On your way to work this week, you probably received lots of brand messages without realizing. Maybe you picked up a coffee from a café with an Italian name and branding, maybe you grabbed a healthy snack in green packaging to go with it, or maybe you bought a bottle of water with a crisp, clean Alpine mountain on the side. Even if you take billboards and magazine ads out of the equation, companies have a subtle way of telling you what they want to be known for in their marketing. Big brands spend millions on these clever ways of making you associate their name or product with certain values. Indie authors should be branding themselves in their communications also.
Everyone chooses to show different sides of themselves in different situations. You probably act differently in front of your boss than you do with your best friend. It’s not about being fake, but making a decision about how you want to present yourself to your audience.
Whether you like it or not, all authors have a brand that will be judged by readers, media, and booksellers. Actively positioning and presenting yourself as you wish to be seen is much better than taking a back seat and waiting to see how people label you. It is particularly important if you plan to self-publish more books in the future, as you want to make a good first impression that you can then build on.
It all starts with brand values. What are the things you want readers to turn to you for? How do you want them to see you? This is the foundation of your author brand. Try to write down a few words to describe your brand values. For example, say you know an older female baker who writes cookbooks and wants to be known not only for her recipes and baking skills, but also wants to incorporate a friendly, grandma-like approach to her author brand. Her values might be:
Think about what 5 words or phrases you want readers to associate with you and your books and consider how you could work those into your communications. If you have a friend or family member who has read your work, run through your list with them and see if they agree. You might think you are giving off a certain impression, but people may see you quite differently.
Once you have these core values written down, you need to keep them somewhere you will see them a lot, i.e. on a Post-It note by your computer. The next time you write a social media or blog post, check whether it is aligned with the values you want to be known for. For example, blogging or tweeting about a bad date might be fine if you’re a romance author, but maybe not if you write business books.
It’s not just what you say and how you say it, but also how you present yourself. Some self-published authors fail because their brand does not look professional enough—don’t make that mistake. You want people to start recognizing you, so you should have the same visual look and feel anywhere a reader might come across you/your books, i.e. your website, social media, business cards, book cover, etc. You want to establish congruity from one representation of your author brand to the others. That will probably mean using similar sorts of colors, fonts, etc. If you’re setting up an imprint, you’ll need a logo that reflects these values as well—you wouldn’t want a child-friendly, cartoony logo for a very serious academic book. These things matter.
If we take another look at our grandmotherly cookbook author, we can see how she might put all these things together to give readers a really good idea of what she is about and what we can expect from her brand.
Think seriously about how you want to be seen as an author. Your brand matters and it should be something that you set for yourself.
This chapter was compiled from the following posts on the IngramSpark blog:
“3 Steps to Building Your Author Brand” by Leila Dewji, Co-Founder of I_AM Self-Publishing
