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Branding and marketing. Ugh! Writing can be an introverts dream, but if you want success you have to be able to deal with both marketing and branding. What is the difference? Stephen King has a brand. You know what to expect when you see a title with his name underneath. Marketing is what you do to promote yourself. At Standout Books, has a great post about both. Oh and “bête noire” means something you don’t like doing. I had to look it up.
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Why You Need To Brand Yourself As An Author, And Exactly How To Do It
Branding is the bête noire of the modern author, an often frightening necessity that can mean the difference between worldwide recognition and total obscurity. It’s an aspect of business that has grown more and more important as social media has become the norm, and the days where it was a possible route to success rather than an outright necessity have ended.
If you think that all sounds a bit gloomy, you’re not alone. This is the attitude with which most authors approach their branding and marketing. Cultural norms can take a long time to catch up to economic realities, and many authors long for a time when they didn’t need to deal with the marketing side of publication. It can feel like a difficult job that you shouldn’t have to do, but there is another way to look at it.
Building a brand doesn’t have to be an awful task, in fact it can be an incredibly creative endeavor. Not only that, but it can put you in total control of your financial future. There are a lot of advantages to establishing your own brand, but this is perhaps the most immediate: you become the boss.
How brands work
A brand is more than a mark of quality; it’s a simple, direct expression of the many things customers can expect from a product. Eugene Yiga put it fantastically when he said:
Broadly speaking, a brand is a set of hooks the mind uses to organize its experience of a commercial offering.
These ‘hooks’ are the concepts that customers associate with your brand, and they’re surprisingly varied. Stephen King has one of the strongest, most effective author brands in the world; the hooks on which readers hang his work include ‘high quality’ and ‘horror’, but also include less definable features such as his individual style and the specific feelings readers experience when they engage with his work.
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