ieva melgalve

It’s been told and repeated over and over that writer’s job is to create some sort of personal brand in her online presence (thinking that, God forbid, nobody would even consider buying a book if the author doesn’t have a website!) and that this personal brand must show her as a generally “not an ass”, preferrably somebody nice, not offending anybody, not having too strong opinions etc. etc..
I’m a copywriter sans proper education and a writer sans proper education and as such, many things come to me like a feeling that something’s “not right”. Then I struggle with that feeling for a while until my brain arrives at some conclusion about the whole matter (and at that point, I become opinionated).

Now, the brain-arrival-time has come for the whole personal branding thing.

I’m thinking that, if we’re looking at literary marketing, it’s pretty similar to that of any other product. A book appeals to certain audience, and that audience is who the author wants to talk to. It’s really that simple.
If I’m producing and selling pink fluffy purses, I’m going to have a website that says “Hi Sweetheart!”. If I’m producing and selling steel-toed army boots, I’m banishing the idea of “Sweetheart” from that website. If I’m trying to be smart and design pink fluffy steel-toed army boots, I’d probably say “Sweetheart, go kick their sorry asses!”. I am not doing a research on 15-year-old girls and conclude that most of them respond well to “Hello there”, because I’m not talking ot most of them, I’m talking to a select few, the ones who’d be willing to buy my product.

So, well, for personal branding a writer has to figure out what sort of product does she write (not “would like to write” or “should write”… there’s no market for whipcream that wanted to be butter), what sort of person is the reader of these stories, and what sort of language does this reader appreciate.
The good news is that if you’re writing what you really want to write, chances are your normal speaking voice is very much like the voice you should be using when talking to your readers. Eg if you’re a cynical person writing cynical stories, your reader wouldn’t mind if you were cynical in your blog. Or, if you are a cute person writing sweet stories, the reader who is nauseated by your cutiepie blog would not enjoy your books, so you don’t need to appeal to that reader at all.
The bad news is that there’s nothing harder than defining yourself and the stories you’re writing outside the useless marketing terms. But that’s, I guess, a subject of another post.