by Diane Holmes, Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book

This is the 8th in a series on Author Branding.
Previous articles include:
1. Author Branding vs. an Army of Writers
2. The Author’s Branding Manifesto
3. The Gleam in Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #1)
4. Storytelling Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #2)
5. Yes, Your Book Is Part of Your Brand (part 1) (Brand Building Technique #3)
6. Yes, Your Book Is Part of Your Brand (part 2) (Brand Building Technique #4)
7. Your Author Brand: What Do You Want People To Say Behind Your Back? (Brand Building Technique #5)

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I bet you need a brand example…

A couple weeks ago, I taught a workshop on Author Branding, and I needed an example that all the writers would immediately understand.  Something on the scale of “one example to rule them all.”

In other words, I wanted to find an example that we could hold up and say, “That!  Do that!”

The Old Spice Story

The New Old Spice Guy:  It all started when Old Spice, maker of a men’s deodorant and fragrance since the 1930’s, decided to revitalize its brand.

Over the years, they’d communicated to their brand’s outdoorsy, rugged, male audience by teaming the product with a logo of a sailing ship and often using a crusty, old seafarer as a spokesman.  Hey, it worked at the time.

But now, they needed a new face, a new message, and a new relationships with consumers who didn’t related to crusty old men as sexy.

Enter ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, writers Craig Allen and Eric Kallman, director Tom Kuntz, and hunky actor Isaiah Mustafa.  What happened next is now Popular Culture history.

RESULT: This amazing, innovative re-branding of “how to think about Old Spice,” not only did the trick, it also went viral.

Instantly, America got the brand, was wildly delighted by the creativity of the tongue-in-cheek single take, and told all their friends.

Old Brand = Old, crusty sea captain, who smells of sea breeze and lives a life on his own (extremely dated) terms (lonely).

New Brand = The man you HOPE your man smalls like (looks like, acts like, woos like…).  He’s drop-dead gorgeous, a guy who can do everything with ease.  Plus he has a sly wit, cheeky over-confidence, and good-hearted charm.

He winks at the audience (because they’re in on it) and is clever yet silly in a manly-man way.  He gets the joke that he’s playing on being sexy yet is still sexy.  He’s on your side and wants to help you and your man.  He’s practically noble in his desire to share his secret.  Men want to be him.  Woman want to date him.  He’s the best of all of us.

From here on out, when people talk about Old  Spice, they will forever think of New Old Spice Guy, this amazing monologue, and the jaw-dropping single take of this commercial.

Think of Old Spice, people smile.

That’s Branding.

But that’s only part of the story.

Who is Isaiah Mustafa?

Isaiah Mustafa was relatively new to acting when he took this role.  He wasn’t a household name for most of us.  But Isaiah was smart enough to embrace this role and make it his own.

It started when Isaiah had been given the script and was practicing his lines.

Despite his sharply scripted monologue, the smug, over-the-top attitude of Mustafa’s character wasn’t planned. The day before the shoot, Mustafa called to chat with a pal from his days at Arizona State University, Denver Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer. When Plummer didn’t answer, Mustafa decided to leave a rehearsal of the commercial’s script on his friend’s answering machine.

“I just did it for him, and I did it extra big, and then when I hung up, I thought, ‘Maybe I should try it that way and see if they like it,’ ” Mustafa told the Times.

–People Magazine

He added a piece of himself , his sense of humor, to the ad.

Here are a few a random facts about Isaiah: Continue reading Author Branding: “The Brand Your Brand Could Smell Like.” →

by Diane Holmes, Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book

This is the seventh in a series on Author Branding. Previous articles include:
1. Author Branding vs. an Army of Writers
2. The Author’s Branding Manifesto
3. The Gleam in Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #1)
4. Storytelling Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #2)
5. Yes, Your Book Is Part of Your Brand (part 1) (Brand Building Technique #3)
6. Yes, Your Book Is Part of Your Brand (part 2) (Brand Building Technique #4)

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Your Reputation

When you consider your brand as an author, you’re participating in creating the story of your career and how you interact with your readers.

If you could be in the room with every reader, every time they thought about you and your books, then branding would be easy.  But readers think about you even when you’re not really there.  Such is the magic of the author-reader experience: your words go out into the world on their own.

-Chris Garrett, Work on Your Branding

Simply put, the largest and most important aspect of your brand is your reputation.

Famously, whatever is said about you when you are not in the room….

What do you want people to think about you? What do you want people to say about you?

In this series, we’ve been looking at ways to uncover what you want your brand to be, and how you want your reader to think about you as an author beyond one single book.  You’re starting to come up with ideas, but now you need to look critically at what you’ve identified.

It’s at this point that your brand can really fail to serve you, because while you’ve come up with things that are true, you may not have come up with what you’re actually communicating to your readers or what differentiates you from other authors, other books, and other reading experiences.

So, let’s look at your reputation.

Brand Building Technique #5 – Reputation Assessment

For each of the following groups, ask two questions:

1. What is your reputation right now? (What they say about you and your work when you’re not standing there in front of them.)

2.  What do you want your reputation to be in the future?

• Readers
• Fellow Writers (in your genre and outside your genres, new authors as well as authors you’ve admired for years)
• Industry Pros
• Booksellers and Librarians
• Reviewers
• Media & Speaking Outlets

Do you have as lot of blanks?  That’s important to know.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be pulling together all the Author Branding concepts discussed so far, looking at real Author Brands out there, and testing them to see if they actually work.

