by Ane Mulligan  @AneMulligan

Brand and voice. Two words tossed about the industry with regularity. Yet, what are they actually, and how do you go about finding your voice and establish a brand?

Finding Voice

When I read Finding Your Voice, by Les Edgerton, a light bulb turned on for me and changed the way I wrote.  He basically said, “Think of how you write a letter or an email to a family member or close friend. That’s your voice.”

I immediately thought of my Christmas letter (which I missed writing last month). Friends tell me they always look forward to mine, because it isn’t a travelogue or list of kids’ accomplishments. I always tried to make it more of a story, and that resonates with people. Following that line of thinking, I applied it to the manuscript that would become my first published novel.

I still lacked a tagline that told what I wrote about, until I was in a discussion of voice with a number of other writers. One of them said to me, “You mean your Southern-fried fiction?” She pulled that from all my emails, and she was right.

And so, my voice was established, along with my tagline.

Brand took a bit longer to find.

At a time before thst first novel was bought by a publisher, I waffled between contemporary and historical. I’d started a story set in the Great Depression. However, my agent told me I needed to choose between them. Because I was yet unpublished, bouncing between genres was unwise.

And so I chose contemporary, and after a while, she sold the 4-book series to my publisher. But something interesting happened along the way. She told me I had established my brand, and remembering the proposal from the historical one, she said it fit my brand.

What brand?

She then told me each book I wrote had an ensemble cast of strong Southern women helping each other through the story. As long as my books contained that, I was free to write both contemporary and historical.

My Chapel Springs series is contemporary, and the Georgia Magnolias series is historical, set in the 1930s. I’m going back to contemporary for the time being and will have a new book out in the new year, called Take My Hand. At least that’s the working title.

Like all my books, it stays true to my brand.

Ane Mulligan lives life from a director’s chair, both in theatre and at her desk, creating novels. Entranced with story by age three, at five, she saw PETER PAN onstage and was struck with a fever from which she never recovered—stage fever. One day, her passions collided, and an award-winning, bestselling novelist emerged. She believes chocolate and coffee are two of the four major food groups and lives in Sugar Hill, GA, with her artist husband and a rascally Rottweiler. Find Ane on her website, Amazon Author page, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, The Write Conversation, and Blue Ridge Conference Blog.