Premium Deep Dive: Author Brands

An “author brand” sounds like a term so salesy and markety that I don’t blame you if it causes a negative physical reaction. I know I’ve rolled my eyes and cringed at similar buzzwords that seem like they have no real place in a creative endeavor like writing.

But, to that thinking, I propose an alternative. An author brand, when done right, is something that can benefit you and your readers.

For you, it can increase sales and get more eyes on all your books while fostering a more engaged readership. For your audience, it can enhance the overall reading experience and help them find their next favorite author.

That’s a win-win if I’ve ever seen one.

In this Deep Dive, we’re going to explore what an author brand is, how to find your own unique author style, and how to tie it all together to create something powerful and cohesive.

To be clear, this isn’t an optional thing if you want to make a career or decent monthly income from your writing. It’s a must-have.

If your goal isn’t to make your authorship a big part of your income, this Deep Dive can still benefit what you’ve made or what you’re going to make, but this is still a commercial aspect to writing, so be prepared to put serious thought into your brand if you opt to go this route.

With that ominous warning, let’s figure out exactly what constitutes an author brand and how we can make it work for us.

P.S. Be sure to grab the FREE resource that goes with this Deep Dive: a downloadable author brand guide.

What is an Author Brand?

One of the most difficult things about building and maintaining your author brand is really understanding what the heck it is in the first place.

To put it as simply as possible, your author brand is how readers perceive you and your writing.

Unfortunately, that’s a really vague, nebulous definition. Let’s dial in a little bit.

Your brand encompasses your unique voice, tone, style, visual identity, and personal values. It includes everything from your writing style and genre to your online presence and how you interact with readers—both online and off.

What makes an author brand unique is that it’s a combination of both a personal and professional brand.

A professional brand focuses on your writing, expertise, and professional persona.

A personal brand reflects your personality and personal interests.

Author brands incorporate all of the above. You’re a professional—in some instances, a business—but you’re also a person readers want to connect with. 

Why Do We Care About Our Author Brand?

I teased this at the start of the article, but let’s establish why we should care about our author brand in the first place and what establishing this identity does for us.

And wow, does it do a lot.

In such a crowded market (millions of books are published every year), a strong, memorable brand helps you stand out from the crowd. That’s great for selling books, but it also makes marketing and promotion efforts all the easier because you have something so distinct backing you.

On top of that, a solid brand lets readers connect with (and latch onto) you. This builds reader loyalty and trust over time, so long as you maintain that carefully crafted image. I think it should go without saying, but readers are far more likely to buy a book from an author they recognize and trust. 

When you make yourself stand out, you make it easier for those loyal readers to share and recommend your work, growing your reader base without a dollar spent in advertising.

And, if sales and fans aren’t enough, effective branding can lead to great opportunities, like book deals, speaking engagements, and collaborations with other authors or other forms of media.

If you’re serious about making a career out of writing, whether full-time or part-time, it should be clear how helpful these benefits are.

So let’s figure out how to make our own author brand.

Understand Your Unique Voice and Style

Remember, an author brand is a combination of personal and professional. We’re going to start with the former, because this is what makes you you.

Something I want you to keep in mind throughout the remainder of this article and as you begin to establish your author brand is that authenticity is more important than anything else.

It will be tempting to look at other authors or content creators who have a distinct, powerful identity and want to copy them. You’ll also feel compelled to present yourself in a particular way to optimize your marketing efforts or present an image you think people will want to see.

When it comes to developing our brands, it will require work and refinement—it doesn’t just come to us overnight. But if you aren’t authentic in how you build your brand, you’re going to burn yourself out, turn off readers, and grow to hate the thing you’re trying to be.

You are you. Your writing is your writing. We’re going to draw out some of those elements that make you unique, but I don’t want you to feel like you need to fabricate things to make your author brand. Let’s leverage who you already are.

Identifying Your Unique Voice

Everybody has a unique voice. It’s a combination of how we talk, act, and feel about things. It’s the jokes we make (or lack thereof) and the tone we use when speaking about particular topics.

When you perfect your voice, readers and fans can identify your writing without knowing it's you who wrote it. It creates that instant connection and familiarity. 

You might already know a bit about your own voice. I tend to approach things with a dry sarcasm but will set it aside when I’m really passionate about something. I can speak quickly when I’m excited and go on tangents about things that (usually) connect at some point to what we were talking about.