One of the biggest questions when it comes to Author Branding is what makes an Author Brand “road worthy” and what causes a brand to fall short?

Here’s a sneak peak at the criteria we’ll be using:

• Original
• Relatable
• Long Term
• Mythic
• Punchy
• Emotional
• Authentic
• Effective
• Strong (able to support the weight of a career and reader interest)
• Able to capture lightning in a bottle

See you then!

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Diane writes two columns for Freelance-Zone: Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

She’s the Founder and Chief Alchemist of Pitch University – “Learn to pitch your book from the AGENTS and EDITORS who make their living at it. Learn. Pitch. Sell.”

by Diane Holmes, Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book

This is the sixth in a series on Author Branding. Previous articles include:
1. Author Branding vs. an Army of Writers
2. The Author’s Branding Manifesto
3. The Gleam in Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #1)
4. Storytelling Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #2)
5. Yes, Your Book Is Part of Your Brand (part 1) (Brand Building Technique #3)

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While YOU are your Author Brand, your book is an essential part of YOU.

In part one, we explored how to link your book to your personality, values, and story. In part two, we’ll look at how you and your reader are linked by a comment delight in genre, character, plot & prose.

Let’s face it, you’re building a brand because of your writing, to support your career.  And it’s a rather unique career, especially for fiction writers.  We write and write and write for the love of it, hoping that someday we can sell what we write.  We tend to love our books fiercely, because it’s just us against the world.

So, today let’s look at that thang we love, because what jazzes us most about our writing can also be part of our Brand.

Brand Building Technique #4: Linking Your Brand to Your Book’s Genre, Character, Plot, and Prose

For each book you’ve written, ask the following questions. (Like last time, omit any book that doesn’t have a plot or topic you’d write today. If it’s not part of your current or future career, it’s not part of your brand.)

Genre:

• When you find yourself talking to someone who loves your genre as much as you do, what do you both agree makes that genre so great?
• What books in your genre do you recommend the most to others?  What are the similarities between those books and your book?
• What drives you nuts about your genre?  How do you address that in your own book?
• What can you point to in your book that is a classic example of your genre?
• What did you do that you’ve never seen done before in your genre?

Continue reading Yes, Your Book Is Part of Your Brand (part 2) →

by Diane Holmes, Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book

This is the Fifth in a series on Author Branding. Previous articles include:
1. Author Branding vs. an Army of Writers
2. The Author’s Branding Manifesto
3. The Gleam in Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #1)
4. Storytelling Your Author Brand (Brand Building Technique #2)

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As we’ve been discussing, a company brand or an author brand is how you put yourself “out there” to another human. It’s all the things people know, feel, think, and experience about you. In fact, when someone defends you to another person, they are defending your BRAND.

What does this mean? It means your book is NOT your brand. Your Logo is NOT your brand. The color scheme on your website is NOT your brand.

Instead, as Roni Loren says, “Your brand should be YOU. Whoever that may be. Your book/genre is only a piece of that package.”

This is a really good talk on brand by Thunder::Tech.

Key Points:

• Brand is a combination of Personality & Values.
• Why is spending time on building your brand important? “You’re not always there to tell your story.”

One of the things that is “there” is your book. It’s not you. It’s not your brand. But it does speak to your brand. It’s a piece of information that generates a reaction from your reader.

So let’s look at how you can use your book to explore your Author Brand.

Brand Building Technique #3: Linking Your Book to Your Personality, Values, and Story

For each book you’ve written, ask the following questions. (Omit any book that doesn’t have a plot or topic you’d write today. If it’s not part of your current or future career, it’s not part of your brand.)

Personality:

• What do readers think they know about your personality from reading this book?
• Think about traits, skills, beliefs, and what they’d be expecting if they saw you in person.
• How do your characters influence other characters?
• Is the message that this is productive or not productive?
• What are the details of the story world & setting?
• The landscape of the character’s life?

Values:

• What do readers think they know about your values from reading this book?
• Look at the themes & issues explored in your book.
• Think about morals, ethics, mottos, and sayings that seem “true” in your book.

Story:

• What can the reader guess about your personal story from reading this book?
• Think about the big events in the book, and also how your characters spend time in their downtime.
• Take a look at the hopes and dreams of your characters.
• What do they consider worthwhile?
• What do they fight against? For?
• How do your characters grow and change?
• What are their passions and interests?
• What are your characters overcoming?
• What do they work hard to achieve?
• What is their greatest regret? Greatest failure?

Jot down answers, then come back through and circle the answers that seem to apply to you.

What you’ve just done is identify the subtle information you’ve been giving the reader about you.  Look at this words.  Circle the ones that you’d like to be part of your brand.  This is key in understanding what you need to reinforce in your brand.

We’ll talk more about this in our next Marketing Zone installment: genre, character, plot & prose. These are the elements that delight both you and your reader. That delight is part 2 of how your book is part of your brand.

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Diane writes two columns for Freelance-Zone: Fiction-Zone: Leaps in Fiction Mastery and Marketing-Zone:Marketing-Zone: Marketing Yourself and Your Book.

She’s the Founder and Chief Alchemist of Pitch University – “Learn to pitch your book from the AGENTS and EDITORS who make their living at it. Learn. Pitch. Sell.”