Your Branding Promise

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is author branding. There is no need to spend a lot of angst on this. Branding yourself as an author is simple, once you know the answers to two questions… 

Who Is Your Target Audience?

The first question to ask yourself is: Who is your Target Audience? 

Let’s define our terms first. Your Target Audience is the set of all people in the world who would love your book, if only they knew it existed. This is usually much less than 1% of the world population. It’s often much less than the population of the country you live in. And that’s OK. I live in the US, which has a population of almost 350 million. 1% of that is 3.5 million. 

And that’s plenty. My Target Audience for this blog is the set of people who want to write a novel. These are very special people. I’ve always estimated that only about one person in a thousand is really serious about learning to write a novel. That is more than a third of a million people in the US. And many more outside the US.

If you work with a traditional publisher, they’ll often send you a questionnaire about your Target Audience, asking “demographic” questions like “What is the age of your ideal reader? What is their sex? What is their annual income?” I take a jaundiced eye toward these questions. They’re relevant for a few kinds of fiction and useless for most. 

I prefer “psychographic” questions such as “What does your ideal reader secretly dream of doing, if they had the time, energy, and money? Who would your ideal reader want to have dinner with, if they could choose 5 guests from any period of time?” These questions tell you how your ideal reader’s brain works. 

Once you know who your Target Audience is, there’s only one other question to ask…

What Would Delight Your Target Audience?

You have only one job as a writer—to delight people in your Target Audience. If you do that, you’ve won the game of fiction writing. If you don’t do that, you need to rethink and retry. There’s no shame in missing the mark. Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We all have to keep improving. But once you start hitting close to the mark, your life changes. Amazingly. 

So what experience can you give your ideal reader that would delight them? Only you can answer that question. And you’ll probably be getting better and better answers to that question for your whole writing life. Finding good answers to that question is the secret to branding. It’s the whole secret. There isn’t anything else.

Constructing Your Branding Promise

When you’ve figured out what your Target Audience wants and you’ve settled on an experience you can give them, it’s time to make a Branding Promise. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

I’ll use my own work as an example, so I don’t have to guess. I respect and admire many authors, but I don’t know exactly what thought processes they went through to figure out their Target Audience or their Branding Promise. Whereas I do know mine. 

For my Advanced Fiction Writing website and (forthcoming) Substack, my Target Audience is “Everyone who dreams of writing a novel someday and successfully publishing it.” There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US who are in this Target Audience. But there are hundreds of millions of people in the US are aren’t. 

My Branding Promise for Advanced Fiction Writing is this: “I will teach you to write an excellent novel.” This appeals to people in my Target Audience, and it drives away people who aren’t. If people who aren’t in my Target Audience accidentally come to my website, I want to let them know right away that this is not the place for them. But if they are in my Target Audience, I want them to stay. 

For my fiction, my Target Audience is “Everyone who would take a vacation in ancient Jerusalem.” This is not a huge Target Audience, but I’m in it. I’d go on that vacation. I’d love every minute of it. The closest I’ve come to this impossible vacation is the four times I’ve worked on archaeological digs in Jerusalem.

My Branding Promise for readers of my fiction is this: “I will take you on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” I’m well aware that not everyone wants to go on my adventure. That’s fine. Other authors can take them on other adventures. But for those who want to go to ancient Jerusalem, my aspiration is to be the best person on the planet who could take them there. (A high bar, yes, and I hope someday to reach it. You jump higher when you try for something difficult.) 

Constructing Your Branding Promise

Once you know your Branding Promise, it tells you how to market yourself, forever. Everything you do marketing-wise—your website, your email newsletter, your blog, your Substack, your TikTok, your Instagram, your FaceBook, your whatever—should make your Branding Promise crystal clear. 

You can make your Branding Promise explicit or implicit. Neither way is always right or always wrong. The only important thing is that you must know what it is. That will guide your art, your layout, your presentation, your message, your everything. 

Your Branding Promise gives you a clear yardstick to measure your work. Look at the results of your fiction every year or so. Are you keeping your Branding Promise? If not, what went wrong? Did you lose focus? That happens to everyone occasionally. The solution is to get your eye back on the ball. 

Talking to Agents and Editors

Once you understand your Branding Promise, it becomes super easy to talk to agents and editors. When they ask, “What do you write?”, you just tell them your Branding Promise. “I teach people how to write excellent fiction.” “I write novels that take people on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” 

99 times out of 100, when an agent or editor hears your Branding Promise, they’ll say, “Sorry, that’s not for me.” That’s fine. You’re trying to separate the sheep from the goats, and you just found another goat. If they don’t like your Branding Promise, they’ll never like your book, so don’t bore them by talking about it. Talk about the weather or sports or food or something else equally unbook.

But 1 time in 100, the agent or editor will stare at you with thunderstruck eyes. After ten seconds of golden silence, they’ll say, “Where have you been all my life?” And now you have a potential business partner for whatever you’re writing. And not just a business partner. A true believer. Wouldn’t that be incredible, if your agent or your editor was a true believer in your work?

Homework:

• Who is your Target Audience? 
• What delightful experience could you give your Target Audience?
• What is your Branding Promise? 
• What actions could you take to make your Branding Promise clear on all your marketing platforms?