As soon as you start talking about your book in the public realm, you are laying the first foundational bricks of your author brand. What is a brand? It’s the image or persona the public forms about you and your offerings based on what it sees, reads, hears, and experiences.
A brand develops organically, with or without intention by the company—or in this case, you, the author. The public will create their own vision of your author brand, pulling in threads from the name, logo and other visuals, product offerings, tone and word choices in your messaging, stories heard from others, and any other cues they receive. You can better control the resulting image they form—the public persona—by ensuring that everything going out to the public feeds what you want them to see and feel. This is called “branding.”
For authors, your brand is built using a number of elements, including your author name, logo, website, social media presence, book covers, any other images you use, such as for advertising, and your newsletter, to name a few. When you give everything a consistent look, tone, feel, and message, you create a solid, cohesive brand. Readers will eventually be able to take one look at a book cover or ad and know it’s yours.
Research First
To create a solid author brand, start by researching other best-selling authors in your genre for inspiration, paying attention to imagery, colors, and fonts they use in their logos and covers. Also be sure to incorporate your own preferences to show your personal style. You may want to work with a professional branding specialist to design a logo and create a branding guide so you can be consistent in all of your ads and other messaging.
You can research and identify strong author brands by looking at their website or author page on Amazon. Notice how their name appears the same everywhere—same font and treatment (except maybe in their logo), same size and placement on book covers, etc. Study their book covers and the similarities, even across series (and sometimes genres, if they use the same pen name for different genres). There’s likely a certain style to all their covers. It may be that they always have bright colors or muted tones or a watercolor look to them. Their logo, website, ads, newsletter, social media pages, etc., all reflect these similarities, creating that consistent, cohesive image.
*Side note: Book covers should be designed according to genre, and they play a big role in setting the author’s brand. This is one of many reasons one author may have multiple pen names, so that each name has a different brand identity that suits its genre.
Creating Your Powerful Author Brand
So what kind of image do you want the public to form in their mind when they hear your name? Consider your genre as you begin to brainstorm. If you write non-fiction about health or finance, the image you want to conjure will be very different than if you write children’s stories, which would be different from the author who writes sci-fi or erotica. Form the persona in your own mind, then start brainstorming how to create it for the public so that it consistently comes up in others’ minds, too. Consider fonts, colors, an appropriate logo, tone of images as well as words you use in your messaging.
You may want to work with an author branding specialist, who can design your logo for you and give you a branding file with specifics so you can ensure your brand remains consistent in everything you do. If hiring a professional is out of budget for you, research “brand guidelines” or “brand style guide” so you can create your own. Such a guide lists the details of your brand so you can easily reference it anytime you’re creating a new ad or marketing piece and you can easily pass it along to a new website developer or cover designer.
Remember, everything you put out in the public realm about you and your book contributes to your author brand, whether you intend it to or not. The more you do to take control of your public persona, the more consistent and front-of-mind you and your books will become to your target readers.