Episode 214 - Your Persona is Your Brand with Jami Albright
November 28, 2023
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Jami Albright discusses YOUR PERSONA IS YOUR BRAND, including the power of surrounding yourself with reminders of your brand; the role of genre conventions in branding; the importance of repelling the right readers; how to find out what your reader's "butter" is; positioning a rebranding effort and whether it requires a new pen name; whether rebranding cover design is the first or last option (and an inexpensive option to pursue); the importance of tweaking the dials delicately; the fact that authenticity doesn't require over-sharing; and how (like it or not) every public-facing action, including the community you build, is part of your brand.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
If one of those topics piques your interest, you can easily jump to that section on YouTube by clicking on the flagged timestamps in the description.
"If people look at my books and they don't know exactly what it is, what they're getting, if I polled my readers and there's not a theme that runs through the things they say, then I probably need to tighten up my branding. That's something that can be done over months. It's not something that has to be done tomorrow, but I do think it's important that you start moving in that direction." —Jami Albright
Jami Albright is a born-and-raised Texas girl and is the Amazon top 100 author of the sexy, swoony, and pee-your-pants funny Brides on the Run and the Small-Town Royalty series. She is also the co-host, along with Sara Rosett, of the WISH I’D KNOWN THEN podcast.
Links
Jami's Links:
Author website: https://www.jamialbright.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063473599652
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/jamialbrightauthor/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jamialbright5683
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Author website: https://www.jamialbright.com/
Facebook profile: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063473599652
Instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/jamialbrightauthor/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@jamialbright5683
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jami! What about your own author persona would you like to convey to your current and prospective readers to establish your brand promise? What about your personal persona and life would you want to keep “off-screen”?
Please post your comments on YouTube--and I'd love it if you would subscribe while you're there!
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
AI-generated Summary
When starting your writing journey as an indie author, there is more to think about than just writing your manuscript. One factor that might not initially come to mind, but is just as crucial, is branding. Branding is tied to every aspect of your authorship and it is essential to create and maintain a strong, consistent brand that carries through everything you do.
A recent episode of the Indie Author Podcast featured Jami Albright, an Amazon Top 100 author, and co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then podcast. In the episode, she shared a wealth of knowledge about the concept of branding and the practical implications for authors.
Defining Branding for an Indie Author
According to Jami, for an author, branding is the promise you make to your reader. She refers to her brand as "Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny, Rom Coms" which immediately gives readers a sense of what they can expect when picking up one of her books.
She also emphasized that it is crucial to remain consistent with your brand. This not only applies to the contents of your books but also crosses over to your online presence.
The Importance of Persona
A part of your branding could be a certain persona or character you portray when interacting with your readers or audience. This does not mean being inauthentic, rather, it can be a 'version' of yourself that fits best within your brand. Whether it’s personal life shares or just interactions centered around your writing journey, your persona can be molded to match the profile you want your readers to associate with your authorship.
For instance, Jami refers to herself as a helper and that fact influences her interactions with readers and fellow authors. It even extends to her marketing methods where she shares other author's work with her network of readers.
Implementing Your Brand in Blurbs and Taglines
How you use your brand in your book descriptions or taglines is also an essential factor. Blurbs and taglines are some of the first things potential readers will encounter about you and your work, and they can set essential expectations.
For instance, Jami uses a catchy and intriguing tagline for one of her books: "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house. What the hell could go wrong?” This simple sentence gives readers a compressed view of the central conflict, the tone of the book, and aligns with her overall brand of humorous romance.
You can use things like tropes that resonate with your target audience, or common themes in your works, to establish your brand in your blurbs and taglines.
The Evolution of Your Brand
As an indie author building your brand, it’s important to note that this will be continually evolving. You might have a clearer picture of your brand after a few books or after significant interactions with your readers.
Mistakes and missteps in branding are bound to happen, but it's part of the process. The important thing is to learn from these instances, and make gradual adjustments where necessary. Remember, your brand is a reflection of you as an author, and ultimately, it’ll be crucial to remain consistent in the promise you make to your readers.
Branding might seem daunting at first, but by focusing on the promise you want to make to your readers, and how you choose to present yourself, it can become an authentic and enjoyable process. It is this authenticity that will resonate with readers and make your author brand truly memorable.
A recent episode of the Indie Author Podcast featured Jami Albright, an Amazon Top 100 author, and co-host of the Wish I'd Known Then podcast. In the episode, she shared a wealth of knowledge about the concept of branding and the practical implications for authors.
Defining Branding for an Indie Author
According to Jami, for an author, branding is the promise you make to your reader. She refers to her brand as "Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny, Rom Coms" which immediately gives readers a sense of what they can expect when picking up one of her books.
She also emphasized that it is crucial to remain consistent with your brand. This not only applies to the contents of your books but also crosses over to your online presence.
The Importance of Persona
A part of your branding could be a certain persona or character you portray when interacting with your readers or audience. This does not mean being inauthentic, rather, it can be a 'version' of yourself that fits best within your brand. Whether it’s personal life shares or just interactions centered around your writing journey, your persona can be molded to match the profile you want your readers to associate with your authorship.
For instance, Jami refers to herself as a helper and that fact influences her interactions with readers and fellow authors. It even extends to her marketing methods where she shares other author's work with her network of readers.
Implementing Your Brand in Blurbs and Taglines
How you use your brand in your book descriptions or taglines is also an essential factor. Blurbs and taglines are some of the first things potential readers will encounter about you and your work, and they can set essential expectations.
For instance, Jami uses a catchy and intriguing tagline for one of her books: "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house. What the hell could go wrong?” This simple sentence gives readers a compressed view of the central conflict, the tone of the book, and aligns with her overall brand of humorous romance.
You can use things like tropes that resonate with your target audience, or common themes in your works, to establish your brand in your blurbs and taglines.
The Evolution of Your Brand
As an indie author building your brand, it’s important to note that this will be continually evolving. You might have a clearer picture of your brand after a few books or after significant interactions with your readers.
Mistakes and missteps in branding are bound to happen, but it's part of the process. The important thing is to learn from these instances, and make gradual adjustments where necessary. Remember, your brand is a reflection of you as an author, and ultimately, it’ll be crucial to remain consistent in the promise you make to your readers.
Branding might seem daunting at first, but by focusing on the promise you want to make to your readers, and how you choose to present yourself, it can become an authentic and enjoyable process. It is this authenticity that will resonate with readers and make your author brand truly memorable.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today, my guest is Jami Albright. Hey Jami, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Jami: Hi, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you.
Meet Jami Albright
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Jami Albright is a born and raised Texas girl and is the Amazon Top 100 author of the Sexy, Swoony, and Pee in Your Pants Funny Brides on the Run and Small Town Royalty series. She's also the co-host, along with Sara Rosett, of the excellent Wish I'd Known Then podcast, which I can highly, highly recommend as soon as you've caught up on all the backlist episodes of The Indy Author Podcast. Definitely, go over and start listening to Wish I'd Known That because you guys and your guests share some great, great insights.
[00:00:38] Jami: Oh, that's great. Thank you for saying so.
[00:00:40] Matty: Always learn a lot every time I listen to an episode of that.
[00:00:43] Jami: Yeah. Sara and I both got our indie publishing education from podcasts. So we always say that our podcast is a love letter to podcasting and indie publishing because it's just that's how we learned about indie publishing.
[00:01:00] Matty: That's a lovely way to frame it up. I like that.
[00:01:03] Jami: Thank you.
[00:01:04] Matty: Very nice. So, Jami, I know, and anyone who listens to the Wish I'd Known Them podcast knows that you know tons and tons about loads and loads of things related to indie publishing, and we had tossed around a couple of topics and we landed on author branding, which I think is always a great topic to revisit periodically because I think it is still something that writers don't necessarily think of, branding themselves. You know, that's for Nike or McDonald's or something, but that reminder that no, there's an author brand as well is great. And so why don't we just start right out with the question about what is branding for an author? What does branding mean for an author?
[00:01:39] Jami: For an author, branding is the promise you make to the reader. So if you promise the reader, either through your books, like with your cover and your blurb, if you promise them fun, rompy, rom-com, then you need to deliver on that promise, and the same can be said of your brand. I brand myself; someone told me that some time ago, and I should probably do that just because I do have a pretty strong voice when I write. So, across whatever I write, my books are pretty much going to be the same thing. And so, my brand is Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny, Rom-Coms, and if that changes, the only way it would change would be it might not be sexy because if I wrote something that didn't have sex in it, not a romance, but something else, then, but the rest would still be emotional, they'd still be swoony, they'd still be funny. And so that is my brand. And that is the promise I give my reader. And I try to deliver on that promise every time I write a word on the page.
