First published in The Author (Winter 2025 – vol 136.4)

Let’s talk about your author brand… Wait, come back! I get it. There is perhaps nothing more icky in a writer’s career than hearing this phrase. Often said in a well meaning way, it can’t help but raise the hackles. I write – I make art, even – what has a brand got to do with that? To do with me? And yet. We know the ruthlessly competitive markets we operate in, the ridiculous number of titles published every year, each trying to get noticed by readers who have many other competing attractions for their attention. Perhaps by understanding a little more about what brands are, their powers and their limitations, we can incorporate some of that thinking into how we as writers go about the business side of the business.

My bona fides for what follows: as well as being a poet and critic I have, for 25 years now, pursued a parallel career in branding. I’ve done strategic things and creative things (this is a world where the two are thought to be different) for businesses and organisations you will have heard of, and many you haven’t. Sometimes these have a real-world impact. Like finding a form of words that summarises a CEO’s business plan to their board, investors and employees, and persuades them to implement it. Sometimes these are more esoteric. Like trying to describe why a shape in a logo has been drawn in the way that it has. In my dreams I am creative director extraordinaire Don Draper from Mad Men. In reality, I am Siobhan Sharpe from W1A, the kind of person who says, ‘We’re nailing jelly to the hothouse wall.’ (Not that I have, in a meeting. Yet.)

To understand why brands matter – why so much brainpower and money is lavished upon their creation – we need to take a detour into the guts of modern capitalism, and in particular its dirty secret: most things that are made in the economy are mostly the same as each other.

A car is a car is a car; a box on wheels, more or less elegantly shaped, with some form of power to make it go. A smartphone, whether designed in Cupertino or elsewhere, is simply a shrunken multi-functional computer that now and again projects our voice. Watches, pens, software, even the services you might buy directly from humans (hello accountants and lawyers) – within every sector, the variety of products on offer differ very little in what they functionally provide. They have been commoditised.

So, if you are a maker of a car, or watch, or software, what do you do? You bring in a team of people with my – I was going to say ‘skillset’, but perhaps ‘proclivities’ is a better word – to make and weave stories and myths around your particular object, to persuade customers that it is actually better; a better fit for their lives, their personalities, than AN Other very similar product.

It is always stronger if we can use a truth or two, to base our mythmaking on. If you happen to build cars in Bavaria, have been doing so for a long time, and are known for your precise engineering and technological reliability, well, you’re not like those other manufacturers – you make The Ultimate Driving Machine.

That’s ultimately what a brand is: what you do, and what it might stand for.

You can see why people who make art and literature jibe against a framework of thinking so rooted in industrial capitalism. (Oh I forgot to mention – the notion of ‘brand’ itself comes from the making of a mark with hot iron on a cow or bison’s skin, to demonstrate ownership.) Surely the meaning is inherent within what’s been created, not who is creating it? It’s graspable that a logo, a name stuck to and developed over time, can become some form of asset, worth investing in. But these are inert objects, lacking personality and soul! How can you reduce a human to such a simplistic take on things.

And truthfully, you can’t. But then, if I say ‘Damien Hirst’ to you, you might say ‘dead sheep’ back to me. If say ‘Dan Brown’ to you, you might say ‘thrilling facts’ back to me. ‘If I say ‘John le Carré’ to you, you might say ‘spy novels’ back to me. Congratulations, you’ve just done some brand thinking.

When I really want to wind people in the publishing world up, I’ll sometimes work on a riff that suggests that books are fast-moving consumer goods – think chocolates, soft drinks, washing powder – that no one ever acknowledges in that way, because it would destroy a lot of the polite dialogue that we have around how we write and why we write. But a cold eyed observer looking from the outside of the industry would absolutely recognise the patterns of thinking that go into making a large chunk of our books. The fierce focus on cover design. The obsession with being able to pin down precisely what genre (a posh word for ‘category’) this title can comfortably slot into. Heavens, whether this book is right for a supermarket or not.

In that wider context, it should not be surprising that suppliers into this market – and dear author, that is what you are, a supplier – might be asked to think about brand a little more.

If I was giving this as keynote to an industry conference (hint: I am available), when it came time to proffer some advice on how to build your author brand, my first tip would be: beware anyone who uses the phrase ‘author brand’. They are, more likely than not, trying to sell you something – a workshop, a course – you probably don’t need. If you have reached the happy stage where number 13 in your successful romantasy novel series has come out and found its many readers, perhaps you can more willingly embrace that logic. But for the rest of us, I would suggest decoding and reframing the question, and making it much more simple. To wit, what you are really trying to define is the answer to three questions: What do you do? How do you do it? Why do you do it? My second tip then: answer them in ways that are interesting and unique to you, that no one else can realistically claim or say.

And of course, good answers to those three questions mean you just might be able to break out of the prison that many authors feel they’re in when it comes to writing books in different genres from their previous ones, without having to resort to a pen name (or, as we might call it, a product extension that needs new investment).

For example, rather than saying: ‘I fancied writing a historical novel this time’, what happens if you say, ‘What connects all my writing – the core of my brand – is the attempt to answer how men relate to women. This time I’ve chosen to explore this topic through a historical rather than a contemporary setting’. A sleight of hand perhaps. But you can see how it gives you permission to go into other genres too.

I feel like the Wizard of Oz now. You don’t have to worry about logos or brand strategies, or any other jargon. All you have to focus on is: how do I answer those three questions? I didn’t say they were easy questions to answer. But they are less icky than ‘what is your author brand?’

Note I haven’t said anything about doing anything with or in social media, or any other type of marketing. All of that is, to me, a second order issue. Gaining any form of attention through marketing is hard. It is harder if you haven’t done your definitional work first.

My final tip: do not worry about any of this at all, if you don’t feel this way inclined. It is not a pre-requisite for success, far from it. But: spending some time pondering how to articulate concisely what you do, and what it might stand for is, in my view, valuable. Think of it as the first step in suggesting to readers why they should be interested in your book – why your characters, your argument are distinct from all the others they could read. Or maybe it could be why you’ve written it, or how you’ve written it, your process or your style. Ultimately the task here is to find a point of difference that separates you from other authors.

Because once you’ve done that, you’ve done what all good brands do: found a shorthand that defines why you are doing what you do, and why people should be interested in that. Sometimes dealing with the icky can be useful too.

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