The Power of Your Media Brand

This is my second blog post this month over at Write Non-Fiction in November

Read more of Nina Amir's blog at www.writenonfictioninnovember.wordpress.com

How Writers Can Create Their Own Media Brand

“Branding” has become quite a catch word these days. As nonfiction writers, we, too, need to “brand” ourselves and our work. We even need to go so far as to become a “media brand.” In the process, however, we can make our writing more marketable to publishers, and, ultimately, to readers.

What exactly is a media brand and how do we as writers go about accomplishing the creation of our own media brand? Back today to tell us is entertainment professional and consultant Philippa Burgess of Creative Convergence. I’ve heard her speak about this topic, and I’ve always found what she has to say fascinating. I know that by applying the principle of branding to myself and to what I write, I can not only make myself more-marketable as a writer, but that I can help myself build a platform across all media - all of which will make my books sell better as well.

So, today, take off your writers hat and put on your marketing hat. Or, better yet, wear them both. That, I think, is the idea.

The Power of Your Media Brand
By Philippa Burgess
Entertainment Professional and Consultant
Partner, Creative Convergence Inc.

As nonfiction writers, I encourage you to think about becoming a media brand. In my previous post we talked about how to create compelling content. Beyond that, the success of your project lies in your ability to market it to the greater public. The easiest way to do this is to cultivate a relationship with your audience that includes desire, familiarity, and value using a myriad of media channels. In doing so, with a certain amount of consistency and growing visibility, you become a media brand. The additional benefit to doing it this way is that you are able to develop your content and your platform concurrently. When your book is ready you’ll have a better product that’s knows its place in the market primed with a ready audience.
Here are some key points you need to know and keep in mind when creating your media brand:

A media brand is a promise. If the expectation is a positive one, every time it delivers on its promise it deepens the loyalty of its audience. A brand seeks to earn mindshare, which is a general awareness that it exists. From there, it has the aim of creating top of mind awareness in its category. This means that if someone says, “Toothpaste,” and you say, “Crest,” this brand of toothpaste not only has mindshare, but represents the category leader in your mind. This holds true for media brands such as Dr. Phil, Oprah and Martha Stewart, who all have vast mindshare and are category leaders in their respective arenas.

See your media brand as a relationship that creates and fulfills a desire for its audience. A brand is not just a fancy logo or a catchy tag line but an experience that is shared between the company, product or service and its audience. Therefore, a successful brand is able to become a proven commodity in the marketplace. Writers, celebrities, and titles are just as much as brands as Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Tiffany’s.

This is important to you as nonfiction writers, because today’s audience encounters over 60,000 marketing messages a day. Everyone is vying for our attention while looking to make a positive impression. If your brand has rooted itself within the hearts and minds of your audience through repeated interactions over time, then it has established value. From there it can be promoted across larger and larger media channels with greater traction and ultimate success.

Build your media brand so you can distinguish yourself and your message from other nonfiction writers in the marketplace. If you are writing a memoir or offering practical advice on anything from how to run a business, a family or a hi-tech gadget, then you need to be sure you are distinguishable in the marketplace from all others. You want your audience to develop a relationship with you, and then consistently seek you out for the fulfillment of their desires - be it for information, inspiration or entertainment.

Your media brand builds on its success and provides additional opportunities to get your message out. There are many who come to nonfiction writing with academic or real world credentials, but all nonfiction writers need to start thinking along the lines of gaining media credentials. If bloggers, magazines, conferences and talk shows want to talk about what you’re doing because they think you’ll entertain and inform their audience, thus making their brand look good, then you’re on your way to being able to successfully grow your brand into the publishing arena, television or even film.

Your media brand helps you to consistently reach and call your audience to action. We often hear “platform” as a buzzword in the publishing industry. It is becoming more essential to have a platform, because it means that you have cultivated an audience so there is less risk involved for publishers when it comes to investing in your project. They know that when you speak, your audience listens. They have confidence that you have learned to navigate the infrastructure you need to reach your audience and have proven your value through repeated interactions. Moreover, you know how to motivate (or ethically bribe) your audience into action. It also becomes easier to move a story across media channels, such as articles, books, graphic novels, television, or film, if the story or its author, are branded.

Your media brand gives you the opportunity to monetize yourself and your project. Given your ability to deliver an audience, you have created more opportunities for speaking, articles, book sales, film rights or other business transactions. You’ve proven that you have something to offer; now comes the time to start packaging it to sell across media platforms. The more established your brand becomes the more value is attached to what you are selling. The term “rich and famous” is just simple math. The more people a brand is able to connect with powerfully, the more revenue it can generate for you and others.

