Is branding not important for ebook writers etc.?

[Jake]

There are certainly exceptions, perhaps more so for those selling bizop ebooks who are able to up-sell people to $1000 webinars based on the guru author's reputation. David DeAngelo is a well known dating title pen name for the marketing author Eban Pagen.

Certainly a massively more important aspect for any relatively unknown authors is the book title, some pre-internet authors ran test advertising campaigns for non existing books of different titles to measure the market response to the names.