This month, Janet, Marianne, Lon and Ran join JP and Crys for another book club, this time reading Your Brand Should Be Gay (Even if You’re Not) by Re Perez. They discuss hot takes, useful tips and how they’ll incorporate this book’s teachings into their own brands
Show Notes
Your Brand Should be Gay (Even if You’re Not) by Re Perez
Start with Why by Simon Sinek
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody
Transcript
JP: Hello, friends. This is episode number 43 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 12th of May, 2021 as we are recording. We are here once again with Book Club and we’ve got myself, JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: With Crys Cain.
Marianne: Marianne Hanson.
Janet: Janet Kitto.
Lon: Lon Varnadore
Ran: and Ran Weingartner.
JP: Yes, our special guest. Ooh. All right, friends, we read Your Brand Should Be Gay, Even if You’re Not by Re Perez.
Crys: Before we get into our discussion, however, I do want to announce that we have made the decision to change from Substack to Patreon. We tried Substack out because it was super simple and we did not know what we wanted to offer. And Substack limited us, which worked out really well. It was a great experiment.
But now that we have our feet under us with 43 episodes, we know a bit more of what we want to do, the kinds of things that we want to create with the Write Away Podcast and with you all our listeners and our community. And so we are moving over to Patreon.
There will be a link on the show notes where you can go hit that support button, become one of our awesome patrons, get access to all of our special episodes, which includes our Tarot series where we are doing business planning with Tarot, as well as some other stuff that we’ve been talking about implementing in the background. And you get extra early access to all of these episodes. So thanks so much for listening to the schpiel.
Now we’re going to talk about the book. Okay.
Your Brand Should Be Gay, Even If You Are Not. Re Perez. This is a book on branding. This is not limited to authors. In fact, it is geared more towards businesses, but I found quite a few useful things within it.
I think branding is something that most of us feel really overwhelmed by. I will say that this book did not help me feel less overwhelmed, but it did give me some good information that is helping me build my idea of what branding is and what my brand is.
JP: I liked it, definitely something that I’m putting on the back burner for later, but there are pieces of it that have blended into a lot of the other conversations I’ve had with a lot of authors and the TASM community. This blended really well with the Business Model Canvas, which was a fun thing to realize for me.
Crys: Can you just just give a short idea of the Business Canvas? Because that’s something we’ve been doing in The Author Success Mastermind small group, but most people are probably not familiar with it.
JP: Business Model Canvas is a free template that anyone can grab. And I believe we’ll have a link in the show notes cause I’ve mentioned it. And J also has one that he uses that he, I believe, shares on the TASM website, but ultimately it’s a one-pager on your business.
Focusing in the center is your core value or what you want to be as an identity. And then it spreads out to either side being who are your customers. For writers that would be who are your readers. And then to the other side, it’s like, how do you get there? What other sources or resources do you use in order to get there?
And then there are some other boxes around there, but ultimately it’s a huge overview as to how your business functions and flows so that you can get an idea as to what your identity is.
Ran: What I thought was really interesting about this book, and this book has a lot of very practical tools to address something that is really ephemeral, if I can be wordsy for a bit. I see a lot of heads nodding, so I know you know. Branding can be very difficult to put your finger on, like what makes a good brand versus what makes a crappy brand.
It’s like we have a gut feeling about it, but we don’t really necessarily know how to articulate it. And he does a really good job of that. As a writer, the one thing that I got out of this that I did not expect is a real strong plug for being authentic.
What I mean by that is accepting who you are as a person and as a creative and unabashedly staking your claim in the world and saying, this is what I do, this is who I am, and this is what I write. That is something that fills me with terror and shied away from doing my entire writing career.
So yeah, so I feel converted. I feel like, okay, I’m still scared, but I think I’m sold. I think it’s really worthwhile.
I think this is how that authenticity is how readers connect with us and it’s how consumers connect with your brand. I get that. So I think it’s worth daring, daring to be authentically who I am.
Lon: Take on the book. Yes. I have words.
