Hillary DePiano's Blog, page 40

Who are you online? Are you your real self? A pen name? The name of your company?

#Marketing:

You may already have a presence online but it’s never too late to consider this. Should your social media accounts be under your real name or that of your company? Should you have multiple accounts, one for each? Do these identity require separate websites too?

Branding doesn’t have to be painful.

Take a minute to think out your online presence. Do the avatar, bio, profile design you’re using reflect what you’re trying to convey? You may have just slapped something up there quickl...

Just shut up and take their money! Get out of the way to make the sale.

#Marketing:

You know the meme, right? “Shut up and take my money!” It’s a gag from the TV show Futurama but it’s an excellent reminder to anyone with anything to sell that sometimes, trying to market something, just gets in the way. You’ve got something to sell and, somewhere out there, is your ideal customer, the one who knows exactly upon hearing about your item, that it’s what they want and they go to buy it. What an easy sale, right? Except that you can actually get in your own way by co...

eBay retires Traffic Reports for Store owners & I want to smack them for making me do rewrites yet again

No matter how future proof you try to make any kind of e-commerce advice, it’s an industry that’s constantly changing and things can become obsolete or out of date in a minute. Anytime I finish an e-commerce book and put it out into the world, there’s always this tension. When will something happen that makes part of the book obsolete? How bad will it be? How much will I have to rewrite or scrap? It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It’s very indie. You won’t have heard of it. All th...

I just really REALLY like talking about selling online, OK? Sheesh.

We were at a socialthing a little while ago and were casually chatting when someone, who had no knowledge this side of my life, randomly said, “I just wish I knew more about how to, like, sell and market things online.”

And I’m just ready to pounce and tell this person All The Things and my husband just looked at the person, shakes his head sadly and says, “You can’t just giveher a set up like that.” Because I have a habit of going on about this kind of stuff FOREVER if left unchecked.

But I...

Increase the number and variety of products you have for sale to make promotion easier

#Marketing:

We’ve spent of lot of time in this series talking about how having a quality product can help sell itself and make marketing that much easier. But what about quantity?

Crayola knows all about quantity as a marketing tool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quantity here could mean how many you have of a specific product. After all, what good is exerting all that effort of promoting your stuff if the item is out of stock or your store is nearly empty once you finally get the customer where y...

On self-publishing a play versus submitting to theatres directly: an ungodly long blog post

On a playwrighting group I belong to on Facebook, someone asked if anyone had an experience with self-publishing plays. I replied about how I had I self-published The Love of Three Oranges, racked up a ton of productions and then publishers came to me so I had my pick of offers and that there were a lot of benefits to it. There a bunch of reasons why I ultimately went with a traditional publisher when the play was doing fine self-published and I outlined them in this series back in 2011.The t...

I am not a monogamous writer

I’ve been obsessing lately over the fact that it takes me too long to edit novels. The dumbest part of this is absolutelythat I don’t actually even know what “too long” means on any levelor how my editing compares with this mythical measurement.I’ve never tracked editing before so I have no sense at all of how long it actually takes me but it hasn’t stopped me from completely fixating on it. A big part of the problem is that I find myself comparing the time it takes me to edit a novel with th...

Daddy Issues will have its World Premiere on April 30th, 2015 at SCSU

Here’s some exciting news I’ve been keeping under my proverbial hat. Daddy Issues, the play I wrote by hand in a fit of madness in the middle of the night several years ago, has steadily been building up steam since I released it in 2011. There were readings and some performances of bits of it here and there but suddenly, in the last year or so, it’s been getting a lot more attention despite the fact that I pretty much neglect it in the marketing department. This year I had several groups con...

Daddy Issues will have it’s World Premiere on April 30th, 2015 at SCSU

Here’s some exciting news I’ve been keeping under my proverbial hat. Daddy Issues, the play I wrote by hand in a fit of madness in the middle of the night several years ago, has steadily been building up steam since I released it in 2011. There were readings and some performances of bits of it here and there but suddenly, in the last year or so, it’s been getting a lot more attention despite the fact that I pretty much neglect it in the marketing department. This year I had several groups con...

Here’s what I’ve been working on lately

Words. Word everywhere!

In an effort to be more transparent about exactly what I’m working on and how those word counts I share divide up, here’s a recap of what’s been going on since I last checked in:

February was a mad dash to finish my total rewrite of Mistress Novel. I finished it with about a week to spare before the end of March. It’s like a first draft all over again but it was good to at least get that step done and figure out a new version of the plot. I used that last week of Febr...