Blogger: Janet Grant
Our office is closed for the holidays so we can spend the holidays with our families. This post is from our archives, and is one of our “Best of.” We’ll return with new posts when the office reopens on January 5, 2015. Happy New Year!
I know, I know, some of you have heard about branding so often that your ears flap shut when the word is uttered. But this topic seems to keep popping up, even if it isn’t invited into the conversation.
Is branding a “bad” word? One that you can’t bring yourself to care about? Or is it a word that can help you to breakout of your current status (be that mid-list or trying to break into publishing)? My answer is…it’s both a bad word and a good word.
Recently I was chatting with a woman at a writers conference who is unpublished but makes her living as a marketer. She clearly was savvy about how to position her pr0jects. But the problem was that she had written a romance and a nonfiction book that would appeal to a specific, broad, and easily-located readership. Her question to me was: “Am I shooting myself in the foot by presenting to editors two very different types of writing?”
My answer: “I don’t think so.”
Here’s my reasoning:
While some people are born “branded” and know who their audience is and how to reach it, most writers enter the world of publishing not sure of the direction they should go. I advise those people to knock on all doors to see which one will open. It’s a simple matter of The Open Door Policy. Once you land a contract, you can think about focusing on branding.
Receiving a contract offer means you have put together a project that the publisher believes will find a ready audience, is tightly focused, and that you have the means to help to publicize. It’s a thumb up on all fronts!
This particular conferee had presented her fiction and nonfiction projects to a variety of editors and 100% of the editors requested to see the project. Now, here’s the smart action point the writer took: She only presented one project to each editor rather than talking about both projects.
Why was that smart? Because, if she had presented both, she would have looked as if she were flailing around to grab publishing’s attention anyway she could. She would have looked unbranded.
This writer could, and I believe would, put all of her focus on whichever project ended up with a contract being offered. She had the know-how and the passion to pursue either. That’s the crux of branding; it’s a combo of walking through the door that opens and remaining true to your passion.
Two dangers exist in presenting more than one project at a time:
1. You could find both projects are happily received by different publishing companies. While that sounds great, two giant, golden-egg-laying geese have just landed in your lap. Now you have to write and market two projects, with two different audiences, at two different publishing houses, and figure out how to brand yourself while you’re going in two directions. It’s like starting two businesses simultaneously.
2. You could distract yourself from purposefully branding yourself and becoming known as a certain type of writer to editors. Editors and agents have awfully good memories about what you’ve pitched them in the past. So if you pitch a nonfiction book to an editor one year and a fiction title next year, that editor is likely to remember…and to wonder if you “get” the importance of branding.
I also would advise against having more than two genres you’re working in because it’s very difficult to write middle-grade fiction, adult fiction, and adult nonfiction. Well, it might not be hard to write in several genres, but it’s only the extraordinary person who can effectively market in all of them. Most authors struggle with how to write fast and well and to aggressively market their books and develop a significant platform–all of which are requirements in today’s competitive publishing world.
Now, you tell me, do you think branding is a good word or a bad word? Why?
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I like to read an author who writes books with a similar feel. Bodie and Brock Thoene for example. Loved the WWII books and the Israel books and because they still felt similar I even loved the Ireland books. The books gave me that same thrill and sense of story. So I was all there. Their brand worked. But as a reader, it really bugs me when an author puts a nifty little title after their name. Like: Renaissance Writer or Homesteading Author or Writer who loves Dogs. I know they are doing this at their publicists request to try and solidify their brand in my mind. But it just makes me not want to read what they have to write because I have such a negative reaction to it. I’m not the only one, either. So I like to see writing that will give me the same ride when I read it, but not the nifty little titles. Does that make sense? What does everyone else think?
So rather than help, the tagline makes you cringe?
I’m glad you shared your perspective on this. Not sure how much or if the publisher encourages their authors in this regard.
As a pre-published author, I find that creating a tagline for the style or sub-genre I write has helped me hone in on the future readers I hope to build relationship with. But I also don’t want it to pigeon-hole me either.
I can see how that would help solidify who you are writing for and what is important to your audience. I have tried some of that in my head, wondering what I would put by my name. Who I am actually writing for. But I cringe at the idea of actually doing it. Can anyone make you actually use a tagline. I’m hoping not.
I’d agree that self-descriptive taglines tend to push me away.
The word I’d use to describe the feeling they give me is cloying. It’s an affectation that sets up the writer-specific genre as a stylization.
It may or may not be a fair judgement; Richard Marcinko’s first book was “Rogue Warrior”, a memoir about developing Seal Team 6 (now the Navy’s Special Warfare Development Group). Certainly “Rogue Warrior” emphasized the cowboy reputation that SEALS got in Viet Nam, but it was, on the whole, a balanced account of his experiences.
So his tagline became “The Rogue Warrior”…which is about the worst thing a professional operator can be called, for reasons that should be obvious. He sold a lot of books, but his brand makes some individuals cringe in embarrassment.
But – and this may be important, or even vital – his audience is not his peer group.
That is very interesting Andrew. That his peer group would have a different reaction than his audience and that he knew and accepted that. Very thought out.
Branding’s neither good nor bad. It’s simply a tool that can be useful, or not.
William Butterworth wrote under a number of pseudonyms (13, I think), and each one was a unique brand. “W.E.B. Griffin”, for instance, put out well-researched blood-and-thunder series like “The Brotherhood of War”, which developed almost a cult following.
Butterworth’s “own” brand was nothing like that; he was much more thoughtful and nuanced, and wrote quite a bit of nonfiction.
Personally, I don’t mind being branded as a writer of contemporary romance, and actually work quite hard to establish that. I don’t feel the need to explore different genres.
I just want people to be able to enjoy a good, and hopefully moving story, and then keep the book to someday read again, because they enjoyed being in that setting, and spending time with those characters.
And, if I can write well enough, I hope that they can vicariously enjoy the almost heartbreaking beauty of falling truly in love.
I would gladly accept a brand like that.
Hi Andrew. Looked up your book at Amazon and read the available pages. Pulled me in and I’ve got to read the rest. Congratulations on a good opening.
Does the brand feel like more like a goal or a closet? An opportunity or a prison? Is it the road ahead or hitching post to the past? An affirmation of God’s calling or our own plan for self-promotion?
Cattle are branded with a mark of ownership. May we all be “branded” with God’s mark of ownership.