How to Brand Yourself as a Writer
In creative writing programs, you lack learning about two very important things: marketing and entrepreneurship as a creative.
I’m a writer 100% in my heart, but when I was choosing colleges and universities to apply to as a senior in high school, I knew that I couldn’t major in it. There were two very big reasons why I made the decisions I did: the first is that fact that you’re probably not set up well to get a job if you’re a creative writing major.
The second is the fact that I think I would’ve burned out if I had majored in this because of the very nature of it. Writing programs force you to write often, which is something I think I wouldn’t have wanted after four years of already being in a program like that. I also knew that writing programs often won’t teach you something very important: the act of treating writing as a business.
I ended up majoring in Fashion Business Management and International Trade and Marketing over at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
You’re probably raising an eyebrow and being like “fashion? Why did she choose fashion?” which isn’t the point here. Even though it was fashion-focused, it was still a very creative industry, and I learned the business tricks of making it in a creative industry. Most of what I learned about business and marketing are very applicable to the writing world, as business is business at the end of the day.
If you want to be a writer or artist, you need to learn business tactics in order to make it as a creative in a capitalistic society.
And that’s why I’m sitting here writing this post for you today. We can make it through this tough world together!
Even if you don’t like social media, make an author platform. It doesn’t have to include anything from your personal life.
Personally, I absolutely despise social media. There’s been so much research about how social media has been bad for your mental health, since we are prone to the comparison game when we see people more beautiful, successful, and richer than we are. But it’s also inevitable that you’re going to have to be on it if you want to make it as an author.
Book publishing isn’t just a love for the craft; at the end of the day it’s also a business, so if a publisher sees you as more marketable or your idea as something trending in publishing, they’re more likely to warm up to you as a writer.
If you’re worried about privacy, you can consider writing under a pen name. I know a lot of people nowadays are writing under a pen name because of a multitude of reasons, whether it’s the fact they don’t want their family and friends to know about their work, they want their privacy, or they just don’t think that their actual name is catchy enough for people to remember. There’s a lot of authors out there and there might be a ton of, say, Anna Smiths. Sometimes you might want to be unique.
Your social media platforms also don’t have to include anything about your personal life. Here you can post snippets of your work, books that you’re reading, or upcoming news for you as an author or creative.
I blended my personal Instagram account to be my author account and what I tend to post on there is my photography, the occasional picture of me, and my poems every so often. I’ve been worried about privacy myself, so I’ve been slowly but surely removing myself from the page as physically as possible.
Twitter is a big place for writers. I started out small with who I was following: just the literary magazines that I was working for at the time. But as my work started getting published, I tagged the publications, they would retweet the poem, and then people started following me because they genuinely loved my work.
I didn’t put any effort into my Twitter and within a year, without any solid networking, I had gained 200 followers, most of whom I don’t know personally. I also began to be solicited for my writing by magazines, as well as being offered opportunities.
Facebook is for older people nowadays, but if your niche is the younger generation, Instagram will also be a big friend of yours. Use hashtags, network with other bigger accounts, and tag the accounts that repost the work of smaller accounts. It’ll be tough getting your name out there, but, trust me, the hard work pays off at the end of the day.
Submit your work to publications as much as possible.
I started publishing my work when I was seventeen years old. I’ve written about this topic before. If you’re a writer or artist and you want people to see your work, but don’t want to just post the work to social media, publishing them through other established mediums is one of the only ways to go. I’ve also written about this, but you also need to be careful about submitting your work. It can be expensive to submit to magazines that have fees, which, unfortunately, tend to be the more prestigious magazines.
A trend I’m noticing on Twitter are writers who haven’t published in big magazines are gaining a large following because of how they’ve managed to build a presence on the platform. I cannot and will not comment on the quality of their work, because writing is too subjective and people come in with a bias about publishing in big magazines, but it marks a noticeable shift in what is success in the writing world.
We began seeing this with Rupi Kaur, who began posting her poems on Tumblr. The quality of her writing is very debatable, but there’s one thing obvious about her work: she’s learned how to market it to the right demographic. She’s mastered a core part of business right there.
Find your niche. Read as many publications and platforms as you can. Find out where you can place your work that like-minded readers will also be reading, then readers and your own platform will slowly begin to trickle in. You can’t give up when all seems hopeless because then you’ll never actually see any results. It sucks to end on a bad note, doesn’t it? So keep going for a little while, you might end up being surprised with what you end up doing.
Also you don’t have to just do fiction or poetry. Try your hand at pitching to other blogs that pay. For example, I recently wrote an article for the Women in Theatre Journal, which has built me connections into the League of Professional Theatre Women. If you’re willing to do a lot of research and hone in on an authentic voice, as well as if you feel passionate about the topic, I think you definitely can branch out and conquer a bunch of different topics.
