History That Never Was

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Now that the 2024 WriteHive Online Conference panels are available on their YouTube channel, I’m catching up on the ones I missed during the conference itself and sharing some of the things I gleaned from them here!

I was particularly interested in “Writing Multiple Genres and Author Brand” because I write in a bunch of different genres. Among other things, I wanted to see what the panelists had to say about marketing, pen names, and more!

The panelists talked a bit about the writing aspects of multiple genres, including being sure to read widely to understand the genre conventions. But they also talked about the many benefits of writing multiple genres, including not getting bored with a single genre and how having books in multiple genres means you can sell those different genres to different readers.

When it came to author brand, they talked about making sure that your brand is true to yourself, as that makes it the easiest to sustain. And having that authentic “you” as part of your brand also helps with marketing. They also talked about the ways that different genres might market their work. For example, for a horror novel, readers want to hear more about the killer or monster than the characters fighting that threat, whereas in drama or romance, readers want to know about the characters involved.

Another topic was pen names, which the panelists encouraged for those who might write for separate age groups and are concerned that younger readers might accidentally find their other books that are inappropriate due to subject matter. They also acknowledged that some authors might write under a pen name due to privacy concerns, either for themselves or for people in their family (for a variety of reasons, i.e., do you want your parents to read your erotica?). However, they also noted that if you write under your name AND a pen name, it means you have to do double the work for marketing, regardless of whether your pen name is secret or connected to your main writing persona, as you’ll need a social media presence for each pen name.

There was a ton of great information jam packed into this panel, which only runs 51 minutes. It’s available to watch at WriteHive’s YouTube Channel!

Tags: advice, author brand, conference, marketing, online, panel, pen names, writehive

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Monday, December 2nd, 2024 at 6:00 am and is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.