“Branding,”  not “Brandon,” just so we’re clear. Brand-ING.

We open with the definition of “branding,” talking about what it is, and (just as importantly) what it is not. With that out of the way we forge ahead and talk about author brands, brand messaging, and why any of this really matters. We throw down a few examples, and use them to help the listener arrive at a decent author-branding strategy.

Writing Prompt: Pick your favorite author and in 50 words or less write down what you think their brand is, then compare it on the forums with what others write.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Branding is the sum total of your customers’ perceptions of their interactions with you. You need to point every interaction at your message. Be aware of your brand and decide whether you want to be branded as an author or a series. Be aware of your electronic image as well as your face-to-face interactions.

[Brandon] 15 minutes long cause you’re in a hurry
[Dan] And we’re not that smart.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Rob] And I’m Rob again.
[Howard] Hello, Rob again. We’re happy to have you back. There were a dozen different cans of worms we could have popped open in our last marketing podcast. I think what we’d like to talk about today is branding yourself, specifically for authors. Brandon’s over here chuckling. Every time he hears the word branding, he says…
[Brandon] Me?
[Dan] And let me tell you, that’s gotten old fast.
[Brandon] It’s a running gag. Running gags are good, right?
[Howard] Well, you know what? Running gags are part of my brand, maybe.
[Dan] It’s a myth.
[Howard] That was a real stretch. I’m sorry. I’m not going to do that again.

[Howard] Rob, help us out. When you say branding, what are you talking about?
[Brandon] Save us.
[Rob] Okay, there are two… there are a million definitions of brand and everyone defines it different ways but the two that I think are the most important… one, very simply, a brand is a promise of value. So when a company has a brand like Coke or Apple, you know when you see Coke or Apple, or you see things that have that logo, or you see a commercial for Coke, that it is promising a certain amount of value that you can rely on.
[Howard] If that’s brand, then what’s brand recognition, because now I’m fuzzy?
[Rob] I’m going to ignore that question and jump to the second definition because I think that this will answer that. The second definition…
[Howard] Nope. That’s okay.
[Rob] And this is the more important when you are setting strategy even as authors… well, it’s easier to define by what it isn’t. A brand is not a jingle. A brand is not a slogan. So the brand of Writing Excuses has nothing to do with… well it has something to do with the slogan “15 minutes long cause you’re in a hurry and we’re not that smart.” That is not the brand. A brand is not the cover, a brand is not your name. Instead a brand is…
[Brandon] It’s mine.
[Howard] You know what, that’s a new twist on an old joke, I’ll let that go.
[Rob] A brand exists only in the minds of your consumers and what it is, is that it is the sum total of all of your customers’ perceptions about all the interactions they have with you. And basically what that means is that every perception that they have when they come into contact with your book, your cover, you at a book signing, fan mail that they send to you, your website — interaction with that, your blog… everything…
[Howard] That’s all part of the brand?
[Rob] It all goes together and the sum total of all those perceptions is what your brand is.
[Howard] So logo or the company name are just what? Symbolic triggers of that?
[Rob] Exactly. They’re a tactic to be used in your message. And so if you think about all of the things that you do as an author… so we’ll use you for example. I’m sorry, I pointed at Howard.
[Howard] You pointed at Howard.
[Dan] Nonvisual medium.
[Rob] Okay, so you have your website. You go to Dragon’s Keep and you color and you interact with customers there.
[Brandon] You wear boots.
[Howard] I wear big boots, my glasses have squiggles on the side.
[Rob] Exactly. You participate in forums, you have characters, you have storylines, you have conventions that you go to… all of those things affect how customers perceive you. And so what you need to do…
[Dan] Yeah…
[Rob] like we talked about in the last thing is brand messaging. You need to define exactly what you are trying to convey. And then you need to point every interaction that you have with customers toward that brand message. Every single [garble]
[Brandon] Right now, for most of our listeners, your customers are editors only, really, right now. Or potential customers as you build your website and start to build a following even before you get published. But this is good stuff to practice.
[Dan] This is what we were talking about our website podcast with — be careful what you put online. Because that’s all part of your brand. It’s part of your perception from your audience. So people will read your work and they’ll think one thing and then if they get on your website and see something entirely different, that will confuse them. If they see you in person and get an entirely different message, that will… you’re sending very mixed signals. You’re not on the message.
[Howard] Is there a term for those mixed signals? Is there a marketing term for the problem he’s describing?
[Rob] Basically when your brand is off message — when you are sending a message that is not the message that you want to send.

