The Business Side of Writing: Branding

Writers cannot focus on their writing without thinking about their audience. Unless you are writing solely for the purpose of self-enjoyment, writers must consider the thoughts and feelings of their audience. They do this by shaping the characters, putting them into heart-racing action, and making them fall in love. But writers must also think about how the readers view their brand. Here are some tips that will help you construct a great brand for your writing career.

Focus on Your Qualities

People are always curious to know what makes you, well… you. In life, your strongest points help determine whether someone is interested in you as a friend, significant other and especially a competent coworker. Nearly every interview you will go on in your life you will be asked, “What strengths will you bring to this company?” You better have an answer ready, otherwise your timidness may be confused for weakness.

It’s the same with your own writing career. While we all may think that we are our own bosses because we make our own schedules and use our own ideas for projects, really we are controlled by those that consume our media. They are the ones that need to see our strengths. In a corporate setting, many of your strengths would focus on working as a team and providing a better way to represent someone else brand. In the writing world, you must represent your own brand in order to be successful.

How can you focus on your strengths, especially if you have yet to establish yourself as an expert? While it may be easier to use a good reputation to launch a new project to the public, we all have to start somewhere. The key is not to be boisterous and pretend you have no weaknesses. In fact, sometimes showing that you are susceptible to mistakes is an asset. It provides your readers with authenticity so they can see you as a human, just like them. But that doesn’t mean you should let them focus on all your mistakes. Just make sure your readers see your best and can relate to you.

Branding is a long-term project for writers. Their brand must always be in their mind, even when writer’s block, rewrites, and other issues get in the way.

Concentrate on Your Audience

It is one thing for a writer to have a brand. You’ve planned every detail about what you want to put out as your image and how you want to deliver it to your audience. But have you really put in the effort to understand your audience? Many writers begin a writing career not for others, but for themselves. And unless you can find thousands of people who think exactly like you, your branding efforts could fail unless you consider the diversity of your audience.

The best way to accommodate your audience is to work them into your brand before you even put it out to the public. While not every writer will have time to do market research to figure out their target audience, they can get a small sample feedback from their blog and other social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. This will help you determine what message your brand will send out to those diehard fans as well as the general public who may know nothing about you and your work.

Having a brand that meets the needs of a larger audience from the beginning can help spread the word of a writer’s work before a large amount of effort is put in to advertising.

Communicate Without Words

We all know as writers we see that the best tool in our promotional arsenal is our words. But even the most avid readers may not completely relate to advertising and branding that has a lot of words with little else to tell them what you are all about. Many writers looking at their branding options need to consider all types of advertising including logos, websites, flyers, and yes—your words.

Just because a writer may want to handle all the words themselves does not mean they are necessarily capable of handling the other tools of branding. Unless you are a jack of all trades, it may be wise to let a professional graphic designer or web designer handle those aspects of your brand. Communicating without words is just like it is in the real world—you are communicating everyday without words by the way you dress, the way you act and even the way you speak—no matter how eloquent the words themselves are. As a writer and as a business person, it is extremely important to know your limits. Knowing when to ask for help will benefit you in the future when you have a polished, professional brand to present to your audience.

Shape Your Word-of-Mouth Reputation

Writers know how to say things without really saying them. They can use metaphors to make the common seem spectacular. What a writer can’t always do is control the messages being sent out about their brand. They can try with marketing techniques, but even the best branding strategies cannot control what is being said through word-of-mouth communication. And with the introduction of social media into all personal and business communications online, it is getting tougher to shape any brand’s reputation.

You will also need to remember that social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter can also be your best chance when it comes to molding your brand. Being active with fans on these sites can broaden your outlook on your brand. Knowing what your followers are saying about you can help you fix any problems they may have spotted, address any issues that fans feel uncomfortable with and also have the ability to give you diehard fans something extra for following you and spreading the word about your brand. It will not only show that you care about them, but that you are constantly striving to do your best in order to meet your own goals as well as theirs.

What you will not want to do is get discouraged if you find that there are some negative comments about you and your work out there. You cannot choose for your readers (and potential readers) what opinions they should read, but you can easily use social media and traditional media to address any looming negative images being associated with your brand.

Brand? What Brand?

Sometimes a writer must step out of the promotion role in order to see how a typical branding concept can actually remove some of the originality of your products. What any writer wants to do is stand out from the crowd. The only way to do this with your marketing and branding strategies is to take a good look at what you have. If you see anything that looks like anyone else, throw it to the wayside. That way, you can focus more on getting your message out to readers in a new, exciting way.

If you find yourself in the position where you are simply riding on the current branding trends or just repeating what everyone else is saying, there are ways to return to a more creative, out-of-the-box idea. First, try to uncomplicate your brand. If you are focused on getting a complex identity out into the market, many potential readers may shy away because the brand is boring or too confusing. Don’t restrict yourself into a corner. Instead, think of ways to make your brand flexible and flowing. This doesn’t mean you want to completely forgo structure—it simply means that your brand is easily transformed into something new when the status quo is not working.