As others have already said that there’s a lot there. There was also a whole lot of information thrown at you and it was just one of those. My thought was either, okay, I can either start going through this slowly or let’s just mark it and keep going, mark it and keep going, mark it and keep going.
There were quite a few things that I’ve marked and I’m definitely going to go back to it at some point. And beyond that, I do feel a little bit more confident in what I’m trying to do as far as trying to build my own brand. So it does give some support for the ideas that I have.
And also, there are some points where it’s this does not make any sense to me, but that’s fine because this is also just a person’s opinion on branding. It’s not like this is the be all end all.
Janet: Yeah, he’s got lots of step and how to build your brand. But I was reading through, getting very excited about all these steps, and then I thought, but should I be? Like, I liked reading about the science of it all. I’m always interested in learning how to grow my business, but there’s so many examples in the book, and I just thought, I don’t feel that I need to do everything that he does.
I understand now why I would hire a branding expert and it also helped me to see more clearly what to do with the foundation that I’ve started. And I think that’s the thing is knowing what you can put in place, where you can start with, and what to leave space for.
Yeah, just the same as what Lon was saying, I’ve got a lot of stuff flagged in there that I want to do, and I’ve done some of the exercises. There’s lots of great stuff in the book, but he’s definitely, this book definitely goes into it at a level where that’s the kind of stuff I never want to do myself for my platform.
Marianne: First question was, does he ever tell us how to make our brand gay or is that just the name of the book?
Crys: Yeah, that was one of my disappointments with the book. And that was just that the only things gay about the book where the title and him. And that’s fine. Like it was an attention getter for sure.
Marianne: No, but I don’t think that’s authentic. I have an issue with that and I have an issue with platforms, although I’m doing much better with my issues.
But I hate narrowing down myself. And when I was reading this book, I thought, okay, my name is my name. That’s just my brand. And then he started talking about colors and I thought maybe I should go as the red one, the red author.
And people can just be like, what does a red author write?
And I kinda liked that. I think it’s nuts, but I thought that there was a basis for it reading the book. But yeah, I have actually hired somebody to help me with this because I think it’s just so broad and I just want people to like me, for me. I need a self esteem book rather than a branding book, I think is what it comes down to.
Crys: One of the things that I really liked about this book that he kept iterating over and over was that authenticity thing.
Regardless of whether the book felt really gay and authentic in that specific way. But he kept hammering that authenticity was something… you already are something, but does your brand reflect what you are, what it is, are those all aligned? And I think that alignment is what he defines as authenticity is everything is aligned.
Did you guys pick up on a similar definition or was your slightly different?
Ran: No, I think that’s well said.
JP: Yeah. I think it’s all just very much walk the walk, or walk the talk, whatever the term is. I don’t know. But ultimately it’s, whatever you want to say your brand is how you live as, and I think that this whole identity aspect of it is just something that I’ve seen a lot of, like within the whole nine to five world of managers and plant and site managers trying to live the way of the company.
And sometimes it comes off as authentic and sometimes it doesn’t, but I think the key for us is whatever we’re trying to present to the world is who we should also feel and be because whenever those two things don’t align, it just doesn’t feel sincere.
Ran: People know it, people automatically pick up on that.
JP: Yeah. So fun fact, that’s why your brand should be gay because if you, as a gay person, are out as gay, you are then your authentic self. Full-circle.
Marianne: As a writer though, does that mean that you have to… yeah, what does that mean? Because I feel like I look at life and I’m ironic about it, and then when I meet people, they expect me to be funny or they expect… I don’t know.
Crys: You are funny.
Marianne: But it’s to put on a show. Is that being authentic? I think that’s what scares me. That’s what scares me about branding and platform is feeling like you always have to be on.
Crys: I think that knowing that you don’t have to be on, that you are aligning who you actually are on the day to day with how you present is one way to claim that authenticity.
He does mention the one guy who presented their services were very upscale, but their branding, how he dressed, was not upscale.
Most of the time, it was like, Hey, the presentation and where you are aiming is not the same. But I think that where you are aiming in your presentation is generally the same, I would say.
Marianne: I think I need to buy all of my clothes at Nordstrom now. I think that’s what I’ve just discovered.