[Brandon] There is somebody who is very good at doing this before he got published, at least in novel form, was Jay Lake. You guys know Jay Lake?
[Howard] Yeah. Hawaiian shirts. Big guy.
[Brandon] Yeah. Jay Lake really did a good job of branding himself, during the era before he was… he has novels out right now… back then he was publishing short stories, he was doing anthologies, he was going to the conventions… and when you saw Jay Lake, he always was wearing Hawaiian shirts, which was part of his brand but wasn’t his brand. His brand was, “I am a fun guy who writes serious literary science fiction.” And he was able to combine those two things in some very interesting ways. And all of his interactions pointed toward that. When he met people, you got this sort of sense of that. When he would give his readings… he would do readings, he would have a chorus of women who would chant with him. He would… these very avant-garde readings which would have door prizes and people chanting and there’d be parties with these… really like hippies meet beatniks meet… that guy who sang on the beach? Mel Torme? I don’t know. He had this whole big thing going which was really cool and he branded himself.

[Howard] Rob, you’re familiar with your brother’s work? Dan’s work?
[Rob] Unfortunately, I am.
[Howard] Okay. What is Dan’s brand?
[Rob] Oh, that is a very good question. See, the thing is, it’s difficult to come up with something just off the top of my head.
[Howard] Dan, what do you think your brand is?
[Dan] I want to turn this back at Rob. Because as… when we introduced him two weeks ago, we talked about his three novels are a romantic comedy and two political thrillers. So in its branding sense, how does your brand justify those two very disparate genres? What message is that?
[Rob] Well, it actually was a marketing fiasco. What happened, and this is a perfect point, I’m actually glad you brought it up…
[Howard] Did you get the MBA before or after screwing this up?
[Rob] I got the MBA after screwing this up.
[Dan] And it wasn’t difficult.
[Howard] It was [garble].
[Rob] What I write is… I write humor, and even my political thrillers are humor. What happened is I wrote my first one, it’s a romantic comedy, you get the humor. And it all sells very well and that is the brand that I established. I actually, even without knowing the tactics of it, I set this up on my website, it was about humor. And my second book came out, it was a political thriller that had a lot of humor in it. It’s kind of styled after… I was inspired by Hugh Laurie’s The Gun Seller where it is very violent, very action and very serious issues, but at the same time, just tons of humor in there. So I tried to do that with my second book — kind of take that route — and it was just marketed absolutely horribly.
[Brandon] It was marketed as if it were the same book as the first one.
[Rob] The cover of it said, “A hilarious new adventure from the author of On Second Thought” which is the name of my first book. And so people were… it was sold as this is another book exactly like this romantic comedy.
[Howard] Sold as a romantic comedy with guns?
[Rob] and it sold absolutely terribly.
[Brandon] Oh, no, no guns on the cover. It was a cover that looked almost identical to the other one…
[Rob] Except ugly.
[Dan] It was abysmal.
[Rob] It sold terribly. And when my third book came out, we actually had to completely rebrand it. My third book is actually a sequel to the second, but they distanced themselves in the cover, in the promotion, everything about it. They distanced themselves and said, “We want to really play up the political thriller angle of this.”
[Howard] This comes back to what we talked about with Dave Wolverton/David Farland where he was a science fiction writer, no wait is a fantasy writer, no wait he’s a science fiction writer…
[Brandon] And he re-branded himself…
[Howard] And he rebranded himself intentionally with a different name. They let you keep your name?
[Rob] I kept my name. Well, I lost my initial. But I kept my name.
[Howard] That’s… Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks. Two different markets, same author.
[Brandon] People get away with doing different things. Lee Modesitt does not rebrand for his science-fiction and his fantasy. He feels that his science-fiction will sell… the name brand just means great writer is what he’s trying to brand himself as. And he thinks it’s more narrow… or more broad. Some people like Dave think it’s more narrow and he’ll rebrand with a different name. Not everyone does the same why. I think there’s an argument here.
[Dan] And I think that this highlights the need for this very top-down, high-level strategic approach because like Rob said, his brand was there even when he didn’t know how to build a brand, you’re building one anyway. Your interactions with your audience are building a brand whether you like it or not, and so you need to know going in to it what impression you want to give. And if Rob had gone in saying, “my brand is going to be humorous books that are well-written and that involve different kinds of genres,” then that could have incorporated both under the umbrella. But as it was, he built his brand as “this is romantic comedy,” and then nothing else fit.
[Brandon] There’s not been a lot of crossover between my children’s book and my adult books.
[Howard] Crossover among readers?
[Brandon] Among readers. I think it’s this thing. The Alcatraz books have had to rebrand completely. And that works because I’m in a different section of the bookstore there. That hurts me and that helps me. It hurts me because my readers who read my epic fantasy can’t try my comedies, my children’s books.
[Howard] Well, it hurts you because momentum in one genre is not boosting sales in another.
[Brandon] But it also helps me in that it allows me to rebrand. People don’t pass the books in the children shelf and automatically think, “Oh, it’s that guy who writes those other things, obviously he can’t write this.” And so… personally I think it’s hurting me more than it’s helping me, but there is an argument to be said there.