Surround yourself with reminders of your brand
[00:02:53] Matty: Well, one thing you're doing for branding, which I think is brilliant, is your name on the wall behind you. I
[00:02:58] Jami: Oh, yeah.
[00:02:59] Matty: You know, people always put their books up and things like that, but having your name like that, I just have to ask, where did you get that?
[00:03:04] Jami: Etsy. Etsy. I redid my office during 2020. And so I found it on Etsy. Yeah, I love it.
[00:03:13] Matty: That will be a little encouragement for anyone who's been listening to the podcast to hop on over to YouTube and check it out because it's a, you have a very cool background, and one that's both showing your name, but also has some nice elements of yeah. Flowers it was kind of like you could tell somebody who was writing romance and things like that.
[00:03:29] Jami: Actually, that's—this is Happily Ever After, so you can't really read it. But yeah, it reminds me. Yeah. Yeah. And I have something across from me that says the secret, hang on. Y'all know I can't see without my glasses. I was trying not to put them on. The secret ingredient is always love. And so I try to remember that. I mean, it's just little things to remind me of that when I'm writing. So yeah, that's, this is my brand. This is who I am. And really, and truly, it is my name. I mean, if you get in, if you encounter Jami Albright, In book, speaker, podcast form, you're pretty much going to get the same thing every time, so,
[00:04:10] Matty: And that's nice, surrounding yourself with those reminders because it helps you in the same way that I think sometimes people put something, or like, listen to music as they're writing because surrounding yourself with those branding things, I think, would help make more concrete that commitment. You're making a promise and you need to deliver on it.
[00:04:33] Jami: Right, right, right, yeah.
Genre conventions and branding
[00:04:34] Matty: Do you feel like there's an aspect of genre conventions in branding? Because you were saying you've made a promise to your readers, and not only is there the sexy, swoony, pee-your-pants funny aspect, but there's also the sort of underlying expectations about if you're writing romance, then there's certain tropes. To what extent does complying with conventions of genres overlap with branding?
[00:04:57] Jami: Oh, well, I think so much because You know, there are genre expectations that are for every genre. You know, a sci-fi author needs to have a spaceship. I mean usually they need to have a captain that's reluctant and he needs to have probably a broken-down spaceship and a very ragtag crew.
Are you repelling the right readers?
[00:05:22] Jami: So there are always genre expectations. And so, because of that, you want to make sure that your branding is hitting those expectations. Because in marketing, it's as important to repel the wrong people as it is to attract the right people. And so, because of that, I mean, you can do that with your branding before they even open a book.
That's why it's so important to have it right. Because if you don't, you might repel the right people. So you want to make sure that you are always hitting those expectations in your blurbs, in your covers, in your branding, across a series, in the interior of your book. Are you giving them a Happily Ever After, which is a romance genre expectation.
Now, I know that there are books that, and there are readers that don't care about a Happily ever after. But for the most part, the majority of romance readers want that happily ever after. If you're writing romcom, is it funny? I mean, is it really funny? And if you think it's funny, that's great.
But do other people think it's funny? You know, if you're writing suspense, is it plot-driven along with character-driven and does your branding indicate that it's going to be that kind of suspenseful, thriller kind of book. And if it doesn't, then it's fairly easy to change. You just need to come up with some ideas.
[00:07:06] Matty: Well, you're saying that the idea of appealing to the readers you should appeal to and repelling the readers that you don't want to. So what are the ways that an author can investigate who they're reaching, de facto who they're reaching, and then are they reaching the people they think they're reaching? Or are they looking at that audience and saying, "Oh my God, that's not at all who I thought would be buying my book."
[00:07:29] Jami: Right. Right. Well, one of the easiest ways is covers, you know. I mean, looking at the top, looking at your cover and looking at the covers of the top 25 in your genre. Are your covers matching those covers? And if they are, then you're on the right route to finding those right people. Another good way is to get involved with promos that are genre specific. If you are getting sign-ups to your email list or something like that because of your cover, because of your blurb, then that's a good way. You know, if it's genre-specific, you're hitting those people that like what you write.
Compare reactions of different beta reader groups.
[00:08:19] Jami: Another is like reader groups that are kind of specific to the genre that you write. Being in there, talking with readers, asking questions, polling your readers to see if what you're offering is what they expected when they picked up your book.
[00:08:38] Matty: It would be interesting if somebody were writing something that was a bit cross-genre. I think this is easier if you're really center. What's the term that Sacha Black uses? Very center of genre. But if, as you get to the edges, let's say you're writing something that is sort of like a rom-com but also sort of like a murder mystery. Well, Lucy Score writes her Riley Thorne books, which are romances, but they are also mysteries. Not like suspense, not like romantic suspense. They're mysteries with romance. So, yeah. If somebody was early in their career and they were in that position, it would be interesting to go find some of those beta readers that are very specific to romance or very specific to mystery and then give them the book and say, "At what points did this appeal to you or didn't appeal to you?" and kind of tally, where did I land?
[00:09:28] And I think that's important and one of the things that you can do once you kind of settle on what your brand is even if you are kind of melding genres a little bit, if your brand is specific to that, if you're saying that, you can use that in your advertising. A love story with a mystery. I mean, that is so bad, but you know what I'm saying? Whatever it is, you can use that in your branding so you are reaching those people and you're making people interested. "I've never seen that. Let me read the blurb." And then so it's just a step down and a step as they dig deeper to see if this is who they like if your book is something they like.
[00:10:11] Matty: I'm thinking of this in terms of a new writer, but I think it's a good test for people who have more books out there. But if you're putting your first book out or even if you have more books, there's the brand you want to be conveying.
[00:10:25] Jami: There's the brand that you actually convey, and then there's the, when you have no idea. Let's talk about the new writer. They're writing a book, they have no idea, they don't know where it's going to be they don't even know what genre to name it.
[00:10:35] Matty: Is branding important at that point? And if it is, how do they go about defining a brand if they're so early in their career?
[00:10:43] Jami: I mean, I think it is. For me, I knew what my brand would be. Did I have it narrowed down to sexy, swoony, pee-your-pants funny? No, but I just understood my voice. Also, I was in a critique group with some really great people. I know critique groups take a hit sometimes because you can get into not-great ones, but I was in a great one with really experienced writers who helped me define my voice and things like that.
Using word clouds to understand your de facto brand
[00:11:18] Jami: And so, having someone else read it, like a beta reader or something like that, and having them give you feedback. If you had beta readers, you could have them write down words that specifically came to mind when they were reading your book. One of the things I say about how to find your brand, if you've already got reviews and stuff, is to go into that word search in your reviews on Amazon and see what keeps coming up. There could be some words there that you could use in your branding or give you an idea of what other people think your brand is.
[00:12:00] Matty: Yeah, I really like that idea of giving the assignment to beta readers to write down a list of words because I think that's a great way to get the most possible value without making it onerous for them. You know, if you have beta readers and you're giving them some assignment like describe your favorite parts of the book and why and what you describe your least then it gets not fun for them. But if they can just be dropping in words here and there.
[00:12:21] And if they do it in the format that would enable them to do this, like highlighting it in an EPUB or whatever format you use to give beta readers your work, they could highlight all the words that you liked in green, yellow or something like.
What's your reader's "butter"?
[00:12:37] Jami: Yeah, or the parts you like, you know. Theodore Taylor calls that the butter in your book that really just... And I love, for me, I love A Kiss in the Rain. If I read a book and it's got a kiss in the rain, I'm like, yes! And so it's sort of the same. I put that in my books because I do love that. Knowing what that is, that just good stuff that you like when you read a book, whether it's a romance, a thriller, or sci-fi whatever it is in those genres that you really love or that the reader really loves, those are the things you want to incorporate into your brand when you're telling other people what it is you write.
The chicken-and-egg dilemma of branding
[00:13:31] Matty: It is interesting, the idea that it's sort of a chicken and egg thing. So you could go into it knowing right off the bat, in general, what you wanted your brand to be sexy, swoony, and funny, even if you haven't framed it up in a lot of detail. And then I think there are people who are just writing the book of their heart, and they have no idea. If they decide, they think it might be noir, so they decide to join a noir writers group. And then all the noir writers hate it because, in fact, it's a cozy Agatha Christie Mystery or something. It would be hard to—I've never thought of branding in this way, of having it be like an intentional thing that you should start out from the beginning, but the coincidence sort of drives it as well.
[00:14:13] Jami: And I think I think that's how most people are. Very few people start out going, "Okay, this is what I'm going to write." I have a very clear image of branding. I was fortunate because, again, I got my education from podcasts. So I listened to a lot of smart people.
