by Leslie Lee Sanders
An author’s brand isn’t just the specific colors of your website, a catchy tagline, or a recognizable face. Branding is delivering on a promise after setting an expectation. Determining how you want to be perceived and what sets you apart is essential when organizing an author’s image, but that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to branding. Diving deeper when creating an author brand is a must.
Following is an in-depth look at how to build a successful author brand and become a fierce competitor in the publishing business.
When establishing your image, think beyond color scheme and website layout. Humans are unique for their feeling capabilities, and the way we feel about something usually stays with us longer than any color or image. If applied properly, certain phrases, images, and colors trigger emotions, and this is your main goal when establishing your image. However, you must recognize the emotion you want to convey and how it links people to your brand.
For example, you might want to convey love, calm, excitement, wonder, intrigue, nostalgia, or even hilarity, but deep down the feeling should be universal enough to be relatable.
This is how branding works. A brand effectively engages emotion. Remember the Geico commercial where the massive camel awkwardly strolls through a busy office during the middle of the day asking the workers what day it is? Sure, it is a funny ad, but what is that commercial doing on a deeper level? The commercial is selling a service using a situation most people relate to by making you laugh. Actually, Geico’s history of running funny ads have become their brand, from the gecko, the cavemen, Maxwell the Pig, and now the “Hump Day” camel.
Most people relate to the situation of working a demanding nine-to-five and counting the days until the weekend. Most people are probably familiar with a co-worker who, much like the camel, points out the middle of the week in the same tedious way, prompting tired sighs and eye rolls. The commercial triggers something most people “get” and therefore it sticks with them. This is what your brand should do too.
What you do for your readers through your website, blogs, videos, and podcasts is your “service.” The books and stories you sell is your “product.” How you manage it is your “business.” Connect to your audience using emotion to form your reputation and establish your image.
List the emotions you want others to feel when visiting your website or when reading your books. An easy way to accomplish this is by asking yourself what words you want to associate with your image. Take the third party route, step outside of yourself, and look at what you offer through an objective view. If someone were to describe you and your brand, what words or emotion would you like them to use? Trigger those emotions by using specific words in your content, books, blog posts, and author bio. Use images and colors on your website and book covers to convey your overall message.
Triggering feelings and having them resonate are two different things. The former is what sucks you into the brand. The latter is what you take from it, what you’re left with, or what stays with you. What would you like readers to take away from your book after reading it? After visiting your website, what message will they remember you by? Make your mission clear in your work.
By communicating a promise, and most importantly, delivering on that promise, you establish trust that produces satisfied readers, which not only translates into repeat service from avid fans, but generates new readers through word-of-mouth marketing. People will seek you out because you’ve become the go-to person for your particular service and product. Think Starbucks and coffee. When you’ve become the go-to person, you have successfully built a brand. Your brand’s promise is what your audience comes to expect from your business.
To further expand or maintain your brand requires consistency.
Being consistent falls under the tier of delivering on your promises. There’s a cycle when building a brand; make a promise, deliver, build trust, and repeat. By performing this cycle, you are practicing consistency, which is the reason people come to you instead of your competitor. Take away one of the components and you break the cycle. Break the cycle and your brand might suffer.
You might think to get ahead or to produce sales requires you to beat your competitors, and to be on top means to flaunt what makes you unique. Today, in the writing business, this kind of thinking is retroactive because with so many books and authors flooding the market, being unique is a one in a million chance. The truth is, establishing a brand, building an audience, and keeping your audience satisfied is the trick to success in most businesses. Do this and in return your readers will help you expand your audience by advertising your products and services through recommendations (i.e., word of mouth, social media sharing, and book reviews). This is the tried-and-true formula of every successful brand.
How do you satisfy your audience? Consistency.
Whatever your service, provide it regularly. Readers expect a new book from you once a year? Meet or exceed that expectation and release a new book every year or sooner. If your newsletter subscribers expect a monthly newsletter and your YouTube videos to highlight important writing techniques for novelist, continue giving them what they come for or give them what they want and more.
Sure, you write in a specific genre with no plans of crossing genres anytime soon. Still there are other ways to stay consistent. Do your novels end with happily ever after? Don’t try experimenting with the latest story now. You may lose some readers if they’re convinced their favorite author or series is becoming something other than what they’ve grown to love.
Your voice and style, the words you use, and the way you piece them together in your writing is unique to you and your personality. Your audience will grow familiar with your writing mechanics and may even recognize your style in your speaking voice. Keep it consistent. You may have read a book by an author whose writing style reminded you of another author. For example, you may believe the book you are currently hooked on reads like a Stephen King or J.K. Rowling novel. If you’re consistent, your style can become recognizable and be a distinctive part of your brand too.
Establishing your image, being consistent, and building trust are some of what it takes to build an effective brand. Let’s talk coffee. When mentioning coffee, which establishment do you think of first, Starbucks or McDonalds? Most would say Starbucks. Why? Because Starbucks successfully built their coffeehouse brand.
Starbucks is one of the largest and most successful coffeehouses for many reasons, but one reason is they are consistent with their products, using the same ingredients and measurements to make each coffee the same as the one before. You know exactly how your favorite latte should taste, and they meet that expectation each time. Your brand should build a similar kind of trust with your audience.
When mentioning branding your business, the next thought might be logos. Your logo is not your brand but the visual symbol of your brand. Your logo is a way to identify your brand in its simplest form, a visual representation of your business.
Here are the best ways to use your logo to maximize your brand’s exposure:
Overall, your brand, brand identity, logo, content, message, storytelling, and reader experience is your reputation. Your reputation is built from the general feelings, opinions, and beliefs of the majority of people who encounter your brand. And to be just as successful in your niche as Starbucks is to coffee, remember these steps to building your author brand:
LESLIE LEE SANDERS is a published author with over ten years of fiction writing and book publishing experience. She teaches the art and craft of blogging, writing, and publishing on her blog at leslieleesanders.com. Her work has been included in the following Writer’s Market books: 2016 Writer’s Market, 2016 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market, the 2014 and 2015 editions of Guide to Self-Publishing. She’s currently writing the fifth installment of her post-apocalyptic and dystopian book series, Refuge Inc.