Start small and grow it with steady efforts. As you look to establish your brand across media channels, remember that every oak tree was once an acorn. Trust that you will get experience as you go - “ready, fire, aim.” You won’t do all of this perfectly, so don’t worry about it. You’ll need to step out and jump. Then you can adjust course along the way. The idea of starting small can help you get practice, but it can also help you learn what your audience really wants and needs from you. When you make mistakes, they are in front of a smaller audience who are more forgiving. Plus, your brand will still be emerging and less will be at stake.

Cultivate your relationship with your audience as you develop your content. In this way you’ll get to work on your material and see how you are able to deliver the most value. Writing articles or giving talks is a good way to find the parts of your story that are the most compelling and valuable based on audience feedback. As you develop your stories, join writers groups or speaking clubs, such as Toastmasters, to polish your skills.

Take the time to go to the bookstore, the video store and Amazon.com and look at competing authors and titles. You want to find authors and titles you can point to in your space that have been successful, but you also want to find ways to distinguish yourself from them and fill a gap in the market. Think in terms of presenting your brand as “the fresh in the familiar.” Doors in entertainment and media are not difficult to open if you have the key. It is a very doable process if you take the right steps to fashion such a key by creating a strong media brand.

Not only do titles, books and authors become media brands, so do particular niche markets and categories. Find your category, take the steps to developing your media brand and look for the audience that is looking for you.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving!

SFWC Teleseminar Series

Over the past few months we've had the great pleasure of working with Elizabeth Pomada & Michael Larsen of Larsen-Pomada Literary Agency who are the co-founders of the San Francisco Writers Conference and Writing For Change Conference, along with their team who are instrumental in the organization and running of the events.

Together we've put together a series of teleseminars on various topics with some of the conference speakers that are important to writers at every stage of writing, development and promotion.

I'm posting them here for you to check out at your leisure. There are some terrific gems of information to be gleaned from each and every call. They cover the storytelling, PR, blogging and the role of an editor in publishing.

Elizabeth Pomada interviews Chris Soth of MillionDollarScreenwriting.com about story structure and techniques that makes a book a "page turner" and a script a "must-read."
www.creativecvg.com/SFWCChrisSoth11-19-08.wav

Michael Larsen interviews PR Guru Jill Lublin about scoring coverage in the media to build your platform both before and after the book is written.
www.creativecvg.com/SFWCJillLublin10-30-08.wav

Michael Larsen interviews Britt Bravo of HaveFun.DoGood and Kevin Smokler of VirtualBookTour about the bloggesphere.
www.creativecvg.com/SFWCBravoSmokler9-15-08.wav

Michael Larsen interviews industry veteran Alan Rinzler, Executive Editor at Jossey-Bass/Wiley & Sons.
www.creativecvg.com/SFW4CAlanRinzler7-16-08.wav

The San Francisco Writers Conference is this next February 13 - 15th at the St. Marks Hotel.
Learn more at http://www.sfwriters.org/. Early bird rate ends on December 31st.

It's a fantastic event and we hope you will spread the word and make your own plans to join us there in 2009.

Write Non-Fiction in November

You may have heard of Nanowrimo for the novel writing in November. But there is also a group for all the non-fiction writers out there run by Nina Amir called Write Non-Fiction in November. She's got a terrific blog packed with great information for all of you non-fiction writers out there.

You can check out the site at: www.writenonfictioninnovember.wordpress.com

I am today's guest blogger. Here's the write-up.

Today's agenda: Learning ways to make our writing more marketable, a necessary skill for writers to learn if they are to successfully sell their writing. After all, if we want to be published writers, or authors, we have to be able to sell our writing. That means what we write must be marketable. Makes sense, no? Sounds simple, but it isn’t.

To help us learn this all important lesson, Write Nonfiction in November welcomes guest blogger Philippa Burgess, an entertainment professional with Creative Convergence in Los Angeles. She specializes in developing and marketing literary content across Hollywood and the publishing and publicity industries. Out of all her experience, she’s culled three guideposts to help us hone our prose into marketable manuscripts.

Marketable Prose Informs, Inspires and Challenges Readers
By Philippa Burgess
Entertainment Professional and Consultant
Partner, Creative Convergence Inc.

I commend you on your participation in Write Non-Fiction in November. I know you’ve already received a ton of invaluable expert tips, and I have no doubt there will be more to come. I’d like to offer three of my own signature guideposts in order to help you develop your content so that it is inherently more marketable: to inform, to inspire, to challenge.

1. To Inform

What type of non-fiction are you writing?
Broadly speaking there are two types of non-fiction. You may want to consider which one you are writing because that will help you think about what types of media you can use to best share your story.

