Branding
14
Nov
Nov
2
Just a quick note- a friend of mine posted a brief and interesting piece on how she’s branding her ebook fiction - basically, attempting to develop a consistent theme and style for her work so that readers who are looking for a certain type of fiction will automatically come to her.
It’s a good idea, particularly if you’re producing a large volume of fiction - carve yourself out a “position”, to use marketing terminology. And it’s an interesting reversal of the knee-jerk that a lot of people, including me, have - which is to feel that you have to have variety in your work and not pigeon-hole yourself.
What do you think? Do your films have a “brand”?
If you’re going to be a professional, then having a brand is a good choice. You become successful when people will just automatically buy your new book, without knowing anything specific about it, because they know what to expect. You achieve fame within a niche group, and from that, you get loyalty.
Your knee-jerk reaction comes from the fact that you want to feel free to create whatever takes your fancy at the time. That’s admirable, from the point of view of artistic integrity, but if you’re a pro, then what the audience wants to pay for is far more important than your artistic whims. Bums on seats, dear boy, as they say in the theatre.
You can, of course, find ways around this. There are some authors who have more than one style, or you can write under more than one name. In the film world, think of Guillermo del Toro - on the one hand he makes Hellboy-type action blockbusters, and on the other hand he makes slow, lyrical, weird horror movies in Spanish. Or, once you have a following, you can move in a new direction, and see how many of your fans come with you.
Occasionally, you can get away with doing something completely different on each project and still be successful - people such as David Bowie and Miles Davis spring to mind - but it’s rare.
As you may have seen in my recent blog post about the Mongoose Movies I jettisoned, I was happy to make whatever I felt like: horror, drama, romance, thrillers, comedy. But I wasn’t making them for anyone except me and my friends. I wasn’t trying to attract an audience of more than about ten. It was just sheer indulgence. If I were being serious about my film-making, though, then I would definitely strive for a niche I could exploit.
I tend to agree. I probably should have specified - I don’t think that my knee-jerk is right, but it’s the instinctive reaction for a lot of people.
OTOH, how do you account for people like Charlie Stross, who writes a) an alternate-history fantasy-ish thriller series, b) a bunch of post-singularityish SF, c) near-future SF cyberpunky stuff and d) wry semi-parody Lovecraftiana?
Great comment - thanks.