Also, I held my first book for a year before I published it because I was trying to learn this business. I did not want to just throw a book up; I'd done that before. I wanted to give my book as good a chance as I could for success. So because of that, I had thought about things like branding—like, what is it that I can give the reader that they can't get anywhere else? Or if they can get it someplace else, is it the kind of thing they like when they go to find that kind of thing? And then play that up in everything: in my writing, in my marketing, and everything. But most people, I think, stumble into it. Honestly, my author tag or whatever was something I saw on a pillow. It wasn't clever, but I felt like I needed something. So I put it on there and on my website and stuff.
The intersection of your and your readers' understanding of your brand
[00:15:33] Jami: But I think that most people do stumble into it, but that's okay. I mean, you can change. I mean, you can hone your brand. After a few books or a series, you can realize, "Hey, wait, these all sort of have the same themes. People seem to be saying the same sorts of things about my books." And then you can come up with an author brand. You can go back and put it on your website, put it on your cards, put it on your marketing.
So, I don't think coming into it not knowing and letting your readers decide—or not decide, but like getting feedback from them—is a great way to come up with your branding. And most people do that. I think what you said is true: we think our brand is one thing, readers think our brand is another thing, and then there's someplace in between. And that in-between is really what you want to home in on, I think.
Positioning a rebranding effort
[00:16:40] Matty: Yeah. If someone has started out writing what they think is noir, and then they start putting the books up, they look at the reader reviews and say, "This is the coziest noir book I've ever read," and they realize that what they're really writing is cozy, and they have to rebrand because of that. How big a separation do you feel like they need to make between their work before and after that rebranding? Would you recommend people use a new pen name or just be explicit in their reader-facing materials?
[00:17:09] Jami: Yeah, I think, I don't think you really have—I mean, it depends, I guess it depends on how many books and how many people have read those books. You know, if it were me, I would probably just recover and write new blurbs and change my categories and let them go under the name they're under. Because the fact is that people who've already read them clearly don't like cozies. And then the people that were reading them aren't going to read them if they're branded towards a cozy.
Does rebranding require a new pen name?
[00:17:41] Jami: So, yeah, I wouldn't necessarily do a pen name unless it was something where you'd gone years putting up books and they weren't hitting the mark, but you felt like this set of books would hit, let's say, a cozy market. Then maybe, yes, have a pen name then because a confused reader is a reader that just moves on. They don't. There are too many books; they are not going to sit around and try to figure out what it is you have to offer. So if you had six or seven books and they were all kind of all over the place or they weren't branded correctly and marketed to the right people, then I think maybe at that point doing a pen name, if you knew you had something that was specifically, let's say, cozy or let's say thriller or something like that.
[00:18:38] Matty: Yeah. It sounds like Nora Roberts. Doesn't she have, I don't know how many different pen names and different genres that she's writing in? I guess it also depends on whether you're looking at what you're going to do from a certain point out, if you're continuing to write, or if you're wanting to go back and relook at previous works.
Rebranding cover design--the first or last option?
[00:18:56] Matty: I would think that you could even subtly change the colors of a cover. I just talked with Michael around about a rebranding effort he went through, and we were talking about how you can tweak colors in a cover to have a different effect. The idea that if things are really more cozy maybe you take the guy with a gun and the dame sitting on the desk off your cover, and you replace it with something a little bit.
[00:19:20] Jami: Yeah, a cat sitting on the desk. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:23] Matty: Yeah, the cat sitting on the desk.
An inexpensive option for cover rebranding
[00:19:25] Jami: If it's cozy, but yeah, no, I agree. And in my consulting that I do, cover change, unless it's just a terrible cover, is always the last thing. I mean, changing colors on a cover is a lot less expensive than a whole new cover. So, yeah, I'm all for doing the thing that costs the least amount of money. Blurbs, in particular, that costs you nothing unless you're going to pay somebody to do it. And that can change the tone of a book and the tone that the reader gets when they read the blur.
[00:20:07] Matty: Well, I have almost convinced myself that for the Ann Kinnear books, anyone who is tired of me talking about the Ann Kinnear covers can fast forward for a minute, but I've almost convinced myself that rather than going for a full cover design, I'm going to get the back, the equivalent of the background of the print copy, and put all the text on it myself, because I think I have a flair for the text. Also, because, especially for the ebook, so I would just clip out, like, the right-hand side of the print cover for the cover of the ebook. I've done this once, and I can see doing this quite regularly that as I look at You know, my BookBub emails coming through and they're very clear trends, like for month to month, you can definitely see what the trend is for the cover text, and it would be quite easy and quite inexpensive to just maybe like once a year, once every other year, update the text to whatever the current thing is, at least for the ebook, and that gives you a slightly different look but still recognizable as the same.
Like, I think the images in my Ann Kinnear covers are really part of my brand, and I'm loathe to change them, but those tweaks that you can make on your own to continue to comply with the evolving standards of the brand that you want to allot yourself.
[00:21:24] Jami: Right. I agree. I think anything you can do for the least amount of money and time, really, I mean is what I would start with. I always say that because time and money are a precious commodity. So, yeah.
[00:21:42] Matty: You don't want to be thrashing around too much with something like that if you're investing both of those resources.
[00:21:47] Jami: No. And if you realize that, I'm not really branded very well.
Look for a theme in reader responses
[00:21:53] Jami: You know, I mean, if people look at my books, they don't know exactly what it is, what they're getting, if my readers, if I pulled my readers and there's not a theme that runs through the things they say, then, I'm, I probably need to tighten up my branding or whatever. That's something that can be done over there.
Thank you. I mean, it's not something that has to be done tomorrow, but I do think it's important that you start moving in that direction because as the market gets more flooded it's just better to be the one that stands out because of, let's say, your branding, as AI becomes more prominent than your branding as a person and with specific emotional, or well, emotional things that you can give the reader, even if you're writing horror you're going to give them an emotional experience.
And if you can really bake that into your brand, then that's going to help you to stand out against books that may not be written by people. So I think that's something to think about.
[00:23:08] Matty: That point about leaning into being human is very important. And one change I'm making on, I had two thoughts about social media. One is that the comment you had made about what people are saying about your books, a private group like a private Facebook group can be a great way to gather that kind of marketing information. Because periodically, I'll post a question in my Matty Dalrymple Readers Group private Facebook group that says, "If someone said that they liked this Ann Kinnear book or this Lizzy Ballard book, one of my books, what's another book you would say, 'Oh, if you like that, you'll like this,' because it's a great way to get comp information. But doing it in a private group is nice because if everybody says, 'Oh, Agatha Christie,' and you don't want to go that direction, you don't want a bunch of that on your Facebook feed.
And then the other thing I was thinking just apropos of your comment with regard to being an actual person is I'm starting to back away from just sharing things that I think are cute. For a period of time, my Facebook feed was all just me sharing cute dog videos, and I thought it's going to be better; they're going to have a better sense of me if I'm posting my own pictures of my own dogs. There's a concept, or here's a picture of where I'm going on a walk, and so you can build your brand by allowing people to see that human side of you, to the extent you're comfortable.
Authenticity doesn't require over-sharing
[00:24:22] Jami: Yeah. Well, I was going to say authenticity, but it doesn't have to mean that you're sharing all your personal business. I mean, I am an oversharer from way back; you know, that is sort of my brand. And so for me, I'm okay with that. But there are people that don't want to share their personal stuff, but if you have a brand, and you have a persona connected to that brand, then you be as authentic as you can be to that brand and that persona.
It doesn't have to be you. It just has to be your forward-facing self with your readers.
[00:24:58] Matty: That’s a great point. It's kind of fun to think about; it's a performance.
[00:25:10] Jami: Yeah. And I mean, for introverts that don't like they don't want to share. I mean, I'm not saying only introverts don't want to share their personal stuff. But I mean, if for some introverts that I know, it's really nerve-racking to go through. Onto Facebook, even chatting with people in a group, but if you're going on as your author self, as opposed to your real self, then it's different. It's a different sort of thing. You are not tricking them. You are not being inauthentic. You just created a persona that writes these books that's the person that relates to your readers.
[00:25:45] Matty: Yeah, I really like this idea of aligning persona with brand. I think that can be really useful to people. In the same way that people sometimes feel uncomfortable promoting themselves, you have to put on your promoter hat, and not your writer hat. I really like that.
Branding through cross-promotion
[00:26:05] Matty: And it does—the groups you... I'm trying not to draw a weird comparison to cliques in high school, but the group you associate yourself with matters. One of the reasons that I had not really delved into doing cross-promos in email is that I'm afraid of recommending a book I don't like to my readers, or now feeling committed to recommend a book that it turns out I don't like. Do you do cross promotions in emails or other forums? Can you talk about that a little bit and how that ties in with branding?
