Aim higher than SEO for your marketing content

You know, Jane Austen could have opened "Pride and Prejudice" with the standard line, "Once upon a time there was a family with five girls and no sons to inherit the estate that they depended on for their support." She didn't.

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Instead of sticking with the safe formulation, she crafted one of the most memorable openers for a novel that also gives the readers a taste of her wit and sense of irony. That opening line is Austen's brand in a nutshell.

This is what businesses should be striving for in their opening lines on their sites and their reports. Generative AI will not deliver that because it will work off pre-existing models. Simply tweaking that output will still not result in something truly fresh, though it may be just good enough to not incur the generative AI penalty Google has promised to deliver for those who aspire to achieve high SEO results.

Achieving SEO goals is not the same as making a memorable impression on your target audience when they click through to your site or blog.

What impresses Google is not necessarily going to move your target market to establish a relationship with your brand. The content that does can only be produced by a combination of analytics and human creativity.

You can't just be content with optimizing for search engines by following SEO guidelines when you need RO -- responsiveness optimization -- that requires blazing your own brand path.

That's what Write Way branding and marketing is all about. Learn more about my business offerings here.

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Pride, Prejudice and Persuasion: Obstacles to Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels

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What's in a pen name?

We’ve all heard that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about the name on the cover? Should it be the author’s real name or her chosen one?

The Reclaim Her Name series is a re-release of books “with their author's real name on the cover for the first time.” To mark the 25th anniversary of the Women's Prize for Fiction, there are 25 books available for free download or eBooks (which definitely keeps costs down for printing and shipping).


It’s a fact that women have written some of the best novels ever published. It’s also a fact that some of those novels feature a man's name in place of the authors.



The question then is: are we doing a favor to George Eliot and her pseudonymous peers in stamping their birth names in place of the names they chose themselves?

Read more in A Toast to Women Writers

Related:
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/06/jane-austens-heroines-from-extroverted.html https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1658/

The quantified swoon, or how readers fall for Mr. Darcy

Personally, I've never had a crush on Mr. Darcy -- in book or film form. But I see I'm very much in the minority here. You just can't argue with data. 

I wrote about the kind of data Oyster Books and similar services pick up on their readers a little while back in Reading & Being Read by E-Books
Now Oyster is sharing its data to track readers' fascination with Mr. Darcy. Here's the infographic that was shared by Huffington Post:

Related posts: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/06/jane-austens-heroines-from-extroverted.html

http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-big-bow-wow-bit-of-ivory.html

Jane Austen's influence on English language

A recent Guardian article on Jane Austen as the "queen of modern slang:" fits quite well with a piece I wrote a few months back about the influence of her work on the literature that followed -- as confirmed by big data in The Big Wow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory

The Guardian article informs us that

Oxford professor Charlotte Brewer told the Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye that while Austen had a great influence on the first Oxford English Dictionary published in 1928, she is quoted 1,640 times in the most recent edition.Entries include 321 phrases from her 1815 novel Emma, which includes ‘dinner-party’ and  ‘brace yourself’. She also came up with ‘if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you 100 times’.

As the piece is very short, though, it adds in a piece of what it considers good news: an upcoming  BBC adaption of Death Comes to Pemberly. I don't usually like the modern writers' takes on the most popular couple of Pride and Prejudice. Someone picked out that book for me once, and I couldn't even bring myself to finish it. That's saying quite a bit. However, I have no objection to the Jane Austen stamps issued by the UK recently. They are little works of art in themselves.