From BookWorks:
What is an author brand? Take a moment to think of your favorite book. What springs to mind?
If you’re anything like most readers, you’ll think about not only the captivating characters, or the gripping plot, but also the author behind the magic.
Consider some of the bestselling and most-loved authors out there. Stephen King. JK Rowling. Dan Brown. No matter what they write, they are sure to have an eager army of fans ready to buy it.
Why? Simply put, these authors have cultivated solid author brands.
. . . .
The term ‘brand’ in a marketing context originates from the markings manufacturers applied to physical products to differentiate them from their ‘competitors’. The term has since evolved to refer to the psychological impression a product or service has made on customers.
So how does this apply to authors? Think of any two authors, for example, Charles Dickens and JK Rowling. What are the thoughts, feelings, and impressions you have about these writers?
The sum total of these impressions can be thought of as the author brand each writer has cultivated.
. . . .
By taking the time to build your author brand, you benefit in the following ways:
Sharing your authentic personality and motivation with your readers creates a sense of trust
Buyers of your books become fans of you as an artist
You differentiate your work from competing works that lack personality and brand
Now that you know what exactly an author brand is, and why it matters, let’s explore the two keys to effective author branding—story and purpose.. . . .
So how do you convey information about yourself as an author in the way which is most likely to interest your readers and turn them to fans?
In the words of Mish Slade –
“It’s your opportunity to connect with readers and make them feel like they know you and *want* to read your work. You just need to make sure the information you include is relevant and will be of genuine interest to them.”
As you can see from the above, it’s vital to know your readers in order to understand the details of your life that will resonate with them. Some other tips for effectively sharing your story with your readers include:
- Matching the tone of the info you share with your work. For example, if you write humor, share funny stories.
- Make it personal. Don’t be dry and only describe your work. Add an insight into your life so readers feel they know you.
- Make sure the info fits with the image of yourself as an author you wish to project
By sharing your story, readers feel connected not only with your work, but with your personal life journey as an author.
Link to the rest at BookWorks
A dead horse isn’t going to come back to life no matter how much you beat it. Especially when it’s being pulled along behind the cart. Tell me if I’m wrong, but trying to brand yourself is a pointless exercise unless you have a good backlist with a big following.
Branding is about repeat sales, mostly.
So, step one is to get *some* sales. And a catalog.
Not something to go crazy over.
But it won’t hurt to be thinking of some of the elements that feed into it from day one. Things like narrative voice, genre focus, trade dress…
There’s lots of ways to succeed but every little bit helps.
Being an Indie writer means occasionally thinking like a publisher. (Three Jaguars-style…)
Branding ? I doubt jk or steve sat down thinking branding. Knowing both of them, I’d say, they, like most other authors, sat down to write the best book they could. Then did it again. And again.
No doubt the sidelines/nick-nack licensers showed up somewhere along the line and ‘branding’ experts with their chaff. But both were already well on their ways by writing compelling stories, and pretty much staying in their lanes. JK wrote a novel and sorry, it is forgettable. Her forte, not brand, is fantasy and the strange. Just my .02
Actually, there are a fair amount of authors who do have strong branding. The strongest being Tom Clancy, who managed to sell his brand as a product all by itself.
The idea is that the author name becomes a strong and reliable indicator of what readers can find in any of their books. A brand no different than “Apple” or “BMW” or “BOSE”.
Most of the big name authors are brands and while they may not have been thinking branding when they started out they did do brand building once they were established.
Grisham = legal thriller
King = horror
Heyer = regency romance
Leonard = crime thriller
In the genres authors tend to focus on specific subgenres and over time readers come to associate a certain flavor of story with their name. That is branding.
Many have evolved their brands by focusing on different subgenres than they started with, like Laurell K. Hamilton who started with generic “tough chick” urban fantasy and drifted to fantasy erotica, or through a very successful series that becomes synonymous with their name/brand despite other efforts. (David Weber has a couple of ongoing fantasy series but it is the Honor Harrington Military SF series that has become his calling card.)
Remember how tradpub received wisdom has long been that authors should not “confuse” readers by jumping genres and that they should use pen names if they want to venture outside their “home” genre.
Rowling? Remember the flap when she release a litfic novel under her ownname? And then used a pen name for mystery? Even after being exposed, she sticks with it to differentiate her efforts. That is branding.
And she’s not the only author to write different genres under different names/brands. Roberts is the best known example today but far from the only one. Her Roberts/JD Robb duality is no different than GM sending out some cars out as Chevys and some as Buicks.
Branding is a useful marketing tool and something worth thinking of for repeat business. As such, it falls more under the publisher side of the Indie business than the creative side but it can be impacted by creative decisions so it’s not a bad idea to keep it in the back of the mind. It doesn’t have to be complicated; it can be as simple as playing to your strengths or chosen audience.
Thanks Felix
Id have to say, that the pubishers/editors/sales dept branded, not the authors. oth were naive as heck for first few books
Branding seems to mean being known. For 1 or 10 somethings. Seems ok. And most authors including julia child and heinen and others as far as I know never had interest in what today is called branding. That would go to the pp who liked to flog book sales i think.
Yes, it is publisher function primarily, a marketing technique. Brand loyalty is a real thing. It kept Sony alive during the last decade, if nothing else. It also lets Apple get away with…issues…like antenna-gate. 😉
But Indies are both writers and publishers.
There is freedom on the Indie path but there are also non-creative issues that need addressing. And branding is something that many Indies ignore. Some on purpose but others…
We’ve recently seen examples of the kinds of problems that come from ignoring or mismanaging the business side of the writing business. It’s not enough to just be a good writer; there has to be at least a modicum of attention paid to the publisher side; accounts receivable, marketing, rights management, and, yes, brand management…
What most people in publishing don’t seem to appreciate is that in the real world brand applies not just to the name, but also a visual image – ie, logo.
In publishing, that should apply to book covers – unique and recognizable to many authors. But instead publishers keep changing book cover art, so only the author name is the brand and the visual element is lost.
PG, Thank you for your blogging. I appreciate it and the time you give to it to make the internet a little brighter and more informative for me. And others. I wanted to say so publicly.
The writer knows different readers than I do. We care about what’s in the book. Mostly the author is in the background. Sure, I don’t avoid finding things out about the writers, but I’d rather keep enjoying their books than find out from interviews, or whatever, that they’re brainless idiots in all other ways. I don’t think JKR became big because people knew much about her, either. I think once she became big, people wanted to know and so she became ‘news’.
“If you’re anything like most readers, you’ll think about not only the captivating characters, or the gripping plot, but also the author behind the magic.”
As a ‘reader’ I care nothing about the author – other than if they wrote what I thought to be a good story I’ll use their name to see if they wrote any more stories I might like.
You want to have a good ‘author brand’? Write good stories. It might even hurt your ‘brand’ if (in my case) the readers found out you’re a crazy old fart farting away on a keyboard and writing nonsense … 😉