[00:26:37] Jami: Yes. So, from the beginning of my—I mean, when I was starting, and I had an email list before my first book came out, so I was sending emails out six weeks before I started sending them out. I don't think I had other books in my newsletter until after my first book came out. And then I have something called Jay Albright's Spotlight in my newsletter. I don't read these—some of the books I've read, some I haven't. And my readers know that that's a thing. That's just a thing, because I don't publish very often, but I do want to give them the opportunity to read other books and other authors. They're usually authors I know, and they're usually in KU, so if they get it and don't like it it's pretty low risk.
But I do make sure that they are books like the books that my readers would like in that the rom-coms or light romance or something like that. Every once in a while, I have put a darker romance in, but I do have readers who like that. So if I look at the downloads, they've downloaded that as much as they have something else. So, over time, I've just learned that about my readers. But as far as branding goes, I do try to keep it on brand for what my readers like about my books. If I look because I will look at the books and I do look at the reviews and what's said about them and stuff.
Let your personality shine through
[00:28:19] Jami: Also, part of my brand is that kind of sharing and, I mean, I've offered my art team to several people who write what I write that are new. I mean, I'm just, I'm a helper. I'm a two on the Enneagram. I mean, that's just who I am. And so I like to help people and I like to share things and stuff. And so that is on brand for me to share other people's books. It just is. And actually for a year, I think it was during the pandemic, on the two weeks that I didn't send out my newsletter, I sent out a newsletter that was an author discovery newsletter, and so anyone who had a newsletter of less than, I think it was 1,500 people, I sent their book out to my readers, and I made it very clear, I have not read these books, some of the authors I don't know, but if you want to take a chance, you might find your next favorite reader. But I was just giving the authors the opportunity to get in front of a larger audience. I have my newsletters around 25,000 people. So I mean, it was an opportunity to do that. My readers loved it.
Now, if, like on the form that the authors had to fill out, if they didn't have professional editing or professional cover, I did not feature them because. You know, we do have some standards. There, but if they did, and the reviews didn't say things like, "This author could have used an editor or something like that," then we would put them out. The downloads on those were so high, and the authors were thrilled because some of them hadn't sold any books. And then they get this bump, and they were able to move some books. That was exciting for them, and I got emails from my readers saying that they had found an author that they wanted to read more of.
But that is my brand. I mean, that is who I am. Nobody else. I don't think anyone else needs to do that or even wants to do that, probably. But for me, I just felt like it's so hard to get email followers newsletter subscribers, that it would be great to give people the opportunity to do that. That is just how my mind thinks. It's not because I'm this huge altruistic person, and that's just, I'm just constantly thinking about how I can help other people because that's who I am and I over-help. I'm an aggressive helper sometimes, and my daughter does not appreciate it. So I mean, it's good and bad, but that is part of my brand. So, for me, it was no big deal to do that.
[00:31:10] Matty: I think there's a lesson to be drawn, even for people who don't have tens of thousands of people on their email list, which is that if you said your readers really appreciated getting that information about the other authors, and I think that even if someone is just starting out, they're just starting out their email list, but they like this idea of demonstrating they're helping, and I think their helping tendencies. Maybe an alternative is including in your newsletter a review of a book that you read and enjoyed that you think your readers will also enjoy because you can start developing that. It's not like you're necessarily helping out the person. Maybe it's a big-name person, and they're never going to notice the blip on the radar that your email would produce. But, yeah, that establishing that kind of persona early on can pave the way for exactly the kind of relationship that you're describing you have with your newsletter.
[00:31:57] Jami: Right. And it just creates goodwill. Because that big-name person will probably never know, but you know, your readers know. I mean, they just know that about you. And, I think that can become part of your brand and who you are as an author and as a person.
Every public-facing action is branding
[00:32:15] Matty: I think the message that everything is branding is both kind of scary, but it's also super helpful because I do think that sometimes people think of branding as the color of my website or whatever.
[00:32:26] Jami: Or the theme that runs through each cover there's a ribbon that runs on every cover. There's more than that.
[00:32:33] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. It's not limited to just blurbs and taglines. But, how you use branding in blurbs and tagline, taglines is one of the topics that we wanted to hit. So, we've talked very generally about the persona you put out there, but this idea of how you implement this in blurbs and taglines I thought was very appealing. What, how do you recommend doing that?
[00:32:53] Jami: Well, I think finding the some people use trope, which I think is great. I've used tropes too, but finding that better as Theodore talks about that thing that is going to make your anybody reading is going to just go. And stop and go, whoa, what did she just say? And I suggest putting it bolded at the top of your blurb because a lot of people are not reading below the fold.
They are not expanding that blurb because there are just too many. There are just too many. Plus, if you have been able to boil down your book and the good stuff in your book into two or three sentences that can fit right there, you can use that everywhere. You know, when you do a promo on one of the platforms like Free Booksy or Bargain Booksy, you can use that there. You can put it in your ads. You can include it in other people's newsletters. I mean, you can use that, and it is powerful. It can be really powerful to be able to just use that tagline that encapsulates the whole book and, by association, encapsulates you as an author. Then you can use that. And people remember that. People will remember those things, especially if you're putting it out there enough; they will see that, and they'll remember that.
[00:34:26] Matty: Yeah, the taglines I've been using for my series, including my ads, are for the Lizzy Ballard thrillers: "What Happens When an Extraordinary Ability Transforms an Ordinary Life." And for the Ann Kinnear books, it's, "They say that dead men tell no tales; they don't know Ann Kinnear."
[00:34:38] Jami: Ah, I love that.
[00:34:46] Matty: Yeah, I like those because I feel like it gets to the heart of what the themes of the books are, and yet it's both a blessing and a curse that it doesn't clearly align with a particular genre. And I do feel like this is another one. Okay, fast forward if you're tired of hearing me say this, but especially with my Ann Kinnear books, I feel like if I just decided to go whole hog into saying Supernatural Suspense 100 percent and had the cover that had the crystal ball with the hands around it on the front, I might have sold more books, but it's not really the book I was going to be writing. So I feel in a way, I'm sacrificing some breadth to not pursue that. But I think that the fans I get, like, I often get the comments that I like this because it was different than these other books for these reasons, and I'd almost it's a business decision as well as a creative decision to say, do you know, do you go for the bigger pool of readers or do you go for the deeper pool of readers? I think that then when you hook someone, you've hooked them big because you're offering something that isn't completely compliant with the more obvious tropes.
[00:35:47] Jami: Right. I agree. In my Homecoming Teen book, the tagline for that is, "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house. What the hell could go wrong?" and then the blurb was underneath that, but really. But “what the hell could go wrong” is not even necessary, particularly, except I needed it for the lyrical part of it. But just, "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house." That's built-in conflict. That is, for some people who like that kind of conflict, like the icing on the top. They just want to dive into that. So if you can find those things that really grab a reader and boil it down.
[00:36:33] Jami: And sometimes you can't do that by yourself. Sometimes you need help. Sometimes you need to brainstorm. And I love brainstorming. It's one of my favorite things in the world because I can say something not great, but somebody can take a tiny bit of that not great thing I said and make it greater. And then the next person can make it greater, and it's just better and better the more you talk about it. So, I think that's a great way to come up with taglines and even your branding and any kind of tagline you're going to use for your author brand or anything like that, to brainstorm or to use ChatGPT, this is a good way — an ethical way to use the AI. You can just put in words that you think may define your writing and stuff, and ask them to give you another list of 20 other words. Some of them may not be great, but there may be one or two that you can take and expand on and come up with something that really hits the mark for you and your books.
I also think making a list of sayings things that might be a brand. Make a list of 20; the first 15 are probably going to be cliché and not great, but those last five might be awesome. So, because it makes you think, it makes you dig in, and we're authors, we're creatives, we can come up with catchy little things to say that aren't cliché.
[00:38:05] Matty: Yeah, I can attest to the importance of market testing because the first version of the Lizzy Ballard tagline was, "What happens when an extraordinary power transforms an ordinary life?" And it quickly became clear that people thought I was writing Christian fiction.
[00:38:20] Jami: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:21] Matty: Like, "Oh yeah, that's not the impression I want to be leaving." So, I changed "power" to "ability" because it felt like less of a religious connotation.
Branding as a Constant Evolution
[00:38:30] Jami: I agree. And I think that's what's so important for everybody to remember. It's not a one-and-done thing. We're constantly evolving as authors, in our writing, and we can constantly be evolving in our brand. You know, our brand, we can just get better and better at it as we go along because we have more feedback. We have more people we can poll or talk to, or we know ourselves better. And I just think starting the journey is what's important. It's not where you finish because until we stop, we're not really finished.
