of 21 in the series “eBay Marketing Makeover”

Proofread everything

Here’s what to do:

Go through every bit of that text you went over in the last step and proofread it. While your company voice may deliberately play with grammar, you want to check for any unintentional errors as well as spelling and punctuation. We’re doing this on a separate item from the rewriting because it’s much easier to find errors when you’ve let the writing sit for a while instead of when it’s fre...

“What’s stopping people from performing my self-published play without my permission?”

This is post 15 of 15 in the series “Self-Publishing a Stage Play”

I covered this already in my Self-Publishing a Stage Play series in another post but this is far and away the most frequently asked question on this series so let’s have another go at it, shall we?

“What if someone tries to perform my play without permission?”

TD; DR Version: People will try to perform your play without paying no matter how you put it out there but it’s not difficult to stay on top of and make sure you ge...

Use the power of writing voice to speak directly to your ideal customer

This is post 18 of 21 in the series “eBay Marketing Makeover”

Reevaluate and rewrite with your ideal customer in mind

From listings to form emails, there’s a lot of written word involved with selling on eBay. Let’s take the time to make it all consistently speak to your ideal customers to encourage more sales.

Here’s what to do:

A few steps ago, we wrote up a list of everything we knew about our existing customers to get a picture of what our ideal customer is like. Now it’s time to make...

July 2017: The Second Wind

If my records are correct, this July was my 9th Camp NaNoWriMo victory, lucky 13th time participating. While there’s a lot about the event that is wonky and ways it can improve, it’s still amazing how the accountability of having other people aware of my word count for the month motivates me to write more and more often. Even when I’m not working on anything specific, the Camp NaNoWriMo or NaNoWriMo months never fail to be some of my most productive and highest word count months of the year a...

July 2017: Getting my second wind!

If my records are correct, this July was my 9th Camp NaNoWriMo victory, lucky 13th time participating. While there’s a lot about the event that is wonky and ways it can improve, it’s still amazing how the accountability of having other people aware of my word count for the month motivates me to write more and more often. Even when I’m not working on anything specific, the Camp NaNoWriMo or NaNoWriMo months never fail to be some of my most productive and highest word count months of the year a...