I started responding to Writer Girl's comment on my previous post The dress code for bookshops, and other ways of annoying Brian Sewell, and it turned into something longer, so I'm posting it here instead. Talking about this business of branding authors, WG said
My business brain cannot understand why an arrangement that would give authors brand recognition and a shot at a wider audience should be sniffed at.
My business brain agrees - not least because the brand stays with the author whichever publisher has the individual books - but my writer's brain can see why so many authors, with every desire sell books, are nonetheless very sniffy indeed. Most writers' creative core offers fierce resistance to being pre-determined, or pigeonholed, or restricted in what it's allowed to create. I feel like that too, even though I'm sure that on my deathbed I'll look back at my work and see a strong family resemblance between all of it.
But though usually we think of only the most commercial writers as brands, cheerfully and successfully operating within the constraints of a genre and selling into a well-defined market - Martina Cole, say, or James Patterson - there's no inherent reason that it should be so. The first time you find yourself thinking of 'the new Ian McEwan' or 'the early Beryl Bainbridges', then you're thinking of those authors as a brand, and I, for one, would never be sniffy about them and their kin. Danuta Keane's example of Penguin's handling of Zadie Smith is a case in point. I'm very sure that Smith writes to please herself, but through clever design, publicity and marketing Penguin have established 'Zadie Smith' as a place to go for something whose only pre-determined feature is that it's original, literary and challenging: something, in other words, which by definition precludes predictability.
What I'm saying is that we tend to think of brands in terms of a single image (in all sense of the word) - something known for its specificity, like Heinz or Adidas - but it needn't be like that. I don't blame any writer who doesn't want to be a brand if it entails being as limited in possibilities as a Persil packet. But if you think of a brand as the name of a huge department store, which draws people in - hopefully thousands of people - with the promise of showing them all sorts of things, some familiar and reliable and some new and strange, then I can live with being a brand very well.
But then, that's how I see my novels. I've never been able to sign up to the often-made assertion that original ideas and uncompromisingly excellent writing inevitably preclude the traditional, reliable pleasures of fiction: engaging characters and narrative drive. Is it horribly reductive to hope that in the future a cover with my name on it will suggest that inside it a reader will find both the familiar and reliable, and the new and strange? Certainly I've always tried to build a good story, well told, by weaving characters and events together with thick ropes of themes, patterns of images, explorations of ideas or even - dare I say it - the human condition. For me the past exists inescapably within the present, and those ideas exist inescapably within those characters and events: an embodying that's as undeniable, and as intangible, as was the strange process of imagining them in the first place.