Tweak the Dials Delicately
[00:39:10] Matty: I think it's also important, generally, to make changes gradually. And I was thinking of this in terms of if you feel like you have to change. One of the things we talked about was how comfortable people feel sharing personal things. I can imagine someone saying, "Yeah, I'm going to be the kind of sharing person who talks about personal topics or shares stories about my family." And then, for whatever reason, you decide you want to back off that. You don't want to sully your brand by making some statement. What I'm thinking of is all the people who say, "That's it, I'm off social media now," and then a week later they're back on.
It seems goofy because they're always back and forth. But if you decide you've made a decision that you don't want to stick with, like sharing, just pull back from it. There's no need to announce it to people that you're changing because over time it will become clearer. And the people who are there because they wanted to know about your family life will gradually drop off, and the people maybe who were made uncomfortable by that level of sharing will filter in.
[00:40:09] Jami: But, like tweaking the dials delicately, yes, that is really smart. And I mean, depending on your brand—like my brand is Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny—you are never going to see me in a political conversation online. Never, never, never. I mean, there are one or two instances where I've shared because of my family and the family I have, and my granddaughters and stuff like that, that I have made statements. Actually, it happened before George Floyd. My granddaughters are black. And so, there was an incident that happened when we were all together, and I was like, "Come on, y'all, we got to be better than this." You know, and, but that was before George Floyd.
Not that I wouldn't say it. I'm not a coward. But there are places to say things and there are places not to say things. For my brand, my Jami Albright brand is not where I would necessarily get into a discussion about that. That's just the decision I've made. You can make a different decision, and that's fine. But for me, that is the decision I've made, that I don't—I'm not going to really necessarily publicly address controversial things. I mean, privately. And if someone did something or said something, I would go to that person, but I'm not going to publicly do stuff like that because I just don't think that's necessarily what my readers are looking for.
The community you build is your brand.
[00:41:43] Matty: Yeah, I think that's one of the benefits of having a separate personal page from your public-facing pages a public, private profile, for example. And I also think people can think of curating their social media feeds as a form of branding as well because I remember when I first started getting traction on Facebook, let's say, and 99.9 percent of the comments were great. But every once in a while, there would be a weird one. And for a while, I had this dilemma about what should I do with that? Is it ethical for me to remove it? I'm like, yes, it's perfectly ethical because it's the community I'm building. And I don't want some weirdo showing up in the community. And if I have a party and some stranger walks in and starts saying inappropriate things to people, I'm going to kick him out. And so, curating that you're creating the community you want to see, and you're doing that not only for yourself but for the other people who want to share that community with you.
[00:42:33] Jami: Right. Exactly. Exactly. I love that. Yeah.
[00:42:37] Matty: Well, I think, I mean, the, your conversation about everything you do really being part of branding and the idea of having the persona that is what you brand with, I is brilliant. And, so, thank you so much, Jami. This has been such a fun conversation, and please let everyone know where they can go if they would like to hear more from you about branding and many other topics.
[00:42:54] Jami: Sure. You can go to the "Wish I'd Known Then for Writers" podcast, and that's where Sara and I do a lot of our discussion on things like this. My website, Jamialbright.com. I also do author consulting, and if you are interested in that, it's Jamialbright.com/authorservices. And yeah, my books are on Amazon. So, I'm in KU, so that's where I'm at.
[00:43:25] Matty: Thank you so much.
[00:43:26] Jami: You're welcome. You're welcome.
[00:00:05] Jami: Hi, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you.
Meet Jami Albright
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Jami Albright is a born and raised Texas girl and is the Amazon Top 100 author of the Sexy, Swoony, and Pee in Your Pants Funny Brides on the Run and Small Town Royalty series. She's also the co-host, along with Sara Rosett, of the excellent Wish I'd Known Then podcast, which I can highly, highly recommend as soon as you've caught up on all the backlist episodes of The Indy Author Podcast. Definitely, go over and start listening to Wish I'd Known That because you guys and your guests share some great, great insights.
[00:00:38] Jami: Oh, that's great. Thank you for saying so.
[00:00:40] Matty: Always learn a lot every time I listen to an episode of that.
[00:00:43] Jami: Yeah. Sara and I both got our indie publishing education from podcasts. So we always say that our podcast is a love letter to podcasting and indie publishing because it's just that's how we learned about indie publishing.
[00:01:00] Matty: That's a lovely way to frame it up. I like that.
[00:01:03] Jami: Thank you.
[00:01:04] Matty: Very nice. So, Jami, I know, and anyone who listens to the Wish I'd Known Them podcast knows that you know tons and tons about loads and loads of things related to indie publishing, and we had tossed around a couple of topics and we landed on author branding, which I think is always a great topic to revisit periodically because I think it is still something that writers don't necessarily think of, branding themselves. You know, that's for Nike or McDonald's or something, but that reminder that no, there's an author brand as well is great. And so why don't we just start right out with the question about what is branding for an author? What does branding mean for an author?
[00:01:39] Jami: For an author, branding is the promise you make to the reader. So if you promise the reader, either through your books, like with your cover and your blurb, if you promise them fun, rompy, rom-com, then you need to deliver on that promise, and the same can be said of your brand. I brand myself; someone told me that some time ago, and I should probably do that just because I do have a pretty strong voice when I write. So, across whatever I write, my books are pretty much going to be the same thing. And so, my brand is Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny, Rom-Coms, and if that changes, the only way it would change would be it might not be sexy because if I wrote something that didn't have sex in it, not a romance, but something else, then, but the rest would still be emotional, they'd still be swoony, they'd still be funny. And so that is my brand. And that is the promise I give my reader. And I try to deliver on that promise every time I write a word on the page.
Surround yourself with reminders of your brand
[00:02:53] Matty: Well, one thing you're doing for branding, which I think is brilliant, is your name on the wall behind you. I
[00:02:58] Jami: Oh, yeah.
[00:02:59] Matty: You know, people always put their books up and things like that, but having your name like that, I just have to ask, where did you get that?
[00:03:04] Jami: Etsy. Etsy. I redid my office during 2020. And so I found it on Etsy. Yeah, I love it.
[00:03:13] Matty: That will be a little encouragement for anyone who's been listening to the podcast to hop on over to YouTube and check it out because it's a, you have a very cool background, and one that's both showing your name, but also has some nice elements of yeah. Flowers it was kind of like you could tell somebody who was writing romance and things like that.
[00:03:29] Jami: Actually, that's—this is Happily Ever After, so you can't really read it. But yeah, it reminds me. Yeah. Yeah. And I have something across from me that says the secret, hang on. Y'all know I can't see without my glasses. I was trying not to put them on. The secret ingredient is always love. And so I try to remember that. I mean, it's just little things to remind me of that when I'm writing. So yeah, that's, this is my brand. This is who I am. And really, and truly, it is my name. I mean, if you get in, if you encounter Jami Albright, In book, speaker, podcast form, you're pretty much going to get the same thing every time, so,
[00:04:10] Matty: And that's nice, surrounding yourself with those reminders because it helps you in the same way that I think sometimes people put something, or like, listen to music as they're writing because surrounding yourself with those branding things, I think, would help make more concrete that commitment. You're making a promise and you need to deliver on it.
[00:04:33] Jami: Right, right, right, yeah.
Genre conventions and branding
[00:04:34] Matty: Do you feel like there's an aspect of genre conventions in branding? Because you were saying you've made a promise to your readers, and not only is there the sexy, swoony, pee-your-pants funny aspect, but there's also the sort of underlying expectations about if you're writing romance, then there's certain tropes. To what extent does complying with conventions of genres overlap with branding?
[00:04:57] Jami: Oh, well, I think so much because You know, there are genre expectations that are for every genre. You know, a sci-fi author needs to have a spaceship. I mean usually they need to have a captain that's reluctant and he needs to have probably a broken-down spaceship and a very ragtag crew.
Are you repelling the right readers?
[00:05:22] Jami: So there are always genre expectations. And so, because of that, you want to make sure that your branding is hitting those expectations. Because in marketing, it's as important to repel the wrong people as it is to attract the right people. And so, because of that, I mean, you can do that with your branding before they even open a book.
That's why it's so important to have it right. Because if you don't, you might repel the right people. So you want to make sure that you are always hitting those expectations in your blurbs, in your covers, in your branding, across a series, in the interior of your book. Are you giving them a Happily Ever After, which is a romance genre expectation.
Now, I know that there are books that, and there are readers that don't care about a Happily ever after. But for the most part, the majority of romance readers want that happily ever after. If you're writing romcom, is it funny? I mean, is it really funny? And if you think it's funny, that's great.
But do other people think it's funny? You know, if you're writing suspense, is it plot-driven along with character-driven and does your branding indicate that it's going to be that kind of suspenseful, thriller kind of book. And if it doesn't, then it's fairly easy to change. You just need to come up with some ideas.
