Author Branding: Where's the Line?

The latest online bitch&blab re: costumes and professionalism has got me thinking about Marketing. One of the many issues in the torrent is whether or not the self-styled "Rebels of Romance" (www.rebelsofromance.com) are branding themselves in a way that is beneficial to themselves or the genre. Lest I get hit by "defense spam", I'm not judging the authors in question or their approach to marketing. I'm cabbaging this example because it illustrates my point and because, as many of my non-feline readers are fellow authors, marketing is of some interest to us.

I don't want to market. I just want to write some books and get paid for it. I obviously employ, to varying effect, some of the methods an author can use to get her name out there, but I'd rather concentrate on writing and editing instead of selling myself and my fiction. I do acknowledge this may not be possible; hence this blog topic.

Marketing ourselves--the buzzword for which is branding--all starts when we let other industry people know we exist. We hop online, maybe put up a website or blog, participate in some groups, and send query letters to editors and agents, not necessarily in that order. We can be minimalist in the beginning, if we dare, but those query letters are where we really have to consider our image. Do we go for a plain, no-nonsense query and hope for the best, or do we start sculpting who are are as a writer, what our body of fiction currently is or will be, what readership we can expect or think we can capture?

I've read a lot of query-writing advice and I’m not going to hunt any of it down. You're just going to have to take my word for it this is what "people" say :). And they say, "Don't brag, dude." Don't say you (or your fic) is unique. Don't say you're fresh of voice, or wildly comic, or amazing, or better, or, I don't know, rebellious. Certainly never say you're the next So-n-So or you'll be bigger than So-n-So. Maybe your protagonists or plot have unusual characteristics, but branding yourself or your book with superlatives or certain descriptors is dangerous in the event you don't live up to them. Even if you do, it's a fine line.

When the book gets published (let's assume it does), we definitely need a website, if not a blog. We might be interviewed and go to booksignings and conferences and send letters to fans. What should this website have on it? What should it say about us, as writers--how should we brand ourselves? Will that brand work for whatever we take it into our heads to write in the future? How can we maintain that brand in our public "appearances", be they cyber or physical? If we don't have a specific brand, if we're generic or perfunctory, will we hinder our careers? Here's where the issue raised by the Rebels of Romance comes in for me. What can we, as authors, safely claim about OURSELVES and OUR FICTION AS A WHOLE when we attempt this branding stuff?

Can we dub ourselves rebels or our books cutting-edge? Even if we feel it's true and have review quotes to support it, can we claim our books, and by some extension our persons, are wonderful, unique, hilarious, insightful, and so on? Is this convincing to readers and potential readers or does it seem as if we're setting ourselves above other writers--other writers who are less wonderful, less unique, less hilarious, and less insightful? If we don't set ourselves apart, will our books be enough?

Can we brand ourselves without going there or is going there what branding ourselves MEANS?

Thoughts?

JW