Ran: Actually to be honest, like I’ve only known you a short while, but I don’t think you’re capable of being inauthentic, Marianne. Like I think, you are like is what you get.
I don’t know. What I do relate to though, is that fear, and certainly, what am I promising by putting myself out there and putting a product out there and putting a website out there, what am I promising? And am I ready to deliver on that?
Crys: One of the things that this book has driven me to analyze is I have some friends who are both in business, like in our writing world, Sacha Black comes to mind.
And in real world who you know exactly the kinds of things that they’re going to do in a given situation, or like what’s on brand for them. So if they did something you’d be like, Oh, that’s such a Sacha thing where you could also say that’s so on-brand for them. And Sacha has got her evil, her devils horns, she loves fill-ins, like she’s got purple.
You know what her brand is. But that’s a reflection of who she already is, and she’s encapsulated that in her branding. So it’s made me think, what are the things that are uniquely me that I’m already doing? And of course my hair comes to mind, first of. Like you never know what my hair is going to look like. You never know what country I’m going to be in.
Those are on brand for me. I know that those are my brand things. And so I feel like the step I’m at is I have a brand, I just need to backtrack to what its definition is. What are the words that describes how I am already authentically living, so that when I am faced with a choice of is this new path authentic for me or not, I have that distilled definition to guide me.
Marianne: Did the author talk much about why? I can’t remember if this author talked about your branding being about why you’re writing, why you’re doing the things.
Crys: He referenced something, one moment. It’s in my notes.
Ran: While you’re looking, Crys, what comes to mind is that any sort of brand isn’t going to be the totality of who we are. It’s always going to be like a representation, an illustration of possibly a point in time or a certain facet of your personality.
It’s not going to be all of you. And so within that, you have a little bit of control. Maybe you’re more like, who was it? It wasn’t Betty Davis, but who was it, that black and white film actress who was notoriously unsocial. I’d rather be alone. And that was part of her brand though, right?
That became a part of who everybody knew her as. This phenomenal actress, very glamorous, who absolutely was antisocial.
Marianne: Was it Greta Garbo?
Ran: Greta Garbo. So like we have a certain amount of control in a way over how much we want to engage, how we engage, whether we’re close or far away. Like J talked to me about that the other day.
Do you want to be close and up personal with your readership or would you rather have more of a formal kind of distance type of engagement? So we do have a certain amount of control, right?
Crys: I did find where it’s referred to in the book. And it’s at the very beginning of chapter five and it’s labeled in authentic purpose, but it starts out with a quote from Simon Sinek’s book, Start With Why, and that’s people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
Ran: Yeah. He also has a quote that I really liked. Let’s see if I can remember where it is.
Marianne: I think that, just to jump in, I think that during this pandemic, one of the issues I had was I had forgotten why I did it. I was forgetting why I did anything to be honest as I stayed home with my kids. But no, they’re wonderful people. But over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve been thinking about branding and thinking about the things that I need to do, I’ve really started concentrating on why again. And so it’s just been interesting to see how all of this, the pandemic, really affected my why for a little bit, or I forgot it.
Crys: Ran, did you find that quote?
Ran: Yeah, I did. “Be yourself and allow your brand to be what it is without pretense. People connect with authenticity, and when you’re authentic, it shouldn’t take extra work. Your ideal client customers want to know who you are and what you care about. Share your history, both good and bad, to help your customers connect with you on a deeper level.”
Arguably, that’s less relevant in a brand if I’m like, say an event planner, than when I’m an author. Cause you’re going to be reading a piece of me, and a piece of what I think, and how I see the world, and how I see people, and how people interact and so on.
JP: I think, too, what you mentioned there was something about the person showing their fallibility as well as their successes. And I see that a lot, especially with authors and even authors who support other authors, like Sacha Black, where, you know, on their Instagram stories, they kind of show when they have a misstep or they’re like laying on the floor with the final revisions done.
Because we get to see that side of, Oh, this is also a struggle and we can relate with them on that end too. I definitely think that your full, authentic self is not the shiny Instagram filter that makes you look perfect, but it’s actually the stuff behind it and showing off that side too.