[00:07:06] Matty: Well, you're saying that the idea of appealing to the readers you should appeal to and repelling the readers that you don't want to. So what are the ways that an author can investigate who they're reaching, de facto who they're reaching, and then are they reaching the people they think they're reaching? Or are they looking at that audience and saying, "Oh my God, that's not at all who I thought would be buying my book."
[00:07:29] Jami: Right. Right. Well, one of the easiest ways is covers, you know. I mean, looking at the top, looking at your cover and looking at the covers of the top 25 in your genre. Are your covers matching those covers? And if they are, then you're on the right route to finding those right people. Another good way is to get involved with promos that are genre specific. If you are getting sign-ups to your email list or something like that because of your cover, because of your blurb, then that's a good way. You know, if it's genre-specific, you're hitting those people that like what you write.
Compare reactions of different beta reader groups.
[00:08:19] Jami: Another is like reader groups that are kind of specific to the genre that you write. Being in there, talking with readers, asking questions, polling your readers to see if what you're offering is what they expected when they picked up your book.
[00:08:38] Matty: It would be interesting if somebody were writing something that was a bit cross-genre. I think this is easier if you're really center. What's the term that Sacha Black uses? Very center of genre. But if, as you get to the edges, let's say you're writing something that is sort of like a rom-com but also sort of like a murder mystery. Well, Lucy Score writes her Riley Thorne books, which are romances, but they are also mysteries. Not like suspense, not like romantic suspense. They're mysteries with romance. So, yeah. If somebody was early in their career and they were in that position, it would be interesting to go find some of those beta readers that are very specific to romance or very specific to mystery and then give them the book and say, "At what points did this appeal to you or didn't appeal to you?" and kind of tally, where did I land?
[00:09:28] And I think that's important and one of the things that you can do once you kind of settle on what your brand is even if you are kind of melding genres a little bit, if your brand is specific to that, if you're saying that, you can use that in your advertising. A love story with a mystery. I mean, that is so bad, but you know what I'm saying? Whatever it is, you can use that in your branding so you are reaching those people and you're making people interested. "I've never seen that. Let me read the blurb." And then so it's just a step down and a step as they dig deeper to see if this is who they like if your book is something they like.
[00:10:11] Matty: I'm thinking of this in terms of a new writer, but I think it's a good test for people who have more books out there. But if you're putting your first book out or even if you have more books, there's the brand you want to be conveying.
[00:10:25] Jami: There's the brand that you actually convey, and then there's the, when you have no idea. Let's talk about the new writer. They're writing a book, they have no idea, they don't know where it's going to be they don't even know what genre to name it.
[00:10:35] Matty: Is branding important at that point? And if it is, how do they go about defining a brand if they're so early in their career?
[00:10:43] Jami: I mean, I think it is. For me, I knew what my brand would be. Did I have it narrowed down to sexy, swoony, pee-your-pants funny? No, but I just understood my voice. Also, I was in a critique group with some really great people. I know critique groups take a hit sometimes because you can get into not-great ones, but I was in a great one with really experienced writers who helped me define my voice and things like that.
Using word clouds to understand your de facto brand
[00:11:18] Jami: And so, having someone else read it, like a beta reader or something like that, and having them give you feedback. If you had beta readers, you could have them write down words that specifically came to mind when they were reading your book. One of the things I say about how to find your brand, if you've already got reviews and stuff, is to go into that word search in your reviews on Amazon and see what keeps coming up. There could be some words there that you could use in your branding or give you an idea of what other people think your brand is.
[00:12:00] Matty: Yeah, I really like that idea of giving the assignment to beta readers to write down a list of words because I think that's a great way to get the most possible value without making it onerous for them. You know, if you have beta readers and you're giving them some assignment like describe your favorite parts of the book and why and what you describe your least then it gets not fun for them. But if they can just be dropping in words here and there.
[00:12:21] And if they do it in the format that would enable them to do this, like highlighting it in an EPUB or whatever format you use to give beta readers your work, they could highlight all the words that you liked in green, yellow or something like.
What's your reader's "butter"?
[00:12:37] Jami: Yeah, or the parts you like, you know. Theodore Taylor calls that the butter in your book that really just... And I love, for me, I love A Kiss in the Rain. If I read a book and it's got a kiss in the rain, I'm like, yes! And so it's sort of the same. I put that in my books because I do love that. Knowing what that is, that just good stuff that you like when you read a book, whether it's a romance, a thriller, or sci-fi whatever it is in those genres that you really love or that the reader really loves, those are the things you want to incorporate into your brand when you're telling other people what it is you write.
The chicken-and-egg dilemma of branding
[00:13:31] Matty: It is interesting, the idea that it's sort of a chicken and egg thing. So you could go into it knowing right off the bat, in general, what you wanted your brand to be sexy, swoony, and funny, even if you haven't framed it up in a lot of detail. And then I think there are people who are just writing the book of their heart, and they have no idea. If they decide, they think it might be noir, so they decide to join a noir writers group. And then all the noir writers hate it because, in fact, it's a cozy Agatha Christie Mystery or something. It would be hard to—I've never thought of branding in this way, of having it be like an intentional thing that you should start out from the beginning, but the coincidence sort of drives it as well.
[00:14:13] Jami: And I think I think that's how most people are. Very few people start out going, "Okay, this is what I'm going to write." I have a very clear image of branding. I was fortunate because, again, I got my education from podcasts. So I listened to a lot of smart people.
Also, I held my first book for a year before I published it because I was trying to learn this business. I did not want to just throw a book up; I'd done that before. I wanted to give my book as good a chance as I could for success. So because of that, I had thought about things like branding—like, what is it that I can give the reader that they can't get anywhere else? Or if they can get it someplace else, is it the kind of thing they like when they go to find that kind of thing? And then play that up in everything: in my writing, in my marketing, and everything. But most people, I think, stumble into it. Honestly, my author tag or whatever was something I saw on a pillow. It wasn't clever, but I felt like I needed something. So I put it on there and on my website and stuff.
The intersection of your and your readers' understanding of your brand
[00:15:33] Jami: But I think that most people do stumble into it, but that's okay. I mean, you can change. I mean, you can hone your brand. After a few books or a series, you can realize, "Hey, wait, these all sort of have the same themes. People seem to be saying the same sorts of things about my books." And then you can come up with an author brand. You can go back and put it on your website, put it on your cards, put it on your marketing.
So, I don't think coming into it not knowing and letting your readers decide—or not decide, but like getting feedback from them—is a great way to come up with your branding. And most people do that. I think what you said is true: we think our brand is one thing, readers think our brand is another thing, and then there's someplace in between. And that in-between is really what you want to home in on, I think.
Positioning a rebranding effort
[00:16:40] Matty: Yeah. If someone has started out writing what they think is noir, and then they start putting the books up, they look at the reader reviews and say, "This is the coziest noir book I've ever read," and they realize that what they're really writing is cozy, and they have to rebrand because of that. How big a separation do you feel like they need to make between their work before and after that rebranding? Would you recommend people use a new pen name or just be explicit in their reader-facing materials?
[00:17:09] Jami: Yeah, I think, I don't think you really have—I mean, it depends, I guess it depends on how many books and how many people have read those books. You know, if it were me, I would probably just recover and write new blurbs and change my categories and let them go under the name they're under. Because the fact is that people who've already read them clearly don't like cozies. And then the people that were reading them aren't going to read them if they're branded towards a cozy.
Does rebranding require a new pen name?
[00:17:41] Jami: So, yeah, I wouldn't necessarily do a pen name unless it was something where you'd gone years putting up books and they weren't hitting the mark, but you felt like this set of books would hit, let's say, a cozy market. Then maybe, yes, have a pen name then because a confused reader is a reader that just moves on. They don't. There are too many books; they are not going to sit around and try to figure out what it is you have to offer. So if you had six or seven books and they were all kind of all over the place or they weren't branded correctly and marketed to the right people, then I think maybe at that point doing a pen name, if you knew you had something that was specifically, let's say, cozy or let's say thriller or something like that.
[00:18:38] Matty: Yeah. It sounds like Nora Roberts. Doesn't she have, I don't know how many different pen names and different genres that she's writing in? I guess it also depends on whether you're looking at what you're going to do from a certain point out, if you're continuing to write, or if you're wanting to go back and relook at previous works.
Rebranding cover design--the first or last option?
[00:18:56] Matty: I would think that you could even subtly change the colors of a cover. I just talked with Michael around about a rebranding effort he went through, and we were talking about how you can tweak colors in a cover to have a different effect. The idea that if things are really more cozy maybe you take the guy with a gun and the dame sitting on the desk off your cover, and you replace it with something a little bit.
[00:19:20] Jami: Yeah, a cat sitting on the desk. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:19:23] Matty: Yeah, the cat sitting on the desk.
