For the moment, I’m back among the living. But I’m still going to keep this brief. Here goes: What the hell is up with authorial branding?
Kate’s post about authorial taglines got me thinking about all the advice authors get to “build a brand”. And, certainly, plenty of authors do just that, creating different pseudonyms for different genres, sub-genres or heat-levels. I guess if you write both erotic and non-erotic romance, a different “brand name” is a good way to let your readers know what to expect from your story.
But what do you do when you don’t even know what to expect from your stories?
I write what interests me, and I have the attention span of a gnat. Maybe I’ve already messed this one up. Ember and Like a Thief aren’t very alike–not genre, not heat-level, not POV or tone. People who wanted something like Ember were probably disappointed by Like a Thief.
And when I look at the WsIP on my hard drive, with the exception of Nieves, which is the sequel to Ember, and Split which features characters from Like a Thief, everything else is very dissimilar. 3 sci-fi in 3 completely different futures (okay, two and a half) and 2 fantasy stories in two completely different worlds. 4 first person narrations. 1 3rd person. 1 scorching erotic, 2 regular romances and 2 that have “romantic elements”. Two of those WsIP don’t even have bad-girl heroines! What the fuck am I thinking?
Anyway, here’s my question: How important is authorial branding. How important is it to get the type of story you expect from an author you know?