The financial opportunities connected to writing a book in 2024 are all downstream from the author’s brand, which is to say, their reputation. These start with the size of the advance on future sales the publisher pays the author and include those that exist beyond the book. Depending on the size of the author’s brand, the latter can far exceed the former, in which case the book serves as a promotional vehicle for the way the author is monetizating her brand. An example is the book publishing venture that BMM Worldwide conceived and launched for journalist and opinion celebrity Melanie Phillips backed by Peter Thiel. Interested authors should reference our Brand Development Practice when reaching out.
Author brands are malleable and can be scaled. BMM Worldwide president, Suzanne Balaban hails from Scribner Books where she looked after novelist Stephen King ✍️. Before Mr. King published Lisey’s Story, he was known as one of the most successful authors in the world who writes horror stories often adapted for film. But after publishing Lisey’s Story, King was more often spoken of as a literary novelist in the mold of James Joyce.
What changed? Steven King’s brand.
As if by magic, Janet Maslin opened her review of Lisey’s Story in the New York Times:
“This sentence is about to do the unthinkable: connect James Joyce and Stephen King.”
Janet Maslin’s words constituted a branding milestone for Mr. King. It represented the culmination of his move to Scribner and the literary branding genius of Suzanne Balaban.
Today, BMM Worldwide’s Brand Development practice works alongside our Agency and Publicity practices like a Literary Advertising Agency 🚀.
While our Publicity practice 🗣 conducts campaigns to secure unpaid organic book endorsements, and our Agency practice 📚sells new books to mainstream publishers, our Brand Development practice 🚀 assists authors with their: brands, markets, positioning, platforms, networks, followings, and revenue opportunities. Depending upon the author’s objectives and financial resources, our methods include:
brand work-up
market segmentation
digital marketing
digital advertising
book launch events
book cover design
author playlists
book movements
and commercial ventures
Brand work-ups entail segmenting the author’s readership, developing positioning and key brand parameters, supporting the author in selecting branding vehicles that align with their goals and budget, and producing a creative brief for use in soliciting bids from vendors.
BMM Worldwide negotiates with, retains, transacts with, and oversees the work of the vendors and uses the finalized brand parameters to guide their work. The vendors express the brand parameters in physical form across the different branding vehicles, from headshot photography and TikTok teasers, to branded collateral for book launch events and Facebook advertisements. We work with the premier vendors in the world, leverage globalization and our platform in the cloud to coordinate their efforts, and secure advantages on costs.
The author branding projects below comprise a representative sample:
🎥 Trailer for Shira Nayman’s time travel novel River (Guernica Editions).
🎥 Trailer for In Sickness, Harvard University scientist Barrett Rollins’ shocking memoir (Post Hill).
🎥 Trailer for emBooks, the Peter Thiel-backed, new publishing company we launched to re-position UK opinion celebrity, Melanie Phillips. Following in the footsteps of the gatekeeper disintermediations of celebrity journalists Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Beck, emBooks garnered national headlines in the UK and published an international bestseller in its first month of operation - Islamophilia, by Douglas Murray. To assist Ms. Phillips in bringing her publishing company into the world, BMM contributed:
🌈 business concept development
🗄 legal and accounting
📈 financial projections
💵 entity capitalization
🫂 executive management
🎥 brand development
™️ trademark registration
📕 product development
🎉 launch event production
🗣 venture and book publicity
🎯 and marketing
🔬 Critica, a book movement to amplify the ideas introduced by Drs. Sara and Jack Gorman in Denying To The Grave, a New Yorker Magazine, Scientific American, and Atlantic featured book about the psychology of making health and security decisions published by Oxford University Press. Summing up their experience, the father-daughter scientists wrote:
“Suzanne and Elliot were a delight to work with in every way. They transformed out book into a real movement that’s opened up opportunities beyond what we ever thought possible. We thoroughly enjoyed working with them. We can’t thank them enough.
☁️ Social media for the Bill Clegg-agented novel The Likely World by Melanie Conroy Goldman.
🗣 Digital marketing for Harvard Prof. Ruth Wisse’s memoir, Free As A Jew (Wicked Son).
📕 Cover for When She Comes Back by Ronit Plank (Motina).
🗣 Social media for A Promise of Sweet Tea by Pinchas Blitt (Azrieli)
🎵 Playlist for Eric Metaxas’ memoir, Fish Out of Water (Regnery)