Yes, Brand: On Personal Branding, Which is Admittedly Gross, But We Live in a Society (Patreon)

Greetings, Mad Fictioneers! 

Here in Maine it is winter, but don’t make a big thing about it, man. It’s mostly in the 30s and 40s and the snow melts quickly, becoming a venomous sheet of hateful, angry, dare I say possibly racist ice that covers everything with its malevolence. Last year it was so cold half the island went bankrupt paying the fuel oil bills. This year it’s like whatever I guess I can freeze your shit if you really want. 

I AM AN OLD LADY TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER. 

The child, on the other hand, is mostly summer and light, except that this is my first day back to work, so he is PISSED and also CROSS AS HELL. He has recently discovered that he has toes. For most of us, this is old hat and not overly interesting. For him, it is the finale of Game of Thrones.

I thought we might discuss something rather revolting. It’s gross and just the mention of it makes you want to wash, and we all wish it didn’t matter but it does, really, and it matters especially once you’re over the hurdle of a couple of published stories or a book or a painting or an instagram account or a sculpture or a YouTube channel or whatever it is you do that is meaningful. The dreaded personal branding.

LOOK, I KNOW. BARF. We are all authentic artists with souls of rough-hewn burlap and/or mystic gossamer. Commercial concerns do not trouble the pure and unalloyed mettle of our aesthetic vision quest. Base marketing is to us as oil is to water, as rank sewage to the most rarified parfum. 

Yes, well, but we do love to eat, now don’t we? And we do know, deep in the dark corners of our collective hearts, that humans have a vanishingly small attention span that more and more Things are competing to command? And that the chances of a single author getting a slice are dismal on a good day?

So. Let’s talk about personal branding, and afterwards we shall all have a nice bath.

I’m going to go ahead and use myself as a case study, not because I’m a narcissist (though, you know, I am a writer, so ooh look at the pretty lady in the water what’s her name?) but because I know how I blundered into doing it fairly well and I can’t really speak to how affected or not other people’s brands are without getting in trouble with the literary cops, so there’s no one here but me and, well, all those chickens out back, who are really quite good at SEO and forward-facing consumer interaction. Cluck.

The very simplest way to explain the value of personal branding from my own experience is as follows. 

I’ve been at this here gig for about fifteen years. (My first book was published in 2004, which is when I count the start of my career. Obviously I was pitter-patting away at the keyboard for quite a bit before that.) For a very long time now, when you pick up a Catherynne Valente book, you have a pretty good idea what you’re gonna get. FANCY SHIT. STRUCTURAL WHACKAMOLE. MAYBE SOME LAUGHS. MEBBE FAIRY TALE MEBBE NOT. BUT PROBABLY YOUR HEART RIPPED OUT AND THROWN IN A PIT. FANCILY. One of the reasons I was able to scrape together a bit of success in the beginning was that if you wanted what I was serving, there weren’t a lot of other places to get it. 

And boy is it hard to express how different the field was in 2004 than it is now. Every other panel I was on was just explaining what slipstream or New Weird or steampunk or splatterpunk or whateverthefuckpunk even was. Just sitting down and seriously discussing with our ENTIRE SERIOUS FACES how it could possibly be that one might attempt to write science fiction or fantasy in a non-linear, literary, postmodern, or otherwise FANCY fashion that didn’t always—but did sometimes—include an elf, a dwarf, and a human walking into a tavern and how THAT WAS ACTUALLY OKAY DO NOT BE A-FEARED HUMBLE VILLAGERS. Also a lot of panels justifying the choice to retell fairy tales when everyone already did that in the 80s. Listen, we used to have diversity panels where whether or not to include diverse characters was what was up for debate. We used to have entire panels about making sure female characters were vulnerable and we were expected to address that solemnly like it’s a real thing that matters. I have legit been on a panel that aimed to decide whether it was acceptable to swear in high fantasy and YOU GUYS I AM NOT THAT OLD. It was a different world. When Palimpsest was nominated for the Hugo in 2010 it was shocking, because it is queer and it is very very sexual and it is full of fancy sentences and basically its plot is feelings. And Hugo voters got real weird and real mad at me because it was just SITTING THERE on their ballot RUINING LIFE, looking all glittery and gay and naked next to their real science fiction. It would not be seen as a particularly unusual book on the ballot now. Shit has CHANGED, and I don’t even remember the last time I heard anyone use the word slipstream because all the techniques and flair of slipstream is now just part of what science fiction and fantasy does. This is what happens, and I presume will continue to happen. Experimental becomes acceptable becomes mainstream becomes old hat becomes cliche. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

ANYWAY. 

