Mike Murphy's writing diary

Tuesday 23 August 2016

Fresh ideas from author branding course

I've been attending an author branding course with Natasha Lester and it has been a revelation and an inspiration.
I've always seen myself as a writer in the most general sense - I can write anything - and the novels I have written reflect that. A spy novel, a romance, a thriller, a children's story, a crime novel. I tried it all without ever defining the sort of writer I was. What I was doing was casting a wide net to see which publisher it would catch. Only one of my novels expressed something of my own thinking and philosophy and that was the one I self-published, A New Era For Manny Youngman. I wanted people to read that not just because it showed I could write but because it said something I wanted to say.
Now Natasha has challenged me to define the sort of author I am, the sort of story readers can expect if they read a book I have written.
I find it exciting. It offers a new direction.
One part of the process is to develop a "strapline" which summarises that idea. I've come up with "A male view of human relationships" and it's now the heading on my web page.
The next steps are to redesign the page, and my blog page and Facebook page, to fit that image.
Then I start a programme of writing posts that reflect a male view of human relationships and work social media to attract traffic to those posts.
Meanwhile I continue writing my next book.
I feel as though its coming together as a whole. I can begin to see who my ideal readers are and target my book and my posts towards them. It will also add a new focus for my author talks.
The course is continuing and I'm looking forward to the next session with a lot more optimism and enthusiasm than I had at the start. Thanks Natasha.

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Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.