Crys: Yeah, I will come against that… I do think that… I wish you guys could see the mean mug JP is giving me. Because while I do think that, especially the people in this group, we really connect with those personal realistic failure and success stories, there are certain brands, even author brands, that will not delve into those failure elements.
And that kind of ties into what Ran was saying about the question that J Thorn asked her, like, how close do you want to be to your audience? If you want to be close to your audience, you do want to share the failures as well as the successes. If you want to be more distant, if you want to be more informative and less emotional, and both of those are great qualities for a brand to have.
A brand doesn’t need to have both of them. One of them may not require or even be super authentic to be sharing that close and personal information. So I just do want to say there’s a balance there, but we just happened to be a group that tends to relate much better to the closer proximity in certain things.
Marianne: I want my audience to just call me Your Highness. What level is that?
Crys: I don’t know. I’ve got Siri to call me Your Highness. So that’s a start.
Janet: I made a note for myself to think about my money story because he was talking about, you have to ask for money, and if you can’t have those kinds of conversations and branding’s not going to fix it. Now, with myself, I don’t have confidence around money and I struggle with that.
And that’s part of my branding is that I’m living this life with less burden that I’ve made myself. I’m debt free and I earn from investments, but I still feel like I have no worth because I don’t have a paycheck. So again, it’s thinking about, this is who I am and if I can relate that’s what I want my brand to be.
I don’t have to have a conversation about money. I’m just going to sell my story. I don’t want to be a salesperson.
Crys: Yeah. That is a very good thing to know about you and your brand.
Ran: There’s something very valid about that, right? Like thinking about it less in terms of selling a product or selling a service, and rather thinking about, how can I help you? If you need help with this, I might be able to do that.
Which is a much more comfortable conversation for me than I need 250 bucks.
Crys: Yeah, I really resonate, thinking about this from an author standpoint with some of the things Brian McDonald has said about like what the point is of storytellers in society, and that’s to convey survival information and that’s about, it could be life or death, like actual, there’s a tiger in the woods, how do you avoid that? Or how do you kill it?
But I remember just being a kid and how much solace I found in books and the escape I found in books. And the survival information I gained from those books is you are not alone. Like you are worth something even when you feel alone, when there is no one at your side.
There’s so many subtle messages that I clung to through my childhood that I gained in fiction. And when I think about what my brand is for fiction, it’s very closely tied into that, providing digestible survival information and escapism for people who need it.
Ran: Thoroughly agree.
Janet: And value. Value doesn’t have to equate that money conversation. It’s what value are we giving? Yeah.
Crys: Yeah, and that value can be the emotional journey that they take so that they can, in short, process an event that they’re already having in their life, say, a divorce. They can process that in fiction, through the lens of somebody else’s life so that they can look at theirs and see it in a different way, even though they consciously probably don’t have a clue that’s what they’re doing. They will unconsciously seek out books that will help them process what is going on in their life.
Marianne: Do you think that branding ties in with marketing? So then I have a question. So when you talk about branding and your why, and if it deals with making money or not, then how would that go into your marketing? Or does that mean that there is no marketing? But if there’s branding, isn’t there marketing?
Ran: I think there’s a difference between selling a product and, I keep wanting to come back to what kind of stories do you like to tell? If I want to feel like, I dunno, I haven’t read anything that you’ve written, Marianne. But like when I think of cozy mystery with humor, there’s days when that’s what I want.
I want to binge on Downton Abbey, because I want just to feel like I’m part of a world where everything turns out okay in the end and everybody gets their due, but everybody’s really nice ultimately. And so I started looking for authors who will give me that. I look for those stories.
A successful brand in that way, if that’s what you write, then a successful brand will allow me to connect immediately and go, okay, that’s what I want, that’s what I’m looking for. And so that’s what I get. So if I wrote that kind of stuff, how could I demonstrate to someone who’s never read anything of mine that’s what they’re going to get from my books.
