What about Branding?

Once you’re published, you hear a lot these days about “branding,” about getting settled into and known in a single genre. No one talked about branding when I came into the field forty years ago. But then my peers and I almost always started out under the guidance of a single editor, and that editor usually did his or her own shaping of our careers. If you succeeded with your first novel or your first picture book or your first work of nonfiction, your editor was very apt to want more of the...