Your brand is like a short-cut for the most important aspect of marketing your books: creating the emotional connection between your reader and your books before they even begin reading your book.
This is the reason that so many successful authors talk about the importance of brand, and this is why we’ve spent two days talking about what your brand really is. It’s more than a logo and colors and fonts. It’s about this emotional connection between your readers and you.
Translating Your Brand Into Colors
This is where artistic and empathic color studies come into play. We know we need to invoke an emotional response in our readers from the very beginning. But how do we do that?
I know that my writing brand is: kickass characters with punch in fantasy and science fiction. What emotions do I want to invoke with this message?
- Remembered hardships
- Triumph
- Hope
- Courage
- Belief in one’s self
What Do Colors Mean?
There’s been a lot of study on psychology and colors, so you can just Google “What do colors mean?” and you’ll get a slew of images and pages that tell you in greater detail what each color means. I’m going to link this page for now because it’s an excellent resource: https://graf1x.com/color-psychology-emotion-meaning-poster/
- Red: Excitement, energy, passion, courage
- Orange: Optimism, independence, adventure, creativity
- Yellow: Enthusiasm, opportunity, happiness, positivity
- Gold: Success, achievement, triumph
- Pink: Compassion, love, playfulness, admiration
- Blue: Trust, responsibility, honesty, inner security, loyalty
- Green: Safety, harmony, stability, reliability, balance
- Purple: Imagination, spirituality, compassion, mystery
- Brown: Reliability, stability, honesty, comfort, natural
- Grey: Neutral, practical, conservative, formal, quiet
- Black: Power, control, authority, discipline, elegance
Now, let’s look at the emotions I want to target and pair them up with the corresponding colors:
- Remembered hardships / Blue
- Triumph / gold
- Hope / yellow
- Courage / red
- Belief in one’s self / pink
So, when I was designing my logo, I chose blue, yellow, pink, and red as my main colors. I also wanted an image that inspired people to rise up, work hard, and conquer, which is why I chose a rendition of Rosie the Riveter, but this one had tattoos and looked like she could buck today’s systems. I almost changed her hair color to red—like mine—or purple—like mine when I dye it—but decided to go with black because it represented the emotional response I wanted.
The only thing that isn’t really represented here are the genres I write, so I chose fonts that kinda supported and showcased that. Each font represents a different genre while still looking “cool,” which is important. We have light urban fantasy, harder urban fantasy and fantasy, and science fiction represented. Though, not superbly well, so there might need to be some more tweaking.
There are other ways I could have represented this as well. I could have put in a few elements in the fonts like unicorn horns or space helmets or something. And I might still do that. My logo is still a work in progress.
But these are the colors I’ve put into my F.J. Blooding style guide to invoke the emotional response to my work before my readers even pick up my books.
Questions
What kind of emotions do you want to invoke in your marketing, website, graphics, etc.?
What colors represent those emotions?
What images might work to tie them all together?