An inexpensive option for cover rebranding
[00:19:25] Jami: If it's cozy, but yeah, no, I agree. And in my consulting that I do, cover change, unless it's just a terrible cover, is always the last thing. I mean, changing colors on a cover is a lot less expensive than a whole new cover. So, yeah, I'm all for doing the thing that costs the least amount of money. Blurbs, in particular, that costs you nothing unless you're going to pay somebody to do it. And that can change the tone of a book and the tone that the reader gets when they read the blur.
[00:20:07] Matty: Well, I have almost convinced myself that for the Ann Kinnear books, anyone who is tired of me talking about the Ann Kinnear covers can fast forward for a minute, but I've almost convinced myself that rather than going for a full cover design, I'm going to get the back, the equivalent of the background of the print copy, and put all the text on it myself, because I think I have a flair for the text. Also, because, especially for the ebook, so I would just clip out, like, the right-hand side of the print cover for the cover of the ebook. I've done this once, and I can see doing this quite regularly that as I look at You know, my BookBub emails coming through and they're very clear trends, like for month to month, you can definitely see what the trend is for the cover text, and it would be quite easy and quite inexpensive to just maybe like once a year, once every other year, update the text to whatever the current thing is, at least for the ebook, and that gives you a slightly different look but still recognizable as the same.
Like, I think the images in my Ann Kinnear covers are really part of my brand, and I'm loathe to change them, but those tweaks that you can make on your own to continue to comply with the evolving standards of the brand that you want to allot yourself.
[00:21:24] Jami: Right. I agree. I think anything you can do for the least amount of money and time, really, I mean is what I would start with. I always say that because time and money are a precious commodity. So, yeah.
[00:21:42] Matty: You don't want to be thrashing around too much with something like that if you're investing both of those resources.
[00:21:47] Jami: No. And if you realize that, I'm not really branded very well.
Look for a theme in reader responses
[00:21:53] Jami: You know, I mean, if people look at my books, they don't know exactly what it is, what they're getting, if my readers, if I pulled my readers and there's not a theme that runs through the things they say, then, I'm, I probably need to tighten up my branding or whatever. That's something that can be done over there.
Thank you. I mean, it's not something that has to be done tomorrow, but I do think it's important that you start moving in that direction because as the market gets more flooded it's just better to be the one that stands out because of, let's say, your branding, as AI becomes more prominent than your branding as a person and with specific emotional, or well, emotional things that you can give the reader, even if you're writing horror you're going to give them an emotional experience.
And if you can really bake that into your brand, then that's going to help you to stand out against books that may not be written by people. So I think that's something to think about.
[00:23:08] Matty: That point about leaning into being human is very important. And one change I'm making on, I had two thoughts about social media. One is that the comment you had made about what people are saying about your books, a private group like a private Facebook group can be a great way to gather that kind of marketing information. Because periodically, I'll post a question in my Matty Dalrymple Readers Group private Facebook group that says, "If someone said that they liked this Ann Kinnear book or this Lizzy Ballard book, one of my books, what's another book you would say, 'Oh, if you like that, you'll like this,' because it's a great way to get comp information. But doing it in a private group is nice because if everybody says, 'Oh, Agatha Christie,' and you don't want to go that direction, you don't want a bunch of that on your Facebook feed.
And then the other thing I was thinking just apropos of your comment with regard to being an actual person is I'm starting to back away from just sharing things that I think are cute. For a period of time, my Facebook feed was all just me sharing cute dog videos, and I thought it's going to be better; they're going to have a better sense of me if I'm posting my own pictures of my own dogs. There's a concept, or here's a picture of where I'm going on a walk, and so you can build your brand by allowing people to see that human side of you, to the extent you're comfortable.
Authenticity doesn't require over-sharing
[00:24:22] Jami: Yeah. Well, I was going to say authenticity, but it doesn't have to mean that you're sharing all your personal business. I mean, I am an oversharer from way back; you know, that is sort of my brand. And so for me, I'm okay with that. But there are people that don't want to share their personal stuff, but if you have a brand, and you have a persona connected to that brand, then you be as authentic as you can be to that brand and that persona.
It doesn't have to be you. It just has to be your forward-facing self with your readers.
[00:24:58] Matty: That’s a great point. It's kind of fun to think about; it's a performance.
[00:25:10] Jami: Yeah. And I mean, for introverts that don't like they don't want to share. I mean, I'm not saying only introverts don't want to share their personal stuff. But I mean, if for some introverts that I know, it's really nerve-racking to go through. Onto Facebook, even chatting with people in a group, but if you're going on as your author self, as opposed to your real self, then it's different. It's a different sort of thing. You are not tricking them. You are not being inauthentic. You just created a persona that writes these books that's the person that relates to your readers.
[00:25:45] Matty: Yeah, I really like this idea of aligning persona with brand. I think that can be really useful to people. In the same way that people sometimes feel uncomfortable promoting themselves, you have to put on your promoter hat, and not your writer hat. I really like that.
Branding through cross-promotion
[00:26:05] Matty: And it does—the groups you... I'm trying not to draw a weird comparison to cliques in high school, but the group you associate yourself with matters. One of the reasons that I had not really delved into doing cross-promos in email is that I'm afraid of recommending a book I don't like to my readers, or now feeling committed to recommend a book that it turns out I don't like. Do you do cross promotions in emails or other forums? Can you talk about that a little bit and how that ties in with branding?
[00:26:37] Jami: Yes. So, from the beginning of my—I mean, when I was starting, and I had an email list before my first book came out, so I was sending emails out six weeks before I started sending them out. I don't think I had other books in my newsletter until after my first book came out. And then I have something called Jay Albright's Spotlight in my newsletter. I don't read these—some of the books I've read, some I haven't. And my readers know that that's a thing. That's just a thing, because I don't publish very often, but I do want to give them the opportunity to read other books and other authors. They're usually authors I know, and they're usually in KU, so if they get it and don't like it it's pretty low risk.
But I do make sure that they are books like the books that my readers would like in that the rom-coms or light romance or something like that. Every once in a while, I have put a darker romance in, but I do have readers who like that. So if I look at the downloads, they've downloaded that as much as they have something else. So, over time, I've just learned that about my readers. But as far as branding goes, I do try to keep it on brand for what my readers like about my books. If I look because I will look at the books and I do look at the reviews and what's said about them and stuff.
Let your personality shine through
[00:28:19] Jami: Also, part of my brand is that kind of sharing and, I mean, I've offered my art team to several people who write what I write that are new. I mean, I'm just, I'm a helper. I'm a two on the Enneagram. I mean, that's just who I am. And so I like to help people and I like to share things and stuff. And so that is on brand for me to share other people's books. It just is. And actually for a year, I think it was during the pandemic, on the two weeks that I didn't send out my newsletter, I sent out a newsletter that was an author discovery newsletter, and so anyone who had a newsletter of less than, I think it was 1,500 people, I sent their book out to my readers, and I made it very clear, I have not read these books, some of the authors I don't know, but if you want to take a chance, you might find your next favorite reader. But I was just giving the authors the opportunity to get in front of a larger audience. I have my newsletters around 25,000 people. So I mean, it was an opportunity to do that. My readers loved it.
Now, if, like on the form that the authors had to fill out, if they didn't have professional editing or professional cover, I did not feature them because. You know, we do have some standards. There, but if they did, and the reviews didn't say things like, "This author could have used an editor or something like that," then we would put them out. The downloads on those were so high, and the authors were thrilled because some of them hadn't sold any books. And then they get this bump, and they were able to move some books. That was exciting for them, and I got emails from my readers saying that they had found an author that they wanted to read more of.
But that is my brand. I mean, that is who I am. Nobody else. I don't think anyone else needs to do that or even wants to do that, probably. But for me, I just felt like it's so hard to get email followers newsletter subscribers, that it would be great to give people the opportunity to do that. That is just how my mind thinks. It's not because I'm this huge altruistic person, and that's just, I'm just constantly thinking about how I can help other people because that's who I am and I over-help. I'm an aggressive helper sometimes, and my daughter does not appreciate it. So I mean, it's good and bad, but that is part of my brand. So, for me, it was no big deal to do that.
[00:31:10] Matty: I think there's a lesson to be drawn, even for people who don't have tens of thousands of people on their email list, which is that if you said your readers really appreciated getting that information about the other authors, and I think that even if someone is just starting out, they're just starting out their email list, but they like this idea of demonstrating they're helping, and I think their helping tendencies. Maybe an alternative is including in your newsletter a review of a book that you read and enjoyed that you think your readers will also enjoy because you can start developing that. It's not like you're necessarily helping out the person. Maybe it's a big-name person, and they're never going to notice the blip on the radar that your email would produce. But, yeah, that establishing that kind of persona early on can pave the way for exactly the kind of relationship that you're describing you have with your newsletter.
