A brand is more than a name. It’s the image your product is striving for, the connotations of that image, the feel of it.
On dictionary.com (one of my go-to resources) the word brand has two meanings:
- a type of product by a particular company under a particular name
- an identifying mark burned on livestock
Explanation 2 is what a brand seeks to achieve, to burn its name into your consciousness.
Branding is an alien concept to a new author. When I started writing The Inner Lands: Something Stirs, I had no thoughts about branding. I had no thoughts of a trilogy. I didn’t even have a clear beginning, middle or an end (in fact, all of these changed as my ideas developed). I wanted to write something organic that held real meaning for me, so all I really had was a concept, a bunch of “big” moments, some vague characters and a name.
Turns out, that concept was my brand. The Inner Lands was my brand.
Big business has sometimes made branding feel like something evil (perhaps more here in the UK) but as authors we have to understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with branding our work. After all, what is your number one aim? To reach people, right? If not, then don’t publish your work, just keep it for yourself.
Branding shows you are serious about your work. It lets people easily identify your work and says something about the quality of your work but it’s far more than that. Releasing the first book in The Inner Lands was a huge moment in my life and yet it passed so quickly (and was so much work) that I didn’t really savour the achievement. There were some sad things about the release, too. My long-term girlfriend and I were no longer together, so I was unable to share it with her, and my current girlfriend is Polish and her English isn’t good enough to understand the book! Also, one person who shared my love for fantasy and introduced me to two of my, now, favourite authors had sadly passed away before I finished.
Thinking about The Inner Lands as my brand has helped me celebrate my achievement. It reminds me of the reasons I’m doing this and of my end goals, such as film conversion.
As authors, of course our books are our brand. But we mustn’t forget that we, ourselves, are also our brand and our stories extend beyond the ink on the pages.
Now, I could sit here and tell you exactly what The Inner Lands means to me. I could write an essay on all the themes, semiology (reading between the lines), characters and plot developments – on how the novel represents and discusses our day-to-day lives. But that wasn’t the point of it. The point of The Inner Lands was to give others the same sense of escapism that the younger me enjoyed so much. If my brand is capable of doing that, then I will always deem it a success.
There is a huge pressure on authors to sell themselves and their novels, something most of us are not comfortable with, or good at. So, if you are writing, or whatever it is you are striving to be successful with, just try to remember why you started. A brand is more than a sales tool. More than a name. It’s everything.
A.J. Austin
theinnerlands.com 