Are all of those great for an author brand? Not at face value. But we can take things that are unique about our voice and find ways to make them work for our image.

Here are some ways you can figure out your own unique voice.

Self-Reflection to Discover Your Unique Voice

You might already have a great author voice and not even know it yet. Or, as is the case for most of us, something is already there, waiting to be refined. Here are a few techniques you can use to find your voice.

Write a few pages and analyze

Take some time to write a few pages of a story or an entire (if very brief) short story. Don’t stress too much about planning or getting the technical details right.

Then, look back and identify any messages you’ve inserted, what tone you adopted, and any particular style you use.

Do this a couple times or approach past work with the same analysis. You’ll start to see common elements emerge, guaranteed.

What do you default to?

In addition to reflecting on your writing itself, take some time to think about the elements of writing and reading you gravitate towards. What genres are you obsessed with? Which ones feel natural to write?

What themes have really stuck with you? What types of characters do you love to write or read?

Personally, I love underdog stories, especially when the underdog is sassy. That’s like my bread and butter.

What makes your writing distinct?

I don’t need to define distinct for you, but I want to emphasize that I don’t mean “what do you do that no one else in the world has done before,” because that’s setting you up for failure.

All authors are a product of their environment, and that environment includes things they’ve written. Your style—and your voice—are a Frankenstein’s monster of everything you regularly absorb.

How have you taken those pieces and crafted something distinctly you? What are those elements you’ve brought together?

Tips to Recognize and Cultivate Your Voice

Those are all great ways of reflecting and trying to discover your author voice, but you aren’t alone in this journey. Once you start getting an inkling of your voice, here are some ways you can really dig for gold.

Pay attention to feedback

We all know feedback makes our writing and stories better, but it’s even more useful than that. For our purposes, we can use feedback to help us discover the voice we want to refine.

Specifically, I want you to look for common threads across your feedback of what stands out really well.

Are your sword fights incredible? Are your love triangles a blast? Do you make killer magic systems or write terrifying horror monsters?

Look at things that people are noticing in reviews, beta feedback, editor critiques, and in online discussions. Those are the elements you can leverage the heck out of when creating your brand.

Practice different styles and voices

Now, this may seem counterintuitive when we’re trying to find pieces of your voice, but stick with me.

If you take some time to write in different styles (different perspectives, settings, characters, genres, pacing, description length, etc.) and in different voices (mimicking other authors you love), you won’t come up with your unique style.

However, you will come up with a bunch of vastly different pieces that will all contain threads of your voice. When you look at them, you’ll start to identify your natural inclinations. These are the nuggets of gold you can use.

Keep a journal

Listen, I’m not a journal person. I’ve tried so many times, but it just doesn't work. That said, I know a ton of people who swear by it, so it might work for you.

For our purposes, keeping a journal (on whatever you want) gives you a place to explore your thoughts and ideas without constraints or the worry that people will ever judge you for what you write. 

It doesn’t matter what you write about or how often—I’ll leave that up to you—but your true self can shine through when there’s no filter to write through. That’s about as much of your raw voice as we can get. 

Why Do We Care About Our Voice?

Before we move too much further, I just want to reiterate why finding and refining your voice is so important for your author brand.

Your voice is you. It’s a combination of who you are wrapped up into a neat writing style. Since the best brands are authentic and genuine, understanding and using your voice is a must.

It’s going to impact every single thing you write—from your books to your website—so you need some level of understanding of it.

What happens once we find it, though?

Maintain a Consistent Voice and Style

Once you start refining your voice and understanding who you are as an author, it’s important to use it consistently.

This means being true to who you are, not trying to sound like another author or social media personality you saw get a million likes.

Why? Because this consistency helps you build a recognizable brand and sets reader expectations. It ensures your audience receives a coherent and unified experience now matter where they encounter you.

Most of all, it means they get you. No one wants to follow an author if they get knock-off Margaret Atwood every other month.

If you really want to go all out with this, you can develop a style guide or sheet for your writing—again, novels and everything else—that includes preferred words, phrases, punctuation, and more.

We did a Deep Dive on style sheets, which you can check out here.

And when I say consistency, I mean it. That is the same voice and style across blog posts, social media updates, and newsletters, generally based on what you present in books. 

If you’re up for the task, take a couple hours every few months to review the content you’ve put out to make sure you’re not straying too wildly from your voice.