So at the time there were people doing linguistic pyrotechnics and there were people doing fairy tales and there were people doing slipstreamish plot structures and but there weren’t so many doing all of them at once and also EVERY SINGLE FEEL. This was me. It was how I fit in, or didn’t fit in, as the case might have been. I was weird and different (and utterly clueless, I had no idea what I was doing and it all only looks deliberate in retrospect) and while weird and different doesn’t necessarily sell tons of copies, it does find its people, and those people love it especially, which is sort of the root and stock of all geek culture. 

The point is that, very quickly, my name was attached to a Certain Kind Of Thing, and while I always have and always will try to change up what I do with every book because I get bored SO SO easily and decide I hate myself six times before breakfast, the Certain Things I do all cluster around a recognizable shape and this has stood me in quite good stead for a long time. Now, that has dangers, and the dangers are these: a whole lot of people don’t like my Certain Things and so getting them to read a book with my name on it (especially, let’s face it, an obviously girly name with a, I have been told, dumb spelling) can be a challenge bordering on the impossible. And some people who do like them will get upset if I do something out of the box I artisanally made for my custom self. (See: literally whenever a mommy blogger who reads my middle grade books tries to read my adult novels and finds some swears. I guess that panel wasn’t a complete waste of time.) Whoever you are, whatever you make, and whatever your groove, this is the flip side of having a strong brand at all. It can be hard to break out of. It can be hard to break others into.

But the fact is, if your aesthetic has a unity, it’s easier to rise out of the stormy signal-to-noise sea and get recognition. This is especially true if what you do is somewhat, a little or a lot, outside the mainstream. There is an audience for every kind of thing. You gotta find it. It helps if you wear a sign on your chest. 

So how do you unify this aesthetic? Well, your writing style will do some of the work, and that where short stories before novels has value (but is only one method of getting your name out there and if you’re not a short story writer, you don’t have to be, chickens) because you can build a sense of HERE BE WHATEVER SORT OF DRAGONS before that first novel and all its attendant performance anxiety rears up. But it extends to your personal website, social media, sense of style in personal appearances (see Mary Robinette Kowal’s Regency costumes or Althea Kontis’s fairy tale garb. I went to the Space Opera launch in a blue sequin minidress and a galaxy painted on my face. This stuff can be fun—and it can make people feel invested and intrigued and like they’re havin fun with you), anything where you can actualy control what someone else sees of you.

If that sounds like a lot of work you don’t want to do, then don’t do it. Seriously. Just letting your work speak for itself is fine. An aesthetic will arise from the fact that what you care about and how you care to say it will out in anything you write. Squarespace is fine. Jeans and a t-shirt has stood science ficiton in good stead since time immemorial (in con years). 

But I do want to talk about social media, because it’s going to be very hard these days if you want to rock it old-school and be a successful writer with little to no social media presence. It DOES happen. Susanna Clarke comes to mind. But to be blunt, your first book has to be a lot better and a lot more successful right out of the gate (again, harder to do without using social media) to make that a workable model, and your publisher is STILL probably going to ask you to start a Twitter account. 

So, other than your actual work, your social media is your biggest chance to make an impression and shape the face you show to the world. If you want to be seen as a dick, and many do, it’s a valid choice for a certain kind of book, go ahead and be a dick on the internet. Otherwise, hey, maybe start out being careful and considerate of others and not a huge asshole, if it’s not too much of a burden or a violation of your personal artistic ethos. It’s just that most communities are small communities in the end, and their memory is long, and if you’re a dick to someone in the literary world it will come up at some point in the future and you won’t like it because literary people can cut you down with a phrase, it’s literally their job.

