B is for Branding
© Albund | Dreamstime.com – My Metal Brand Glowing Red Hot Front Photo
I’m not too proud to say that when it comes to the whole business of writing, there are things I absolutely understand and other things that leave me scratching my head. Branding is one of those head-scratchers. It’s not that I don’t know what it is or why it’s important, it’s just that sometimes I struggle with how to effectively brand myself and then stick to that brand.
I’ll start by telling you what I know.
Branding is how you package yourself. It’s everything from the look of your book covers and website to the photo you choose to be your author pic. I had a lot of people point out way in the early days of my writing career that I have a great name. Merry Farmer is my actual name too. (Pen names confuse me, but that’s a whole other blog post!) So I took my cue for branding myself from my name. Merry is a nice, happy name full of positive energy. Okay, I can do this. So my brand is positivity and all things happy. Easy enough, right?
Well, it’s easy when it comes to interacting with people online and in the real world. I’m a pretty upbeat person to begin with, so I’ve got that covered. How do I then carry that over to the more visual aspects of my brand? For me, the answer is in light, vibrant colors and rich saturation in the images I use for books.
I have a ton of other friends who employ the same thought process in their visuals. A couple of friends who write more kick-ass sort of books have very kick-ass covers. The ones who focus on traditional romance with strong alpha heroes have lush visuals with strong men on their covers and websites. Once you figure out how you’re going to brand yourself and your writing, it’s easy to come up with visual material that supports that.
Ah, but there’s the rub and one of the things I struggled with for a long time at the beginning of my writing career. How do you know what your brand should be, and how do you go about solidifying that into something that can be tangibly represented in the first place?
It’s an important question and one that bears a lot of thinking about in the early days of a writer’s career. How do you want to be known? What do you want readers to pick up on about you and your writing. Or perhaps the more important question should be, what promises are you making to your readers before they ever pick up one of your books?
I love so many things about the covers Erin Dameron-Hill has designed for me. She really gets my brand!
The best place to start this self-discovery process is with what you write. Different genres carry with them different promises to the reader. Contemporary Romance makes very different promises than Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Sci-Fi. Readers of those genres want to go on a different sort of journey. The basics of genre expectation are a good place to start when figuring out your own brand. If you write those zombie novels, you probably don’t want to include a lot of flowers and recipes for cupcakes in your branding.
In the early days, I spent a lot of time thinking about historical romance (my primary genre) and all of the reasons people read it. Hot guys was an unexpected buzzword that came into my thinking and stayed there. Cool. Easy. I can put hot guys on my covers and post pics of celebs we all love on my Facebook page. But all from a historical angle. So less of the bodybuilding guys and more of the sort who appear in costume dramas for the BBC. Already I’m able to narrow down where my image, my branding, should be headed.
That’s just one example of so many I could talk about. Instead of rehashing everything I’ve done, though, I turn it over to you. What general things define the genre you’re writing in? What specific things set your books apart from that genre? How do you want to present yourself in public, and how can you tie that into what you’re writing?
Once you answer those questions, it all comes down to finding a great designer who can put together visuals that suit your image. Trust me, they’re very good at knowing how to execute a specific style or mood that you’re going for! I personally believe in hiring other people to do this kind of stuff, but you can also do it yourself.
So what are some other branding ideas that you’ve come up with to set yourself apart?
