Last week wrapped up another workshop here at WMG Publishing: this time, cliffhangers and genre.

The cliffhangers workshop was particularly exciting, especially when…

Oops, I’ll have to leave you hanging. I was busy working in my office during that one.

But I was able to catch snippets of the genre workshop, taught by our own Dean Wesley Smith. As he outlined for writers the ways to understand what virtual (or physical) shelf their books should really go (i.e. genre), I couldn’t help but think how much that paired with our recent discussions about branding here at WMG.

You see, for books, branding has a lot to do with genre. You want the book’s cover to reflect the genre with the art, typography, color scheme and overall appearance. You want to choose the right categories (aka shelves) in which to list your book so that they’ll reach the right audience. And as a publisher, you want the books in your inventory to also reflect your house brand.

That can be a bit trickier.

You don’t want to bury the book’s branding with the publisher’s. A logo helps, certainly, as it’s an obvious and small way to brand each book. It also helps to choose signature font families that reinforce the genre of your author’s books, but which will have a familiar feel for the reader from author to author within the publishing house. For example, we have specific font pairs (complimentary serif and sans serif fonts) identified for science fiction, fantasy, mystery, etc.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but hopefully you get the idea. You’ll see this in action on our home page every week as we feature two new or newly redesigned books.

So, keep watching for them, and let us know what you think.

Just don’t leave us hanging.

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Allyson Longueira is publisher of WMG Publishing. She is an award-winning writer, editor and designer.