Branding isn’t just your website or the colours or fonts you use or what your covers look like, though these things are all part of it. It’s the feeling that your overall work – from your images to your voice to your content – evokes. This depends on readers getting to know you and your work, so social media will play a fairly big part in this (though I’m going to save that for another post), but it also has to do with the expectations that you put out and staying consistent in that, even as you evolve as an author. You don’t want to go from having a serious, intense Gothic romance vibe to a bright and cheerful rom-com voice – that’s whiplash for a reader. This is not to say you can’t switch genres, but there needs to be something linking the two to make things seem consistent and cohesive.
Courtney Milan is an example of someone who knows her brand really well, even though she writes two different time periods (Victorian-era historical romance and contemporary romance). Her visual branding is ON POINT. She has very distinctive covers for her historical romances with the same curling font and always a woman in a big, solid-coloured dress. And if you've read a few Courtney Milan stories, you know that inside, you’ll get a clever, progressive, thoughtful story about making changes in the world. (If you follow Courtney on social media, you’ll see these are the things she’s interested in talking about in the real world as well.) You’ll get the same kind of story in her contemporary romances, appropriate for the time. And while her modern covers look different from her historical covers, they, again, look consistent across her contemporary brand.
A starting point to keep yourself consistent AND establish a recognizable brand is to come up with a tagline that tells your reader in a very concise way who you are and what they can expect when they pick up your book. The more visual side of branding can develop from there later, but first let's figure out what it is that you do that makes your readers want to read a [YOUR NAME HERE] story and how you can give it to them.
What are you giving your readers that’s different from any other author out there? If you’re just starting out, this may be hard to determine at this point (hell, it might be hard to determine after three or four books), but you’re in the process of finding your voice and your brand.
Ask yourself: what words describe you and your books best? What is your work concerned with? What do your readers expect from you? Once you've got a good list of words/phrases, start to narrow down and see how you can combine them in interesting ways to come up with your tagline.
Here are some examples of author taglines:
Dakota Gray – “Happily filthy ever after.” The woman wrote a series called “Filth.” She knows what she’s about. And you know what you’re getting with this tagline: smutty (in the best way) erotic romance.
Alisha Rai – “All the heat, all the heart.” Alisha is known for her emotional, angsty, smoking hot writing, all of which is conveyed here.
Zoe York – “Sexy, small-town romance.” This ain't your typical, traditional, sweet small-town romance. (Zoe knows the branding and self-publishing game through and through, and you should absolutely follow her for insights on that.) She also writes as Ainsley Booth, and the tagline for Ainsley is "Filthy erotic romance." Ainsley writes a series with Sadie Haller called Frisky Beavers, which is erotic romance in a fictional Canadian political scene, and their tagline is "100% Canadian, 100% Filthy." Her tagline game is STRONG.
(I did not intend for "Filthy" to be the defining adjective for so many of my examples! But it's a great word for erotic romance, and it might work for you if that's your sub-genre.)