On Writing Well: How to Create Brand Awareness as a Writer

As a writer, it’s becoming more and more important to market yourself to your readers, to create a brand perception by which you will be recognized so that your readers are able to seek out your writing. Wonderful as it sounds, very few writers successfully manage to create enough awareness of themselves, let alone create a positive brand perception, so that they are invited to reading events or to submit work for journals.

Yet it is not very difficult to create brand awareness, and many of the tools – regular writing, personal style, social media marketing – are easily available to all writers, regardless of how long they have been crafting their work.

Keep a constant stream of writing

As a writer hoping to create a specific brand awareness of your writing and of yourself as a writer, you must set up a regular stream of writing. You have seen examples of this, have you not? A writer who publishes a book every summer as opposed to a writer who last published seven years ago, and has not been heard from since, not even within an essay or a short story? Of the two, who is it that you have a stronger recollection of?

Readings and events

As a writer, you are both the words on the page, and also the creator of the work. Writers who stick the longest in the memory are those with whom the reader has had some positive interaction. Hubber Thooghun agrees, “The best exposure I have ever received for my personal writing (including projects and job offers — no lie!) came from public readings and guest writing in literary journals. The latter was immensely rewarding. I’m quite a good orator so the fact that I “acted” my work out made it appear better than it probably was.” As a writer, most of us want to hide behind the page, and don’t want to have the public interaction that Thooghun describes. But it does work magic for creating brand awareness. If you are so inclined, you could also record your reading, and post it on YouTube or even create a series of podcasts.

Social Media

Social media has made it a lot easier for writers to get their name out there. Posting your writing on Facebook and tweeting your work to your friends and followers is a great way to publicize what you’ve been working on. It also creates the potential of going viral. Hubber laral recommends this technique as well – laral says, “Create a Facebook page and finally send your work for reviews to relevant magazines, newspapers and editors.” I agree!

Specific voice

This point has come up before in my previous post. The more recognizable and unique your voice is, the closer you are to having a brand perception working for you. Whether you write exactly as you speak, or have a humorous or ironic style of writing, you’d be best served to stick to it within all your writing.