It’s not hard to figure out where I stand on this argument, but I’ll try and objectively summarize both sides, starting with Erin:

In the last decade or more, the trend in trade publishing has been to focus on branding an author instead of an imprint. There are some notable exceptions, but, for the most part, publishers’ branding rarely extends beyond the colophon on the spine and printed at the bottom of an advertisement.

Ask any publisher, and they will say that the average reader does not relate to a publisher, they relate to an author. This may be true, but is this merely because publishers are not doing enough to brand themselves and their types of books? Is there more that could be done that would make imprints stand out, thus attracting more readers, and allowing savvy publishers to be more competitive in an already-saturated marketplace?

Before I begin, I would like to define the term “branding” as a method by which a publisher or a publishing imprint defines who they are and the types of books they publish in order to establish a relationship with the reader.

Anything that promotes a closer connection between readers and publishers is a good idea in my book. But going on, here are a couple examples Erin includes on how to build a brand:

Package

Sure, there is a colophon on the side of the book, but why not create a standard package that helps to assert that this is a book published by [INSERT PUBLISHER HERE]. It could be expanding the colophon to take over the whole spine (which might also inspire bibliophiles to want the whole collection for their library) or be something more dramatic like Library of America’s uniform edition or the consistently colored spines of the aforementioned New York Review of Books editions.

And here’s a slightly more embarrassing/meta suggestion:

Put a Face to the House

Go forth and talk to the readers. Train a few editors, publicists, marketing people to be spokespeople for the company. Get them out there doing interviews, host a book club in a local store, write a blog about the books they publish, get them on panels at festivals and fairs beyond the traditional writing festivals. That’s how magazines help to brand themselves, why not book publishers? Chad Post, Publishing Perspectives contributor and Publisher at Open Letter, is almost more famous than his imprint. He was recently on “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer” and is regularly on local television in Rochester.

I agree with all of this—with the caveat that this makes most sense when the publishing house (or imprint) has a clear focus. It’s hard to brand a general house that’s appealing to one group of people with its cookbooks, another with its poetry, etc. Not that it’s impossible—I trust in Knopf for basically anything in any category (although recent conversations about have shaken my faith a bit)—just that it’s easier if you are a certain definable thing.

Flipping sides, here’s a few quotes from Sarah Russo about why publishers shouldn’t brand themselves:

I’m of the belief that publisher or imprint specific branding would be not only fairly fruitless for trade publishers but also hugely time consuming and a financial drain. Branding, specifically online branding, works in niches that allow you to reach specific communities. A branding campaign needs a defined target or it is destined to fail. [. . .]

The abundance of publisher Facebook pages, blogs and Twitter feeds suggest that publishers want to go direct to consumers, but many are not reaching that audience at all. Some market research on the bigger imprints’ Facebook pages would likely report that their “fans” are already in the industry (or want to be). Pantheon has 724 followers this morning. Sixty-five of those followers are publishing people that I know personally. That’s a hefty percentage. And that’s a lot of effort expended to get those 700 fans, a minimum of 10% of which are in the industry.

That’s the best paragraph in here, especially considering that Open Letter has almost 1,500 FB fans . . . It actually sort of proves my point that you have to be somewhat specific to be able to build a brand.

So we need to reach a new group of readers. I don’t think our reading public is spending hours watching TV each day. However, targeted TV ads could work in the right markets using the right TV programs. Slate tested an interesting TV ad experiment recently. It’s not out of the question, but it can be strategically limiting financially and production-wise. (I’m not intentionally leaving out radio but NPR ads are frequently used by publishers and are nothing new.)

I think I’m done quoting from her. Sure, this is all fine and good, but none of her suggestions address the fact that the old model is creaky and not very adaptable to an age of connectivity. I agree that it would be a huge waste of money for Random House to try and rebrand itself—that’s just plain silly. But entertaining the idea of TV ads strikes me as being as misguiding as launching a billboard campaign. (Does anyone actually watch live TV anymore anyway?)

Sorry—I thought I could write a balanced post about this, but I can’t. Even if general readers don’t necessarily pay attention to who is publishing which books, a savvy, strategic branding campaign can help build a loyal audience in a relatively cheap and easy way. And who doesn’t want a core group of fans buying and talking about their books?

Paradoxically, the proliferation of digital media that is arguably the biggest threat to traditional publishing also offers authors more opportunities than ever to distribute and promote their work. The catch: In order to do that effectively, authors increasingly must transcend their words and become brands. [. . .]

In today’s fickle marketplace, the Internet—with blogs, videos, Twitter, and other promotional tools like Amazon’s Author Stores—is the modern-day equivalent to hand-selling. [. . .] In a way, authors are empowered in this new model, provided they can leverage their networks into living, breathing communities who have a stake in—and benefit from—an author’s ballooning platform.

With the examples in the article being people like James Patterson, John Grisham, and Mitch Albom (where’s Tom Clancy? Dude has videogames named after him), I’m glad Jill Priluck pointed out the insanity and danger of this all:

The overemphasis on platforms means that authors sink into brand-speak to get their projects sold, even though their writing—and often their reputations—gets short-circuited. With limited choices, they trade depth for instant gratification, visibility, and higher advances. Ironically, their longevity, supposedly the marker of a good brand, falls by the wayside. It seems that unlike a detergent or a car, an author who is branded too quickly will often fizzle out just as fast.

This “author as product” mentality is pretty insane and really devalues the work itself. It also completely fits in with the changes that have gone on in the publishing world over the past couple decades.

Through mergers and corporate acquisitions, any “branding” that publishing lines once had (and by “brand,” I mean editorial vision and identity, something readers can recognize and appreciate, not the Open Letter XBox game) has been completely dissolved, and the name on the spine of a lot of books is sort of meaningless. So the author’s name/reputation/brand is more important than the publishing line, something that is the exact opposite at independent houses, which are often introducing unknown authors to the reading public.

Andre Schriffrin’s The Business of Books (which should be required reading for anyone in publishing, but is strangely out-of-print) gets into this exact issue, especially when he takes Michael Korda to task for his lackadaisical attitude toward this shift—and the cheapening of publishing as a whole—in his publishing memoir, Another Life:

Korda describes these authors, on which the firm’s fortunes were increasingly to rely, with remarkable disdain. They are demanding, their clothing is vulgar, they do not know the right places in London at which to order custom-made shoes, or the appropriate restaurants at which to eat—subjects on which Korda is very well informed. At the same time, he describes their books as the unavoidable wave of the future as publishing becomes increasingly tied to the entertainment industry, and the styles and values of Hollywood become dominant. Celebrity books are the titles that will make or break firms and Korda, with his boss, Richard Snyder, are determined that it will be the former.

In the time Simon & Schuster was bought by Viacom, owners of Paramount Pictures, and for a brief while it was even renamed Paramount Books. While Korda is frank in describing the economic pressures of these changes, he is nonetheless firmly wedded to the assumption that these are the books on which publishing should focus, and he is proud of his successes with them, if not of his associations with their authors.

Schiffrin then related a bit about Korda attacking Harold Robbins for Robbins’s shame at going from a literary author to a commercial one, concluding:

It seems that in today’s publishing it is only authors who despise themselves for selling out. Publishers merely anticipate inevitable trends.