Personal branding for authors? When you hear the word branding, you probably associate it with Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Toyota, and Sony. These are great examples of iconic corporate branding.
Their logos are the pillar of their marketing strategy, and consumers instantly recognize them as almost a trademark of quality and popularity. Large companies spend millions of dollars on brand messaging and long-term brand identity.
Of course, corporations use advertising campaigns to promote their products or services. Instant brand recognition makes this short-term publicity expenditure more valuable.
But some famous brands are not corporate in the strict sense.
Name brands that we all know
You don’t need to think for very long to make a list of famous people who have created successful personal branding based on their names.
The big ones very often only need one name to create a strong personal brand.
Think about Madonna, Elvis, Cher, Pelé, Boyoncé, and Sting.
You could add Voltaire, Michelangelo, and Cleopatra.
There are also athletes such as Pele, Maradona, and Ronaldo.
When it comes to authors, though, two-name brands are more common.
Douglas Adams, Steven King, James Patterson, John Grisham, and Agatha Christie come to mind, for example.
One author who is a cross between corporate and name branding is J. K. Rowling.
Her name is famous for sure, but her brand, Harry Potter, is equally, if not even more, well-known.
You’re probably not going to join this list, but can you improve your name recognition?
How does branding work if you are not famous or a corporation?
Personal branding can take on many different forms.
But generally, it means you spend time developing your personal brand and trying to build an online, and perhaps as well as an offline presence aimed at a particular target audience.
For most authors, the quickest and easiest way to interact with people on a personal level is to start building a solid social media platform.
But this does not mean mixing professional book marketing and personal accounts.
It might sound contradictory, but creating a personal brand is about your profession as an author and not your personal life.
Your online profile on social networks should be all about how well you write books, with no mention at all about how well you bake cakes.
Tips for building a personal brand for authors
The key ingredients for effective personal branding are the same for author promotion as for any other professional pursuit.
Consistency, clarity, reliability, honesty, and even emotional connection are essential elements of strong personal brands.
If you are a new author, the best way to build your personal brand is to start with four basic parts of your branding.
1. A personal brand website.
2. An active and effective blog and content strategy.
2. Selected social media accounts.
4. Your look, style, and behavior
A static website still has value
Creating a standalone website that presents you and your books is one of the best ways to get your name indexed by search engines.
If and when someone is doing an online search for you, you want them to find you.
You should have, at the very least, a well-designed home or landing page. Separate pages for each of your books are essential so people can buy your books.
You definitely need to add an about page and write it with the thought in mind that it will be your personal branding statement.
You will not need to update your website unless you release a new title, so it requires almost no work once you set it up.
While it is quick and easy to use free online websites, they have very little SEO value.
If you can, it’s better to use a self-hosted site and make sure you select a good domain name. Then, you can fully SEO-optimize your website for Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
A blog is an absolute must
Creating content is how you can quickly enhance your reputation and build your brand.
Not only as a writer and author but also as a way to become one of the thought leaders in your target market.
You need to select the core topic of your blog very carefully and stick to it.
If you are a science fiction author, do not write occasional articles about rose gardening or how good your chocolate brownies are. These are topics strictly for personal websites.
Find a topic theme you are knowledgeable about, such as mid-20th-century sci-fi, and stay on topic.
Your reward will come in time as you get known by people as an expert in your field.
Write blog posts and articles regularly or even on a schedule. Then, slowly build your bank of quality content and online presence.
Every article you write will be another small addition to the definition of your brand. And again, they will be indexed by search engines.
Think of a blog as a way to be a public speaker. If you do it well, people will listen to you.
Professional social media
Avoid creating a personal profile on social media platforms.
Or at least only use these types of accounts for your friends, close acquaintances, and family.
You can add professional Pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, and you should set up a new branded account on Twitter.
Or, if you already have a couple of Twitter accounts, you can rename a Twitter account and re-brand it.
Pinterest also has the option to create a business account.
Once you have established your branding accounts, make sure you use them to promote your author brand.
Use social media to promote your blog articles, and always add links to your website and blog.
Like your blog, the best advice on how to use social media is to stay on topic and concentrate on enhancing your professional profile.
Be consistent and create your look
Your behavior is of the utmost importance in creating and maintaining great personal branding for authors.
It means remaining polite ALWAYS, being calm, and never entering into petty online spats.
Make sure that people perceive you to be informative, civil, and decent.
Doing something silly just once can be a total reputation killer. A perfect example is how much one tweet cost Rosanne Barr.
Another consistency you absolutely must have as a writer is the accuracy of your writing.
I never take chances, so I use a grammar checker to help with all of my online and offline writing. I call it cheap insurance.
Typos, grammatical errors, and poor spelling are reputation killers for a writer or author.
One overlooked component of an author brand is how you want to look and be recognized and remembered online and offline.
One possibility you can consider is the font or fonts you use.
Think about your blog, website, and even emails. Selecting a classy font says a lot about your style and will create a memorable image.
You could also standardize the color of your online text. Dark grey is far more appealing to the eye than black.
While on the subject of fonts, another great idea is to design your author name so that it can become your brand logo.
You can then use it on your books, website, blog, social media headers, and even business cards.
You might want to hire a graphic designer to help you make it powerful, stunning, unique, and, above all, memorable.
While not every author will want to have a graphic logo, it is still not a bad idea to consider. A good example is Rachel Thompson on her blog, Bad Redhead Media.
Summary
Consistency and predictability are the key attributes of all the branding examples I have used in this article.
When this is broken, any hard-won reputation can be lost very quickly.
It takes years to build a brand and trust, but it can take only seconds to destroy.
While you certainly will not be as famous as some, it’s not difficult to create your style of personal branding for authors that will work for you and help your reputation as an author and writer.
Create your look, stay polite, and be patient.
Related reading: Blogging For Authors – The Major Pros And Cons
While I appreciated the article I found it ironic that right after the word “Professional” was misspelled the next section talked about being sure of the accuracy of whatever you post.
Thank you for reading so thoroughly that you noticed a typo. It has been corrected.
A useful reminder of how important brand is to authors, and good ideas as to how to go about building one’s own. Thank you.