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Branding for Nonconformists
Author Branding Isn’t Smarmy!
(Unless you were a relentless self-promoter even in kindergarten)
After publishing the first article in this series, I toggled back to last-minute edits on A Bright Clean Mind, my new creativity book that includes juicy interviews with sixteen vegan artists — painters and illustrators, musicians, writers, the indie dyer behind VeganYarn.com, and the maker of the first-ever vegan feminist horror film. One of the authors I interviewed is Maya Gottfried, who has published several children’s picture books as well as Vegan Love: Dating and Partnering for the Cruelty-Free Gal, with Fashion, Makeup & Wedding Tips. When I reread our conversation (which took place exactly a year ago), I felt a pang: am I contradicting myself? Here’s our exchange:
There’s so much stress these days on your platform and being a brand, and while I understand that times have changed, my personal preference is to be a writer rather than a brand.
YES! Thank you for saying that!
Publishers may need me to be a bit of a brand, and I’m happy to do that work to try to sell my book as much as they need me to — but in my heart of hearts I really want to be David Sedaris, who is so not a brand. He is a writer.
I’ve been doing a fair amount of research for this series (as you can imagine), and I particularly appreciate what Dongwon from the Writing Excuses podcast has to say about author branding:
“If you’re asking people to go to the bookstore or the internet and pay money for your words, you are already a brand. There’s no way to escape it, and whether you find that to be a dark apocalypse or a blissful mercantile utopia is irrelevant, because you have to live in it.”
Maya has a lot of experience in journalism and publicity, and while she writes for both children and adults, the better part of her writing is focused on making ethical veganism as accessible as possible for readers who might otherwise feel overwhelmed or intimidated by these unfamiliar ideas. She is…
