Branding

You may be asking – The Velvet Zebra ?? Unless you didn’t even notice your browser bar isn’t showing MyMidnightMuse anymore … You’ve arrived at TheVelvetZebra.com

In the coming week(s) this page will be updated to reflect the new business model my sister and I have adopted. There’s not that much changing besides structure and presentation – we both still make and sell jewelry and I’m still busy writing away, working on the next novel.

What’s changing is our name(s) and how you can navigate through it all. To that, I have my oldest niece to thank.

See, a couple of weeks ago she sent me an email asking for my web pages, for the jewelry and the fiction, and we’d been talking about our blogs earlier … so there I was, typing out this email with the various sites where she could find Fables, Midnight Reading, My Midnight Muse … the jewelry, the blog, the Lulu site for paperbacks, the Smashwords page for eBooks … and I realized not only are there way too many odd-ball sites to direct her too, the names made it sound as if I write fantasy romance or something.

It was – in a word – embarassing. (Please note, I don’t mean to suggest writing Fantasy Romance is a bad thing, it’s just not MY thing)

Sure, there was a reason I ended up being called Midnight Muse that has NOTHING to do with what I write – but that was a long time ago and it’s a boring story. Ten or so years ago, my sister and I started a jewelry business, selling at art shows and online, and we named our business Fable’s (apostrophe is on purpose) but while we were able to get a business license under that name, naturally we were never able to get the web domain. Plus, we realized later, any web site named after Fable would seem like anyting BUT a jewelry business.

I had even tried, and failed, to register my own name as a domain – – seems my name isn’t all that unique (!)

We had already been thinking we had too many odd names for our sites and products, and it was a pain to try and direct people to various places on the internet to find us, so when it got so awkward telling my own niece what our sites were called, I realized it was time.

So my sister and I put our heads together and gave it a long, hard think. And it took some time. It’s really not easy to blend lapidary jewelry, chain mail jewelry, and novels. Plus take into account anything else we might add in the future – – since we’re constantly experimenting with stones and agates, making things like Agate nightlights, beach rock mosaics, etc. We didn’t want something that would be too descriptive and limiting.

Long story short, we took a look at some of our favorite towns in our area, and the names of some of our favorite shops, picturing what it would look like if we had a brick-and-mortar store – the combination of our products, etc. And what we came up with – after serious thought and narrowing down – was The Velvet Zebra. Not only a name we were able to purchase the domain of, but also license as what was formerly Fable’s.

Unfortunately it seems a tad impossible to change the names of some sites we have, without closing them out and starting again – and in some cases that would cause a lot of confusion. Unlike this web site, I can’t just change the name of my Smashwords page, for instance, and have an automatic redirect take place. And we’d thought of that ahead of time – so our solution was The Velvet Zebra.

Here, once I finish some house cleaning and add some fresh paint, you’ll find pages and links to all the other sites. Making Thevelvetzebra.com our hub, if you will. The one place we can direct everyone, where they can find it all. They’ll be directed to other sites, but it’ll all center here.

So now I have some house keeping to attend to – some pages to create, links to make, and a novel that needs to get finished ! I hope you’ll stay tuned, and enjoy the changes.