Your Intellectual Property Determines Your Future

I was thrilled to learn that my book, GEORGE WASHINGTON’S ENGINEER: How Rufus Putnam Won the Siege of Boston Without Firing a Shot received the Best STEM Book award from the National Science Teaching Association and the Children’s Book Council. See that beautiful sticker on the cover? Read more about submitting to awards here.

Keeping an Eye on Competitors

In a recent post, Kathleen Schmidt of the Publishing Confidential blog discusses the details of the new Board of Directors for Simon & Schuster. (subscription required for the entire article). We are indie-published, you might say, why should we care about S&S’s Board? Because they will determine our competition in the future.

The new board includes executives from TikTok (think Booktok), YouTube, and Disney, including expertise in tech, entertainment and publishing. In past acquisitions in the publishing world, the hype has emphasized that the intellectual property could be utilized in multiple ways across different companies within a conglomerate. It never seemed to happen. But that may be changing, as this new S&S Board seems poised finally make it happen. Here’s one of the Board’s first moves.

The Importance of Your Intellectual Property

My understanding of intellectual property’s importance has been growing for the past five years. Influential indie publisher Kristine Katheryn Rusch named the IP question of supreme importance in planning for 2019. Since then, she has focused in IP issues many times.

Thinking about IP is one of the main reasons I attended the 2022 Licensing Expo, 2022 Kid Screen, and the 2022 Dallas Toy Fair. One major takeaway was to think about how IP could be used BEFORE you write a story. When you create a character, could that character easily become a toy? Does the story have enough breadth to expand to fill an animated series? I’m not necessarily writing just to create IP for other uses. I still focus on book publishing because that’s what I know. But I’m thinking broader when I decide which idea to develop. The book must succeed on its own; but if it has potential for expansion, I may try to develop that in conjunction with developing the book.

We need to be aware of our intellectual property’s worth. We should be writing stories that have possibilities in adjacent industries such as toys, movies, or licensing. With S&S’s new board of directors, I think this issue will only grow in importance over the next few years. Are you ready?