Should You Have Multiple Brands as a Writer?
Over the past three years, I’ve done a lot of work to develop brands of my own — I have my business brand (Takingdictation) and my faith brand (Faithful on the Clock). But these brands are separate for a reason — topics, audiences, and functions are all different.
Not all writers operate in multiple spheres this way. Some might do just romance, for example. But lots of authors don’t want to be in a box. They enjoy all kinds of writing, and they want to be serious in more than one area.
If this is the case for you, branding can’t be muddled or nebulous. Readers need to understand what they are getting with each brand you have. But you can choose whether to develop all the brands under your real name or develop some of them under pen names.
Developing brands under your true name is usually fine if all you want to do is distinguish categories you’re OK with being known for, the way I do with my business and Christian writing. But creating a brand with a pen name increases the distance between your work and your main identity. That strategy might be advantageous depending on who you are and what you want to write, because audiences tend to deflate imaginative scope and assume that there’s a significant overlap between an author’s real life and what they put on the page — that is, writing is an expression of the writer. For example, an elementary school teacher might not want to be associated with writing gritty murder mysteries.
As long as you are clear about what each brand offers to the audience and you meet readers’ expectations, you can have as many brands as you want as a writer, regardless of whether you use pen names or not. The key is to understand that an increasing number of brands translates to an increasing amount of complexity. It’s a lot of work to keep multiple channels functioning simultaneously, and it requires the ability to mentally track project tasks and marketing efficiently. Present each brand on its own website, or at a minimum, create menu systems on your author site that allow different audiences to easily navigate to the brand they want. Add a new channel only if you’re truly developing a new voice for a new audience.
[Transcript summary]
If you’re doing any kind of serious writing these days, you have probably heard that, like any other professional, you — as a writer — have to create an author brand. But the reason why I want to talk to you today is because I think we really have to be careful as creatives how we approach this idea of branding, the reason being, brands are kind of meant to keep you in a lane. Like, they define you, right? And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But as creatives, we don’t necessarily want to stay in one lane, right? Maybe we want to do some fiction, then we do nonfiction, or we do a certain type of fiction, then we go off and do this other type of fiction, right? So, we don’t necessarily want to limit ourselves, but —
So, that really comes down to, you need to market yourself intelligently. And the advice that I would give there is you can either create multiple brands with — under your name, but make it very clear that they are different brands, or you can say, I — as an author, I’m going to promote this one brand under my name, so that people associate me with that. But then I’m going to have some pen names, and I’m going to build brands around those. So, that’s a good idea, like, because I know a lot of authors, they write topics that don’t necessarily jive with each other, so they don’t want the conflict, so they create pen names to get around that. So, that’s an option for some people.
But just think about how you do that, and just be — realize that you have to be intentional about the branding that you do as a writer. Take care. Everybody. Bye.