Managing Your Brand

This month I wanted to revisit a topic we touched on briefly in an earlier article: Your author brand.

Building your brand is arguably the most important step in becoming a successful author. Developing a well-known brand among your target audience is the first step, but managing it is essential for maintaining audience engagement. Here’s a quick recap of what it means to build a brand:

What do you think of when you see the Coca Cola logo? That’s right, a brown fizzy substance that, apparently, can clean your floor as well as taste great with Jack Daniels. But in author terms, Stephen King is a great example of a brand. He writes horror novels, and he has millions of followers who love his books. When he releases a new title, fans don’t even need to know the name of it, they can simply go into any bookstore and ask for the latest Stephen King novel. And because they’re buying the brand, they know exactly what they’re going to get, a spine-chilling character-driven story with the hallmark injection of horror.

You’ve published your book and you’re well into your marketing campaign, you’ve even started to build a mailing list with your subscribers. So how do you maintain this? And how do you keep your audience involved?

First run your brand like it’s a business. This means register it as an entity (sole trader). The business name can either be under your author name or you might want to create a publishing name, for example, my titles are published under the name Zhu Zhu Press. Once you’ve done that use this name for your registrations such as ISBNs, book databases and library entries, etc. If you create your own publishing entity, make sure it is included on the copyright page of your book.

The next step is deciding what you want to do from there. Some books, such as self-help, motivational and biographies, etc. can be timeless, which means they can be marketed continuously, whereas fiction tends to have a limited shelf life. This is why most fiction writers need to release new titles regularly. This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t continue to market your first book, you just need to be aware that the audience you are aiming to attract are likely voracious readers and will be looking for the next book as soon as they’ve finished the first.

Next month we’ll take a step back and look at your marketing plan.

Until then, keep an eye out for our next newsletter and have a great month.

Write on …
Andy