Stick to your girly guns: Sticking to who you are while marketing your book
“Stick to your girly guns.” My friend and fellow entrepreneur said through a screen, sitting across my desk, with the Atlantic sea between us. I expressed my branding concerns while we co-worked on a Saturday afternoon.
In the last year or so I have been going through an important career transformation. I’ve gone from writer-in-the-making to published author of a SciFi book in a matter of months. This experience has taught me that indie publishing is a double-edge sword. It allows you to choose every aspect of your publishing process while leaving you stranded in a sea of questions about book marketing.
When plagued with questions about book promotion, my first instinct was to dive into research about what other authors have done. Among the many “you’ve written a book, now what?” articles, a piece of advice kept shining through: choose your book’s genre, find your niche, and build a brand that resonates with your audience.
Following this advice, I set to take a second look at the brand I had spent two years building for myself as an author. My brand focuses on my Latinidad and on the fact that I write Speculative Fiction. I built it with an aesthetic of earthy blues and pinks. The color palette brings clay and cactus flowers to mind and this makes it, most definitively, a “girly” brand.
Imagine my dismay when I learned more about SciFi marketing. According to many experts, I had been doing everything wrong. The SciFi market suggests cool colors for brand colors. Advice out there tells you to feature space and moons as part of your brand images and to make your brand as genderless as possible. I saw a couple of places that even advice female authors to take on a pen name that doesn’t disclose their gender because SciFi is still seen as a “manly genre”. Yes, even in 2020. With my head spinning, I was left wondering where do I stand as an author and as an independent brand. Do I change every aspect of my brand to fit the SciFi market?
“Stick to your girly guns.” My friend and fellow entrepreneur said through a screen, sitting across my desk, with the Atlantic sea between us. I expressed my branding concerns while we co-worked on a Saturday afternoon. The glare of her screen reflected on her pink cat-eye glasses right before she dropped this important wisdom on me.
That same night, I laid awake past midnight in the middle of a career-identity crisis. With my friend’s advice resonating, I reminded myself: I’ve always bent gender roles. As the only girl in a herd of boy cousins, I jumped puddles, spat, hid under greasy cars, and ran from feral dogs with the rest of them, all while wearing dresses, bows, and 90s frilly socks. I grew up to have posters of Backstreet Boys, Batman, and Dragon Ball plastered all over my bedroom. I loved the idea of having a quinceañera and getting married while also dreaming of being a career woman and the breadwinner of a family. It’s who I’ve always been, so why should my book marketing be different?
The beauty of indie publishing is that you can choose how you share your art with the world, and I’ve decided to stay true to myself. I will continue to wear flowery prints while I talk about superheroes, aliens, and horror stories in author interviews. I will sign my SciFi book with a rose-gold pen. And I will still doodle hearts in the corners of my notebook while I plot stories about super soldiers and militarized states. This is what I did while growing as a writer. Now that I’m a published author, I’m sticking to my girly guns.