Naming My Brand

My publicist suggested to me recently that I identify my brand. The suggestion stumped me. Frankly, I associate the word “brand” with pet food or soup or cigarettes rather than with a person who writes books for a living.  But I am catching up with all the lingo and with what it takes to get a book out there into the hands of readers.  She helped me with this follow up question. What does a reader expect when they pick up one of your books?  Even though I write for all ages from toddlers to baby boomers, some of the same qualities drive my books.  First, I start with character. A person saunters into my mind or across my field of vision and I begin to wonder who she is.  Even a photograph stirs my writer’s brain. This photo that the great child labor photographer, Lewis Hine, took of little Addie Card in a Vermont textile museum stopped me in my tracks.  Who is she? Where did she come from?  Why is her hair tied up like an old woman’s? She doesn’t even have shoes. What happened to her? The story starts.

Readers who pick up my books will find characters in trouble. Complicated lives drive plot. How could this little girl who I called Grace get out of that mill? Then comes research if it’s fiction set in history. About research I always say, the writer needs to know the iceberg but only needs to give the reader the tip. The reader will trust the story if she senses what’s beneath the surface, what doesn’t need to be spelled out.  

Some of the research involves setting which means I need to visit the place where I’m setting the story.  For my memoir, Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, I wanted to try and see every place where my British born mother had lived during her childhood. So I traveled to Gibraltar where she was born

and on another trip, to Ware, England where my mother at the age of 13,  

was sent to Catholic  boarding school

and to the Scottish moors where she spent summer holidays and to London,

 where she worked as a decoding agent for MI5.

And in all my books, family dynamics move the story and the characters. This was true in my fantasy novel, The Castle in the Attic, where William, the 10-year-old protagonist, will do anything at all to keep someone he loves from leaving him.

It was true in Counting on Grace where Grace’s mother is happy to keep her working in the mill while Grace fights to get out and on with her life. 

And it’s certainly true in Daughter of Spies, where I had to mine my own family history to understand why my mother and father kept so many secrets not only from me and my brothers, but from each other.

I learned that in writing memoir, I could use all the writing tools I’d sharpened in my fiction writing, from dialogue to structure to character development to setting, but this time, I had to use those tools to make sense of my own story.

So what is my brand? I’m a prolific writer for readers of all ages. I write deeply researched stories that explore family bonds across generations, stories that are driven by character and that are set in places I’ve come to know well, be they around the corner or across the ocean.