For years, I’ve been skeptical about the whole brand thing. As a writer, I’m supposed to be sculpting “my brand,” whatever that is—an abstract collection of images and words that my readers will associate with me.
Am I funny, light, and colorful? Am I thoughtful, introspective, and deep? My brand is supposed to be consistent and strong, something readers bond with and return to, and I’m supposed to project it out in all media, from this website to Facebook to email.
That sounds exhausting. And limiting. I don’t want to be hemmed in by a brand. At thirty-five, I’m still figuring out who I am in real life, let alone online.
Plus, it feels calculating to sit behind my computer screen and design the perfect way to present myself to the world, then to check each post to make sure it fits with who I’m “supposed” to be.
When I was a teen, I refused to wear make-up. As a writer, for much the same reason, I’ve refused so far to think very hard about my “brand.”
But I just had an experience that convinced me the whole brand thing has merits. For the first time, because of this experience, I get it—the number one reason why attending to my brand is worthwhile.
What changed my mind was appearing this week on Wisconsin Public Radio’s The Larry Meiller Show. I’d been invited to promote my first book, Field Guide to Wisconsin Streams, which I co-wrote with my husband Ron while we worked at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Ron and I spent three summers on a DNR field crew surveying streams around the state, then were tasked with creating this book to help scientists and anglers identify the plants, fishes, invertebrates, reptiles, and amphibians we were seeing. The book came out this spring, and even though we’ve since quit the DNR, we were invited to appear on the radio this week and talk with Larry Meiller about our work.
We were thrilled to appear on the show. It went well—we geeked about freshwater mussels, about the fascinating silken cases built by caddisfly larvae, and about the mating rituals of the Johnny darter minnow. We described our hopes that the book will be useful to anyone wading in streams, and we beamed when listeners called in and asked how to purchase it. (If you’re interested in listening to the show, here’s a link!)
But there was one moment of satisfaction we shared privately, because no one else noticed it besides us.
It came at the show’s outset, when Larry Meiller introduced us. “Katie Songer,” he said, “is a writer, and she’s an ecologist… Ron is an ecologist and educator.”
You see, those titles mean something to Ron and me. It took us years to arrive at them.
When we first started our jobs at the DNR, we were fresh out of grad school with master’s degrees in soil and water conservation. We’d both taken three years of classes, including Ecology of Rivers and Streams, Vegetation of Wisconsin, and Limnology (the study of inland waters). We wanted to be stream ecologists, and we were excited to be hired into jobs where we’d get field experience to supplement our coursework.
Our new job title was Water Resources Management Specialist, a bureaucratic catch-all for “anyone working in water resources.” But the work we’d be doing was stream ecology. We were on our way.
A year or so into the job, a long-time DNR ecologist told us we were not ecologists. This was someone with whom we worked closely, and whose email signature read “Ecologist.” In a position superior to our own, he seemed intent on us knowing our place. Apparently, although we were doing the same work as him, we hadn’t yet earned our chops.
We accepted his statement. We must not be ecologists yet. To be a real ecologist, we must need to be more like him, though we weren’t exactly sure what that meant or when our transition would take place. Yes, he’d been working in the field for decades—but after how many years had he started calling himself an ecologist? Five? Three? Did it take a certain number of publications? A certain number of years in school? That last answer must be no, because we both had several more years of schooling than him.
Two more years passed. That whole time, we meekly called ourselves “stream scientists.” Hesitant to sound presumptuous, we reserved the word “ecologist” for our colleague and other old-timers like him, awkwardly explaining to friends that what we did was “stream science.” We collected data about streams and their wildlife. We analyzed the data we collected, finding patterns in how the wildlife interacted with each other and the water chemistry. We ran large-scale watershed studies. We were writing a book about stream ecology.
But we must not yet be stream ecologists, because no one had told us we were.
It wasn’t until our book was published, and we had quit the DNR, that we realized our mistake. Of course we were stream ecologists. We had just written a book on stream ecology, for heaven’s sake. We’d spent years in the field, and more years before that in the classroom.
We had learned, by now, that the scientist who said we weren’t ecologists was someone who harbored rivalries with other scientists at the agency. We saw through his poisonous statement at last—he had caused us to doubt ourselves for years.
The damage was already done, partly. On the back cover of our book, Ron and I are both identified as “environmental scientists.” The distinction is subtle, but to us, that title sounds much less authoritative than “ecologist.”
To partly make up for it, we created Amazon.com author pages. Mine begins:
Katie Songer is a writer, ecologist, and environmental educator living in Madison, Wisconsin. She is an avid naturalist and worked at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from 2008-13, spending several summers surveying and researching Wisconsin streams.
We knew almost no one would see our author pages, but they were still satisfying to look at. Somewhere, there was a printed statement of our true titles.
Then The Larry Meiller Show invited us to appear. This was the first promotional activity we’d participated in related to our book, so we were excited. We were even more excited when we read our own bios on Wisconsin Public Radio’s website. The bios had been taken almost verbatim from our Amazon.com author pages!
That’s right: Larry Meiller’s producer had done a search, and had found what we’d written about ourselves.
When Larry introduced us on the show, he read right from those bios. He announced to his thousands of listeners that I am a writer and ecologist, and that Ron is an ecologist, too.
At last, hearing Larry say these words, I understood what other writers have been trying to tell me about my brand. It’s this:
If you don’t attend to your brand, then you’ll lose control of it. And someone else could control it instead of you.
For years, at the DNR, I unwittingly gave my brand control away. As a result, I was diminished subtly—most of all in my own mind. I didn’t believe myself to be a true ecologist, a true authority. It took having a book published and going on the radio to finally believe that I was, in fact, a real ecologist.
Writers have this same problem. How do you know when you’re a “real” writer? Is it when you get a book published? No—you’ve been writing for years by then. Is it when you attend your first writing conference? When you write your first short story for fun? When you begin journaling in grade school? When you’re three years old and your grandmother tells you your made-up stories are amazing?
The truth is, you’re a writer when you say you’re a writer. It’s up to you. And what kind of writer you are, and who you want to be online, is up to you too. The power is yours to use or to ignore—but if you ignore it, you’re giving it away!
From now on, I will be thinking about my brand, trying to find a balance between calculation and authenticity. Eventually, I’ll find a way to be me online—both thoughtful and silly, both rebellious and quiet. I know a couple things for sure, though. I am a stream ecologist. And I am a writer.
The power to define myself is a precious gift, and it should be nobody else’s but my own.
