Weekly Fiction Workshop

Limitations Of The Author “Brand”

Can writers separate themselves from their “brand” and still sell books?

“Think of an author brand as a bundle of perceptions and expectations that form in readers’ minds over time. A brand is a promise; it’s what readers expect from an author,” — Mark Coker, Publisher’s Weekly

The “author brand” problem is that YOU are the product.

Authors have become their book’s champions to a staggering degree in the past few decades. What was once the publisher’s job to initiate sales and marketing plans is now the author’s first test when looking for someone to accept their book.

“What will be your marketing strategy if we should publish your book? Who is your audience? How big is your online following?”

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you are less likely to score with a big publisher. The hard truth is that no one is going to love and support your book more than you.

Building Your Author Brand

Many authors find this to be their biggest struggle when they want to go full-time or write their first novel. They spend as much time and effort as possible building their “brand,” or the person that everyone sees on social media.

If you’ve ever taken a look through “bookstagram” on Instagram, you might have seen gorgeous image after image of cafe lattes next to a stack of notebooks or beautiful people posed by beautiful views with a novel in their hand. If you’ve ever gone on the #writingcommunity on Twitter, you might follow a few writers who pose a new question to their followers every three hours, keeping them engaged with fans of their work.

Whether you’re the Tweeter or the Bookstagrammer, you are building your brand. You might be an author looking for viewership and sales, or a book review guru looking for free advanced reader copies and affiliate partnerships.

Successful author brands will engage with potential new readers and capture the attention of publishers and agents who think they can make a lot of sales.

If you aren’t already one of those successful brands, then you know that becoming one of them is hard-earned and long-fought, a lifetime of tailoring your online presence to establish yourself as an authority on your craft. That way a publisher will even bother to look at you.

That’s right: you need to present the publisher with a thousands-long list of people that already follow your online musings and are therefore highly likely to buy your book. — Ruby Peru, Rubyperu.com

Tearing Your Author Brand Down

The “author brand” problem is that YOU are the product.

As a freelancer, I know that being my own product means maintaining a level of professionalism while still trying to be true to myself. For authors who have a brand or are looking to build one, this can be a tricky tightrope to walk.

Just think about the normal author who wants to talk about their feelings on political or cultural debates. Or authors who want to go from writing only about romance and instead switch to epic fantasy or thrillers. What about those children’s book authors who decide they want to publish steamy adult fiction?

As soon as we step away from our niche, we are stepping away from our readers' expectations. We are threatening our sales and our audience’s hopes for another novel just like before. So how do we fix it?

Do we all have to come up with fifteen different pennames and then build those new author brands from scratch every time we subvert our reader’s expectations?

Publishers Looking for a Sure Thing

I think the root of this problem comes from the BIG publishers who are always looking for the next NYT Bestseller and rarely just “a great book.”

They want a business partner, not an artist. They don’t care if your book is a solid creation, just if it is a great product. They will always prefer books that are just a large collection of selfies as long as you have millions of online followers.

This means that being a normal person and a niche author will always be a struggle.

Should authors have to build a “romance writer” platform with 50,000+ followers so that a publisher will look at them twice but never give their opinion on political events or write something new?

Even indie authors struggle with this problem. Sure, they don’t need the Big 4 publishing houses to tell them that they are marketable, but they DO have to keep up on their author brand to appeal to readers and new readers. Because if they don’t do the work and maintain their following, who will?

Famous authors can probably say a lot of whatever they like, change up their genre, or branch out into poetry or novellas, so long as it doesn’t completely erase them from the court of public opinion.

But for the average writer looking for a chance, maintaining our image and our follower count is the difference between publication and never making a single sale.

There Should Be A Happy Medium

Readers put a lot of pressure on their favorite authors to provide their specific genre or style of writing.

A thriller writer puts out a poetry collection. Epic fantasy authors take a year off to write a cupcake-themed rom-com. Serious historical fiction writers decide to dabble in werewolf erotica. Who knows?

It shouldn’t matter.

Let’s give an example. Romance readers have come to expect three steamy novels a year by their favorite author X. X delivers for nearly five years — that’s fifteen great steamy books!

Then, X decides to take a break and deliver a gothic fantasy or murder mystery instead. X’s readers’ feathers get ruffled.

They don’t read the new book because it isn’t their preferred genre (which is fair), but they also don’t come back for X’s next romance novel either. In that short amount of time, many have lost interest.

I’m not saying that readers can’t be disappointed or avoid books that aren’t their style. The problem here is that, by making authors into a “product,” it prevents them from ever branching out into something new.

Reader loyalty shouldn’t come from authors putting on a public persona to make book sales. In an ideal world, reader loyalty comes from the quality of your books — not the specific genre or image that you create for yourself.

For those readers and authors who CAN juggle the author brand and their creativity and desire to make new things, I applaud you! I hope you continue to live and grow in a place where you can dabble in whatever you want and still make a living with your passion.

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