Then, not being a total knob in hand, go look at an account like @sketchesbyboze, which is run by an aspiring writer. Now, I would pick up any book by this person no questions asked, because their Twitter is a GLORYHOUSE of unified thought and imagery and I love picking up what they are putting down. They’ve also used this to amass a huge following, which will be helpful when that book eventually does come out. Is this easy? Not in the least. Is it successful? Very. There is a persona behind these tweets, a very specifically crafted one, that seeks to create a kind of feeling in the reader with every little vignette and it’s the same feeling tweet by tweet. That’s what I mean by a unified aesthetic. The emotional and imagistic goal is the same, whatever is specifically being said.

But of course, that account is highly performative and specialized. Most people just want to have a regular old Twitter account where they can talk shit. I KNOW I DO. So, in terms of social media and branding, look. Make it like your books or make it like yourself. (Or both if they are very similar). My Twitter isn’t very much like my books at all except for one thing. I swear more on Twitter, I used gifs and slang and it’s not overly fancy or refined, because I value a space to be sweet or salty as I please. But that one thing is that both my books and myself and therefore my (barf) online brand is NONSTOP XXX BALLS TO THE WALL FEELS. I tell you feelings and I tell them very close to the bone and honestly and it’s just that those feelings come wrapped in fairy and/or spaceship wings in a book and very possibly in yelling at Bill Maher on the internet. It’s the same feelings, the same desperate striving for genuine connection, just with a lot more contractions and less elegant similes. 

Feels may not be your thing! If you think of it like Captain Planet, I’m definitely heart, but you may be fire or earth or water or air. You may want to project a highly intellectual aura or a political one, you may want to be known as controversial or an endless wave of enthusiasm. But it pays to be the one in control of that image, and it pays to think about what will come to mind when a potential reader (or buyer, this is just as true for people making a living selling other kinds of art—and selling art is a business that should be treated as seriously as other small businesses, with the same detail given to what you’re presenting to your audience. It might sound mercenary, but it isn’t. This is you, this is what you’ve made. You should be in control of how it appears and how it’s marketed. Because it will be marketed, either way) sees your name. What do you want them to think about? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to assume is on the next page? Because we are pattern seeking creatures and we make associations. You can’t avoid people associated certain things with you so try to make sure you present the association you want made. 

As an example, after The Orphan’s Tales, I very deliberately positioned Palimpsest to be published next and not Deathless, because I didn’t want to be THE FAIRY TALE GIRL forever, and three books in a row would have done it. I wanted the fancy experimental kid aesthetic. I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into fantasy alone and fairy tales specifically. So I thought about that very carefully instead of deciding that marketing was beneath me as an artist, and avoided an association I would have found hard to break later. On the flip side of that equation, back when Fairyland came out, I wrote a silly little book that didn’t really fit in with everything else I was writing at all. I used a pen name, because I wanted to avoid crossing the streams, and getting my carefully-hoarded literary cred all messed up in goofy off-brand projects. I still think this was the right thing to do. This is why many writers use different names to label different kinds of work they do (like Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire) and I TOTALLY meant to do that but it just…didn’t work out that way, for Reasons. (Had Fairyland not already been published online I think we absolutely would have used a pseudonym for my middle grade work.) I didn’t think far enough ahead. But now, I’ve done enough work and proven myself VERY FANCY INDEED enough times that I am happy to put that painstakingly proven-to-be-taken-seriously name on stuff like Mass Effect, and hopefully use that to pull people who would never see my books otherwise into the FANCY ZONE. My name can survive any genre at this point and that’s so important to me. This is how branding can work up and down your catalogue in order to grow your audience HAD ENOUGH YUCK SPEAK YET?

The point of all this is that you gotta THINK ABOUT THIS SHIT. Write the work first, then you gotta think about this shit. Because if you don’t, a publicist is going to think about it for you, and you may not like their line of thought. Who we are in this world is always partly crafted, and sometimes that crafting is accidental and sometimes it isn’t, but if you want to make a living as an artist, that crafting needs to be in your hands, and it isn’t inauthentic or against the artist’s creed to shape the face you show as deliberately as you shape the work you do. And maybe you, too, can be the experiment that becomes mainstream that becomes old hat. 

It’s what we all aspire to.