Some marketing advice will tell you to build a brand: a tagline, phrase, description of the type of books you write that will attract readers interested in them … a way of saying, “If you like this element, you’ll find it in all my work.” I may not be describing this well, but that isn’t really the subject of this post.
I’ve tried to distill what my brand might be a few times, and every time, I’ve ended up stumped … or with a concept that excludes a significant fraction of what I’ve written or want to write. For instance, outside of brand, I’ve typically said that my wheelhouse is secondary world epic fantasy … but my two novels accepted by publishers to date, Flow and Scylla and Charybdis, are contemporary fantasy and science fiction, respectively, and my current query project, Who Wants To Be A Hero? is, while in the secondary world and epic buckets, also a comedy send-up of both mythology (primarily Greco-Roman, but it ranges) and reality television.
If I can find any pattern in my choice of writing, it’s in the things I don’t write, though that’s a relatively small list: hard science fiction, due to comfort level; horror; gore, also due to comfort level; and unrelenting bleakness. Beyond that, my brain seems to take, “Oh, I don’t write about X” as a suggestion …
More than that, I suppose I have a subconscious fear (perhaps not so subconscious now that I’m writing about it) that applying a brand to myself will prevent me from taking the next tangent. I have an unruly, hyperactive brain.
Is “unruly and hyperactive” perhaps my brand?
… nah.