Type 1 - Narrative Non-Fiction - This tells a true story about your or someone else’s experience using a clear narrative structure. This type of story can be told in any particular literary genre, such as romance, comedy, thriller or adventure, but all the facts, characters and timeline are true and corroborated by primary and/or secondary sources. There are a lot of opportunities to publish these types of stories and they can take the form of articles, memoirs, biographies, and other types of non-fiction narrative books. They also may be pitched or adapted for television and feature films.

Type 2 - General or Prescriptive - This offers information that is either a newsworthy account of facts or a how-to approach that provides the audience with a way to save time, money and/or energy to achieve a desired result. Another popular style is to offer an opposing view to conventional wisdom. In either case, you are coming to the conversation with a certain amount knowledge that gives you credibility based on a combination of experience, education, and research.

2. To Inspire

How can your story generate the greatest impact?

For maximum impact you want to make sure your content is authentic and compelling. I offer you a simple but effective “Your Signture Story” formula that you can use to hit your mark with any story or message.

Picture a triangle and each side answers a different questions: Who are You? + What is Your Mission + Who is Your Audience? In the middle of that triangle is the answer that comprises an authentic and powerful story or message.

Who are you? What experience or expertise do you have? What human and emotional truths can you share? All notably authors (either fiction or non-fiction) have a clearly defined voice and point-of-view about the world. Take for example John Grisham, JK Rowling and Sebastian Junger, who all brought part of their own story to their writing. Grisham was a Southern lawyer (writing about Southern lawyers), Rowling lost her parents (remember, Harry is an orphan), and Junger writes about dangerous jobs (he’d had his own workplace accident while cutting trees and was a war correspondent for many years).

What is your mission? Whether it is to inspire, inform or entertain, you’ll do best with a clearly defined agenda when you enter the marketplace. Grisham spins tight thrillers that take us inside the justice system and into world of high powered business professionals; Rowling shares a philosophy of life and entertains with spellbinding magic and lore; Junger tackles what it is like to take serious risks with your life and in your work, because he believes humans have a greater capacity for physical risk than we normally acknowledge.

Who is your audience? It is important to know the audience your story or message is meant to touch. Think about what other books they might read, what TV shows and movies they watch, what magazine they buy, and what internet sites they surf. Surely, you might say that your story is ideal for everyone, but it helps if you have a primary demographic in mind when you start. This helps you in three ways: 1. You focus your voice. 2. You can explore the marketplace and see how else it has been served and where there is a gap for you to fill. 3. You’ll know exactly where to find your audience when you are ready to get yourself and your stories in front of them.

What is your signature story or message? Your particular story or message should serve each side of the triangle. It’s a good way to start for whatever type of writing endeavor you are initiating or a tool you can use as you approach rewriting your material.

3. To Challenge

But really, who cares?

I trust you’ve been informed and inspired, and now it is time to challenge you. You’ve got a great story to tell. You know what type of non-fiction story you are writing. You’ve done well to ask those hard questions about you, your mission, and your audience and crafted a story or a message that supports it. But then someone turns to you, as I have done to many writers, and asked the most challenging question of all, “Who cares?”

I am not trying to insult anyone in asking this hard question; it is a “tough-love” challenge. Many writers have stared at me in wonderment (or great disdain) at that moment. The key here is that the story may be about anything and just because you wrote it, you think I should care. The truth of the matter is that, as a reader, I want to know (I mean really know) that there is something in it for me. I want to know that I will uncover some secret knowledge that will make my life better or be moved by our human condition and get in touch with my own emotions. I want to be empowered either with information or with a renewed confidence in my own strength and abilities.

The answer then, when you are posed with the question, “Who Cares?” needs to be a resounding, “You.” The person you are pitching your idea to at that moment should be able to find something of value in it for them. And if they are really not your audience, because they don’t happen to fit the demographic you’ve defined, then jump right in and enthusiastically answer with great detail who you know cares and why.

With my three tips - to inform, inspire and challenge - in mind, I’m going to use myself as an example, so we can look at them in action. I’ll do this by asking myself the same questions and answering them.

Here goes:

What type of nonfiction do I write?

I write prescriptive non-fiction on marketing for writers.

What kind of impact do I want?

(Formula is You + Your Mission + Your Message = Your Signature Story)
I am an entertainment professional, and my mission is to inform, inspire and challenge writers to achieve greater success. My audience is writers, authors, experts and content creators who are interested in working across media channels.

Who cares?

I trust those writing Non-Fiction in November or those who want greater success in accessing and leveraging the power of Hollywood, publishing and publicity can benefit from my experience, guidance and message and that of my company.