And, if you’re feeling like some homework to really get a feel for this stuff, check out some of your favorite authors and identify their voices. Look at their books, website, newsletters, blog, and social posts. What elements do they include that tap into the same thing that makes them one of your favorite writers?

Define Your Target Audience

Now that we’ve done the inside work and understand what we need to develop and maintain, the next step of building an author brand is understanding who you’re talking to. This is really the first stage of merging the personal with the professional.

Honestly, if you’re putting in the work to develop an author brand, then you’re pretty serious about writing. This means you should understand your target audience and ideal reader for your writing itself even more than your branding and marketing.

Identify Your Ideal Readers

This starts by figuring out who reads your books (or will want to). You probably think you know who those folks are, but I guarantee you’re either thinking too shallowly or are just off the mark completely—unless you’ve already done this work, of course.

The easiest way to start identifying your audience is to join reader communities and forums (do we really still call them forums?) related to your genre. Hop on some subreddits, hang out in the Story Craft Café or on Goodreads, and find where the regency romance or folk horror readers are spending their free time.

Observe, interact, ask questions, contribute to discussions. Don’t sell yourself, please. You’re here to understand what your readers like and dislike, what they do in their free time. You’re not here to get banned from a group for shamelessly peddling your books.

Take it up a notch and look at some social media analytics (bonus points if you have advertising analytics, but don’t stress if you aren’t there yet). Social media companies make their ridiculous stacks of cash from data, so they have plenty.

Where hanging out in communities and forums can show you reader behavior, social analytics can dial it into who is reading your stuff. Age, ethnicity, sex, location, shared interests, even activity. 

You will likely have a spread of people, but look for commonalities. You might find data that surprises you.

Note: for this to work, you need a business social media account (on a platform of your choice). If you haven’t started growing one already, this is your sign to get started.

Finally, consider leveraging the fans you already have. If you’ve started an email list, include a survey or poll to get to know them more. This can be dangerous, as it can come off as salesy or too commercial, so preface it with some messaging about wanting to understand your best fans more and delivering content they want to see.

In such a survey, you want to gather some demographic information as well as preferences and interests.

Consider Creating Personas

Personas are a marketing tool that are like character profiles of the people you’re hoping will become customers and fans.

Personas can get intense, and they’re more useful for companies with some sort of marketing budget. But, if you really want to tailor your brand to be as effective as possible, it doesn’t hurt to have a loose set of personas in your toolkit.

I’m not going to cover how to make one, since that can take an entire article, but you can learn about crafting personas here.

Tailor Your Content and Messaging to Your Audience

Let’s take all this information you’ve collected and do something with it. Once you understand who your readers are and what they care about, start working that into your brand.

Based on what you’ve learned, start tailoring your branding materials (website, social media, book covers, etc.) so they resonate with your reader. If you’re a really prolific writer, you can even write books specifically for your target audience using current information and trends.

That can be a bit much, but we want to lean into the language and visuals that our readers not only want but expect from an author like us.

Then integrate that into your communication with them so they start thinking, Hey, this author is the kind of person I want to support.

This is why a strong, authentic voice is important: you can adopt new strategies based on information you’ve learned while still staying true to yourself.

For example, if I write paranormal romance and learn my ideal readers are totally over werewolves, I can remove images of full moons and fangs from my social posts and newsletter, replacing it with the things that will be more alluring to them. I can drop talk about shifters in my verbiage, too.

But the whole time I’m still using my voice and being myself; I’m just reinforcing who I am with elements of what they want.

Personal, meet professional.

Create a Compelling Author Bio

Once you figure out that sweet spot of who you are and what readers want from you, it’s time to start thinking about the pieces of an effective author brand. We’re going to start that process with an author bio.

Author bios are short and freakin’ tough to get right. In fact, look forward to a future Deep Dive about writing them for more than what we can get through here.

I want to start with this piece, though, because it is a direct reflection of who you are, one a reader can skim and decide if you’re right for them.

On the surface, an author bio has three primary elements:

1. Credentials like published works, awards, notable reviews, etc.
2. Personal information about who you are and what you enjoy
3. Unique aspects of your writing journey

If you can make a list of items for each of those three elements and combine them into something cohesive, you have a pretty basic author bio that will suffice for the most part.

But we don’t want basic. We aren’t putting this much work into creating a great brand just for basic.

Your bio should use the same kind of voice and style you use for everything else related to your career. If you write gritty, military sci-fi, it wouldn’t make sense for your bio to be bubbly and filled with jokes.

