Author Branding (Patreon)

One of the best things being a full-time author has given me is the time and space to think. Not that I wasn’t thinking before, but it was always more harried – things like “what do I absolutely have to do to not drop behind? What’s coming right away that I need to think about? How can I make the next project land?” and so on. It was mostly immediate and short-term thinking.

The place I did get to do deeper thinking was at work – for other people. How to launch other authors’ careers, how to sell their books but also grow their profile while they were partnering with Angry Robot. I had the opportunity to work with a ton of debut authors and inform how their authorial persona took shape as emerging professionals. But I also worked with authors with a few books under their belt and a few writers more than a decade into their career – authors that went to Angry Robot because they were trying to reboot or because they had a cool weird project that wasn’t finding support from their existing publishing partners. When I thought about how to launch a book at AR, I was also thinking about how to launch or re-launch the author – what kind of essays could help feature their interests and knowledge, what types of events or podcasts or social media efforts would fit them best and how that would help reach the audience we were targeting for the book.

It ended up as lot of thinking about author identity/persona, aka an author’s “Brand.” So that’s what I’m going to talk about.

<commercial voice> My Brand! </commercial voice>

Branding has become one of the business buzzwords and I think there are good reasons to be skeptical about focusing on it too much. A good author brand doesn’t mean much if you don’t have good books to sell with it. But my time working on staff for publishers taught me that it’s worth thinking about at least a bit, and some of the reasons why might not be what you think.

Let’s dive in.

After several years working on author branding on strengthening the publisher brand of Angry Robot, I’ve turned more recently to thorough reflection on what *my* author brand is and what I want it to be. If I could go back ten years to speak to 2009 Mike, the advice I give would not lead him down the same publishing path I took.

But barring a time machine usable only for career-scale advice and not for changing massive personal and or political events, it’s better to think about what I can do now and moving forward.
Some of the tools I’ve been using to think about author brand come from a Smarter Artist course by Sterling & Stone called “Clocking Out,” which I’ll be adapting as I talk my through my thoughts about author branding as an example and self-exploration in semi-public.

One cool thing in the class is the “Author Design Document”. It’s part branding document and part art brief, which seems like a weird way of doing things until you realize that Sterling & Stone is a company that builds pen names to share with collaborators – each pen name being a different persona for a different audience/genre. These folks are building those pen names to be like mantles that various writers can put on to write in that name.

That’s not as useful for me being just one writer, so I’m going to take what I find interesting and leave the rest.

As I see it, author branding has several dimensions – how you present to the world in your writing, the audience you seek to earn, and, most importantly, the work you publish under that name. Let’s take those one at a time.

How You Present Yourself 

A few years back, before becoming a co-host, I did an episode of Speculate as a guest alongside Mary Robinette Kowal. I remember the conversation with much more clarity than many podcasts I did in that time because the conversation was so striking. We talked about author identity and curating a specific slice or version of yourself to present to the world – through social media, at in-person events, even in what you do or don’t mention in your biography.

The idea we hit on was that it’s good to be yourself, but you don’t have to present or share *all* of yourself. 

I took this advice with me to share with Angry Robot authors and for myself. 

The things I tend to share online are, thankfully, aligned with the author brand I want to project. An author that works on robotics can bring their professional work and interests into their author brand for a cyberpunk book with ease – it helps grant them a sense of authority based on experience. My background in folklore and gaming fit perfectly with my Ree Reyes urban fantasy novels. I wrote from my own experience in geeky spaces and was able to tap in to ideas about mass commodification of fandom and geekiness as an insider rather than an outsider. Beyond that academic/personal background aspect of a personal brand, I also tried to geek out about my love of pizza and to share what I knew about the publishing industry.

Have I kept to that curated slice of myself since launching Geekomancy in 2012? No, especially not since the 2016 elections. I made a conscious choice to bring progressive activism and futurism into my author brand because I could not tolerate the idea of staying silent on those issues. And it probably cost me some readers or kept some readers at arm’s length (as in they’d keep reading but wouldn’t do more – wouldn’t be champions, wouldn’t back things like this Patreon, etc.). But given that my politics are very solidly baked in to my fiction, I didn’t think the loss would be that great. The chance to speak freely and passionately about what kinds of futures I want has been more than worth it.

As I’ve grown and changed, my priorities have changed, and with it, I’ve modified the slice of my life and perspectives that I share. It’s still not nearly every part of my life, and I try to keep it cohesive and constructive wherever possible.

Your Target Audience

A lot of conventional marketing wisdom says to target specific demographics. Men 18-39, Women 30-59, etc. If you’re trying to sell to everyone, you’re likely to have problems connecting well enough with anyone.

And if your writing fits a neat demographic, then that can be very handy – especially when you’re trying to use advertising systems like those on Facebook.

But what I’ve found is that my audience tend to be clustered by interest rather than by age, gender, race, etc.

