Starting a Publishing Firm? 8 Branding Tips to Check All the Boxes!

Branding is the art of creating a consistent, pleasing, and reflective design identity for your business. Those who nail its intricacies benefit in several ways: higher profits, premium market standing, and customer loyalty are a few of them.

Creating branding for a publishing firm is balancing a high-wire act. You want to earn profits but you cannot do it at the cost of creativity, risk-taking, and imagination. Unlike most other businesses, you do not have the liberty to make decisions based only on financial outcomes. You’ll sometimes need to make decisions that encourage only creativity and nothing else.

But that’s the kind of publishing firm that attracts top talent and earns the loyalty of its readers and writers.

So, how do you achieve this balance? By creating a publishing firm identity design that merges your business core with a heart for great storytelling.

Position Your Brand

Clients need to identify you when they look at you in a crowd. By clearly defining you who are and what you offer, helps you get the most relevant talent from the market. If you want to attract the best upcoming comic design artists, for example, you need to position your brand with a relevant design and offering where your target market sees you and immediately connects with you.

Brand positioning distinguishes you from the rest and gives you an elevated space to shine. You become more visible and more relatable.

Define Your Niche

Take any publishing company in the world; most of them have a very vague, general kind of brand identity. Look at HarperCollins. The logo alone is unable to tell you what the company is about. Even if you know it’s a publishing house, you won’t know what kind of books they go for.

In a book-reading world that is slowly being overtaken by eBooks, such an ambiguous identity doesn’t make you relevant for the most promising talent.

Carving out your niche and properly marketing it to the right people is paramount to creating a successful publishing brand.

Create a Brand-Reflective Logo

You need to communicate with your audience through your logo. Consider it your mouthpiece. Even before you meet your writers, the logo alone should be enough to make people curious and encourage them to get to know you better.

You can use a printing or publishing logo maker to design a logo that reflects your niche and is central to your branding. Choose a shape, colors, and typeface that create harmony and convey a unified message of clear identity and vision for the future.

Logos are what people look at to create first impressions about a brand. If you can successfully create a positive first impression, the road ahead will be that much easier at securing the best writers and establishing a large readership.

Design an Interactive Website

Create an interactive website that people would want to spend time on. Most publishers use their websites as their eCommerce stores. While there’s nothing wrong with that but if your focus is only on selling, you are missing out on so much. And more often, it’s that extra that hooks the potential buyer in instead of an endless list of new arrivals.

Use your website to offer a discussion board, a book review section, an events club, and even a librarian’s corner. Use video, animation, and other forms of motion graphics to tell visual stories on your website. Let your users know that you are at ease with modern technology and are embracing it fully.

The more there is on your website (all relevant, of course), the more people will want to explore. That means longer page visitors, fewer bounces, and increased conversions.

Use Original Photography

Invite your readers in displaying yourself authentically. Using original photography on your website and social media is a great way to connect with the audience. As you prepare to publish a new book, show your audience what goes on behind the scenes. When a new book arrives, show them pictures of the new stock. When you arrange an event, do a live stream and let people be a part of the action.

But do all this with a desire to authentically connect with your audience. Readers and writers are some of the most perceptive people on earth. Anything less than 100% genuine effort and they’ll see through the act right away.

Be Evocative in Your Copy

You are in the business of creating riveting narrations. Consider your website and your social media your live-action story. Make sure you tell it convincingly.

Evocative and creative copy on your ads, social media, landing page, and website will draw people in and make them pause. Using fresh, interesting, and expressive copywriting is integral for your publishing house branding. Trawl your comments sections and review board and figure out the lingua franca of your audience. What is their sound? What vocabulary do they use to connect to others and describe themselves?

Then match them in voice and tone through your copy to ensure you are on the same page with your audience. 

A Buzzing Social Media

Keep your social media a happening place. No writer wants to associate themselves with a publisher who doesn’t know how to get their marketing right. And marketing is fundamental to publishing. If you can’t sell books, what are you in the business of?

Create your profiles on all major social media platforms, including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Use social media scheduling software to manage all of your online marketing from one place. Create insightful, interesting, fun, and regular posts. Engage with your audience, reply to their comments and tweets, and hold live stream sessions/podcast sessions.

The more active and engaged you are on social media, the ripe your target market for every new book you publish and launch.

Analyze and Test

Once you have set up shop, it’s time to get the data in. As people visit your website and social media etc., you will start getting important data on how your audience interacts with your brand and your offering. Studying their behavior will help you create more tailored and user-centered experiences that will in turn bring even more people in.

If things don’t work out as you had hoped, the data will again be a guiding light helping you change course based on facts and figures. So keep testing a regular part of your branding and evolution. With new information, pivot to suit changing reader and writer demands so you can stay relevant no matter how the market behaves.

The Takeaway

A firm grasp on your publishing brand’s core character and passion to encourage people to connect with your brand is what will drive your branding. Since you represent the creative industry, the bar is already high for you. Be diligent in creativity so the top talent has no way but to come to you and stay there.