Hey,

Branding is so confusing for authors, not helped by the mounds of horse hockey online, masquerading as expert guides to the topic.

Even with the advantage of experience, it feels like witnessing one of those bewildering arguments where you eventually realize everyone is talking about different things.

Confusion is perfectly understandable. Today we are going to clear it up.

You’re not here to get a marketing degree, so we will keep the focus on selling more books. And we will discuss things in simplified terms that anyone can understand, with as little jargon as possible.

Warning: we will still have to whizz through some definitions to ensure everyone is on the same page – especially important with the widespread misconceptions about branding which seem to abound.

Don’t worry, though, all this is done with strictly practical applications in mind, i.e. things you can do right now to grow your readership and professionalize your operation.

But… why?

This is a fair question! Why bother? I ask that of everything and it’s especially fair in this case. Here come your branding bullets.

• Branding is essential to capture reader interest beyond the sale. Money is rad but you want more than a one-book stand. Branding helps you get increased sign-ups, more social follows, increases engagement, and turbocharges word of mouth.
• Branding also helps you get that sale in the first place. It makes you look more pro, it makes you look more popular – a force that shouldn’t be dismissed even in the fusty old world of books. And it gives readers confidence you will deliver with the story part too. Who doesn’t judge a book by its cover?

That old cliche is a favored saw of mine because cover design is the tentpole of your book’s branding. It tells readers in two seconds that you understand the niche they love. It shows them your book is exactly what they are looking for.

Reading is an emotional investment as well as a financial or temporal one.

Your brand needs to reassure readers. It needs to say, "you can trust me; I got this. Here’s 350 pages of stuff you like."

It can be that simple.

Translating those concepts into killer graphics can be tricky sometimes, but the underlying principle really is that straightforward.

Bookselling is a confidence game. Your job is to convince readers that you have written exactly the kind of book they like. And a great way to do that is with your branding.

I’m in danger of getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s define more clearly what branding means – in terms any author can understand.

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Branding Defined

If you run a search online, or pick up your dictionary of choice, it will probably go one of two ways. Either you’ll get a vague, unhelpful, and somewhat sterile definition like this:

Which is true, but spectacularly unhelpful.

A modern marketer might define things in a more ephemeral way like:

Or they might be even more esoteric again and say:

I probably hate these latter definitions just as much, although they do capture something of we should take note: branding is an ongoing process rather than a fixed destination.

A trend-chasing marketing consultant might go with something like “branding is the story you tell customers about your products.”

But I don’t think that’s very helpful to, ya know, actual storytellers.

Here’s a definition I like more – not quite as pithy, perhaps, but certainly more useful:

Bingo.

We can work with this. With some tweaks, this translates well for authors:

Makes sense now, doesn’t it?

Now that we understand what branding is, we just need to dispense with one more minor confusion before getting into practicalities.

Brand The Author… Or The Book?

One basic question that comes up a lot is whether authors should be branding themselves, or their books… or their series maybe? The standard response is that all of these things can and should have a brand – as if that’s sufficient information for the average author to expertly assemble these nesting brands like Russian dolls.

I recommend something much simpler: start with the book.

Brand your book, then brand your series when you have multiple books in that series, and then when you have more than one series you can worry about author branding.

Besides, when you only have one book, that basically is your brand. When you only have one series… that essentially is your brand. So, let’s start there.

Translating Your Cover

For the sake of brevity, let’s assume you have a series in a commercial genre (or you are planning to write one).

And we will also take for granted that Book 1 has a good cover, but please don’t skip over that step quickly because everything is going to flow from that book’s cover and if you have any worry at all that it’s not nailed on for your niche, then read my guide to cover design so you can fix that.

Next, you need to translate that cover design into a brand.

What does that mean? Well, remember what branding is:

Our products are books, of course, and because readers’ tastes are so well-defined, we need to convey very specific perceptions – not just positive ones.

Books are not generic products; quite the opposite.

Those perceptions must be about what kind of book it is, and how it will make readers feel.

Because art is a container for feelings, remember?

Drawing all of that together:

We need to create images for social media, newsletters, and ads – derived from, or touching on the same themes as, our book cover. Because that cover design already invokes those feelings in readers (if you have followed everything correctly up to this point).

So that’s all branding is – or all it needs to be for the average author. The graphics you use about the place need to match your book cover and trigger the same emotions.

Do it professionally, the cumulative effect can be very powerful, and help you both sell more books in the immediate sense, and in the longer term sense too as it will help you convert more browsers to buyers, and more purchasers to fans over time.

Collectively, all your graphics, all your branding, needs to communicate the same message, and clearly tell readers that this is the kind of book they love.

Do that, and the book sells itself… once you put it in front of the right readers.

This is the “secret” book marketing formula: the right book, in the right package, presented to the right readers. There’s no more magic to it than that.

Although… you can get some pretty spectacular benefits from nailing your branding, which can feel like magic.

For example, if you get your series branding really dialed in, you are on the way to having a very successful Facebook ad campaign which leads readers to your series page on Amazon.

Or if you just sort the branding for your primary book, your series opener, you should see immediate benefits in terms of better reader response.

Branding is one of those boring or impenetrable or confusing or nebulous things that authors skip over. And then they can’t understand why they aren’t selling more books.

But branding is usually (part of) the answer to that question.

NEXT WEEK: the concrete steps on how to translate that cover design of yours into an actual brand.

One which encompasses your website, social channels, newsletters, Amazon author page, and the back of your books too.

We’re going pro.

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is King Creosete with Pauper's Dough.