What’s in a name – how to create your author brand

It sounds remiss – and it was! – but I gave no thought to my author brand when I started out on this journey. I was flat out working out how to write a book back then, without pondering my author brand. And I had no background in marketing. I’d learnt about cognitive biases in corporate governance, but certainly nothing that would help me with an author’s brand.

I’d always been drawn to the works of Margaret Atwood, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury. I’d recently read Azar Nafizi’s ‘Read Dangerously’ about the need to challenge cliches and stereotypes and her call not to seek out books that make us comfortable, but to ‘read dangerously’.

All I wanted to do was write a book that I wanted to read that would make society reconsider the way it thinks about addicts and alcoholics, their thought-lives and the fact that they are sick people getting better, not bad people trying to become good. 

The crime genre had come a long way since truly hardboiled detectives like Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep) and Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon). But the ‘work’ performed on themselves by modern detectives was, at best, cursory. There were heaps of novels in the crime genre dealing with alcoholics, but few dealt with an authentic path to recovery and the freedom that it brought. And that’s okay, it obviously wasn’t the focus of those stories.

Around about the time I was pitching to agents and publishers, I worked out that authors needed to stay in their lane enough so that readers could work out where their book sat on the shelf with other novels, but, at the same time, have a point of differentiation. No mean feat. 

I looked at how other authors who I loved curate their brand. 

Candice Fox - apart from being a shit-hot crime writer from Sydney’s West, her brand is a wrangler of small creatures, recycler and sewer of zany outfits. There were posts of her rescuing ring-tailed possums, tawny frogmouths, busted dolls from the side of the road and wearing awesome licorice- allsorted- pants. Her (almost) daily posts were hilarious and self-deprecating. 

Veronica Lando – used the treacherous and untamed landscape of North Queensland and added a dash of creepy noir vibe to her crime fiction. When she wasn’t writing, she was ‘hiding from [her] kids in a bid to read just one more chapter.’

So, I thought about what I liked to write and had a crack at distilling my brand:

• I write rural noir with feeling, with a strong component of mystery and suspense.

• I try to create flawed and relatable characters, authentic and engaging dialogue (with a heavy dash of the Australian vernacular), and sense of place is important. 

• I explore gritty social issues, like addiction. 

• I have a boundaryless Airedale Terrier, Clem, whose ancestors were bred to hunt otter but can’t stand getting her paws wet.

Around this time, I was getting my website designed, so I made sure that there were lots of images and content that informed my brand - I write crime with feeling: thrillers featuring themes that tap into broader conversations in society, like addiction’—screams from the home page. The palette used on my website had to evoke the Australian bush—rust, ochre, tan, and sage green.  

Then I tried to import aspects of my own rural life into my social media – there are posts of my chickens, me doing my gardening, my husband bringing in enough firewood to prepare us for an apocalyptic event and Clem standing at our fountain reluctant to get her feet wet. You get my drift.

Finally, my book cover was going to be key in establishing the elements of my brand.

Whether authors like it or not they are going to have to grapple with their author brand. It’s a bit like anger - if you don’t do anger, it’ll do you.  Because a large part of the allure of a novel is the intangibles that make up the author’s brand. And an author’s brand is not here to stay. It will change as their writing changes. The thing about a brand is that it has to be authentic. If you’re not a wildlife warrior, who likes crawling through drains to save ring-tailed possums, don’t pretend to be one. Because your readers will soon sniff out a phony.