New Author Logo

If you meander through the dozens of articles on the internet regarding authors, author platforms, and writing in general, you'll probably come across a few posts advising against the idea of an author branding themselves with a logo. Authors should be their own brand and not have to craft an image - other than their author pic - to associate them with their writing platform.

Regardless of this advice, I took some time out last week to craft an author logo for myself. It's no different, really, from a coat of arms in that it symbolizes what I am all about as a writer, much like the coat of arms represents family heritage. And it helps, since I write in different series, to establish myself as an eye-catching symbol that can show attribution to my many different works.

The main thing this logo has in it is my oak tree - originally a photograph that my wife took while we were in California one year. It is also the same tree found on the cover of the first book in my Black Earth series, End of the Innocence. If you've read through the first two novels in my young adult series, Expired Reality, you also might draw a connection to the oak tree mentioned in those books, the one that Carrie goes to to escape her reality. The oak tree is found in both of my series, and an oak tree represents stability, strength, and firm rooting. Seeing how my firm rooting is found in God, I thought the oak tree symbolized my relationship to my faith quite well, and so that's why the oak tree is found in my logo. Oak trees also drop acorns (seeds), which can then spread to create other oak trees. In this way, the oak tree represents my ability to sow creativity and influence, both through my faith and in my writing.

The second thing you'll notice are the multitude of stars hanging above the oak tree. The stars really represent a multitude of different things, such as creativity, science fiction/fantasy (the genre I specialize in), and the limitlessness of our universe. There is no meaning behind the number of stars in the logo, just in case you were wondering. I simply put in as many as looked good.

In the end, I have a great representation of who I am as a writer. Grounded in faith, in the strength equivalent to an oak tree, crafting creative works of science fiction/fantasy and other relevant genres, I am a writer who seeks to bring imagination to the pages of each of my literary works. I'll be incorporating this logo and a few new design elements to my main website later this week, so stay tuned.