[Rob] One thing before we run out of time that I think we need to hit on is why is any of this important at all? One thing with branding that I think a lot of customers and consumers, all of us included, don’t like to admit but it is proven over and over again scientifically is that we make a lot of decisions not based on logic and anything, but it’s based on perception. As a matter of fact, there was a study released a week ago talking about — and this isn’t related to branding, but it’s the same, it’s related to perception — people are more willing to purchase something if they have held before. And why is that? There’s no logical reason for it, there’s no reason for it. It’s just that they have gained this new perception of the thing by holding it and feeling it. And so when we talk about branding…
[Howard] Especially food.
[Rob] I actually had a branding professor…
[Dan] I’m more likely to purchase food if it hasn’t been held by anyone else.
[Howard] Well, yeah. But if I’ve licked it, it’s mine.
[Rob] I had a branding professor, and this sounds callous and evil, and he said, “I’ll warn you, this is callous and evil but it’s the truth, marketing is brain control.” What you are doing when you are branding yourself, when you are putting out a message, when you’re molding everything toward that message, is you are trying to control everyone’s perceptions of you. It’s no different than if you are going on a date with a girl and you are trying to control her perceptions of you, and trying to make her like you. You do things in such a way that make her think, “Oh, he’s a gentleman, he’s very charming.”
[Howard] I said something similar in the comic years ago, that all conversation is psychological warfare. And I think, Tagon said, “Am I going to enjoy conversation more or less now?”

