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Branding for Nonconformists
Building Your Brand by the Golden Rule
Grow your audience by adding value to your community
As much as we authors like to think we write first and foremost for our own enjoyment, let’s be frank: without an audience, our work is entirely self indulgent. In this fourth installment of Branding for Nonconformists we’ll be talking about fostering community — your community and others’, online and in real life — by cultivating genuine relationships with readers and colleagues. What do I mean by “genuine”? You like and respect your readers as creative human beings, not as members of your “following,” because you are a member of their “following” too. When a reader tells you how much your work means to them, you respond exactly as you’d hope one of your favorite authors would respond to you.
Now that we’ve made this essential clarification, let’s discuss three categories of book lovers:
1. People who already appreciate you.
2. People who don’t appreciate you.
3. People who will appreciate you once they find out about you.
People who already appreciate you.
Readers who devour and share everything you publish, who like and respond to most of what you post on social media, who show up for your event even if they had to drive an hour (or more) in the pissing rain to get to the bookstore, who tell you they still think about your novel years after reading it; and writers who come to your workshops and feel so inspired that they become ardent readers as well. These are your people.
People who don’t appreciate you.
A couple of years ago I read a middle-grade novel that made me cry. It was so clever and so heartbreaking that I felt sure the person who wrote it and I were destined to be friends. Naturally, I tweeted about the novel and followed the author: like me, an active Twitter user with a modest following. She liked my tweet, but didn’t reply and didn’t follow me back.
This happens to me a lot.
