Unless you are Stephen King, John Grisham or Nora Roberts, as a writer you will have to learn how to market your books. An important part of that is Brand building. Now if you’re like me, business classes are those credits offered while most of us took ethics classes ;-). Actually, they were the classes that made my head hurt and thus they needed to be avoided.
Which is fine for my day job in the laboratory.
But since most writers would like to have a well-padded wallet, we need to keep studying the business end of publishing and branding is part of it. Low and behold, on a day I was feeling adventurous and had lots of aspirin on had, a blurb came across one of my many loops mentioning a book on Brand Building. The book is Market or Die: Sensible Brand Building Advice for Writers by Jennifer Fusco.
Now maybe it’s just me but when the word Die is mentioned, I tend to take note. Clicking on my friend, amazon.com, I pulled up the book. Kindle was cheaper but I don’t have a kindle, so I opted for the print book.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until it finally shipped then arrived. My husband read it first as it was a small book. My husband is not really a reader of books, just magazines, newspapers and news stories on the internet. He said I had homework to do.
Hmmm. Homework? I usually only have that when my children are in school. But, I tucked the book into my bag and took it to work. I read it, thought I understood it, then read it again. Although written in plain English, my brain filtered it through the Businessese language first–looking for logic or sanity without really expecting to find any. Results will vary by reader.
On the second read through, I caught on to most of what she wrote about brand. Then she asked three simple questions. Being that I write horror, scifi/fantasy, and paranormal romance, this posed quite a challenge. Still I worked and worked at it until I arrived at something I thought described all my stories.
Then I tried it on a friend who’s read my work and is brutally honest.
Close, but not quite right.
She gave me a tip that might help you. Compile a list of words that fit those descriptions and then go to a thesaurus for more–somewhere will be the right one for you.
Market or Die is an excellent place to start for authors to understand what a brand is and how you go about creating one for your books. As for spreading your brand, it is sufficiently vague to give you an overview of marketing without getting bogged down in the nuts and bolts, that change pretty much daily as the internet sphere expands into the real world.