Crys: This is what I would see as the difference between brand and a marketing tactic, specifically using possibly you, Marianne. And that is your brand is joyful escapism, no matter where you are, with the taste of justice, with the spice of justice. So that would be the brand.
But a marketing tactic you might use is you create a gift basket with the first three books in your story, a box of cookies, and a bath bomb. Cause what you’re doing is escapism, joy, and enjoyment, and planes are expensive, but you could. And this is just a side thought that I had while reading the book. Because we joke about your Donny Osmond and London, and there’s a lot of things that are on brand for Marianne, and none of those are actually your brand.
Your brand is being obsessed.
Marianne: Is there a way that I can switch it so that people are obsessed with me? No, I don’t want people to be obsessed with me, just to read what I write. Okay. Nevermind. Moving on.
Crys: But one of the questions that prompts for me for you is how many of your characters have an obsession that come out in your story?
Whether it’s your murderers, whether it’s your main characters, because that ties in so closely with you of just people who love something so deeply it permeates awkward areas of their life. Right?
Donny hanging over your shoulder can sometimes get awkward.
Now it’s awkward cause Donny is in a corner and he doesn’t know what’s happening and that’s just rude.
Marianne: Actually I can see from where I’m sitting right now. I can see one, two, three, four, five different Donny representations.
Ran: Oh, man. That’s too funny.
Marianne: I get it. I get it. I think what I meant too though, is just, if your goal isn’t necessarily to make money but you have other goals, then how does that tie into everything else? If that makes sense?
Because I feel like a lot of the branding is to get out there so that people can read what you’re writing. And so it changes it a little. Or do you think that it does?
Crys: Yeah. He goes in and says that if you have a problem talking about money, that it’s problem. I do agree. I think a halfway step there to realizing that money isn’t like a negative thing. And then it’s not a dirty word is to maybe change that expectation to value. What value is going to be exchanged here?
Sure. They might give me money, which is a piece of value, or they might give me their attention. Like I want the value of attention. And I think that for those of us, especially if the monetary aspect doesn’t necessarily need to be your measure of value, that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Most of us probably do need to get to accepting that as a measurement of value at some point, but if you’re not, that’s okay. If it is far more comfortable in the beginning to think what is the value I am going to receive in exchange for the value I’m putting out, maybe it’s attention, maybe it is emails from authors.
That’s okay. But I do think that you need to be comfortable acknowledging what value it is that you want in payment for the value you’re putting out.
Marianne: That makes sense. That totally makes sense.
Crys: I’m going to put everyone on the spot for a moment. And this is a little less to do specifically with the book and more just fun branding things. But is there anything specifically about your books or you that you could say, that’s an element of my brand or that’s what people think of me when they think of me me/me as a writer.
And it can be just you, it doesn’t have to be you as a writer. I’m defaulting to hair color because that’s brand and that will affect my colors. That’ll affect my marketing for sure. But I’m curious. Take a minute.
Janet: I don’t think that I have a distinct brand, but I think about myself about transformation. And so everything that I work on, that I write about, should be about transport, transportation. Not transportation, no transformation. So if I’m creating a different life, then that’s, I think that’s the problem that I want to have that I want my readers to relate to.
I hope that answers your question.
Crys: Yeah. And do you feel like not knowing what’s a specific thing that people will say, that’s Janet, do you feel like that’s a problem, like that you don’t have that kind of definition? Or are you comfortable that’s just a growing space that you’re in?
Janet: No, that’s definitely something that I’m working on because there’s an exercise, I actually did it, there’s an exercise in the book and it was like what your desired brand personality is versus what your actual brand personality is.
When I was writing down all the attributes that I’d like to have, and I realized, where I’m starting from, how I can get there, because I don’t have, I’m not comfortable yet in sharing a lot of things.
Where I’m trying to get to is where there’s transparency, that I’m honest about what I’m doing. I think that comes in doing these exercises.
Crys: I agree. Yeah.
Marianne: I’ve realized sarcasm is part of my brand. And if you don’t enjoy sarcasm, I don’t think that I connect very well. This is totally random, but a few years ago I was scuba diving and I couldn’t get the… breathing apparatus, we’ll just call it that, on, and I’m like, “Oh, my life is so hard.”
