Old Books, New Vibes: The Magic of a Well-Timed Rebrand
In 1991, an author wrote a mass-market romance novel called Handful of Heaven about a woman named Devon who hooks up with a Yukon mountain man whose savage kisses make her feel “feminine and alive.”
Thirty-four years later, this same author wrote a novel called The Women, which is described as “ an epic tale of a nation divided by war and broken by politics, of a generation both fueled by dreams and lost on the battlefield.” It stayed on The New York Times bestseller’s list for over a year.
Kristin Hannah, author of both The Women and Handful of Heaven, has reinvented and rebranded herself as an author in a major way without once changing her name. That’s a small miracle because rebranding can be tricky, risky, and time-consuming. But, done well, it can also pay off big.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been discussing author branding (here and here) and I have a confession to make. I was so interested in the topic because I knew my own branding was a mess. Today, I’m going to share my plans for rebranding.
The branding problem:
My novels fall into two categories: easy to market and difficult. Let’s begin with the easy. I have a small-town, feel-good Southern series, which is a breeze to market. Below is an ad I’ve been running on Facebook for several months that regularly gives me anywhere from 200 to 300 percent ROI (return on investment).
It’s successful because I know how to attract the audience for this novel. Unfortunately, I have no desire to continue writing in this series. I only run ads for it because it’s passive income every month.
In the meantime, I have six standalone novels that are best described as humorous, Southern women’s fiction but other than that, they seem to have little in common. That’s made them difficult to market.
They do well when they’re launched because Amazon’s algorithm helps with new releases, but I don’t advertise them anymore because the ROI is much less on standalone novels. Mostly, their sales come from series readers deciding they want to read more of my novels. Despite some crossover, those two audiences are different
In July, I’m releasing yet another standalone so now is a good time to get serious about a rebranding strategy.
The before picture
I’ve had a Facebook page for over ten years, and all my ads go through that. It has over 10,000 followers, and I started it at the request of a publisher who was re-issuing my series. As a result, I’ve gotten into the habit of targeting posts to the taste of those readers who enjoy nostalgia, simple pleasures, Southern charm, and clean humor.
My author photo matched that brand, and my tagline was, “I wasn’t born in the South, but I got here as fast as I could.”
What’s wrong?
Like many authors before me, I had no thoughts about brand when I first started writing novels. I used to have a boyfriend who lived in a small Georgia town, and my visits there revealed a foreign, folksy existence with turkey shoots, old-fashioned Southern slang like “I swanee,” and cutesy businesses such as a diner called the Chat ‘N Chew.
I fictionalized what I saw in the town, and somehow those books got contracts, but there was one problem: The author persona who wrote those books didn’t reflect who I was. In my last two posts on branding, I discussed the importance of authenticity, and, for years, I wasn’t being authentic with my brand.
Even though I’d written six novels since the series, I still publicly presented myself as the author of folksy small-town novels. In fact, to balance the inauthentic person I was on my author page, I created an artsy, cool FB page called “The Creative Genius in You.”
It sounds a little crazy to be so inauthentic, but I was an academic for ten years and didn’t have time to address stuff like my author brand, and I’d regulated book writing to a hobby.
But that started to change after I retired from teaching two years ago. For the last twenty-five years, I’ve spent hours each day working on fiction. Clearly, this pursuit is meaningful to me, and it was past time to figure out a brand that best represents what I write.
Branding sounds very sales-oriented, but at its heart, it involves authors becoming introspective and asking themselves, “Who am I? What is the one thing that only I can bring to my writing?”
Those questions stymied me for a long time. I’ve always been able to see branding issues in other authors, but when it came to myself, the cobbler’s kids had no shoes. However, three years ago, a life event brought me some much needed clarification.
But first, a little background. As a teenager, I moved from Rochester, Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic, to Augusta, Georgia, a conservative, somewhat backward city. Back then, I favored tie-dye and wore my hair like Peggy Lipton in the Mod Squad. I’d only been there a few months when I was asked to don a hoop skirt and be a hostess at an Old South barbecue. That fall, I was urged to attend Cotillion School, which included ballroom dancing lessons.
Honestly, it felt as if I’d landed on another planet.
I never felt at home in Augusta, although I tried to bloom where I was planted. Even though I never liked it, family issues kept me there for decades. At some point, I said, “I’ve had enough. I can’t continue to live in a place where I’ve always felt like a foreigner.”
I finally moved to Savannah, a city I adore. It’s much funkier than Augusta. We have ghosts, Savannah College of Art and Design, Spanish moss dripping over everything, colorful, cool neighborhoods, and did I mention ghosts?
Immediately, I felt in my element, and because I wasn’t around family and friends who’d known me for decades, I was free to lean into my individuality, which led to some additional perspective into my work.
One day, it hit me: All my main characters are outsiders who question the world they’re living in. They are not delicate magnolias or Steel Magnolias, stoically braving their lots. They are rogue magnolias, stuck in life situations that don’t suit them, and they all finally find the courage to break free.
My new brand: Rogue Magnolia
In my series ads, I signal to readers with genre. With the standalones, I’ll be signaling a specific sensibility. A rogue magnolia has a point of view; she knows that fried green tomatoes are overrated, that it’s not lonely but liberating to eat at a restaurant alone, and that Southern hospitality papers over some pretty unpleasant stuff. She knows what it’s like to be an outsider because stepping away from the herd is her superpower.
That point-of-view can be expressed through newsletters, author photo, social media posts, website and more. I also discovered that my new brand, instead of stifling my creativity, gives it focus.
The brand Rogue Magnolia will hopefully attract readers who will enjoy my books, but it will also send a message to those who won’t. Recently, I got a negative review for one of my novels because there was a queer person in it. That reader isn’t my tribe, and I hope my new branding will have more clarity.
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What a helpful article that was also a pleasure to read! Thanks for all of this helpful information and also kudos on finding your brand. Funny how the search for identity is an ever-evolving one, isn’t it? As a kid you think you’ll know who you are by 20 or 30 but I am finding that that’s both true and false the older I get. The core is the same but the edges and shape keep changing.
Thank you for this post. I think I understand my brand better now then ever (I mean my substack and my podcast are based on it). However, I don't think I'm finding my market here.