I was listening to a publishing podcast about branding while I was driving home from work this week. The branding conversation usually leaves me feeling overwhelmed because there's just so much there.
And the overwhelm frustrates me because I was an advertising copywriting major in college. This should be the kind of thing I vibe on and yet it's not. Not anymore.
But I was thinking about the types of books I write regardless of subgenre. As in I think all my books have this whether they're romantic suspense, paranormal romance, or science fiction romance. There were two things I came up with:
1. While my stories have a foot in reality, they're a little over the top.
My favorite movies are Speed, The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and The Terminator. They all have action, adventure, and romance. And they all also require the suspension of disbelief. All fiction calls for this, but these movies need a bit more. This is what I like to watch. This is what I like to write. So if a reader is looking for gritty realism, I'm probably not their author.
2. My heroes and heroines always work together even if they don't necessarily get along with each other. At least at first.
This was never something I wrote intentionally, but I noticed it as a pattern in my writing a few stories in. For example, Wicked Salvation. Griff and Cat do not like each other at the start. They might be attracted to each other, but if she didn't need his help, there is no way she'd be hanging out with him.
Same for Griff, but for other reasons. He has never been able to walk away from a woman in need of assistance. He wants to walk away from Cat. She irritates the hell out of him, no matter how much he wants to sleep with her. But if she's hellbent on her ruby rescue plan, he can't let her do it alone because he knows how much danger she's in.
Another piece of them working together is that they learn to like each other before they fall in love. Again, not something I deliberately set out to do, but in hindsight, yes, it's important for a relationship for the couple to like each other, so it works for me.
But while I have these two things that cross my books, how does this build a brand? I don't know.
