WOW! Women On Writing Blog: branding

Thursday, November 03, 2022

Every Saturday, I read Jane Friedman’s Electric Speed newsletter. One recent newsletter featured a piece on generating a favicon for your website. It explained that favicons are those tiny icons that appear on browser tabs.

Below is the favicon for WOW! Women on Writing. Not only does it appear on your browser tab, you can also find it in your search history and in search results. It makes WOW! and the Muffin easy to find amid all the other tabs, sites, and searches that we writers visit on a regular basis.

As I read the piece in Electric Speed, I was a little envious. I’ve always wanted a favicon although I didn’t know what it was called until that very moment. But did I want it badly enough to take the time to figure it out? The answer was yes and it was helped by the fact that it was wildly easy to do.

I started with Friedman's newsletter and the link she provided to Real Favicon Generator. This site will help you see if your blog or site can support a favicon. It will also help you generate the JPG file of the image.

The Saturday that I was reading this, my site had the WordPress logo. That's fine for WordPress but not so fine for me. There are a lot of WordPress blogs and blending into the pack wasn’t going to do me any good.

But what to use? This is the step that is going to take a bit of time. Yes, you can just choose a piece of clip art, but you don’t want to use something random. You want to use something that will immediately make people think of you. If you write mysteries that are solved by a Sherlock Holmes-style sleuth, you might use a magnifying glass. If you write romance novels, you might use a heart.

Fortunately, I have a logo. It is my nickname set against an oblong background (see below). You might not realize it by looking at the favicons in your browser, but the image is square. My image was rectangular, longer than it is tall. Real Favicon Generator will fix that for you, expanding the image. I fixed it using Photoshop by expanding the canvas size.

I wasn’t altogether certain how to add this to my site once I had it, so I did a quick Google search. That led me to “How to Add a Favicon to Your WordPress Blog.” Honestly, let other people do the heavy lifting by figuring things out whenever you can. If you have a WordPress site, click through. If not? Google is your friend.

In less than 20 minutes, I had sized my image and uploaded my favicon. My site and my blog will now stand out among the WordPress blogs that don’t have a unique image. It isn’t something that you have to do but it is something you might seriously consider. It adds just a bit more professionalism to your site and makes you just a bit easier to find. It’s small but it can help make you and your work more visible, which isn’t a bad thing in a crowded marketplace.

--SueBE

Sue Bradford Edwards' is the author of over 35 books for young readers. To find out more about her writing, visit her site and blog, One Writer's Journey.

The next session of her new course, Pitching, Querying and Submitting Your Work will begin on November 6, 2022). Coping with rejection is one of the topics she will cover in this course.

Sue is also the instructor for Research: Prepping to Write Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults (next session begins November 6, 2022) and Writing Nonfiction for Children and Young Adults (next session begins November 6, 2022).

Leave a Comment brand, branding, favicon, icon. website, professionalism, wow!

The Rest of the (Revamp) Story

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Last time we were here, I discussed how a link started a chain of events with my website (and honestly, I’m still working to bring all the pieces together). BUT those are just house-keeping details; the bigger picture of how all that revamping came about is, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

Back in December, Youngest Junior Hall asked for books under his tree. He didn’t ask for specific titles but he did ask for a subject: entrepreneurship and marketing. So like the good writer that I am, I did my homework. I checked entrepreneur websites and a couple of titles kept coming up. I expected titles like, “How to Be a Pro at Marketing and Big Business” which granted, is not very creative but I was thinking like a boring business person.

At least, I thought I was thinking like a boring business person. But boy, did I ever think wrong. Because boring business no longer exists, as far as I can tell; the best books were about thinking creatively, marketing outside the box, business beyond boundaries. And after I ordered a couple titles and read the first chapter or two, I was hooked. And I realized that much of what I was reading pertained to me as a business person, a writer, and a productive member of the human race. Who knew entrepreneurial books could do all that?

First, I cracked open How Successful People Think by John Maxwell. If you want to change up how you think about success, your work, and possibly your life, start with this slim book. I began thinking about what my success would look like long before I touched my website.

As 2020 kicked off, I participated over at Tara Lazar’s Storystorm, which is a great way to stockpile ideas and just think. (You can still take a look at the great posts if you need idea-generating inspiration; you won’t be eligible for prizes but you’re still going to win.) And I would zip over to websites of all these creatives, too. So while I was coming up with story ideas, I had Maxwell’s thinking stuff churning in my mind while I zipped. A picture of where I wanted my website to go was forming.

Then I read Building a Storybrand by Donald Miller and if I’m telling the truth here, I just checked it out of the library for Youngest Junior Hall ‘cause I was too cheap to buy every book on those lists. But I read the first couple pages because he uses the hero’s journey in his seven steps about building a story brand and getting your message out there.

What writer can resist the hero’s journey? If you’ve ever wondered about your brand and branding in general, here’s something perfect for a writer. And as an extra bonus, Miller goes into website-building, too, and so I took a couple (and by a couple, I mean a lot) of notes.

And finally, I came across finding your core story. Core story happens to be a business principle but I’m talking about it as it pertains to writers. We all have a core story, that story we write over and over again. We might dress it differently—romance, horror, mystery, humor—but we tell the same story, over and over. And not to confuse you, but it’s not the same thing as your brand.

For example, I write funny, whether I’m writing for kids or adults. There will be some sort of humor in a short story or a full-length manuscript or even a limerick, and it doesn’t matter if it’s macabre or madcap middle-school adventures. That’s my brand but it’s not my core story. I’m still fine-tuning my core story thinking and wondering how it informs my career.

Meanwhile, all of that exploring helped me see my brand, my writing, my business more clearly. And so then, I clicked on that link, making small tweaks here and there on the website and...well, you know the rest of that story and now you know the story behind it. Totally worth all that thinking!

How about you? Have a book that re-shaped your thinking? Agree or disagree with the idea of a core-story? Expand our minds and share!

~Cathy C. Hall