[Brandon] These are all good things to be aware of. The more that you understand about the process, the more you understand about what goes on in creating books and in marketing books, I think the better you will be able to handle this all. And you can come up with strategies. A lot of authors, just kind of by accident, allowed their brand to become the series and not the person. Which in some cases is good, in some cases is bad. Some authors — Orson Scott Card is a good example — brand themselves as an author more strongly in many ways than they brand themselves as a series. And when they jump to other things, they get away with it more. Some other authors have a lot of trouble. They brand the character really well, the series really well, and then get locked into it. Some people, they don’t care, they love that, that they get locked into it. Other people, it drives them crazy that they can’t ever escape this one series that had done very well for them. And so if you as an author are someone who thinks you want to write a lot of disparate sorts of things, be aware of this and brand yourself as an author rather than as a series.
[Howard] Yeah, I may have trouble down the road if I decide to write something that isn’t Schlock Mercenary because right now my name and my product are synonymous.
[Brandon] You’re branded as that.
[Howard] In fact, Wikipedia proves it. If you do a search on Howard Tayler, it drops you right into the Schlock Mercenary entry.
[Brandon] I actually intentionally didn’t write a sequel to Elantris. One of the main reasons I didn’t is… I wasn’t thinking in marketing terms. But as I look at it, that I didn’t want to be branded as this series author.
[Howard] The Elantris guy.
[Brandon] I wanted to be branded as someone who is able to consistently write interesting worlds and magic systems in books that you enjoy reading.
[Dan] Well, and… I’m running into that problem right now is I start to work on other projects. I’ve finished the first trilogy that I sold…
[Howard] We’re coming back to that question, what is your brand, Dan?
[Dan] Yeah, and I’ve got other various editors that I’ve talked to, other editors that we pitched the first series to, and they all want more serial killer books from me, and I don’t want to be the serial killer guy. I would like to have a wider thing than that. So it’s a dangerous line to walk.
[Unclear] Not the serial killer guy.
[Dan] I would like to be the sometimes serial killer guy… no…
[Howard] Not taking us to a happier place.

[Dan] Let’s point this back at Rob, very quickly. We don’t have a lot of time left. In fact, we don’t… we have 10 seconds left?
[Howard] Go ahead, that’s fine.
[Dan] For aspiring authors, for our audience… that’s primarily new authors trying to break in, to what degree should they be concerned about branding? What should they do right now at this point in their career, branding wise?
[Rob] I think that the biggest thing is, they need to get their name out there, and they need to, even now, as they are looking forward, they don’t even have an agent yet, they need to be controlling whatever their brand is. A statistic from business, but I’m sure that it applies just as well to editors and agents, is that 80% of HR managers before they hire someone will google them. That’s scary, if you think about it. All the stuff that I know is out on the web about me, and I’m even trying to control what’s out there about me.
[Brandon] Editors do it. I can guarantee they do it.
[Rob] So control that perception of you from right now. And even things… anything that will come up in Google…
[Dan] Your Facebook page.
[Howard] I have started wearing nice clothes any time I’m out of the house because I’m sick to death of ugly photographs of me on the Internet. That’s part of the brand.
[Brandon] You’ve actually gone farther than that. You brand yourself wearing specific outfits, looking a specific way, in order to build that sort of visual recognition.
[Howard] And it’s going to take years and I know that.
[Dan] That’s the main take away, I think, for our listeners right now is that it’s gonna take years. We talk about this right now, even though you don’t think it’s gonna matter, and it might not matter for five years…
[Brandon] But it does…
[Dan] But five years from now, you’re going to be really glad that you started thinking about it right now.
[Rob] Well, and one important thing to note, is that there is no right way and wrong way to do this. If you are writing chick lit and humor, then you can totally go ahead and you can blog about American Idol and you can do all this stuff. But if you are trying to brand yourself as like a serious literary author who’s the next John Steinbeck, then totally that’s not the way that you want to go. So there’s no right way or wrong way, there’s no do this, don’t do that, just make sure that you’re on message.

[Howard] Okay. This has been Writing Excuses. We’ve had a great time talking about branding. And I’ve got a good writing prompt. I’ve got a really good writing prompt. Pick your favorite author…
[Brandon] Me.
[Howard] Okay. Take Brandon if he’s your favorite author, and in 50 words or less, write down what you think that author’s brand is. And then compare it on the forums with what other people may perceive about that author.
[Dan] Yeah, this is one we definitely want you to polish on the forums.
[Howard] Have a discussion about that, and let’s see if you guys can figure out branding.
[Brandon] Me? Thanks, guys.
[Howard] Thank you for listening.