Week Forty: Building Your Author Brand

I've noticed an odd phenomenon recently. On Amazon, new books have begun to crop up. But not like any books we've seen before. These are pre-orders on books not due out yet.

Nothing strange about that, of course. Books have always been promoted before publication day. What is strange here is that some of these pre-orders, on books from big-name authors, are for books not published for almost another year. Most are going on Amazon with no proper covers, only a glossy publicity shot of the author. A few haven't even got a title yet, they are so early in the process that turns an idea into a published novel.

In the past - and indeed still today - these early books would go live with only a 'placeholder' cover. A grey space with 'cover not yet available' across it.

Now we get these ...

UNTITLED: Jojo Moyes (out Feb 2018)

This says to me that publishers are focused on a new way of selling books. And that new way is based on the idea of the author brand.

Nothing new there either, of course. The idea of the author brand is as old as, well, authors. In the Regency era, polite society eagerly purchased new volumes from Romantic poets like Byron or Shelley because they bought into their 'brand' or personality. It wasn't only about the tortured poet, the romantic soul, but the real person behind that trope, with reports of outrageous behaviour and naughty goings-on to thrill readers and feed the salacious gossip machine ...

But in these days of social media, once again we are talking about authors, rather than books. Books are the product, but authors are the draw for readers, the brand.

That's why we have these covers with the author mug-shot, reminding browsers whose book it is they are buying, putting the manufacturer front and centre, before the product, the book itself.

On social media, we see profile pictures. Pictures of authors. We hear about their day, their cats and dogs, their kids, their cookery disasters and triumphs, their struggle with writing or editing ... We identify with them and turn to their books with an increasing sense of familiarity. Ah yes, there's Jill's new sequel. There's Jojo's new novel. I must get them.

This Could Change Everything: Jill Mansell (25 January 2018)

Putting out books on pre-order as many as nine or ten months before publication is about sales, yes. Let's not be naive. But it's more about increasing long-term sales' potential than any short-term, 'make a quick buck' mentality. It's about the long tail, the backlist, the whole show, not just the headliner act.

And we as authors, particularly as indie authors perhaps, need to emulate that thinking if we want to build a brand around our author name like these publishers are doing. Not just by making all our covers look similar, or writing a series, though these tricks also help to build an author brand. But by building ourselves as the force behind the fiction, by selling the author, not just the book.

Selling an author rather than a title means greater sales overall, because readers will then come for the author regardless of the book on offer.

That's the theory, anyway.

The Image Of You: Adele Parks

But how to achieve this in real terms?

Not being a publisher or a marketing expert, that's not so easy to answer. One way I would suggest is to increase visibilty on social media and elsewhere online, and to be consistent with it. I know this is old hat to most writers now, but I would suggest there's a new emphasis here that we can adopt. To propel readers towards us as people, and as authors, rather than towards one individual title we happen to have released. To adopt an overall author promotion strategy rather than single 'book' campaigns.

I don't always follow that advice very well myself. Although I've published about forty books traditionally - I lost count some time ago - and maybe ninety titles self-published on Amazon now, mostly shorts and novellas, my own career has been very scattered, across various names and brands and genres, none of which have been particularly well-developed in promo terms. (With the exception of my romcom persona, perhaps, Beth Good.)

But some authors do manage very well in building a brand. And I am gradually beginning to see how it could be done better ...

One way, highlighted here with these pre-orders, is to keep your author brand ever-present by putting out pre-orders on books not yet written, or written to a certain extent. This is hard for indie authors, who need a file to upload on Amazon for a pre-order. Not only that, but Amazon don't allow pre-orders to go live more than three months before publication date. Which means we can't put up books for sale a year in advance like one of the big five publishers, for instance. It's not a level playing field in that regard. But it can be done with an unfinished file, three months in advance, which is then replaced nearer publication time with the finished book.

And perhaps you could experiment with one of these author 'New Book Coming Soon! covers, if you're particularly photogenic and have a good, well-lit professional shot to put up there. To heighten awareness of you as the author, as a real person, as a saleable brand.

If you have other ideas to share about how to increase awareness of an author brand, do let us know in the comments below ...

My new thriller, ALL YOUR SECRETS, on pre-order now!

By me: out 2017

Amazon Publishing acquires GIRL NUMBER ONE

I'm utterly thrilled to announce the sale of my self-published debut thriller GIRL NUMBER ONE to Amazon Publishing's crime and thriller imprint, Thomas & Mercer.

GIRL NUMBER ONE: a No. 1 Bestselling Thriller

Some of you will recall the convoluted history of this book, which was rejected last year by well over a dozen publishers. I believed in the book, and wanted to find it a readership, so decided to put the book on the market myself. I did everything on my own: editing, cover, blurb, marketing, and published the book in September 2015 at 99p, under my maiden name Jane Holland.

After a slow start, GIRL NUMBER ONE entered the UK Kindle Top 100, and reached Number 1 in the UK on December 10th.

It stayed in the Number 1 position for five days, when I cannily put the price up to £1.99. It began to drop, but thankfully slowly, and remained in the Top 100 for 84 days. The book has sold coming up to 44,000 paid downloads to date, plus over 4 million reads via Kindle Unlimited.

I was called by an editor from Amazon Publishing back in November, who had read GIRL NUMBER ONE and was very excited about it. Although I had already made some super sales on my own, she felt that teaming up with Amazon would open up new territories for the book, and after some research and discussion with other authors, I had to agree. I was particularly pleased that she wanted to acquire a second thriller from me as well.

I took the offer to my agent, and finally signed the contract last week. GIRL NUMBER ONE will be re-edited and republished with a new cover by Thomas & Mercer later in 2016, keeping all its current reviews. Meanwhile, I will be working on a second psychological thriller for them, which we are currently discussing.