Set up an author website and portfolio.
This is an absolutely necessity. I see a lot of younger writers setting up a Carrd, but I’m a traditionalist in this sense. Make a professional website, but also stick to your budget. I pay for a Squarespace website, which is a bit more expensive, but when you’re taking risks as an entrepreneur you need to be able to invest into your business.
If you never upgrade, then that shows and you’ll never take any business risks which means you might lose a big opportunity to grow. If you’re on a budget, Wix and Wordpress have more affordable platforms. Wordpress is the recommended one because of how flexible it is; it’s got more of a learning curve, but you can add so many widgets to aid your cause.
This author website will be your home base. Buy a URL with your author name to make it look more professional, and put all of your work in a neatly organized place.
On your social media accounts advertise any new changes (new blog post? redesign? advertise all of it) so that everyone is aware of new updates in your corner of the Internet—but don’t be annoying about it. People don’t like spam. But also put the link to your site on every social media platform you have, preferably in the bio, just so that you can get the word out there whenever someone stalks your page that yes, you have a site too.
Start a blog and begin pumping out content.
Now that you have your shiny new author website, it’s time to set up a blog. During my gap year off of college, I chose to invest my time and money into making this blog my new career, as well as building upon a major digital marketing skillset. And within months, I began to see instant results. I’m going to break down the statistics for you just to show how quickly I grew.
The first year I had this website I didn’t really do anything with it. It was just a website to host my work and that was it. I knew nothing about website design so it didn’t look too pretty either. But then when COVID-19 hit, I suddenly had a lot more free time. In the first year, 2020, I had 459 visitors total. Now, in November 2021, I have had 2,000 visitors and that’s only within four months of deciding to start this blog. The SEO strategy is a long-term one that I see slowly increasing in organic traffic as the months pass by. So don’t think that this will be an instant winner. It’s a long-term game that, at first, won’t bring any money in.
You need to learn to read the traffic market and stay up to date with current trends in the world. For example, if I know a certain book or movie is hot right now, I’ll make it a priority to get my hands on it and get the review up as soon as possible.
I also do keyword research to make sure that I’m hitting all of the proper words to get the most hits organically. My book review of Almond ended up in the top five results of Google and that has single-handedly brought in about five hundred viewers.
Your content also needs to be quality. You can’t pack in a bunch of keywords and make this fluff. You need to be passionate and informative about what you’re talking about or the search engines will punish you. Google chooses whether to index (show your page on their search engine) or not. Don’t give them reasons to not have your website show up on the search engine.
Find communities and network within them.
I know a lot of young writers know each other through Discord, but there’s a multitude of ways to meet people both online and in-person. For me, I’ve met people through the writing programs I’ve done, whether it be a fellowship at Brooklyn Poets or a program I did at the University of Iowa, through the literary magazines I’ve worked on, and through writing conferences. It can be as simple as DM-ing someone on Twitter or Instagram and saying you like their work and then building a relationship that way, or retweeting a fellow poet’s poem.
Not only will you make friends in the industry this way, but you’ll also have some free marketing and publicity. I hate to describe friends this way but when a lot of people know about you and the work that you do, and they genuinely like you as a person, they’re more likely to share your writing, book your book, and brag about you to the world.
When I self-published my senior thesis in high school, my biggest sales avenue was word-of-mouth. My father owned a restaurant and he bragged about me to all of his customers, leading me to make quite a bit of money through this platform.
Take courses in digital marketing, photography, and basic graphic design.
I did this mainly during my year off. A really great free resource I use is General Assembly, which was recommended to me by my mentor. They have a lot of digital marketing, UX, and courses for PR that you can take for free online. Another thing I’ve also capitalized on is the free access to Linkedin Learning that I’ve received through my university, as well as utilizing free Skillshare trials. Here’s my code to get a month of Skillshare for free. I’ve also looked up writing and marketing blogs online and have found a plethora of random tips and YouTube videos by doing that.
I recommend training yourself in these skills specifically because then you’ll be able to do everything. Digital marketing will cover social media, newsletters, maintaining a website, and SEO. Those are all core components of digital marketing, which is something becoming more and more important as we look to the future of the world on the Internet.
I also recommend photography and basic graphic design skills because you’ll be able to take quality pictures that you can post on your own platforms. A way I’ve built links to this site is by posting my photography on Unsplash; I’ve had over 500 downloads and roughly half of them have linked back to my profile.
Plus, when you learn all of these skills, you instantly become more marketable for assistant and freelance positions if you want a side hustle. I get paid a decent amount of money doing basic website and social media work for other people, which is a nice boost for me. Learn how to use Canva and take some nice pictures and you’ll find out about how much easier it is to make nice Instagram posts or even newsletters.