I encourage you to continue on your road to Writing Non-Fiction in November. My thanks to Nina for inviting me to share on this blog. You are invited to learn more about our professional services at Creative Convergence Inc. and our teleseminar courses, resources and free member site for writers, authors, experts, and content creators. All of this is all part of Your Signature Story: From Content Creator to Media Brand.

About Philippa Burgess

Philippa Burgess is a partner at Creative Convergence an entertainment company in Los Angeles that specializes in literary development and marketing across media. The company has recently sold client projects to Warner Brothers, Paramount, Lifetime, and ABC Family. Recent TV production credits include “52 Fights” for ABC/Touchstone and “Men’s Guide the the Women’s Bathroom” for CBS/Paramount. Among their non-fiction film projects were “Thieves of Baghdad,” “Queensized” and “52 Fights.”

Philippa oversees the consulting division of the company. The department provides a collaborative creative and business development process for a dynamic list of consulting clients that include emerging non-fiction writers, experts, authors, and content creators who want to establish a media brand. She teaches at conferences around the country and faciliates the popular “Your Signature Story: From Content Creator to Media Brand” and “Million Dollar Screenwriting & Content Career” teleseminar courses.
www.creative-convergence.com

Some New Resources and Pre-Expo Round-Up

I've got a lot of great information for you about Screenwriting Expo this weekend.

First, whether you are going to be at Expo or not -- I would like to invite you to sign up for:

Our new Million Dollar Screenwriting & Content Career: Daily Dialogue which offers you a daily screenwriting resource tip that you may want to investigate further. www.creativecvg.com/connect.php

Our new Your Signature Story Quote of the Day from notable artists, authors and thought leaders designed to keep you inspired on your journey as a writer and content creator. www.creativecvg.com/connect.php

We're finally getting our new Your Signature Story membersite site up. It's still in Beta but you are officially welcome to come check it out at http://www.yoursignaturestory.com/ and set up your user profile so that you can connect with other writers and content creators in the community.

Plus, our friends at the San Francisco Writers Conference are hosting a teleseminar with our client and colleague Chris Soth of Million Dollar Screenwriting (see full bio below in Expo info) on Wednesday, November 19th at 5:30PM Pacific / 8:30PM Eastern. He'll be talking about what it takes to write compelling and cinematic stories. Feel free to share this with any of your screenwriter or fiction writer friends. You can register at http://www.sfwriters.org/ask4/index.php.

And -- if you're going to be at SCREENWRITING EXPO this weekend we'd love to connect with you in person.

I'll most likely be at the party of Thursday night, at the Expo on Friday for part of the day.

I'll be teaching:

Million Dollar Screenwriting Career: Picture the Deal on Saturday at 11AM

My colleague Brad Kushner will be on an Agents & Managers Panel on Saturday at 4PM.

Since I'm a huge fan of Heroes, I'll probably go check out the Heroes panel on Saturday at 6PM and I'll be at the party on Saturday night and back for a get together with Chris Soth, his mentees and my Million Dollar Screenwriting & Content Career alum on Sunday night.

I also suggest going to learn from some of our friends and colleagues including:
Pilar Alessandra: the director of the popular writing program 'On the Page' http://www.onthepage.tv/. Her screenwriting podcasts - with guests from within the industry - regularly appear in the film and TV top 100.

She'll be teaching:

Pitch in a Minute on Friday at 9AM

Beyond the Chick Flick -- Writing The Female Driven Screenplay on Friday at 11AM

Surviving Rewrite Hell on Friday at 2PM

Dynamic Dialogue on Friday at 4PM

Behind Their Eyes -- Creating Memorable Characters on Sunday at 9AM

Genre Tricks & Trends on Sunday at 11AM

You Had Me at Page One on Sunday at 2PM

Ellen Sandler: an Emmy nominated television writer/producer. She was Co-Executive Producer of the CBS hit Everybody Loves Raymond, and the popular ABC series Coach as well as 25 prime time sitcoms. Ellen has created pilots for ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox Family, Disney, Oxygen and the Australian Broadcasting Company. She is the author of The TV Writers Workbook: A Creative Approach to Television Scripts, published by Bantam/Dell.

She's teaching:

What Can I Say?- A Dialogue Workshop on Friday at 2PM.

Turning your Screenplay Into a TV pilot on Friday at 4PM.

Devorah Cutler-Rubenstein: a former studio exec who has produced films, plays, and television including the feature franchise The Substitute and most recently Tattoo U for FX Channel. Her writing credits include a variety of genres for indie and major companies, including ABC and Columbia Pictures. She also recently published What's the Big Idea: Writing Shorts.
Together Ellen and Devorah they will be running a pitch coaching salon. They're really terrific and worth getting to know.