There is a way to make that work in a contrasting sort of way that lets your personality shine through, but that’s only possible if you’ve established and used a voice tuned into your brand (and that contrast then becomes part of your brand).

Let your values shine through, too. While they don’t need to be the focus of your bio, this is one of the most personal pieces of your brand. Let that part show to readers. This helps prove your authenticity, as readers find out what’s important to you (and are more likely to join on if it’s important to them, too).

Develop a Visual Identity

When potential readers come across you—online or in-person—visuals are often the first thing they notice and remember. That’s why “A picture is worth one thousand words” is true (and probably underselling that number) and “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is ignorant of how human brains actually work.

We can leverage this natural inclination by creating a visual identity tied to our author brand.

When I say visual, you probably think about images and pictures. You wouldn’t be wrong, but considering how most reader-author interaction takes place online, we also want to think about colors and fonts.

All of these visual elements can elicit specific emotions and associations with readers, and we can use visuals to immediately match their expectations without them reading a single word (if you did your homework, of course).

Elements of an Author Brand’s Visual Identity

As you read through these elements, consider what they would look like for an author in your favorite genre based on your expectations as a reader. That will help you understand what we’re looking for—and why.

Once you decide on your visual elements, add them to that style sheet so you can always reference it when making new content.

Color Scheme

Colors, by their very nature, elicit emotional reactions from people. The catch is that those reactions aren’t necessarily consistent across cultures or even genres.

Red, for example, can symbolize love, lust, aggression, or, in Chinese culture, prosperity.

For a romance author, red can tap into that steamy nature and get some hearts pounding. For a horror author, red can be a stand-in for blood.

Think about the colors that fit your brand and subgenres. What emotions are you trying to evoke? What colors can do that for you?

Usually, you want to pick one primary color, one secondary color that gets used a bit less, and one tertiary color used for accents here and there (these are different than primary, secondary, and tertiary colors we learned about in school, but instead are referring to the frequency with which you use them).

You also might want to brush up on color theory if, like me, you aren’t an expert.

Images

The images you choose should jive with your voice, reader expectations, and your color scheme. If it doesn’t match with any one of those, it’s going to look out of place in your author brand.

This includes pictures you use and images you create. The former might be used on websites and banners, while the latter are more common on social media.

Fonts

This is a visual element often slept on, but it’s an important part of a cohesive brand.

When choosing fonts to use, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Headers and body text
2. Legibility
3. Style

You’ll want to choose at least two fonts for your brand: one for headers and one for the body text of things you write. These should be different to make them stand out and to help fulfill their purpose (organization and standing out vs. being read over the course of multiple paragraphs).

You also want to choose something that’s easy to read. Papyrus might give you an Ancient Egypt vibe, but no one wants to read a page of that. Furthermore, people with visual disabilities will have a hard time deciphering fonts that go heavy on the swirls and extra (digital) ink.

Finally, you want to choose fonts aligned with your style.

A font in all caps that looks like it was drawn with a crayon might be great for a children’s book author for headings, but it would be really weird on a historical fiction author’s website.

On the other hand, a gothic horror author will want to ensure their font has serifs, since that automatically screams gothic.

Build an Online Presence

Your brand is going to be everywhere you are. It is the representation of you as an author, something that screams, “This is who I am and I think you’ll like me.”

There is nowhere more important than online. Almost all of your fans—at least until you become a NYT bestselling author—will find you through online means. The more cohesive and stronger your brand, the more likely they are to become your next fans.

There are a million different avenues you can pursue online to show yourself off, but your brand should permeate across all of them. For our purposes, I want to highlight two of the best options to build your online presence—you don’t need to do these first, but they are where most people start when putting themselves out there.

Your Author Website

I’m not going to go on for pages and pages about building your author website… because I already have. So many pages, in fact, that the Deep Dive had to be broken up into two parts. You can check out Part One and Part Two at those respective links.

For this article, I’ll give you a quick overview of what you need.

And that starts with a cohesive brand (shocker). All that work you put into developing a voice, visual identity, and understanding your audience must translate to your website. That’s the whole point of building this, after all.

As far as the content of your site, you’re going to want to include:

Homepage - Where most people will land. Include a strong call to action at the top of your homepage.

About page - Let people know more about your author journey, including professional accomplishments and accolades, as well as some personal stories.