[00:31:57] Jami: Right. And it just creates goodwill. Because that big-name person will probably never know, but you know, your readers know. I mean, they just know that about you. And, I think that can become part of your brand and who you are as an author and as a person.
Every public-facing action is branding
[00:32:15] Matty: I think the message that everything is branding is both kind of scary, but it's also super helpful because I do think that sometimes people think of branding as the color of my website or whatever.
[00:32:26] Jami: Or the theme that runs through each cover there's a ribbon that runs on every cover. There's more than that.
[00:32:33] Matty: Yeah. Yeah. It's not limited to just blurbs and taglines. But, how you use branding in blurbs and tagline, taglines is one of the topics that we wanted to hit. So, we've talked very generally about the persona you put out there, but this idea of how you implement this in blurbs and taglines I thought was very appealing. What, how do you recommend doing that?
[00:32:53] Jami: Well, I think finding the some people use trope, which I think is great. I've used tropes too, but finding that better as Theodore talks about that thing that is going to make your anybody reading is going to just go. And stop and go, whoa, what did she just say? And I suggest putting it bolded at the top of your blurb because a lot of people are not reading below the fold.
They are not expanding that blurb because there are just too many. There are just too many. Plus, if you have been able to boil down your book and the good stuff in your book into two or three sentences that can fit right there, you can use that everywhere. You know, when you do a promo on one of the platforms like Free Booksy or Bargain Booksy, you can use that there. You can put it in your ads. You can include it in other people's newsletters. I mean, you can use that, and it is powerful. It can be really powerful to be able to just use that tagline that encapsulates the whole book and, by association, encapsulates you as an author. Then you can use that. And people remember that. People will remember those things, especially if you're putting it out there enough; they will see that, and they'll remember that.
[00:34:26] Matty: Yeah, the taglines I've been using for my series, including my ads, are for the Lizzy Ballard thrillers: "What Happens When an Extraordinary Ability Transforms an Ordinary Life." And for the Ann Kinnear books, it's, "They say that dead men tell no tales; they don't know Ann Kinnear."
[00:34:38] Jami: Ah, I love that.
[00:34:46] Matty: Yeah, I like those because I feel like it gets to the heart of what the themes of the books are, and yet it's both a blessing and a curse that it doesn't clearly align with a particular genre. And I do feel like this is another one. Okay, fast forward if you're tired of hearing me say this, but especially with my Ann Kinnear books, I feel like if I just decided to go whole hog into saying Supernatural Suspense 100 percent and had the cover that had the crystal ball with the hands around it on the front, I might have sold more books, but it's not really the book I was going to be writing. So I feel in a way, I'm sacrificing some breadth to not pursue that. But I think that the fans I get, like, I often get the comments that I like this because it was different than these other books for these reasons, and I'd almost it's a business decision as well as a creative decision to say, do you know, do you go for the bigger pool of readers or do you go for the deeper pool of readers? I think that then when you hook someone, you've hooked them big because you're offering something that isn't completely compliant with the more obvious tropes.
[00:35:47] Jami: Right. I agree. In my Homecoming Teen book, the tagline for that is, "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house. What the hell could go wrong?" and then the blurb was underneath that, but really. But “what the hell could go wrong” is not even necessary, particularly, except I needed it for the lyrical part of it. But just, "I did her wrong in high school. Now she's living in my pool house." That's built-in conflict. That is, for some people who like that kind of conflict, like the icing on the top. They just want to dive into that. So if you can find those things that really grab a reader and boil it down.
[00:36:33] Jami: And sometimes you can't do that by yourself. Sometimes you need help. Sometimes you need to brainstorm. And I love brainstorming. It's one of my favorite things in the world because I can say something not great, but somebody can take a tiny bit of that not great thing I said and make it greater. And then the next person can make it greater, and it's just better and better the more you talk about it. So, I think that's a great way to come up with taglines and even your branding and any kind of tagline you're going to use for your author brand or anything like that, to brainstorm or to use ChatGPT, this is a good way — an ethical way to use the AI. You can just put in words that you think may define your writing and stuff, and ask them to give you another list of 20 other words. Some of them may not be great, but there may be one or two that you can take and expand on and come up with something that really hits the mark for you and your books.
I also think making a list of sayings things that might be a brand. Make a list of 20; the first 15 are probably going to be cliché and not great, but those last five might be awesome. So, because it makes you think, it makes you dig in, and we're authors, we're creatives, we can come up with catchy little things to say that aren't cliché.
[00:38:05] Matty: Yeah, I can attest to the importance of market testing because the first version of the Lizzy Ballard tagline was, "What happens when an extraordinary power transforms an ordinary life?" And it quickly became clear that people thought I was writing Christian fiction.
[00:38:20] Jami: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:38:21] Matty: Like, "Oh yeah, that's not the impression I want to be leaving." So, I changed "power" to "ability" because it felt like less of a religious connotation.
Branding as a Constant Evolution
[00:38:30] Jami: I agree. And I think that's what's so important for everybody to remember. It's not a one-and-done thing. We're constantly evolving as authors, in our writing, and we can constantly be evolving in our brand. You know, our brand, we can just get better and better at it as we go along because we have more feedback. We have more people we can poll or talk to, or we know ourselves better. And I just think starting the journey is what's important. It's not where you finish because until we stop, we're not really finished.
Tweak the Dials Delicately
[00:39:10] Matty: I think it's also important, generally, to make changes gradually. And I was thinking of this in terms of if you feel like you have to change. One of the things we talked about was how comfortable people feel sharing personal things. I can imagine someone saying, "Yeah, I'm going to be the kind of sharing person who talks about personal topics or shares stories about my family." And then, for whatever reason, you decide you want to back off that. You don't want to sully your brand by making some statement. What I'm thinking of is all the people who say, "That's it, I'm off social media now," and then a week later they're back on.
It seems goofy because they're always back and forth. But if you decide you've made a decision that you don't want to stick with, like sharing, just pull back from it. There's no need to announce it to people that you're changing because over time it will become clearer. And the people who are there because they wanted to know about your family life will gradually drop off, and the people maybe who were made uncomfortable by that level of sharing will filter in.
[00:40:09] Jami: But, like tweaking the dials delicately, yes, that is really smart. And I mean, depending on your brand—like my brand is Sexy, Swoony, Pee Your Pants Funny—you are never going to see me in a political conversation online. Never, never, never. I mean, there are one or two instances where I've shared because of my family and the family I have, and my granddaughters and stuff like that, that I have made statements. Actually, it happened before George Floyd. My granddaughters are black. And so, there was an incident that happened when we were all together, and I was like, "Come on, y'all, we got to be better than this." You know, and, but that was before George Floyd.
Not that I wouldn't say it. I'm not a coward. But there are places to say things and there are places not to say things. For my brand, my Jami Albright brand is not where I would necessarily get into a discussion about that. That's just the decision I've made. You can make a different decision, and that's fine. But for me, that is the decision I've made, that I don't—I'm not going to really necessarily publicly address controversial things. I mean, privately. And if someone did something or said something, I would go to that person, but I'm not going to publicly do stuff like that because I just don't think that's necessarily what my readers are looking for.
The community you build is your brand.
[00:41:43] Matty: Yeah, I think that's one of the benefits of having a separate personal page from your public-facing pages a public, private profile, for example. And I also think people can think of curating their social media feeds as a form of branding as well because I remember when I first started getting traction on Facebook, let's say, and 99.9 percent of the comments were great. But every once in a while, there would be a weird one. And for a while, I had this dilemma about what should I do with that? Is it ethical for me to remove it? I'm like, yes, it's perfectly ethical because it's the community I'm building. And I don't want some weirdo showing up in the community. And if I have a party and some stranger walks in and starts saying inappropriate things to people, I'm going to kick him out. And so, curating that you're creating the community you want to see, and you're doing that not only for yourself but for the other people who want to share that community with you.
[00:42:33] Jami: Right. Exactly. Exactly. I love that. Yeah.
[00:42:37] Matty: Well, I think, I mean, the, your conversation about everything you do really being part of branding and the idea of having the persona that is what you brand with, I is brilliant. And, so, thank you so much, Jami. This has been such a fun conversation, and please let everyone know where they can go if they would like to hear more from you about branding and many other topics.
[00:42:54] Jami: Sure. You can go to the "Wish I'd Known Then for Writers" podcast, and that's where Sara and I do a lot of our discussion on things like this. My website, Jamialbright.com. I also do author consulting, and if you are interested in that, it's Jamialbright.com/authorservices. And yeah, my books are on Amazon. So, I'm in KU, so that's where I'm at.
[00:43:25] Matty: Thank you so much.
[00:43:26] Jami: You're welcome. You're welcome.
