Branding

As authors trying to promote our work online, we believe it's important to have a good image/name combo. For a long time we didn't even have a profile pic on Twitter. We also had some trouble finding a good name and went through several Lovecraftian ones before deciding on The Snarky Cats of Ulthar.

The previous names were lame, impersonal, and too serious. This was a problem not only because this made them unappealing, but also because our digital comic book series, An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying, is partly a comedy and our blog was pretty snarky. We wish we could say we came up with the image/name combo we have now after some intense brainstorming, but it was actually an accident. We needed an original image and we had already tried some feline based names (unfortunately, all the best names involving any variation of 'cat' were already taken). Zazzie was an obvious choice for the image.

Our most recent profile pic featuring Zazzie

You may know him only as the floofy cat on our profile pic, but he's more than that. Zazzie is also a character in An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying. He made his debut in Geek Addiction, as a picture on Sam's sweater. She explains that the only reason she's still on Facebook is because he has his own page, AGoat4Zazzie, and his owner posts really cute videos (BTW we're embarrassed to admit that we only googled about FB handles when we tweeted this). Zazzie's owner is the creator of a new crypto currency named 'goat', which is being backed by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Reza Dhal.

Simone and Zazzie make a brief appearance shortly after Sam, Penny, and Anne's conversation. Oh, and in case you're wondering, no, we're not in any way, shape, or form involved in crypto. We still don't even fully understand how it works.

We first used Zazzie's non-existent FB handle during our brief time on GETTR, and later decided to adopt it as our own Twitter handle to make sure no one would be able to appropriate it for nefarious ends. At least on Twitter. Of course, for that to happen, people would have to read it first. Sigh, such optimism... Oh, and the handle has a meaning, but we’re not telling. Yet.

It was thanks to Zazzie that we ended up creating a more consistent image for ourselves as authors, with a recognizable profile pic we can use across different platforms and a fun, Lovecraftian name: The Snarky Cats of Ulthar. This was such an obvious choice that we're embarrassed it took us so long to think of it. We're also surprised it wasn't already taken.