On developing your brand...

[gonz]

Which is more important for your branding? Your pen name or your series title? Assume that you want to position yourself as the leading author of a certain styles of books.

Say that you are developing a brand of plumber romances. You develop a pen name that writes books about women and plumbers.

Say that you are also developing a brand of mailman romances.

One option is to write everything under a single pen name.  Your brand is "the working man" romance author. You have your "Plumbing Your Pipes" titled series of books. You also have you "Delivering You Love" titled series of books. Maybe there's some crossover among readers, but certainly not 100%.

The other option is to split into two pen names, one for each series. One pen name becomes "the plumber author". The other becomes "the mailman author".

Which do you think is the better marketing strategy for developing your brand(s) long-term?

What if we push it further. "Plumbing Your Pipes" is a comedic romance series. "Delivering You Love" has melancholy, tearjerker overtones. Any difference in branding strategy, then?

[CoraBuhlert]

Maintaining more than one pen name means twice the work with regard to visibility, newsletters, websites, social media, etc... It does make sense to have different pen names, if you write in vastly different genres, but for something so similar as working man contemporary romances, I'd stick with one pen name and differentiate the different series via cover design, typography, etc...

[Lorri Moulton]

It's up to the author.  Do they want the focus on the story or themselves?

It's a lot of work for readers to find our books. Why do it multiple times?  I decided to put all my genres under my name except for one series I'm working on for next year (first person) and written by the main character.  Okay, not...but it will be a fun marketing experiment. 

[Rinelle]

If you have a different pen name for every series, you lose the benefit of crossover, which is what keeps your backlist alive. Whenever I run a promo on my newer, PNR series, I see an uptick in sales of my older, SFR series, and even my fantasy romance series, despite them being quite different.

If you write in vastly different genres (eg romance vs thrillers) then a pen name is a good idea, but if it's just different flavours of the same genre I think you're doing yourself a disservice and losing sales by separating them.

For branding, you want to look more at the themes of your writing than at the stories themselves. If you're a sci-fi writer, are you better at technical details, or space battles? If you write romance, and your heroes bad boys or nice guys, or do your heroines stand up for themselves? Those are the things that will make readers cross series, not your heroes occupation.

Then brand your series covers to play up on whatever hook that series uses.

[Writer]

I wouldn't do a different pen name for every series, but for every brand I would. Brand meaning a significant change in tone.