Danny Manus: a Hollywood by Phone guest and most recently the CE at Clifford Werber Productions ("Cinderella Story," "Sydney White"), where he set up and will co-produce a larger budget family fantasy/adventure project at United Artists. Daniel is also attached to produce a teen comedy starring Emily Osment ("Hannah Montana") and is currently developing other scripts to be produced independently.

He'll be teaching:

The Other Side of the Table: A No B.S. Guide to Pitchfests for Writers on Thursday at 6PM

Exploring the differences between Indie Film and the Studio World on Friday at 4PM.

Chris Soth: sold his first screenplay, Firestorm, for $750,000, while still a graduate student in the USC screenwriting program. The movie was made, starring football star Howie Long, Scott Glenn, William Forsythe, Barry Pepper, and Suzie Amis, and was released in January of 1998. (“Firestorm rages with adventurous appeal.” - LA Times.) Chris was also paid $200,000 by Universal Studios to adapt the novel “A Fall of Moondust,” by Arthur C. Clarke of “2001” fame. In 2003 Chris sold his own original pitch, MEET JANE DOE to Signpost Pictures and Mosaic Media in a low-against-mid-six figure deal, with Hopscotch Pictures attached to produce. Chris guided the script through several stages of development and the film is expected to shoot in Australia this coming year. Chris's pitch THE CITIZEN was optioned by Escape Artists (Pursuit of Happyness) with Chris attached to produce. Chris also has written for independent investors, creating such screenplays as WASTELAND, HAUNTED HIGH and STAGE ONE, gathering knowledge used to craft DEAD MAN'S HAND as the perfect independent film project. His latest screenplay, OUTRAGE, starring Michael Madsen, Natasha Lyonne and Michael Berryman, was filmed in Georgia last spring and is in consideration for The Sundance Film Festival. In 2005, Chris founded the website MillionDollarScreenwriting.com to share his screenwriting expertise with aspiring screenwriters. His companion networking website, HollywoodByPhone.com, holds interviews with agents, studio executives, managers and filmmakers every week, and through ScreenplayByPhone.com, Chris mentors screenwriters around the world. He has taught at USC and UCLA and authored over 28 screenplays as well as the internet best-selling book "Million-Dollar Screenwriting: The Mini-Movie Method" and the best-selling pitch DVD: "SOLD! How I Set Up Three Pitches in Hollywood". Chris holds an MFA with distinction in screenwriting from the University of Southern California and a BA in Dramatic Literature from Vassar College, with highest honors.

He'll be teaching:

Million Dollar Screenwriting: Mini-Movie Method on Satuday at 9AM.

You may also want to learn more about:

Karl Iglesias: teaches at UCLA Extension's Writer's Program and Writers University. He is the best-selling author of The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters and Writing for Emotional Impact. He writes the regular column on the craft for Creative Screenwriting magazine. Passionate about great storytelling he specializes in the reader's emotional response to the written page. He can be reached through his website at http://www.karliglesias.com/. He's got several terrific sessions on emotional impact.

Steve Kaplan: the industry's most sought-after expert on comedy for almost 15 years. In addition to having taught at UCLA NYU Yale and other top universities Steve Kaplan created the HBO Workspace the HBO New Writers Program and was co-founder and Artistic Director of Manhattan's Punch Line Theatre. He's a MUST ATTEND if you're writing COMEDY!

Billy Mernit: author of Writing the Romantic Comedy (Harper/Collins) novelist (Imagine Me and You published by Shaye Areheart/Random House) and popular blogger (Living the Romantic Comedy) serves as both a private script consultant and a story analyst at Universal Studios while teaching at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program. He's a MUST ATTEND is you're writing ROM COM!

Blake Snyder: has sold or been hired to write dozens of scripts for film and TV in his 20-year career including co-writing Blank Check for Disney and Nuclear Family for Steven Spielberg—both million-dollar sales. Blake is the author of the popular Save the Cat! series. http://www.blakesnyder.com/. I was on a panel with him last year and he's just got terrific energy, experience and insights.

Heather Hale: has over 45 hours of produced television including The Courage to Love a $5.5 million dollar Lifetime Original Movie that starred Vanessa Williams and is now available on DVD and four series: The Evidence which won 'Best New Series Pilot ' Lifestyle Magazine that won two Tellys and two PBS edutainment series that both won Emmys. Heather's 'Navigating Hollywood' DVD is a best seller and her business bio book Nirvana in a Cup was published last year.

Have a great weekend, and a fantastic Expo if you're here in LA for the event.

To your success,

Philippa