Contact page - A way for folks to get in touch. Use a form rather than listing your email to avoid spam bots harassing you. Include links to socials you’re active on.

Blog - Give your readers a peek behind the curtain at your WIP updates, bonus material, and more. This is all about engagement and turning readers into fans.

Books - A list of the things you want people to buy and read and tell their friends about. Organize this page by release or series, and consider dedicating a sales page to each book or set. Your CTA at the top of your website should probably direct folks here (unless you’re focusing specifically on something else).

In addition to the Deep Dives (read them, they’re full of great info for building your site), you can also check out the Premium workshop we put on about creating an author website here.

Your Author Social Media

Social media is an excellent way to not only engage with your audience but get yourself discovered. It’s also a great way to spend way too much time not writing.

I add that second line not just to be sassy but as a bit of a cautionary reminder: you can easily get lost in social media and spend a lot of time throwing your money and time against the wall just trying to see what sticks.

Social media for authors is worth its own Deep Dive (if not multiple). For now, here’s a quick breakdown of the big players for authors.

Facebook

Great for building a community and engaging with readers through posts, groups, and live events.

Groups - Create or join groups related to your genre to connect with readers and other authors. Manage a page dedicated to your author journey and works.

Posts - Share updates and personal stories to keep readers engaged.

Events - Host live Q&A sessions, book launches, and virtual meetups to interact with fans in real-time.

Twitter/X

Ideal for real-time updates, networking with other authors, and engaging in industry conversations.

Tweets - Share short updates and interact with others. Use hashtags to reach a broader audience.

Lists - Create lists of influencers, readers, and industry professionals to stay informed and engage with them while streamlining your timeline.

Chats - Participate in or host Twitter chats to discuss writing, books, and other relevant topics.

Instagram

Perfect for visual storytelling, sharing behind-the-scenes content, and connecting with readers on a more personal level.

Posts - Share photos of your writing process, book covers, and events. Use engaging captions and relevant hashtags to expand your reach.

Stories - Provide quick updates, polls, and sneak peeks. Stories are great for real-time engagement.

Reels - Create short, engaging clips to showcase book trailers, readings, and author life. Reels provide more discoverability than posts.

TikTok

Great for short, engaging videos that can showcase your personality, books, and creative process. TikTok currently (as of July 2024) offers more discoverability than any other platform.

Videos - Create fun and engaging short videos that highlight your books, progress, and day-to-day author life.

Challenges - Participate in or create challenges related to your genre or books to engage with a broader audience.

Duets/stitches - Collaborate with other creators and interact with your fans.

Goodreads

A must for book promotion, connecting with readers, and managing your book listings.

Author profile - Maintain an updated profile with your books, bio, and upcoming releases.

Groups/discussions - Engage with readers through groups and discussion forums.

Reviews - Host giveaways and encourage readers to leave reviews to boost your book’s visibility.

Three Must-Know Social Media Tips for Authors

Before we move on, here are some of the most important things you can read about managing your author social media presence online. Each platform comes with their own rules and best practices, but these three tips are universally applicable.

1. Keep it consistent. At the risk of sounding repetitive, take the brand you’re creating and make sure you maintain it everywhere you post online. That’s where the strength of a brand comes in, after all.

2. Focus on one or two platforms - Choose one or two platforms that seem most appealing to you and focus on those. Trying to capitalize on all of them will spread you too thin and provide diminished returns. And don’t think that just because TikTok is hot right now you must do it. If posting two videos a day sounds soul-sucking, choose something that seems more plausible.

3. Your website is more important - Though social media will get you discovered more, your website is more important in the long-term. Algorithm and public policy changes have and will disrupt social media. Your website is your property and thus not subject to changes outside your control. Make sure you do the basics before you venture into social.

It Takes Time to Develop an Author Brand

I’d love to say that’s all there is to it, but—like many things in life—building and maintaining an author brand is an ongoing process. The more you write, the more you find success with your writing, and the more you understand who you are as an author, the more refined your brand will become.

Treat this as your starting point: take what we discussed in this article and, perhaps for the first time, take a concerted approach to crafting your author brand. Don’t be afraid to update or revisit that brand as you write more,

And you aren’t alone! Not only do you have Deep Dives like this, but Dabble Premium members like you get things like this custom author brand guide (to make this whole thing a little easier) and our own Premium community over at the Story Craft Cafe, where you can find past Deep Dives, workshops, resources, and more.

Now go show us who you are.

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