This whole experience has been a real vindication for me of my personal belief in this novel. So if you're out there now, with a rejected novel, and you're unsure whether or not to self-publish, I would say, don't wait for someone else's permission to believe in your book, just go for it. If you go down the same route I did as a self-publisher, you will have little to lose and a great deal to gain.

I've also used this opportunity to make my first-ever podcast, to announce this publishing deal and also discuss my screenplay entry in the Red Planet Prize. Why not check it out? It's only 5 mins long - and I'll be starting a whole series of writing podcasts soon, so you might want to subscribe.

My other novels like MIRANDA are selling well too, on the back of GN1's success

Week Twenty-Two: Criticisms, Mistakes, and Mosquito Stings

HOORAH! I'm off to the Romantic Novelists' Association annual conference in a couple of days. There will be wine, women and, very probably, song. Kitchen parties. Important lectures. Coffee and meal-time networking. Secret deals may be brokered, book ideas suggested, agents and publishers hooked, new writers inspired, and much booze will be drunk.

So don't expect any writerly coherence from me until at least a few days afterwards. You can follow the mayhem on Twitter though if you like: https://twitter.com/janeholland1

Meanwhile, here's a question.

Question: should novelists ignore critical reviews or take them on board if they seem honest (rather than, say, the venom of an anonymous rival)?

Allow me to elaborate on this.

Some writers resent readers who like to broadcast their opinions on social media and blogs or Goodreads. They may consider their feedback to be artistic interference or, even worse, wholly unimportant to them. These are writers who proudly do not read their reviews, and sometimes not even the novels of their peers. They may write in solitude, keeping their writing unpolluted by outside influence.

Other writers see publication as an open exchange of ideas, and embrace feedback, both positive and negative, weeding out responses to find what works best for them - and even changing the way they write at times in response to reviewers.

You can probably guess which side I would pick in a tug-of-war, given the nature of this blog.

However, while thorough and thoughtful reviews, either positive or negative, are always welcome, they are no longer in the majority. As places like Net Galley continue to grow, seeding free novels left, right and centre, inexperienced or hostile bloggers seem to have grown in numbers, and sadly some take free books for granted. They trash new novels without a second thought as to the damage they may be doing to a budding career, or even to an author's psyche. Who cares about such things, eh? Authors get paid, after all, so they deserve a good kicking.  (Erm, they get paid peanuts, in general, dear readers, and sometimes not even that.)

To add to this problem, a vocal minority of bloggers appear to hate authors and everything they stand for, I'm unsure why, but you get that vibe as soon as any unfortunate author is naive enough to announce their identity on Twitter or Goodreads when replying to their conversations about books. 'Live tweeting' books has become part of that trend, nearly always undertaken to crush an author by reading their new book and tweeting instant (nearly always hostile) reactions: 'OMG, I hate this heroine, that scene was totally shit!' and so on.

And even if you are not being given a kicking, but are merely dismissed as incompetent or boring, some critical reviews can be very difficult to swallow. Sometimes they contain nonsense best left by the wayside, like comments about the author's appearance or character, or views which indicate ignorance of the book's subject matter. This happens quite frequently with historicals, for instance, where a blogger decides they know more about an historical period than the writer who spent a year or more researching it. This is often based on the watching of a television series like The Tudors, which contained more errors and historical inaccuracies than you can shake a stick at, but is frequently taken for truth by readers who then complain your book did not contain the same errors!

I have had furious reviewers trounce my Tudor novels for not being respectful enough towards Queen Elizabeth II (sic) or for retreading the boring familiar territory of Henry VII (sic) and his nine wives (sic), and even listened to one expert blogger explain to her friends that she had given my book a lower rating because she had done history at college and I had used twentieth-century names for some of my Tudor characters. One was a medieval name, the other from ancient Greece. Oh dear ...

It can be particularly frustrating when hostile reviews are lauded by other readers and taken as an indication that the writer's research is flawed and/or her books not worth reading. When every new book is struggling for attention in a desperately overcrowded marketplace, and editors look at places like Goodreads and Amazon for signs that an author has a promising career ahead, enough of these uncomplimentary reviews could perhaps depress initial sales and get a writer dumped by her publisher.

So, as writers, should we read our reviews or not? Should we engage readers - as many publishers press us to do - or run like hell for the nearest exit? And do hostile reviews make any difference to our careers?

Having been foolish enough to 'correct' a mistaken reviewer in the past and have my head bitten off by dozens of her outraged friends, I now feel it is best to smile grimly at such mistakes and trashings, and move on. Perhaps even to join the ranks of those writers who disdain the reading of their own reviews and prefer to work in an ivory tower, considering the mosquito stings of blogger critiques as below their attention.

But of course my feet are firmly on the ground. No ivory towers for me, alas.

And there are still plenty of very lovely reviewers out there, doing their best for the writers and books they love. As writers, we have to focus on those people, and thank them for their efforts, and be grateful for what we are given. Otherwise we would very swiftly give up writing books and hide in a dark cave for the rest of our lives.

So I shall continue to muddle along, occasionally reading reviews of my books when I can't avoid it, groaning at the bad 'uns, smiling at the lovely ones, and trying not to be so swayed by all those differing opinions that I can no longer make my own decisions about the books I write.

And now for the gratuitous book plug.

My latest rom com as Beth Good, published five days ago by Thimblerig Books, is THE ODDEST LITTLE BEACH SHOP.

No historical characters, you'll be relieved to hear. Just a sexy ogre for a hero, plus plenty of Cornish pasty and sandy beach scenes, as requested by my friends on Facebook.

Why not enjoy the FREE sample available now on Amazon?