A pretty large percentage of my readers are geeky folks that engage with speculative fiction across a variety of media – they read books, love movies, follow comics, etc.

Because different people like different parts of what we’d call geeky media, and because speculative fiction is so ascendant within the media world right now, that means the borders of this audience are really nebulous. Why did the specific fans find and get excited by my work?

For that, I need to dig deeper, and think about the writing and what it says.

The Work Itself

In terms of book releases, I’ve written geeky fun urban fantasy, darker thriller-y urban fantasy, new weird superheroes, political martial arts epic fantasy, political epic fantasy, and a cross-genre ensemble science fiction adventure series. (P.S. I’m about to announce a new project in yet another sub-genre).

If we’re looking at just sub-genres, my publishing history is all over the place. And if I were just self-publishing exclusively on Amazon, that would be a big problem.

But I’ve published with a Big Five digital imprint, with an Amazon imprint, with a start-up imprint within a Big Five house, and with a publisher operating more like a tech start-up than a small press. And I’ve also self-published a series that started with one of those publishers. Put together, that’s a decent spread of publishing models to use across a relatively short career of 6-almost-7-years.
Would I have found more success if I just kept writing slightly different versions of urban fantasy? Hard to say. The Ree Reyes books started very strong but had a sharp drop off after the second book. The Younger Gods - the other urban fantasy novel I wrote - had a very hard time finding an audience. 

There have been times when I’ve beaten myself up for being so “unfocused” in terms of sub-genre.
But genre is only one of many ways to evaluate and classify a work.

Thinking about tone, character, and other craft elements, I see a lot of commonalities in my work. If I had to summarize my writing using my most bullish Sales & Marketing Professional hat, I’d say something like this:

“Underwood writes inclusive, plot-driven adventure fiction that twists familiar tropes and genres with a breezy touch. He features funny, likable characters who excel at their specialties and develop families of choice along the way.”

Those are the commonalities – the pacing, the strong action/adventure plotting and set-pieces, the character interactions, the optimism, the play with genre and tropes. Those elements show up in nearly everything I do, save for when I am specifically trying to avoid them. Not every work delivers as well or as much on all those aspects, but they’re mostly all present to some degree.

Branding strategy

Marketing-wise, this all means that I want to foreground those parts of my writing and try to reach people that are hungry for that kind of story. If I can then refine my understanding to be more specific and targeted in my promotional efforts, all the better.

One of the questions in the Clocking Out material about author brands is “What kind of book can you write faster and better than anyone else?” Their bias as a group is toward self-publishing and rapid publication, so I can re-frame it a bit to include some of the other ideas they talk about – “What can you write better than anyone else and have the most fun doing so?”

Some of my writer friends here in Baltimore have a watch-phrase they use for themselves – “Write your Id.” Write the thing you want to see in the world, write your self-indulgent desire unfiltered by what you think you’re supposed to be writing.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about when it comes to author branding. My current project is very deliberately a stretch for me creatively – I’m pushing farther into my academic training and genre interests than I’ve ever done before and trying to not lean on my action/adventure chops. 

The result? It’s hard. Very hard. And it’s leaving me wanting to start a side project that’s as close to 100% id as possible – the kind of book where I can be cackling with joy at the keyboard the way I have when I’ve been at my most playful as a writer. I want to recapture that joy as much as possible, for a lot of reasons. I think I’ll be more productive if I’m having more fun with at least one of my works-in-progress.

Assuming I can then also figure out how to best package the hard project that has me stretching AND any new “Write Your Id” project and sell them both to my existing audience while trying to reach out to new readers.

But that’s a topic for another essay.

Homework/Exercise

If you want it. I’m not the boss of you. But if you want to apply these ideas for some self-reflection on your writing, here are some questions to ask:

What are the commonalities in your writing?
What thematic ideas or territory do you find yourself coming back to again and again?
What part of writing is most of interest to you – dialogue, action, description, relationships, etc.?
What emotion do you most want people to experience when reading your book?
When are you happiest as a writer? 

And if you already have some people that read your work (beta readers, friends, etc.) and who you trust to be constructive and thoughtful in giving feedback, ask them “How would you describe my writing? What makes a <my name> story for you?”

You can also ask yourself questions about the other parts of branding discussed above, but I didn’t want to make a huge intimidating questionnaire. If you want the huge intimidating questionnaire, let me know. :)

I think most writers are probably going to want to build their plans for author branding around the work itself and then see how the audience outreach/targeting and curated self can fit the work. And if you’re finding that your work is connecting with audience you didn’t expect, maybe these tools and my exploration can help you figure out why and how that work is connecting so you can turn a happy accident into a conscious move as you move forward.

And if this helps you realize something cool or you want to talk it through, please share your thoughts or questions below!

UPDATE: The Sterling & Stone guys have now started a series of podcasts on the actual material they use in their genre therapy sessions, in case that's useful for y'all: https://sterlingandstone.net/podcast/ssp049-know-your-genre-part-1/