And the person next to me said, yeah, your life is so hard, you’re scuba diving. And my immediate thought was, “Oh, she’s not my audience.”
Janet: No, because they would have known they had to reference Donny. It had to have something to do with Donny.
Marianne: I’m like, my life is hard. I am here without Donny. I am here without Barry Manilow. There’s no one singing to me at all. But it was just funny how, when different people react different ways, my first instinct is, oh, they’re not my audience.
Crys: That’s a healthy response.
JP: I think I have a little bit of that sarcasm too, pretty dry sarcasm, that some people just don’t catch on to.
But one thing that I really am pushing to be in the forefront is the constantly, maybe annoyingly so, bringing up minority people, minority characters, including those of the alphabet mafia.
And just talking about gender and orientation to try and normalize the conversation. Cause I do it a ton in Write Away as we are right here. But also I’m trying to incorporate that more into my fiction just because I want it normalized and I’m not going to not talk about it anymore.
Crys: Yeah, I would say with the hair color being an element of the marketing, the brand behind that is like spunky, spontaneous and colorful. That’s all part of my fiction for sure.
Lon: I can’t think of anything. That’s my problem. My stuff’s either like adventure or noir stuff. And I’m not a darker, scarier, brooding individual. And like the closest thing I can think of is, I there’s a few stories where there are talking cats and I have cats. So there you go.
Crys: What it sounds like, what you’re saying though about your brand, is that it’s a place you go to just have fun.
Lon: Yeah.
JP: Yeah. Like I’m getting the Douglas Adams, fun, pseudo surrealistic, humorous vibe.
Ran: I get like the story if you were to write a Star Wars, it wouldn’t be about the heroes, it would be about like the minor characters that nobody ever talks about. That’s who the heroes are in your stories. It seems that they’re the junkyard people, the I don’t know, these are the underdog characters that nobody pays attention to.
Lon: Yeah. To some extent.
Crys: How about you, Ran?
Ran: I was trying to think of that. I don’t have an eloquent way of putting it, but it’s definitely about belonging and around feeling like a stranger in a strange land and meaning of life stuff. I dunno, like people grappling with trying to connect their circumstances with meaning. Trying to find meaning in their circumstances and in there not belonging.
So it’s something in around that sounds not very clear.
Crys: The question I would throw at you to see if you can pin down at least one thing is, what’s something that you do that people just go, that’s so Ran?
Ran: Philosophize.
Crys: So digging deep on something that other people are like, “Whoa, I just wanted to know where the bread comes from?”
Ran: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Oh my God, Crys, you know me so well.
But that’s exactly it. That’s exactly it. Oh, here she goes again.
Crys: I love it.
Ran: So many people are like, are you trying to complicate things that are really simple again, Miranda?
I was like, Ooh, do I do that?
Crys: I love it. Finding the complications in simplicity.
All right, guys. Thank you so much for reading this book with us.
Thank you everyone for joining us for this discussion. Next month we will be reading Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, and that will be our first month where we’re actually having our patrons available to come into the Zoom meeting and be there while we discuss the book.
And then we’ll open up for Q and A or comments at the very end. So if that’s something that interests you, please do check out the Patreon link below and subscribe at the level that allows you to join us because we’d love to see your lovely faces or hear your lovely voices if you’re not comfortable appearing on camera.
We will be hosting the live stream recording on June 9th. So if you are interested, we hope to see you there. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next month.
JP: See you later.
Crys: Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Marianne’s on it.
Marianne: I was thinking there’d be more pictures in this. I don’t know if this is next month or the month after that, but…
Crys: Did you not get the comic book version?
Marianne: I thought there’d be cats. And there’s no cats.
Like the only cat is on the cover.
Crys: Well, the cat is writing the novel.
Marianne: I was hoping there’d be at least like a stick figure of a cat, so when you flipped it, it like jumped or something. I’m gonna, I’m gonna write them.
Crys: Can you please draw that in your copy?
JP: You should write them. Their branding is clearly off.
Marianne: They need my stick figures. What are they thinking?
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